I.      Jack of Hearts, Jack of the weakest ventricle:

I’m saving this dance for the boatlady Karen.

 

Play me the one about the starving Danish stowaway

welcomed to shore by a conflagration.

 

When the pointman plays his squeezebox in the murk and grime,

when the band chimes in on their sitars and lyres,

 

make believe it isn’t over. Pretend there’s time

to woo the wrinkled weavers away from their nets.

 

Oh Jack. Oh Karen. Oh keepers of gates,

I’ve built you a toy out of bones and regrets.

 

Please accept this offering as a lamb

bleating in the chest before the awful rattle.

 

 

II.     Let’s say the heebie-jeebies are a kind of flea

and the underbed goonies are only dust.

 

Let’s play the game where there is no death. Let’s trust

the few signs that we’re still alive:

 

soul sloshing like backwash in the breathing body,

this cat’s incessant scotchbrite kiss,

 

the old bread growing out its fur.

Will we miss the stamped planet of expirations?

 

Jack, in the cold black bog, we tire

of you, our aortal ache; what remains

 

of the little boy body with its breakable bones,

of how many licks ’til we hit the marrow.

 

 

III.    Sick chimp, you lagoon-dredger, Lust, I’ve been

meaning to say for you I’d take a bullet

 

to bloat this body with its unspent sins

like a stuffed duck. Let’s agree

 

the bloody steak is a black-eye salve

and the heart—the idiot heart—it knows

 

the course through murk, through rock

and eddy-haunted narrows. If we could go

 

tonight to the sullen limbo

of coffee and cars, would you be

 

so impish and impatient? Would you lurk

like this to a better-lit bed?

 

 

IV.    My little hooked pickerel, just look

what I can offer.

 

Far from here where the smog is cooler,

they’ll pour you a pond you can call your own:

 

some musty woods and their choir of toads,

the petty carnages of beetles,

 

one lone surviving Pangaean iris.

I hereby propose

 

this trade for nothing:

A forever-long stay in the blacker lake.

 

The presiding angel demanding softly,

please don’t go.

 

 

V.    Edge of the bright earth

where we say the dead pass, like it’s high-school science—

 

Can’t we admit the body’s a boat

where its own undoings bob through the day?

 

To what end, anyway: this dreaming of woods

and a tireless choir of toads

 

who hop far off where the smog is cooler;

this dreaming of black bogs

 

where the roasted geese can roost forever.

Little pickerel, in the towns of the living

 

the leaves have started falling

and you’re going to have to choose.

 

 

VI.    A trawler line. A rope and buoy. Karen,

can you lead me back by the lip

 

or the gills cinder-bright with gasping

to the cities of breath where the body

 

staggers on breakable bones,

where everything bleeds and wriggles

 

and feeds? Karen if I’m the fish

you must be me. And little pickerel,

 

little pickerel you must glide

through the wet with a school

 

of sorrows behind you; a barge

trailing gulls in its wake.

 

 

VII.   The last—give or take—forever I’ve spent

betting at morning against the light

 

while the barb and bobber, the line and bough

strafe the muck all day. Tonight

 

I’m cozying up to eternity

among the nonbelievers, all scales

 

and gills, no knees for kneeling,

to drift and drift in the dotted dark

 

to which you’ve given me,

Karen. You toss the keys

 

to every passenger. You give

each one a kiss. You disappear.

 

 

VIII.  Ladies and gents, if you look to your left

you’ll see the soft glow of approaching lava,

 

the petty carnages of beetles,

that regal swooner who tends the bridge.

 

What seems. What is. What wriggles and feeds.

Just like the herdsman I want to believe

 

in one big moon in the bigger sky,

to give myself up like a plucked bud

 

to all who’ve come to find me

wherever I am. Somebody tell me,

 

where is Karen? Why are all these tourists

pressing pennies in my hand?

 

 

IX.   From a list of great evils I’ve chosen the best:

to beat the dog for being fearful,

 

to bet at dusk against the dark,

and the heart, the idiot heart

 

that fails. In the towns

of the living the leaves have fallen

 

like sheets from the bitter writ of birds.

Sweet midgety gripers, how do we think

 

the dusk pulls shut the shade of night,

and why do we call for it? What do we want?

 

A peck. An eye. An iris.

A promise of more.

 

 

X.    Karen you promised you’d come but didn’t

so I’ve captained this cardboard skiff through the night.

 

City of Cherubim, City of Dis,

one is the sorriest digit that beats.

 

The rudder’s gone soggy,

the lake’s at my feet,

 

in the air no sound but the sound of air.

Just like the herdsman I want to believe

 

in one big moon in the bigger sky,

to love the middle world and its imperfections:

 

these six warped chords on endless loop;

E as in Everything, T as in Tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

The little bag slips. Adrift

and untethered in the dotted dark,

the little bag slips and the astronauts

just let it go. They know it’s not

 

a major loss—not really—though

it is a loss that follows: close

at first and then farther away,

like a stray dog gradually giving up;

 

or fading off and out, the way

a person drifts awake from the dream

in which everything is almost revealed.

Waking each morning to darker windows,

 

they watch it go. And to each on board

it seems the station’s filling with regret

the way a wrecked ship fills with water—

each one of them with family below,

 

each wanting to go and get the bag, although

the doctors warned of thoughts like these,

saying think of the satellites, the scar-pocked moon,

over everything that can’t be retrieved.

 

 

 

 

 

Out here one wishes for another name

like Malcolm or McKinney, something someone

else might carry forward, after one’s remains

have crowdsurfed the poisoned fingers

of anemones and turned to chum.

 

To have one name and one name only

while the sea on all sides wrinkles

its indifferent tarp, is to be a lonely

point in space is to be nothing

but an idea. If one meaning of madness

 

is a nude man flailing in the soaking dark,

another is the hour that man and a shark

know there’s no way of knowing who’s

circling who. Lord I don’t want a raft, or land:

just this body. To sink my little teeth into.

 

 

 

 

 

Optimistically and against me an awful cabal

of glass-half-fullers daily conspired.

 

Still, like an unfamous, incarnate semi-god

each morning I rose in my fragrant apartment

 

and to the embalmers, of their services, announced

over and over a further delay. Kurt Cobain,

 

I would say, you’re not fooling anyone

with your last, dramatic monologue out in the rain;

 

Brian Jones, in the stubble it’s not your face

staring up from the bathroom sink’s white mirror.

 

Half-Biblical, that’s how I felt. And I felt wholly tired,

too, of the doctors who wore their worries

 

as beef slabs hooked deep in their brows

while the vacuumed vials, like fat thermometers,

 

filled with a wet and urgent part of me.

Such otherworldly nebulae

 

were the insides of my elbows: bruised

swirls where a star might be born, or the mottled,

 

yellow-and-brownish surface of Saturn, which,

my self-declared astrologist friend so sweetly

 

said was simply rising. I learned I was less

beautiful than I once believed. I found a black seed

 

in the hollow of my belly, which told me the someone

I loved would never love me. Almost weekly

 

my mother announced her finishedness with affections

while the native rodents of my new town

 

in the dry leaves scuttled like thoughts

I’d really rather not be having,

 

and every day from sheets of an almost

unfathomable thread-count I woke and proclaimed,

 

though the finches are so silenter, still I maintain

to inform today I won’t be dying.