Bruce Smith

Is this the world, Miss Bliss? Stacks of ingots on the docks where my brother works? Work and things on the threshold of raw and radiated. Bananas gassed in shacks to ripen by the forklifts. Ships of foreign port. Ships of car parts and dyes. The beef-stripping business. Things, Miss Bliss, and work. Flavors translated from Costa Rica, volatile oils, seized cargoes, incensed loads, cracked coal. After a week the exposed skin around his wrists was blue, vein color, the color of the world. Labor, and the union of the senses to deliver us from our geography. Everywhere is here. When the stevedores break for lunch, one is responsible for the pot-luck of cold meats, the deep dish, leftovers from the wedding, while one is responsible for inviting the office women. These men set the table with the pomp of the late Elizabeth: linen, gilt plates, a taster, and a trumpeted summons. They force the choice bits on each other. They talk about blood and Solomon’s operation. They talk about Lily’s kids and the dead as they come hack to speak to Lonnie in his sleep. And they talk about food they could not eat, the boss, and a dream of playing lead before they switch on the TV with its loud prophecies of soap. They eat deeply in gratitude. The pot scraped with a spoon, that sound. The world’s a word, and a lever. The ghosts at the banquet want something, Miss Bliss. From one world I come to you with two blue wrists, my brother’s rage against the living the world owes, and everything I do that’s duplicate. My cells split. They can’t be true. I smoke. I turn out a little verse. I make a small sacrifice. I throw what cannot be eaten away. I throw it on the ground. Here, some things you can’t eat.

the place of consequence, the station of his embrace. Or else I’m not son enough to see the innocence and the spiritual fiddlings in the uneven floorboards and joists, in the guttural speech of the pipes, in the limp and the lack of heat. All we need, all we really need is light! And let there be a roof with no leaks. Oh father landlord, fill up all our breaches. He gives himself to the cracks; into the chinks my father lowers his bone, the do-it-yourself funeral. He holds the wires in his teeth. He strips the insulation back. If it’s black, it’s juiceless; if it’s red, elegiac.

An obituary has more news than this day, brilliant, acid yellow and silver off the water at land’s end. The disparate prismatic things blind you as they fin their way across the surface of the water. This light cannot inform you of your dying. Fish of lustrous nothing, fish of desire, fish whose push and syllable can make things happen, fish whose ecstatic hunger is no longer news, and fish whose mouth zeroes the multitudes, the hosts who wait for their analogies and something nice to eat, the billions the waves commemorate in their breaking down to their knees on the shore, their cloacal sound. Now how can I stay singular? How can even ore part die when I split and split like the smallest animal in the ocean until I’m famous in my dismemberment, splendid in my hunger, and anonymous— so that naming one is like naming one runnel the sea, or one drop of blood the intoxicating passion? I keep the multitudes in mind when I hear daily that one has murdered another. A news more silver than given, more light than anything captured. And I hold them all in mind—the fulgence, the data, and the death, or else I lose it, that package of slippery fish, that don’t die exactly but smell in a heaven so low we can hear the moans and feel the circles and bite in each cell.

Late August was a pressure drop, rain, a sob in the body, a handful of air with a dream in it, summer was desperate to paradise itself with blackberry drupelets and swarms, everything polychromed, glazed, sprinkler caps gushing, the stars like sweat on a boxer's skin. A voice from the day says Tax cuts for the rich or scratch what itches or it's a sax from Bitches Brew, and I'm a fool for these horns and hues, this maudlin light. It's a currency of feeling in unremembered March. There's a war on and snow in the city where we've made our desire stop and start. In the dying school of Bruce I'm the student who still believes in the bad taste of the beautiful and the sadness of songs made in the ratio of bruise for bruise.

Not even the cops who can do anything could do this— work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this, in a truck that wasn’t even our own, part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love, vomit and shit and the stains of pissing another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin, better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.

Miss Bliss, once I thought I was endless since father was perpetual in his grade school of seedlings in cups, the overly loved pets, and recess while mother was the lipsticked dancing girl on the Steel Pier who would outstep Hitler. I was insufferable when I rolled the Volkswagen bus two times and lived with the snow chains like costumed jewels slung over me and the spare rolled away as in a folktale. The pact I made in the spinning instant said in my language of American boy, Put up or shut up, to God, the State Trooper who was kind and spoke of service and punishment and giving yourself away. Now, I’m alive through the agency of iron and contract work and appeals to the fallen—angel and dusk— but wet-winged and still without you, Miss Bliss, who took me inside where there was an ocean before which we were children. That calm, that fear, that witness of the two-thirds of everything else.

