Don Bogen

A charm, a dream of protection. Gurgles hold the night light’s glow. A stream of clouds misting the branching tubes. Water, in fog, a tub, plug to wire in the wall saying Okay, it’s okay all night. *    *    * School, a door closing he opens: haze of playground French, the five names for different kinds of marbles, games, bullies he wandered among while I was staring at the sea. Shut off, not my past, nothing I could do— I keep making up all the world he lived. His new name, intricate drawings of aliens, long tunnel of lunch (Mais il ne mange rien monsieur)— school hours shadows that smother my days. *    *    * Burnt-out hills: char and velvety ash along the dropped limbs, magpies, new gullies. A dry time clears the ground. He was standing where the road split, arms spread, a small x straddling the crack. That bird call a slash, then, on the edge of things. He was standing, behind him the green blue of ocean, the white blue of sky. *    *    * The house of childhood sold, or razed— not lost but softened, distended: diaphanous linked chambers springing from a lightshaft or a varnish smell, the way a floorboard aches, a scrap of wallpaper tunnels the heart. *    *    * A film of “events”— tiny collisions, tracks of light in the bubble chamber—you’d scan for hours (smell of formica, rock headsets, eyes going furry near four AM). This celluloid memory now your memory, coursing chemical fissures in the brain. Matter split like time, thinner and thinner parings— Anything that happens is too fast to see *    *    * There the sky kept reeling as she ran— wisps, then puffy clumps, then rain— the park spread low beneath the blanketing. Who could have worn that purple coat cartwheeling in the grass? It grows as I look at it, puts on pillowy layers. Now the coat wears memory, warms a ghost. *    *    * Wind off the world’s top, whipped clouds over hedgerows: Girton, that one year twenty years away. He learned to walk, she started school, read, slowly, the first book Red. Moss edging the garden wall, little flags on the clothesline.

To take, like water, whatever shape you flow through, fill, or rest in. And to choose that shape. *    *    * As: Brian, become a gangster, six feet from my face. Voice no longer a caress but a sharpened projection, belly a ram in a buttoned vest. The whole body shows the thing done: goat-song in the rites of a god, transforming, starting to speak now through him as he walks on stage. *    *    * Remember when you turned into moonlight, the bark of an oak, an orange going to shreds in your own cold palm? Everything you saw you were, and you saw everything. No choice. That face light gnarled around a tree was your face. *    *    * Flesh is approximate. We clothe it in dreams, wrestling with our eyes closed down through layers: thug, wraith, chieftain, devouring angel (held by my shoulders I am trying to make you stay put) daddy mama breath balm a man a woman in separate desires overlapped. *    *    * Curious, cautious enough to disguise himself as a woman, the voyeur peeks at the rite. Women, leaping, mothers and daughters— their rapt beauty draws him out. The god has tricked him: they will tear him apart. *    *    * As: a virus. Never alive, but a frantic mimicry of life to pierce the cell, make over its orders, move, repeat itself, mutate in sped-up mini-evolution— now it swims the blood, unravels in light, never alive, now it floats on air. Lost in the host a thousand years, inert chemical mechanism asleep in a rain-forest cave. *    *    * To mime— not a statue or a gray accountant picked from the crowd, but a robot. Steel jumpsuit and boots, greasepaint turning the eyelids aluminum. This hand a crank, this grin the edge of a disk, I am Mister Silver Mister Silver—tape loop syncopating over the drum machine. *    *    * As: a child’s toy, its intricate language of joints and swivels, creature within creature: the robot a wolf on silver feet, in his boxy jaw the tiny half-robotic head of a man who will drive the car. *    *    * Who will drive the car to the hospital after the cancer has metastasized? *    *    * These knots rising in my palm— look, in the photo album, he grips the mower like a sad hawk. Grandfather, father, son—flesh tightens, branching genes send up more of the claw each year. After the operation skin comes back thick as bark. *    *    * A boy, a lion, wild boar, snake no one will touch holds the changes. Dream he is a sea god, and he is. Dream he is a stone, a bull, no, a tree rippling over the waves’ quick light, he is shape always becoming, he is a flame and the stream that drowns it.

Give it back—I made it all up That alcove where surplus glowed under dust Unfinished, an attic space with nails poking down Khaki of sheet metal, orange flickering in tubes Ephemeral as the smells, which were plywood, solder, and Kents Color words, smell words—I put them in a book Everything there is still missing Two lies of remembrance: it was always winter Things could speak

Air as lost time Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus Smack-thin, it lingers forty years I thought it came from the jeweled world we’d seen Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive But it was just pleasure, blank and sure Now what is there to sing From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves Earphones drive it through your head