The Last Two Seconds (4 page)

even logic cannot change the most obstinate person.

A palimpsest is something with something

behind it. Behind her was a plan and a face

in a window at night that essentially said, You see

yourself where you’re not.

She began as a set of sketches

for the construction of a traumatized body

fresh from birth with the mouth removed.

The room went light and dark. The sun narrowed.

She put on her shoes.

Think about it, she thought, a diagram

has no predictive value.

A blueprint can’t keep a house from falling.

The magic of glass shows where one is

even when one is not.

Which is to say, I live inside a scene

inside my head: a lake that remains water

except in winter when the rough cover

of white waves to someone driving by in a car.

A cigarette thrown from the window burns down

to the filter. It maintains its shape but becomes ash.

Gray replaces white.

Whenever she left the room

the touch of her fingers on the broken lock

extended the realm of being in there.

In one sense, you could say I was framed—in other words, led

into circumstances I wouldn’t otherwise have found myself in.

But that wouldn’t be the whole story.

You want me to “shed” light on it?

I can tell you now, that will never happen. I will say this,

the situation wasn’t some pink angora cardigan

with mother-of-pearl buttons that slip into the slot

they were made for just because you find yourself “a little chilly”

after a day at the beach, a little burned on the back,

at least the top of your shoulders. You found yourself wishing

again (didn’t you?) for some Polaroid moment

of the past when girls always sunned under umbrellas

and mascara stayed where you wanted it to. I can tell you that

will never happen again. We’re post-postmodern—in the city,

anyway. We know where we are going and it isn’t back and forth.

We want and light comes. We call what we want what we need.

Before the monument becomes remote

and unapproachable, a made-up anecdote

of easy adoration, pressed into marble

or a more modern plastic, let’s ask ourselves,

What is myth? And further, is it better

to dispel or debunk one, or instead

should we embrace the petty mechanistic

hope that invents it? Are we not ridiculous,

torn in two between the true

and what we’d so like to believe is true?

It’s exactly there, right where we keep our wishes,

that our fake animals act as a code

for what we think of as enlightenment. There,

a tiger’s faux hide pretends to be a pelt that says,

This was my life. And so it was,

since a symbol is nothing but an illustration

of obsession, concern, focus, and an atlas

of where one wishes to have been

or fears one someday will go.

Color can add detail to the expanse between

the short but bright beginning of an era

and a mottled much longer after.

History moves in under the glass-top

where from a safe distance we can watch it

become our keeper and contentious tormenter.

I admit to being frightened, or better,

ill at ease, with what I don’t know but can see:

the instinct for power that some people have.

The extra-fine ingredients sift down on you

or stir at your feet and cover your shoes

with dust. The back of your hands,

dusted. Some fine glass particles stick.

The long bath only removes the thin layer

that can be removed. Everything else

is taken in and kept. You stand up

when you can to the curled lip,

some dog-face raking back the curtain

to expose the starving. Who isn’t on edge?

Always the look that says don’t. And then,

the strategic repetition of the threat.

Death in the performance foreground,

some long-past allegory in back.

“Zero” plays on low while you look back

over your shoulder in a three-way mirror;

look up—there’s the glass chandelier

that substitutes for a people on the edge

of their seats. The natural birthright

position. Every last scene lasts for no more

than a second; some ceramic panther

stands in for the extinct. Is it today yet?

On stage, in a moment of everyday realism,

an accordion folds and unfolds while

we pretend we forget we said we’d be kind.

Nothing has changed, especially

not stumbling. Watching

the play, I thought, this is sad.

This is sad. Affective moments crowd

into a consuming curiosity,

the medical journal says. And then

they asked the subjects: Do you sleep

well? Do you eat well? Do you work

without stimulants? They all said.

One described a house where

someone had summered. A square

tower. Easy driving distance.

Some unsigned damaged painting

on the back of which was another

retrieved from a landfill and later by

not much shoed into a dream

where blown-glass kitsch figures

were excavated from a pit.

Looking out the window above that

graveyard of unearthed history I saw.

The rotational earth, the resting for seconds:

hemisphere one meets hemisphere two,

thoughts twist apart at the center seam.

Everything inside is.

Cyndi Lauper and I both fall into pure emptiness.

That’s one way to think: I think I am right now.

We have no past we won’t reach back
—

The clock ticks like the nails of a foiled dog

chasing a faster rabbit across a glass expanse.

A wheel of fortune spins on its side,

stops and starts. The stopped time

is no longer time, only an illusion that says,

I can have this, and this, and this.

Cyndi says nothing works like that.

There is no all-purpose plastic totem

that acts like a bouncer holding back the fact

that at least once a day you look up:

it’s the self you kept in a suitcase holding the key,

coming to meet you, every cell a node

in a network of ongoing doubling. Cyndi says

the world expands but always keeps us in it.

