Bitter in the Belly 9780228010319

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
At the temple
Young man and sailor
Near nothing
False etymology in a statue garden
Idol
Nay, He Hath Need of Naught! He Is a Wise Man!
*
Raised far from rivers
Under his window
Abandoned warehouse in the afternoon
Aqueduct
Reverse Translation
Clear cut
The Closed Eyes of the Ravished
That They May Uphold Him Horizontally
The Island of Misfit Toys
Trick
Ulcer
The evening
Enough Hast Thou Slept!
Saint Anthony
Bronze Age
Story
Weed
The Fierceness of Pleasure
Una Chupacabrita
The Whole Firmament That Turned Even as We Turned
In the art house
Job
Positive
In the shadow, in the house
Tent
Anger
Thought experiment
Gestures
First snow
Specialty Fish
Jonah, missionary in spite of himself
Jonah, displeased with God for sparing Nineveh
At your door
Your essay on black boxes
Singeth Lovewords
Fact
Thick pronoun
Kafkaesque
Honey in the mouth
Book of Jonah
Kafka on the beach
Yom Kippur
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

B i t te r i n th e B elly

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t he hu g h m ac l e n n a n p o e t ry s eri es Editors: Allan Hepburn and Carolyn Smart

Titles in t he se r i e s Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold John Mikhail Asfour Particles Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song Eleonore Schönmaier But for Now Gordon Johnston

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Some Dance Ricardo Sternberg Outside, Inside Michael Penny The Winter Count Dilys Leman Tablature Bruce Whiteman Trio Sarah Tolmie hook nancy viva davis halifax Where We Live John Reibetanz The Unlit Path Behind the House Margo Wheaton Small Fires Kelly Norah Drukker Knots Edward Carson The Rules of the Kingdom Julie Paul Dust Blown Side of the Journey Eleonore Schönmaier slow war Benjamin Hertwig The Art of Dying Sarah Tolmie Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe On High Neil Surkan Translating Air Kath MacLean The Night Chorus Harold Hoefle Look Here Look Away Look Again Edward Carson Delivering the News Thomas O’Grady Grotesque Tenderness Daniel Cowper Rail Miranda Pearson Ganymede’s Dog John Emil Vincent The Danger Model Madelaine Caritas Longman A Different Wolf Deborah-Anne Tunney rushes from the river disappointment stephanie roberts A House in Memory David Helwig

Side Effects May Include Strangers Dominik Parisien Check Sarah Tolmie The Milk of Amnesia Danielle Janess Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete Eleonore Schönmaier Unbound Gabrielle McIntire

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Ripping down half the trees Evan J whereabouts Edward Carson The Tantramar Re-Vision Kevin Irie Earth Words: Conversing with Three Sages John Reibetanz Vlarf Jason Camlot Unbecoming Neil Surkan Bitter in the Belly John Emil Vincent

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Bitter in the Belly

J o h n E m i l V i n cen t

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  John Emil Vincent 2021 ISB N 978-0-2280-0907-8 (paper) ISB N 978-0-2280-1031-9 (eP DF ) ISB N 978-0-2280-1032-6 (eP UB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Bitter in the belly / John Emil Vincent. Names: Vincent, John Emil, 1969– author. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. Description: Series statement: The Hugh MacLennan poetry series | Poems. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210284129 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210284137 | IS BN 9780228009078 (paper) | ISB N 9780228010319 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780228010326 (eP U B ) Classification: L CC P S 3622.I545 B58 2021 | DDC 811/.6—dc23 This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 9.5/13 Sabon.

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In memoriam

Brian Selsky and José Esteban Muñoz

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The past grabs back what it lets us handle To always mourn one solution Never to another Or sing along: dogs tuning to sirens

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C ont e nt s

At the temple  3 Young man and sailor  4 Near nothing  5 False etymology in a statue garden  6 Idol 7 Nay, He Hath Need of Naught! He Is a Wise Man!  8 * 10 Raised far from rivers  11 Under his window  12 Abandoned warehouse in the afternoon  13 Aqueduct   15 Reverse Translation  16 Clear cut  21 The Closed Eyes of the Ravished  22 That They May Uphold Him Horizontally  23 The Island of Misfit Toys  24 Trick 26 Ulcer 27

