This Clumsy Living

Waiting for my foot to ring

17 Waiting for my foot to ring I picture his stomach outside his body in the hands of a nurse or on a small platform built to hold the stomach. The operation began an hour ago when an eastern blue jay landed on the gate that belonged to a fence years gone. It’s common for poets to pretend to write in the present tense. I assure you the now I’m at my desk is the now they cut into his body to remove a section of colon overgrown with polyps. My right foot is on the phone I stole from an office at the University of Michigan by crawling the ledge of a building two stories up and opening a window. It’s black and has a dial like it wants to be a safe. I have sunlight on my hands I’m thinking of putting in a box and sending to the people who weigh sunlight. A throbbing sound comes from the fields, the cricket pulse of the day. I like fights in bars about order and chaos, words like entropy and system at particle accelerator speed, alcohol quoting Marx and Parmenides until baseball, someone loves the metaphor of the game and it’s summer and I’m not listening because there’s a name cut into the bottom of the table I want to read with my fingertips. It could be true that most operations are common, operations like addition and subtraction, the bootstrap operation or the operation of large machines painted yellow to bring color to construction sites. I was told about a poet who wrote a poem the day his wife was put in a box and given to the ground like it was Christmas. The person telling me had on a green shirt on which trees of a different green were imprinted, he thought the poet was sick and I thought the poet had a mind that only lived in his hands. When my father was fifteen, he trained his dog to sit with a piece of hamburger 18 on her nose until he told her she could eat it. If things don’t need to change until we let them, I would never leave the waist-high grass. I used to take can openers and TVs apart, there was always some small thing I forgot to put back yet I was never deprived of soup or westerns. My father will wake lighter, carrying the sense that he’s a balloon. This is the working hypothesis of my waiting. Every time I write, I try to hold the world still by noticing how the world moves. Butterflies fear the pins of this method, I fear what happens after the pinhole at the end of this sentence. ...