Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Twenty-five Spring 2011 |
The Passenger Jeff Gundy 1. He sat for an hour in the back seat--cramped, but warm, and the rain was someone else’s problem. When the car stopped, he stepped out into the darkness, followed his companion through the automatic doors. Inside, there was light and several lines to wait in, then another seat. In the next city he was driven again, and washed up gently against his destination. 2. He finds another seat, breathes slowly. Air murmurs in the passenger’s ears though he feels no breeze. The world is charged with so much . . . where do the physical and the metaphysical cross? He thinks he used to know. But the blind and suicidal Gloucester was sure he’d reached the cliff-edge, so vivid was Edgar‘s description: The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles . . . This room seems steady, but so did the jet plane, its roaring constant as any waterfall. Wordsworth knew that the memory of landscape is far stronger and stranger than the scene itself-- the hidden valley, a few sheep, kites, the heap of undressed stones. No tender tendril of vine can erase the sense of loss, abridge the brutalities of late capitalism, or run the coal companies out of Kentucky. How does history alter the interior life? The suffering of thousands makes a bed of nails, said Gide, one can almost sleep upon it, but one man’s sorrow, one woman’s, is a spike through the heart. 3. The passenger forgot his toothbrush and has twice brushed his teeth with his index finger, not too well. He could find another but walked across the street instead The poetry of earth is never dead, said Keats, as if the poetry had been there all the time, as if language is of the earth, like sunflowers and crickets and the dust of stars. 4. Learning two words for every thing makes one less sure of anything, and more tender. A new language opens another world, if we learn to trust it. I dropped the pen. The pen, it fell from me. The yellow of summer is not the yellow of winter. The terror of these suburban zones, without a weed or a sidewalk: what happens when we can’t bear to look? It may be that the viewing of ruins reassures us that we inhabit living bodies. But nearness cannot be contemplated directly; Heidegger says so. 5. The passenger is reluctant to write with a person in the chair on each side, stranded as they all three are in their waking lives. When the word bone is spoken he tries to figure the weight and density of bones in the room, to calculate the pounds of flesh, the pairs of jeans and shoes, the memories and genitals and sweet tendrils of hair escaping from pins and clips, all of it precious and belonging not at all to him. The passenger lapses again into dumb Whitmanian tenderness. Nobody notices. 6. A thing is an announcement, someone announces. Try to live in the uninterpreted world, said Rilke auf Deutsch. Warranted when used well, said the sticker within the clock. The passenger is taking bad notes. When the din of thinking dies back, one can begin to listen. I came to you Lord because of the fucking reticence of the world. It is music that opens the doorway. The hide of the deer shivered. The bright eye was still. 7. He fears he has entered irrevocably the world of the gray scale, where the spirit finds no firm ground, where the angels have no names. He may never leave the vast middle room with its bright lights and no windows, its many chairs facing all in the same direction. When the lights go out they are blinded for a moment, but then everything swims back, little changed. The passenger is not lost, nor found. He is the Fool, the card without a number. No, of course he isn’t. But history has broken in upon him, as it does upon us all. He may be led into the eastern desert and abandoned, or sent to tend chickens in the far Midwest. He is a question without a question mark. He is nodding, or trying to rub away a headache. You think you have no map, but your life is the map, says the voice from the front of the room, whose face is a mask with bees and splinters of glass behind. 8. The truck last night went by, dragging a chain. The wick curled cold in the kerosene lamp. The passenger was buried in an asylum for forty years, but that was in another life. The passenger took the gum his friend offered, then had to hold it in his mouth for what seemed like hours. Often in his other life he finds himself standing in the front of the room. George Cantor believed that some infinities are larger than others. The passenger agrees, today. The first woman scribe took the mikveh, the purifying bath, then spent a whole day writing nothing but the name of God. The passenger bathes daily but has never considered himself purified. He is an Anabaptist. He wears a shirt that says Beauty will save the world beneath his other shirt, where no one will see. 9. And now everyone will leave the room. And now he will return to his other life. And now the music will begin, like a doorway or a pattern drawn in colored sand, like wind heeling a small boat close to disaster, driving it into the open sea. The passenger will not choose the music. He will not choose to listen. He will listen, the salty spray on his lips. |
About Jeff Gundy |