For every you, there’s a riot grrrl in prison

in Putin’s Russia. You know the self dissolves

and when it does—no figure, all ground,

like a surface seen microscopically—

you fill the frame and explode,

a rubber-wound inside unraveling and becoming

a measurement of whatever exits. It’s like sleep,

if sleep were a film that didn’t include you, but no,

whatever is happening, you are always in it,

the indispensable point of view.

Proof of that is that a lift force brings you back

and you wake, back to your face, hands, mirror

image in the bed next to you, Ketamine moment

where kinesthesia is secondary to everything

is possible: you and you and you and now and

you and yes and you with the night-self singing

backup. Onstage, the fractured future of a world

which is the world with the scaffolding folded

and laid on top of this night. All through it.

Until it ends or else begins again. Meanwhile,

that indefatigable wavering between

what you want and what you get for wanting.

Think of yourself as a character. It’s hot today,

in the house it’s cooler. Cool air rises off the floor and meets

the heat that inches in through the window.

Listen to the cicadas, the monkeys.

Water evaporates. The boat is dragged forward

along a matched track—to what is that attached?

Today we will read a book and play in the right chamber.

At 6:30 in the morning, there was the noise of the cicadas.

The bus was a lit interior filled with people on their way

to work as she walked in the dark. A man threw a pail of water

on the pavement. She went back to the hotel

and swam in a blue oval pool. The water was warm.

There was another woman there and the two of them spoke

about pleasure. The day before she left that city

she bought a carved ivory figurine at an antique shop

and smuggled it back to London in her suitcase.

Sometimes a person knows an act is wrong but does it anyway.

I myself sometimes don’t know why I do a thing.

She wrapped it in a black sweater

and tucked it into a zippered pocket along the linear axis

of the side of the case. At the airport,

the customs official asked her to open her suitcase.

He patted her folded clothes, then closed the case.

The ivory figurine was “a lady doctor.” In a former era

it was used to show the physician where the pain was

while protecting a woman’s modesty. Months later,

her neighbor offered to take it with her when she went

to sell a landscape painting at an auction house.

The neighbor came back to say she’d been told it wasn’t real;

she’d been told, she said, that it was a Victorian reproduction,

and worth approximately ninety pounds.

Here’s the boat: watch it move forward.

The motor sounds mechanical.

A light bleeds through the shade.

Look at the night to the right, scissored by lightning

Visible rain is whipping the window

with what feels like fury. Then straight rain with silence,

until the window is opened.

When the window is opened, there is the insistently real

sound of rain. The sound meets the eardrum and becomes

one with the body. It is as if nature is making a statement

that sometimes the outside and inside are one.

Darkness is only a relative

index of many other aspects of the way light behaves.

We know the convulsive reiterative mapping—
lub-dub
,

lub-dub, lub-dub
—has multiple meanings.

It hurts here, she says, and points to the torso.

The ivory woman lying on her side.

The doctor’s unsettling warning sounds endlessly.

Thebesian: tragic stories with tragic endings.

Thebesian veins: tributaries

draining directly into the cardiac chambers.

The lightless interior filled with a thick liquid.

The rain was over. Contained.

The possibility of restitution occurs to the character.

The regardless night. Time’s impossible stop. The stars

that predicted disaster. She was drawn back

to what she’d once seen on a stage: someone posing,

saying to the audience, “Look at me, I’m only made

of cardboard. What real good can I do?”

A lamp is a great gift, I think.

The brass tack ouch of a hand

to a hot bulb takes you straight to the top

of the threshold of feeling. A small plastic

object held to the cheek is also quite nice.

I love poly socks, dishtowels with rick-rack,

a surfboard anointed with one aqua stripe.

Idle want seems to dog me along a long cord

that’s plugged into the boot in the mouth

of the near recent past.

The plastic,

we both know, is nothing but a patchwork

of particles, a mash-up of atoms, petroleum

before or after it’s oil—but still, it means

so much more. Something finer than fine.

Like pearls bred from time and insouciance.

Or something like that. I turn out the light,

lock the door, lie down, brush my hair

from my forehead, and listen

for the cinematographer to say to the dark,

Just wait and the world will come back.

The terror I have, I keep hidden.

Think of me as a plant stand turned animal.

Something to hold, or be held.

Think of a pandan matte black and white.

It’s easy. Or at least not too terribly hard.

Think about the danger of night

as the lid of tomorrow tacked to a wall.

Ice in a glass at the height of a heat wave.

Then a sleep lull that sends you

to the airless inside of a Halloween hat.

Goodnight.

Then a sled, two mittens, and a film

with two women—one black in black satin,