Barter: POEMS

Material

67 Material Sometimes the whistling parts of the story take over for the trembling parts, and while it’s often steamy to dig up She said, How could you possibly, You wanted so much, maybe you know the place where an idle space is less empty than serene, a moment before lip service, before storm cellar and should have, just before poets talk to the flowers and confess their addictions, when some item you can put in your hands is a benediction, a breastplate for all those arrows that used to point your way, and suddenly you can play the clarinet part of the concerto. I’m stitching up the miscreant, paralyzed parts, when whole weeks pass and you’re still staring at the same page on the same job, with the same wife, when the scabrous, unjust shadows troll the neighborhood like cops looking for whatever’s hiding in the hallways that gets in their way. Only a person with a lot of cash and a fathomless love of God can say the material is degraded, shallow, an obstacle to the fluffy clouds of somebody’s heaven. I loved it when the butcher entered the theater with his bloody smock. Later someone named Ira digresses to the other neighborhood and takes with him the scents of their stewing pots, 68 and OK, he can’t stop scanning the body types, collecting them for some future garbage can of an afternoon. Now the dirge and the drill bit, the blame and the battering can recede, now you can forgive, if you can’t forgive you can push past the gatekeepers, the men with white collars who love stipulate and interim.Then I can look my mother’s death in the face— don’t think I’d describe it for you—and the impossible passages when I pursue the wrong woman for no reason, the reason being I want to see her and be seen, I can’t turn the TV off with its Bosnias, Serbias, and Ruwandas and all the other countries that are like spelling bees and the gruel they’re picking out of a bowl, while flies buzz around them, stirs the entire afternoon. There’s nothing left to redeem of them, so I apologize, I should be on my knees for this, being so happy thinking of Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes, his head on a plate. I could describe the slight of being cast aside, the crowd diving after quarters that fell from her purse, Mexico City, where my mother’s always dreamed of, so if this is a dream, I’m shaking her out of it. Get out of bed and finish the Marguerita, you’re not going to get the ending you want, the on-balance part, the revelation that’s a relief and a trophy. I’m being unfair, sitting here with the window slightly open, the crackle of thunder unfolding like static on a freshly laundered shirt, waiting and not waiting for the next bolt.When the lights flicker, 69 when old selves are still dilating and deflecting, when I’m chanting, staircase, body part, bombed-out cathedral, if you want to know what stands behind the aura, it’s an angel, a human angel, sitting next to you wiping your chin with a napkin. ...