by Nathan Hoks
Chapter 4
I looked inside the red door and saw a frothy ocean in miniature on the third shelf. Above it were the self-help books, below it barrels of sand. I pulled a hammer off my belt and made like I was pounding nails into an invisible frame. Something started to collapse and the bus arrived.
Chapter 5
It’s not clear what any of it amounted to. I stuffed the papers in the drawer and turned the lights off and on. This is maybe what was meant by sandwich. Some of the paint dried on my skin. A dog barking. Heat rising off the asphalt. I smelled anchovies.
FAMILY OF THE EXTERIOR
I thought I was climbing then the climbing became building and I had a brick house and a family on top of a hill in a province known for olives and glovers. That winter we burned porcupine hides and warded off wolves with pink synthetic feathers. Curious, intelligent, the wolves began to trust me. Their dark eyes posed questions, and each answer opened new questions. Sphinxlike they’d poise themselves at the windows, watching for the feathers, licking their varnished teeth. Eventually the sun would cross the hill and blind them with its glare. They’d howl, so loud, so melodic, I called them my nightingales.
WINTER OF THE EXTERIOR
Once I had nothing but a fawn that came nightly to my window, bowed her head and nibbled at the pistachio nuts I’d scatter on the ground. We had a silent understanding: every moment spent gazing in each other’s eyes was a long voyage at sea. When winter came my knees began to ache. I dreamt I was water freezing and melting back and forth. There were no nights. Hopeless laughter sounded from the forest, a gray-bearded man came to drink from me. His eyes were the fawn’s and when I finally awoke, birds were flying back and forth outside the window. The falling snow gave off a heavy blue light. I could not lift my legs. The sun rose. The snow rose.
MESSAGE OF THE EXTERIOR
“Your eyes are the original lacerations, and every invading photon has been a primordial sponge mopping up the fungus of your inner life. So the task is simple: pour out the box and evaporate in lamplight.”
BUILDING THE SANDBOX OF THE EXTERIOR
I put on my orange shorts and dig into the ground careful not to slice the worms in half, and as I lay down the garden tarp I visualize a seaside resort full of tan oily bodies in perfect rows. So I go to the beach to harvest some sand but the beachgoers frown at the sight of a man in orange shorts pushing a wheelbarrow. I feel as though my skin were emitting a radioactive glow and contaminating the beachgoers and their lunches and the granules roiling in the backwash. So I don’t dig a hole. I don’t open my mouth. I pick up the shovel and turn away.
OUTLINE OF THE EXTERIOR (THE SUN)
1. The sun rises each time I pour a glass of water.
2. Because of it, I can see all the pieces.
a. The tools. The photos. The apple seeds.
3. Thank you, sun.
4. I’m not sure I’m anything but an eyeball.
5. And the sound of water comes from my stomach.
a. Inside out. I say it to myself each morning.
i. Drinking.
ii. Bathing.
6. And there you are, the sun.
a. Along for the ride, floating beside me.
b. A friend. A theory. A performer in my picture window.
7. The sun and the dog and the shadow on the grass.
8. You have a lot of work to do.
a. You warm up a glass of water.
b. You evaporate a lake.
c. And shrink a balloon.
9. How far away you are, sun, even in my chest.
a. Where I hold you all day and all night.
b. Where you practice swallowing my insides.
i. Alone.
ii. In the dark.
Their dark eyes posed questions
His eyes were the fawn’s
An original laceration
Careful not to slice the worms in half
CANDELABRA
When the baby cries it is because the light is on his head.
When the light crosses the patio, the sparrows cannot stand still.
When I drop the glass in the sink, I want to watch it shatter in the light.
The tunnel releases the eyes and pinches the light.
Alone with a tangerine: light in the backseat.
The smell of tarmac that has sat for hours in the light.
Is it possible to think darkness without also thinking light?
In the attic I was lulled to sleep by the buzzing light.
From the window to the floor, dust motes carry the light.
I used to think death was the body becoming light.
After sleeping on the beach I open my eyes to a pasture of light.
I am sitting down on top of the light; I am not killing it.
Between the CD and the coaster: the fresh patch of light.
Every night is an attempt to defy the light.
Next to the sink: wet lettuce drying in the light.
In what way is the mind a byproduct of light?
