Mary Karr

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that I couldn’t today name the gods you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d roast in Hell poor suffering bastards like you, unable to bear the masks of their own faces. With words you sought to shape a world alternate to the one that dared inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you could not, could never fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you inherited. More than once you asked that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your death feel like failure to everybody who ever loved you as if our collective cpr stopped too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten. I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite your best efforts you are every second alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in, each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons. We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.

I came awake in kindergarten, under the letter K chalked neat on a field-green placard leaned on the blackboard's top edge. They'd caged   me in a metal desk—the dull word writ to show K's sound. But K meant kick and kill when a boy I'd kissed drew me as a whiskered troll in art. On my sheet, the puffy clouds I made to keep rain in let torrents dagger loose. "Screw those who color in the lines," my mom had preached, words I shared that landed me on a short chair facing the corner's empty, sheetrock page. Craning up, I found my K high above. You'll have to grow to here, its silence said. And in the surrounding alphabet, my whole life hid— names of my beloveds, sacred vows I'd break. With my pencil stub applied to wall, I moved around the loops and vectors, Z to A, learning how to mean, how in the mean world to be. But while I worked the room around me began to smudge—like a charcoal sketch my mom was rubbing with her thumb. Then the instant went, the month, and every season smeared, till with a wrenching arm tug I was here, grown, but still bent to set down words before the black eraser swipes our moment into cloud, dispersing all to zip. And when I blunder in the valley of the shadow of blank about to break in half, my being leans against my spinal K, which props me up, broomstick straight, a strong bone in the crypt of meat I am.

On this first dark day of the year my daddy was born lo these eighty-six years ago who now has not drawn breath or held bodily mass for some ten years and still I have not got used to it. My mind can still form to that chair him whom no chair holds. Each year on this night on the brink of new circumference I stand and gaze towards him, while roads careen with drunks, and my dad who drank himself away cannot be found. Daddy, I’m halfway to death myself. The millenium hurtles towards me, and the boy I bore who bears your fire in his limbs follows in my wake. Why can you not be reborn all tall to me? If I raise my arms here in the blind dark, why can you not reach down now to hoist me up? This heavy carcass I derive from yours is tutelage of love, and yet each year though older another notch I still cannot stand to reach you, or to emigrate from the monolithic shadow you left.

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love before at last taking himself away. His head away. His recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more than instruments of his creation. Pawns. Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead. Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down from the high dive. The contest was seriousness he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins. Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web. He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came to hate the court he held. He was crowned with loneliness and suffered for friendship, for fealty of the noblest sort. The invisible crown rounded his temples tighter than any turban, more binding than a wedding band, and he sat in his round tower on the rounding earth. Read these, saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest aspects of the human heart with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex. I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face. And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc bag was an air-tight chamber for the regal head—most serious relic, breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.

For David Freedman I read somewhere that if pedestrians didn’t break traffic laws to cross Times Square whenever and by whatever means possible, the whole city would stop, it would stop. Cars would back up to Rhode Island, an epic gridlock not even a cat could thread through. It’s not law but the sprawl of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing. Today I loved the unprecedented gall of the piano movers, shoving a roped-up baby grand up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm. They were a grim and hefty pair, cynical as any day laborers. They knew what was coming, the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant it burst. A downpour like a fire hose. For a few heartbeats, the whole city stalled, paused, a heart thump, then it all went staccato. And it was my pleasure to witness a not insignificant miracle: in one instant every black umbrella in Hell’s Kitchen opened on cue, everyone still moving. It was a scene from an unwritten opera, the sails of some vast armada. And four old ladies interrupted their own slow progress to accompany the piano movers. each holding what might have once been lace parasols over the grunting men. I passed next the crowd of pastel ballerinas huddled under the corner awning, in line for an open call — stork-limbed, ankles zigzagged with ribbon, a few passing a lit cigarette around. The city feeds on beauty, starves for it, breeds it. Coming home after midnight, to my deserted block with its famously high subway-rat count, I heard a tenor exhale pure longing down the brick canyons, the steaming moon opened its mouth to drink from on high ...

Our falter, whose art is Heavy, Halloween be thy name. Your kingdom’s numb your children dumb on earth moldy bread unleavened. Give us this day our wayward dead. And give us our asses as we forgive those who ass against us. And speed us not into wimp nation nor bequiver us with needles, for thine is the flimflam and the sour, and the same fucking story in leather for never and ever. Ah: gin.

