Paul Killebrew

i. I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’s shaking hand. In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats through the dull, black night. I’m heir to an orange heart in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull, but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body. In my dad’s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night where I sit beneath the canvas looking up. My dad looks down and laughs. When I went into my dad’s painting and saw a man lean toward a bright, orange hole, night shook through my shirt in an inherited rhythm, duplicating the heart held by his anxious body. My painting a laughing dad. My heart a hole where on a bright, orange night, I dropped a tattered shirt, shaking. ii. My dad said the man was meant to be looking at the painting he’s in, but it didn’t quite work. And so the hole where he’s looking now. The finger-thick lines around him don’t hide a failed painting or reveal any struggle to mean. My dad believes in action and the truth of process: a man looks into a hole and so he is. He looks past the hole to what brought him to it. The tattered painting doesn’t work as finger-thick evidence of his struggle to mean, but the correspondence of his belief shakes through its presence. To believe in holes and men looking into them. To lean toward action and the presence of process where a man looks at the painting he’s in and is. iii. A man looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He never thought about what the colors mean, the hole bright orange in the black night. Like babies painting a painting of babies, the man laughs at the hole he’s in and looks down to feel his heart beneath a tattered shirt. He’s shaking like an old man’s dad. Is a man the hole he falls into? Colors are the correspondence of babies— they lean and fall into the holes we leave them. A baby looks at the hole he’s in and laughs. He shakes, no colors or dads to hold him still. iv. My dad’s fingers spilled around the surface without distinction, causing the offense we call process. The painting, having the grace of endurance, allows the line its tiny provocation, but lacking the confrontation that would compel the painting into itself—the man looks down, not in; we look at, not through. The painting communicates by presence alone, letting us know that it’s here without a message, or a message embodied in its delivery, a swallowed swallow. The man and the hole he looks into are homage to us. The man doesn’t have a mouth, the hole doesn’t have a shape. Our provocation is presence alone. v. I used to went into my dad’s painting I grew up In When I dull black orange heart wonder about quiet and saw a man      I      my dad      a hole rhythmic wonders the painting through the night I’m heir to anxious painting     my dad’s painting     My painting an inherited rhythm his shaking hand glows in my painting      think my dad’s a hole beats of my dad where I sit In a orange hole black where my night shirt shook a tattered night in the canvas      in the dull shirt        and a man leans by shaking hand       I dropped a laughing dad beneath an orange night     an orange hole quietly my dad in duplicating heart his anxious dull rhythm     My dad held by body was lean down to my body but gave up looks and laughs through a bright My heart      the looking toward a hole shaking on a bright where vi. doesn’t work     where he’s looking now but the painting he's in is presence He looks tattered     The man looking so finger-thick My dad     The finger-thick lines    the correspondence to the painting he’s in     And the hole it didn’t quite mean what brought him to it evidence of his process reveal the man was meant a hole of My action at the dad of any truth To mean in looks      and of looks to be don’t hide my dad at work     toward his past he is the hole the painting believes in but shakes around failed action    struggle to lean through for process where a man and a struggle and a painting as to him     and so To belief      or its presence said to believe in holes and men looking into them vii. the hole looks at A man he’s in and shakes Like A baby looks at the correspondence of babies and laughs     He bright and orange painting never a man he falls into       Colors are of babies the colors mean no colors     they lean night babies painting a black still hole about dads he’s the hole we fall into     the holes in his shaking heart in the thought leave them     and down the what hole He’s like a tattered shirt      the man laughs at the looks he’s an old man’s hole    to feel beneath dad or to hold the laughs He Is in him viii. we call a swallow homage to provocation the hole doesn’t have a message fingers in its delivery lacking grace but the man looks down without endurance confrontation embodied    swallowed causing the process of presence having shape    letting us know that it’s there not in    not without a message     a tiny surface My dad’s distinction allows The painting its mouth spilled The man through The painting the line we look at     the painting into or around      Our man looks into that the offense would he alone have The us and the is are by presence alone the hole communicates itself the provocation doesn’t compel

