The Sleeve Waves (2 page)

Kilmer died fighting in France

in 1918. He wrote, “I think that I shall never see

a poem lovely as a tree,”

but was silent on the topic

of rest stops,

how the engine pauses,

and the Starbucks steamer hisses,

and all states feel equidistant

though this is nominally

New Jersey. He exploded

before he could picture a cup of coffee,

dark and complex

like modern poetry (Ezra Pound's maybe)

which, though stronger than Kilmer's,

still isn't cool and stark and pure

as a tree.

Soldier, soldier:

can you tell us where to go

now that we've shaken up the glass

globe and brought down the snow?

The cold is large and pale and everywhere,

and falling on the South Milwaukee trees.

A cardinal moves his heat across the air,

above the clearance sales, the vacancies,

above the locks that fasten as they freeze

key-holders in the act of passing through.

A mortgage is a number no one sees:

a sleight-of-moon, a slip, a coming-due

of obligations tightening the screw.

The neighbor takes her name off every list,

and blows a fog onto the windowpane

to stamp a phony footprint with her fist.

Petite and singular, the print remains,

as if the neighbor walked out of her veins,

and up the glass—and up, and out of sight.

The cold invades the outlets, cracks, and drains.

The cardinal sheds its red coat overnight.

No blood runs deep enough to crack the ice.

Gerund comes from the Latin
gerere
(future p. p.
gerundus
) to carry on; it carries on the power or function of the verb.

—J
OHN
W. W
ILKINSON
, 1895

Do you have 5, 10, 20

thousand dollars in credit card debt?

1-800-398-2067.

Call now! Imagine

           walk-

ing the green spring

like a fawn sprung

from its spots.

No need to winter over.

You are the gerund.

The sky aches blue—

no cure, no analgesic.

Your debt is buried

like the skeleton

of a twin born dead.

Your feet trot horn-

hard, so far from human

you can't remember

how the voices sounded,

or what they wanted.

First I thought it was my furnace:

a black metallic odor

seeping through the glass-block

window into the yard.

Then I guessed it started

under my car: a shimmery river

of darkness. Then I figured: my lawn-

mower. Did it blow a plug?

What was that weird smell?

Where were the plovers, the sparrows,

the terns? My eco-neighbor,

out watering compost worms,

said, “It's BP!”

And then I knew.

It's not BP. It's him. It's me.

We've been gushing bullshit

since Earth Day, 1970.

What to do? Make a
poem
?

Christ.

Rilke beat everyone to it.

He wrote, “You must change your life.”

It doesn't pay to try,

All the smart boys know why.

—J
OHNNY
T
HUNDERS

i.

To cure insomnia,

don't try. Pretend

the bed's a bunk

in a Pullman car,

bolted to the floor,

but moving steadily

from A to B.

The trick's to picture

neither A nor B

but the space

between characters,

large and yet limited,

like time—

how it elapses

everywhere at once,

despite the zones

fixed by railway

executives in 1883.

Wrong clock
,

thought the Chinese

laborers who ached

but could not write.

The pain spread

from their arms

into their spines.

ii.

All the smart transcontinental titans know

vision is motion. To be

is not to be, but to go.

A koan:
keeping moving.

An hour lost in Maine

is lost in California.

The perennials flash their steam-

punk violet hues,

daring human

women to lose

the flats, the control-

top hose. My mother

always says, “If I have a stroke,

don't let the hairs on my chin grow.”

No clots yet: our spines

climb up to our minds,

node after node,

though lately the ladder

seems long, and the sky

is comatose

in the bird bath,

its whole weight

half-floating, half-drowning.

How strange
, murmur the bearded

irises,
how entrancing,

to drop petals into the dirt.

Slowly they cede

their beauty,

except on posters

in suburban kitchens

where Van Gogh's irises press

predictably against the wind,

as if color were muscle,

as if it were possible to resist

the copyists, the corset-makers, the stylized

forces of nature. Tonight I'll pull

on my scuffed black boots,

where there's space

to stash a razor.

1.

“The fault lies with an over-human God,”

wrote Wallace Stevens (bless his brittle heart).

His balding broker's head began to nod,

then, Humpty-over-Dumpty, broke apart,

all smash and scatteration. There's an art

to making chickens hatch. His spacious mind

compelled him to consume the yellow part

for salt. His daughter knew: he could not find

the words to leave ought but his words behind.

2.

Our father, Wallace Stevens, you are blind

to all we see. We walk you in our arms

like corpse-walkers in China, poised behind

the body, passing factories and farms

en route to the home province. No alarm

can jolt you from your sleep. The black-eyed girls

who pass on bicycles are swift and warm,

and as they ride the road they need unfurls

as if there were no fathers in the world.