The evening  31 Enough Hast Thou Slept!  32 Saint Anthony  33 Bronze Age  34 Story 35 Weed 41 The Fierceness of Pleasure  43 Una Chupacabrita  44 The Whole Firmament That Turned Even as We Turned 47 xi

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In the art house  48 Job 52 Positive 55 In the shadow, in the house  56 Tent 58 Anger 60 Thought experiment  61 Gestures 64

First snow  67 Specialty Fish  68 Jonah, missionary in spite of himself  69 Jonah, displeased with God for sparing Nineveh  70 At your door  71 Your essay on black boxes  72 Singeth Lovewords  74 Fact 75 Thick Pronoun  76 Kafkaesque 82 Honey in the mouth  83 Book of Jonah  85 Kafka on the beach  86 Yom Kippur  88

Acknowledgments 91

xii

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B i t te r i n th e B elly

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A t t h e t e mp l e

O lastly over-strong against thyself! Milton, Samson Agonistes

His hands slip up the pillars His bare feet stutter, slide. From here he looks drawn and quartered on his own hard yawn. *

*

*

If we hadn’t already been we would have stood – Laughing, clapping him into what topples by outliving temples: Myth – who hitched to time – has it made.

* * * For now though he shouts unheard. Adam’s apple – a thumb knuckle soothing a bird.

3

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Yo ung ma n a nd sa i l or

At this fountain the sailor can think only to piss the surface clean of reflection.

The care with which his fingers free the necessary part seems promising for him as a lover.

The moon shatters, shatters, buckles, shakes itself out and reappears nonchalant.

Tucked back in, he’s too much yours, a mere extra in your movie snagging the prop bourbon from the pool’s ledge.

“Look,” he points, as he drapes his bottle-weighted arm around your neck: its reflection rests on the crest of that moon.

You become a face next to his on the breathing belly of the water; a hip that gives to his hip; eyes locked on themselves.

You want him and his eye for detail right there: where need and willingness meet at one forceful point

so only their disturbance shows.

4

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Ne a r not hi ng

So little happened that afternoon, car doors, a walk, cigarettes – the near nothing of pleasure: soft push of a palm-folded earlobe. My skin squirrelled you away as pines do wind. But with dusk, our leavetaking: patchy light, as if from pressed, uncovered eyes. The moon climbing the trees crotch upon crotch. What words unwedged from our silhouettes? All I can recall: the peepers, the greening of the pond, the gristle-rubbing crickets.

5

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Fa lse et y mol ogy i n a stat ue g ard e n

Nakedness derives from stone. The watercarved armpit, independent life of the belly. Heritage from cramp. The hint (from quiet genitals) – beauty: from desire, stilled. Always scale; grim comparison. How envious the past surfacing for revenge, these eyeless fish in sunlit pools. Proud shapes poised in foolish sacrifice.

6

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I dol

The sky takes its first drag of sun, the mist shakes its coat. Your standing form remains a piece of night, backlit bitten into waking glare. When noon is piled on the air, your shadow down around your ankles – the breathless sky will kneel before you.

7

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N ay, H e Hat h Ne e d of Naug h t ! He I s a Wi se Ma n! Immortality but not youth, fame without copyright, living in a castle corner the rest cordoned for tours – Gilgamesh, two-thirds god knew all he did writ itself in stone but would outlast him: he was, that is to say, humbled by his own greatness. Enkidu, his best friend, someone he could barely beat up, tried to talk him out of lasting longer

by dying faster: he said, in my dream, the hand that opens the gate goes weak.

In my dream, the reply, our corpses are dragged and dumped in a pile. Heroes are scared sacred:

Legend’s a brazier

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which gutters in the cold wind, a back door which opens only to squall and storm, a battering ram reversed by the enemy, a crippling shoe. All’s paradox: predictable, sad. Enkidu: why does your heart speak strangely? I tire of this, says Gilgamesh, stamp me in gold already.

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*

Those eyes crouched on your pile of features like mouths.

Our path past the bicycle spokes shot through with a streetlamp’s spines.

A staircase complaining in almost perfect scales. The bed, cigarettes, hands. My head a stone eagle over the entrance to a mine.

