Jennifer Moxley

I was eating my dinner alone, sitting on the living-room couch watching a movie on TV for company when the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves. Without you to follow me with your clipboard, or record the game my face plays, masquerading as a cryptic territory and your field of study, the energy maggots turned the furniture into an ectoplasmic mass with the weight of iron: soft but resistant, a taut balloon against the hand. Hypnotized by the atmosphere I fell asleep, and the chair took revenge on my psyche. I could not scream, so I focused my will on pushing back against the animate matter. I was near failing when I managed to utter the word "dove," and then you shook me awake. "Stop," stop fighting with the furniture, you said. Yet something I could not see pushed hard against me, and it was not a force for good. My vocal chords were paralyzed and the language of the living was the only way to stop it.

For Ann Lauterbach Hemmed in by an un- tenable image: feathers planted below fragile branches of avian feet            scaly crossroads scoring a particular blue of sky offending through the uselessness of misplaced forms                       thorny prongs that make no sense (and yet belong) on the ground out of which the bird wings stiffly jut rigid as rhubarb leaf. Should you kneel the body's aged mechanism beneath the shade of dry feathers, should you angle the vulnerable cavern of ear—trembling passage to psyche's failures   our fall into suffering                           knowledge—toward the root should you listen you will hear the wasted strains of an underground song rising from the muffled beak: site of a perverse smothering throated core submerged deadened by thoughtless depths but alive for the dead have kept it safe from false music a ghoulish guard of LOVE SAFE from Psyche she who bullied by the cruelty of others the sophistication of fashionable libraries the envy of those who would molest the world into false confessions and banish                              all mystery with their dripping candles                   she who would unearth the birdsong                         to cage it she who                 will end by destroying what she loves most. Shhhh

Not forced to fall for hideous Phaon, nor to drift dreamlike from a Victorian cliff, pursued by visions of slender limbs, peach-soft hair, dewy violets clustered in an unwilling lap, not exiled on a distant island for writing smartly about love, not called amoral nor forgotten, not murdered by a jealous lover, nor weakened from drink, did not make an incision in the veins, never murdered in a tavern at twenty-nine nor thought mad, released immediately from St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, freed from Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, cured of syphilis, not mad nor ruined by drink nor shot in the head, the rope unknotted and fluidly slid from the lamp- post, sauntered away with a sideways crawl up the Champs-Élysées, never sickened from drink nor drowned in the Gulf of Spezia, the heart kept tight swam madly toward shore, disappeared down the glistening beach skipping happily in the direction of England, staved off fever while fighting for Greeks, lived, wrote, erased the blood-stained pillowcase, married Fanny, moved to Finland, fathered several pink-skinned children, lay down for a rest in the Baltimore street, got up confused about Spanish port and went to the graveyard to sleep it off, laudanum, opium, stroke, paralysis, aphasia, angels, threads of exotic Delacroix visions, but everything was put right when mom said, "Come on home, I want to care for you," left the house and walked into the river until the water level covered the hairline then shed the heavy Edwardian garments and broke into a birdlike breaststroke exclaiming, "How lovely to be free of the sickbed!" never destroyed by drink, sang while removing the shrapnel from a soldier, recovered from the Spanish flu, returned to Poland all debts forgiven by appreciative readers from the Congo, replaced the bottle of Lysol among toxic rats enjoying a sauna under the sink, did not pull the trigger or push the chair out from under the revolution while screaming about the army of the arts, put on a jacket and sailed to Mexico, calmly came up on deck, folded the jacket over the rail, and then— arrested by a vision of spread-eagled sailors descending like angels through the turquoise sky—decided not to swallow the sea, freed from Payne Whitney, walked right on through the psychiatric state hospital and out the other side, had no psychotic break while on acid in a land of dreamlike torch singers masquerading as Satanists, never touched the stuff, the dead liver tissue miraculously mended, smoker's cough silenced, cured by the sea air of old gray Gloucester, jumped into the beach taxi and drove down the beach gesticulating gaily toward the setting sun, not undone, unloved, forgotten, nor filled with despair, not punished for talking with angels, not unhappy nor alone, not misrepresented nor misunderstood nor nauseous from drink or drugs or depression, loved respected and read long-lived healthy and happy celebrated by all in life before dying contented in a comfortable bed.

A creamy tear descended here when Cupid squeezed the teat of Venus. Dripping down the Milky Way it puddled beneath old oak, new pine. Love’s selfish thirst did pluck a cosmic note, set every entombed entangled bit of me in roots both new and old to singing. I was become in earth and by harmony a million bits of tongue and ear, sound funnels upwhorled in song conducting cones. Fresh music from old flesh corrected my (most melancholy) record of this last go round the planet. Now I was first things: elementals, vegetable and mineral in form, dust to kick it on the breeze, loam to feed old oak, new pine, Eros-greedy energy on hunt for nourishment, cream to suck, breast to squeeze.

How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill. Not seriously ill, just a little under the weather. To feel slightly peaked, indisposed. Plagued by a vague ache, or a slight inexplicable chill. Perhaps such pleasures are denied to those who never feel obliged. If there are such. How pleasant to convey your regrets. To feel sincerely sorry, but secretly pleased to send them on their way without you. To entrust your good wishes to others. To spare the equivocal its inevitable rise. How nice not to hope that something will happen, but to lie on the couch with a book, hoping that nothing will. To hear the wood creak and to think. It is lovely to stay without wanting to leave. How delicious not to care how you look, clean and uncombed in the sheets. To sip brisk mineral water, to take small bites off crisp Saltines. To leave some on the plate. To fear no repercussions. Nor dodge the unkind person you bug. Even the caretaker has gone to the party. If you want something you will have to get it yourself. The blue of the room seduces. The cars of the occupied sound the wet road. You indulge in a moment of sadness, make a frown at the notion you won't be missed. This is what it is. You have opted to be forgotten so that your thoughts might live.

In the heavy fashion magazines strewn here and there around the house the photos of objects and people mouth the word “money,” but you, assuming no one wants you anymore, mishear the message as “meaning.” Arousal follows. The lives of the rich are so fabulous! The destruction of the poetical lies heavily on their hands, as on their swollen notion that we are always watching. There is nothing behind the mask. Nothing suffocating under its pressure, no human essence trying to get out. Awareness, always awareness. Don’t you see how these elaborate masks are turning you into a zombie? The private life is not for the eye but for the endless interior. It is trying to push all this crap aside and find the missing line. Nobody, least of all the future, cares about the outcome of this quest. It is easy to lose, through meddling or neglect, an entire aspect of existence. And sometimes, to cultivate a single new thought, you need not only silence but an entirely new life.