John Brehm

To strip away this incessant chatter, yes, but what lies underneath it? Death, of course, or our fear of death. Which is why we talk so much, bury our heads in books, turn forests into pages and pages into mirrors in which we see ourselves appear and disappear. When I look up from the story I've been reading about the Jews in Nazi Germany and the silence that closed their mouths forever, I see a girl outside the cafe smiling in at her father who smiles back but cannot hear her. She makes all kinds of gestures with her hands, mimes herself inside an invisible box and breaks down laughing. Then she gathers her breath and blows it against the window. It is not snowing outside, the leaves have hardly begun to turn, the season is merely poised for the long descent, but still the glass steams up. And in this little cloud of warmth that's come from deep inside her body, she writes a single joyful word, which vanishes almost before she finishes.

I wear my heart on my sleeve, or rather both sleeves, since it's usually broken. Sometimes when I join my hands to pray, the jagged edges briefly touch, like a plate that fell and cracked apart from being asked to hold too much.

So sexy to slide under- neath a river, to sit inside this snakelike sub- marine-like subway car and freely imagine the world above— the Brooklyn Bridge invisibly trembling with the weight of its own beauty, the East River still guided by the grooves Walt Whitman's eyes wore in it, the bulldog tug- boats pushing the passively impressive broad-bottomed barges around, and the double- decker orange and black Staten Island ferries, with their aura of overworked pack-mule mournfulness, and beyond them the Atlantic Ocean which I lately learned was brought here by ice comets three billion years ago, which explains a few things, like why everybody feels so alienated, and of course the thoughts being thought by every person in New York City at this moment— vast schools of undulating fish curving and rising in the cloud-swirling wind-waved sky, surrounded by the vaster emptiness of non-thought which holds them and which they try not to think about and you lying in bed in your sixth-floor walk-up sublet on St. Mark's Place— such a breath- taking ascension! imagining me rising now to meet you.

Do nothing and everything will be done, that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked around talking 2,500 years ago and now his books practically grow on trees they're so popular and if he were alive today beautiful women would rush up to him like waves lapping at the shores of his wisdom. That's the way it is, I guess: humbling. But if I could just unclench my fists, empty out my eyes, turn my mind into a prayer flag for the wind to play with, we could be brothers, him the older one who's seen and not done it all and me still unlearning, both of us slung low in our hammocks, our hats tipped forwards, hands folded neatly, like bamboo huts, above our hearts.

And what about this boulder, knocked off the moutaintop and tumbled down a thousand years ago to lodge against the streambank, does it waste itself with worry about how things are going to turn out? Does the current slicing around it stop itself mid- stream because it can't get past all it's left behind back at the source or up in the clouds where its waters first fell to earth? And these trees, would they double over and clutch themselves or lash out furiously if they were to discover what the other trees really thought of them? Would the wind reascend into the sky forever, like an in-drawn breath, if it knew it was fated simply to sweep the earth of windlessness, to touch everything and keep nothing and be beheld by no one?

You can take it away, as far as I'm concerned—I'd rather spend the afternoon with a nice dog. I'm not kidding. Dogs have what a lot of poems lack: excitements and responses, a sense of play the ability to impart warmth, elation . . . . Howard Moss Dogs will also lick your face if you let them. Their bodies will shiver with happiness. A simple walk in the park is just about the height of contentment for them, followed by a bowl of food, a bowl of water, a place to curl up and sleep. Someone to scratch them where they can't reach and smooth their foreheads and talk to them. Dogs also have a natural dislike of mailmen and other bringers of bad news and will bite them on your behalf. Dogs can smell fear and also love with perfect accuracy. There is no use pretending with them. Nor do they pretend. If a dog is happy or sad or nervous or bored or ashamed or sunk in contemplation, everybody knows it. They make no secret of themselves. You can even tell what they're dreaming about by the way their legs jerk and try to run on the slippery ground of sleep. Nor are they given to pretentious self-importance. They don't try to impress you with how serious or sensitive they are. They just feel everything full blast. Everything is off the charts with them. More than once I've seen a dog waiting for its owner outside a café practically implode with worry. “Oh, God, what if she doesn't come back this time? What will I do? Who will take care of me? I loved her so much and now she's gone and I'm tied to a post surrounded by people who don't look or smell or sound like her at all.” And when she does come, what a flurry of commotion, what a chorus of yelping and cooing and leaps straight up into the air! It's almost unbearable, this sudden fullness after such total loss, to see the world made whole again by a hand on the shoulder and a voice like no other.

Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting, nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers. If I had a car in this town I'd rig it up with a rear bumper horn, something to blast back at the jackasses who honk the second the light turns green. If you could gather up all the hornhonks of just one day in New York City, tie them together in a big brassy knot high above the city and honk them all at once it would shiver the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if they were made of sand, and usher in the Second Coming. Christ would descend from the sky wincing with his fingers in his ears and judge us all insane. Who'd want people like us up there yelling at each other, trashing the cloudy, angelic streets with our candywrappers and newspapers and coffeecups? Besides, we'd still be waiting for the next thing to happen in Heaven, the next violin concerto or cotton candy festival or breathtaking vista to open beneath our feet, and thinking this place isn't quite what it's cracked up to be, and why in hell does everybody want to get here? We'd still be waiting for someone else to come and make us happy, staring through whatever's in front of us, cursing the light that never seems to change.

Freedom is a rocket, isn’t it, bursting orgasmically over parkloads of hot dog devouring human beings or into the cities of our enemies without whom we would surely kill ourselves though they are ourselves and America I see now is the soldier who said I saw something burning on my chest and tried to brush it off with my right hand but my arm wasn’t there— America is no other than this moment, the burning ribcage, the hand gone that might have put it out, the skies afire with our history.

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—they’re so much more beautiful than anything he might be saying, though I’m no longer in a position really to judge, having stopped listening some time ago. He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop and can therefore get along fine without my attention. He started in reading poems about his childhood— barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers, that sort of stuff—the loss of innocence he keeps talking about between poems, which I can relate to, especially under these circumstances. Now he’s on to science, a poem about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying to imagine himself turning into hydrogen. Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining myself sliding up his wife’s fluid, rhythmic, lusciously curved, black- stockinged legs, imagining them arched around my shoulders, wrapped around my back. My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her! He will, no doubt, once she leaves him, leaves him for another poet, perhaps, the observant, uninnocent one, who knows a poem when it sits down in a room with him.