Читать книгу Popular Longing - Natalie Shapero - Страница 13

California

We often ate late by flameless

candles and took turns choosing

how best to be disposed of.

I want to be buried. I want everyone

to be buried. I realize there’s scarcely

a spare acre left in the ground, but I just

can’t do without the indecorous

transit from parlor to plot.

I need the array of daytime headlights

jolting the arid access road,

the only remembrance that matters.

Don’t make a speech.

For years I would wonder whether

the man who attacked me—

in his memory, did the event of it

persist as a dull sort of flash? Then

he died and became himself

just a flash in the mind of the world.

Now I wonder—is he anywhere?

I don’t believe in Hell and also I don’t

believe in nothing, so that leaves only

Heaven. I have a couple

questions. It is my understanding

that the weather in Heaven

has only a single setting,

which is PLEASANT. I haven’t

spent real time in California, but friends

of mine who’ve moved there

say it’s challenging, absent the changing

of the seasons, to remember when things

took place. With reference to always

the lodgepole pine and the low-bent

needlegrass, you get confused.

Dates and sequences, even the people

involved. You can almost imagine

the whole thing was somebody else.