Tom Sleigh

Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual Motion machine of the waves. Everything still Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we Walked that shore, too earnest and sheepish To hold hands? The wind cutting through our clothes Cleansed and burned, the chill off the Atlantic An ache we courted in our dumbstruck talk: Callow, expectant, what wouldn’t love give? Cavalcanti’s ray from Mars, Dante’s wheel that moves The planets and the stars, how nervous We were, awkward and shivering: “Like this, Do you like it like this?” Up all night, Then waking to the smell of flannel and sweat, We lay grateful, winded, goosefleshed in the chill, Our own atmosphere rich and breathable: We drank round the clock, embracing extremes, Too hurried and heartsore to think of time… Out fishing after midnight, we watched schools of squid Slide and shimmer, tentacles tight-wrapped Around our gig’s hooks: Yanked from the water, They spouted jets of ink, then pulsed and quivered And faded to dead-white, their eyes, resigned and sober, Opening wider and wider…Ten years more, And will either of us remember That ink sticky on our hands, the moon-glare Rippling as we knelt underneath the pier And scrubbed and scrubbed our hands in the dark water?

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK, but he seemed to come apart, not literally I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole: Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping as he panted and began to roar. His balls sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle rusted in midair. Somebody or something I read once said that when Jesus had his vision of what his father, God, would do to him, that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross, pieces of a body appearing through flashes of sun, as if the body in his vision was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso, everything come unmagnetized from the soul: the lion caught me in his stare not at or through me but fixated on the great chain of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that a zebra might gallop in — black and white stripes marking longitudes of this world turning to meat, bloody meat — this vision of an inmate that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by making a cageless cage with glass instead of bars — though the lion didn’t seem to care, he was roaring for his keepers to bring him food, so everything’s what it should be if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion seem concerned about having gone a little crazy, barking incessantly so I could see the plush, hot pink insides of its throat, though like the lion through the glass there’s this distortion, my reflection I’m looking through that makes me float above the zoo: and now this silence at closing time pours like a waterfall in different zones of silences that, pouring through my head, surround roaring, barking, human muttering — is any of that what being sounds like? Or is it just animal gasping like what Jesus must have heard from the thieves hanging beside him, one damned, one saved? What was in his heart when his vision clarified and he saw it was a hand he recognized that the nail was driving through?

intensity and height I want to write, but only foam comes out, I want to say so much but it’s all crap — there aren’t any numbers left that can’t be added up, nobody writes down pyramids without meaning it. I want to write, but I’ve got a puma’s brains; I want to crown myself with laurel, but it stinks of onions. There’s no word spoken that doesn’t dissolve in mist, there’s no god and no son of god, only progress. So come on, to hell with it, let’s go eat weeds, eat the flesh and fruit of our stupid tears and moans, of our pickled melancholy souls. Come on! Let’s go! So what if   I’m wounded — let’s go drink what’s already been drunk, let’s go, crow, and find another crow to fuck. hat, coat, gloves Right in front of the Comédie-Française is the Regency Cafe; and right inside it, there’s this room, hidden, with a table and an easy chair. When I go in, house dust, already on its feet, stands motionless. Between my lips made of rubber, a cigarette butt smolders, and in the smoke you can see two intensive smokes, the cafe’s thorax, and in that thorax an oxide of elemental grief. It matters that autumn grafts itself into other autumns, it matters that autumn merges into young shoots, the cloud into half-years, cheekbones into a wrinkle. It’s crucial to smell like a madman who spouts theories about how hot snow is, how fugitive the turtle, the “how” how easy, how deadly the “when.” best case Look, at the very best, I’m someone other — some guy who walks around marble statues, who enters his adult clay into indexes of blood, and feels the rage and fear of the fox chased to its hole — and if someone anoints my shoulders with indigos of mercy, I’ll declare to my absent soul that there’s no hellishly paradisal elsewhere for me to go. And if they try to choke me on the sea’s wafer, telling me it tastes like His flesh, more acid than sweet, like Kant’s notions of truth, I’ll cough it all up:No, never! I’m other as a germ, a satanic tubercle, a moral ache in a plesiosaur’s molar: in my posthumous suspicions, all bets are off! another day of life I’ll die in my apartment on a cold bright day, with nobody around, the apartment next door gone dead still while wind whistles through the balcony, though the branches somehow aren’t moving, just as the sun doesn’t move, everything’s so quiet, so frozen. Parked cars, plastic bags bleached in the bare trees, a couple of those Mylar balloons tied to a chair on the balcony next door, celebrating something, maybe? ... now sagging listless on the floor, as if every last molecule had been pierced by a needle — Tom Sleigh is dead, he stared up into the air, the sky was pale blue as usual and he couldn’t feel the cold coming through the window, and there wasn’t much to say or not say — and nobody, anyway, to say or not say it. my jailer won’t weep to be my liberator My cell’s four walls, whitening in the sun, keep counting one another — but their number never changes, despite my jailer’s innumerable keys to chains wrenching the nerves to their extremities. The two longer walls hurt me more — who knows why — their salt-stained cracks like two mothers who die after labor, but give birth to twin boys whose hands they still hold. And here I am, all alone, with just my right hand to make do for both hands, raising it high into the air to search for the third arm that between my where and my when will father this crippled coming-of-age of a man. insomnia is the only prayer left How childish is the spectacle of the stained glass’s holiness: the night doesn’t give a shit what goes on inside human beings, the night has its own web of dendrites refuting the inane prayers prayed for the dying, for the confessions going on between earthworms and earth, between the way a man argues with his own shoulder bones. All the while, barracudas in a coral canyon, a sea turtle flying, swim through fathoms and fathoms of images that keep crashing on the shore of the eye that never shuts — and smarts in its sleeplessness staring up into the dark shadowed by stingrays, gas stations, the slow flapping wing of a lottery ticket.

1 Out the barred window sandbags in a sagging wall surround the guard post where a soldier half-hidden by the flag holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost. It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps pulled tight over the troop trucks. Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys, telling some joke in Arabic in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”: I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations, the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged room while a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares, If you sleep in a cemetery,you’re bound to have nightmares. 2 No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy, the head is its own country obstinately surviving, the pupil of   its one eye peering through the glass’s pure transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic, long-legged thighs almost like an obscenity the eye watches over — no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marks from tank-treads scarring the concrete to give any of   it drama — and what about the way the lips’ frozen smirk keeps daring me to touch the sexless V between the thighs staring up at me? 3 The barracks dissolve into a reef   of   rubble in the fog. On either side of the road, crater after crater flashes with glints of glass, plastic bags, a chair leg clinging to a dismembered chair. The TV station, the power stacks thrusting up through mist, the black-bearded posters and banners strung across the streets lead to an absolute nowhere: all that’s left in the emptied town after the army pulled out are PSYOPS leaflets fluttering up around the car that winds down the coast road deeper into mist, headlights probing like instruments in a wound they illuminate the more they violate.