metempsych

[metempsych]

littoral zone

We feed as god intended, on the outs and ins of water, passive, anchored to the rock. The days move through us like a dream of life, no knowledge of the depth beyond the shelf, pink fish and yellow fish and green the color of the weakly but reflected stars. When gulls with asshole cries come round we find nowhere to hide but in ourselves, baroque and pearled and ever hastening to find a later and a later end, to one day loosen from our comforting and whether in a current or a tender beak discover what awaits us in the chamber we will build when we arrive.

[metempsych]

We build a room

and then another, each as endlessly elaborate as we can bear before we burn it down, hardtack and one canteen of water for the dark dead forest walk to meet the next of them, the next of us, two sadmoon figures in relief against a canted shack. It starts from less than zero every time, somehow, the rags not even worth preserving, pale and fluttering and hung from trees to die. And when the bursting firework illuminates the canopy we see once more how many clearings we have made, abandoned, made, abandoned, made again, the work of life, of progress through the woods, discovering what matters for a time and for a time creating space to hold it true and solemn and as safe as walls on which we hang the pictures of the place we dream of resting when we reach the end.

[metempsych]

This is the work of honeycombs,

of industry, of gears in mountains, Swiss and more precise than I. I make a triangle of fingertips, soft framed against the upturned reading light, extend it out southwestward at approximately 35 degrees. What good it does comes down to some complexities of math, and god, and god these dreams I have, of shimmering six-sided shields set end to end against the fray, of welcoming and song from deep within the wood, of all the ways we know we’re home, and home, and still at home, and in the spring the opening and pollinated cups will bear for us the love that we divert to them each day, preserved, enriched with buzzing, only ever free.

[metempsych]

oh how they wait, with joy,

to squeeze the redcents out of you, a copper fountain on the corner spilling circles rich with oxygen: each one tastes only of itself, and little rolls that break when sharply hit on countertops, and secret fullforgotten pockets of the pants you wore the night you kissed the one you loved, and deep the darkened drawer with memories of all the names we had the day before we met the world. And sometime after someone washes up the street with pushbroombuckets and a face in profile and when they’re gone, they’re gone: no one will mint them anymore.

[metempsych]

bleached road on canvas, 2025

and white the strippedbark birch, the splinters of the air before they reach your lungs. Our pockets turn up ancient lint; our eyes are newborns: moon, ellipse, ellipsis, epigram.  Slow brass the funeral that makes its way toward the blind horizon; no second line the first one couldn’t fix if it had known the years it waited for a sign the sign was right in front of it each day, and how it drew itself into the cracks that bind the concrete even as they break it, veins of loss we set our wheels upon to understand the pieces that remain.

[metempsych]

the field

held agates, bias cut, in rooms that in my mind are darker than they need to be, and hushed, and down a great glass panel in the floor a mummy I have known to be myself for many years now, sugar cubes spraypainted gold and stacked into a tomb, a toiletpaper shroud, canopic jars of smuckers reappropriated from the fridge. I wait now for the rest at the appointed time, the hour of the ritual drawn near, the sky a tone poem pink and orange gradient, and no one comes, and no one holds the ankh, and no one says the words the must be said. The games that we imagined would be played one day when we were done with all the testing fall to earth like slices of an ancient rock, unmask the waiting face, preserved, to meet the sun a final time before its eye is placed above a placard with a brief explanatory note: “It powered, once, a world of almost love.”

[metempsych]

box set

of billy corgan being jesus in a park, the basement pebbleboarded ceiling moon light slipping through the insulation, stacks of minor worlds in boxes on the desk. I launch a spindown die centrifugal and in the time it takes to clatter to the floor I’m forty three years old, and trying to convince my dad to let me write her down, write any part of her, so that she doesn’t have to hide and all my bathtub sittings in the dark would mean a thing god damn it I have learned from them what I was meant to learn and when I come back with mcmuffins it is all okay and it will always be okay because the next time we will talk about it will be when I find myself thirteen and butterflying wings between the people I have always yet to be.

[metempsych]

one handed cartwheel,

nautilus, cathedrals of highceilinged paint and some concessions. Circumscribe my life, oh lord, with these: a cup of coffee on a winter morning fresnel lens, the maladaptive tangents of a noon, and chambers for the evening to expand but never quite resolve, soft focus rolls of fifty fifty celluloid and lycra blend. We face the judge before we start and after it is done, to understand ourselves immediate and fully flawed, our hands raised not in defense or in praise, a flourish just before the reckoning, the gentle click and whir of art unspooled before the watching all, and now with breath we wait to know who found our prayer beautiful and true.

[metempsych]

the comb, the quilt,

the slowly dust descending from the purple sky, the laugh a many-mirrored lamp reflecting to infinity and we are having marshmallows and popcorn and the first pinehallowed air of fall. We all have our regrets, our years of running laps around the edges of the yard, of barking madly in the haze of spring, of flitting round the treetops of an august night, the wildlife and moths associated with a house. But here we build a clearing in the softly grass, we huddle each in each, with arms so close we feel the warmth of elbows, breath in hands. We fan the fire, say the stories, write them backwards in the dirt until they hold no sway. We make the magic trick of us into a shape that holds forever in this little place, a stick, a ringing note in frequencies our ears become too old to hear but trembles always through the hallways in our wake.   

