II.
Santa comes down the chimney and I vanish
up it in a cloud of self-smoke. He calls his alternate
troupe of elves who wear brown shirts
and keep stricter lists than their merry master.
I become the hot puff that beckons
the neighbour kid’s asthmatic lung from within.
Soon, coal will be the most prized gift
I steal a look into Santa’s sac of loot: an alp
of children’s shoes, one stuffed with cold foot,
a sit-in of dolls with eyes that don’t close,
a mint of necklaces that could dry-drown any digger,
grave- or gold-. Busy urban laundry room
on Christmas so we go for a swim on the third floor.
My friend pushes for the sauna. I say, Just a few
minutes more? For, I have always panicked in steam
rooms with those fuming showerheads and heart-
heavy doors the non-existent locks of which I am certain
will malfunction. My head is a mimetically sealed
chamber I’d shut down if only learning I’m Jewish(ish)
could have killed my catholic(ick) compunction.
A performance artist once sliced onions with strangers
until they could stop, be held and cry. Sentiment:
another airborne disease to pantomime
over salted-maple pecan pie and no-whip chai?
I stick sweetly to the words that sorrow whispers
into my thighs with perfect elocution: you may know
the problem. You are not not not the final solution.
III.
Just a list of clichés about my cheap selfhood
clattering like drunk Yahtzee or Boggle or Trouble
or another game that’s louder than les manifestations
casseroles. Dice fall out with no black dots.
Boggle’s cubes settle down but show only Qu,
X, W and other dead letters. In the mirror
I see professional photographers whose boon was 2002.
Getty Images must have hired them to retake
stock photos of Manhattan air; I double-dog dared
myself to snap a still pre-pill with morning hair—
to take a picture that aims to conceal what only used to be
there. The security guard says I am too fat to sit
on a painted pony that does not move. Another
mirror shows me the abandoned scaffolding
of the most recently failed Oak Island treasure hunt.
As I fall, may the skyline look like an architectural
kaleidoscope. May I not have to remember Mies
van der Rohe or bad trips. May I fall asleep
on the way down to make the euphemizing
of my eulogy and obituary easier. “He died peacefully
in his sleep, surrounded by the wet-grey concrete
modernism about which he felt ambivalent at best.”
May I dream in that cattiest of naps that we had all
risked more. That my Jewish dad might have reached
down to me, honked my schnoz and flipped
a kid script, taunting: You’ve got my nose.
Obituary
I would never write an obituary ahead of time.
It would be written badly, adjective- and adverb-
weighted to anchor you (or you) inkly to the ground.
Self-fulfilling prof, you see? (Apologies.)
My obit will not place paper dolls over wet wounds,
will unravel a skein of shimmering yarn
over the hay shirt I was fitted for long, too long, ago,
Scaredy-crow. Let my drafts of auto-death-prose
go. Let them fail to decompose. Let them heart-harden
to papier-mâché. Let me trip on this mummy on a grey
gentile holiday, nutcrack it open to find inside
burnt kernels of you. Those are for the chemists
to investigate while I open, close, open, close
the blinds like you used to do. Let me pretend
to live inside your old, jammed viewfinder.
I wrote your obituary ahead of time.
Do you remember my catatonic fall? Sundays
were the scoop-shop outing for I the infirm.
Mom and I talked about loving Annie Hall.
(The thought that she’d seen it was uncanny.
As the Moon Mist melted, it sunk in.
She meant Annie.) It’s a hard knock life
not wanting to be part of any club
that would have you as a member.
*In someone’s obit I have asterisked this
as the ideal time at which I would have been told
I’m Jewish. But tricky us, we wait
for tomorrow, tomorrow, transplendent
tomorrow. The Kafkaesque is only a day
away… I wrote an obit on the back
of a collage of Keith’s labels held together
with holy water and melted butter,
even if some things just don’t mix. The lobster’s
already dead behind the fridge, hollow shell
lack-blue. Are you empty too, your liver
flown the coop, your heart martyred off
into a collection plate, or split in two,
then two, then two? No? I’ll wait. Premature
obits have no expiration date. You’re not
a celebrity but I don’t want to write in haste.
Do you ever wonder what a person would
act like who was literally full of grace?
My church is high-camp pleasure and low-
grade