Tom Sleigh

When I woke the darkness was so thick, So palpable and black that my eyes Seemed blind as stone staring into stone. The blade that I had dreamed, efficient and quick As it cut into my thigh, cleaning a gangrened Wound infected to the bone, seemed poised Above my throat: Close-grained, impenetrable, The blackness rose before me like a wall. And then off in the next room, nervous, light, A soft padding as of an animal Raced like my heartbeat in my temples Round and round, trapped, stealthily desperate As if hunting its own track, terrified And captivated by its own odor. Skin cool in the night air, eyes drilling Through the dark, who I was before I Slept had burned off like a vapor So that amnesiac and pure, witnessing My terror that I no longer recognized As my own, my mind floated beyond me To confront that frantic, closing footfall As Jacob dreaming met his dark angel— Though in my wrestling nothing blessed me Or promised any blessing; but was a mask whose eyes Were all black pupil, blind as molten tar. I strained to see what paced there, my eyes burning Through the dark until a pair of eyes blazed Back across the blackness, an insistent, glazed Staring that shimmered and disappeared. The shining blade plunged at my throat, my mind Stretched and twisted, its wires tightening And turning as the creature lunged back and forth And with a deep-throated yowling, thrashing And thrashing to fight clear of its own circling, Cleanly leapt away. I reached for the knife But gripped only air, my eyes pressing Deeper and deeper into the night’s black stone, Cutting the way the knife had cut into my wound, Probing for the white shining of the bone: What had I become? What darkness had my dream Led me down into? Too frightened even To move, I lay bound and sweating in The sheets, the moon a warning-bell beating On the glass, its light carving out the curtains Like the shadow of a wing across the windowpane.

for my father 1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He fights the terror of being poured out, The fall into darkness unquenchably long So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding Back like a dam the flood overtops—but nothing now Can stop that surge, already he swirls To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ... And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted, He hears the Voices begin to die down The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling Sunup to sundown falls gradually still —Unappeasable, the silence that will follow When his every last drop has been poured out. 2. Countdown In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across Your face siphoning air into your lungs, You lie helpless as an astronaut Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious To ours, your body's fevered presence Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail Up the pipe of the crematory oven: How distant we will seem after Such intensity ... We drift in your stare Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility. Already you are space immeasurable By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted Payload, liftoff, escape velocity. 3. Prayer In the house of the dead I pace the halls: The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert Or flatten into horizonless ocean. I step outside, the door clicking shut Comforting in its finality ... Now I see the house as if I looked down From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused, Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits: I can't look you in the face, you see only The openness of sky rising above mountains. (Only after the world had emptied You and filled you with its openness Will I feel the love I pray to feel?) 4. The God a dream A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere. Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure, I cradle you, I sponge you clean As if you were my son, the emptiness you Drink like heavy black milk erasing Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain. The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven By the god, blinded by the god's Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads In this place the god commands: Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you are nothing in my hands but my hands moving. 5. His Stare Absently there in a moment of pure being He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring: The air's transparence gains solidity From his looking; while his emaciated features, The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones, Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green Of the trees he is too weak to prune. And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing And enters and becomes each spectral vibration; So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare. 6. The Current The numbing current of the Demorol Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night He lives in slowly begins to darken, His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness Blinding as an underwater cave. Already He filters the dark water through gills aligned To strain that element he more and more resembles: Like walls of water held in miraculous Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially Above him, my hands holding his tightening Its grip even as his hand loosens ... As if my hand could lead him past that undulating Weight towering above us out of sight. 7. The Rehearsal I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair, The rank rich air of breathing flesh— But like fumes rising from earth's molten core The voices of the dead reach out to you, Your whispering parents, dead for forty years, Entreating me to turn—and so I Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die, You dwindle, blur into unfillable Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ... But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus —Only this voice rehearsing breath By breath in words you'll never read these Lines stolen from your death.

What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can't see it: Like the river bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets beneath the whirling fan impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to arrive: Her sisters and brothers gone, she ventures alone through sunlight and moonlight weaving shadowy faces across the peeling walls... —Speeding toward her, is it you and me she spies in the trembling train windows while the engine hauls us down rails that swerve under wheels rolling through her brain? Faces burn through dirty glass, smears of lips and eyes dissolve to spots of darkness swarming between her eyes so that swaying apartment towers crumble as her nostrils prickle from the landfill's ammonia that hangs above the stacked, crushed cars. The rails that take us to her pass boxcar after boxcar like the successive selves we are as she dreams us coming closer, switching track to track: Now the super unbolts her door as she calls: “Oh is it really you?” —the wheel's rolling through her head bringing us face to face with raveled bandages, crutches leaned in dusty corners, terraced mountains of yellowing newspaper. Framed above her chair a picture of a prairie sprawls round a covered wagon and the horse she rode as a girl, her eyes fading points of light... Again she calls out above the train's approaching rumble: “Is it you at last?” My eyes have got so bad peoples’ faces are all blurry...Now tell me, is it really you?” But already the rails are switching, bearing our waving hands away at the speed of thought over the stony waters that ceaselessly pour out.

