The Book of Goodbyes (4 page)

begin long before you hear them

and gain speed and come out of

the same place as other words.

They should have their own

place to come from, the elbow

perhaps, since elbows look

funny and never weep. Why

are you proud of me? I said

goodbye to you forty times.

I see your point. That is

an achievement unto itself.

My mom wants me to write

a goodbye poem. It should fit

inside a card and use the phrase,

“You are one powerful lady.”

There is nothing powerful

about me though you might

think so from the way I spit.

I don't want to say goodbye

to you anymore. I heard

the first wave was an accident.

It happened in the Cave

of the Hands in Santa Cruz.

They were drinking and someone

killed a wild boar and someone

said, “Hey look, I put my hand

in it.” Saying goodbye is like that.

You put your hand in it and then

you take your hand back.

Maybe it's because you're cut off

from your roots, and you need to go

to Spain, be with your forefathers,

the Diego Logos, whose remains lie

in the sea surrounding Majorca.

There you'd feel more
insula maior
,

less
insula flatbrain
. There you'd rest

in a hammock, mid-afternoon, writing.

Except such peace makes awful poetry.

There would appear a beetle

by the ill-begotten name of Hydraboo.

He is angry, scaled, with pokey things

like fingers if fingers were shiny blades

of poison. He is evolved beyond

our Horatian notion of beetles. He sees

your left ear and it tenders him,

calms him the fuck down. I can't

blame him for that. Your ear, lined

as it is, like the marks he made by the sea,

and it is soft, with a secret spot

for getting into. Don't you think

he had a day of flat brain?

You bet. But not this day, the day

you swing in the hammock, composing

a much too peaceful crown of sonnets

or just a crown inside a sonnet

or just a curtal sonnet about a king

who lost his ending, an ending who lost

her king, when suddenly beside you

Hydraboo the Beetle wants in your ear.

What will you do? You are a monist.

Bisabuelo Logos was a monist.

Indeed you are a monad. Sometimes

this is what I do when I am especially

missing you: I pretend you are hiding

behind everyone in the world's face

and I have to say the code to reveal you.

This is why I buy so much fruit

from so many different vendors.

I guess I'm on the island too.

Do you mind? I wonder how I got here.

I must've taken a whale.

I say to the vendors, “You are a royal

pumpkin. You are a five-dollar chicken.

Are you not?” No, he is not, and he is not,

and neither is he. On I walk, eating

pomegranates and berries. As Diego

Logos used to say,
Esperanza mis niños
,

and as he spoke he saw Hydraboo,

back when he was half-a-pint,

half-a-toothpick, flat without brain,

pinch without body, scuttle here,

scuttle there. Diego watched him

with your very own eyes before they

were your eyes, when they were still

Diego's eyes watching Hydraboo,

who was not yet boo, and not yet beetle,

more like
be
, only an inkling, before

poems happened, when all writing

was wish and whizgig in sand.

He called her number, after many months,

and reached a man named Pete. “This is Pete,”

the man said. “Don't nobody answer here

but me.” So she had changed her number.

It was almost like she wanted him to suffer.

It was almost like having her new number

would give him something that belonged

to him anyway. During other hours of the day,

he didn't want her new number and would

content himself without it, until he got drunk,

and thinking, and online found her faculty page.

She never should have said where she worked

if she didn't want him to call her at work.

He dialed and a mechanical voice said, “We

are not available. Please leave a message.”

What college had such primitive devices

as standard answering machines? Where

was she? Furthermore, what was this
we

bullshit? Did the voice know something?

Was she seeing someone? It was just like

leaving any other message except his heart

beat differently. Had it always? Why yes,

hello, you are no longer at the number I had

for you. I spoke to some guy named Pete.

It has been a while but I still miss you.

This is pointless. Once he left the first

message, it was easier to leave the second,

third and fourth. He made a regular habit

of calling her. It was like they talked.

