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Personal
Doomsday Clock
I
watch my father in the home video,
and I know I will bury him
a few months after.
Did I sense then the soft, glacial passage
overtaking him?
As I watch, his muscles are already melting on
the bone.
His nose is already sliding off his skull.
He is
sublimating, disappearing,
and I wonder if he feels himself
drifting, rising,
like a balloon bounced from his grandson’s
fingertips,
careless and unhurried above our conversation.
Just
before sleep,
my eyes closed, I watch.
My wife’s
breathing, as she dreams beside me,
is no more real than it is
solid, or tangible.
It is the heart of a balloon bounced from
our son’s fingertips.
I feel them all all all all
all
(even me, especially me)
drifting, rotating,
to land
briefly, as if settling,
until urged elsewhere,
random and
blind,
by the slight breeze that moves the moon.
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Day
Like Living Vellum
I
see morning, pink and warm and indecent and soft
as the
buttery flesh of an exposed midriff,
and she’s lounging
across the stolid hills behind Germantown Pike.
I want to bite
her a little, softly,
just in the tender spot,
taste the
salt and feel the flesh submit --
to make this day my own
by
writing short, slightly vulgar words on
the fragrant,
inviting surface of her vellum skin.
Driving
over the hills,
I like to mount the pavement
as if I'm an
obsessed bull,
only satisfied when the concrete rolls
underneath me,
unable to cease until I say so.
I keep
insisting, prodding, grinding,
trying to make this day give up
its pleasure, its release.
And
sometimes it actually works.
Sometimes the day throbs joy and
juice, almost against its will.
Other times I pump away,
hopeless and stubborn, and just get winded.
But when the
pressure builds again next morning
and I swell and harden to
the day's come-on,
then I get right back on it and in
it,
determined, imperious,
watching with animal cunning for
the tell-tale flush
that says the ride was worth the ride,
and
that the vellum day will shudder under my clutching hand.
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Arrogance
of the Ordinary
She
dreams she is Gretta from James Joyce’s “The
Dead.”
Michael Furey is singing under her
window,
doomed, beautiful, insidious.
His weightless,
quivering tenor buoys him into the next world on aoelian sails,
but she feels the weight of his sacrifice
stacked against
the long years of marriage and children she still has to
endure.
She knows, as she listens to his hopeless melody,
that
the years of practicality awaiting her
will blunt the keening
laceration
of listening to this beautiful boy sing himself to
death in the name of love.
She
wakes, turning to the arid future of ordinary life,
relentlessly
called to normalcy by martinet necessity.
She wants to cry for
loss of imagined love and beauty.
But the drone of morning
traffic
already infiltrates her bedroom,
gray and
irritable as the light sneaking around her blinds.
There is no
snow falling faintly and faintly falling over all the living and
the dead.
There is only the soft, fossilizing mud of routine
and must and should
covering beating hearts,
turning breath
to stone.
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