Branching the way blind fingers splay across The face they’re reading, trees trace the backyard Ditch sop that their shadows drop off into Space, an abyss where I hear a neighbor boy’s Voice cursing an exhilarated, out of its mind, Unappeasably inventive flow of “Fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy that maybe He imagines the neighborhood can't hear?— or is his tongue wired To some source of inspired but as yet unknown Intelligence that radiates from all of us and he Is its mouthpiece, speaking it to the trees That screen him from me listening to his Unrelenting arias, predestined like birdsong Flowing unbidden, of four-letter almost Erotic keening over something I know too, Everybody knows?— and even if all it is Is the “fuck fuck motherfuck” ecstasy Of April budding in his mouth and sending down Roots to some anti-self that sprouts and shadows Him as it croons and shouts the song of its difference— Even then, this Billy whom I don’t think twice about When we meet in the alley and slap palms Or I see him playing alone on the swings of big kids’ slide, Even then is he the vessel of some signal that uses us, Down in the abyss irradiating him so that just this instant Whatever that other uses him for he can’t resist: His voice an instrument of blissed-out torment Until that grip flings him loose— Who knows which of us it chooses to penetrate Next, making us suddenly sweat or shiver, That influence bathing everything budding in profane rays.

What came wafting down the ditch by the marsh grass waving opened a hole in the day through which, like a puff of breath, a ghost fountained up rising in soft slo-mo, lost, desolate, no place left to go. Dear bloody Beirut and its internet cafes were still smoking from last night's "little bombing." Such threads, tattered sleeves blown all over the street from Emporio Armani. Husband and wife shot dead at the airport checkpoint. Where else would this lead? The investiture of grieving takes all day to sweep up in the tidal spillage of plate glass. What ish my nation, asked Captain MacMorris between battles. But the ditch knows just who we are— and I see its only water on a stealth raid of the glimmer hidden in the reeds. And when I come close, little scavenger flashings and great claws held out rigidly scuttle back into mud holes drilling the bank. Bending down to look, I could smell the corruption's gathering, sweetish odor, its sonar gone haywire driving it to shore. What choices are you given, what makes you want to swim out of your own element? The demure little ear-holes and intelligent clear eyes, the fate from birth sealed inside its smile, spent flukes and tail being gnawed to bone. The curt unrevealing stare mirroring back my own.

i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949–2017 the unified field It wasn’t that there was anything to say that would stop him from feeling this way — the X of himself splayed out in space where gravity was weakest. He and his father and talkative mother suffering tiny strokes that took away this syllable from this word, that syllable from that, all this lay in one pan of the balance scale while in the other there was nothing but dark matter and the cosmic inconsequence of his literal physical heart beating. And then the unified field, faced with its own emptiness, bent down to his chest as if to listen. a toast to pavlov’s dogs Oh Leash held by a hand I can’t see, here in the laboratory where nothing can change and where yips and bites are fine-tuned to the pack’s mentality, am I one of his dogs, the three-legged one that knows nothing of my lack except for how I bark, growl, and whine to be let in? Am I the salivating triangle guided only by my nose that keeps me on the move in my limping trot away from you, Leash, yanking me back from all the filth I want to shove my nose in? Why won’t you let me go free? The sad gestures of our growing intimacy is a reflex we can’t escape or express: sometimes, emotion is just mange. So Leash, here’s a toast to my lab pals: August, Fast One, Pretty Little Lady, Joy, Beauty, MiLord, Clown. the judgment after the last What would we like to see happen? Would we like to drive nails into our hands? Would the shame engulfing us like flame on a computer screen make us understand that throwing a match into the Grand Canyon while snapping a selfie, and never once thinking how far that match falls, is the original sin that a donkey’s ears twitching as we ride it to the bottom reveal as the truth about our consciences? How many nails will we need? Go to the movies, do research, be the Regulator forced to kill kill kill and that’s when we’ll find out just who we are or if there’s anything like “who” anymore. mission It’s not simply that the palm trees are on fire but that they waver up more fire than fire, brighter and harsher and more intoxicating than the flames spreading ever thought of being — the thick black smoke turning noon to midnight rears up in a wall that nobody can see over or around or through even as this nobody comes crashing through the screen right into my living room: poor nobody! In this loneliest of times, he tells me how much he loves me, how his lack and mine feel somehow the same and that the flames crawling over him have become his mission: burning, he erects a burning house of smoke we can neither live in or abandon. sunday is never the last day of the week Using zip ties and Velcro to strap on a homemade bomb, who is to blame, who should have told us that on the far side of the screen in this Sunday calm our generation has had its time? In that corner where we slept together so many nights, yes, in that corner where the bed of the dead lovers has been put out with all the other Monday morning trash, there are always two doors opening and closing as one of us goes out and the other comes in. Why couldn’t we show our love for one another the way the void dissolves into the zero? Why did the animal grafted to the human find such satisfaction in explosions? Darkness to darkness, ashes to ashes, the animal to the human, why shouldn’t we take pleasure where and when we can — provided this is pleasure, provided that the body isn’t null. last rites Even if the suit they dress me in for my funeral is dry-cleaned at Perfection Laundry, then washed and washed in the blood of the lamb, the knees will still be muddy from kneeling down, the sleeves, mismatched, will tell their own threadbare tale about the breath of life breathed into tabletop dust. What would the naked man and woman and talking snake say about the god who no longer remembers if they’re forgiven or not? Listening as a kid to the old stories, there were never enough beanstalks and giants and Jacks. Now, the pallbearers pick up my coffin, they carry me out to the ruined cathedral where the saints’ wooden faces, frozen in their homely expressions of grace, are shadowed by flocks of  blackbirds whirling past. coda: the hunger artist as a senior citizen Nowadays, in my cage in old straw, where my brother keeper forgets to come feed me anymore, at last I’m fasting for its own sake, not to break records I’ve broken a thousand times before. Besides, nothing could be easier than to starve forever if the food they keep on giving you makes you sick. This hunger is a moment’s vision that will persist in a pillar of radiant house dust.

