The Last Two Seconds (6 page)

which led to a river (linear and male), or a lake

(circular and female), whatever you wished.

Her eagerness was earnest

and fit with fashionable attitudes.

The knowledge of failure

was in the distance, or at the bottom

of a glass—a beverage that left a trace

at her lip line. A hand wiped the trace away.

Her best hope was that on the first floor

there would be someone who might serve

as a model. Yet, she thought,

one mustn’t be naïve about motives,

since they are always mixed.

There were so many things to consider:

the feel of a faux-leather sofa, the picture

of a perfect apple, shrink-wrapped in plastic.

Who didn’t consider oneself a guerilla band,

heroically battling regular forces.

The needs of the moment were ever-pressing,

yes, but so was her love of the underdog.

Which would she choose?

And who’s to say she had a choice?

Chance only sometimes branched

in front of her like a limited fish fork.

This way was X, that way was Y.

She might lie down and sleep

on a pile of clothes taken from the closet.

Or on a loveseat still warm from a woman

who had acted as if she were queen.

In the past, each time she woke, she was

in trouble again. In spite of best efforts,

she often made the wrong friends.

The dragnet closed in around her.

Once caught, she’d never escape.

The key wasn’t where it should be.

“Should be?” Or was it “could be”?

Another small error to add to the others.

She knew there was no ending

to the ever-ongoing. She had begun

with hope and a house. Some minor act

was misread and—
alley-oop
—

that knocked the lead domino down.

She knew little more than when she had started.

That said, it wasn’t that she knew nothing,

it was just that what must be known

was constantly evolving. Yes, that was it.

She sat on the love seat. She ate a chocolate

arranged around a walnut. She wondered

when they invented such emptiness.

What she was certain of was this:

the awful unknown would continue

to complicate the facts and meanwhile,

one had to distract oneself. In the meanwhile,

or for a few more weeks, she said,

I’ll simply act as if I belong here. How unkind

to have a brain that could only recall

that day dissolved into evening, or

that the neighbor on the balcony knew nothing

but pain and prodding. Of course,

there was the panic of the lost bag.

It was finally found, yes—what luck!—

but the story of worry continued to exist:

daylight out the window faded

while the human element was speaking.

There was also the very pushy uncle

who had promised to be a savior but then,

on a whim, retracted the promise.

She said, “We drank ginger lemonade,

then watched a movie with a plot

that was messy but inspiring.”

What more could one want

except for time to go by in thirty-minute intervals.

Each wasn’t enough—but still

the undercurrent was the terror one lived with

while doing what she couldn’t remember.

She was always there and always

answering questions and entertaining

at a party that relieved her

from the plight of being herself.

You could call it a ballet: cooking, clean up,

cooking, repeat. On and on. A broken glass

on the edge of boredom, on the way

to becoming. Why was that disconcerting?

Because she knew that between effort and effect,

there was mystery. And inevitably,

some bad luck. Going backward was pure panic,

a 3 a.m. moment wrapped in an anxious blanket.

It consoled not at all that next door,

in the taller of two apartment buildings, there

was someone who looked like the self she had been

before time had made several revisions.

More and more time passed.

In the mirror, where her face should have been,

was the small clay box she had made in first grade—

its terrible childish beauty, its hopeful moment.

She set it on a table, as painful as that was.

The ballet was bleak, the bed in the corner

was a symbol of what she didn’t know.

She told herself she was lucky she had so little support

because it meant she had little to lose.

Someone suggested she try to be less guarded,

simply make the elevator go up and down.

And yet, didn’t up and down exist in the same space—

so where had she been, really?

Outside, a snow and ice storm. Or was it inside?

A massive blood rush above a face

that was papered onto an oval head

that was slightly atilt, as if the mouth was about

to push out a question. Sadly, the question

had already been answered and not in her favor.

On Tuesday she considered going back to last week

and starting over. Perhaps in Chicago,

where winters were cold as Lake Cocytus.

Perhaps in Tulsa, in an empty mansion

built by an absent oil baron. Perhaps

she would bounce from one city to the next

for all of March and half of April,

staying in bare-bone motels

near shuttered airports. It all blurred.

Why not stay where she was

and spend time with strangers?

Of course some were slightly tense and a few

were bitter. She needed to remember,

she was as much a cipher to them

as they were to her. Who wasn’t living

on the opposite side of non-existence?

Cultivating one’s past damage while watching

the doorman at the hotel next door

hail a cab for a woman

who was holding a poodle. Arf. Arf, arf.

Today had dissolved into nothing worthwhile:

small tasks, a vague sense of indignation

at having been ignored on the street

by a child at whom she had smiled.

At least she thought she had smiled.

She partnered with the harpies in her head.

They showed her short films of every error

she’d ever made. Remember this,

they asked? And this? They never tired.

They showed her Darwin’s last daydream.

It was a tour of his childhood:

a miniature lake, a park named January,

a frozen road, the corner of a hill.

The Monday loaf of bread seemed enormous

now, like a dead armadillo.

She said, “A border is forever moving away,

and as it moves, the individual begins to bleed

into the landscape.”

