Deadpan

with Dorothea Lasky

There are mice crawling everywhere here
In this house
There were four birds, or were there six,
Or seagulls rather, that flew through the Russian sky
And they were always there or will be forever
Alone in that sky, or with each other
White birds that fly through a white expanse
Of an airy feel like snow or semen
Or milk, holywater that flows from the heavens.
I have decided to be an alien, or to live alone
On a spaceship with lifeforms that escape me
By their many years ahead of me.
Still, it is not midnight yet, but this poem is very old
And I do that, write poems that are very old, much older than me
Even though I am at this moment decomposing into nothingness
Like the rotting flower that God meant for my body
Woman in the green bathroom, who descends the bathtub
Because it is her time to haunt
Or it is rather, she can’t get out of there
The way the birds can’t ever get out of that painting
The way Emily Dickinson is in that house, whether she likes it or not, for all of history
Her brown hair surrounding her face in the same white bed
The grapes in the small silver bowl next to her, not rotting but frozen for all eternity
In mid-gasp
Things are like that, whether they escape (and I mean escape) into the bloody footprints of hell
Or they go down like saints, with children at their bedside.
It is all frozen in time, like a static shot of bloody leaves
All along the baseboard of my mind.
Still, the saddest movie in the world shouldn’t scare us
Don’t be scared of the saddest movie in the world that is your favorite
You are not fixed in their story, that is theirs
And when you leave this earth, it will be of your own free will
To go into that snowy plain that you have understood completely
And when I said that the sublime is only the beginning I meant that too
That to be one bird in snow is to know you have nothing left to lose
So the fullness of life is right upon you
The tomatoes, the tomatoes, the lemons
The orange fruits, the lemons, upon you, wandering in the dark forest
Is not the loneliness of life, but only the idea of love
Still soaring above us in the wind


*


Serials tune us… *All work and
no play*

Interference
The way you said

The light was hitting it
That ass tapped by grief

Would not be haunted if not for
You

Hunted

I returned to my senses I cried
What place is this the world

An “Earth-scorched” world today

Fire here
Fire far away

In headlines
Because we tremble

They say we are sometimes true.


This place always calls us out
Into what shining won’t set

There will be no pictures enough
For it, just the tinge of worlds

No walls, no windows to feel
It felt itself becoming us

A bright monochrome, a direct line
For semblance, its purer spaces


Some pre-Soviet sea not quite real yet
Not quite "after the fall" or before it

Those birds are soaring for your “idea
Of love” the cum of their crests snow

Caps and sails glint in this false sunlight
Clouds like an unfinished business of us

True because no one can be together
We were always those crystal birds we

Can’t help it the frozen grief of their wings
Bring us back into being give us hands

To haunt a holographic world and float
Below them in a sort of saintly motion.


I think of the flames of David Lynch’s films

Always seeming keyed or matted, never
Quite here enough

I am reminded that we are always
Flickering
Our bones like

Substantives, suns, words we constitute
What little light

Is left in the world

Risked by wind, always ready to
Go out

If anything could spare it.

Is this your deadpan justice? That we are bound
In fatal

Contact with the words we use?

Lynch’s characters always live-out this problem:

The sound of their breath
That was always more
Than anything they said,

The open-ended pene
tration of the wind in this

The curtains still and the
Curtains just barely
Moving.

Your idea of love,
So much more than the real.