Routines

The bed is much the same.  Like a coffin, or a cage.  The wooden bars have been traded for chrome ones; the chiming mobile has given way to a single tray on which there sits a television remote with wide, round buttons that belie the trembling of fat, stiff digits and the anxiety of being alone.  The beds are similar but the rooms are starkly different...

The florescent sun chases color from this room.  The sheets, the walls, my own bone china flesh have all become a transparent white.  This chamber, with its finality, is made of light and vapor.  The ceiling is a portal, up, out.  The nurses on either side of my shell are diaphanous creatures.  In the opulent polyester that hugs their flesh like blasphemy, they are no longer trying to constrain me.  They believe like Pegasus.  If they could do anything to assist me they would lift me up, extensions of me.  My wings, they should be grafted to the fruitless arbor I have become, sprouting out of my scapula and armpit, the future generation.

Then, at the terminus, I will feel the gentle tugging as my soul is pulled out of the body.  The angels paid by medicaid are lifting me up like wings.  They struggle to get me in a sitting position.  I am a little disoriented at first,  I have been impatient.  Tired, I will tell you a story.  A story will put me to sleep. 

My eyes roll open like an excitable doll.  The birds are cheeping, a sightless symptom of morning.  White doves are peopling the eaves and beams.  The ornithologists are gathered at a big table at one end of the library.  They are studying the stuffed remains of extinct species:  dodo, passenger pigeon, the rare vermillion swan.  I introduce them to my little bird, who hops and shivers and sings.  Two of the girls do not notice.  The boy jumps up and begins chasing the delicate creature through the crowded stacks.  "They are too wild for the library," I scold their parents.  I am a man more or less satisfied with the present but regretful for the past, and a bit scared--well, terrified--of the future.  The parakeet is an escapee.  My wings are broken.

Here the light comes and goes in intervals.  I have been persuaded (by the persistence of their accusations) that the cranking of the generators and the arrival of the light within the compound is the same thing as 8 o'clock a.m. used to be.  And the eggs are white on white plates served on long white tables wrapped in bright white table clothes.  The servers wear white, the the inmates wear white, and the honored guests wear the brilliant white that repels the humid summer days in Alabama and Mississippi.                                                                      

Breakfast.  Pills.  Lunch.
Pills. Dinner
Pills.  Bed.
Pills.

Morning

For now, we will forgive the nightmares (so-called) because there is nothing should distract us from our happiness.  As children, we are obligated to be happy.  Those inconvenient moments of confusion, anxiety, terror are easily glossed over, easily treated with the rosy sheen of sentiment.

While babies smile and toddlers squirm, they worm their way into our heads, our hearts, into our dreams.  My father will recount to us the emerging personalities of each of his five children.  His youthful speculations of who we were, of what we would become slowly evolved into a stolid confidence.  Infants are amphibians; between two worlds, they crawl out of the mire, the muck, the mother...  The eyes are slits.  They slowly open.  These five nascent senses--so powerful, so persuasive in experience--are finding the way onto the land.

Thus,  overwhelmed by light and noise, the body begins to breathe, begins to be in the world.

I taste the salt of my own tiny fist.  I feel the soft cotton against my cheek and smell the extravagance of the fabric softener that my mother has justified by my arrival.  I am a speechless voyeur.  My own eyes, defocused and straining in the grey evening light, stare abstractly at some shadows in the corner of the room.  

A creaking door and light invades the somber silence of my cell.  Then there appears above me a crescent moon of smiling faces.  Back-lit and nodding, they are a bouquet of flowers above me.  I smile.  They are stars.  They are flowers floating in the firmament: they are love, attention, security, in full bloom.  

New Seasons

It is here,
the dear memory of spring
revived like Lazurus.
And life must summon
hope from the heat,
from the rain's reminder:
Keep breathing.

On summer nights,
of stifled thunder,
the air ignites with meteors,
with expectation.  You sleep.
You dream on balconies
naked, wrapped
in powdered sheets
that tug at your desire.

The sun comes--
curious enough--
to caress all of you,
the linen of your skin,
not yet torn
not yet opened.

But you remember
all of this, at least
a version
that turns on the loss
that costs you
everything
come Fall.

As summers go
in radiant succession
and elm and oak
and aspen grow
tired of their modesty,
an honest shrug
is all it takes
to denude
your father's stand.

Now,
shorn of color,
humbled by the snow
and barely breathing,
there are whispers.
All your secrets lay
beneath the poverty
of Winter.

Popper

Time has become the progression of pills:  the powdered hope that you take at the end of the day, the courage that you muster in the morning.  And sunlight swims in the molten gold that is your orange juice, a swig, a swallow.  Your blood, a richer red, conveys the chemicals into the background of your brain.  Each day is measured by the antidotes, and by the hours in between.  Days, weeks, months.  These moons are full, or half, or hardly visible as they dissolve under the tongue.  The crumbling eye.  The erosion that comes with seeing.  There is poison on the tip of your tongue.

