Questions About Angels (4 page)

I spot the neighbor's dog scampering across the lawn

with my name in its mouth,

leaving me to wander through the house anonymously

and scour the telephone directory for an alias.

When I say my name out loud it sounds like

someone else's, a character in a play who cheats

the hero and comes to a bad end, or an obscure

athlete lost in the deep encyclopedia of baseball.

When I try writing it down on paper

I find I have also lost my signature. My hand

feels retarded, unable to perform its inky trick,

that unmistakable, eerie, Arabic flourish.

Perhaps the dog was never given a name

and is now eating mine with pleasure

under a porch in the cool, lattice-shadowed dirt.

Perhaps late tonight I will hear the voice

of my neighbor as she stands at her back door,

hands cupped around her mouth, calling my name,

and I will leap the hedge and come running.

This morning is the same as all other mornings.

I part the window curtain and the familiar play begins.

Sunlight keeps repeating itself as if I were blind.

The same black car waits in the driveway for my key,

my manipulations and the sound of its radio.

It is the same old song, blue exit signs enlarging

and disappearing behind the stream of my travel

as I think about the past, that rope I drag along,

and the future which is the rope that pulls me forward.

Ah, but tonight I will drink red wine at dinner.

I will continue to drink red wine after dinner.

Then I will lie down in the dark greens of the lawn

and think of something entirely new.

I will feel the rotation of the earth

as electrically as the sudden touch of a stranger.

I will wonder how many thousands of days

it would take the two of us to walk to the moon.

I wish my head to appear perfectly round

and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions,

please trace the circle with a dinner plate

rather than a button or a dime.

My face should be painted with

an ant-like sense of detail;

pretend you are executing a street map

of Rome and that all the citizens

can lift thirty times their own weight.

The result should be a strained

but self-satisfied expression,

as if I am lifting a Volkswagen with one foot.

The body is no great matter;

just draw some straight lines

with a pencil and ruler.

I will not be around to hear the voice

of posterity calling me Stickman.

The background I leave up to you

but if there is to be a house,

lines of smoke rising from the chimney

should be mandatory.

Never be ashamed of kindergarten—

it is the alphabet's only temple.

Also, have several kangaroos grazing

and hopping around in the distance,

an allusion to my world travels.

Some final recommendations:

I should like to appear hatless.

Kindly limit your palette to a single

primary color, any one but red or blue.

Sign the painting on my upper lip

so your name will always be my mustache.

It is awkward for me and bewildering for him

as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,

balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,

but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier

than training him to sit obediently on one spot

with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.

With pencil and paper I subtract my weight

from our total to find out the remainder that is his,

and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.

It could not have to do with my leaving you

though I never figured out what you amounted to

until I subtracted myself from our combination.

You held me in your arms more than I held you

through all those awkward and bewildering months

and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.

This is the only life I have, this one in my head,

the one that travels along the surface of my body

singing the low voltage song of the ego,

the one that feels like a ball between my ears

sometimes, and other times feels absolutely galactic,

the life that my feet carry around like two blind

scholars working together on a troublesome manuscript.

This is the only life I have, and I am standing

dead in the center of it like a man doing a rope trick

in a rodeo, passing the lasso over his body,

smiling inside a twirling of ovals and ellipses.

This is the only life I have and I never step out of it

except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel

or when love makes me want to remove my clothes

and sail classical records off a cliff.

Otherwise you can always find me within this hoop of myself,

the rope flying around me, moving up to encircle my head

like an equator or a halo or a zero.

I thought about his death for so many hours,

tangled there in the wires of the night,

that it came to have a body and dimensions,

more than a voice shaking over the telephone

or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.

His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs,

windows and shutters which are the motionless wings

of windows. His death had a head and clothes,

the white shirt and baggy trousers of death.

His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index,

and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read.

His death had hinges and bolts which were oiled and locked,

had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna which listened

to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past.

His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams.

It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor

you could not lie down on in the middle of the night.

In the freakish pink and grey of dawn I took

his death to bed with me and his death was my bed

and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,

and then it was the light of day and the next day

and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future

like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

“Life is beautiful. Life is sad.”

—
NABOKOV

And the two are braided together

like the long hair of a woman

who is about to die suddenly.

She arranges a vase of flowers,

takes a coat from the closet.

She regards herself in a mirror.

She is leaving the house,

closing the door behind her.

There is no stopping her.

The sadness is the bread

and the beauty is the wine

or the other way around.

I have been visited by a thought

contoured like an automobile:

beautiful.

Then again, I am lying under

all the clothes of the dead,

feeling every ton

as they add more to the pile.

I want the scissors to be sharp

and the table to be perfectly level

when you cut me out of my life

and paste me in that book you always carry.

