by Kate Hall
the golden mountain. They’ve had a hard time
proving something non-existent doesn’t exist.
Meinong allowed for all logical
subjects of sentences to have some kind of being.
When the crate of giant cockroaches arrives,
I don’t know whether or not to find it reassuring.
(b)
When the window cleaner spills
into the sink and runs down the drain,
I try to imagine all the fish suddenly going
belly-up but all I can worry about is
the dirty mirror. When seen as a drip from a tap,
water is not remarkable. But what we rarely
consider is that water is more dense
as a liquid than as a solid. At the end,
Tennyson was so short-sighted
he couldn’t see to eat without an eyepiece.
As a child I was afraid to go to sleep
in case I didn’t wake up again and went to hell.
I can’t remember when fear was replaced
with resignation and I moved into the apartment
behind the funeral home. On an exam,
one of the essay questions was Speculate as to why
‘Crossing the Bar’ has been ‘criticized for
a falling off in the last stanza.’ What could be
more obvious? What I wanted to know was
why is God the pilot instead of the compass?
You can’t end with a poem about the end;
the poem is always a precursor.
There’s a bestseller that documents the suicide notes of
famous people. One guy addressed his note to
the whole world and said he was just bored.
Narcissus fell into himself because of
light rays and surface tension.
Virginia Woolf collided with herself.
She listened to herself talking to
herself and finally understood
she wasn’t going to recover from any of it.
IV. Methodology
We get jobs stuffing experience
into manila envelopes. I put
the Thousand Islands in one of mine,
hanging on to each by the pine trees
and dropping them in one by one.
It’s scary to loom this large in
the world of tiny experiences.
People are the size of ants. They’ll
carry their small purses and backpacks
and go about their business
while you can pick up the whole of France.
Somebody tells me they’re not sure
this is the right way to do it, and oh,
the trembling of insecurity. I look for
the big boss and finally suspect everyone is
doing the same thing and no one really knows
whether it’s just a lunch break or the boss is
on permanent leave. So we continue
using sticker labels and writing in various
coloured pens and making it up as we go.
When the corners get torn and torn again in
the process, things sift out. Usually the finest grains
go first; usually that’s us. Sometimes I have to
imagine places I have never been and
stuff them in secretly. Sometimes I wish
the job satisfaction survey was
a multiple-choice questionnaire. There’s a point at which
we realize we have nowhere
to send anything. It’s amazing
how the envelopes start to pile up.
V. Results
What’s really happening is happening
simultaneously in secret in the attic while
I’m busy watching the morning cartoons. I buy a lot
and build a house and everything
goes well until it starts sinking into
sediment. The ground is still the same
ground I paid for but the house is not in the same spot.
The problem is the frequency with which our diagnostic
strategies fail, the gigantic margin reserved for
wrong guesses. We’re cellular interactions
and brain chemicals we don’t even understand.
We sent two robotic vehicles to Mars.
They survived there much longer than we expected.
Scientists speculate Mars might once have had water on its surface.
I hope there was an inland sea on Mars.
I don’t want us to be alone
in this expanding, black space.
It’s winter. I put on my mitts and wrap my scarf tightly
over my ears. The snow is so different
from anything I can think about it.
These were not the results I was expecting.
I had hoped for so much more.
VI. Discussion
(a)
Faced with a choice of lures
in the bait-and-tackle shop, I was forced
to rely on visual composition. In the absence
of any fishing experience, it became
a kind of Rorschach test. I chose
spinner pattern 208, meaning I chose a tool for
dark days or waters where the forage base was
crayfish and other dark species.
The literature said the fish would bite. To achieve this
required a lot of subterfuge. Each cast
had a plink that started a lure spinning
and blinking under the surface. Down there,
it must have looked like a beacon, but
this is a trompe l’oeil.
Sometimes I get the urge to scream warnings
at the fish as I reel them in.
I never want to be the one to pull the heart out
and watch it beat its final struggle on the granite rock
but when someone else does I am happy to sit and watch.
