Dothead, p.2
Dothead, page 2
You have over a dozen medals on your lapel. Thanks to you, the nation is sure to last a long time. Still, you wonder whether you identified that first terrorist correctly; whether that first killshot prompted the descendants to become terrorists and necessitated all the subsequent killshots.
At last, forty medals later, the nation safe for a thousand years, the rifle is extricated from your grasp and you are peeled off your perch. The Secret Service wheels you upright into the Presidential Palace, where you join the rows of other snipers who have protected the President for millennia.
A great triumphal chorus blasts from speakers in the four corners of the hall. Your arms, like those of your many predecessors, are frozen in position: one hand curled close, trigger finger pointed almost at your heart; the other flared above your head, cradling the absent barrel, index finger pointed almost at the ceiling. Your jaw is massaged until it lowers.
Now you, too, look like a tenor, singing from the heart.
You, too, are part of the choir.
THE ENDURING APPEAL OF THE WESTERN CANON
Michelangelo had the model for David pinch a grape with his buttocks.
Surrealism was born when a young Luis Buñuel, peering through a hole into his landlady’s bathroom,
Saw she had “a small tail, with a curl like a pig’s.”
Caravaggio was a closet Muslim, converted at twenty-three by the Turkish dye merchant
Who supplied a rare brown needed for the Virgin Mary’s eyes.
Degas attended his first ballet in order to gawk through binoculars at naked ankles.
Perspective, in the first years of the technique, much like polyphony made European churchgoers vomit.
“The truly new in art can be identified only by its emetic effect.”—Salvador Dalí, 1929.
For Titian to have produced all the paintings ascribed to Titian,
The most conservative estimate is he would have had to have started painting at age 10
And painted at least sixteen hours a day
Every day until his death at age 143.
Monet started out trying to stay inside the lines, then lost his glasses.
Every one of his haystacks contains a single needle, done in silver paint, using a single horsehair.
Giotto kept a black African assistant who, according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari,
“Sketched out the master’s frescos on the church walls, and sometimes completed them as well.”
The blackberries in the Dutch painter Jan van Os’s still life
Cause ants to abandon genuine grains of sugar
And head single file for the wall:
Look up “Van Os Ants” on YouTube if you don’t believe me.
The Cubist Braque slept with the wife of his most prominent realist detractor
And painted, on her freckled shoulder, a single unshooably micromiraculous fly.
TO THE HYPHENATED POETS
Richer than mother’s milk
is half-and-half.
Friends of two minds,
redouble your craft.
Our shelves our hives, our selves
a royal jelly,
may we at Benares and Boston,
Philly and Delhi
collect our birthright nectar.
No swarm our own,
we must be industrious, both
queen and drone.
Being two beings requires
a rage for rigor,
rewritable memory,
hybrid vigor.
English herself is a crossbred
mother mutt,
primly promiscuous
and hot to rut.
Oneness? Pure chimera.
Splendor is spliced.
Make your halves into something
twice your size,
your tongue a hyphen joining
nation to nation.
Recombine, become a thing
of your own creation,
a many-minded mongrel,
the line’s renewal,
self-made and twofold,
soul and dual.
THE STAR-SPANGLED TURBAN
Hot pink frosting
on my chocolate-
cupcake noggin,
switched-on lightbulb-
yellow, tulip-
bulb top-heavy
orange, sky-blue,
bruise-blue, navy
thought cloud, darkening:
Any towel,
any shawl will
serve as well to
bind this open
wound atop me,
mark me off as
not quite level-
headed, tops on
any watchlist.
It’s Old Glory
that I choose this
time: I pleat her,
sweep her, set her
on my head as
reverently as
any U.S.
M.C. honor
guard triangle
on a coffin.
WINGED WORDS
The downside to rising like this:
How the emphasis shifts from your legs.
They cycle the air at the outset,
then slacken, and finally trail
the torso’s relentless flexing.
Disuse for a month or two withers
them into mosquito whiskers,
and then, when it’s time to descend to
your fellow men and walk beside them,
you land and buckle in a grand
absurd kerfuffle, the satin tent
of wings collapsing over you,
real earth in the mouth
where ethereal used to whisper.
HIS LOVE OF SEMICOLONS
The comma is comely, the period, peerless,
but stack them one atop
the other, and I am in love; what I love
is the end that refuses to stop,
the promise that something will come in a moment
though the saying seem all said;
a grammatical afterlife, fullness that spills
past the full stop, not so much dead
as taking a breather, at worst, stunned;
the sentence regroups and restarts,
its notation bespeaking momentum, its silence
dividing the beats of a heart;
STEEP ASCENSION
A last tercet reworked like a last will,
he’d told me he was writing, feeling well,
but I found his body turned to face the wall,
no bigger than a child’s. Eight years ill,
he slept with his legs drawn up, a letter L.
