A Pretty Sight (6 page)

One day all those kittens and pups

we drowned in a sack

will come crawling back.

They’ll drag up shit

from L.A. to the Moscow underground.

They’ll claw through our exhaust,

oil and grease

that’s decanted into sewer grates

by generations of squeegee kids.

Their scratches will resound

like some turntablist’s retro stack

that
doo-langs

as it’s tipped from a milk crate.

They won’t be fucking around.

They’ll hunt us down.

They’ll get a fix and calibrate

like the Hubble’s squint staring in,

one eye a plaster cast

from Pompeii, the other in decay

like Chernobyl.

They’ll raise a din,

their yips like drone strikes, their howls

a martyr’s mother on
CNN
,

their meows the opinionated crap

we generated in chatrooms

so easily after the fact. Just you wait.

They’re no Mutt and Jeff.

On their tags there’s
WTO
and
IMF

engraved in gold. And when we’re found

on the business end of their
GPS
,

they’ll say, ‘Did you really think

you’d give our sins the slip

by filling up some burlap

and tipping us in the drink?’

They’re coming around, crammed

up the yingyang

with talking points and spreadsheets

on every bailout,

g8 summit, profit bonus

and offshore bank we ever had.

Doo-lang, doo-lang
.

You must change your life, but first,

wait a few minutes. After all, Rilke couch-surfed

from castle to château for a decade before

his internal mood ring shifted to purple

and signalled the muse. He finessed this later

as creative possession: an impulse so focused

he’s said to forget the time of day,

though Wikipedia claims he never missed

a meal at Duino. Big deal. Whatever

it was, he could direct the spirit’s surges

and knew how to work a crowd in its wake.

Imagine him on Facebook.
LOL
.

Precious, yes, but how not to be

when you’re born in Prague and write

about angels. In any case, you won’t catch me

mooning along parapets and sea walls;

not because I wouldn’t, but so far

there’ve been no offers. I booked a week

at Banff in a forest studio,

ate scones, startled a ground squirrel,

kept forgetting to bring a jacket,

and one night heard blues harmonica

drift from the aboriginal arts lodge nearby.

I texted a friend who’s Ojibwa.
WTF
?

He wrote back ‘Why don’t you go

over there and ask them what they’ve got

to be blue about?’ Touché.

So I managed some edits, and through

the skylight watched yellow leaves

parachute the branched heights to amass

as ground cover. No thought-fox

raised its rusty snout, or gifted prints

across the page, though a few fingers

of cask-strength Scotch made

the waiting a little easier. Paradox:

to be perfectly here, you must

stop thinking about it, then it’s on.

Most days I leaf around trying to sidle

out of the peripheral sight of myself,

so when I focus again, I might

be astonished, do something real, feel

like Jarrett at Köln, overtired

and saddled with the wrong piano,

forced to work the corners we get

backed into. It might be a thunderbolt,

but mostly a mule I keep thinking of

when I picture myself in the grind between

the start of some work and its end result,

but like an apprentice before the koan,

I’m afflicted by the absent revelation,

never sure if it’s better to change the light bulb

or stare into the dark.

A mariachi band has just begun;

the
cantinero
muddles lime, ice and mint.

Is it industry, folly or perverse fun

to lounge here, behind my glasses’ darkly tint,

reading elegies in the sun?

Crouched in the back, the official team

portrait, his gesture above a teammate's shoulder:

who is he giving the finger to?

Players, those fielders from New York

maybe, who taunt their league rivals with snorts,

bored with delay in the April

dugouts while waiting to pose for their own team

photo. Or maybe it's Radbourn's

scorn for these ‘pictures' that's lifted his digit so

snidely, irate at the tripod and bellows

holding the game from its opening pitch. Or

managers maybe, or press who reported drunken

brawls and philandering.

Maybe it's time with a capital T that faces Radbourn's

finger, a signal he's sent from his age to ours,

showing he knows we're all stuck in a world

made by palookas who dream the fast buck while

playing each other for suckers,

so why not break the measure this once

just to say Fuck You

and So What, it might be the only

thing that's left worth doing,

the only thing we're any good for

in this unexamined life.

So slight, no weight, a non-bug,

it wafts past

like an ash flake bobs

above a bonfire’s heat,

its shape

an ephemeral asterisk.

Do fruit flies ever die of old age?

At what moment are they living

and then they’re dead?

The only times I’ve seen them die

were flat between hands,

or dialing out their limits of energy

in a glass of stale beer.

When Voyager 1

was scheduled to clear

the solar system,

NASA
signalled its onboard camera

to swing back

and take a picture of home. Six

billion kilometres out,

Earth’s photo

a ‘pale blue dot’ .12

pixels in size.

I am in there too,

a child in trampled clover.

If I stand on a scale

and hold the fruit fly in my hand,

does the needle drop a bit

the second it dies?

Where once there was nothing, something.

Where once there was nothing, nothing.

I’ve been reading how they still dredge up

tacks and ivory eyelets

scattered near Simon the Cobbler’s shop,

where Socrates

often stopped to chinwag in the Athenian agora.

As the weather clears

and the austere linden sags into leaf, I watch

our neighbours

empty out their rooms across the street,

propping odds, ends and bags

of garbage against the realtor’s sign; a big, bold SOLD

in red Calibri.

Of the agora scrap, the ancient inventory

piles up: amphorae,

broken capitals and
ostraka
used as votes to exile

fellow citizens,

so many loops and lines alike the same hand

must have carved them,

proof of ancient vote-rigging. We think the news is over,

but it never is.

Mid-May I watch and rewatch the Madsen doc

on Onkalo, the ‘hiding place’

in northern Finland. Did I mention you should see it?

At surface the clocks

run very fast
, Peter Wikberg notes in his Scandinavian

accent,
while in the rock

it goes very, very slowly
. His subject is the shelf life

of nuclear waste,

where they hope to stash it away forever.

Greek diggers raised

curse tablets found in ancient wells. Socrates might

have known their authors:

students, merchants and neighbours who shared a bench

in the Theatre of Dionysus

and heard the rhapsodes stitch Homeric tales into local

stories of their own,

the orange Attic sun radiant on the southern slope

of the Acropolis. Onkalo

will be closed and backfilled with rows of radiation tubes

secured in passages

five kilometres below.
Conditions on the ground

will change
, Berit Lundqvist

admits at the table next to Wikberg.
On the surface you never

know what’s going to

happen. It could be wars; it could be economic depression.

A caribou lifts its muzzle

and listens across the taiga’s granite and snow. My neighbours shift

a shovel, rake

and lawn chairs from back shed to scuffed, grey porch

for moving day, clear

a bookcase of knick-knacks and novels, then clear the wall

of shelves and art,

posing tiredly in bare windows as I browse

and click, exploring links.

‘I bind Euandros with a leaden bond,’ one tablet states,

the goal to handicap

a rival actor in performance. This curse was scraped

into hammered lead, rolled

and clasped with tacks, then submerged to set its spell

in motion. Online

new headlines replace Fukushima and Damascus, the late

Eurozone undertow

shored up in an Athenian square where a pensioner

in protest and despair

has blown his brains out.
Sing, goddess, sing the rage

of Peleus’ son Achilles
,

Euandros intones to the festival crowd, his voice

steady and clear,

the theatre’s tiers raised with broken stone from older

temples. By June,

new neighbours paint the pine railing and steps

with two fresh coats

of biscuit-brown acrylic. I’ve watched them watch the street,

weighing their lives

by what they chose to leave or take, knowing

we must make

strange with a place before we inherit the sense

of never having been

anywhere else, and curse it for ruin, and stoop to paint

the porch again.