Read You Must Remember This Online
Authors: Michael Bazzett
The dark oaks creak with the dead
weight that hangs from their limbsâ
ropes taut with bodies barely turning.
We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,
looking out across the charred fields
and the smoking timbers of a farmhouse.
By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears
into dreaming orchards thick with bees,
but now in the chill of morning it is mostly
the scrape and croak of birds just starting in.
Someone has knotted an enemy banner
to the tail of an ass to drag the muddy lanes.
But the ass stands rooted in a ditch,
shredding weeds with a ripping sound.
Up on the wall, a woman works the crowd,
making the rounds with a steaming sack of corn.
People buy a roasted ear for warmth,
holding it snug inside their hands for a long while
before peeling back the damp husk.
It was not yet light.
I heard my father stir.
I crept downstairs
in my pajamas to listen
as he sent my brother
to find his spirit animal:
If it is a crow it is a crow
,
and you will not go hungry
.
I want it to be a bear
or a wolf
, my brother said.
If it is a crow it is a crow
,
murmured my father.
The door whuffed shut
and cold ascended the stair.
After a long moment
I walked into the kitchen
where my father sat.
I want to seek mine
, I said.
Your what?
he asked.
My spirit animal
, I said.
He laughed and pointed
to the broom closet.
Check in there
, he said.
Maybe the mop bucket
will be able to teach you
how to hold your water
.
Very funny
, I whispered.
My father shrugged,
What do you expect?
You're a closet Slovakian
,
and your brother is simple
.
Last week at the library
he checked out the phonebook
.
As my father spoke,
I heard the staccato
footfalls of my brother
and his curious gait.
The door burst open
with a gust of cold:
A bus!
he said.
Huge
as the sperm whale!
The mirror of my soul
is a crosstown bus!
My father smiled,
Good for you, Jeffrey!
His face was frank
as an open sail. Then
he looked at me and
mouthed these words:
The steam that blows the whistle
never turns the wheel
.
Now that I am a man,
I can clearly recall
how snow sifted sideways
through the air, how
I never had a brother,
how my father yearned
to be elsewhere, how
I longed to board that
crosstown bus and sit
quiet in the weak light,
using a stubby pencil
to draw the curious
members of my new
family, smiling there
on those paper napkins.
Your humor is deft and cutting
my fingers off one by one,
she said as we left the party.
I started up the car and said:
Every joke holds one blade inside
the breast pocket of its coat
to open things and liberate
the world of unremembered light.
This exchange took place without words.
A snowbank leapt into the headlights.
The car seemed to know the way home.
Until that moment I had been waiting
to put my mouth over her mouth
and breathe the ferment of the evening.
This might have led to touching
the soft parts of our bodies together.
Instead we fell asleep, tongues
heavy in our mouths like fish.
When They Meet, They Can't Help It
His obsession is a cart drawn by muscled oxen
over rain-softened roads. Salt marsh spreads evenly
on either side. Reeds stir like fine hair in the breeze.
The land seems flattened by the heat. The wheels
crush white bits of shell into densely packed mud.
Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks
in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the
dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the
animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.
The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,
drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the
driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.
The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving
through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality
of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.
Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.
The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers
motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted
to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite
through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal
and fearâif pressed, he could name neither impulse.
His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could
calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling
neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they
open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,
while the silence holds, he thinks of what they've done
and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this
forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.
She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What's the sound
skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?
If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things
are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner
thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.
The night is not a hole
to fill with your thoughts.
It is not a sock to stuff
deep in the gob of morning
and hope the sun has
soiled itself there on the couch
where it collapsed after the gin.
The sun can be so tiresome.
The night is not a black dog
snuffling around the muskrats.
The night refuses to stumble
through Byzantine circuits
like loose electricity. The night
has no limbs. It never stutters
or grabs. It settles in like
a headache: there before
you know it then a pressing
darkness stained with light
and you wish you'd taken
that handful of crumbling
white pills before it came.
When they lead you into the room with the blind man
and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face
so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails
that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight
and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat
because once he has confirmed the bones of your face
fall into line with his memory of the bones of your father,
he will offer a tobacco-stained smile and a wine-tinged
exhalation and announce, yes, you could only be
his
child,
all the while fumbling for the greasy string around his neck
to withdraw from inside his shirt a key that still holds
the warmth of his chest when he drops it in your hand.
The map is in the box, he'll say. The box beneath the bed.
You expected worn parchment or carefully folded vellum
but not this sturdy clothbound book. It is not merely a map.
It is an atlas, replete with indexes, charts, and translucent
overlays that display your various organs, followed by veins
and arteries traced in red and blue, and then the delicate lattice
of nerve endings that lace your body. The fine white crescent
scar on your forehead is indicated with an asterisk to footnote
the make and model of the car door that delivered the blow,
back when you were a boisterous child. The final overlay
takes care to reproduce the actual melanin of your skin tone
and quietly highlights this fact by including a small inset box
that offers the proper ratio of ocher to umber so that the hue
can be replicated by the paint department at any hardware store.
The thought of inhabiting a room the exact color of your skin
crosses your mind. You flip to the index and begin thumbing
through the italicized headings. The word
orgasm
catches your eye.
It is followed by a list of subheadings tucked into parentheses:
(first, last, multiple, most sustained, most frightening, inadvertent,
nocturnal, diurnal, induced by: stuffed animals, Bulgarian cuisine,
silk bedding, musical role-playing fantasies, velvet; see also:
sneeze
.)
It is all here, you realize. The manual you suspected and sought.
With a start you flip to the final section, and see it bears the title:
Future Accomplishments
. You are uncertain whether to continue,
knowing that the first item on the list could quite possibly be,
1.)
Currently Reading Future Accomplishments
and no matter how
quickly you begin skimming over the text your eyes will alight
upon only those words, and you will settle into a whirling pause
which comprises the rest of your life, reducing it to an infinite
bumper sticker: The Future Is Now, Is Now, Is Now, Is Now
but if you do proceed you will be delighted to discover this is
not the case. This is not some sort of cheap rip-off of Borges:
there is actually a numerical list of deeds, some quite surprising.
It gratifies you to know you will one day befriend an orangutan.
Of all the things on the list, this is the one you will carry with you
once the book has been returned and the lock has clicked shut.
Many years later, while those at your bedside await your last breath,
you remain serene. There has been no orangutan, you murmur.
No orangutan whatsoever. In this moment, you begin to recover.
The Difficulty of Holding Time
The silliness of clocks and watches,
weather vanes with no wind, spinning
to correlate a thing they don't measure
but suggest. Perhaps a large ceramic
bowl with its round mouth opened
always to sky would be more accurate.
Days pass: the sun rides its staring white
road. And
again
. Always
again
, opening
and closing like a dutiful flower. You
put entire hours in your pockets and later
find nothing but lint. You slip a minute
into your coin purse and it transforms
into foil wrapper. You chant
is
and
is
and
is
which already
was
before touching