Читать книгу In Defense of Nothing - Peter Gizzi - Страница 17

DESPITE YOUR NOTICES

This is my poem. The one I was afraid to show you. A poem to provide against the voices that will ultimately ensure my failure in this endeavor. This poem is a pillow, small and embroidered, the satin death pillow used to prop up the face for one last viewing. All attempts of understanding finally and thoroughly erased. This is my poem. The one I tuck under my eyelids when looking inhibits the distinctions of what can be seen. And air always present, always there to stimulate the hair at the base of my neck. Insert this chill exactly where you presume to have found me, only to uncover an abandoned parking lot for eyes. Look harder and you will discover we are all matched to this swatch of steel gray that is as wide as the seam on my scrotum but longer than the chalk ray on the board in the classroom to represent infinity. Silent and irreversible. A fault line running from one hole to another. Forever. That we are drawn, together. So see you on the other side. Even if we can’t represent that which we were hoping to resemble. But for one day heaven. See the tips of buds swaying in union beneath a spring sky so faint so blue that it could only suggest a further devastation, as if we were fated to repeat this day, as if we could. It came and went without the anxiety of anticipation and its finality of passage and unannounced significance stains us good. Even the colors fade so we can only imagine we were once so alive. Sad nothing can be held so thoroughly we might assimilate it. Only in the letting go will the full concentration of tone bleed into the periphery of our lives and settle into a patina that can never be altered. I surrender my vision thus. Because I don’t understand. That joke isn’t funny anymore. It cuts me precisely where laughter is a departure from this parlor. I live on flight 405 departing into an icy altitude—cold and detached. I’m here despite your notices and obituary. That plane didn’t crash. It still hovers around my head. The constant hum of its engines reminds me I still haven’t landed. I know this by the way a hand like a landing strip will reach over to wave here, here, here. So here again is the earth. Not the idea of it, but that clump of dirt and weeds outside my door each day—humiliates me. So long. I’m off to my job, alone in the clouds where my fathers live perhaps younger than I am now. Having left me to dinners, movies, books and with this incredible sickness you call enthusiasm. It’s a smoke screen though. For it was me they stuck out there in that winter hole. Earth so frozen it came up in slags that still get caught in my throat every time you tell me you love me. So don’t. I mate with these voices on the other side. Their memos become the mottos of my solo walk into emblem. As the torn metal of all industrial accidents flowers in my brain. Yeah, I saw the broadcast. Transmission deceived.