10

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R a i se d fa r f ro m ri ve rs

Raised far from rivers I didn’t know smooth sheets of motion. Things stopped and after: became their stillness. Days ran into months and disappeared, the calm of any plural threatened. Once I dreamt I, as e e cummings, steadier of hummingbirds, rode a twister, a long fading moan; I bucked roofs, they flew clean as circumflexes from telegrams. Row upon row, block by block what I knew came visible. I chomped into basements expecting boxes of wigged, dead heads. Instead: I found – buried! – stacks of photos – pictures of fountains, pictures of rivers.

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Unde r hi s wi ndow

In the parking lot one boy tells another: I could love you. He’ll turn away from the window, and tomorrow he’ll make a note: Never plead in earshot.

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A ba ndone d wa r e ho u s e i n t he a f t e r noo n Near its entrance, a bird peeps renditions Of the shape and sharpness of its beak. Around, trees stripped To snags of wire. The high windows Concede to the winded day Only squared-off shafts And shrugs of rags. Tonight it will be charted By constellations of cigarettes; Tonight within these walls: A low clear sky without a moon. Men snipped from balloons of speech Will gather, lean on oil drums, against girders – I cannot say that even now I am not filled with that nothing. I imagine playing In this puppet theatre Whose only characters Are clacks of limbs: My heart pumps Klepto-fast and my eyes Jag over a dark depiction Of fear and lust, or, fearless, hate.

13

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But the wind shuffles cables slung from rafters. A crow calls. In the light I’ve met no one, Leave with a sigh, not safety.

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A q ue duc t

I dropped into you to hear the deep bass crack of ice, faults born while substance changes phases. But things did not break: the truth barrelling through a badly told lie. The lie lingered. Because I was not ice, I was stone. Your finger bumping down my spine in smooth ellipses

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R e v e rse T r a nsl at i o n

I. Then came a day when returning became not possible but irresistible. If memory bit, this chewed. The rains, each sheet discrete, bar-coded on asphalt. I saw your beard worm into you. Eyes brighter in rewind, your wince a smeared smile. I should perhaps have smiled back.

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II. The castle on the hill means siege. Your wet dad planted your dry mom mid-vineyard. And the bad people escaped barely by inflicting themselves till nothing remained of them. You became their memory, they beckoned you back. You stopped talking, they begged. Because they knew from begging. How it repels.

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III. The empty glass display box your family is. Mystery of nothing: we came again and again to it wondering at, no, refusing to believe the lovelessness. Stubborn, we insisted: life over time weighs. Cruelty has correlative; coldness, motive. Hands, more than grip.

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IV. The dogs’ bones in their basket sometimes gnawed sawed ends: evidence of brutality. The bones they nosed, toys. Some days, worse, toys.

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V. This is apology. For wrongs done you. Because I can. Except mine. Those, or, that, was never to see what the basket held. To refuse rewind. That we’d’ve lasted mere months without translation into dog.

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C l e a r c ut

Strange. While I was chopping there was plenty of shade . . . Porcupines emerge, dustballs at an estate sale, their cries are baby cries. I forget its name, but it’s half-otter half-human, calls from the forest in the voice of someone you love, someone you love in trouble. Amid log smell and saw leavings puffed to oyster crackers, in the drizzle, I hear it still. That thing, it’ll lure you into the forest. I mean: metaphorically.

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The C lo se d E y e s o f t he R av i s h e d

Asleep, or ecstatic, let them be. Faces topographical with pleasure. They’ve been. And seen. Too soon. But not too late. Their eyes don’t roll up when their lids click closed. Spare them knowing knowing won’t spare them.

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T h at T he y May Up h o l d H i m Hor i z onta lly Little Hans naps, face pressed to the couch pillow’s button – he’ll have to be carried up. But what he wants: To be too heavy but still to have to be carried – fame he thinks. Like fame. Blessed are the famous, loved and unmoved.

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Th e I sl a nd of Mi sf i t T oys

Huddled, if only there were opposition proper. They could take it; there’s nothing they couldn’t accept. *** They should be strong, like a march but there’s the baton league and the flags to wait through before the message. And there’s tv, and what’s on. And feeling not very good, and just not social. Gratitude for a lasagna sent two months ago. Strong loyalty: the kind that’s a warning.

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*** O, may the peace of empty benches overtake you mis-designed souls. You were not meant to be born, and meant not to act on it.