The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart

and still we are not touching, like things

in a poorly done still life

where the knife appears to be floating over the plate

which is itself hovering above the table somehow,

the entire arrangement of apple, pear and wineglass

having forgotten the law of gravity,

refusing to be still,

as if the painter had caught them all

in a rare moment of slow flight

just before they drifted out of the room

through a window of perfectly realistic sunlight.

When you injure me, as you must one day,

I will move off like the slow armadillo over night sand,

ambulating secretly inside his armor,

ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball

which will shelter his soft head, soft feet

and tail from the heavy, rhythmic blows.

Now can you see the silhouettes of ranchers' hats

and sticks raised against the pink desert sky?

The small camel leaves his common place

on the front of the pack of cigarettes

and sways across the floorboards in search of water.

His absence leaves a vacuum as eerie

as the one you left in our rented house,

empty as a desert without its furniture.

I never thought I would find myself smoking here

on this flat stretch of uncountable sand,

a forlorn illustration of figure and ground,

my only company the tiny pyramids and palms

planted in the distance, and the man

whose shirt pocket I ride in all afternoon.

Turn away from me, you, and get lost in the past.

Back to ancient Rome you go, with its parallel columns and syllogisms.

Stuff yourself with berries, eat lying on your side.

Suck balls of snow carried down from the Alps for dessert.

I don't care. I am leaving too, but for the margins of history,

to a western corner of ninth century Ireland I go,

to a vanishing, grey country far beyond your call.

There I will dwell with badgers, fish and deer,

birds piercing the air and the sound of little bells.

I will stand in pastures of watercress by the salmon-lashing sea.

I will stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of cows.

He was born one sunny Florida morning

and napped through most of his childhood.

He spent his adult life relaxing in beach chairs,

always a tropical drink in his hand.

He never had a job, a family or a sore throat.

He never mowed a lawn.

Passersby would always stop to remind him

whose life it was he was living.

He died in a hammock weighing a cloud.

Just when I am about to telephone her

so she can hear me swallowing my pride,

a thing the size of a watermelon,

a giant barges out of a fairy tale,

picks up the house by the chimney

and carries it off laughing like thunder.

She will never believe this I tell myself.

From the windowsill where I hang on

I can see geysers of plumbing,

the exposed basement embarrassed by its junk,

snapped telephone wires on the lawn,

and the neighbors looking up with little

apocalypse expressions on their faces.

I realize on the way up the beanstalk

apologizing over the phone was a bad idea.

A letter provides a more reflective means

of saying hard things, expressing true feelings.

If there is pen and paper in his kingdom,

I plan to write her a long vivid one

communicating my ardor, but also describing

the castle floating in high clouds,

the goose, the talking musical instruments,

and the echo of his enormous shoes.

In fact, to convince her of my unwavering love,

I will compose it while pacing back and forth

in his palm.

If Kafka could turn a man into an insect in one sentence

perhaps he could transform me into something new,

a slow willful river running through a forest,

or simply the German word for river, a handful of letters

hidden in the dark alphabetical order of a dictionary.

Not that I am so miserable, but I could use a change

of scenery and substance, plus the weather reminds me of him.

I imagine Kafka at his desk: the nib of his pen,

like the beak of a bird, disturbs the surface of a pool of ink,

and he writes a sentence at the top of a page

changing me into a goldfish or a lost mitten

or a cord of split wood or the New York Public Library.

Ah, to awaken one morning as the New York Public Library.

I would pass the days observing old men in raincoats

as they mounted the ponderous steps between the lions

carrying wild and scribbled notes inside their pockets.

I would feel the pages of books turning inside me like butterflies.

I would stare over Fifth Avenue with a perfectly straight face.

I wonder if I have become smaller or has the bedroom

always been the size of a western state.

The aspirin bottle is in the medicine cabinet

two hundred miles away, a six day ride,

and my robe hangs from the closet door in another time zone.

A strange circumstance for one who was a giant king

last night in a principality of thimbles

where all money was smaller than dimes

and the flag over my castle displayed a flea.

But no matter. The television is right next to the bed

and Donald Duck is taking his nephews ice-skating.

No wonder everyone loved the private dick

whose only badge is a pack of Camels

and who never dies until the movie is over

and nobody can watch him writhe.

He charges a hundred a day plus expenses,

and there would be plenty of time to relax

between cases.

The only suffering in the world would be

those blackjackings from the blind side,

his nods to mortality,

but then he fades into a soft dissolve

and comes to on a sumptuous couch,

a blonde in a nightgown rubbing his temples

and pouring brandies as she reconsiders

the doublecross.

What better style of transport

than an open car squealing along

the Coast Highway, one hand on the wheel

as you unravel the onion of the murder

so fast even she can't follow.

What better place to think things over

than a swivel chair in a darkened office,

the pulse of the neon hotel sign

illuminating your notorious face,

your hat hanging on the rack where you

tossed it on the way in.