If you can't trust the monitors Then why do they have the monitors If you can't trust the cars Then why have the cars If you can't trust that I think you're hot Then why do you look so good Turning me on that way that you do If you can't trust the people Then why have the people If you can't trust the cards then why have the cards If you can't trust this room then why have the room Why not just an open space Where you can be naked and fascinating If you can't trust the milk in the bottles Then why have the bottles If you can't trust the wine the song Then why have the country If you can't trust the kangaroo Then why go jumping If you can't trust the sky Then why have the sky at all If you can 't trust the stars Then why look out Why not just sit in your room It's dark and safe anyway If you can't trust what's dark and safe anyway Then why even bother Then why even be here at all I don't know I just went and walked But desire is hopeless If you can't trust the windowsill Then why put the flowers there Why not leave it bare Oh I did And then what After a while Anyway That old sun It burned it green The windowsill And when I All I returned to the room All I saw was green Grass green Like grass but greener than A halting hue of it And I forgot the flowers And I forgot you If you can't trust the daybreak Then why have the daybreak Why not sit Let the night come It won't stop itself The hormones And all
Something cold is in the air, an aura of ice and phlegm. All day I've built a lifetime and now the sun sinks to undo it. The horizon bleeds and sucks its thumb. The little red thumb goes out of sight. And I wonder about this lifetime with myself, this dream I'm living. I could eat the sky like an apple but I'd rather ask the first star: why am I here? why do I live in this house? who's responsible? eh?
The problem of time. Of there not being enough of it.
My girl came to the study and said Help me; I told her I had a time problem which meant: I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes. Numbers hung in the math book like motel coathangers. The Lean Cuisine was burning like an ancient city: black at the edges, bubbly earth tones in the center. The latest thing they’re saying is lack of time might be a “woman’s problem.” She sat there with her math book sobbing— (turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers dangle in little nooses) Hawking says if you back up far enough it’s not even an issue, time falls away into 'the curve' which is finite, boundaryless. Appointment book, soprano telephone— (beep End beep went the microwave)
The hands fell off my watch in the night. I spoke to the spirit who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing they invented. Had wakened from a big dream of love in a boat No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face lived for months in my dresser, no arrows for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio nose (before the lie) left in the center; the watch didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I. My girl was doing her gym clothes by herself; (red leaked toward black, then into the white insignia) I was grading papers, heard her call from the laundry room: Mama? Hawking says there are two types of it, real and imaginary (imaginary time must be like decaf), says it’s meaningless to decide which is which but I say: there was tomorrow- and-a-half when I started thinking about it; now there’s less than a day. More done. That’s the thing that keeps being said. I thought I could get more done as in: fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller archon, then push-push-push the tired-tired around the track like a planet. Legs, remember him? Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . . Hawking says there are little folds in time (actually he calls them wormholes) but I say: there’s a universe beyond where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. . Push us out in the boat and leave time here—
(because: where in the plan was it written, You’ll be too busy to close parentheses, the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water, even the caterpillar will hurry past you? Pulled the travel alarm to my face: the black behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark from being ruined. Opened the art book —saw the languorous wrists of the lady in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning gently. The glove (just slightly—but still:) “aghast”; opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed into a fourth dimension but I say space thought it up, as in: Let’s make a baby space, and then it missed. Were seconds born early, and why didn’t things unhappen also, such as the tree became Daphne. . .
At the beginning of harvest, we felt the seven directions. Time did not visit us. We slept till noon. With one voice I called him, with one voice I let him sleep, remembering summer years ago, I had come to visit him in the house of last straws and when he returned above the garden of pears, he said our weeping caused the dew. . .
I have borrowed the little boat and I say to him Come into the little boat, you were happy there;
the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out onto the pond, or onto the reflection of the pond, whichever one is eternal
Finally, in middle age, I was tempted to return to childhood.
The house was the same, but the door was different. Not red anymore— unpainted wood. The trees were the same: the oak, the copper beech. But the people— all the inhabitants of the past— were gone: lost, dead, moved away. The children from across the street old men and women.
The sun was the same, the lawns parched brown in summer. But the present was full of strangers.