If the windows were any larger I could not stand the light.
Raindrops darting down the glass: falling prison cells of light.
THE ARCHITECT AND THE HAT
1
An architect is looking for his hat.
2
He constructs a watchtower from which he can survey the environs of his house and nearby property.
3
He designs a spiral staircase and archways that seem to disappear into the sky.
4
From the tower the architect admires the triangular trees and circular shrubs but he cannot spot his hat.
5
The hat was perhaps never real or in a blinding blue flash it vanished from his sight.
6
Though he has no idea where it is, the architect feels certain that his hat is full of wind.
7
Or of vapor.
8
The architect hates the voices he can hear from the tower’s 3rd-floor window. They distract him from thinking of and looking for his hat.
9
He imagines a giant ear growing from the dirt in the courtyard.
10
The architect builds the giant ear out of fiberglass. It is not as supple as the ear he imagined and he is disappointed with its curvature, but it solves the problem of the voices.
11
Now the architect is free from voices but he misses the sound of water running and the buses he used to hear storming through the streets of the adjacent neighborhood.
12
With all this sound hullabaloo he has forgotten his quest to find the hat.
13
In a dream once more he sees the hat controlling the stream beside the pine.
14
The hat tilts to the north.
15
The goldfinches drop suddenly to the ground and the stream freezes.
16
When he wakes up he can think of nothing but eating dessert.
17
Some ice-cream shops serve sundaes in upside-down baseball hats.
18
That’s not the kind of hat he’s looking for.
19
Exactly what kind of hat am I looking for? He shoves a spoonful of cereal into his mouth and crunches slowly.
20
To assist his memory the architect constructs a room where he assembles tiny replicas of various hats:
21
Fedoras. Berets. Derbies. Cowboy hats. Paperboy hats. Baseball hats.
22
None of them seems quite right.
23
The architect builds a narrow window to keep the outside out. He does not want the hats damaged by light or wind.
24
And he is afraid that a giant gr
een worm will come burrow a hole in his head as though it were an apple.
25
A hat would cover up the hole.
SPORES OF THE EXTERIOR
The carpet spawns miniature cities where men and women ride buses and subways through cavernous streets and tunnels. And even their animals are busy, pacing in the yards, looking at each other’s eyes as if they too believed in heaven.
MARIGOLD OF THE EXTERIOR
The marigold is a feeling I get before I sleep.
A performer in my picture window
Falling prison cells of light
A hat would cover up the hole
A feeling I get before I sleep
BAROMETER OF THE EXTERIOR
Sometimes I turn myself into rain.
Airplanes still take off.
Their motors give me shivers.
I paginate my memories.
Falling straight to the planet
I tear out the pictures of teats.
I curve my face around an apple.
Silence spills from the codebook.
The phone slips through the fingers.
The color red is a tunnel of plumage.
I am warm there. I feel ink
Seeping into my thigh there.
A singer steps into the automobile.
She is full of milk and resin.
She puts the frontal lobe on notice.
I tear out the diagram of the heart.
A mourning dove coos at the fire hydrant.
Droplets run in all directions.
TWITCH OF THE EXTERIOR
My left eye twitched, a communication from
The twitchy leaf detaching from the old oak tree,
Twitchy leaf about to fall to the grass, to be stomped
Into the mud or blown to another oak, to be torn
To shreds and swallowed by a rabbit, battered to
A pulp, digested and excreted, washed into
A brackish pool and smeared into the pavement—
Twitchy leaf that cannot fall asleep, cannot change
Its posture, revise its politics, sell its time, twitchy leaf
That cannot buy a book, make a note, feel despair,
Groan, belch, hesitate, burn the toast, take a bath,
Grade an essay, write a poem, rip a fingernail,
Stack the bottles in a pyramid on the patio,
Call Teddy over for fried eggs, burn the butter,
Crack the window, cut into the soft tomato
That had been sitting on the counter in the light.
SKY OF THE EXTERIOR
When sky comes out
Of the mouth
Should I break it—
Crack it open with
A spoon—spill its guts
Out on the sidewalk
Where an anthill
Was just demolished
By the three-year-old?