I don't want to pay

all the parking tickets my junkie

handyman racked up

using my Honda

while I was in Asia

on a Fulbright fellowship,

but hey! The judge says his wife

also did a Fulbright,

“had a fantastic time,”

and packed her white

privilege as a carry-on.

It was oversized. The airline

didn't charge her a dime.

The judge declares

all fees dismissed,

but it takes me awhile

to find the exit,

because there are two elevators:

one for courthouse clients,

and one for prisoners.

At night Seattle's scenery

sinks into Elliott Bay.

No toga party, no everybody limbo! No.

Limbo is stalling on the floating

bridge. Limbo is look out a cop.

Limbo is the Frontier Room's closed—

even that guy Ben with scars for a chest

went home. A young woman lives

with a man she doesn't love:

this is deep structural corruption,

the way the Pacific Ocean

keeps acting like an ocean,

even in dead zones

where toxins are man-made:

PS oligomer, bisphenol A.

So why does the brain bother

to rebuild itself in sleep

(carefully, nerdily)

as the blacked-out woman

dreams of drunk-

driving off a bluff?

O but they love her,

these organs she shreds:

gently the pons and the meek cerebellum

follow her to bed.

Raven scours the Pike

Place Market. He's bereft:

the sun he once kept

in a cedar box is lost,

“replaced by an exact replica,”

as his brother the human

junk-picker mutters,

combing a dumpster

for cans. In the version of history

that didn't happen,

everyone's Salish,

Makah, or Tsimshian,

and under the Sound

a squid the size of Vashon

spurts ink enough to blot

out the Constitution,

but in lieu of that,
what?

Sales stalls. Hipsters. Blind

buskers by the pig sculpture,

bending notes with a slide.

The singer bangs a crate.

The ground vibrates.

There is a fault,

a fault under Seattle,

from Fall City to Whidbey,

not
fault
as in guilty,

but
fault
as in geology,

bigger and deeper

than any historical error,

which is why Seattle can't gentrify,

not entirely,

no matter how tightly

the newcomers close their eyes,

no matter how hard they visualize

a PDF copy, not dirty,

not bloody, as if the Coast

were not the West,

as if some app could elevate

the city above the quake.

When my grandmother

was cremated she relaxed

enough to dissolve

off the Pacific shelf,

but alive she moved

neck-deep in nerves,

the way a spiny dogfish swims

even when it slumbers,

picking up electromagnetic

fields from the sea.

She'd disappear

to jump off the Aurora bridge,

and though she never did,

I still sense her slow surreal

fall in my chest. She always said

Light up to make the bus come,

which makes me miss smoking,

how it fills the lungs

with poison

that feels like heaven:

one suck on a Winston

will draw the Ballard #10,

its driver seeking

fire in the fog.

Flew through White Center in a borrowed Volvo.

White Center, where they tried to snuff your ghost.

They used a tin can. They didn't know who the hell you were

but they knew how it smells to suffer. Still you drift.

Excuse me while I block your path. Your eyes glide past,

seeking a type of female English major (younger, prettier)

who doesn't exist anymore. The current crop would sue your ass.

So listen:
soul retrieval.
I know, it's crap—a New Age metaphor,

so let's call it
fishing. Fishing from the hood of an old car

as bait floats down the Skagit. You're parked at the edge,

waiting to yank—what—salmon? No, too heavy. Yuck:

in the Northwest (until recently) souls weren't sexy.

This one's moldy and mossy. Light rain falls on the scene

like a net. You can't start a fire with wet wood. In this state,

no one freezes to death. They rot. Look: the soul walks,

like a deer under the overpass as if its legs were barely up

to the task. Drunk, fat, and dead: only the latter lasts.

You must remember this: matter persists. Beer

still resembles beer when it's piss. Fresh water turns

to salt at Deception Pass. Richard—Dick—your shadow

can't be cast. Instead, clouds cover the mountains.

1.

Post-millennium,

post-Lou Reed,

post-Elliott Smith,

it's too late to subsist

on three chords

and a leather jacket,

so your corpse looks tiny now,

floating out to sea,

much tinier than a human soul

ought to be.

The waves move autoerotically

because they don't give a damn

2.

about us velveteen rabbits.

We thought we could make ourselves real

by knowing the words to songs.

Colorless green

ideas sleep furiously,

but hang it all, Noam Chomsky,

you can't drain meaning out,

not entirely,

because say you have a sealed can of Diet Coke

in your messenger bag

(not that you are a messenger)

and it's dented and the dent

weakens the aluminum so it leaks all over,

then still, dammit: wet

Kleenexes and a wet wallet.

That dream
you failed a math class

and now you have to retake it at the age of forty

but you can't find the classroom

and you're in your pajamas,

even that means

and keeps on meaning,

which is not the same as thinking:

it's an outside pressure,

a chemical insoluble in water,