Poetry |

“An Index of Distressed Events”

An Index Of Distressed Events

 

  1. New Year

 

‘Forget to forget’ is something I’ve read,

the same way I’ve read

 

‘a painter’s vision

 

is not a lens’ and was

suddenly ‘frozen

by fact,’ as Lowell put it,

 

like a journalist or banker;

still, I go to the market

to be in the

 

world — to grab a year-

 

of-the-pig lotto ticket,

and the grin of the purple pig

 

I scratch out its

pink snout

 

first: black glossy digits below it,

 

and a number to call,

 

and the seal of

 

California, image image —

 

To be in the world. If I’m not

in the world,

 

then how I can be    in the

 

poem?

 

 

  1. White Plastic Lighter

 

The cheap flint, in that instant

when it’s struck

from inside

 

the deepset underpass —

the way it lights the face

of the hands

 

from beneath, like a billboard.

It’s an eerie misfire

 

once at least

once: a tiny dud

 

failing its blast

off as I

 

keep on

 

walking by,

staring as into the

 

mouth

 

of a hangar.

Next corner, a park

 

owned by the city,

where in the center is

a rock

 

owned by the city,

from which two flags fly

above an

 

empty Diet Coke can.

 

 

  1. Closing Time

 

An amplified voice it

elects us

 

to attention, the shoppers —

 

quickening,

they grab things

 

nearest, an odd sort of panic.

One of us shouts,

down an aisle,

 

and their voice comes back,

 

having lost its

target

 

through the beep

of a fork-lift

 

backing up; the end-

 

to-end sounds

 

of softly slit cardboard

 

       

  1. MacArthur Station, A Pear On The Platform

 

The damaged meat of it I see is

gouged, disfigured by momentum.

The front half I swear it

 

has a face an expression

in the bright-red signal light I

think I

understand —

 

and the discrete feet of people who pass it

I study quite a while: schooner-

tipped; loafer rounds; ballerina squares —

 

until the next train enters its berth.

 

How it rocks just slightly,

the pear, whenever an anxious load detrains.

How like flames the shadows

of legs

 

seem to flee what is

behind them, whatever that is,

 

on the ominous stairwell

 

I watch

their calves

 

spasm.

 

 

  1. Convo On Delta

 

 Out there, on the open

water it’s

 

all stars

 

and water and you

and god,

 

the nuke-sub dude says, a god-

 

damn born-again —

an airline

 

nip-bottle’s worth

 

of grassy scotch

in his cup,

 

and the ice

 

cubes actually round

with a hole

 

in the middle they melt

through themselves,

 

in their centers,

 

like glass

 

reactor cores

 

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