And in some way it was all exactly right, exactly as I remembered: the house, the street, the prosperous village—
Not to be reclaimed or re-entered but to legitimize silence and distance, distance of place, of time, bewildering accuracy of imagination and dream—
I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere. This is the house; this must be the childhood I had in mind.
This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills, the thyme and rosemary that grew there, crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks and, lower down, where there was real dirt, competing with other things, blueberries and currants, the small shrubby trees the bees love— Whatever we ate smelled of the hills, even when there was almost nothing. Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.
Maybe, too, that’s what it looks like— beautiful, like the hills, the rocks above the tree line webbed with sweet smelling herbs, the small plants glittering with dew—
It was a big event to climb up there and wait for dawn, seeing what the sun sees as it slides out from behind the rocks, and what you couldn’t see, you imagined;
your eyes would go as far as they could, to the river, say, and your mind would do the rest—
And if you missed a day, there was always the next, and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter, the hills weren’t going anywhere, the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit—
The streetlight’s off: that’s dawn here. It’s on: that’s twilight. Either way, no one looks up. Everyone just pushes ahead, and the smell of the past is everywhere, the thyme and rosemary rubbing against your clothes, the smell of too many illusions—
Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room. Whatever was left, that was ours for a while. But eventually the hills will take it back, give it to the animals. And maybe the moon will send the seas there, and where we lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills, paying the sky the compliment of reflection.
I went back but I didn’t stay. Everyone I cared about was gone, some dead, some disappeared into one of those places that don’t exist, the ones we dreamed about because we saw them from the top of the hills— I had to see if the fields were still shining, the sun telling the same lies about how beautiful the world is when all you need to know of a place is, do people live there. If they do, you know everything.
The hills are terrible, they hide the truth of the past. Green in summer, white when the snow falls.
Allegedly the worst is behind us. Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow, Halting like a headless hant in our own house, Waiting to remember exactly What it is we’re supposed to be doing.
& what exactly are we supposed to be doing? Penning a letter to the world as a daughter of it. We are writing with vanishing meaning, Our words water dragging down a windshield. The poet’s diagnosis is that what we have lived Has already warped itself into a fever dream, The contours of its shape stripped from the murky mind.
To be accountable we must render an account: Not what was said, but what was meant. Not the fact, but what was felt. What was known, even while unnamed. Our greatest test will be Our testimony. This book is a message in a bottle. This book is a letter. This book does not let up. This book is awake. This book is a wake. For what is a record but a reckoning? The capsule captured? A repository. An ark articulated? & the poet, the preserver Of ghosts & gains, Our demons & dreams, Our haunts & hopes. Here’s to the preservation Of a light so terrible.
The summer everyone left for the moon even those yet to be born. And the dead who can’t vacation here but met us all there by the veil between worlds. The number one song in America was “In the Year 2525” because who has ever lived in the present when there’s so much of the future to continue without us. How the best lover won’t need to forgive you and surely take everything off your hands without having to ask, without knowing your name, no matter the number of times you married or didn’t, your favorite midnight movie, the cigarettes you couldn’t give up, wanting to kiss other people you shouldn’t and now to forever be kissed by the Earth. In the Earth. With the Earth. When we all briefly left it to look back on each other from above, shocked by how bright even our pain is running wildly beside us like an underground river. And whatever language is good for, a sign, a message left up there that reads: here men from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon july 1969, a.d. we came in peace for all mankind. Then returned to continue the war.
The limit of the song is this prelude to a journey to the outer islands, the generative sentence, waltz project, forms, qualities, suns, moons, rings, an inside-outside then an outside-inside shaped with her colored clays. The days yet propse themselves as self-evident, everything there everything here and you are reading in a way natural to theatre a set of instructions that alters itself automatically as you proceed west from death to friendliness, the two topics upon which you are allowed to meditate under the first broad drops of rain. The planes will be piloted by ancestors who have come back to life. Why the delay.
1. Who are you and whom do you love? 2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive? 3. How will you begin? 4. How will you live now? 5. What is the shape of your body? 6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? 7. What do you remember about the earth? 8. What are the consequences of silence? 9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment. 10. Describe a morning you woke without fear. 11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? 12. And what would you say if you could?