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Trick

The moon with his soft charcoal jockey’s cap pulled low . . . clouds of night jasmine. Between us: a country. But tonight as if on fans’ up-pressing hands I could be carried I suspect, like a rock star to you. Night and crickets. They aren’t stitching on old Singers. Rather: unzipping, then zipping back up. The gown scene before any grand ball, but repeated relentlessly and could it be stuck enough in that moment – reflected in the pivoting wood-framed mirror – that these are perfectly round plates twirling on poles, where, there is so little of me left, I could walk to you.

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Ul c e r

Joke or lesson: spit-up blood’s called “coffee grounds.” And against porcelain – sugared Turkish dregs: startlingly correct. Joke or lesson: that one always comes back forcibly as the other.

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T h e e v e ni ng

When the soul scootches around in the bucket seat of body. When tree lines draw their curtains and the river’s quizzical. There’s a fist trying to be made in my chest – quivering, which is, the heart insists to the disagreeable head, at least a gesture.

31

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Enough Hast T hou Sl e pt !

What are you doing here? Ordinary men are hacking other ordinary men, exquisitely, in half. Your friends, could they, in uniform, point the way, ladies and gentlemen, to the gas? The thickets you’ll scratch and scrape through aren’t nightmares. Worse: they aren’t nightmares.

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Sa i nt A nt hony

Dithering. Can it be that old age is sainthood – mortal acts, dirt worn off the artifact? Slumped. I can see just where they’ll cut for relics. Anthony, your goodness: it waits to rip you to pieces.

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B ro nz e A ge

People like us – educated out of importance – can mourn or yearn. Thirty, unemployed, I thought the world had turned its back. But I had – so not to suffer its loss. You were braced against the gale; the way was steep. You trained; you rowed on a machine at home. What you want I’m sad you can’t have. It’s a time after the humiliations: a time of triumphs. And the poets prove: a time after ours.

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Story

First she thought That Could Be Me then Thank God It’s Not. But it followed her from the breakroom. The drill press made repeated suggestions the card clock stapled it to her sleeve. Surely everyone else saw it, thought it a remnant of her neglect. The clerk snagged her cigarettes from above his head without looking he bagged the tampons quickly, left the gum on the counter. Why an escaped dwarf? Why an unrealistic family each behind a curtain opened

35

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at the touch of a button? Her Datsun hunkered. Inside, the smell of new heat. The roads swallowed snow. And the front door was unlocked. But she only read it that afternoon, after leaving the Cheerios toppled and spilled over the spare key. She must have left all the lights on on purpose, the shower dripping, every window open, an icicle on the bathroom faucet shy and shiny as a tear. The shower curtain pulled full around. The heat clanked to catch up. Closing each window, latching each window

36

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she recalled sidestepping the centre of the hallway, stepping around it. No mark. But she stepped around it again, understood something missing. The end of the story was unconvincing though, revenge is never zip-locked, it is what starts stories and the dead always come back as earaches or missing buttons. Putting the kettle on felt epic, pulling the teabag from its sleeve, definitive. The salt and pepper shakers were each toppled next to a knife out of the block. She’d forgot her trip to the bank,

37

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she’d forgot dinner, she’d hurried past the clogged mail box. The setting wasn’t even convincing. But now one spool unravelled, its thread stabbed into canvas, in rows. Formed a sack. Rocks rimmed the dead herbs out back. They clacked in the sack, sound of boats at dock. The hatchback groaned open. The bag curled perfectly around the spare. The drive was short, the lake frozen. Hard to chip. Now and then the boom of great plates suturing.

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Then there was a hole. The sack slid into it like oil, and the shattered ice rippled back, little floes rocked and settled, as if a puzzle done just to do a puzzle for the hundredth time. She smoked all the way home. Where was the circus now? Who had a circus in the dead of winter? In what trailer did occupants persist on bourbon and canned sausages? It wasn’t hers, the story, but she worked at it, and shifting on her seat a necklace snagged the seat belt

39

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a necklace she’d never seen before plopped its beads in her lap.

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We e d

I thought: lacy. You show me blood. Tiny queen collar neck stub. Or: hanky in uncanny hands after dabbing the stump. Or: the fatal cough. The mark – trillion on the hill. Over her face they laid it; she was not yet dead. Or a cardinal, a cloud. Trillion on the hill, on the frown of hill. Blizzard stoplight, bottle base, wedding sheet . . .

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And the lace moon, full curtsy. Which, I wonder, better? You insist the flower. You say, the moon’s not even pretty: a pocked hotel hallway ashtray – it’s not beautiful. Not beautiful: just far away.