I saw three cards beside his bed and all
his meds, hope’s aspirin, the spirit’s pill,
the withered fig tree of his IV pole,
his white skin withered, too, beyond the pale.
I saw how age can leave the skull a hill
and the breath a white wind whistling in a hole.
He awoke when a gurney squealed down the hall.
We spoke. He told me how a poem ticks:
a clock, a bomb, a heart that’s been attacked.
It felt like medicine to hear him talk,
heart medicine because my heart was sick
to see another Alexandria sacked,
Goethe burning, Lowell, Job, Balzac,
and though I told myself that death begins
the work of stocking all the shelves again,
I knew this rare edition would be gone.
His room’s barbaric, biometric din
was full of screens that lit up and trilled like dawn
whenever a heart lead came undone.
For all our neat rhymes, John said, death’s a mess.
A juice cup tipped, bedpans, a bleeding mass.
It doesn’t lack for the lachrymose:
I guess sophistication must regress
to speech as rusticated as the grass
where rumination bows its head to graze.
We write, we die, and what we’ve written dies,
he said, but damn it those were blessed days
deciding if a given rhyme would do.
His cuff inflated, and gave out with a sigh
the same old numbers, nothing more to say.
To think the heartsblood could be measured so:
systolic, diastolic; waking, dream.
What use defining rhythms for the drama
if soul won’t put her bare fist through the drum?
Back when I was young, he said, it seemed
the art and the artful were one and the same,
no sweeter labor than to do my sums,
to jump the fence and grin around the bit.
Listen, Amit—that’s not what it’s about.
It isn’t worth it if it isn’t bought
with suffering. The best of us have written
maybe a dozen lines that tap the root.
The rest? Bout-rimes with dead men, overwrought.
I sensed the disappointment in him, the fear.
But John, I told him, beauty is a fire
those who burn hardest labor coldly for
and I for one will hold your labors dear,
the music of meaning, the artistry that dares
to conjure walls that it might conjure doors.
THE BOY WHO COULDN’T GROW UP
His twin has lost another tooth today.
I try not to make too big a to-do.
Tomorrow, two more Easter eggs to dye
for coming into, coming back to life,
my heart prayed out with gratitude he lived.
He’s elfin-eared and easier to lift,
my boy, my boy who isn’t going to grow,
born with a holey heart, his lips blue-gray,
his body shivering at seven degrees
inside a baby greenhouse all for him,
his life support a lullaby-like hum
for the month and a half we couldn’t take him home,
that cruel April of a risen sun
and a second sun that almost set too soon,
drawn from the wound-dark sea in a seine.
Son, you are perfect, your arms and legs are perfect,
the knees and knobs and nose of you are perfect,
sealed septum, welded breastbone, perfect, perfect,
precisely the size and sorcery you are:
beyond a surgeon’s, poet’s, father’s art
this sprung rhythm of your spring-risen heart.
RUNE POEM
Fe
Wealth is a wolf, in the hedge found.
She eyes you, blinking cold coins.
Ur
The aurochs, Thor’s ur-ox,
Rushes the hunter in his camo vest.
Thur
The workweek is a ladder of thorns
We ascend to the rose of a weekend.
Os
The ash tree blossomed these runes.
Awestruck, we are most us.
Rad
Riding is sacred, asphalt a psalm.
Hells Angels read the road.
Kaun
Contagion, bedbound, keeps count
As fever’s red creeps up five.
Hagall
Hail falls on the desert, a cold seed.
White wheat halos all the hills.
Nyd
Need knits his brows over his bills.
How does a have-not have three jobs?
Isa
Ice is deceiving, glass on the lake.
It chokes children without a trace.
Ar
Earth is an heiress rumored rich,
Left a legacy of acrid air.
Sol
The sun, unsullied, smiles dully
At the soiled creek, the spilling oil.
Tyr
Tired of war, we wear our tears,
Interior amulets.
Bjarkan
We bark at the sky as hard as we can,
But the gods remain swingers of birches.
Maor
The more he wants no more than he has,
The more he becomes more than he is.
Logr
Bottoms up in the name of the father,
Water of life or bitter lager.
Yr
A new yew erupts from Ur’s sewers.
Time eats its young and rewrites the ruins.
HORSE APOCALYPSE
Hrhm Shp, colt-culling,
Is what hoof lore calls it—
The choke-chain sound a roan coined
To describe the things he saw
Before the sniff weevils crept
Up his nostrils and chewed
His eyes at the hue-sweet root.