“endlessly making an end to things” —Celan I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil, a seal, a slick when I took my hands away from her throat—the way she liked in loving to have her pearls exchanged for the torque of my fingers and so kill her eminence for a second. The queen is dead. Long live the queen. The evidence was volatile, was fugitive, was a story told in menstrual blood and glycerines, Chanel and boss sauce. It failed in the telling to be events and sequence, the spell of water and bridge, and became rain and distance, the first faint smell of rose dismembering, masking the rigor mortis of the coyotes. I took my hands away as from the child sleeping or from the hot stove, and I was no longer I. I saw the sky in the windshield of another city. The sky an empty karate studio, the sky Route 95. Because she saw herself everywhere, The sky a fugue, the folds of a gown where the dragons are. there could be no other. A film was her darling, the sky Artists’ Supplies, the sky six-thirty darkening. a mirror of her hair—fixed or deranged Sky of correspondences, the color of G minor, the taste of gray. She thought, from the audience: I should be up there. February sky a copy center, relocated elsewhere. I loved to go out into the audience, the bebopist said, and walk in the crowd to feel what they feel. Jumping down from the bandstand, I broke my foot, lay there, had to blare it from my back. The sky nineteenth-century smoke, the sky a drum, then here comes the bass solo. Vote Hoffa , the sky says, labor sky, the dollar soaring with the yen. The sky popularized, blue-red, the access and the factory. I take myself to the movies—the romance of sheets, the dustup of things and her magnificent face: stylish, the sky inside her eyes, chlorine and glass. I tithe to the darkness and I’m glad for the dark two hours where I undo her, where I remember the eye I indulged, the opposite of sacrifice, the lamb’s throat uncut, the woolly body kindled in the green like a dream of Lorca’s, betrayed in the telling. The sky Repairables, the sky Pony Rides. Some nights in the house by the river, I walked out into a collective dream of home—an overstory overlooking a body of water—where I found the horse like smoke or luck, a muscled earth, an avatar, and I held him, face to flank, and felt the skeleton under the skin and the fear of the human touched back by hunger. The great white eye another moon. It was a lesser and a greater form of the feeling after fucking, if it has a form, if its past is present. Sky an empty shelf in the Salvation Army Thrift Store. A few fine hairs like her lashes on my hands The sky a white peony, the sky a paper life. when I came back and found her bound in the sheets, the opposite of spectacle, not absorbing the gaze but giving off light like night water, giving back the gorgeous I had inscribed there, a fallen form, small, fursheen, film still, a body suddenly small enough to fill a tear duct. The sky a shell, a lull in the shelling. What was it like, the loving? Like Sarajevo under siege, no electricity, no gas, no water, and yet the dance goes on in which a bathtub is filled, and, although the theater is twenty degrees, the dancer of the god-kissed tendons for her finale jumps into it—the leap that takes away the breath and rations it to everyone, and it’s the only bath for anyone in two months. The sky orchestra and karma, the sky Gold Bought and Sold. The windows of the house I won’t live in held light and the island fires on the river, held hawk and heron. Under siege in dream, the panes slash my face when they shatter with difference, inside, outside, with distance, what was not. A second dream: kids go by on bikes and big wheels, their faces grown up and disfigured, scabbed, hydrocephalic with sadness. Finally the whole body The sky a gray whale, the sky magnanimous and cruel. and not just its parts, wants to be unloved, beginning The sky Purgatory Road, the sky a god mouth, a crow. with its parts, the fetish of her: a cell from the lining, spit, a follicle, the thousand ships of her face, the torso and ratio, rib whittle, unbound feet, beginning to become vast, nothing you can touch, a taste, The sky a copper pot blackened, picked clean of puchero . a smell, familiar and far away, unlocked by thaw, feral and essential, like a language lost, like night illuminated by the night.

In bed as the machinery of morning begins, indistinguishable the subterranean turbines of the A train from the jet engine as it gins the clouds, rips and reseams the length of dungaree on its way to Pittsburgh (with the terrible and subtle cargoes, with ashes and a cat under the seat) from the pulleys of the service elevators from the baffled sound across the alley of the hand-iron press and the sewing machine motors whirring bobbins that stitch together the hot properties of Seoul and the suburbs and the idiot village of Chelm, needle the veronica and the Buddha robe and the sateen for spring. I looked over at her. Her skin a warp of Christ and a weft of meat. All night she had hauled me and the boy and the smoky, feckless men I was across the fens and stretches of mesquite through the tunnels and delivered me to my misery and the laborious knots of the sheets I wound myself in. And she was exhausted from Eros and swollen from anger. She could stand to put on a few pounds. I could see it in her ribs. Before I would marry my restlessness to her terror, before the crushes and wages could be made into our equity, before the endlessness would end in spinning jennies and sleaze and the noise of a fleet of vehicles with tinted windows testing the evacuation routes, I would cut, then peel, then dice, then caramelize some onions before she wasted away to nothing.

Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls, churched river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities and principalities of central New York, the hollows and corners of the burnt-over districts visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings, gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb, the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through the underbrush to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day. We learned obedience and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve. He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to block for punts— and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited for the cops and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance one does in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified, and swore and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead, and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he was befuddled with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes of his eyes. The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the indwelling beauty of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq with three others in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot. I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing, he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.