The Golden Underground

Eight Modes toward Desire

14  Eight Modes toward Desire i Downriver dining tray piled with squirrel from someone’s excursion into backyard sports or the actual bounty of small game hunters, its skin a syrupy sweet from a life of digesting nuts, not all trophies are for keeps. The planet Saturn looms like a children’s pool toy in the amateur telescope purchased for a month’s worth of child wages, the boy having trotted out the black-and-white tube amounting to more than Galileo could muster in 1610: year toward censure. Its rings push like arms against the night as if the circular field of view were more like a silent movie where the oculus of view, reduced by the lens, collapses upon the minnowed form of an actressturned -flapper, overly poignant in her distress. The color seems an addition as soft hues swirl around the bend, into starlight dotting the periphery, into the first notion of memory he will have. Venison will possess the taste of this night’s sugar. Water will seem like wine as if Saturn were floating face up in the cup.  15 ii Sun shines like the only basis for desire, a couple kissing in Clark Park as if their parents were farther than the Ambassador Bridge, the Straits of Detroit a fugue of blue, red-hulled oil tankers headed for ports as far as Chicago, inland seas like the world turned inside out, an inner world made real beneath failing autumn light. A university astronomer makes a routine study of the sun, her students quite mobile—their bodies like thoughts offered before the conveying of knowledge, perfect mirrors before the lens through which they study. Or maybe the world does not bear this much light. Men wander the streets looking for spare change and the upturned butts of those who hadn’t time to finish before the next appointment: the spiral rings of their day-planners like rings of Saturn undone. The lovers will graduate in time. Winter will push on beneath the knowledge of Sky as we push snow to the sides of roads and the sidewalks of our families and the elderly. Spots in the telescope, empty bottles in the snow, lovers who will break up before the long pull of winter has seen them through to Valentine’s Day: loss represents the truer face of freedom, seemingly more lively than the visage of Sky. Peer down at a galaxy of delight and sorrow, the snow more like splotches upon the land, bottles as the accumulation of more than just waste, the sun revealing a spectacle burrowing deep beneath its surface: sunspots as lovers lying for the last time. 16  iii The somber moon waxes within its field of lament before the harvest, the closest feeling to leaving this Earth for some other place. I stood and watched that unknown creature come and visit me in the night. The air: a chilled martini. The ground: a wet napkin. We should ignore metaphors in times like these, the moon trapped in the northern hemisphere as if Earth owned it, orange mortgage through the mist of October as if moisture paid us back for a pleasant summer. Twentieth-century castles stand along Fifth Avenue with traffic swimming past, the absence of simile like the nothing inside of me when a streetwalker says “hello.” The night chills me, not really afraid of whatever the absence of light might bring. People gather for Taizé in the Cathedral of Hope, the streetwalker among them. I do not feel guilt as we chant in unison. I feel Sky outside as if God stood right here with us. The moon has not left me wondering about the harvest or Halloween, or wishing for a more telescopic vision. The moon gathers steam from the night sky as if the charge toward winter seemed more like battlefield maneuvers than happenstance. The man gathers his breath to form the one perfect word he knows, the next one, which leaves me with peace.  17 iv Flat plastic floats by on Halloween, victors and villains poorly sheltering children from northern drizzle. Pellets against the scent of vinyl abrupt as the representation of black and orange: celebrations in the basements of two-family flats where the owner’s space becomes a shared place for the block’s revelers. His putting-green lawn gets trampled on this one day of the year, the harvest moon like...