Dara Wier

You're presenting me with a telescopic line of reasoning. You think because one dies then to die must be a good idea. Let me get this straight. So you think to follow suit is what's In the cards and the works and the stars. It may be that's The next step that's clear or it may be there's another way. You may find a friend for whom to die is not the be-all Or the end. There were ten rooms and a thousand shelves And ten thousand bottles filled with ten million tickets. You Were on the end of the ladder in a blue sky filled with litter. It was tantamount to a ticker tape parade on the streets of A stunned city. Staccato ropes couldn't hold you any longer. And in the evening's sudden stillness I breathed in your ear. From now on out everything gets said in a whisper. If you like If you want if you care to come closer. This way is better.

Except when once we drew identical lots nothing’s ever come between us. We keep our drifts of space spare and daily shake our down. You’ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts. Stuck with sharp wind, both bloods are rare and rarely do we taste the walnut’s knot of oil. We wake between our fitted sheets and shake our fists or pretend real fright but not in this do we dare touch. My rib cage can stand in yours, yours become the swinging doors through which magician’s swords will slice and miss that knotted muscle. It is a trick. We’ll make an endless show of the outright clanking, irregular beating of our acrobatic hearts. We’ve designed the double bars of depth; our hearts skip — the tumbleset we think is absence, the somersault we call forbearance — the hearts are there, doing turns that teach us to count and keep each finger close to its own sly pulse.

As soon as I step into the tunnel that will take me under the river I need to cross to get to the city my brain shuts down.  No signal gets through and the question remains how do I know? With a brain well emptied, and a head a vacuum of nothing, everything I’ve ever known goes quietly absent.  As still and as quiet as a house abandoned or a mouth wide open in a painting. As soon as I step out of the tunnel scientists squabble about when we should abandon the earth for some other place.  I duck straight back into the tunnel in order to disrupt the signal. In the tunnel's shelter there is nothing in my head, it's empty enough For the origins of the universe to begin.  A frightening thing interrupted by my backing back out of the tunnel just in time. In the light of day what's on my mind turns out to be your lifespan. Next to the tunnel is the only safe place to be.  It is the only place where it's certain I’ll not all day not need to be crying and weeping to go on. Which draws me directly back into the tunnel to interrupt the signal. It takes a little while for my mind to stop trembling.

1 No one felt in the dark for his hat. No one budged an inch. Thus the story draws to its end. No one felt over the edge of her silk pocket to touch her parking ticket. No one even wished to walk out of the dark to the street. 2 Over the transparent page I traced my name. I thought about The Bird That Turns Around, How To Blow A Brick Over, What To Do While Waiting For The Doctor, Answers To Problems On Page 2,000, The Chair That Comes To You, The Mysterious Paper Purse, The Universe Around Us,Lift To Erase. 3 Those days everything I thought trembled through the rotating blades of an electric fan. The way my voice moved through it. The way my fingers shook. I wore a two-tiered hat. A dead mule is huge. The man with the stick was fat. 4 A dead deer has the face of a rat. Last night I watched seven white deer walk single file across the black edge, the levee’s border. Slowly, each one looked me over, saw I was sleeping, and soon came closer to lick my face all over. 5 All fall I played at being a slave. In the red embers of fires I made I burned slips of paper with politicians’ names to pass the time. I cooked rich soups of dragonflies. I learned to aim an arrow through a devilhorse’s brain. 6 I sat alone by the water. They trusted me with the river. When United Fruit Company boats headed for port, upriver, I called out to sailors, down came stalks of bananas to snag and bring up to the batture. 7 When the polls opened until the polls closed two men dangled their rifles over their shoulders and pretended they couldn’t be seen. The men and women who came were embarrassed. They looked down at the white glare of crushed shells at their feet. They looked off into the distance. 8 In the hot sun on the wooden platform I stood waiting for the icehouse doors to open. I wanted to be asked inside the cool bricks of smoking water, frozen and squared in fifty-pound blocks, rattling along belts of silver rollers. I wanted to be cool and dry. 9 The women were left locked in the house. The rifle’s blue-black barrel shone in the corner against the white, white wall. Somewhere in the swamps around us a man threw himself against the dark. I couldn’t understand why our lights were on. I wondered if he would drown. 10 I was afraid of the iridescent algae pool, hit with glaze after an afternoon storm, lifted like a giant keyhole, lit by the great green eyeball behind it, watching me, watching me turn away, watching me look back, watching me, for all I knew, catch my breath, not wanting to give it back. 11 We walked into the parking lot after 10 o’clock mass on Sunday. A car’s blur crossed our path so close I felt the heat of the sun in the hot wind off its fender. They only meant to scare us. I felt then what my prayers might have been. 12 That afternoon someone decided to slaughter the rabbits. They held the scruffs of their necks, whacked their soft brown crowns with cracked baseball bats. Each one bled through the nose. We fed their guts to the alligator by the shed in the deep, deep hole. 13 I watched them kissing, kissing in sorrow, in the sitting rooms in the funeral parlor. They were drinking cafe au lait and eating ham sandwiches. Yes, there were so many flowers. I didn’t want to be kissed in sorrow. I didn’t want to be patted or pitied. 14 The squeak and thump and mist of flit as someone pumped sprays of insecticide. It fell over my face, like a blessing, like a tingling sensation in my fingers, like a thousand evaporating lessons, it fell on the oil lamp’s wick. The flame danced. It wobbled, dipped and brightened.

