Ashes for Breakfast (11 page)

Asleep in bed (
in your dreams!
),

     Or else wide-eyed, awake, walking:

A flash of something fleeting, captivating,

     Oysterishly cool and damp

Round a crease, a tuft of flamy hair.

     The pink of gums, maybe, or the crack

Of an eyelid, the infrared eye sniffs human warmth

     And infers interred bodies.

A shake of the hips will do it,

     And all over again something begins

That will end so staggeringly, so unresistingly.

 

 

And then the surroundings, the hiding places

     Of separate lives, so single,

Driven by lack, by want, in love with winning

     That you forget how you got here,

Among these camouflaged houses that witnessed

     All the ancient and recent trades along

The arterial routes into the countryside.

     Better to follow the bodies

In their Brownian motion, politely

     Obeying Phoenician protocols,

Instead of the forbidden aromas, obscene

     Oaths, and this crooning available

On one or two frequencies since Orpheus.

 

 

Skeptical, well read, irritated … you were

     In the style of the small ads, infinitely remote

From any landscape limned

     In one or two strokes, the newspaper man

With his twilit soul, that was you.

     O the frailty of those lungs …

The xylophone of hidden bones

     From the cranium to the little toe.

The trouble bodies have finding

     What their desires seek, the violence

That forces them into its trammels, till,

     Hurriedly, eaten up with gossip,

They press toward the exit—what to do there?

 

 

To be invisible, moving silently

     In space, an ethereal body,

Turning doorknobs as though remote-controlled,

     Gliding upstairs and down,

Hanging out the window as though dangling

     On the spider's web of a block and tackle, an Ariel

Without orders and under no one's paternal eye,

     At home in tenebrous cinemas,

In bank vaults, ship's cabins, and luxury suites,

     A stowaway, lacking for nothing

Behind the billowing curtains, unaffected

     By the light, by the ship's manifest:

In a world of murder and mayhem—run for it.

 

 

Negligently, the way everything begins,

     You yawn and bleed, you stare at

Your cut chin in the glass, the skin puckered

     Under the Swedish steel,

The eye glazed in the morning light, an animal

     In double jeopardy, practicing

The use of edged tools while standing on its hindlegs.

     The beard hairs swarm like lice

In the basin, and each time you shave

     The haggling begins again, your fear

Seeks an equilibrium: a first plea

     For the innocent heart,

The amnesty long before the opened veins.

 

 

Just before Good Friday, as before

     Every holiday, narcolepsy hits. Nothing

Disturbs the passing of the days. Blasphemously

     You hear the hydraulic hiss and thrum—

Some new premises coming into being, a department store

     Celebrates its incarnation with new prices.

Almost with relief, the law report

     Describes the killer breaking down in tears—

So much industry all those years ago.

     Easter quarantines family by family.

(The children are dreaming of Christmas.)

     Soon it will be time for first-footing,

Coals, and champagne at midnight.

 

 

What a bloody little leprechaun you once were,

     A wrinkled imp with knotted

Arms and legs. Bluish skin,

     As though kicking for your life,

Early concerned with your impending death.

     And it all began so unconsolably,

With a piercing yell, when the world

     Moved into your lungs with a rattle.

With a shock (“so much light!”), a slicing

     Of deft scissors and knives

Into the only flesh that wasn't you.

     The umbilicus was like the thread,

The Fates' love of sundering from the get-go.

 

 

Embarrassing—the way even the earliest photographs

     Of you show the same trusting smile

At the lens, which bunches your beams

     Into a nostalgia, opened

For milliseconds, the body seduced

     By the promise of the return

Of everything familiar. And later

     Time is palpably passing,

A vanishing, shocking, on celluloid.

     Just as your smile seems to dissolve

As you look at it years later. Chary

     Of the unknown, fixed on something

Long ago and far away, your gaze rejects you.

 

 

The thick lengths of piping you crawled into

     As a child in your games of hide-and-seek

Were enormous tunnels in the dreams that ensued,

     Bunkers, and limestone caverns,

Where you were a primitive man, or a soldier …

     But above all, you were grown up,

Slipped from your frail bonds of the feebleness

     Of your family and size. You lay flat on the meadows,

Stunned by the overwhelming smell of earth,

     As close to yourself in the grassy hollow,

As a pear to the pear tree.

     Till it was time to wear the team shirt,

And piss—look, no hands—in padded shoulders.

 

 

What is childhood anyway, after years

     Of running away, an extorted wish

Quivering on your lips, a nursery chant

     Like home and belonging.

Spat over your shoulder the deadly look

     Back was a poor exchange

For the shrinking of both day and night.

     The colors washed out, the pink idyll

Of lambskin. That was it: the whiff

     Of regurgitated milk, the conspiracy

Among the growns to feed and stifle you,

     Great clouds of hysteria

Where you learned to walk, and to fight back.

 

 

Strange, the things an eye can get used to:

     The sealed rim of the horizon

On every side, and the substitution

     On X-ray photographs, of black for flesh,

Light flecks for bone and marrow.

