Mary Jo Bang

Fragile like a child is fragile. Destined not to be forever. Destined to become other To mother. Here I am Sitting on a chair, thinking About you. Thinking About how it was To talk to you. How sometimes it was wonderful And sometimes it was awful. How drugs when drugs were Undid the good almost entirely But not entirely Because good could always be seen Glimmering like lame glimmers In the window of a shop Called Beautiful Things Never Last Forever. I loved you. I love you. You were. And you are. Life is experience. It's all so simple. Experience is The chair we sit on. The sitting. The thinking Of you where you are a blank To be filled In by missing. I loved you. I love you like I love All beautiful things. True beauty is truly seldom. You were. You are In May. May now is looking onto The June that is coming up. This is how I measure The year. Everything Was My Fault Has been the theme of the song I've been singing, Even when you've told me to quiet. I haven't been quiet. I've been crying. I think you Have forgiven me. You keep Putting your hand on my shoulder When I'm crying. Thank you for that. And For the ineffable sense Of continuance. You were. You are The brightest thing in the shop window And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.

The story is written, the slip of a girl is loosed And her life folds over. Against the cold, the waiting For the what will happen. The next. Wonderful Awful. The blonde in a chemical bath. The story keeps on being written As a woman who waits for never to happen As an empty wall waits for light to form a bridge And under it, a mass of open eyes, Waiting for the awful eventual. Now? And yes is what is said. Then here it is, the box We live in where the crazy face of the day looks back At the closed eye of the night looking in. A boy of four comes in as an example Of where the door of life is left open for a moment. Time tumbles hour after hour until it's morning again. Some glass is for looking through, some is for seeing back. Every outline is a cage one way or another.

I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom, one day I went with a friend on a walking tour. We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the man I would move with to a boarding house, then to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant, and from there one morning in January to the Registry to be married. Afterward we moved to a studio apartment and two years later to the school where boys returning from the war would remove their collars and sew them back on with red thread to demonstrate the end of their allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past. Everyone wanted to be launched into a place from which you could look back and ask whether the red was also meant to enact spilled blood. You could say so, but only if you want to insist that history's minutia is best read as allegory. The fact is, history didn't exist then. Each day was a twenty-four hour stand-still on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future. It's near where you're standing now. One day we were lying in the sun dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera came by and devoured us.

The aqua green goes with the pink in a way no one knows what will happen. Every step is a dangerous taking. Amazing the time span of a trunk (a door opens in it and suddenly, someone is asking how this came to be). The green curtain is a pressed chime which when rung rings in a dogwood white as if a storm were approaching its green extreme. Brick crumbles into living pond particle while a bent hook holds back the last dissolve. An uneasy leap over a sharky sea. Gravity plays its little emotive role. It’s Elm Street all over again, ragged walkways lead to Toon Town. Hello kids. Hello Jimmy Neutron. The blanket rises, and under it, a fetishistic pompadour green, greener and paler than bluebird. But hush, the nuclear power plant is about to blow unless Jimmy can locate the elusive button. A siren and standing-by fire truck. It looks like a lost cause until presto, a messenger. A racketing aside. The day is dragged here and there but still can’t be saved. BAM. Immediately the next second clicks into the skyscape apocalypse. In the dust, a celluloid woman mows a multilayered lawn. The arch overhead reads, O Art Still Has Truth Take Refuge. Where? There. There, there, says someone.

September is work to the center Of arguments and controversies. Prejudgments and incomprehensions. What will I love if not that That was enigma? The years of infancy, Memory says, And there we are, with the demon Of the art of living Traced on the glass of some window. In the beauty of the night of May, Clear of moon, to the lume of a candle There was a design like the profile Of a landscape almost abandoned. Gone But not gone yet. It's fascinating, These mysterious uncovered feelings. Enigma of an afternoon of autumn, the picture Of which is a composition Of the eye of my mind. Every hour That I watch this picture I see again still that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma For me, in how much is inexplicable. The physical things hide in the architecture Of the event. The enigma of a mock-up, Of a shadow, the spectral and eternal aspect Of the moment. Praises to you for being One great box of surprise, Your head the scene of a wonderful theater Of the most tender gray of the fog That joins the sky to the earth. A tangling of truth and memory, Mythology and iconography, I watch with the eye Of the mind the city that accommodates That one beautiful day that is now infinite. It deepens. It begins. The cyclical method. Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction, Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth. I was assigned to you, together we were A beautiful and melancholic picture. This last picture is the realization Of the overwhelming moment In which the acute eye perceives you as a now That is over. A now that is fixed In the swept past.

The role of elegy is To put a death mask on tragedy, A drape on the mirror. To bow to the cultural Debate over the aesthetization of sorrow, Of loss, of the unbearable Afterimage of the once material. To look for an imagined Consolidation of grief So we can all be finished Once and for all and genuinely shut up The cabinet of genuine particulars. Instead there’s the endless refrain One hears replayed repeatedly Through the just ajar door: Some terrible mistake has been made. What is elegy but the attempt To rebreathe life Into what the gone one once was Before he grew to enormity. Come on stage and be yourself, The elegist says to the dead. Show them Now—after the fact— What you were meant to be: The performer of a live song. A shoe. Now bow. What is left but this: The compulsion to tell. The transient distraction of ink on cloth One scrubbed and scrubbed But couldn’t make less. Not then, not soon. Each day, a new caption on the cartoon Ending that simply cannot be. One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.

Three items in an envelope. A photograph of two, four, six, eight, nine boys boarding a bus. Not boys, men. Dressed in the long wool coat of winter. Something “based on the life of.” What can a moment outlast? That question becomes a theory, theorem, mechanism. Three boys, one girl, a tree brushing back air off her forehead. Paper, six clean sheets, a monogrammed envelope. An index. The physical bias to existence becomes some wedge, the inexact value of an empire of ether. Tick-tick. The amphibian emerges from water, walks off stage. It’s as if evolution is embodied in absence. Someone is lying on her back. She turns over. Her breath is in the air. Or in the idea of atmosphere.

At a book of details Of all the moments when knowledge is acquired. A sort of expanded balloon Sighs and says, “We are what came before.” “The storm in the window of the mind,” The sleeping sister says while she’s walking around Wonderland watching A cat touching down and talking. Not a car in sight. A cemetery seen from the air. All the obelisks you could ever ask for.

Naked or not, I’m a costume that moves, figurine with a face that changes. You could call me a mood. I begin cheerful but sometimes turn solemn when confronted with my own mythology (wolf in a cape, cat scratch on a cupboard door, mouse tail in the hand of a bland farmer’s wife, a drop of blood on her shoe). Today’s beginning ended in a dream. In a fantastical bed, a lover leaned in to kiss me just as I realized I was part machine, part primitive urge. I left the bed and said, You know, don’t you, not everyone is so disposed. And then I heard from inside my head, You should say, not everyone is so disposed to your utopia. Only then did I realize I’d been inexact. Even here there are scolds that tell you how to be. Sometimes they live inside. Naked or not, I am trying to tuck my arms invisibly behind my back so that all you can see are my breasts and my highly simplified head.

A personal lens: glass bending rays That gave one that day’s news Saying each and every day, Just remember you are standing On a planet that’s evolving. How beautiful, she thought, what distance does For water, the view from above or afar. In last night’s dream, they were back again At the beginning. She was a child And he was a child. A plane lit down and left her there. Cold whitening the white sky whiter. Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world To be a sea.