After Porfirio Barba Jacob’s Canción De La Vida Profunda Variable, changeable, yes, there are days when people like us are like that. Maybe under some other sky something like glory smiles on us, maybe there life is clear, maybe there things open up on the way the sea stretches out to the horizon— but us, we’re blown by chance the way wind blows blades of grass lightly blowing them all one way. And then there are days when we feel April, the fields of April making us feel our bodies longing to be held and fucked into oblivion, bodies fertile as a field in April, swollen, trembling to be touched: and under the influences of rains pouring down as if pure spirit poured into us like rain, that thing called “soul” sprouts and branches and entangles us in lush bowers and thickets of illusion. Oh yes, days come along when we’re calm, clear —childhood sunsets, lagoons rippling sapphire!— days when a verse, a sudden whistle, days when a mountain and bird passing over it, days when even our own pain and what we feel it to be like make us smile. And sure, there are days when we're so disgusting, so sordid to ourselves it’s like we’re dark stone in the darkness inside flint: then nighttime surprises us, its lamplight dizzying, cold, profuse, glinting off tossed coins of the good, the terrible shining with the gleam of that primal metal. And other days come, come when women want to cry their come cries and use us as their own, days when we’re itching to get a woman naked, and then we can’t face it, can’t stand it somehow, they want us but we don’t know how to want them back: arm tightening around a waist, hand cupping a breast, we don’t dare touch the roundness of an apple or a pear, the round earth spins us off into space. And then there arrive days so dismal and stupefied and numb that the idiot soughing of a pine grove sounds like weeping: and what some idiot called the soul whines and wails and carries on with what some other idiot calls “the pain of the world”: and maybe not God himself, that absolute fool, can make that wind less cutting, or make it stop. And then there comes, certain to come, oh my earth I love beyond any of my days, a day . . . a day . . . a day when my sail catches the wind and drags the anchor up out of the bottom muck, and nothing can withstand that wind blowing by, talking to itself, talking, talking . . . and the day is mine and yours and every living thing’s . . . the day when nobody and nothing can keep us from getting up and going, no matter who we are . . . the day when our leaving is the same as our arriving.

In my fantasy of fatherhood, in which I'm your real father, not just the almost dad arriving through random channels of divorce, you and I don't lie to one another— shrugging each other off when words get the best of us but coming full circle with wan smiles. When you hole up inside yourself, headphones and computer screen taking you away, I want to feel in ten years that if I'm still alive you'll still look at me with that same wary expectancy, your surreptitious cool-eyed appraisal debating if my love for you is real. Am I destined to be those shark-faced waves that my death will one day make you enter? You and your mother make such a self-sufficient pair— in thrift stores looking for your prom dress, what father could stand up to your unsparing eyes gauging with such erotic calculation your figure in the mirror? Back of it all, when I indulge my second sight, all I see are dead zones: no grandchildren, no evenings at the beach, no bonfires in a future that allows one glass of wine per shot of insulin. Will we both agree that I love you, always, no matter my love's flawed, aging partiality? My occupation now is to help you be alone.

