Elsewhere in Dreams

I would not open the door of your unhappiness unless
there were no other way into the storm, into the night.
I would not enter, myself and the air I bring with me,
into that empty room and stand in a sliver of light unless
there were no other way to gauge your melancholy.
I would not close it behind me unless all the other doors
came unlocked, so that I could test their weathers,
the bluster and shadow of their various altitudes.
I would not open the door of your unhappiness ever,
except to perch beyond it and tell you that the world
is a cold, dark place when you are missing.

Are you bursting with the life
suddenly inside you?
The oblique impossible cord
winding round and round the poles
will strap you down.
The many-fingered consequences,
the thumb-wrapped miniature fists
will be ballast.
The punishing weight of gravity,
the body of your body,
won’t topple you.

Are you bursting with day
suddenly from grey on grey half-life?
Tell me how this will and that will
not steal you.

There she is
in a water world
in the shallow
wavelength
of a womb.

There she goes,
a sudden rippling
unfolding of
wings.

She can’t stay
in the cradle
forever.

There are few unique features to
this mass-produced trinket.
It sits in the cup of my palm
like an opaque, common liquid.
Strange, the immense value
of the memory it holds.
There’s no market for that,
no dollar figure.

Amble on and we’ll pore sweat over maps,
plumb with a chalk snap and mark twain:
this is the tributary where I first paid
the belle’s toll, a river of silver and gold.

Toddle on and we’ll find our sea feet
to the rise and swell of brine and stomach:
this retreating continent where I first voided
her saltwater kisses into a shallow trough.

Saunter on and we’ll cross swords and whiskey
shots across the bow like ships in the night:
the stern warning blinking dashboard red,
the iceberg, and the imminent disaster.

Old, found in a notebook. Verbatim.

I was so small. An infinite circle, but so small.
A perfect circle, an artifice, an unnatural symmetry.

If I outgrew the circle or if it shrank within me,
I don’t know. It is a tiny, significant, imperfect memory.

I remember stars like eyes askance circling overhead
while I stalked my claim. How I struggled to bring it down!

I remember the jaws closing round my neck.
I remember the tubes and vessels full of vacuum.

I remember feeling so small while the vice tightened.
The circle right around my few remaining waking moments.

I remember being blind and deaf and sleepless for a while,
but also I remember the knives. I remembering being cured.

And I am so small, the happiest infinite smallness.
Joy at being found dead and wanting death.

I remember the first time I realised it,
and how I fell into it and disappeared.

I can’t remember why I dislike you.
It was something you did or didn’t do,

I’m sure. Petty theft, I have stolen
the day we met, added a semicolon

and squirreled it away. Another occasion,
another chance to complete the equation.

Meanwhile, I’ve examined the debt
and it’s interesting. Not due yet,

but soon. Perhaps. Diagrams and charts.
Games of chess, of pool, of darts.

Time turns many slights to wounds.
Bastard child, not due yet, but soon.

Mime the gap–
inconsiderate years have
stacked themselves
between us.

You’re an imaginary person
now a figment, a
small, dark fruit
of the past.

You’re the monument
reposed in restless
unexpected
erudition.

Mime the gap–
arms spread like
wings. This far–
no, further.

I was left standing,
a monument to myself,
unshaken, proud to have
survived the trenches,
the bullets that whistled
around me like warm wind,
the hot-blooded former
friends pooling in my boots,
the gripping drama of
weapons and white knuckles.

This is the me that was,
I explain to lookers-on,
the horrified ex-soldiers
huddled in groups,
in church basements,
in bunkers, in bars,
vainly trying to forget
themselves.

This is the is that was me,
they shout into my wake,
where here lies the hero,
the one who said war
workes in mysterious ways,
who came back covered
in medals and pine slats,
who never woke screaming
from his unshakable sleep.

I was left standing,
a monster, the pride
of lions, of eagles, of iron crosses.
They wouldn’t look me in the eye,
instead inspecting my feet
for the conventional clay.
I regret nothing, I whispered
as they wept. I regret
nothing.

The welder throws an enormous,
glowing hunk of slag against
the wall and it sticks.

A barber down the street notices
smokestacks coughing viscous
phlegm out over the lake.

Your shift and a chunk of your year
lopped off; can’t afford
the other half,

and so you retire with
bad hair and a bad back
to your parents’ house.

Should have been a lawyer,
she says, and the
litigation begins.