•
Mother mares scare foals
From folly-trots and foxglove
By telling them fury tales
Of muck stirrup-deep and shells
Shoveling Passchendaele
Onto Passchendaele,
The foal fallen with the boy.
•
One memory, common
To all breeds, spurs night mares
Sparking down the mute streets
Of their sleep, gas-blind
Witnesses scraping Krupp
Guns over the cobblestones,
Winged sparks breeding in the hay.
•
Having watched us box and ditch
Our dead, they thought our dead
Ate termite-runnels
In the black bark of the land
And pulled all horsefolk down
To join whatever dark cavalry
Thundered underground.
•
The burlap gas mask cupped
And strapped to the wet snout
Could be mistaken, when
The gas gong sounded
And the men grew fly-heads,
For a feed sack chock-
Full of red ants.
ABECEDARIAN
ADAM
The only proof we have of intelligent design is that Adam could not connect his mouth and his penis. His designer was so aware of the risk that he designed Adam with a two-rib buffer. One rib eventually went to make Eve, but the second made sure Adam never lost interest in her. If given the ability to fellate himself, he would have poured himself endlessly into himself, like an ocean evaporating into one fixed cloud and raining on its own waves, greening nothing. The act would have been a means to knowing himself biblically—to self-knowledge—and as such would have vaulted Adam above the sexless archangels. He might well have lost interest in God, too, bowing only to himself, rising a little, bowing again. Eve and Eden would have blossomed, Satan would have hissed in vain as Adam rocked like a pill bug on the grass, our species committing suicide as its intended first parent over and over again shot himself in the head.
BREATH
Between the nose and the throat, we swallow in the same place we breathe. The pharynx is an anteroom where breath and drink mingle before they are sent, by the mindless knowingness of the body, down their separate tunnels. The breath is constantly blowing up and down, just beyond, while the head continues its own up-and- down, the life-giving movement crosswise to the pleasure-giving one. The ancients believed that God blew the breath of life, the nishmat chayim, into a mud effigy. In this sense, the arousal of Adam to life was the first blow job. The first time my first girlfriend was forced to give one, she kept stopping every ten to fifteen seconds. Holding one thing in her mouth, reflexively she held the other as well. It’s okay, I told her. Breathe.
COME
At the moment you come, the spinal cord detaches from the brain and whips down, forward, and out, liquefying as it leaves you. The dull pearl hue of come comes from mixing gray matter and white matter. Immediately before that moment, gooseflesh prickles up the neuraxis and the body gives a slow, rising shudder—as if a third, colder presence had come into the room and blown, ever so gently, on the naked back. This is the same shudder Eve felt when the serpent came inside the garden: her first adumbration of the female orgasm, courtesy of Lucifer.
DUINO
Duino Elegies, in Edward Snow’s translation, sat on the nightstand next to her bed. She had bookmarked it with its own receipt. I kept turning my head to it, pondering its thinness and the thinness of books of poetry generally, and wondering what a duino was, and wondering why my head was not in the getting of head when head was what I had wanted for so long. I knew nothing of Rilke then—she introduced me to poetry, too: you’d think we would have kept in touch—but I had seen, maybe on a calendar, the famous quote about how love is two people protecting each other’s solitude. At the end, when she rose onto her knees at the foot of the bed, distanced from me by the length of my body, looking to the side, perhaps at that very book on the nightstand, I did feel loneliness. Loneliness is just solitude without a book. O fig tree, how long I’ve pondered you…
EYES
When Adam first asked Eve to look up at him, he thought eye contact would be like touch, only deeper. His mind would enter the upper half of her head as his body was entering the lower half of it. She, too, wanted to lock eyes, believing it would connect them—it was getting lonely and tedious down there, and she was wondering whether she preferred the snake-eyed sweetness of the apple to the salty tree sap of Adam. But Adam thought her left eyebrow rose slightly as she looked up, and he couldn’t shake an impression of knowingness, which only reminded him of their lost innocence. Eve saw him looking down at her from his height and sensed a new hierarchy between them, in which he made demands, and she knelt and serviced him. Non serviam, she insisted, but her mouth was full as she said this, and Adam mistook it for a groan of pleasure.
FACE
They couldn’t have learned it from watching the beasts of the field. For many—the giraffe, the horse—the logistical barriers to any technique other than mounting are insurmountable. The closest thing they could have witnessed was the mutual investigative sniff between dogs. For that matter, even the default position of human copulation, face-to-face, had little precedent in nature. The new discovery cleared Eve out of Adam’s field of view. This transition in his pleasure, from Eve’s face to the absence of her face, made the pleasure twice removed from the pleasure of beasts: consummately solitary, consummately human. Before the fall, Adam lay on his back and marveled at clouds and their infinite counterfeit forms. After the fall, he stood and watched himself in a mirror.
