1. Never Trust an Animal that Appears Suddenly
It was a day painful with sunshine when I said Dog and one appeared in my garden, lumbering out of the foliage like time-lapse botanical evolution, plant to animal in a matter of minutes, the time it takes to name the outcome of a foregone conclusion. It was a mastiff ropy with brawn, weaving in a way that said it was spoiling for a scrap with an obsequious lap dog. I knelt to claim it, be claimed by it, held out my hand, smaller than its paws. It sniffed the grass then wagged its sculpted haunches, loped toward me. I imagined its slobbering muzzle buried gratefully in my palm, its skin shivering with the satisfaction of encountering a beneficent creature with an endless supply of bone-shaped food in her cupboard. As it came toward me, I saw its heavy testicles swinging, that lightly furred, leathery sack of canine perpetuity, and I saw the progeny in his future, wormy thug pups that would force their eyes open prematurely, develop a menacing gait. Then he trotted past me, gaze forward, wagged his way to the woman standing behind me in the street, a woman wearing dark glasses, a flowered sundress and yellow hat, skin so tan she seemed purple. She knelt, held out her hand.
So is it always. Though I can predict it, I make myself blind with hope I know is fated to be dashed, an impotent optimism I know will one day erase me. I am a collection of faint pencil strokes on onionskin, a script that blurs imperceptibly with daily handling, fading in the sebum of more definitive fingers.
2. Don’t Rely on Augury to Know When to Wear a Parka
When my mother calls to tell me the weather is soon to turn, though it’s early, to tell me to take my sweaters out of the cedar chest, I tell her I know, the mercury will drop this very night, plummet below freezing, causing porch plants to shrivel with hypothermic shock. Tomorrow, TV meteorologists will distract viewers from the previous night’s inaccurate forecast by capering on camera in mittens and parkas. I wonder, says my mother, if I should bring in my begonias. Your flowers will die, I say, go limp, translucent, blooms and stems withering, the thick leaves of your jade plant falling off like frostbitten toes. I think I’ll wait, she says. The drop will be gradual. The season is so short. I’ll give them another day to soak up the final drizzle of sunshine. I see the clay pots full of dry dirt and old roots that will line her porch through the winter.
3. Dreaming Will Only Make You Hoarse
I dream myself, underwater, keening at a glass surface, my diluted voice not even conjuring bubbles, sound lodged somewhere in my sternum.
4. Is That a Tumor in Your Brain or Are You Happy to See God?
At work, as I place the lead vest over shoulders, drape it across laps, I try not to see the burgeoning tumors, the wayward cells colonizing the native putty of being. I know it’s an invasion, peering into the crystal ball of the body, eyeing its eventualities, but my eyes stare into portent even when closed. I touch the dark spots on the spectral record of the body’s interior, touch the dim fissures and opaque intimations. Once I passed a child on her way to an MRI, a tumor the size of a hazelnut bullying its way into her brainstem. My face tensed when I saw it, and the child stopped and patted me on the arm. “God is love?” she asked, squinting as if adjusting to sudden sunlight. “Love is blind,” I returned, determined to liberate us both from illusions. We pictured a fiercely scowling, milky-eyed man, rag-tag and smelling of urine, holding out a cup in a fiery hand, the word FORGIVENESS stamped in the tin. Humans, the mundane braille that God fingers when he needs to find a flophouse, weary from all the begging.
5. One Man’s Hearing is Another’s Impairment
My lover listens with the aid of a device, pink and coiled like a tiny fetus resting inside his ear. It is dark in his room, but I see his eyes going dim like the screen of an old Philco TV reducing itself to a silver horizon, a luminous dot. I am here, I say. Where are you? he asks. I put my mouth to his belly, bite. Touch me here, he says, pointing to the imprint of my teeth. I circle my tongue around his chin. Your mouth here, he says, touching the delicate cleft. I take the hearing aid from his ear, put my lips to the cavity and blow. He hears, says, Fortuity, Embezzlement, Disappearance, Metastasis.
6. From Your Mouth to God’s Hand
In his front room is a round table covered with a black and purple cloth batiked with owls. I sit beneath the table and trace my finger along the backside of the cloth, the horned tufts that crown the owls’ heads. There is a knock, and my lover lets his client in. The woman sits down at the table, and feet in brown suede pumps appear, neatly parallel, on the floor behind me. The ankles are thin and the bones press through the tops of the feet, a trellis draped in skin. My lover removes his hearing aid, birthing his deafness, passes the device under the table to me. I hear the static that roars inside his ear, the white noise of prophecy. People place stock in the physical impediments of oracles, believe congenital vexation of the body must be compensated, must result in sensitivity to extrasensory rumblings. My lover’s spirit, they imagine, is horn-shaped, amplifying the inscrutable godvoice that hums inaudibly beneath the surface.
With one hand, my lover holds the wrist of his client. He offers the other hand to me under the table. I press my lips to his palm and mouth the woman’s future into his skin. He tells her she should move to the desert, where life springs green and spiny through small cracks in adversity. He tells her that erasing the body will not save the soul, that she should not see flesh as an iron-mawed trap she must gnaw herself free of.
The feet disappear from beneath the table, but I continue to hold my lover’s hand to my mouth. He turns his hand over and takes my wrist. I put my other hand to my mouth, feel the velvety movement of my lips against my palm. I see my skin grow sheer, hear my voice turn to wind.
7. If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close
My eyes are ponderous with sight, eyelids drooping like window shades with weighted pulls. The people who seek answers from my lover can barely keep their eyes in their heads, eyeballs empty, transparent, buoyant as effervescence.
The cross that stoops the back of the prophet is her own conclusion, the film of her departure projected interminably on the screen of her eyes. What I have always seen, in the moments when I’m left utterly alone, is my own unmaking, cells loosening, life moving backward from two legs to four to the scaly arc and rudder of prehistory and the phosphorescent shimmer before that, to the dissonant whir of life plotting its inception, from dry land to water to improbable inkling, the body devolved, a life unauthored.
My voice vibrates in the ears of the unsuspecting; the familiar timbre makes them tug at their earlobes, the sound of belated intuition. My lips, forever parted, the very shape of vanity. Those who seek credit for foresight sport ample, pouty lips, mouths that suggest they fancy themselves on speaking terms with deities.
Every mouth is entitled to only so many words, every page too. The mouth and pencil at rest are things to be lauded. Physics tells us we are the prediction of what happens elsewhere. Let the elsewhere begin. In the end, I breathe into my hand, watch with the wary eyes and elevated pulse of a tornado tracker, with a body tilted happily toward disaster, as the unheeded mouth closes, as a fine script disappears from a page, fading with each preoccupied reading, letters seeming to lift off the page as they whiten.