The Last Two Seconds (2 page)

where a cult of ghost-lovers predicts a rapture

but instead remains to inherit varicose veins,

rubber knickers, douches with bulbs, douches with bags,

girdles in a choice of pink, red or white,

and in rubber, silk or twilled linen, enemas, clysters, oils,

balms, and other Benjamin etceteras burrowing

like scabies into the brain’s ear as it listens to the click

of the next second coming to an end.

                             Throughout,

the senseless waste of reaching up to pull down

a machine-made device from the rafters, a beatific

mythical magical deity.
Sturm und Drang
, storm

and stress, turbulence and urge, turmoil and ferment.

A revolution goes right, then wrong. The right falls

in love with an icon. They force the landscape into a box.

They lock the box with the key inside. The aristocracy

is an improbable agent of change. Whispering

is no longer saying out loud, the all-seeing god a brother

grown bigger by another name.

Adv.
sadly

He stared sadly at the ruins of his house.
traurig

Er starrte traurig auf die Ruinen seines Hauses.
sadly

People make the mistake of thinking of impossibility

as if it were a corner visible dimly through a blanket

called “a failed way of thinking.” I see the impossible

as an example of the simulacra

that demands that you decide whether it is a new thing,

or simply the old thing emptied of itself.

Remembering the impossible is like remembering

a struggle that shows no signs of struggle but is a record

of a permanent closed door that always looks

as if it just happened. The scene is the early 1960s:

a room, a fog-gray wall, an absence of ambition

as a response to self-doubt. Along the way, the ceremony

of switching on a light, setting a table, the ordinary useless

shapes of the nonchalant. Meanwhile,

the room keeps disappearing like some relentless nothing.

Some photo solution to dissipation, wasting,

some erase of face, some get out of here

and keep going. The sun bleaching you dark

and gone.

But before that you’re asleep and dream-sorting

through what will be left behind. A closetful

of dried grass, and a jacket. Two boxes of what.

You’ve come so far. You’ve come a long way.

You’ve gone and you don’t stop going.

A year filled with this day, this, this, this day, this,

this becoming a form of sidling up to cessation.

This day, this. Winter will bring emptiness,

emptiness, emptiness; winter will bring emptiness.

All spring, emptiness. All summer. All fall.

She is sitting in front of a plate. On it, fresh lettuce and better—a handful of murmur and stir spinning in circles. She offers herself a word of advice: Don’t. Says, you’ll only pitch forward and start receding into a figure paused to reflect on what’s outside the window. Cars backed up for miles. Firefly taxi-light flicker.

The sea, if it ever was, is gone. A rhythmic geometry troubles the horizon. She spends too much time looking at a tree. She sees it but doesn’t know it. Which is something like the idea of freedom: it’s impossible to achieve and yet the individual sometimes
feels
free. Inside the mind a vector points to someone subtly rustling the wormhole, which in turn makes her wonder: who is that? Who was that me?

The door closed on the self she had been and

the outside went soft. A cat brushed by a leg.

A car went over a cliff. The clock minutia stopped

and was hours ahead when she opened her eyes.

The sky opened and let out an image: the optical

illusion of a mountain melting, each former rock

now a bird in the mouth of a cat, or something

like that. Countless snare wires fired in succession,

a tornado continually mimed a bluster on one side

or the other of audible. Everything lasted a second.

Against a white wall

someone’s hair was a treetop; the body,

a trunk. It was a time

when everyone said,

“Behind every great veil is only a human.”

If there was an overall ethos, it was

self-forgetful guilt and sorrow was real

enough. “I don’t know how

the curtain caught fire,” she’d said.

And I don’t know how reluctance to act

became a machine sucking air

from every sulcus and Grand Canyon

canyon. “Do you like air?”

What could one say to that—

I’ll have to think about it?

The waiter came by with the pepper mill.

The barman with his cocktail shaker.

The unsaid was becoming a picture

of sand, land, and nothing.

It was inevitable, she said, that she would

someday stand behind bars

at a window. She could imagine it:

high above an ice-covered expanse

otherwise covered with tin men

and tin women and rude mechanicals.

The noise, she was sure, would be awful.

I wear red to match the air

that comes over the fence

and fills the jar in which I keep the day.

I say every dog looks like no other

but that isn’t true. Not entirely.

Difference is slippery. I say,

Just look at my head, how it tilts to look up

at these over-large leaves. They’re large

and blue, the better to be seen

by my pincushion eye, so bright in the light.

I am sad. I am happy. I keep busy.

I count the eight legs of the tick

on the table. Arachnid and such.

The book I leave open, the wind blows it shut.

In late April I make a schedule: June

to July, July to August. I begin to realize

the circus will be places, minds, people,

pleasure. The drumming all of these.

I practice, when I’m not sure of myself,

this repetition: know, know, know, knew.

