Read The Last Two Seconds Online
Authors: Mary Jo Bang
The Last Two Seconds
Note to the Reader on Text Size
“This is the corner where the murder took place.” Of course, corner
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BOOKS BY MARY JO BANG
Poetry
The Last Two Seconds
The Bride of E
Elegy
The Eye Like a Strange Balloon
The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans
Louise in Love
Apology for Want
Translation
Inferno
by Dante Alighieri
POEMS
Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 by Mary Jo Bang
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-704-7
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-901-0
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950982
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Kikuzo Ito,
Speeding Monorail: On the Precipice
, 1936
The Earthquake She Slept Through
Provisional Doubt as an Architectural Space
The Too-Bright Light Will Wash You Out
An Individual Equinox Suitable for Framing
Equidistant from the Center of Never
Silence Always Happens Suddenly
A Calculation Based on Figures in a Scene
Lions and Tigers: The Escaped Animal Was Bent to the Trainer’s Will
Can the Individual Experience Tragic Consequences?
The Blank of Reason Produces Blank: After Goya
The Perpetual Night She Went Into
Except for Being, It Was Relatively Painless
Time Trap: The Perpetual Moment
2. This Bell Like a Bee Striking
The earthquake in this case was
A Technical Drawing of the Moment
Reading Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
A Structure of Repeating Units
Studies in Neuroscience: The Perpetual Moment
Compulsion in Theory and Practice: Principles and Controversies
Here’s What the Mapmaker Knows
Scene I: A Hall in the Temple of Justice
Close Observation Especially of One under Suspicion
Sure, it’s a little game. You, me, our minds
The Disappearance of Amerika: After Kafka
She slept through the earthquake in Spain.
The day after was full of dead things. Well, not full but a few.
Coming in the front door, she felt the crunch of a carapace
under her foot. In the bathroom, a large cockroach rested
on its back at the edge of the marble surround; the dead
antennae announced the future by pointing to the silver mouth
that would later gulp the water she washed her face with.
Who wouldn’t have wished for the quick return
of last night’s sleep? The idea, she knew, was to remain awake,
and while walking through the day’s gray fog, trick the vaporous
into acting like something concrete: a wisp of cigarette smoke,
for instance, could become a one-inch Lego building
seen in the window of a bus blocking the street.
People sometimes think of themselves as a picture that matches
an invented longing: a toy forest, a defaced cricket, the more
or less precious lotus. The night before the quake, she took a train
to see a comic opera with an unlikely plot. She noticed a man
in a tan coat and necktie who looked a lot like Kafka.
The day after, she called a friend to complain about the bugs.
From a distant city—his voice low and slightly plaintive—he said,
“Are you not well? Is there anything you want?”
The rhinestone lights blink off and on.
Pretend stars.
I’m sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said
of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave.
A science of motion toward some flat surface,
some heat, some cold. Some light
can leave some after-image but it doesn’t last.
Isn’t that what they say? That and that
historical events exchange glances with nothingness.
You know, don’t you, what we’re doing here?
The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless.
We’re watching the spectators in the bleachers.
The one in the blue shirt says, “I knew,
even as a child, that my mind was adding color
to the moment.”
The one in red says, “In the dream, there was a child
batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting
that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends
with the body making a metronome motion.”
By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically
side to side while making a clicking noise.
His friends look away. They all know
how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch
because we have nothing better to do.
We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd
will rise to its feet when prompted and count—
one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred,
three-one-hundred—as if history were a sound
that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss
with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this.
The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.
We’re sitting here quietly.
You’re feeling your arm, I’m feeling my face.
We’re supposed to stay quiet
and live the waiting life.
We were told to be a portraitist’s object
and imitate a sad fate.
We are a skull times two.
We’re supposed to stay quiet.
Herr Moment is looking
at a watch that says now.
Its red face reminds me of the eye of an ogre.
Its shiny rim reminds me
of Herr Moment’s handcuffs.
I don’t want to speak
about what can’t be fathomed—
mourning and missing, rings cut from corpses,
Herr Moment’s refusal to show his real face.
1.
A cage can be a body: heart in the night
quieted slightly; mind, a stopped top.
Clock spring set. Hand in motion.
The fact of the hollowed nothing head.
How did we come to this? Inch by inch.
I was born, borrowed from the beast;
I was now property in a country
where chain reigns—the empire city of I.
So, the empire: the breath, the legend
Of the well-guarded hell.
One comes to tell you
what you should have done differently.
I think, I say, and I am not you.
In the margin of fear I heard a woman
convincing me to listen.
“Listen,” she said, “to the doctor.”
The city before this was nothing
but swirled sand in a storm.
Nothing turns back. I saw a fluttering
I recognized in the distance.
Out of nowhere, there was red:
the furnace and the beating heart.
Every giddy excess behind the beginning
was also leading to the emphatic end.
The trapeze artist above
is invested in space.
She attends to the arc the bar makes
the way you’d watch a movie
where a star who looks like you swings on a swing.
It’s true you know how to wait
although I don’t know that
that counts as knowledge.
I heard a banker say to Monsignor this morning,
I’m certain God wishes me well.
A rat’s face at the window next to me
is stone and the wind isn’t blowing.
A rat’s face sometimes reminds me
of what one sees in a morning mirror:
nose, eyes, a head, some hair.
Five racehorses, neck to neck,
each with four feet off the ground:
yet another classic example
of time seeming to be standing still.
Everyone with money knows that
flying from Pisa to France is a pain
since you have to change planes in Brussels.
As I said to Monsignor this morning,
I’m certain God wishes me well.
Strum and concept, drum and bitterness, the dog
of history keeps being blown into the present—
her back to the future, her last supper simply becoming
the bowels’ dissolving memory in a heap before her.
A child pats her back and drones
there there
while under her lifted skirt is a perfect today