Provenance
I was born tiny, pink, and shrieking
from neonatal nicotine in the womb,
head encased by an auspicious caul.
Was supposed to be a boy, Luke.
Upon emerging, did they frown?
I grew up in a small Ohio suburb
that used to be a summer cottage
resort, and prior to that, was land
that belonged to the Erie Indians.
I had a doll, Debbie, I carried everywhere,
then in middle school, an invisible friend
I named Priscilla. I encouraged others
to believe in her: some did, in the way
certain children are willing to invest
in fantasy in order to remain alive.
A small house with little privacy,
I lived behind the couch, reading
with my cat, occasionally coming
out for meals that I poked at or fed,
sans observation, to the hungry dog.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around
numbers, formulae, or geography,
preferring biographies of people
who blazed trails in their fields.
Adolescence hit like a meteor:
I became haunted and numb.
Decades later, I still feel I
have no recourse to forces
that railroad me without
my volition or consent.
I didn’t ask to be born
I screamed at my mom,
when she called me out
for any minor infraction
turned major, with time.
Had I known now what
I couldn’t know then, I
would have repeated it,
with theatrical aplomb.
The difference between
then and now is that now,
my life — mistake erased,
slipknot untied — is mine.
* * * * *
Fugue
It’s been 212 days since you left this earth,
love, to enter the medieval ring of paradise.
Outside, the pothos shoots its alien blooms,
trees leak sap from their pulmonary veins.
You’re unrivaled, undefeated, as the one
who will never stop breaking my heart.
I wanted your death to never transpire,
or if it did, be an epiphany in the night.
The diminution of the objective world
condensed into an object on the floor,
cried holy, behold that square of light.
You were my prize, my high romance.
Draft after draft of my life hurried by:
cold excision, sheet music in the wind.
Until you arrived, a wayfaring vagrant
seeing shelter, like my umbilical twin.
We knew joy together, an infinity pool.
Your play toys, now artifacts of grief.
I want it to be conceptual, but it’s not
conceptual. When you lose your mind,
you never really get it back. In truth, I
don’t know who I am, why I am here,
but would suffer it all again for you.
To vouchsafe your existence, touch
your musky fur, feel your breathing
alter the planets — in your absence,
I call your name into the darkness.
Dead is dead, I discipline myself.
Consciousness sluicing through.
* * * * *
Fin du monde
A sea of faces incites nausea: they look like
baby birds waiting for their mother’s worm.
Flies buzz around me, thinking I’m carnage,
or enjoying my Bois de Balincourt perfume.
I sit and observe friends networked to death,
as if people watching at the Tate or Louvre.
Theirs, a brief effusion, brief as these words:
experience, memory, perception, exchanged
for chronic interconnectedness, surveillance,
former democratic rule turned demagoguery.
The ice outside forms into glittery stalactites,
like stilettos hung from trees. Perforce I must
be plain: there exist angels at the intersection,
angels at the stoplight, angels in cyclonic rain.
Angels fortify ramparts, defending the queen,
on the ceremonial parade grounds of mystery.
I saw one at a flower stall in Poland: another
at Souk Des Teinturiers, a Marrakesh bazaar.
They throng the Lord, interceding as ghosts
or thieves. Why did I cry today for an hour,
with my whole body, the way babies cry?
Because I saw how beings more innocent
than babies are tortured, all the world over:
animals that once swam, ran, and breathed.
It feels criminal to turn from this suffering:
a fate beyond language, worse than death.
Outside my window, a destroyed birch’s
trunk mimics a ballerina in first position,
when in truth that’s a weather-beaten tree.
As for those who seek recognition: they have
their reward. It is finished, the forestalled end.
At last I’ll see my hunger for meaning go free.