This is Over

"America is the oldest country in the world because it has been in the twentieth century
longer than anyone else."
Gertrude Stein
1
You took yourselves outside for photographs,
by curbs, on squares of grass, in the morning in
America, when planes were out. You saw only
the contrail, always the sun like snow, blurring
the pressed faces, the tail fins, the spares an O
on trunks of cars, antlers on the poles conducting
lightning speech. In August, you heard
summer insects, locusts. As you looked toward the t's,
the very tops aligned with houses, past the looming
cottonwood, over lilacs, fences, you thought
it was the sound of people talking, glowing nodes
pressed through a wire, insects the analogue,
in oblique wind, and thinning slanted light.

You have the measles, you are quarantined indoors.
You trace the metal numbers on the screen door.
Outside, in the concrete double-drive, your brother
casts a rod and reel, an arc into the dim end,
daylight savings. Your mother peels potatoes
at the sink, her lips shaping soundless words.
Your sister wanders home from junior high, for lunch.
She and her girlfriend watch Dick Van Dyke ,
a gray-white Tuesday, and eat on tv tables: tuna-fish,
potato chips. You try to get attention by tripping
on a hassock like Rob Petrie, wisecracking from the corner
of your mouth, like Morrie Amsterdam. Silence.
So you do jumping-jacks while standing in the closet,
rocking by your phonograph, its hot motor smell, in plastic.
You were singing Ferry Cross the Mersey,
Gerry and the Pacemakers. Also Dusty Springfield,
who sang Wishin’ And Hopin', your favorite song.
You had glass 78's: The Artist's Life,
Tales from the Vienna Woods. Barnacle Bill
the Sailor. Slap Her Down Again, Pa.
What is the method, this century?
I think it is a thing ground fine,
then spread and rolled, silver, sylvan,
silent, en grisaille, black haloed like
the sodium lights in early video,
punching holes in the coin-colored sky.
For most of history, when history was made,
so few showed up for any large event.
Now you crouch for shadow presentations
of the world, before a box with figures
in snub-nose pirouette, assassin finger puppets,
the big jet roaring home, black haloes
in the air around the lights, like whorls
of negativity, a chaos emblem,
a depthless eye to warn us, this
we should not penetrate, this holy
shroud of Now; don't rend the real,
this deep grimoire, bird-laced, rounded,
sunned. And then a funeral with the caissons,
horses. Drums. To go with the trumpets.
Backwards boots in stirrups. A young girl asks,
are they his boots?, stunned.
Nightly News. Chet Huntley is a dry man
smoking in the dark. He tells the booming,
flying land a story. And when he tells,
the rest areas fall silent, and pictures loom
above his shoulder. A cigarette plumes lazy
at his crooked elbone. Roll the credits,
with the molto vivace from Beethoven Nine,
whose sharp non-sequitur timpani thwacks
recall loopy genius, and splice us to history, Chet.
He leaves at night beneath a sloping hat,
and loping past the outdoor weatherman,
the fella with a marker and a tri-state map,
(a mix of sun and clouds) heads off to Lindy's,
for a scotch.
2
For the complicated, handsome sickly man,
a bread box with a flag around it.
We saw his head, that waved a flag of blood.
In autopsy photos, childhood loiters in his face.
His little boy salutes and squints, Oswald's stiff
hid underground, not a parapet to pole his head.
In five years, another brother, a fell year.
Two months prior, a great black King
lined out in a tufted coffin, dead,
and draped on the back cover of Look.
He rolled from behind the neighbor widow's garage,
the cover snapping open in the drive.
The kitchen window curtains pull aside,
all handlessly. I imagine this, and widows
everywhere, who in infinite, separate
living rooms, lurch in crepe, from winking
TV screens to pristine, folded beds.
Lay back with your shoes on, mother.

