An Index Of Distressed Events
- New Year
‘Forget to forget’ is something I’ve read,
the same way I’ve read
‘a painter’s vision
is not a lens’ and was
suddenly ‘frozen
by fact,’ as Lowell put it,
like a journalist or banker;
still, I go to the market
to be in the
world — to grab a year-
of-the-pig lotto ticket,
and the grin of the purple pig
I scratch out its
pink snout
first: black glossy digits below it,
and a number to call,
and the seal of
California, image image —
To be in the world. If I’m not
in the world,
then how I can be in the
poem?
- White Plastic Lighter
The cheap flint, in that instant
when it’s struck
from inside
the deepset underpass —
the way it lights the face
of the hands
from beneath, like a billboard.
It’s an eerie misfire
once at least
once: a tiny dud
failing its blast
off as I
keep on
walking by,
staring as into the
mouth
of a hangar.
Next corner, a park
owned by the city,
where in the center is
a rock
owned by the city,
from which two flags fly
above an
empty Diet Coke can.
- Closing Time
An amplified voice it
elects us
to attention, the shoppers —
quickening,
they grab things
nearest, an odd sort of panic.
One of us shouts,
down an aisle,
and their voice comes back,
having lost its
target
through the beep
of a fork-lift
backing up; the end-
to-end sounds
of softly slit cardboard
- MacArthur Station, A Pear On The Platform
The damaged meat of it I see is
gouged, disfigured by momentum.
The front half I swear it
has a face an expression
in the bright-red signal light I
think I
understand —
and the discrete feet of people who pass it
I study quite a while: schooner-
tipped; loafer rounds; ballerina squares —
until the next train enters its berth.
How it rocks just slightly,
the pear, whenever an anxious load detrains.
How like flames the shadows
of legs
seem to flee what is
behind them, whatever that is,
on the ominous stairwell
I watch
their calves
spasm.
- Convo On Delta
Out there, on the open
water it’s
all stars
and water and you
and god,
the nuke-sub dude says, a god-
damn born-again —
an airline
nip-bottle’s worth
of grassy scotch
in his cup,
and the ice
cubes actually round
with a hole
in the middle they melt
through themselves,
in their centers,
like glass
reactor cores