Herein lies what I lived through and with
and tore to fit over my cast, fell down in,
rose up in, wept and slept in on carpets
of peanut shells, on clouds and tombstones
and soggy chairs, on the bent weaponry of
remote women, my glimpse of the garden
occluded by dreams of hundred-dollar bills.
It all goes up the nose fast but somehow
I survived, put on weight, took up some
unpredictable space like the woman from Iowa
abducted by a UFO who now has a few things
to say to the media. I too have been far away
and heard the extraterrestrial hum and feared
I’d be dissected. I too have heard the crickets
of earth straining their leash in thin weeds,
anxious, anxious for the record stores to open.
It seemed at any moment a new music was about to be
discovered like an inland passage to a golden
shrine and all would be familiar as the beloved’s
name heard in a crowd, my jacket unwashed but
absolved, patched by a woman who joined
the Peace Corps and lost all her hair
to a disease that mostly afflicts chickens.
I seethed and yearned like the suicidal sea,
my jacket weighing over me no more than a couple
size D batteries, not nearly as much as all the meat
I’ve eaten amassed if one imagines such a frightening
karmic mess like all the time we spend asleep joined
end to end, horror of dark accumulation. Oh,
I’m nearly lost sending you this jacket. Always
something lost and ripping, thick tears spilling
through us, drying like my jacket draped
over the radiator after sleet. We
were young and toughing out a season
in our sneakers as we tried to kill the Buddha,
tried out madly for the fencing team, seething
and yearning in our jeans, first to be cut,
aimlessly driving while someone fussed
with the radio buttons. It was like a game,
divided into sides, everyone screaming
the same thing to entirely different
purposes. You’d get up, pull on pants, shirt,
jacket, then what? You’d finger the scar
ringing your skull from where they put
this brain in you. You remember being hoisted
into lightning. You remember something terrible
and unintentional by a stream and the villagers,
enraged, approaching the castle. Maybe it was all
a mistake, your few happy nights in the woodland,
your invitation to the wedding where the beautiful
stranger kisses you on the ear. For a while it seemed
like it could last forever as long as you did some
sewing yourself. People were necking in idling cars.
The snatch of song made out in passing seemed
rotund with longing just as the trees seemed
withered with longing and the man who promised
to throw money from his window was hustled away
in the night by those named in his will. They tried
to convince us it was all for our protection:
those flashing lights behind us, the fierce visors
girls in miniskirts were wearing, the seal
on medicine that seemed impossible to break
so for a while we hung on to all sorts of junk
we didn’t need, couldn’t wear, our size
had changed. It was a way of avoiding menace
we thought, a way of forestalling loss, pretending
it was something we’d already been through, suffered,
survived that the years had made quaint, inert,
the way we feel cozy looking at photos of people
long ago dead, the way we think what killed them
will never kill us yet we’re just as helpless
pawing for the dropped key in the dark, equally
confused about what can bring us light, about what,
exactly, electricity is. We thought it was a day like
any other with a dental appointment at 2 and our dreams
rusting away like old baby carriages. It was simple,
just drive to the store for something new,
for something more. So what there was the usual
haggle over parking and someone in the noodle aisle
had to discipline his child and what was once
revolutionary song was converted to ether
in pipes over our heads? How secure the milk
in its firm prediction of spoilage and that too
somehow comforts us, convinces us to quit
for a moment our long treatise on death. We
could drink it after all, all of it, stand
right there with it gurgling out the sides
of our mouth but of course that sort of thing
isn’t done. Why? Well, it was agreed upon
while you were out of the room like the rules
of poker, a game you’ll never win or lose
much at. And our desires? Well, they went
running off ahead of us as usual toward
the lake with ducks, a-wag, tennis ball in mouth
and we felt some odd sense of well-being, coiling
the leash up in our hand, loping after. It turns out
so much in the world actually works and no one
right now wants to remind us of all those
messes we’ve left for someone else to mop up.
There’s healing all around, scabs are forming
and flaking away and even the fat, legless lady
with her Pekinese seems another shape of love
just beyond our comprehension. It turns out,
all that time, vast conspiracies of forgiveness
were mustering in the sky and we had only to look up
to receive. Starlight. The resemblances of clouds.
Of course these frightening moments persist,
we really are going to pieces but surely
we can’t go on dragging all this stuff around with us,
no matter what it means, which may, even this,
nearly rag, permanently soiled, passed-on,
constitute a gift.