if not here then where, exactly, am I
supposed to insert myself? And if we’re talking
movie stars, Mark seems to be doing it right.
At least, anyone who still manages to be sexy
even when you know you’re being played
must be the good kind of wrong. Imagine,
Mark writes. Imagine, is what he dreamt
last night, imagine a world, and then
I lost track of what he was so artfully made
to be saying, but dinner was involved
and a chance at something, a chance
for something, a chance. Mark, what if
by chance I met my true love when I was
too young to know to keep him? Mark,
what if by character or by foolishness
or by fate sometimes good people are
inexorably drawn to their own demise?
Marked by desire is usually code for something
catastrophic and even when we try to focus
with quiet minds and pursue the animal
feelings within us with only the most
measured sighs, so often something
catastrophic is what turns up in the late light
of early night, like you did on Annette Bening’s
porch in that movie and even as a loser,
Mark, you were sexy, but less so, I’d be lying
if I didn’t admit. Line, please. Just give me
a hint. Actually, let’s take ten, I need
some time alone in my trailer. Sometimes,
we arrange in our minds a thousand goodbyes.
By arrangement, a funeral publicly can be
held to honor a body not present or, privately,
for somebody technically not dead yet.
Final arrangements may be made in advance
and locked in a drawer in a sealed envelope
with to be opened in the event of my death
scrawled elegantly across the seam.
Imagine, the next e-mail in my queue details
arrangements being made to honor a man
who made arrangements for the dispersal
of his modest assets by embedding subtle clues
only his family would detect in the arrangement
of the phrases of what turned out to be,
and probably he knew it, a farewell letter
his cellmate memorized the night before
his ransom came through. The cellmate’s, Mark.
Like so many of the best parts of ourselves,
like so many of the characters we like to watch
you play, he was the good one left behind.
QUESTIONS ARE AN ATTRIBUTE OF GOD
Light a steeple bright enough and blind
the bats will come stitching white
against the torn black cloth of sky.
All these years and still no one knows
what draws the moths and their buzzing
relations with tired jaws, or at least
no one’s told me. We know enough
to stop and look up, but not one thing
more. They look like manta rays
riding moony ocean waves, like lumens
let loose from a drunken ray gun.
I’m not necessarily convinced by ideas
that have been around so long it seems
their time must have come, but coyotes
do fill the night with tricks when they
throw their voices from bedside lamp
to rising sun, and reincarnation is one
explanation for some kinds of otherwise
inexplicable love. Forever my horse
has thought he is descended from unicorns,
he tells me over and over with the one
brown and one blue lake of his eyes
and doesn’t bat a lash when I tell him
unicorns only ever inhabited brutally
the northernmost seas. He just champs
his bit a little and stamps any nearby puddle
and refuses to blink, as if to say, yeah
well, what’s all that about you and whales
and the scaled digits of your precious thumbs?
On the 2× life-size statue of the saint
beneath the steeple beneath the moon,
the most realistic way to depict the eyes
is the inverse of true: pupils a bolt of stone
and all around them nothing but absence.
THE DISASTER
The disaster ruins everything.
There is no reaching the disaster
this way, the disaster threatens.
The disaster is separate, the disaster
does not come. We suspect the disaster
is thought. To think the disaster,
we are on the edge of disaster
already. When it comes upon us
the disaster is imminence: disaster
detached from the disaster. Time
belongs to the disaster. The disaster
has always already withdrawn,
there is no future for the disaster.
The disaster is perhaps related to
forgetfulness, the disaster not thought—
not knowledge of the disaster,
knowledge disastrously. The disaster
is perhaps passivity. Night, white
sleepless night, such is the disaster,
night lacking darkness, night separated
from star. The disaster exposes us
with respect to the disaster. Nothing
suffices. The disaster would liberate us
if it could. The disaster does not
impose itself. The disaster is not
our affair. The disaster takes care
of everything.
NIGHT PEOPLE
Your