Ageless

One gets the symptoms of acceleration.  The lips tremor and the eyes clench tightly, defending the optic nerve against the blur.  To see what time and distance (and the other impossible watches of tireless golden precision) might do with the thin film that describes my vision frightens me, disfigures me like only gravity can.  My perspective is the sole purpose of the eye.  Shuttered with lid and lash, the pupil enlarges, fat with the knowledge of the darkness that pervades the brain.  The memory of light is a thin red crescent; the sun coming over the eastern horizon is a scimitar seared with blood.   The edge is enough with which to kill both dreams and ambitions.  But the flat of it is still just an alternative to a mirror. 

Time.  Time.  Time.  You can somehow slow your breathing, break your chronic jittery concern about the minutiae that bites you--the bed bugs in the hems of things, in the luxuriant billows of the feather tick.   Try.  This habit will not buy you any extra days, gratuitous years. There is nothing for it.  Instead time will devour you that way:  small bites igniting like cigarette burns on your hands and feet, your hair receding, your muscles depleted from the exhaustion of a sloth. 

Beyond Pluto

This one is at the end of the tether.  Tugging at the thread, spinning.  She is a spider from outer space singing the galaxies into and out of being.   Stars are ensnared,  this net made of glistening silk.  Beyond us, a planet  plumbs the dark, cold ocean of the universe.  It is lost and little convinced by the gravity of a sun so distant that it looks like a star  A memory failing.  An extinguished candle just pucker and blow.  Even so, there is no reason to be unnerved by the ellipsis.  This barren rock, iron and ice, remains complicit to the tenuous attractions.  It maintains its predictable place.  This is clockwork, the slippage of gears.  This is a time machine, well-oiled a billion years ago, greased by our expectations and subservient to God.                 

11 11 11

The meaningless specificity of time sits on his chest.  Anticipation.  The agitation of waiting.  The pacing.  The regret from being late.  In the distance, he hears church bells; he hears a passing train.

What time is it?  Their watches are synchronized.  There is a room in Greenwich that is the center of the universe.  Nevertheless, the lone security guard--in rumpled uniform, reflective sun glasses--has his own watch (which he checks pathologically).  He is always amazed by the halting acceleration of the minutes and the hours. 

Underground, in the sewers,  the anarchists are speaking in conspiratorial whispers.  Ironically, one must place a timer on the bomb.  They want to disrupt the continuum.  Tick Tick tick tick Tick  Two minutes from now, weights and measures will be dispersed as shrapnel and all precision (or, at least, the pretense of precision) will be shattered.

The clocks will slowly roll down into a mechanical sleep.  Every minute, time lands decisively on the arbitrary symbols.  At least in the mean time, for the time being.  Hands somehow always come to rest.  Here.  Now.  tick Tick Tick tick  Tomorrow.  The day after.  The day after that.

Like sands...

tick Tick Talk about the flux, the flow that runs out the other side.  There will be freedom found in forgetting.  There will be loss, that what cannot be recalled...

Three Photographs: 2. Liederhosen

1967:  The photograph is square.  Modernists have deemed the Golden Mean old and mean and retrofitted our visual vocabulary with something just the right size to slip in your pocket (if you get my meaning).  

And, what am I?  

There among impressionistic roses, I have a flaxen crew cut, a smirk instead of a smile, and corrective shoes that look like a wing tip mated with a Converse All-Star, a strange high-top made of brown leather that suggests, simply by being, a single word:  polio.  Everything here--the green moss against igneous rock, the waterfall, the lager I am holding in an imaginary advertisement--suggests Bavaria.  It may be the summer of love somewhere, but here...

I, four years old, am wearing leiderhosen made of a soft greenish-grey suede that feels good against my inner thighs.  I am a pretty boy, a kind of flower among the fading tulips, the towering glads, the sad mums now humbled by the array of colors.

Is this Hitler's garden? There is so little to control the myth.  It comes and goes, evolves and grows.  But soon enough this alpine costume caved in on itself and went from adorable to deplorable.  Even I knew that.  The Teutonic traditions were damaged by a little something called the holocaust, and now Hansel's knee socks, bib overall shorts, and jaunty felt cap were evocative of fascism.  

I am so small in them that they hang off the suspenders like the proverbial barrel or a bell.  The "shorts" end up almost to the ankles and a dozen hipster retailers are competing for every scrappy moment in his charismatic arms.  I will wear the comfort--growing into and then out of the liederhosen--until the fit, tight and barely beginning the trip down my naturally muscular thighs, becomes something vaguely erotic to me.  I take great pleasure in "forgetting" to put on underwear before buttoning the leather cod piece closed.

