Obscure Line


When sleeping pills fail, I suck my brain.
Endorphins, serotonin
will eventually run out;
and then I’ll have to read till dawn
the usual bad poem and worse critique,
but for now the technique works. With a new soundtrack,
private despair becomes triumphant, heroic, public,
solitude a crowd
hanging upon my every mumbled word.
They have no other entertainment,
for media once switched off are dead
and what crosses the eyelid screen is immediate me.
Late-middle-aged women return to high-breasted youth
at the cost of being probingly
interviewed forever about our month
or few seconds together, so that
their every guarded sentence starts with “He.”
One channel up are war crimes trials
I’m no longer even interested in
but have been playing so long in my mind
I won’t know what to program when they end.
Meanwhile, the cultural station is showing
how all parents, grandparents, etc.
abused or elegized in current verse
are the same two people, all dogs one dog,
all landscapes kudzu. Which is boring too,
except for the part where they all vanish.
(I turn, and my fetal position
becomes a commanding though seated pose
in another dimension ... ) What’s on
the nature channel is more interesting.
A ship drops anchor in a shallow sea
that seems both Freudian and Jungian.
Its anchor scrapes along the bottom
until it snags on the idea
that the seabed is the surface of Europa,
the sea beneath, and warm.
A tantalizing form
both radiant and dark is there
like Schelling’s self-divided God,
a teddybear clutching a teddybear …




The Intendant


He lived a long time.
When his wife died, he retreated from his family.
He retreated from physical pain into philosophy,
and, with decreasing conviction, prayer.
He retreated from the encroaching blur
of objects by circumscribing
his interaction with them,
remaining alert to the starched apron
of the maid who brought his morning egg,
to the park near the institution
he had ruled forty years,
to the small colorless birds
who pecked the dust of the path, awaiting his crust.
He did not, however, retreat
in his search for a comfort
that would no longer demand
he sacrifice intellect.
It was what he pursued during his walk through the park
and strict half-hours on a bench.
Here Liberals had made their last stand,
in his youth, against the Emperor;
two had been wounded, one even seriously,
before they fled. Here the Telegraph
had been announced, and the Railroad,
and Peace, and later War,
which had brought the first motorcar
and trucks that belched filthy smoke; now
the sky to him looked gray at noon, not blue.
One day as he sat the Emperor died,
the state fell, the park filled
with rabble; he couldn’t tell
if they were Right or Left or merely
disgruntled. “Who are you?” they cried.
“I was formerly Intendant,”
he gestured towards the building, “of the Imperial –“
But someone said, “Oh, the *Intendant,”
mockingly, knocking him down.
It was what he had hoped: he had time
to think, Life is an error, God an error made
by an error; time and space are a farce;
if there is something beyond them,
nothing is lost; the same if there is not.



Jolly Corner

1

The Administration advises
that in these times of uncertainty and,
yes, pain, we would be wise
to build *shrines in our homes. Like everything
this Administration says, it has an elusive
but not immediately laughable
logic; suggests intense
discussion with the other
party and the economic powers
that be. Who supply the religious
with as many more flaming, thorn-circled
hearts as they need; it’s us secular types
who require creative marketing.
Some of us place ancient beer-cans,
autographs, or pre-childproof
pill-bottles on a shelf and leave it
at that. Or the condom,
now stone, that rode a wallet twenty years.
Some put a child’s drawing,
torn now, brittle and faded;
some fake a child’s drawing,
or make something like one but different
for the secret place beneath the constant nightlight.
Taxidermy revives. Some burn
or smash the things they install; they’re the ones
who tend to show their shrine to visitors.
A former Marxist of my acquaintance
records an analysis
of what the ruling class means by all this:
another deep fad, a shared ecstatic guilt
that isolates us more.
Why don’t you expose it on your blog? I ask.
He says that blogs are for opinions;
the tape in his shrine is True. Meanwhile
the corporations try to offer
not merely paraphernalia – inlaid reliquaries –
but thoughts. What standardized symbol
would fly off, and onto, shelves?
They revive that calm plastic face
from the Seventies, the Yuppie Buddha,
but need something new
to stand for love, death, loneliness, whatever.

2

My own small fane is consecrate
to hatred – an uncomfortable fact.
Let me rephrase it, for hate is quite comfortable
with itself. Has fewer moving parts
than love, is a solid compared
to the liquid and gas of others …
even renounced, it lives.
I don’t have a photograph
of you, before which to sacrifice
nail-clippings and mice. And that photograph
would be of two, three, maybe seven people
who have long forgotten themselves and me,
so that our rights and wrongs
live nowhere but my shrine.
As I walk this murky, inferior plane,
Nazis burn in a chamber
that also delivers electricity and gas.
I peer in, mimicking Himmler,
and it’s all rather public and boring;
but what happens to you is *pain.
And the farther I get from you in this world,
the more you are a measure of
that distance, and where I have come.
It isn’t the lover or the easygoing
for whom the universe is evermore
about to be, but him who seeks revenge;
revenge will outlive him. But this knowledge
may be too much for friends or self
to handle, and best left
for twilight and its charms. A knife. A candle.