“MICHAELA VONHAMME, YOUR SETTLEMENT
OFFER IS NULL & VOID”
With goo did Virgil pacify the beast.
The time I tried to tutor Eamonn
& he wrote a one-line play. It went:
Hey Lady, (pause) want some goo?
This solace was for someone else.
But I could still take solace in that.
I’m in the outer rings of hell right now.
Fran says that many people mistake
this time of life for their life. Mistake
the pace of its demands for difficulty.
The real difficulties will be far more
difficult. I sense she’s talking about me,
or for me. Though not only. (“Hey Lady”)
I delete the message for Michaela
from my phone sure that it’s a scam,
but the language saddens me. All threats
& foreclosures do. Diamonds painted
on the side of the jeweler’s store
exceed themselves, in dashes, reaching.
Dug out of the earth & left here.
A beast both irredeemable & leaking.
BOOK REVIEW
The longer I talked I listened, and it seemed
to me that satisfaction was what I loathed.
Satisfaction as a resolution. That one’s love
would be returned, that one’s art would be adored,
that all suffering led to something better for
the ones who suffered. This satisfaction like a lid
closing over a box.
From the experience of not understanding, suspicion.
From the experience of suspicion, a dark volcano
heaps itself into being and covers up the heart.
The smoke that issues from it isn’t the heart’s
incineration. It is a lower smoke—wounded, grousing
—it fumes.
When I feigned sleep, I wanted to be alone.
I could feel the light being put out, though my eyes
were “closed.” A nylon stocking of surveillance peeling
off my body. In the bathroom an electric toothbrush
hits the floor and its distressed buzzing reaches me.
I could picture the grime I’ve memorized there
across previous trips to the toilet. Packing tape whipping
against a stop sign in the wind imitates dog nails.
I look out the window of the train I’m riding, high over
the clear green water. The water is so crystalline I can see
down to the bottom. There are dolphins leaping out
of this water, churning it at the surface and the surface
churns gorgeously, in sparkling armfuls of tulle. The view
at the bottom is pristine. There’s a leopard underwater
who has leapt on the back of a dolphin and is tearing it apart.
But the blood doesn’t become red clouds around the carnage.
The blood doesn’t hang in the water like a rusty web.
The interior of the train was very white, an ancient white,
full of blues grays purples. It conjured a clown’s greasepaint.
The risk of it rubbing off, the dissonance of seeing skin
beneath it. A clown can’t sleep as clown. Like me,
they’d have to fake it.
The longer I railed, I began to argue that these books
had abandoned their clowns and this was their problem.
It was in the character’s moments of exaggerated struggle,
of foolish, stubborn desire, of bald need and abject failure,
that they could embody the predicaments of humans trying
to become equal to the identities available to them.
These books I set myself against were commercial
successes. Did I begrudge them that? I didn’t think
I did. And I didn’t think the successful should
begrudge me my study of them. When I feigned sleep,
I was half a clown. The other half a student. And finally
a thief. Intent on finding the cracked window, the forceable
door to the house where real life was locked away.
Down the street, new owners had sheared the forsythia
bushes into uncanny yellow cubes. I had known spring’s
beginning by the mad arms of these forsythia.
I felt my kinship with them sheared and gone.
Who had strained so garishly. Whose exaltations repeated,
flared and mulched. Now they made me think of paragraphs
of highlighted text. A passage on the way the shocks
we pass to one another can be extinguished in a single touch.
PIG ZAP / TRANSFORMATION
Me and the baby
identifying feelings.
They’re hanging from
the mammoth’s tusk
vegetal and lush.
On my face, blue stars
smothering some pus.
Image of the pig, whose
head is altered by a line
of platinum magic, zig zag
line which has the teeth
of the shark, sharkish
teeth of the heart’s work
medically transcribed.
Her eyes take on
the color of what is done
to her. It’s a painting, so
impossible to know if
temporary or
forever. Forgiveness is
not a feeling. The effort of it
so abrades. We aren’t where
we begin to feel it. Forgiving
to get back to that most recent
home. A clawing at the air
called generous. I imagine
that she isn’t, in order to
turn back to her, to any her.