And so it was then--down the obscure tunnel of time--that I was the same animal, feral in the garden.  My eyes are blue.  The sun is hungry.  Tomorrow belongs to me.

Time on Steroids

This acceleration--yourself watching yourself vaulting forward through decades, the permeable plasma of time--can be disorienting. The g force pulls.  It disfigures the clarity of your handsome face.  If it lasts...

A minute longer and you will faint, forgetting weeks and months and seasons.  You will wake up stumbling in a smeared hallway, recklessly hurling down  a highway paved with adrenaline where you careen.  But, keep breathing.  Check your pulse.  Check your baggage.  Take what you can...

With you, I feel what I would like to call calm but at this speed, this feeling (this love?) is more like stability than peace.  You steady me.  You hold together this aging spaceship, this rusting Toronado, this eroding body.  Growing old...

I am getting wiser.  I am retreating from my fears.  Vanquished, they lay where I left them.  The frontiers of me are torn and bloody, but those battles are done.  And I imagine futures that find miracles, and futures that find peace...

Death-bed conversions and catholic perversions, past aspersions by those begrudged against both my values and my character.  The unnecessary dramas of a fragmented dream depart from me--scraps of paper in the wind--the longer I am awake... 

I remember many things:  gravity and weightlessness.   One reminds the other.  Each assures the other of its validity.  And what are we but in between;  we are formlessness enclosed in form, the immaterial soul constrained by body, flesh and blood and water...

Time is fluid, at any speed.  Its just that evaporation occurs.  Velocity is, of course, a kind of heat...

Nick of Time

Memory.  A decade on.

Summer felt somehow brighter, lighter.  Ignited by flowers, fireworks, the explosions of color, life on fire.  On fire with life.

There was the warm sun of our promiscuity.  The libertine hours.  The languid days.  The electric nights of Scotch and water.  The embers of endless cigarettes.  The way faces appear, vaguely, when you inhale.  An orange glow to trace your features, to suggest you to me, to draw me deeper.  Follow.

Follow the moon into morning.  The indigo of 3 AM.  The green of 4 AM, the pink of 5 AM.  Orange arrives without trumpets.  There will be no apocalypse, today.  Just the dawn and the devouring engines.  The heat of the day.

I assemble the pictures.  I guess at the people's names.  They have left me to make other lives, large lives lived large.

What has happened?  Time is a fleeting melody.  Recalled in the shower.  For no reason.  Erased by the towel that covers my face.  I lay naked on the bed thinking of nothing.  The summer air comes in the window.  A light wind.  A cautious lover.  I lay naked on the bed.  I slowly dry.  Only five notes retain.  They make no sense.  They are stripped of their context.

Like these pictures.  Like that summer.  The hum of the cicadas says nothing.  The fireflies are submerged in the blue ink of evening.  Like sparklers, they spell something when on wing.  Their mutant calligraphy will make sense, one day.  They are casting spells.  

An old friend.  More likely.  An acquaintance, tainted with a hopeless crush on me, stops me on the street.  This is not the town we lived in, then.  This is not the town I live in now.  I call this a coincidence.  His romantic mind prefers to call it serendipity.  But it is quickly clear that his life then and my life then depend on nothing shared.

At his request, we exchange phone numbers; we will never speak again.

I dare to say:  were you absolved of the expectations of others.  The connections controlled by rhythms and words, well-practiced over years, might be abandoned.  And you discover the limitations.  Yourself.  Your family.  Your spouse.  Your lover.  Your children.  A tired script of acceptable topics.  Predictable phrases.  Familiar lies. 

Take me back to summer.  The undulating forest floor.  The acid filling the pines with breath.  The lessons of your scouting days applied.  Before...

And after, just the photographs, just the names scrambled.  Just the sun.  The long arms of memory.  The long arms of summer. 

Accidents

Newlyweds.  In bed.  Sleeping.  The crash will take them from their dreams.  Half an hour from now.  When the fissure opens in the earth that would devour me.  And drunk.  I am careening (out of control).  Across four lanes of traffic.  The burning headlights.  The blur and swerve of tail lights.  Street lights.  Neon.  My wife.  Of fourteen years.  The decision made.   The divorce all but final.  The velocity of life is the thing that will get you.  The trouble between us.  Yellowed the wallpaper like nicotine.  Yellowed my teeth, jaundiced and jaded my eyes.  Tainted everything.  "But still I loved her."  The last swallow of whiskey.  The bartender cannot be persuaded.  The groom presses his body against his bride.  He enfolds her.  Sleeper's hand finds sleeper's hand.  He holds her.  Soft body.  Cool fingers.  Her hair lies about her.  Long, silk ribbons.  The blue light of the moon.  On the ceiling.  Cars passing on the widened avenue are slices of light.  Sliding.  Down dormer walls.  Round corners.  Over the bed like angels.  Hovering.  I am an accident.  Waiting.  At sixty miles an hour.  To happen.  Bouncing over the medium.  A crystal ball.  The glass of the headlamps can see the future.  Crashing a gate.  Bright white.  Freshly painted.  Decorated with the bride's proud stencil.  "Our first home."  Then nothing.  They are in pajamas.  Police called.  Slow to suffocate.  My own blood.  The young bride is crying.  My own wife.  When she hears it.  Will feel nothing.

