A person
is lightning striking the same spot everyday,
a little electricity that speaks Portuguese
or reads Kundera again after thirty years
with a bowler hat on her head. It’s likely
the person I’m thinking of was also covered in bees
under her skin: I should have asked. Now she’s gone
and her husband doesn’t know, her mother, her doctor,
her horoscope, her banjo, her dead roses
if she’s dead or alive. No note, just a small gap
in the clothes in her closet, a crushed phone
in the drive. A person is a diary in a safe
in cement on Ganymede if she wants to be,
not even our near and nameless moon. I’d like
to vanish too. Into nothing. Into something
like feeling who I’ll be in the future
whispering behind me now
to go left instead of right, live naked
in the woods, put down the hammer that is
a man’s hand before walking into the house.
I used to think she was lucky
but in hindsight I know the centuries
will conclude that none of this is real,
this poem or air, this story or scar: a person
is the ache of a star to be light again
moving at the speed of itself, unfettered,
untouchable by the missings of flesh
for flesh, is for was, near for far.
* * * * * *
Pedagogy
The red haired green eyed woman to my left is alone
she tells me in a note and tired of being the only lesbian
in this room. I look around. Of the thirteen other
possible lesbians, I rule out eleven based on purses
and shoes. I write this back to her and she agrees.
I’m the teacher so passing notes is fine
with the authorities. We’re both bored
with the presentation on Charles Olson.
I seem to remember that “Projective Verse”
wasn’t reprinted in a volume celebrating his work,
as if the editors recognized a fart disguised as an essay
when they smelled it. The presenter would have done better
to twirl flaming machetes. His voice sounds like a shoe
being drowned. She writes that the two possible lesbians
would make an attractive couple. I marry them
in Tahiti and get a little drunk on sunshine
in my thoughts. I don’t know what to write to her:
that everyone is alone like a key to a safe in the safe
at the bottom of a well at the bottom of a sea?
Her solitude is not my solitude, which can wear
a live alligator on its head and still hide in the open.
I’m trying to get her to say what she says to me
in these notes in her poems, but a note
is the most private genre after the shopping list.
I finally suggest that she open a gay bar
in the northeast corner of the room. She asks
what to call it and I tell her I’m just an idea man,
execution is up to her. But I have no guillotine,
she writes back just as the student finishes
hurting me inadvertently with his passion.
The red haired green eyed woman is next. The note
she gives me as she stands confesses that she’d rather
eat a rat while it’s shitting out the remains
of the smaller rat it ate than stand in front of people
who probably hate her. As she writes “Audre Lorde”
on the board, I write “Audre Lorde” in my notebook
and underline her name twice. I try to make the word
“theater” out of “hate her” but need another t
and one less h. I really want to read the poems
in which her solitude speaks to mine like two new kids
in first grade sharing potato chips on the edge
of a playground while throwing their carrots at a turtle.
We’ll see what happens in this life and the next.
I don’t know how to teach people a thing, I write on a note
I give myself. That’s OK, I write back: what you lack
in intelligence you make up for in sly hug
of the gravity of body mass. I wish I believed him
but he’ll say anything to suggest that everyone’s
running around with a parachute on their back
and a hand on the rip cord so why not help each other
find the escape hatch or ground the plane due to the fog
we’re in. As if life’s as simple as levitation
or the perfect martini: eighteen parts gin
and three parts gin and gin and an olive orchard
and don’t bother with a glass and gulp and gin.
* * * * * *
How do I compare thee to anything we know: a song of climate change
In summer a windshield used to be an abattoir,
I drove through winged carnage and at now-
and-then gas stations, squeegeed it off. The whole way
to the Pacific from the terrific Midwest,
I stared at western expansion through an oozy paste
of bugs. Took decades to notice the lessing
of that mess. To pick up my rope and lasso trees
and tombstones, lasso an ice shelf the size
of Manhattan, an ice shelf the size
of everyone who ever queued to rise up
the Eiffel Tower and smooch
in front of Paris. What can I do to help
besides twirl a rope: sit with friends
who look like me and friends who look
like BF Skinner and give the world
the shirts off our backs. Take a big problem
and fold it in half, fold that whole in half
and that whole in thirds and that whole
seventy times and swallow it with a glass of milk
to shine my bones. I don’t know. I am sure
we’re running out of ice shelves
to compare landmasses to: poor Cuba, Zug
and Rhode Islands, me and you. An ice shelf the size
of how sorry we’ll be
that we didn’t do something sooner
about garroting Antarctica
would go from here to the moon if the moon
were as far as any of every star
we’ve made a wish on. I remember this
from a recent trip: spotless windshield. From my youth:
being younger. From my younger
and hungrier summers: a cornucopia of libido
and moths and mosquitos. From a car
alarm this morning: wake up.