Stethoscope

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.