“Living it up
at the Hotel
California” tortures her
with gray
memories. She’ll blame
it on the antihistamines.
The way coffee appears
in that translucent cobalt
blue mug. The way
each word laid down
suddenly looks foreign
to her eye. Backwards
is an unwanted side-to-side
motion she has no rudder
to stabilize.
She doesn’t purchase
the wobble
board. Gets no purchase
behind the joke.
Hypochondria never
took off
so gracefully. Never
mind the landing.
When the sequence
of events leading to your NDE
gets fuzzy,
you may think
you are cured. A sore
arch and bruised
thigh don’t need to sound
off uninterruptible alarms
when you know
their origins. Never mind yours.
His. Ours. Endings.
Just the facts.
If she’s really letting me
speak
for the first time, I don’t know
where to begin. All those stories
about drawing pictures
in the moonmilk
inside ancient caves and rods
taking longer than cones
to adjust to the dark. That’s not how
I would talk. I don’t have a lisp
or thick Minnesota accent, or
New England one. I will sing
quietly about iron
rail bridges and natural rock
formations and the view
from the top. That’s
exactly what I will do if
she’s for real this time.
Looking past the ice
on the pond, she decides
facts get in the way.
She could fast forward
to spring
with the right attitude.
She’s more afraid of prose
poetry than formal verse
or 140-character chants.
She walks the perforated
line between
with a hot beverage
in her hand and shouts:
Be refreshed.
Who will build
the hotel to house all
the souvenir
heroes stacked
against that cellar
door? That perfectly
framed cellar door. One more
time, and I could go
to heaven
where I wouldn’t care
about that pile
of bones and springs and fascia and tentacles
and fins and feet and hair and eyes.
The ones staring
past mine.
I am nobody’s sculpture
to be displayed in a climate
controlled case. Or worse—
stored in an underground
vault and forgotten. I am
nobody’s monster
roaring and lethal
or grunting
and servile. I could be
Emily’s nobody.
I do
prefer toads over frogs.
I always forget the part
where you yell at my answering machine:
If you ever darken
my doorstep again,
you’ll regret it
till the day . . .
Now I remember.
Have it recorded on tape
along with the first words . . .
Not everything
you utter is
worth repeating. We all
risk becoming
self-parodies.
This isn’t some geography lesson
about North
Korean borders.
. . . you said to me
. . . you die.
Nets tangled and wet cast
shadows across a step street. An urban
torch flickers. Those narratives
get recorded large and
blotched on skyway
glass back in this middle
where below there’s tonight’s snow—
laced with diamonds—and a full moon
to guide me home.
Her biannual dream
of him gets cut short
by the cat’s early morning
demands. In it, a hotel
room filled with lost
friends bleeds over
a highway bike ride
she would never take
awake. A memory
of drinking vodka
martinis in a tree
under a warm Connecticut
night sky fades into forgetting
the last time she saw
his face: he’s married / everyone’s
married / generalizations
every one of them / a drive
back to New York City after
a Northampton, Mass., wedding /
a carload of drunken
college students at a drive-in
movie theater / a run
by the Long Lane School
( years before the suicide)
at midnight / making love
with a cast
on her foot in a Bronx studio /
those step streets come into play
again / he smoked, she didn’t,
he quit, she started, she quit, the air
they breathe no longer
shared / it’s no longer
early / time
to feed the cat
The man who scrubs
one patch of facade bricks
for hours
could use some
graffiti begone. Must be
an app for that.
An app for this—
I won’t download. How to
tag beauty,
tweet truth.
Here’s what
happened: She dated
a shepherd. But
that’s not it. The basement
beneath the basement
counts. Compact stacks could
be where accidents happen
but never do. Stop.
Reset. Move right. Move left. 140 more
to go.