I think that chaos fascinates me. I say,

I am part of that,

one of the characters in a cage.

She had been talking about the story

where the cat had been belled.

Now the cat sat alone, learning.

Why learn behaving, slinking, fetching?

Why? No reply. The telephone rang.

It’s the biology mistress, the cat said.

The fine-print zeitgeist was act,

and consequence—

a mirror-image inference, the perfect mate.

The clear message was: the world’s full

of fear, finessed slightly more.

Death, said the cat, as it lifted a souvenir

trinket mermaid castle from the fish tank,

is day plummeting

behind a cruise missile set for a mid-sized city.

I’m only a human. Always is only in me

as long as I last. What do I want? Don’t ask.

We forget who we are. Conformists all alone

looking for a fake mirror and finding it

in some poker-faced nobody

sitting across the aisle. To be like some other

and feel that while I am walking around

on the only surface that exists in here—

some stage set designed for collapsing.

While I don’t the world falls away.

This circus I’m part of was built just for this.

That’s how it was then, a knife

through cartilage, a body broken. Animal

and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed.

The collective howl as a general alarm

followed by quiet.

Boot-black night,

halogen hum. Tape snaking through

a stealth machine. Later, shattered glass

and a checkpoint charm—the clasp

of a tourist-trap bracelet. An arm. A trinket.

Snap goes the clamshell. The film

in the braincase preserving the sense

of the drench, the angle of the leash,

the connecting collar. A tracking long-shot.

The descent of small-town darkness.

There are still many marvels, you know.

The festivals on Fridays. The divider

in the center of the wasteland.

On this side—flesh; on that—an iron claw

and a new-made screw

fallen from the factory window

at noon. The doll doctor pushes the arm

back into the socket. “There,” he says.

Day is done. He wishes he could smoke

but he gave that up long ago.

The rubber sole of the nurse’s right shoe

makes a squeak when she reaches the room.

Silence surrounds the empty bed.

The body is elsewhere.

“When they want more,” she says, “I give it.”

“When they want less,” she says,

“I take it away. I always let them choose.”

The doctor drums his fingers

on the doll’s flat abdomen. A sea of blood

moves back and forth to a song of no mercy.

I’m making a strudel of bluebirds.

A pied piper is playing a strange song

to the sound of a shredder that’s going non-stop,

each ordinal number is isolated, each receipt

gets eaten. Each is made safe.

The dish is hot from the oven.

The mesmerizing sound lulls like a candle

on a table makes a mirror of the eye.

A knife draws a line down the center.

This is mine. This is yours.

There is no way out.

Every language gets speckled with references

to what it is to be after: shredded,

sleeping—eyes closed, home-schooled

to ignore what you don’t want to see.

Now, down the disposal the feathers,

the unfed, the crust crumbs,

the monogrammed small plates stamped I

for Idiocy. Mine and yours.

After the fall of the Wall I felt anything

was possible. History would no longer exist.

The mic goes out.

The sound softens.

The books burn down to embers, then ash.

The fever hospital closes for lack

of a solution to the seven deadly sins: betrayal

for one, intolerance for two,

greed for three, cruelty for four, large cars

for five, war for six, suicide for seven

when it kills more than one.

We put you in the circus. Was that a good idea? And now

there are so few of you. Why why why why why?

Why why why why why why?

A human head should infold

    to behold all extremes: monstrous

serpents, lambs joined

    with dolphins, the sea,

flowing hair, a nose, eyes.

The forest dies,

and

    we are mice in the midst of things.

Now reversal inches back into the past:

bomb building and bloodbath.

A billion anthills in a grid.

Drone and bass blasting every chorda tympani.

Flesh melting. The sky moving a mushroom.

The stupid apprentice at a loss to sweep water

and staunch his watch. My head’s in my hands.

Some sobbing from somewhere. Is it you?

You vote but the vote goes nowhere.

Dante to Virgil, “I can’t bear to listen any longer.”

Night of crystal, night of knives, day of wall

plus wire, morning falling into a reeking cloud

of time burning back to liquid, to rock declining

like gravity in a glass shattering.

Someone comes in in a white coat.

In my white coat.

I call myself doctor but really, I’m consequence.

The winter of consequence. I can’t learn.

She went into the perpetual theatrical night

and woke somewhere past the point of fading

but before sunlight was due to be reinstated. Afterward,

a small wish that she could lie down and close her eyes

at the side of yesterday’s quarry-cut rock. In her mind,

she was the weather—i.e., an inconsistent frenzy,

intermittently electric, insistently wedded

to Monday’s tower of wooden blocks. The sharp pinch

of some maybes. She thought, I’ve felt this. I think

it’s the furniture in the gloom for some of us.

Her deportment got ordered from time to time.

A jury decided that a wave should sweep over her again.

She marveled at a wall in the optician’s office: eye chart,

frames missing lenses arranged in rows. Very classic, yet