Sometimes we blubbered through the fallout of willful confusion in pants that didn’t fit the legs we sawed off. We looked at each other and fell forward and back, forward and back, a little bit like dancing and a little like aggravated assault. At times it seemed reasonable because it always seems reasonable to accept whatever anxieties or losses must accumulate in the face of what we really wanted all along. In buildings and on streets you could paint a few eyes on a face and see the careless representation of brothers and sisters making a family out of paint and the gracious mistakes of seeing. Mistakes, the essence of sight, could have been all we had to go on anyway, and not for us to leave behind what took us through the shower of dumbasses with tact and a breath of elegance, even the hope that later, when the streets cleared of agitated needlers and the AC kicked on for good, we could sleep on the clothes spangled outside the closet and find a reason for closing the bedroom door on shadows of pedantic radiation from thin margins of lamplight always suggesting some other plot in some other bedroom, tensions to splay us soon enough. And then it occurred to you, or maybe it occurred to me, doesn’t matter, I think actually someone called and said that anyone who doesn’t leave something for you isn’t worth having, so maybe now's a good time to find a dapper little high school where everyone can be a little less civil, and blessed with selfishness, we could part the fingers interlocked between us, make fists and get busy. Then intensity fermented into green books of music, loud country music, and I love country music. It rolled around my ears in corridors where boredom had once been so irrefutable and heavy, and I was happy and dancing and throwing punches at pigeons and even hitting a few. But the romantic arc never made it over the willful lack of conviction, some gap between the faces on the heads we saw pass our table in the sour-faced restaurant run by those French people, okay a gap between that and the face in the dream you had of your father, the one where you said he stuffed a billy club down a duck’s throat and called for another shot of Dewar’s. I expected you to take things when you left, but not those things. Light diffuses evenly across the kitchen, blood through my body, and it’s sort of funny, but our whole thing fits between two haircuts, like a roadtrip or something. I feel now that I’ve been digested by time, and light would pool into terrible reflections of my own back as I backed into a mirror or performed some other forgetful jujitsu, an effort to lose thoughts or patterns of thought, but the light diffuses and you walk through it, collide with little pieces of what ate you, get angry and write long letters about how your hand can’t talk, how the paper is so light and effortless when you hold it how could you even know, you couldn’t even imagine holding this light and ridiculous thing that my hand brushed over in patterns it will later try to forget. Then I taped my mouth shut and tried to whistle. Leave me alone. Don’t call. Get lost, dumpster of confusion. I know it’s never been that easy, that from the eyes in your skull the black plastic bags were suffocating the trees even though to me it was more like a ballerina’s shadow had escaped and was dancing through the branches frantically with desperate happiness and cause for alarm. I guess either way something unsafe and ridiculous was happening, and I guess we knew it, I think we even talked about it, but I’ve been a little lonely since I started writing my dissertation. It’s about class consciousness among people who work behind registers. And it’s interesting, there’s all kinds of different races and classes and income levels represented in the world of cashiers, but at the level of values we see predominantly two classes, the complacent and the entitled, though many cashiers are some measure of both. The complacent are resigned to what they understand to be their position. They’re courteous and reliable; class issues only arise when people are rude to them, which they tend to handle fine, though if they say anything about it afterwards, it tends to be a cruel and brief dismissal not only of the occurrence, but of the entire offending person. The entitled have a very complicated expression of social hierarchy. Because they see themselves in transition, usually ascending, there’s this idea that their values won’t, or can’t, find full expression from their current position and so they don’t feel compelled to act in a way consistent with their values, while at the same time they may expect to be treated in accordance with those values. When people are rude to them, they flip out. Basically today’s been pasted together from the leavings of some green intensity and cigarettes crowded at the back of the passive classrooms of the skull. Will there be coffee on the other side? Will there be ladies to walk up to you on a plain old shit-for-brains day and ask you of Washington Square Park, “Why is this on the map?” I like it when people cock their heads a little when you talk. Seems elegant. I tell them I’m not sure, but Henry James wrote something complicated about it. Then these nice ladies with a telling lack of accent move along into non-history and the bulk of our hours waiting without a mind for restitution. I would surrender our moist telephone calls and arthritic tribes of entitlement if I knew who to give them up to. I never go anywhere or do anything slow because revision is only a function of doubt. Well okay, maybe doubt and shame. Actually, it’s just shame. Revision is a function of shame. But enough of these dead people, we must rise like blood in April! Instead here I am peeling seconds off the end of my life, glass of water, frown on face, notebook open to the parade of minutes and obvious as a daisycutter in the desert. No more nights in the kitchen or bowls of macaroni, no more misdemeanors with the microwave or blue orbs whistling into my ear, no more cats meowing at the television, no cigarettes on the patio, no more blessings in drag. My schedule is totally blank this afternoon.

I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air. I am blind. I am unable to understand the dark passages. I begin to speak of being deprived. I believe that I am being kept in want. Who governs me? Who is to say what I am, and what I am not? I wish to be conscious of myself. My frontiers are long and insecure. I contract them. I cannot command them. I determine myself not to desire what is unattainable. I have a wound in my leg. I am a schoolboy. A rule does not oppress me if I impose it on myself. I assimilate it into my substance. I can never be thwarted. I cannot want it to be other than it is.

