Wait For It
Rodents inherit, evolve, and
after many ages form
an image of us. But they are mild and communal
and think we were merely solitary and cruel.
They envy our power –
how could they not? There are so many
poisoned places, still –
and the sky remains so heavy
they seldom see the stars
they know they will never reach.
The sun will swell, the sea will boil.
It isn’t, however, science
but religion that tells them so,
as well as that the next life
endlessly edits this.
The Applicants
Some try to sell themselves.
Intuition, warmth, altruism –
whatever non-technical
brains we could presumably put to work.
Securing a place
in the tram at dawn, the cafeteria
at evening; a nod in the decaying
stairwell wherever we housed them.
But most go on and on about their lives.
A mother overcome by sky
a block from home, which afterwards
she never voluntarily left, but was otherwise
(they insist) fine.
A friend who phoned and shot himself,
tying up the line.
The years of drink that followed years
of nurturance. The psychological
effects of these causes.
Mostly they only describe the effects,
with the aim of convincing
us to let them in because
they’re interesting.
I try to tell them that colorfulness
is no more guarantee
of acceptance than usefulness;
that they don’t want a visa to my country.
One breath of whose air
would turn them to stone,
with any stone’s or stone-segment’s
insistence on its own
specificity;
its time-dilation, its hopes reduced
to metamorphosis.
They never listen. Gaze at the map
behind me, which brings to mind
cafés and plazas. It’s
the doll’s-house look of our borders,
bullied on every side
by states as large as novels …
I tell them it lies; that the land-mass of poetry
is wider than Siberia and not as kind.
More Than Generous
One of our beloved billionaires
must be behind it, must have signed
the foundation behind it into being.
One of those men whose well-known features
remain somehow forever indistinct.
He tours the rooms of the upper floors,
the common room, the kitchen;
randomly touches drapes and fixtures;
appears unfocused. But his aides are paid,
as he says, to be tunnel-visioned,
and drag him out, and load him into his limo.
Guests start to arrive.
The first are what you’d expect:
the passive, needy, and rejected:
graying ponytails, polite abstracted tenors,
eyes fixed on imagined scenes
of compensatory violence
as if upon a missed receding train.
Yet those who, elsewhere, command
or at least shout, and are adored
or boast they are, appear also;
and though at first they straighten ties and glare,
they find themselves, or perhaps you find them,
crouching in hallways like
the other sort, whose weakness here is strength.
They peer around corners for enemies
but there are no enemies here.
Someone who could be, who is elsewhere empowered
by vicious faith, enters and strides
directly to a window, and looks out
on streets that might as well be walls,
and remains there.
Towards evening, women claim the common room.
They are generally older,
and know the light is unflattering,
but are past caring, though not perhaps past
the hope of a word. But people sleep alone here
and seldom exactly talk. For when two
approach each other, one recedes infinitely,
or swells and swells till, of two seekers, one
is crushed, the other bursts.
Only in deep night, which could be day
elsewhere, the billionaire –
he may be dreaming elsewhere but not here –
roams, like a devoted concierge,
the corridors and stairwells, scattering
on everyone a sort of dandruff.
It may be this that keeps them coming back
or staying, often for many years,
often till death. Upon which
the guests incuriously hobble forth,
bearing a friend through the surrounding dust.
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