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T h e F i e rc e ne ss o f P l e as u re

I understand the beasts. They mean only harm. Stay, but when you hear the blood feast: run and then stand right where my cries turn demands.

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Una C hupac a b r i ta

He sits in the hand Like a gun meant for a purse. His crest, his seahorse tail. His greenish almost scaled skin. To be dead means to be identified. Or at least no longer a mystery. So they all think. In that dinosaur saw blade skull Digits are still turning to goats And goats to cows and cows To fountains. As sort of Beautiful as a wedding Ice sculpture, but faster in melting. Sweet creature, how can incipience Not be innocent, or no, how can fierceness In its earliest form not be celebrity, How can we leave these little eared Seahorse mermaid blood sucking legends To die alone. We also die a little. We are either fountains Or thirsts. We are stone-walled Pools or the weird young people who Stomp around on cool nights I guess drunk And splash one another

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And think that this is innocence, When it is una chupacabrita, Incipience, violence, calm. Play with your handgadgets, Walk with your head down. But know, children, kids, Near adults, something is younger Yet. And curled in a warm hand and if we can do it Brought back, and yawning, and hungry. We’ll feed it things from banks Of freezers. And best to think It is not just where we end, But a place we never leave. Chupacabrita, the life we used To give you was as ranchers, We had valuables grazing. Now, sweet thing, we are the valuables, When you grow, know we can’t Blame anything for anything, We’ve lost the footing To period that sentence. And dear thing, perhaps you will Kill me, or someone I love, Perhaps you are wayward nature, Or an eye-infected driver, Or a jerk with something to prove, But as all these, I do love you still, Can I love you still, curly-tailed beast, Funny seahorse, prose poem of creatures. I will love you. With you grown and curled Over a donkey, a dead donkey, Whose face was so big it was Only comparable to a moon, 45

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Whose face was so skully It got human, because like humans With hollows, it looked both hungry Because thoughtful and the other Way round. I could watch you Do what you will do, should you grow And I might chase you for football fields But still, know, it is only part of you I chase but the whole of you runs.

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T he Whol e F i r ma me n t T h at T ur ne d E v e n as We T u rn e d You were the exception when you didn’t feel one.

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I n t he a rt h ouse

You you were about to speak we sat in the dark the reel stubborn – through the square window clicks and curses. You were telling me you were the spirits’ favourite in all the cult. I loved the line between belief and dismissal

48

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or rather the line which is true belief. The voices you spoke broke over against you but one always took guided – I saw: a scout troop blindfolds held hands the electric touch of each to each thought: snake skeleton thought: bullet train tradition thought:

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would I were so convincing amid candles. You were always speaking abandoned in company. Toward no spot. But for wending and you you

took my silence

correctly. Months later we’d part badly after tragedy and crazed reply to tragedy that is cruelty to the crazed. But now in the thick

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telling about being the medium of choice my what was it suspension of something – when you fell silent were going to tell me about how it felt because I asked you paused I think: thought and as your mouth opened the screen lit up.

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Job

It’s no e mt ’s job to clean the scene. Nor the 911 not to leave one. I said You must go. Check. After the failed calls after the threats. Took wheedling ’til four. He could’ve won if you hadn’t you could’ve. How I regret it next morning you

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his camera in hand recording his blood and spit on the kitchen floor to develop on recovery or what resembled recovery. Soon after he’d threaten

to kill you.

I don’t think it was Pictures – : gestures planted that seed. I won’t blame either of you stuck in frames too big or frames

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too small for psychopaths. Needed a

corkboard was my thought.

But you were my friend not him I forgave you even when he told you he’d kill you forgave you even then.

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P osi t i v e

Two friends almost simultaneously Convert, telling me each that he Intends to tattoo the fact on his chest With a Red Cross. Saying it’s the best Symbol for possibility. Ambulance and ampersand. Treasure, target. Worn on white bands By stretcher bearers. Complicity Of the Swiss: “neutrality” and timing. Outlasting Its own prediction. Hot gushing Life corralled by a tiled floor’s grouting. Slick red x of an unstaunched, bandaged wound. But also, how hope can be, is, pronounced: And?