The lake becomes a doctored environment.
When the fish get wise, we’ll think of something else.
Philosophy warns that it’s important
to establish a basis for distinguishing
between persons, or between processes, in
classical demon-worlds. The ducks are really tragic.
They look at decoys and think
they’ve actually found someone else.
(b)
I have followed the only line of
inquiry available to me, and still I think
I’ll be judged epistemically defective.
Experience is a starting point
for speculation, a point of departure
from which there are delays
at the baggage counter, delays
at security, until eventually
the flight is cancelled
due to mechanical complications.
The weather channel is often wrong,
but when the sun and snow have already
happened, they make gorgeous graphs
that make a lot of sense of it.
Dad, your heart is working like
a leaky battery. This can be explained
by electrical impulses and wear.
An ultrasound specialist sees
the shape of the imperfect container.
He’s a stranger but he has a better picture
of our internal organs than we do.
I try to follow the rules of responsible
evidence-gathering. Cardiologists don’t necessarily
read the ecg, they learn to listen
for the faltering beat, diagnosing problems
by sound. NASA’s probe
burned up in the Martian atmosphere
as a result of a simple error: they forgot
to convert to metric. A team of investigators later concluded the
mission planners hadn’t envisioned the mission as a whole.
I’m not justified in my beliefs and I don�
��t really care.
In a room full of thirty people there’s a 71 percent
chance that two of them will have
the same birthday. Every now and then, the forecast is
dead on. And no matter how much evidence
I’ve gathered about the storm,
the storm is still its own thing.
VII. Conclusion
Tracking a package can be so easy,
going backward from any point to
the source. Other times, my watch
falls off my wrist and I don’t notice
until I reach for it and it’s gone.
You are like an old cotton sweater –
your bones clasped together by ligaments
slowly losing shape and deteriorating.
The twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity,
were abandoned on the red planet.
There was never any intention of bringing them back.
The watch was an expensive thing to lose.
The clasp on my necklace keeps giving way,
which is a kind of certainty I’m waiting to lose as well.
I’m waiting to find myself
huddled in the empty bathtub. Some days I wonder
if I ever had a watch in the first place.
I cried through your speech about money
and mortgages. I didn’t want to know
that you could add up so many things
and have them equal less than nothing.
INSOMNIA
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
I wouldn’t ask for a mattress
or decorate. I wouldn’t ask for beautiful.
I’d let the philosophers in,
but not into my bed.
They’d arrive cradling their brass instruments.
I might let them play
but only very softly and only if
they didn’t fight or sing.
If I were to sleep, there wouldn’t be any windows.
There would be a skylight,
but in the middle of the floor.
I’d press my face against the glass
and stare down at other floors upon floors upon floors …
I’d do a sleep dance right on top of the skylight.
It would be a new game.
It would involve amazing feats of sleep contortion.
It would involve letters.
If I were to sleep, I would be spread-eagled across the bed,
and even with the iron struts and screws cutting into my back,
I would protect the metal frame.
I would protect the springs.
STORY TO CRANBERRIES
And I will call you obelisks and you will call me nothing cranberries. And something cranberries will be made into sauce and the turkey will be stuffed with not toast. And the cranberries. Turkey prepared with pumpkin seeds and it cranberries. The blackbird comes crow eats and shits also cranberries. Underground he fed her kept her part-time cranberries. And everything the king touched it cranberries became solid in here cranberries. Is arbitrary and confusing and I am lost in it. Continue. Everything moves forward because you cranberries.
SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT
There is a cat outside my front door.
Sometimes I have a headache and I wonder what it’s from.
It could be a tumor, something I have made
from some crazy cells rioting in my brain.
Sometimes when I’m not at home I wonder
if the cat is still waiting outside my front door.
I bathe in futility. I try to make it fun.
I lose my toothbrush and I don’t even try to find it
because there are so many stores.
I count on this fact.
There’s a square composed of flat polygon tiles.
You’re supposed to make a tiled elephant. It’s classic.