He told her about his student who, by

his recommendation, won the Duquesne

Fellowship. He told her about his reading,

in the Lower East Village, the audience

loved his poetry. He told her about his colleague

who farted, regularly, in the office. It was

always the same. “We are not available.

Please leave a message.” The voice was firm.

The voice forced him to leave messages.

He told her about his mom who sent

an Advent calendar with windows full

of Xanax. He told her his mom always said

he was a good eater. He told her to call

and gave his number, though he knew she had it.

Where do you get off changing your number

and not giving me the new one? Not reading

Endless Love
by Scott Spencer? Not taking

me up on any of my recommendations

like when I recommend you call me back?

He kept waiting for the tape on the machine

to run out. Every time he called, tenth,

eleventh, and twelfth now, he waited for

the tape to run out. Weeks passed. He took

a Xanax. He drank a beer. It was raining.

There was a song. Someone said something.

He didn't put it that way on the machine.

He didn't say I'm stoned I'm shitfaced

I'm calling because they were playing James

Blunt in the Whole Foods Market. Instead

he told her about the view from his office.

The tops of roofs. The smoke plumes.

The clouds. He was Li Po sometimes

and Catullus others. He made sure to get

sweet after he got vulgar. It must have been

an independent machine, sitting next to

the phone, on her desk in her office.

So he was on her desk talking. This isn't

very nice. It isn't very nice of you to go

away and not tell me how to reach you.

I'm starting to doubt the whole enterprise.

He told her about a podcast and a movie.

Once, after reading Wittgenstein, he left

a message of silence punctuated by

a nipple clamp. Sweet again. Thursday.

It's me. You check this machine. You and me

both know it. The tape never runs out.

Don't ask any questions of me. Stay on

your side of the tape. We're fucked.

I don't love you. I'm sleeping with various

women from the boroughs, professional

and amateur. I miss you. Come see me.

I saw a therapist. Her voice was like a cartoon.

She wore pantyhose with tennis shoes.

I said this is the deal. I'm beginning

to doubt the whole enterprise. There is

no one I've seen that you need know about.

I had a bad dream last night. We died

and came back to find each other in the

Dulles airport bar. That is why it won't

go away. You took me to the Great

Sadness. You look cute even when

emaciated. We were going to survive.

We fully intended to be survivors.

All our poems went up in smoke. Us too.

I'm not writing. I haven't written since

I saw you. I can't write. The therapist

wasn't too worried about it. I couldn't

take her seriously. I lied continuously.

Pick up the phone. You must be checking

your machine. Your students wonder

where you are. Your boss left word.

Don't you have appointments to keep?

Stop erasing me. Keep this one at least.

This is a good one.

Zahra Baker is missing. “I don't know. You all know more than I know,” says her father. The news on five websites tells the story the same clausal way. A girl, who wears hearing aids and a prosthetic leg, went missing.

Why bring Lacan into it?

I dated this guy who liked to make unannounced visits. “Whaddya know,” he would say. “I was just in the area.” When we broke up, he said, “You must have had childhood trauma.”

I called my mom. “Did I have childhood trauma?”

Where is Zahra Baker's mom?

Zahra Baker was born in 2000. Her parents divorced in 2001. No one can find her mom. They are both missing.

Wednesday. Poetry Workshop. Here I am again talking without thinking. “I have a fake leg and I saw this clip on the news about Zahra Baker who may be dead with a fake leg and it didn't make me cry. It's very hard to make someone cry in poems or on the news.”

After I said the words
fake leg
, everyone in the class looked at my feet.

I do not have bone cancer or anything that easy. People know what bone cancer means. She was ten years old. And, if she is still alive, she is still ten years old.

“Zahra was last seen in her bed at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning according to her stepmother.” —Fox News

“I am gothic and proud.” —Stepmother's MySpace page.

“Mr. Coffey, you like being in control now who is in control we have your daughter no cops.” —Ransom Note

Her leg was found in the woods. They matched the serial number from leg to medical records. This is how it begins. Serial numbers on our parts. Only our doctors can tell you who we are.

