Three
Oracles
Black boom box of the town loner, one hand propping it on his shoulder, pressing it against his ear, as it blasted a force field of electric outrage all around him as he walked the streets, in his own parade of being no one anybody knew, in black boots, black pants and shirt, neck shackled with austere chains, while a heavy key chain clanged from his belt. Mute but for the blasted sound, the indecipherable screeching, he passed by too quickly to be hassled, to care if he was jeered at or merely seen and then forgotten, just part of the scenery, part of the background, the backgroundās angry edge of caring not at all about him, appearing in our lives the way a stranger might appear by accident in a photograph taken by a loved one of a loved oneāa wandering oracle, but of what? What didnāt register? What mattered little then, and less now, or mattered, we were certain, unforgettably until it didnāt, remembered if at all as just a black blur in a torn-off corner of an absent photograph heās stepping out of, into where for him we all along had been, and for each other soon would be?
First Love
Before he happened the body was to me
like weather in a place where weather changed
so little it never needed to be noticed,
a sleepwalk through long spells of fog
effusing inside out and outside in
until one day the feeling for him in my body
made of my body the isolated site
that seeing him could only happen from.
His presence fell impartially as sunlight,
indifferent, needless, blindingly unaware
that I was brightening alone below it,
like Blakeās sunflower, fixed, drawn, leaning up toward
the golden clime whose going left so fresh
a dark around me I was grateful for it.
Grateful because so long as it was dark
the wanting could be imageless and placeless,
not a being with of bodies but an in-
between so dense with wanting to be filled
that wanting to fill it was itself the force
that held me at the edge of having what
the wanting somehow wouldnāt let me have.
Was he my otherwise? Or was I his
the day he leaned across the front seat to
unlock the door for me the way he had
for others so we could go somewhere the smiling
promised would be mine alone, or ours,
long hair the sheen of corn silk, hand on mine
that on its own refused to pull away
the more I tried to pull it, pulling me after
even while I withdrew, like the sun caught
between collapsing and exploding, which meant
I wanted to and couldnāt while I did,
both drawn in and withdrawn held down
and hovering galaxies away above
the small boy looking up from where the wanting
wouldnāt let me enter, or escape.
How I grew up is how a black hole shrinks
by sucking into its event horizon
all of the emptiness around it, which
it squeezes to a dot that keeps contracting,
sucking until the space increasing in
the shrinking speck has grown too vast to cross.
Mirrors
The amusement park of my childhood was called Paragon. Paragon Park. And in it was a ārideā that wasnāt a ride at all but a crooked hall you walked through called the Crooked Hall that was in fact a crooked hall made entirely of funhouse mirrors, not just on either side but floor and ceiling too. I pretended to love it because everyone else did or seemed to. Maybe we all pretended to love it, anxious to show the world how confident we were, how free of vanity, that we could laugh in clinical fluorescence at the monsters we became inside it, on one side the body pulled like agonized taffy to a barely human smear, while on the other it swallowed itself up into a paramecium blur, a fat puddle. Jeered at by our bodies warped and morphing all around us, we didnāt laugh, or I didnāt, not really. The mirror did the laughing for me. It was like being caught inside a nightmare particle acceleratorāin which the images I presented to the world were all exploded down into some grotesque confessional essence, the Higgs boson of a self-contempt I hid even from myself, except in dreams, or in sudden eruptions out of nowhere of disgust that had no aim or object, that, not to feel myself, I would have to train on others, usually the weakest ones I knew. Getting older, at least, changed that. Getting older is a new park; itās still called Paragon, though no one goes there for amusement. Yet stuck inside it we still joke a lot, we say things like all mirrors laugh now when we are in them, but while the mirror on one side is a young self laughing at an old self in the facing mirror laughing back, we ourselves donāt laugh; we are where the laughs collide and shatter.
Grasshopper
to the little ant that was me,
intrepid Stevie, pretty
Stevie for whom the future
was a foreign movie
without subtitles,
bad boy of the moment
of the high school
parking lot, the hallways
and classrooms too,
flask peeking out
from shirt pocket,
always a little drunk,
or high, a different girl
or boy clinging to his arm,
envy of girl and boy
alike, by me especially despite
my ant ways, my little
drone ambition, glanced
at and envied not
so much for the beauty
as the beautyās fuck-it-
all serenity, magnetic
pull of couldnāt-give-a-shit,
the you-know-Iām-me face, bright shock
of blond hair, body tall
and slender flexed
with having, taking,
giving, body both
a shameless dare
and warning, and warned
and dared was how I
ant-like, drone-like,
navigated, tray in hand,
the hormonal roar and milky
sourness of the lunchroom,
the sticky linoleum hubbub
each step had to be un-
stuck from as I searched
for a seat at any table
but his, but never too
far from his, and always
near enough ...