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In t h e sha d ow, i n t h e ho u s e

phantom limbs of limbs not lost rooms open blooms

of their chairs



an attic beckons with creaking



mannequin fingers



– kindly enough



a basement unties the shoe



of its must

a bathroom sincere

from its placid rheumy eye



while walls iv drip light to lamps

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How to thank the terrible dream the anklebone pillow for this house turned away from the world How to shake misfortune’s hand

clasped white

at the small of its back.

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T e nt

Cortázar once wrote that happiness makes bad literature but I wonder as I watch you surrounded by friends flanked by the dogs telling a story about a woman visiting Tibet who finding it hard to sleep feeling like it was time to wake though still dark put her hand on the tent’s canvas and found it heavy and wet

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Her heat had called to a thousand leeches like happiness to fate, always the unsent delivered signal – how alive! how attractive

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A nge r

Mid-field there is a spout of flame. We honour it with our dead at whom of course we’re angry. But the living: it is inelegant to hate them. Why spend anything on what you can abandon?

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T hought e x p e r i m e n t

A man washes up on a desert island. Next to him, the book he never read. Mostly, he finds the characters flat, the situations improbable. His self slides through the lines like floss. It’s a book about a family so big they people a continent. Restless, they build ships and subdivide the moon. Finally – space unfashionable – time gentrifies. Stepping back centuries or forward as they please. No one is ever happy in this book. Ancestors begin to win all the tennis. One boy gets so bored

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he takes poison but his father grounds him to the day before. The dad is a decent man, though, as everyone knows, he fucks goats. There he is belt clanking at his ankles. Bliss on his face. He was stoic when his wife climbed back to the treehouse with her brother. The man is kind. People come to him for advice. He begins to age, develops memories. Giddy, he names each wrinkle. One day he ungrounds his son, the next, he buries him. He builds a “real time” sanctuary, invites people.

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They watch ice teas sweat on porch railings, keep diaries. The goats certainly seem happy. But the stranded man wants to punch someone. And in the book it is he who does slug the goat fucker, over and over, saying I’ll give you happy. Yeah, I’ll give you happy.

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Ge st ur e s

Rain falling so hard on roofs it shatters to mist. What is it has the heart to lift the drilled garden’s flattened shoots. The sky gestures. The earth spits up birds.

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F i rst snow

The lives that run streets return to plumb. I recall the cloud cover that eased you from your features. The sun that fetched you. All this weight and bright. The evergreens with their weird enthusiasm. The willows, whips. In the wind, whips. And down the hill that bare stand of elms: the veins of a heart to which it itself has lost its way.

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Sp e c i a lt y F i sh

On chipped ice banks, full sprawl. Beside steppes of fillet. Outside scales, in-, feathers. Hands, un- and regloved, unfurl each beauty. They stink of nothing. But heavy sound the ticking, the clanging of the hour. Close and closer: something breathing on your eyes. Huge and tranquil. Your vision pinched off at its periphery is mouth-shaped – or it strikes you shaped by one. 68

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Jon a h , mi ssi o na ry i n sp i t e o f h i m s e l f

We ask ourselves if it had to happen if it would have despite us and conclude that, yes, it is convenient to think that. We sniff through your things, we cook your foods. We set your table. Out of politeness we’ve invited people you hated. The friends. Look! the truth – They are as little good to each other as they were to you.

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Jon a h, d i sp l e ase d wi t h G o d f o r spa r i ng Ni ne v e h The cup of bitterness tastes good, he thinks. Empties it. Are there other cups? Places for refills. But the cup sits O-mouthed stupid as pissiness. Night falls. He puts the cup in the sink sits back down. A pale ring on the table’s wood, – mocking eclipse of all he desires. Zero lipped by a fish.

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A t your d oor

At your door, where the sky one last time sunk its hooked lung line. At the open door, closing it did you feel this you’ve taught me: pang swell and twitch. Cut from a length of light. Then stitched.

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Y o ur e ssay o n b l ac k b ox e s

The plane falls from the sky – still the moonlight shimmers on it the letters on the plane still in language the trees come more into focus – and quickly – they don’t flinch. There are no expressions the world takes in change until change has passed, until the moment

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relaxes and the world touches its face gingerly.

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Si nge t h L ov e wor d s

The rich are sad They’ve had their troubles Taken from them – shiny Fingertips scale their pineapples. The professionals are sad They’ve had boredom Taken from them – plush Are their chairs, strained their belt-leather. The past is sad Dragged as it is Behind and The future is sad – all it left – the tatters How sit And not feel The heartache Of each thing?

