Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty-five
Spring 2011
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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

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