I want to make a cat. I want to pull the cat out of the box
and make sure he’s okay. I don’t want him
to suffer in anyone’s thought game.
Decay, even on the atomic level, is cruelty to animals.
At night I think about my overdeveloped sense of intuition.
It’s not really a sense but it makes me happy.
It allows me to think I know without looking.
Sometimes it occurs to me that one day
all the stores are going to be closed.
One day I’m going to commit some kind of cruelty
and it will probably be toward myself. I might not know it
until I get a headache. I really want the cat to be outside
licking his paws. I want him to drop dead birds on my doorstep.
Someday I’m going to have to get up and turn on the
porch light and check for him. The cat is made of polygons.
When he swishes his tail I hear the ivory tiles clicking.
At night he climbs the tree next to my bedroom window.
I sleep with my back to it.
THIS IS A DREAM LETTER
1
this is where the throat gives way and the Achilles tendon
we glimpse our black dog at the edge of the forest
we try not to stare
his ribs can be accounted for, his hip bones
this is the version where you bear up the universe
you build an animal skeleton
you breathe life back into the dry bones
this is where I want you to empty your pockets
this is the version where you approach from across the field
and this is where we go gently
and this is where you rip out our intestines and stroke our hair
and this is where the water seeps in
2
this is where the throat gives way and the Achilles tendon
where I don’t want you to breathe on me
the ball of twine and the horse become one thing
this is where I am weighed in the balance and found wanting
this is the version where the lion is prowling the house
tell me why you think we’re a diptych
tell me again
this is where we’re backed into a corner
and this is where you offer the dog a femur, smash a hole in his head
and this is where we peer in
and this is where we watch the dog crawl around blindly
PASCAL’S WAGER
‘If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.’
– Blaise Pascal
We have a stainless steel pepper grinder.
When the kitchen light is turned on
there is another bubbled room reflected in the bulbous top.
This is the problem: duplicity is always shining
forth from ordinary objects.
Pascal developed his equations because he was losing
at cards and dice. We like to play games but only if
we get to keep our shirts.
At the casino, striped ties and slinky dresses
are calculations. We show a lot of skin. We’re practically naked.
I waitress at a restaurant with limestone walls.
Pasta is the cheapest thing on the menu.
It’s very popular.
It’s my job to grind pepper for the customers.
What I’ve learned is this:
some people like a lot of pepper and some people don’t.
You can never tell.
Pascal understood that probability is triangular in nature.
Cardan was also working on this problem
for noble reasons. He was in debt.
In an amazing act of clairvoyance he accurately predicted
the date of his own death. He had the probability thing down.
&nb
sp; He marked the cards and rigged the dice.
They arrested him when he discovered Jesus Christ
was a Capricorn. Cardan loved pepper. I can sympathize.
I used to be a croupier.
I liked watching the dice roll across the green felt,
especially because it wasn’t my shirt.
Pascal, I think God would know
you were hedging your bets.
Cardan hedged too. He committed suicide.
The God equation is absolutely clear.
God could be hiding inside the pepper grinder
and there you are, shredding him to bits
on top of your farfalle, gobbling him up
with the chunks of tomatoes and kalamata olives.
What are the odds? You can never be certain.
POEM TO RENOUNCE MY RENOUNCING
My apologies for not titling you
Your Grace or Captain or
Father. In the end
you didn’t call the unearthly
coast guard to pull me
from the shoal when I’d had enough
and couldn’t drive the boat
home. Unfortunate as you will deem it,
I’m taking it all back, each little thing,
and placing it inside
the old blue steamer trunk. The one
with the faded orange tag, specifying
my name, destination, occupation:
tourist and instructs HOLD.
When my possessions are all there, together
as in the beginning, before
I learned to flush shit away and leave
myself empty and porcelain,
I’m going to climb inside
with all my crappy belongings and
breathe until I can’t breathe
anymore. But permit me to hold on
to my wickedness. Just that.
ONLY IN SHORT SENTENCES
the lady asked directions
to the pier the same pier
buttressing every seaside town