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luminolous
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dapt-poems

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that didn’t arrive with a roll of the dice
and was hard to maintain and had a knack
for disappointing. I wanted to give you
something for your pain that didn’t smack
of a sorcerer’s trick, or a poet’s swoon,
or a psychiatrist’s quip. Nothing too heavy
or spacey or glib. I’d have given you the moon
but it’s been done (and besides, its desolate dust
and relentless tendency to wane
might have only exacerbated your pain).
If I could have given you something
you could depend on, could always trust
without a second thought, I would have.
A splendid view, perhaps, or a strain
of music. A favorite dish. A familiar tree.
A visit from a genie who, in lieu of granting you
a wish, would tend subtly to your every need,
and never once tire, never complain.
But when all was said and done
(or hardly said, not nearly done)
I was as helpless as you. Could you tell—
or were you so overcome your pain was all
that mattered? It seemed to me we were a kind
of kin: willing the mind its bold suspensions,
but the heart, once shattered, never quite matching
its old dimensions. And yet you persevered
in spite of pain, you knew to hold hope
as lightly as you held my hand (a phantom grasp,
a clasp that seemed to come from the other side).
And your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased
by my wish to please. And then you died.
after Hokusai and Hiroshige
who knows when, and will end
who knows when?
One spring night, at the end of my street
God was lying in wait.
A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan
like a couple of cops on surveillance,
shooting the breeze to pass the time,
chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals,
all the wouda-coulda-shoulda’s,
the latest “Can you believe that?”
As well as the little strokes of luck,
the so-called triumphs, small and unforeseen,
that kept us from cashing it all in.
And God, who’s famous for working
in mysterious ways and capable of anything,
took the form of a woman and a man,
each dressed in dark clothes and desperate enough
to walk up to the car and open the doors.
And God put a gun to the head of my friend—
right against the brain stem, where the orders go out
not only to the heart and the lungs
but to consciousness itself—a cold muzzle aimed
at where the oldest urges still have their day:
the one that says eat whatever’s at hand,
the one that wants only to fuck,
the one that will kill if it has to…
And God said not to look at him
or he’d blow us straight to kingdom come,
and God told us to keep our hands
to ourselves, as if she weren’t that kind of girl.
Suddenly time was nothing,
our lives were cheap, the light in the car
cold, light from a hospital,
light from a morgue. And the moments
that followed—if that’s what they were—
arrived with a nearly unbearable weight,
until we had acquired
a center of gravity
as great as the planet itself.
My friend could hardly speak—
he was too busy trying not to die—
which made me chatter all the more,
as if words, even the most ordinary ones,
had the power to return us to our lives.