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter and in my twenties I almost ended up there— and then as an alternative to vodka, to live alone like a hermit philosopher and court the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway— and then there were the years in which I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity, years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares, and that was the worst, the very worst— you could say that always my life was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart— my life like scraps stitched together in a dream in which animals and people, plants, chimeras, stars, even minerals were in a preordained harmony— a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten, but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason— and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth. I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion, the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony, there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground. And maybe that's all it means to be a poet.

After lockdown, tier by tier undresses to sleep: Each skull nestles in its mattress-hollow. Wall facing wall inside of wall shrinks to a keyhole: A fly creeps through and starts to buzz, reeling through bars Down steel corridors. A dreamer’s eye follows the fly, And wherever the fly lands, the eye touches down With an airier Midas touch that turns all to glass: The eye wakes to Bentham’s panopticon, glazed cage Of an inspection house where only the Warden sees all. —I am asleep and not asleep, I stare up into faces swarming: Cellblocks of memory focus face by face, Mine flitting in and out of theirs: In prison issue They come, footsteps mingling over mine in a child’s game Of chase from yard to cell, only we’re all grown men, Meatier, less and more malign than A boy’s imagining himself grown... —I was asleep and not asleep, Faces came and went. Frank the Joker, the West Virginia biker, who composed “A rhyme to fit the crime”: “There was a young fellow named Frank Who gave his girlfriend a spank; She fell in a heap In front of Frank’s jeep And old Frank ran her down for a prank.” Or the white-haired lifer, densley oracular: “Sometimes, after lockdown, your thoughts Just don’t have the energy to climb the wall.” The Giggler who bolted His brother in a barn and burned it down, Eyes challenging, sly: “They killed this guy and see, I think this is funny, hilarious In fact, but you, you won’t think so—they cut off his dick And shoved it in his mouth.” Or the child molester who said about flowers At funerals: “They’re there, aren’t they, To hide the stink off the corpse?” Or Pat, armed robber Who held aloof: Rolled shirtsleeves, forearms Carved from basalt, smoke rings Lazily effusing: “The johns here, they got no doors: You ever try to take a shit while someone’s watching? It took six months to get used to that— But here, man, the bars feed on Time, they nibble It to nothing.” —I wanted to sleep and couldn’t sleep, I stared up into faces swarming. Three o’clock dark dissolves The walls, faces start to drift, their atoms Mix with concrete’s Atomic swirl, bodies get stuck Floating halfway through, heartbeats Booming as through a stethoscope: Like Michaelangelo’s slaves, if a fly Landed on their noses, They couldn’t lift a hand to brush it off. Dark velleities buzz in this hive of steel Where power handshakes Flower in forests Of interlocking fingers: In red prison uniform, a man On death row, convicted 1984, exonerated and pardoned October 2000 (New York Times, Dec. 10): “You could hear the humming of the chair Every time they cut it on, like an air-conditioner Cutting on. My daddy came to see me, he said, ‘What's that?’ I said, ‘The chair.’ The way they put it, they got to test the chair.” —I was asleep And couldn’t wake up. Inside my skull, glass Keeps shattering: Dream-beings Unsubscribed to the will, with insect bodies And human heads, dash against walls, mammal softness Of cheeks and lips join with stingers Pulsing...my eyes awake and not awake, where is the chamber As in the horror movie Return of the Fly that, circuitry and test-tubes Sparking, would unscramble these divided Natures? (They called me “Teach” As in “Hey, Teach, how do you spell...” When I confessed I’d been in jail, they looked disappointed in me: Their side of the wall was theirs, not mine.) —I tried to turn over, to look away, But couldn’t wake up, couldn’t not wake. Chemicals drip into a man’s veins, one each For heart, lungs, brain. Strapped to a table, he stares Impassive, eyes flickering shut, body A meat wall, IV tubes Almost empty... —I was asleep and not asleep, I couldn’t move to wake. I hear shrill wings—that fly inspecting bread crumbs Under dining hall tables while the Warden blares Descartes over the Intercom: “If a man’s head were lopped off His mouth would keep on moving, faultlessly Justifying his crimes.” But that fly, that speck against Steel, its wings steered in ways that seem crazy To eyes awake, not awake, Not seeing, all-seeing, the head unmoving Moving to turn away...oh seely fly I can’t not see, can’t move to brush away From my unsleeping eyes, you veer In spirals unflattened into pathos Of careening chaos, your eccentric Flight path darts Through bars, oh alas, hairy Vibrant fly!