Militant sky ageless
And dark and swerving
Into flowers and eyes
I thought you were
Extraterrestrial but you are
An immigrant and
Something in your foot-
Step makes me stop
Frail and bloated and the
Definition of dog
Eludes me because of the
Dusk’s Scotch tape
Emanation.
Refugee sky’s not
An ornament or a
Brainless image flowering
In the dust cloud.
Maybe more of a clot—
Layered sky—
Dog ears up, I am your
Changeling asylum.
I am warm there
A singer steps into the automobile
A communication
Brainless image flowering
MOUTH OF THE EXTERIOR
I feel my mouth.
It is a child crying in a dark bed.
ANATOMY OF THE EXTERIOR
I feel depleted in my left ventricle
Because miniature vehicles of light
Race across the parking lot of
The convenience store where I am
Waiting for you, looking for you,
For your breath, your innumerable
Earrings spitting photons into the ether
Of my face, but I also feel so artificial,
So horribly glassy and ersatz in my
Liver and so alone in my diaphragm
That my innards are tied together
And even though the charts on my phone
Tell me which way to turn, my hands
Feel full of cold wet sand, and it’s
Uncomfortable the way the stripes
On my shirt are tied together
Spitting back the light so I feel all lit up
In the optic chiasma as though
The dark marble sky were coming down
To stymie the tear ducts where
I used to believe a small family lived
And they cleared out after the first snow.
STEAM OF THE EXTERIOR
I am watching the steam come off
A team of oxen grunting
In the cold spring morning.
Soon it will snow.
Tomorrow I have to have a tooth removed
And the snow will melt
And the cold spring morning
Will be perfect for working the team of grunting oxen.
I’ll watch the steam come off.
EDGE OF THE EXTERIOR
My mouth has become
The edge of me.
It spills outward
Like a spool of thread
Which I can use to stitch up
The rest of my face.
I am so afraid
Of this mouth
I keep it as far
From me as possible.
Here it is—
I hold it towards you.
ANIMAL OF THE EXTERIOR
A small animal leaps onto my chest. It spins its tail and gnashes frantically. It is free but unable to leap off me. It confuses itself with my chest hair. The ribcage imprisons it. The thuds drive its head into my guts. Its tail clutches my wrist. Its face becomes a hole spitting up the molecular void.
APPLE TREE OF THE EXTERIOR
I was in love with the apple tree, the invisible city that seemed to be growing inside it. Every time I walked by I became cloud. I liked watching myself disperse ten feet above the water tower.
*
I sat down beneath the tree to read the Poems of the Interior which I had hidden behind some fallen branches the night before. A drawing room had sprouted out of the ground. There, near the stack of paper, was an old couch and a piano and a glass of pinot noir.
*
I was building little versions of the apple tree when a breeze lifted my hat. For a moment I observed improvements in the theory of rationality. I stood in front of the orange garbage can contemplating a sandwich from the gas station.
*
On my way home I stopped at the forest to listen to all the things being born in the thickets. I have always admired that about life: it is webbed to the thicket. The branches take care of many details. Who’s coming over for dinner? A sunset.
Earrings spitting photons into the ether
Soon it will snow
I’ll watch the steam come off
Who’s coming over for dinner?
HEART OF THE EXTERIOR
I should mention that my heart is a vestibule and that I cannot keep it closed. It’s losing warm air and at night it looks up at me as if to say, “What is a vestibule, how come this chamber?” I will cut teeth out of the woodblocks and drop the
m in the vestibule. Its emptiness is my soul growing fronds, a few pines, a deciduous forest, and the dirt covers the teeth in silence.
LETTER OF THE EXTERIOR
I dread getting wet though I swim nearly every day. Water makes me feel like an exhausted word draped over a stick. When I open my mouth, a whale swims out and I am the hologram projected from its spout. From the unfading light I start comparing me to myself, which is impossible, but there’s enough paper and a table and I can’t help it.
I pick up the pen and write, “You are a blood-smeared lieutenant in the Royal Air Force. Now that your aircraft has crashed into a mulberry bush, it’s best to wander to the seaside to collect a bag of crabs, you who will see without eyes, you who will drink without a mouth. Your teeth burn; your words are a kind of fire scorching the exterior.
“When the sun rises, it is a cannonball exploding through a window, that glassy void blocking us from the wafting river sludge and birdcalls of morning.”