It was the year we decided not to get divorced. The poem said something like clouds moving quickly across the sun while the rest of us talked about faith and how my personal level of intensity in faking it is one way to measure the depth of the drop I’d have to make before I could turn over in bed toward a window open to the night and spotty rain dotting leaves with light caught from porch lamps and know that what I’d imagined to be time drained of sound was the purest sound, one person turning away from another into a cone formed by his turning. We sat on the porch while the kids napped and watched light rise and fall through clouds moving quickly across the sun like distractions from a vital and complex truth that requires too many pages of exegesis for people with days like ours, time’s version of an optical illusion, both too long and too short for anything like actual thinking. I remember one of the many unsolicited pieces of advice we got when Elmer was coming along—don’t make any major decisions until he’s one, you’ll be too tired to get it right. So naturally we changed jobs and moved across the country. I can’t even remember who gave us that advice. They’re probably out of our lives now. And what’s in them, these six and something years out of your forty and my almost that we’ve been spinning through together, watching our obligations mount around sensations that folded out of us from zones of our beings we hadn’t seen before, like a third arm you’d somehow failed to notice, an us both alien and uncannily us, children, a marriage, an unexpected love— these things have taken over, brushed aside whatever was there before like an anxious developer. This force is of our own making but comically has no regard for us, like that arm is a whole body, two bodies, tugging us along wherever they feel like going, the most dangerous places they can find. I was writing that line on my phone while following fifteen-month-old Harlan doing his duck walk down a wheelchair ramp. He leaned way over the side of it to look at some smooth rocks on the ground and, as I got to the word “dangerous,” toppled down into them. So much for art, some might say, but not me, I just learned how many people have put videos online with the words “spectacular sunset” in their titles, there’s one after another. I’d made one myself, a video I mean, because the sun had ducked behind an unmoving cloud at the horizon, and I knew from the internet how long it would take the sun to reappear in the gap between the bottom edge of the cloud and the top edge of the earth, a sun-sized gap dotted with its own minor cloud variants there to complicate the image, a sun moving slowly behind clouds, and I felt a low note being struck within, something I’ve learned is not sadness but gratitude in unknowing, a feeling that is hard but porous, that dissipates like short rain steaming off its first idea of the ground. Dark pink reformatting the blue, dark pink lights of our forever car, dark pink of hippies, dark pink life tassels, dark pink “to fly,” as you put it, “by the night of our pants.” I don’t know where the night goes, but I know we’ll be awake, and why, this long year of nights when people standing right next to us broke in half and spilled everywhere just because they paid attention. We don’t have an exact date for when we got engaged, there was no moment, no single question but instead weeks of them while an idea changed from something we could do into something we would, it was gestational, like this year has been, a year I hope is over. I’m glad you’re turning forty. I wish I were, too. I need a number for what we’ve come through, our second engagement, longer than the first, permanent, in fact, the questions of questions and the answer we give— give, deny, and give again.

I wonder if I’ve really scrutinized this experience like you’re supposed to have if you can type —Frank O’Hara, “For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson” I was born in Tennessee. I was raised on ideas. Now I fall down as a person in bodily emulsion. But spiritually speaking? I’m not suffering. I’m looking at nine pictures on a light blue wall in black frames with white matting. In one the Secretary of Defense walks through Iraq in a suit and boots, surrounded by a thick white line. If it wasn’t like this I wouldn’t care, which is not to say I wouldn’t mind. Some find this layering of thoughts within the ever-diminishing moment to be a complete defense to the charge of privilege, but surely more is expected, and there is no defense; we commit crimes and show ourselves and each other unbelievable mercy. To be meticulous is to give up in a way still marked by effort, which for many is the one, true art. What did the New Critics think about plagiarism? Repetition as a form of time travel? Conservatives prefer repetition in service of an incantatory mourning for a lost world, but one plagiarizes the self in the commission of boredom. Maybe it’s the difference between new meanings and a complex weave of old ones, or those who hold no new meanings are possible. Or maybe all that’s possible is a new ordering of priorities within experiences. A sensibility and its chosen course are what matter most to me. The present calcifies into interlocking crystals, leaving so much gratuitous precedent to be lined up in the narrow hallway of one’s attention that a trajectory could be plotted to anywhere. You go through each room and remove a single wall, but only in your mind, and still the house collapses. It wasn’t built to last. What kind of imposition would that have been anyway? Words on a page and a bare molecule of intentionality coming through this pinhole of sensation and time. My face, lit by screens and angled penitently towards coffee, withers like a democracy under its loudest