The Clock Receding

Their faces--now alert, now defeated, now mustachioed--may grimace now and again; clocks often frown from under the weight of their authority.  People look in expectation, in urgency, in need... 

...and the meter makes its cordial rhythm run, 

under the bed, 

into the middle of the night.  

Sleep keeps disrupting my dreams; the creak on the landing, the laughing water in the porcelain bowl, the old man's snoring in order to breathe.  And in the notebook, another blank page, as if some censorious editor had stumbled--upon my blog and then the password for my blog--and erased me, deleted me, leaving no trace behind.  

The blank page was (as if) the material man that I am dislodging from the universe, perhaps a blood clot--"a knot microscopically small"--running randomly amok until the stranger across from me on the night train (always on time, arriving in the morning, with a sprightly whistle) is seized by collapse or rather collapsed by seizure as, in an instant, his personality is changed permanently into someone who doesn't speak but rather like a Sphinx stares down the desert, like a clock staring into the future...

The Sinking

You are
now only
an equation.  You are
the weight of your body
exaggerated,
the weight of your dress,
wet. You are the salinity
of the water
confronting the temperature
of the air.  You are
the temperature itself
(not the word
for it, not
the idea, but)
the actual feel
of vapor given
a set
of conditions.

You are
heavy...

Your heart like lead,
dead in the cavity,
is sinking.  The black
ink of the ocean
enveloping you.
Time standing still,
at attention,
at the edge of the world.
11:55

This is
a broken clock
a silenced organ,
still standing
a steeple of crumbling stone:
after the war
the watch's face
wrinkled in doubt
begins to sag.
Dali begins
to dream.

One wave
will reduce you
to the rubble you leave
behind.  One wave,
your fingers are blue roses
that may bloom
a final time
as you slip beneath the surface.
One wave
one breath
one last tattered tongue
wagging.

Words,
unheard,
unspoken
are broken
(like ancient pottery)
on the ocean

floor.

When He Left

on a cold day
forgetting
his jacket on the arm
of this worn leather
sofa,  the water still
running, waiting,
anticipating
his nakedness,
he never mentioned
anything
about the time
or the weather
and his regrets
were nothing
compared to mine.

On Time

The train that I have been racing has been obscured in smoke, blurred by speed.  It forever going into tunnels..............................................emerging faster, shinier, polished chromium reflecting the world, reflecting the sun, bouncing it back into my eyes.  By foot, on horse, in a  70s Cadillac the same color of the sky, I have challenged this agile serpent, this zipper quickly closing up the land.  Like barbed wire, the humming rails communicate the danger.  I hear some explanation whispered in the cold shell of my ear.  One's memory of the ocean could start to ache here.  A train can't come fast enough/a train can't go quick enough to alleviate the melancholy knowledge that one feels at the station...........waiting.  

But in those days, I tried 

to outrun time 

to the crossing, my sneakers 

kicking, gravel 

flying from the Appaloosa's hooves 

only to shock 

a crack into the windshield 

of the Caddie. 

My watch,

face broken,

now always reads the same

time.

The Ocean Knows

The ocean knows
no urgency

until

it reaches

the end,

the beginning
of the other
world.

Ship-wrecked
survivors,
washed-up and gasping,
are clawing
at the shore.

The waves
crave
something.
They are the lung,
the tongue,
the heart.

The ocean
is a clock,
a wish made
with the gold coin
of a pocket watch.

You are
spinning
like a clam
in amorous circles--

sun reaching under,
blackness reaching up--

sleepily

descendiing

finding

a place
to rest.

In 5

In five graceless minutes,
the world's will
(so willfully driven)
will end, will come like a kingdom,
will come to an end.

In significance,
there is meaning.  Nothing
more strenuous
than understanding
the limitations of time.

Sustain

time progresses
like a minor chord
straining to find
resolution

RESOLUTION

Be it

herein

resolved

that I

will (try)

to let

the old

skin go...

If
you walk
the road back
to find the lost
meanings of your name,
you will discover
that even so
the road is
not the
same.