THINGS THAT DON’T HAPPEN

Is there a place they go—the gold stalks, the umbels, the new

shoots,

when the seeds rot in the fields or are eaten by birds? Is there a city

someone meant to build

where your car is humming steadily through the streets, while here

the ignition

turns over with a dull sound announcing silence, and you trudge

back to the house,

the appointment canceled, erased from the date book, and a

different day starts, the way

it starts for someone in a farmhouse kitchen, with a mother who’s

suddenly

a widow, an uncle who says Don’t let any niggers touch him so

that for a moment

the black coroner lays out the body, and gently closes the eyes

while the wife slips on her old nightgown and the son whispers on

the phone

to his lover, and the monsignor prepares his eulogy—

this is a eulogy for the things that don’t happen, for the stillborn,

the unstamped passport, the ring given back or pawned, or simply

tossed

into a drawer with the final papers, the ones that say you failed

as everything fails, while each day the tiny accumulations, the

insignificant actions,

destroy those shimmerings in the air, those sparks thrown off, the

fire of the actual

consuming everything. The ice settles in the empty glass beside my

bed, a sudden,

startling click, a latch, an opening or closing, I can’t tell which; I

could get up, pour

another shot, stop trying to explain how it obsesses me, each day

the not of what is: this lover’s mouth and not the last one’s, this

dream

that isn’t premonition and vanishes on waking, incoherency

refusing

to coalesce, the words stoppered in a bottle that floats to the

horizon’s edge

and goes down, flaring for an instant. And each day the terror,

your house

with its blood-smirched doorpost, the angel passing over but

stopping somewhere else:

brains sprayed on a brick wall or leaking into the dirt, bodies in

the river carried down

with the current, river where one fish feels a hook tearing through

its gills and rises

frantically into the air. But why should we be sad; shouldn’t we be

breaking out

the champagne, thinking of the would-be suicide sweating in a

room, the pistol

with its rusted firing pin flung onto the bed, all the black shoes

safe in the back

of the closet; and of the boy in Birkenau, his death that doesn’t

happen

so that two generations later, in Brooklyn, a girl can kneel down

to place a small stone on his stone, and stand to brush the dirt off

her knees?

Isn’t the loss held in abeyance each day, the benign tumor, the

wreckage

at the intersection where you might have been standing, except

that you caught the streetcar;

but really there is no streetcar, none of this is happening—it’s

trying to but I can’t help

realizing how hopeless it is: as fast as I have you step up, pay the

fare,

struggle into a seat with your packages, I’ve kept you from a

thousand better things.

I should let you lie in bed late at night, awake but not alone; I

should nestle you

against the one true lover you haven’t let yourself long for in years

but who is finally here, who’s not ever leaving. I should seal you

up

with the breast, the kiss. Nightingale, nipple, tongue dipping into

the real,

the taste of it, the singing, the virtual lark, the light beginning but

not yet

day, not clothes yet, not shame or betrayal, just the lovers too

unironic to survive

anywhere but here. So this is the end, because I want to keep my

stupid faith

in romance, in the idea of love, and if you would just let it go on

forever this way

you wouldn’t have to go out into the nothing where something is

waiting

especially for you, though what it is I can’t tell you, only that it

begins

as soon as you stop listening, and turn away, only that it happens

now.