This will be better, the life after the life,
in another time, among the essences.
He will sacrifice the analogues of fire,
the neon fires, blue cathode fires. Then
he'll know, not the smell of something burning,
but the agitated, firstborn fire itself.
Over any torn meadow, the sun revolves
to coax speared wheat with a measured word.
Iron will mimic bone, but no one will be fooled:
the marrow teaches without question.
A kiss will be a cloth that barely conceals,
spread over the face of her body.
It will mislay her grimness suddenly,
a smile beneath the folds. But this is now.
A wraith loiters by his spine in tired clothes,
envying the dead their finish, though avid
for more living. There is a daily tomb
of Tuesdays and Thursdays, delved in February's name,
a name too thin to feed on,
and in fluorescent fade-light, rayed from nowhere,
his living holds its breath, and waits for what has passed.
A Long and Swerving Conch
It's the surfaces romance me. When the salt trucks rain in the street, the cars roll over the unbroken pellets each with a hollow fricative, hailstones on a cathedral roof. Elsewhere, like a consort of viols inside, the morning wheezes somberly awake. A clean shirt I’m unfolding has a tearing sound I like, not adhering to itself. I am ready for what? To see more, it looks like, and, thankfully, though there’s no money in it- hear more. I notice the phenomenal world observes all the repeats. Are the workday combinations different from yesterday, or was I not paying attention? I was screening films in the frontal lobe, no doubt, about unfulfilled particulars. I noticed they’d only lose about thirty seats if they put an aisle down the middle. If not exactly rested, see how my black and loamy wedge of sleep just now digitally truncated, rhymes with the following: Schubert’s Unfinished in my north-lit room. This old seahorse and the Sonata d. 960: written by someone with inside information about their own mortality.
A French historian theorizes that up until a couple of hundred years ago people knew when they were going to die, days, months in advance, and prepared quietly for same. This skill has faded, a lovely green signal, dashboard-colored, no longer rising above the press of microwaves. Myself, I have noticed fewer and fewer deja –vu episodes as I’ve gotten older. The music is draped this morning in its brooding snow-cloud get-up, led by a conductor untimely killed in a crash. Note the overlays: my truncated sleep, the Unfinished, the young morto-conductor whose baton may still be heard. These overlays can become very fine, with attention. Every day, I tell you, like stepping up to the lip of a long and swerving conch, and going in. I am embedded in what I see the way the bird I heard when I opened my eyes just now was embedded in jet wheeze; a jet, a great winking abomination, but also a room with seated people in it. They are stretching, looking out at gothic Manhattan, a city with jongleurs but no wolves.
I read The Diary of Samuel Pepys on the subway, how he supp’d last night on boiled milk and a pullet, then stopped to get his periwig rehaired and dusted, a cone over his face like a wind-up fox. His domicile is a mess, he says, with cheese laying about, but life gets done. At that London instant, my old neighborhood, the one I grew up in Michigan, is still a rocking wood-lot where the poplars flip us their gleaming undersides with great tenderness, though there are brambles that can trip you.
I’ll take it, even if, as the Buddha says, it is impermanent, Not-Self, unsatisfactory. I’ll take it, sleepy, and with the feeling (which I won’t be deprived of) that it matters about as much as I think it does, and it’s my hand that makes the adjustment, cranking up or down the significance of the moment like Simon Bar Sinister.
And I’ve got to find a little danger somewhere, to leverage the relative safety of this life against three million years of running after cross and dangerous potential meals, the fear of having my skull staved in in my sleep, the sparkling marrow inside probed with sooty fingers while they hold me down. I remember that, I remember that and wake up screaming. I remember rhythmically trundling along that railroad handcar, too, (ah, the rhythm of love) escaping the police, opening and closing drawers in that deserted farmhouse, looking for things. It wasn’t me, but it was, and outside gongs shuddered in the wheat, bronzing everything.
Dreams are like bleeding radio waves from other people’s lives, a log-jam of whole, discrete instants, a vast pointillist canvas. And we never get over them, the others, and we are never alone. But people aside, conditions, the way things are, actuality-- all our fights about it (mostly with ourselves) have a certain rank poignancy, like rancid lavender, or backed-up crying, a smell like ammonia rearing in the sinus cavity, a billowing, x-ray shroud.
Perform this exercise. It is only Thursday, but imagine yourself away from the earth so long that when you finally get back and get in the door, and go through the mail, everything you hated while here is new again, and blameless. Your nose runs and your eyes tear, though it could be the wind. You are hungry, and not overly concerned. All the epochs of the spot you’re standing in surround you, right here, shuttling by, a book of days fanned close to your face. You breathe, your lungs as impersonal as the lowering stratocumulus, the bellows mechanism without patent anywhere. Your movements, and those of your friends, are plotted on the spine. This much is plain: one thing in this blurred schematic, so delicious, is not much larger or of greater duration than another, because it all transpires against a stillness unimaginably dense, an emptiness empty even of emptiness, and for our purposes, forever.