For Phil Jackson The gym opened out before us like a vast arena, the bleached floorboards yawned toward a vanishing point, staggered seats high as the Mayan temple I once saw devoured by vines. Each of us was eaten up inside — all citizens of   lost and unmapped cities. Frank hugged the pimply ball over his belly like an unborn child. Claire dressed for daycare in daffodil yellow and jelly shoes. David’s gaze was an emperor’s surveying a desiccated battlefield. Since he viewed everything that way, we all saw him the same. The psych techs in Cloroxed white were giant angels who set us running drills, at which we sucked. The zones we set out to defend were watery at every edge. We missed close chest passes, easy combos. Our metronomes run different tempos, John proclaimed. Then Claire started seeing dashes stutter through the air behind the ball. Then speed lines on our backs, and then her own head went wobbly as a spinning egg. She’d once tracked planetary orbits for NASA and now sat sidelined by her eyes’ projections. Only Bill had game. Catatonic Bill whose normal talent was to schlub days in a tub chair — his pudding face scarred with chicken pox — using his hand for an ashtray, belly for an armrest. Now all that peeled away, and he emerged, clean as an egg. He was a lithe and licorice boy, eeling past all comers, each shot sheer net. He faked both ways, went left. Beneath the orange rim his midair pirouettes defied the gravity that I could barely sludge through. He scored beyond what even Claire could count, then he bent panting, hands on knees as the orderlies held out water cups, and the rest of us reached to pat his back or slap his sweaty hand, no one minding about the stench or his breath like old pennies. Then as quick as that he went. Inside his head some inner winch did reel him back from the front of   his face bones where he’d been ablaze. He went back and back into that shadowed stare. Lucky we were to breathe his air. Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self   I’d come in wanting to kill, and I left him there.

No sooner does the plane angle up than I cork off to dream a bomb blast: A fireball roiling through the cabin in slo-mo, seat blown loose from its bolts, I hang weightless a nanosecond in blue space then jerk awake to ordered rows. And there’s the silver liquor cart jangling its thousand bells, the perfect doses of juniper gin and oak-flavored scotch held by a rose-nailed hand. I don’t miss drinking, don’t miss driving into shit with more molecular density than myself, nor the Mission Impossible reruns I sat before, nor the dead space inside only alcohol could fill and then not even. But I miss the aftermath, the pure simplicity: mouth parched, head hissing static. How little I asked of myself then—to suck the next breath, suffer the next heave, live till cocktail hour when I could mix the next sickness. I locked the bathroom door, sat on the closed commode, shirtless, in filmy underpants telling myself that death could fit my grasp and be staved off while in the smeary shaving glass, I practiced the stillness of a soul awaiting birth. For the real that swarmed beyond the door I was pure scorn, dead center of my stone and starless universe, orbited by no one. Novitiate obliterate, Saint Absence, Duchess of Naught . . . A stinging ether folded me in mist. Sometimes landing the head's pressure’s enormous. When my plane tilts down, houses grow large, streets lose their clear geometry. The leafy earth soon fills my portal, and in the gray graveyard of cars, a stick figure becomes my son in royal blue cap flapping his arms as if to rise. Thank god for our place in this forest of forms, for the gravitas that draws me back to him, and for how lightly lightly I touch down.

for John Holohan Jesus wound up with his body nailed to a tree— a torment he practically begged for, or at least did nothing to stop. Pilate watched the crowd go thumbs down and weary, signed the order. So centurions laid Jesus flat on a long beam, arms run along the crosspiece. In each palm a long spike was centered, a stone chosen to drive it. (Skin tears; the bones start to split.) Once the cross got propped up, the body hung heavy, a carcass— in carne, the Latin poets say, in meat. (—The breastbone a ship’s prow . . .) At the end the man cried out as men cry. (Tears that fill the eyes grow dark drop and by drop: One cries out.) On the third day, the stone rolled back, to reveal no corpse. History is rife with such hoaxes. (Look at Herodotus.) As to whether he multiplied loaves and fishes, that’s common enough. Poke seed-corn in a hole and see if more corn doesn’t grow. Two fish in a pond make more fishes. The altar of reason supports such extravagance. (I don’t even know how electricity works, but put trust in light switches.) And the prospect of love cheers me up, as gospel. That some creator might strap on an animal mask to travel our path between birth and ignominious death—now that makes me less lonely. And the rising up at the end into glory—the white circle of bread on the meat of each tongue that God might enter us. For 2000-near years my tribe has lined up at various altars, so dumbly I open this mouth for bread and song.

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night, and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love Lucy