[metempsych]

slow and always

we are taking down the pool, or other pools, and leaving rings of yellow grass and tealit candle glass, the rattling of ice and sheets of stamped aluminum. When on the too-small stool I think about the swing, the hours of the stars, the ache of knowing why it was the way it was, I hear them still, soft voices at the edges of the yard, and beckoning to join, small figments of another year, to stand inside the circle of the water, half submerged in meaning, half still naked to the air, the afterimage of our truer selves still visible as long as we can bring ourselves to watch, the laughter humidly collecting on the leaves until they dip circumferenceward and break.

[metempsych]

old-fashioned way, with knives,

with blood in chalices, with fens. With leyline factories in low suburban fields: six days of toil, one of dread.

We stand atop the overlooking cliff, the shadows of the lakes below much deeper now. What trees we should have planted yesterday we ask each other how to find within ourselves.

[metempsych]

the alabaster drip

is slow and even, if you are of a mind to think of it this way, is sensuous: it carves an ever-wider arc beginning with the softer stuff before describing angles through the bone, the ridges of the nails, the thrumming hothouse grape that holds the future wine you’ve yet to let mature and bursts it straight into the blood, stream flowing like a flooded creek and weathering the rocks below too fast to see, the stuff of us made ancient over days. And over days the widening unmoors entirely, we feel the rope go slack that held us to the dock within our hands and mutely set it down to tail behind us in the water, salt wicking upward into every strand until it may as well just be a part of well what even is this boat we’re in, what water now, what fog, and this is how we know that we are learning something new and learning how it feels to be so ultimately claimed. So like I said, is sensuous, if you are of a mind to think of it this way, and as the drift begins its tidy inward path again, because they always do, we plead for it to stop; we plead to stay out on the lake, the ocean, where it is so big that we can only think of it and nothing else but it can never last, we know, accelerating loss of body heat the only way to tell we’re cold, no instrument to gauge the truth inside of us, hands hydroplaning one against the next. The sound of stubborn wood against another piece of stubborn wood is what at last will break the spell, put once there by a wiser man who knew that we would soon collect ourselves and what we found out there to show them to the ones who need to see them, now.

[metempsych]

currier & hives

The dogs are thrown the butcher cuts, a grim foreshadowing of how this thing will end. A laminated VHS box cover, flat, haphazardly and stamped by mute librarians rests on the coffee table just above my head. The pattern of the day descends, first soft and then with spikes and are you ready for vocabulary tests and then at length the books are taken from the canvas bag and launched toward my now-expectant face. The cook says “Dinner will be ready at 7:30”: this is many, many months from now, reducing options to a siege defense or risky prison break. My sister takes the calamine and twists the plastic cap until it breaks, like always, rolls away and into the conservatory, black linoleum with white, or white with black I guess depending on your point of view. “I had to stop her screaming” is the thing my dad would say if ever he would say a single word, and when I hung onto his hood to keep him here I didn’t know what I was hoping for. The winter scene is calm, the sleigh so close to its escape, at last to leave the frame and call the FBI to shut the whole thing down. It never makes it, still, no answer and no prayer I can accrue enough to break the wall that turns on secret hinges to reveal a passage to a place with sharpened knives. And when it falls, the chandelier so sweetly sings to me and only ever me that life could be a dream, sweetheart.

[metempsych]

EJ takes the bait

and when I land the uppercut it feels the way it feels in rock’em sock’em robots, just with slightly more and navy blue creasepanted children arranged in the periphery. I carry still the graphite nub Brent Loftus stabbed into my kneecap on the bus, the small memento wedgies in the rain, a lasting fear of public restrooms, and the face of someone whom I lost at once, then slowly, but I’ll never be without a pencil when I need one.

[metempsych]

full moon

and all the neighborhoodly dogs are out and fur aglow with powder. Wind wilds bluely through the solitary pines, the chimes shed darts of deckward ice, and long and trapezoidal shadows cut across the yard. The wakes of temperamental luck are all about us, eyes rolled back, the sky a manifest of passengers who usually don’t cross this way, cross-legged on the floor, but we are under some protection: howl of everything avoiding us; one night of freedom from the wolves again.

[metempsych]

in which the diorama breaks

Assume the Venn position, here: each overlapping underlapping is a backpack strap around your shoulders, flush beneath the desk, entanglement of limbs. We spin until we can’t, accept our fates on knees like Boromir. They took the little ones, and, later, took the big ones too.

I bought the house on Archer Avenue the winter of my thirty-seventh year because it made me think of how we looked in certain buildings, isometric, young and unaware of how we’d reconstruct this moment out of clay and cardboard paint a hundred hundred times, until the thing collapsed, the dust drawn skyward to escape, before at length it settled on a windowsill with some specific purpose and a shape.

[metempsych]

With ankles crossed

we try to sleep, the night birds and the noose of ties compacting into different knots, more complicated and more fresh. A blue alarm floats silently outside the glass: what meek petitioner they come for none could guess. I saw the burning rock swing down beneath the dark horizon, held the feeling of the ancient feeling of the ritual of poison swallowed from the jar we build each day inside our hearts, the jaws of things we make and ask in turn to keep us from remembering we were the ones who made them. None of it has helped, but possibly I’ll make it to the morning, and your voice will be the first thing I will hear.