     Even in the act of love, the pink leaks out,

The bodies are a tangle of individual limbs.

     And the eye goes cold even before life chills.

An unaccountable yen to be palped,

     To lie under the knife, and awake,

Is repaid by glittering droplets,

     Tears in which joy collects:

A residue, an overplus, a meniscus.

 

 

How many gestures are futile, and yet

     Their inadequacy keeps them going.

To make menaces at a fly, to lower the head

     In mute respect before the departed,

To sweeten your time in solitary by waving

     Or greeting, can be diverting

Or decent. It's all absurd anyway,

     Against the slothful clouds.

No one sees the clown making an ass of himself.

     The witnesses nodded off, and missed

The blink of an eye, the expression

     Of a spread hand, when cunning

In the presence of proof loosens the tongue.

 

 

The identity of the hands, the piece of sheet music,

     The out-of-tune piano,

Are unknown to you, you know only:

     Bad études in the anteroom

To one of your fears, one of your chambers,

     Verboten, tight as a grandfather clock.

On closed lids, the keys for

     Excess, for the rumbling of tummies …

What metronome, what vocal?

     Fine sand spills out of the rattle,

The fetish masks on the dusty keys.

     Do you hear the constriction

In which you live and breathe?

 

 

That it's things that have made a mockery

     Of you, fading away into the daylight

Left to your own devices; that time goes after living

     Things first, imponderable smiles,

The backs of necks and hair-fine hair;

     How long since you first saw

How far the past extends that the furniture

     Stakes its life on? From the vantage point

Of a chair leg, every table is a coffin,

     Immovable in the shadow realm

Of former tenants, residents long since dead,

     Paying nostalgic visits. Listen

To the tight-lipped vase, the laconic doorknob.

 

 

Fat chance of taking to the air with a chest

     As flat as an ostrich's or emu's.

Too much bulk on the ribs, insufficient momentum

     In the limbs, not enough lightness.

As you stand by the window with folded arms,

     Watching the gulls plummet and curvet,

It feels like toothache, and every swoop

     And curve and conjunction leaves you

Earthbound, an instance of a species

     Threatened with relapse, an invalid

With a cricked neck. Only a penguin

     Can stand to stand on the brink, stand to

With wing shrugs and heavy dreams.

 

 

What else is it but magic, that chasm

     Between things and their names,

The only echo sounding into the forbidden realm

     Of the taboo? A leathery cactus leaf

Lies under the table like a severed hand,

     A bare fishbone on the plate

Resembles a hairclip in a pool of grease.

     The idea that you doll up the dead

Is something the trousers say in their press,

     The shirt draped over the chair back at night.

A bucket makes its contribution to available space,

     A magnifying glass scrutinizes the crazed cranium.

Paintings like grave ornaments on every wall.

 

 

As providentially as life comes into being

     It's ready to go again, in your throat,

Between your fingers, dribbling down the walls.

     What remained constant was fear.

On offer in every diner, in the right spot

     It was the steam issuing over the bar,

The smell of dead chicken from the kitchen,

     The rancid oil, the boiling

Of shellfish to fertilizer. With a shudder

     You see the crab with rubber bands

Round its claws, the trout and eel nuzzling

     The slimy belly of the vast carp.

A cat cries in the car trunk for air.

 

 

And often death itself is interrupted half-

     Way, before it can effect its own

Interruption—a blockage in an artery,

     Leaps up, downfalls, commiserations

Over as many endings, as many beginnings

     As there are reflexes, changes

Of opinion between amoeba and astra.

     The weariness of vagaries,

Of singularities, of the versions of fission,

     Cleverly tricks itself out

In broken mirrors in the pose of forgetfulness:

     Every crack is a missing piece,

And the effort of finding it is a psalm.

 

 

To start over—isn't the true beginning

     In the days immediately ensuing,

In the woman's wondering who was the object

     Of such forceful suit. Possibly

Her echoes sound alien to her by the morning,

     The new life, glimpsed prematurely,

Blackmails her and forces her to turn back,

     In panic that her own life is over.

What are his groans, compared to

     The devastation wrought within her,

The disruption of her rhythm, her hesitation

     Before the egg reaches its hill station,

Her fear of the ending, shortly beginning.

 

 

Observe how often you flinch from your re-

     Flection on the lacquered metal of car hoods,

In reflector sunglasses, on encountering

     Yourself in a revolving door

That spins you in. So rapidly replicated,

     You were always there ahead of yourself

Like the hedgehog in the fairy tale, an irritating

     Opposite number. Drifting malignantly

On eyes of fat in soup, in every glass of beer,

     Were there not always too many of you?

Was there not always one of your doubles

     In every droplet, making you wonder

Whether time really did cover its traces.

 

 

Think from the rim of wounds, from the veto

     Of the intestines, the silence

Of the cranial seams. The moonrise

     Of your fingernails adduces

Other heavens more sternly starred.

     Strange the flights, the dim view

From narrow bone arches

     Of cloacas and tombstones,

Scraps of skin, cyclical and constellations at hand.