Falling off a triangle. Putting two fighting fish in one bowl. Talking yourself into a headcold. Falling off a rectangle. Putting insects in ice cubes. Talking yourself out of doorways. Falling off a parallelogram. Talking into a microphone. Falling off a footstool. Putting earplugs in acorns. Looking into a teacup for trouble. Talking yourself out of breathing. Taking a nap on a drum set. Eating a peach with an air filter. Wearing a dress made of hand grenades. Talking a mudslide back up a mountain. Lighting a camp fire in a taxi stand. Launching a boat on a horse trail. Hiking in an elevator. Falling into an envelope. Discussing smuggling with customs officers. Taking a cat to a dog show. Falling in love with a toothache, Questioning your thumbprint. Looking for milk in a gas tank. Kissing hydraulic acid. Blindfolding a parking meter. Falling over a water tower. Reasoning with a baby.

You are a seahorse unraveling. You are the back of a landhorse looking backward. Gotten away form have you thrown yourself racing. Who took what was not out of thunderous shade In an all-knowing sycamore's branches. What who do you make of stone steps you stepped through. You took the boat onto flattened waters. White wall of blue morning fog to slip into. You withstood what is was that was wailing you through. There you were standing on nothing, looking down at two Blackfeathered slashes your two hands held on to. Off were you going aloft would birds such as these take You. Who leaned you and stood you and shook you and shook you.

The batture’s water and sand disappear when water swells the river, heat’s portion of a northern winter. Under willows cropped up since our last cow is dead and carried to the batture to be taken by the water clean into another season, we sit on green granite piled deep enough to keep the batture dry one more week. We don’t say so but we wait for the swollen body to appear before us, we want the torn leg to distract us, the loose arm to show us where. We’ve always known which way the water runs, the differences among earth, air, water and whatever the horizon offers that is not actually there. We want to be the ones to identify the missing person. We count the reward we’d earn. There is a family in southern Minnesota keeping a closet of dry-cleaned suits, a mahogany high-boy of ironed shirts, folded undershorts and sweaters. In the ashtray that says Welcome to Nevada are the coins he left without thinking, the only clue which tells his family what they didn’t want to know, he might have known what he was doing. We want to be the ones whose call is first in a series of related events which will end we hope in the family’s satisfaction with the coroner’s identification, and though it is old-fashioned and no longer done in this country, we’d like to think the pennies from his pocket will be mailed to the morgue, polished to their copper finish, pressed to float forever on his eyelids and make us take a second look as the light hits them and they beautifully glitter. We think how glad we were when we first saw him he floated face down in the water which a few moments earlier had been snow his children sledded and slipped on. Light beats gravity, lifts these young trees from the water. This is where we watch time, mark the spot across the water which is the red flag we hope calls us come across and save us. This is twenty-eight states.

Do you know what’s the unluckiest thing In the world, a differential grasshopper Said to me. I paused, I put down the Diesel grinder I’d been trying to fix, I turned off the stealth bomber, I faded Away from the faded away pedals, I put up Finely embroidered silk panels over the Faces of the statues, I pulled the green Vacillating amplifier into the hallway, I swiveled seven of the chains and Loosened the bolts in the balcony, I went Into the barn to unlace the cattle and Overturn the empty buckets, I put the White flag on the mailbox, I cut the Telephone wires, I fed the ducks better Than I usually feed them, I adjusted the Faucets so they’d drip a little, I waved At old Mr. Wiley with his smokeless pipe And his manpowered plough across the field, I moved a claypot off of a narrow ledge, I taped the key to the bulldozer to the Roof of the canopy, I took the cup of Auger bits away from the rabbit hutch, I put a padlock on the children’s playhouse, I picked up a stick by the sideyard gate, I broke it over my knee, I went to the well To fill a stone pitcher with cool water, I let the donkey & the goats go. I took A ladder to the hayloft and took down a Suitcase. I could see across the valley Down to the river from up there.