features. Sometimes it’s hard to watch, I know. Not at all like yours, or yours, presences to which my life is a distracted vigil, having found no higher calling. Certainly not this, which could happen or not and all that's at stake is whether I’ve told you. You drive us through the rain in Virginia after taking me to see my 93-year-old grandfather in Nashville. My dad and I went to his hospital room at night, where he told me about the Korean man he’d met at the church he built in Nagoya who had to hide from police after becoming a suspect in the kidnapping of a local teenager. He hadn’t kidnapped her. Years later they learned she’d run away in the middle of the night to avoid an arranged marriage. But prejudice against Koreans ran high in late forties Japan, so my grandfather’s friend became the target of an investigation whose misguidedness ensured its longevity. I forgot to ask my grandfather, whose name is Ernest, what Nagoya was like in the late forties, after a quarter of the city was incinerated by American firebombing that Robert McNamara, who also lived to see 93, later conceded was a war crime. A few weeks after the Korean man disappeared he called Ernest and asked to meet at a popular restaurant in town. Ernest arrived at the appointed time and found the restaurant packed with people. A hostess, upon learning whom Ernest was meeting, directed him to the restaurant's second floor, which he found completely empty except for his friend who sat alone at a table at the far end and waved Ernest over as soon as he came up the stairs. They talked for a couple of hours, during which time the man explained that he was innocent, but, given the conditions in Nagoya, he would have to remain out of sight, at least for now. He thanked Ernest for his friendship and went on to explain that he owned the restaurant they were sitting in, as well as a couple of nearby hotels, and he was actually quite wealthy. A few years later, Ernest’s job as a missionary was moving him to Tokyo, and apparently his friend learned he was leaving because he called Ernest again and asked to meet at ten the next night, this time at an address my grandfather recognized as being in the industrial section of town, mainly warehouses and the like, with few stores or restaurants and probably no people around so late. With some trepidation, Ernest went to the address at ten and waited. The streets were empty except, after fifteen or twenty minutes, a yakimo man whom Ernest heard a couple of blocks away. Yakimo men drive carts around at night selling sweet potatoes—yakimo—that are roasted over charcoal on the cart itself. You can hear them at night bellowing out, "Yaaakiiiiiiiiiiiimooooooo!" Eventually the yakimo man came right up next to Ernest, then stopped his cart and said, in Japanese, “It’s me.” It was his friend, who explained that this was one of several disguises his circumstances unfortunately required. He said he’d heard Ernest would soon be moving, and he just wanted to see him again to thank him for his friendship. They spoke briefly, and then my grandfather's friend rolled his cart away, occasionally calling out, "Yaaakiiiiiiiiiiiimooooooo!" And now you and I are driving through Virginia again, the sky a further gray. I woke up this morning with you in Roanoke, thirty-five years old for the first time, in love and astonished. I jogged three miles while listening to “The Weight” seven times in a row and thought the song could be a pacifist anthem: you righteous people go on and kill each other; all us sinners will be here, living in peace and mutual assistance. The feeling vanished, or perhaps deepened past visibility, when I heard about the acquittal. Bastille Day. A wary sun bided its time in the drowsy grad school of an overcast sky, and then, finding its moment, delivered a bleaching intensity to the reading glasses resting on the dashboard of our financed Acura under a dewy windshield, casting bleary water shadows through the double lens of windshield and glasses across the car’s front seat, the deep blue fabric of which was brushed into dark and light patches working crossways from the sun cast complexly through fat leaves of the adjoining yard’s many hardwoods. A single leaf shadow bobbled over the plastic lid of a day-old coffee cup sitting in the center console next to the gear shift, white and blue-gray mixing over the still black hole of the spout, a small, circular cinema. Doubled, tiny threads of dust on the rearview glowed in a stripe of light reflected from the trunk forward, trembling minutely as the air inside the Acura warmed, circulated, and gained humidity, seashells of fog developing from the bottom of the windshield at the defroster’s vents. Spots of dew on the roof shrank as they dried, leaving concentric trails of pollen and air dirt in a yellow-brown haze against the car’s light blue exterior, sediment at the level of microns building glacially over weeks of quickly warming summer mornings. Seatbelts and downward seams in the upholstery lent no sense of vertical logic to the interior. The passenger side buckle rested papally on a pile of folders and papers in the seat. The silver tip of the buckle breached the edge of a pie chart printed on the piece of paper at the top of the pile. The chart was in grayscale and demonstrated striking productivity. Before the dewdrops on the windshield dried, the bumpy shadows of four of them fell evenly along the rounded edge of the chart’s largest triangle, giving the edge’s black line the appearance of growing darker as it travelled through the dewdrop shadows. Up very close, the paper itself was a thicket of rough fibers, a cotton ball flattened, and the black line of the chart’s edge was a dense, black dust resting on the thicket, containing to one side a far less concentrated swarm of black particles.