| Fred Muratori |
Subsidence left the continents, their cooling chimneys
dry and black against the newly-reddened atmosphere.
We have only myths as witnesses, like second minds
that know before we know yet ride our stooping shoulders
down the parrot dark, keeping silent as we strike out
to the left or right, both directions bent for sadness.
Regret was not invented or designed from need. It
was crosshatched in our molecules, embedded in soil,
waiting for attention. Choices, choices. Our hearts swoon
as if from joy or late Cretaceous winds. What can we do
to keep from being inevitable? We can create
the past that would've happened. You remember: sunlight
through the seams and contradictions, a yellow jungle
of geometry beyond the kitchen door, a breathing
sky. Ours, nearly ours. We did insist it in our bones.
A rhododendron so like love, no two incentives
match. Though one branch genuflects in homage to the earth,
another spirals upward in mimicry of chance.
How gracefully human beings will live another's life:
arms and kneecaps, the nuances of grin and tantrum.
You'd think it was the person people think the gestures
make, but then the facial tics, the halting lies, would
tip you off. Just like a falling tree, just like a rill
cut into diamonds, just like an acrobat in pain.
Touchstones everywhere retreating like huge ladybugs.
Yes, the parents whisper from their graves or shaded homes,
we wanted dearly to inform you, but..... Thanks a lot.
And so there are the pigeons in our chests, insomniac,
grizzlies at the windowpanes, invisible neighbors,
our time withdrawn like shallow pools of rain in sunlight.
Always a choice: French or Thousand Islands, Jesus or
Dracula. One team gets the fastest runner, one the
knock-kneed boy who carries Dostoyevsky in his hand.
A marriage might endure for fifty years, the couple
could divorce before their bedsheets dry. In new lives planned
on paper for a future less resigned and sullen,
people live like gods emeriti , their creations
so exact, so fused to pure ideal even music
seems a lesser thing, faltering and shopworn. The question
This or that? inspires jokes and nightclub acts, the perfect
norm as obvious as desert where a rainforest
used to be, unbreachable, unbalked, the goal sustained.
Life and death, like summer homes and winter homes, declare
their special uses, but even now begin to merge.
We resume our fates while meaning something opposite.
By the fountain people gather to examine it.
Its feathers heighten in the breeze, and the dogwood twig
it perches on sways, but the bird stays, examining
them back. I have never seen such colors says the man
whose dusty hat has blown across canyons and rested
in the shadows of fiery buttes. A woman whose dress
waves smoothly as a field of blue alfalfa before
a hailstorm says, It must be rare because it calms me..
Others nod and hum agreement without meaning to.
Two children, one of whom will see a planet not yet
known to us, run hide-and-seek among their parents' legs
and will not remember this moment, which plays no role
in the shaping of their souls. The bird raises its head
and takes flight, its wake a gold hem on the rolling air.
The people go their ways, bearing a fatal anger.
Meditation augurs failure. To huddle inward
means a station missed, cuffs uncaught on thorns intended
to present the rose, Charybdis hidden under ponds
of Monet's lily pads, under love too foolishly
professed. Had the world been cast for our amusement,
our enterprise and lust, we'd never heed our minds,
their interruptive voices like a mother's call to milk
and softened sheets, the bed from which we would not wake.
Our eyes would glide through blurring vistas, purposeful
but willing to be lured if new transgressions meant new
sight. Now every vantage snares us, words set words in chain
reaction through our heads until associations
blunt to proof, intentions dress as acts: a severed life
packed and waiting for two cabs. Configure it this way:
the rain mists lightly on a street, our minds wander.
THE OBVIOUS
Know the obvious or fear it. Why pretend the air
is empty? Here in our acute democracy each
person occupies a piece, then leaves it for the next,
undiminished or good as new -- or better -- with scents
of soap and lightly sauteed onions. Try striding through
5th Avenue at Christmas time and notice air change
hands, the street become a centipede of opposite
intents, flowing pros and cons in search of an hypothesis.
You might pass the very soul who knows what's innermost
about you -- what you force out of your mind at dawn
or else start work an animal. Look, there goes salvation
in a pair of skintight jeans! You missed it but it was
beautiful, and meant for you, its body heat still hanging
in the waiting space. We take the emptiness for fact,
that flagrant vacuum, so plainly personless, a guise.
Something in you falls, drops wincing to the cinder track.
You're unprepared. The white, paternal sun leans forward
till your shadow is a puddle at your knees. What advice,
what jade or mauve epiphany can urge you one more
step? What Batman rescues human souls? The world too late
acknowledges its losses, waiting till the canyon
and the riverbank drone out their silence, till oceans
freeze to countertops for lack of leaping fish. One day
you and all your insides ambled carelessly among
the crowds, cashing checks and reading labels, investing
kindness and hostility and unprovoked belief,
tripping on extended leashes, ducking out of rain.
Life was locomotive : crazy movement, unreasoned
purpose. It has once more to be that, shoplifted time
passing hand to random hand, to no hand more than once.
THE APPEARANCES
Time takes shape or seems to only as it disappears:
a tulip lost in fields of matted weeds, something in
the eye that exits only when the weeping starts,
when other, better selves work free of sublimation,
telling us they could have, could have been had we become
them as we'd wished, before the wishes stopped and turned to
day on day on day of movement for the sake of movement,
an army of alternatives dismissed for want of interest.
The layering continues, the coarse protective strata
build until the earth is no more than a muffled
pied-a-terre equipped with beds and mirrors, shades and
dead bolt locks, its clocks all hurrying to start again.
Some people have their memories embossed or bronzed or
published as if true, still fish poured from buckets over
ice for our consumption, so alien we think they move.
BACHELORS
Devoid of daughters here, for each of them is fated
to the tabletop as though to white Moroccan sand
and heads lift not to light but only to shadow,
passing motion just a flicker on the iris
which washes out to rim unfeelingly, mechanical,
the ball-and-socket block-and-tackle clockwork
meshing at a level so interior and unsurmised few
instruments can plumb its measure. Listen flush
with them to no essential music but the brush
of silver knives on china, sighs well-spersed
and nectar slow. Admire linen suits unchinked
by accident or faux pas at the velvet rope. Say
nothing on your way home of the love remaindered,
of air that seems euphoria spread thin enough
to pass for struggle, or for struggle that has ended.
In an effort to contain the poems' conceptual instabilties within
defined yet correspondingly unstable forms, they have been
composed in fifteen-line sequences consisting -- with very few
exceptions --of thirteen-syllable lines.