What am I doing with my life?

The commercial starts with a celebrity. The celebrity turns into a potbellied man with a missing leg surrounded by empty beer bottles. “Be thee amputated, drunk and alone? Play Rock Star.”

In the spring issue of
Pony Swoon
, Nadine Neeze has a poem titled “Lame Sonnet.” Hugh sent the issue. What am I going to do about it? Tell Hugh the word
lame
is offensive? Do I actually care or is this another of my baseless campaigns?

“You used the word lame on the phone the other day,” Josh says. “Sometimes I use it just to see how it makes me feel,” I say.

In regards to the song “Pretty Boy Swag” by Soulja Boy: It is about a lame boy who goes to the club and because of his limp, which is called “swag,” all the women want him.

I am watching
Pawn Stars
. It is about how much something is worth.

How much would you pay me to say the name of the condition I have? Would I just need to say the name or would you require an examination? How much for the box of legs in the attic?

I start calling myself a cyborg.

I find a website called
Gimps Gone Wild
. “I could make a lot of money selling photo sets,” I tell Josh. “Probably a hundred dollars for a set.”

“Don't do that,” he says. “I would never do that,” I say even though I'm not sure if I would do it or not.

“Have you seen the Suicide Girls?” I ask Josh. He says, “No. What's that?” It seems impossible that he has not seen the Suicide Girls. “It's porn but the girls are really different with tattoos, librarian glasses, emo, indie, that kind of thing. If the girls on
Gimps Gone Wild
were pretty like the Suicide Girls then maybe.”

What is pretty?

I read the novel
Fay
by Larry Brown. I read it fast and pretend Fay has a fake leg. This is a recurring approach I take.

Zahra Baker's stepmother has been arrested for 1) assault with a deadly weapon 2) failure to return rental property 3) writing worthless checks and 4) some other charges not reported. Her father has been released after posting bond.

In the Netherlands, if you are disabled, the government gives you 12 free sessions with a prostitute each year. “For women too?” Josh asks.

A man at a coffee shop. I thought he had a condition that caused him to shake uncontrollably. Later, the emails roll in. “I got turned-on seeing you walk to the stage. I bought your book. Do you like making love?”

The emails got so bad I had to forward them to my professor. He would read them and let me know if I needed a restraining order. Or a gun.

If I enrolled on
Gimps Gone Wild
, I would wear a wig. I would dress up in a ball gown. Employ various speakers. Is it any different than poetry?

Zahra: Here's the drill. There have been so many laws against us. Laws that say we can't go out in public and we can't marry. Laws that mandate the splicing of our wombs and parts of our brains. I was going to lay it out for you in poetry, all the laws against us, but there were just too many.

On the cover of the book Josh is reading: BEST BLACK WRITER. Josh says, “Bet that pisses him off.”

Zahra Baker is still missing. I better write some more notes to her before she's dead.

It is weird that I have all these legs in the attic but they would not let me keep the real leg. The real leg they cut off and I guess it went somewhere like to a shelf or an incinerator. Sometimes I wish it had a proper burial.

“Probably has to do with medical waste,” Josh says. “There must be laws.”

Yesterday was fine. I was straightforward with them. I told them why I wrote the things I wrote. I read with a Native American poet.

Someone asked, “Do you feel the burden of your identities?” I said yeah, I feel it. The Native American said he doesn't think of it as a burden. His first language was Cherokee. He doesn't speak it anymore.

I am writing my acceptance speech for the Best Disabled Writer Award. The speech begins: I need some new words.

Tell us. How is it getting around? It's awful. You have to negotiate with so many people on the sidewalks and you can hear their thoughts, like “Hurry up” and “Why are you walking so slow?” and “Move out of my way.”

Zahra: You'll get better at passing. It's a pain in the ass, I know. You'll learn, I promise. Just make it out of the woods.