The Last Two Seconds (5 page)

one white wearing pearls—watched

in a paneled room brought in from an era

that’s over. Good-bye. Outside,

a dust-covered dog’s grave. You, your back

tacked to the seat, basket-weave plastic

on plastic, drive by—your mind

tuned to the news, a glut of miasmic static.

You, a light-bulb filament substitute

for the flame that stands for the awful truth:

the dead of war will now be unknown.

We don’t know, the fire says.

At home, the bird’s last cuttlebone

is a stripe of white in an empty cage.

Human failings are human failings.

Forgive me.

The streetlamps above emit a halogen haze.

The light makes it easy to think

everything here is reversible.

The mirror is a formula for when the open door

closes on a clock and starts countless wires firing

in rapid succession. The self can’t be made visible

outside the brain. Define resuscitative: heart beat

brain bed occupied. Discernable action: the way a,

or the, transparent top of water

in a glass or on a lake sends back light at an angle.

Optics are not always involved

in how others see that face you call your elastic face.

Flies and a fan and a pillar

in this or that arch of the empire.

Space is such a pain: cars shooting by like bullets,

palm trees pinned against a wall,

a helicopter wasting away the above.

This is the world at one on a street

where the angles of architecture meet

and point west where the end of a tunnel,

unseen but assumed, is draped

with a blanket of crêpe

that it’s easy to mistake for night—

[
a woman’s mouth-made swearing
]

CLEOPATRA: And I’m entangled with it.

And now: what to do with the fact

of the once-blue above, the mind cloud

tinted pink with particulate matter—

a pollution that looks like a postcard.

CLEOPATRA: I’m saying yes

to whatever you’re saying: an asp in a basket,

betrayal and horror, a room that tilts inward,

natural vice, the smell of sweat, wasted lamps,

petty lives born to murder and war.

The delicate undid disaster of all good things.

The smug see me as nothing but negatives:

pout-mouth petulance, underwear lust,

a city of mystery in which pathos and greed

stand empty as high-rent apartments

with coffin-shaped plate glass vents.

Inside, the dead are resting

on expensive brocade sofas.

I have stun-gun marks on one arm; there’s a fig

at the edge of the myrtle-leaf rug.

The snake is acting like he likes me.

The dimpled boys are practicing their onion-eyed dirge.

I don’t like it when time ticks back

to where it’s just been. It takes stamina to do what I do,

day after day on my barge.

During performances, I was devoted

to miming the plans of others: the room,

the walls, the people listening,

the drowning from time to time, whatever.

Watching invariably begins with a glimpse

of awareness, followed by not knowing

what will come after.

I sat in a straight-back chair, lead beneath

my feet. There was a wide arch to the right.

Do you ever think? Yes. No. I don’t not

for an instant. I open my eyes,

it’s still the present.

Enter a Messenger

Was this done well?

Who’s to say?

Make me up like a manikin

with a cosmetic palette. Tired now?

I know I am. Add a bed, and a sea overtaking

a city. Now draw something

that looks like a blown vent of blood

and a pinching sense of regret

over some wrong done.

Psycho-sexual memories coalesce into a complex fear—

I want, I am opposed to—every contrary desire becoming

equally evident.

Transference might be a masochistic shame-kiss signifier,

or some sort of extreme narcissistic need.

A normal form of defense could lead to a state of rage.

Affective states could be performed on stage.

Chaos could be suggested by something as humble, and

as theatrical, as breaking glass.

A human—face painted, dressed as a clock—could race

time back to a start line

and then be made to stand, face against the wall, and

think and think and think: I am, I never will not be.

O
is the ocean and
t
the consequence

of time at the edge of a landscape

of dots plotted into the plane

with a constant scale.

Any place can be located and later divided

by cultural and social data

and sketched on a napkin—

disregarding distance and leaving

only the little one knows.

Description is reductive: a shirt, buttons, a mind

that is willing to enact its own explosive end.

What idiocy the world is made of:

fierce justifications, landmines and such,

a rifle upright. An empire

of uncommon horror: the human speaking,

“Every moment all that matters is me.”

Tick-tick in the drifting dark.

Verdi refused to write an overture

for
Aïda
, or rather he first wrote a simple prelude

and then replaced it with a potpourri variety

overture but in the end refused to play it

because of its “pretentious insipidity”—

his words, or his words translated into English.

What is translation? What is “insipidity”

in Italian? Aïda is an Ethiopian princess

who is captured and enslaved in Egypt.