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F ac t

Like that Monty Python cartoon where one leaf On a tree jumps free with no explanation, but a belief In individual action, which is shown to be a lie When another leaf leaps from grief. Then another follows. Finally, the tree stands bare, it Means the season that it joins. And it is fact, not tragedy, suddenly, it owns.

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T hi c k p ro no un

1. Up ahead signboards, a closed motel: the crescent moon “Sleepytime” sign – a rectangle of extra-white where no would go. In 1976, three truckers beat Teddy post-proposition past predicate. They are their punishment I want to think.

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2. And for Brian: we were his. The nailed boards leaning by the entry when his mom answers, the chipped hole bored in the pull-down door. There is a thick pronoun where he hung. I walk through it to his kitchen.

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3. What do they do with the dead exactly? I wanted to know that. I was running over a bridge over a small creek, three weeks had passed. I imagined his body.

How it fought what they’d done. How it would win.

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4. After the rains the red clay lays tracks the sentence of their passage to the dirt pile of cloud. The road was ridden yesterday. You can read it.

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5. They made it to town. Nothing befell them. Except: they laid tracks . . . and like every novel this one ends: always time smearing its red through a field bigger than you.

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6. We are lastly our names. And: first. In between, something slightly less. Maybe the light through your dirty kitchen windows falling into reds, thickening, and maybe the push of your hand through your curls and the disorder of your teeth, who sometimes laughed themselves out before you could catch them.

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K a f k a e sque

When I say your life was Kafkaesque, I don’t mean cramped or dim – I mean nose-scratchingly eloquent and pressed to a puzzle end that argues with beauty.

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H one y i n t h e mou t h

In a dream you are mid-lasagna, placing mushrooms and saying: what you love will be taken from you eras and music you like that once spilled onto the esplanade trimmed with chatter and happiness – they will pass. And with them sorrow. You foil the dish. Set it in the oven, unmitt, sit. In the dream, I’m happy, but also furious with you for planning

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a dinner at my house and refusing to come. But that’s why you say this night is different from all others. Horseradish and honey on the same plate. I can’t argue. It’s funny and unfair: to quote me quoting you.

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B o ok o f J ona h

Lonely, I read and read the last thing you read. Afternoon tugs, evening plies. Morning has its leash in its mouth. *** Two chairs face: sea swells pelicans. I sit watch. The sea waiting to poach the sun. *** Here I am with my hand palm up between our chairs. I do know that some time ago yours hovered wanting to settle there. 85

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K a f k a on t h e b e ac h

He’s youngish, about the age you’ll always be. Up to him he’d also have left nothing but friends. And with them, photos. This one in a black bathing costume, arms akimbo and a neck, the V holds up that smile like a crab, wide, to prove mastery. *** Spit up there, posing, you’d have pulled back your hair

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like Garbo, as if to say: Brian, he’s not here right now, but if you think back to Garbo, young, you’ll know how long he’s been gone.

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Y om K i p p ur

October twilight: a solitary walker, blocks down, scissors his legs toward and away. Now I’ve known you twice as long dead. As taken God bait. And my eyes have adjusted – saturated: your death ends, and you push through.

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Sleepy after the sun the house is full of light spilt from our eyes  until our eyes are empty and we see

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A c k nowl e d gme n t s

poems in this manuscript first appeared in these venues sometimes in slightly different forms The Beloit Poetry Journal “Abandoned warehouse in the afternoon” “Clear cut” “Tent” The Cortland Review “Anger” Denver Quarterly “Una Chupacabracita” [now “Una Chupacabrita”] Drunken Boat “Thought experiment” “Story” “The cup of bitterness” [now “Jonah, displeased   with God for sparing Nineveh”] – finalists for the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards failbetter “The Closed Eyes of the Ravished” “In the shadow, in the house” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide “Near nothing”

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Gents, Bad Boys, and Barbarians: New Gay Poets (anthology) “*” “Idol” “Abandoned warehouse in the afternoon” “Young man and sailor” The James White Review “Young man and sailor” Liberty Hill Poetry Review “+” [now “Positive”] The Massachusetts Review “The evening” The Plum Review “Raised far from rivers” “Untitled” [now “*”] Spinning Jenny “The Island of Misfit Toys”

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