Your oldest brother had a girl with looming hair,
and while he drove, you sat between, a drive-in Saturday:
hardware, car wash, Wimpy's. You bumped her cigarette,
which made her nylons melt. And he, soon Air Force
classified in Bangkok, let you have it.
And figuratively then, he let them have it.
Then they let us have it. Then I let you have it.
It goes around.
3
What is the method? There were other methods.
There was mud, then stone, a little iron.
Woodland felled. Now unlike things are mixed
and ground and rolled. Materiality
is rendered first in vats. It never scents,
in any way, the trail of the sun.
Never a contour cut by time. And
there are no flaws. Our method of air
is transit. It is a material of transit. Our method
of water is no longer harness, but ubiquity.
It spirits away turds everywhere, and I mean
everywhere. You wouldn't believe
where we can do that! The method of ground
is ground, though there is a second ground,
a colony of the idea of ground,
an unmysterious lump, a myth gone to a dump, the moon.
I almost forgot we ever went, because,
and no one says it, it was dull, and not a little dull,
but fabulously so. We'll stay pent down here.
We touched goal is all. No money in it, either.
O my beautiful.
Oh my beautiful, again beautiful, some pitted china
pulled from a house fire's cooling nest,
a naked bed lit only by a streetlight, a face
the life has fled from. O my beautiful that was less,
there was soundless groaning that night in 1969
from three billion souls. Something
had gone out of it. That this is all it is,
our moon, less interesting than a desert,
less rich with surprise than an empty parking lot
in sodium light, a few millennia of fable
dashed by Neil and Buzz, athletes doing calisthenics
while you fitful sleep, or rise at four,
parched and padding to the fridge to gulp cold milk
straight from the bottle, leaning on the door
with a drastic local headache. Then,
passing through the living room, you see
the lost white wafer floating, hovering
in her stygian cricket-dark, alive
in dreaming only. You are unmaidened,
and will ever you be swan’d again or not
some distance underneath her,
your thin feet joined in the living black grass,
your thin feet painted with her, beautiful,
my beautiful, O my beautiful.
O my beauty. My dead moon.
4
Walking sidelong down the street
to present a smaller target to the world,
as though it made a difference. Which it doesn't.
She crawled backward on a car trunk for assistance
in a pink nubby weave suit. Not that you knew
what this was like, picnicking by trestles.
The lake-glass quivered slightly when your line
disturbed the water, and trees spired
upside down. Fields out to a tree line
of mixed hardwoods! A wizardly oak. A field of
arrowheads. A cemetery with iron stars akimbo,
last centuries dead mulching the earth,
unalterably virtuous, by virtue of their death.
You drove a little while, then parked and walked together
through the trees, and finally spread a blanket.
You covered her body with yours, awkwardly,
not even lustfully, and for an unknown reason,
under the watchful sky, under the tall trees,
fresh young hominids in a temperate forest,
Early Quaternary period, the Holocene Epoch.
Your girlfriend was distracted. Her soundless lips
formed words. You tripped over some roots
to get attention, faked a pratfall.
You wisecracked from the corner of your mouth
like Red Skelton.
Goodnight and God Bless.
Your life is a long strip of sky-colored film
framed with bare branches.
There, the two of you, who chase bright love
around in one another, pant together
in her bed. There you saw the two of you
from far above and from the side,
then from the other side, in rapid flashing.
Both your trains came in together, timely, timely,
but your ka, auteur, remained aloof,
stood by, some distance from the good thing.
5
Who cannot touch it.
In your house with central heating.
With your walls lined with some distant
fraction of world culture, listening to Delius,
some languid, lovely music of the swamp.
What's left of a fish is scuppered in oil
in a frying pan on the stove.
You who cannot touch it, eating a pear.
Who cannot touch it, which is grief.
Nothing, no salt in the eyes, a sigh that sounds
more bored than anything, a fantasy of houses
looming over swamps, on stilts. Solitude
among the mute and pendant leaves.
Long hammock days. You, enchanted
on the balcony, lank-haired, bearded,
frail, with a lap rug and some crackers,
reclining in a wicker chair. Beneath
the dead crusader cheekbones, death,
a sort of wildlife stalking in the lymph,
exotic and discreet. Who cannot touch it.
In the 13th century, a nun named Margery
of Kempe expressed humility before God
by incessant weeping.
But you are here, and grief approaches
from the street and up the drive. Some cars
sough by. She has a little hat with netting
hanging down, with small faux asters tangled
in the veil. Her scent is like cut flowers
and clean closets, cedar; faintly, photo chemicals,
official documents that bloom with mildew.
Her eyes blink on and off somehow,
some gradient of light behind gray irises
going through its changes; some nearly frozen birds
passing by a window, in February.
The brittle day is kindling. The tiny birds
strobe the room almost imperceptibly,
and a minor comet is thrown on the horizon,
its tail folded behind it, like a check mark
in a ledger, the morning sky the color
of an open mouth, an unlikely,
shredded looking place.
She crosses her legs. Her stockings
make a nylon whisper, and she smokes.
The smoke twines up. Some morning sparrows
commence the skirling that they do in cities,
the way they always did when you were dull-eyed,
enervated, sleepless.
But the room reddens, and rises, and glows.
The music swarms in greater tides,
ascending modulations, new lands unrolling
out from under one another to reveal
the silver brass frontier, threaded
with a golden, crawling river.
There is duration, more than change.
You don't know why. And then you say,
don't ask me why.