She said, “I don’t even know what I’m saying

except a single life seems like a false construct.

Each individual is so interconnected

there is barely anything that can properly be

called a self.” The backdrop was a drape

on which was written grim statistics

about wars she’d experienced vicariously,

making each singular death both real

and a figment of her over-anxious imagination,

which doubled the tragedy of the irrevocable

outcome. She sat at the edge of a circle.

The engineer wore a doctor’s white coat

and told her that she might be in the midst

of a migraine and to simply drag herself

from place to place via subway, bus, or by taxi.

This was the punishment she deserved.

The dour waitress wasn’t the problem.

There were periodic questions: is this true,

has this documentary—in which

the scaffolding crashes—been tampered with?

Did this melodrama happen?

Or was it fiction installed like a furnace

to warm the house?

Bewilderment could fuse everything together.

How was she sleeping? She said her dreams

seemed quaint and mannered,

and had nothing to say about the world of now.

Yes, cowardly political forces stood in the way

of right, but was that something new?

The cruelty. The hubris. The insane selfishness.

Incarceration as a form of colonization.

Blatant racism and sexism

that went unpunished, and thus prompted more.

To give up, she knew, would be to say uncle

to the aching. In makeup,

someone smeared color on her face

leaving her feeling even more self-conscious.

Life was testing her indulgence.

If only she could enjoy being an animal,

kept busy with being alive. But instead,

the body politic was a perpetual pain machine.

You could lie down on it, or under it.

It was an architectural wonder, an indie film

called
The Disappearance.
In a pit,

the pendulum scratched the tender surface.

Was it a question of daring to cross

some dangerous line? Of allowing a thought train

to take up the fragments of a difficult life

and imagine what constant anxiety felt like.

To live in that state, crying for the lack of comfort.

The continual dread. The belated beginning.

The damaged family. The early ruin.

The history of work under a brutal sun.

In a steel trap of tiny tomorrows, she sat

in the shade and waited to escape this mind set.

We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket

about to settle into the shape of the present

which, if we wanted to imagine it

as a person, would undoubtedly look startled—

as after a verbal berating

or in advance of a light pistol-whipping.

The camera came and went, came and went,

like a masked man trying to light a too-damp fuse.

The crew was acting like a litter of mimics

trying to make a killing.

Anything to fill the vacuum of time.

The wind whirred and tracked the clouds.

The credits, we were told, would take the form

of a semi-scrawl, urban-sprawl, graffiti-style

typography. The soundtrack would include

instrumental versions of “Try a Little Tenderness.”

Our handler, who was walking backward

in order to maintain constant eye contact with us,

nearly stumbled over a girl in a sheath and pearls

who was misting a shelf of hothouse flowers.

While the two apologized to each other,

we stood and watched the fine spray settle

over the leaves and drip onto the floor.

On the way out, we passed a door

with a small window reinforced with wired glass

through which we could see a nurse

positioning a patient on a table. We swore

afterward we’d heard her say, “Lie perfectly still

and look only inward.” A clock chimed and

as the others were audibly counting backwards

from five to zero, I thought I heard someone say,

“Now let go of this morbid attachment to things.”

The cover image,
Speeding Monorail: On the Precipice
by Kikuzo Ito, illustrated a magazine article, “World Transportation Invention Competition,” in a 1936 issue of
Shonen Club
, a Japanese boys’ magazine.

The Earthquake She Slept Through
:
The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka tells the story of Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes to find he has turned into a giant insect. When he fails to leave for work on time, his sister Greta talks to him through his closed bedroom, asking, “
Ist dir nicht wohl? Brauchst du etwas?”
(Are you not well? Is there anything you want?)

Costumes Exchanging Glances
: Bertrand Russell said, “Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul’s Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.” Walter Benjamin said, “Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.” Walter Benjamin,
Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline 1927–1934
, “Protocol II: Highlights of the Second Hashish Impression,” 1928, trans. Scott J. Thompson, 1997.

You Know
: The poem is an ekphrastic response to Jessica Stockholder’s outdoor sculpture
Flooded Chambers Maid
, mixed media installation, 2009–2010. This poem, along with “In This Box,” “The Elastic Moment,” “A Technical Drawing of the Moment,” “An Autopsy of an Era,” “Scene I: A Hall in the Temple of Justice,” “The Numbers,” and “A Structure of Repeating Units,” first appeared in
Jessica Stockholder: Grab Grassy This Moment Your I’s: Assemblages by Jessica Stockholder
, poems by Mary Jo Bang. St. Louis Laumeier Sculpture Park, 2011, published in conjunction with the exhibition,
Jessica Stockholder: Grab Grassy This Moment Your I’s
, February 12 to May 29, 2011.

Masquerade: After Beckmann
: Max Beckmann,
Masquerade
, oil on canvas, 1948.

The Storm We Call Progress
: The title is taken from Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay, “On the Concept of History,” in which he describes a painting by Paul Klee: “There is a painting by Klee called
Angelus Novus.
It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before
us, he
sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is
this
storm.” Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings
, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).