It’s a story of love and power but then

what story isn’t?
O patria mia.
My dear country.

moving through time. Our heads acting

like filters that filter ice in the winter,

cicadas and such in the summer. A system of seeing

through slats. And what is that, that flourish

raising a ruckus of dust? A burr at the sock line

takes a bite. Is that nice? Come here.

Closer. Let’s play this way. Like fish that follow

a regular beat. An ear at your chest might make sense

of the beating, but instead, you’re face down,

your face facing the fact of the Earth.

Get up. Take a box and fill it with dirt.

Reduce architecture back to a rock and a hard place.

Tuck the idea of a buttress far into the future.

“You can’t be there anymore,”

he said. A lobotomy sever between two hemispheres.

The symphony of scalpels quieted.

Peru with one cup of clean water per person.

A sliver of silver in an otherwise empty hand.

Make a landfill that looks like a mountain.

Leaves are falling on only one corner of the intersection.

The cab swings by, takes a turn. And in the back,

dark glasses make moot the issue of eyes. Is this

what you wanted? A boardwalk with wood planks

and squares at the edge, a chrome hat

that comes with a collapsible rabbit.

A hand keeps drawing a card that says go back

to the cell you just flew from. Well, maybe it’s not a game

but a coffin cover, the innocence project,

bomb plots and wire strippers. Why make it dirty?

The erotic potential of sheer stupidity,

underneath which is someone in a suicide vest.

The street signs seem both strange and familiar.

In the distance, in a camera flash, dolls dressed in red.

I’m wearing my waking threadbare

while I’m waking up and walking

in the park. A doctor once told me,

A part of your life will be a room,

a door that’s as long as consciousness.

The form of the dream I just had

is a fact. A serious talk. An inner

outward. An animal dead, now

reanimated. Maybe a river, or a lake.

It makes me think that death is a view,

whole, and nothing more tragic

than a species of nonsense where ever

is on a dimmer switch. It’s clear

that this lever, this thingness, declines.

She was standing as usual, half-sunken in concrete,

uncovered to the summit of August in December,

the broiling furnace of heated winter air blasting past

in front of her like a false wall that holds nothing back.

Impressions approached. Her eyes were level

with the idea behind the scene—a rusted absence

extending back in time. She thought, I will never

step out into this. She felt she was a stick-figure aspect

open to the emporium that sells nothing but combs.

She combed her hair, as if she were safe inside

the iron claw that governs every detail, as if

she had ever been anywhere else. And then like that,

behind a door, she said, someone was drawing

a topographical map where a line turned

into a mountain. In another room, workers were wiring

her body to a machine. The tick was like a metronome,

one tick per second. Nothing was neutral.

Lying on her back, looking up at the glass eye, light

furrowed the future. She saw her own inimitable way

of seeing what is missing and sweeping a floor

and setting up a table and winding a timepiece,

and throwing a voice. When she woke, a rash

was making her a manikin spattered with crimson.

Spatter and drip ripped fabric. An evening collapsed.

A convincing conspiracy of one stood on the blade

of that odd state called over and done with. Outside,

rain at the window created an instant vertical sea.

The land looked like beached long-nose dolphins

stunned into immobility. Lights blinked intermittently

in the haze. She looked back blankly and said, the mind

isn’t everything, only a gray-suited troop of mechanics

working to ratchet the self through the teeth of a wheel.

A wand was waved. A voice-over said,

“You’re going nowhere except where you’re led.

Prepare for the future. Prepare for a score.”

Composer notes floated in the background.

It was just as much a capital as DC:

declension, dog collar, declawed.

The monument was partially damaged.

A crowd milled at the base.

A press kit promised the trailer would shed light

like a spotlight is known to illuminate a star.

The boat had motored into the harbor,

passing a French woman in green

holding a sword aloft. Was it a sword?

Or a torch? She was no longer sure.

She was here because here is anywhere.

Who hasn’t been pushed outside like a cat

that is making a nuisance of itself?

Wasn’t she just like everyone else: with a face,

two eyes, one mouth, two air holes, two ears?

Who dares insist on difference?

She overheard someone say, “Well,

that’s just how it is, one’s own preferences

aren’t always taken into account.”

To be cast aside “the way one throws out a cat

when it becomes annoying.”

To be divinely young.

That was the essence of a “summer house,”

wasn’t it?—a window opened out onto a meadow,