To Keep Love Blurry

by Craig Morgan Teicher

  whether he still has what he once had.

  Is impressed with how promises of sadness

  are so often fulfilled. Wishes he could push restart.

  Understates. Is accustomed to therapy.

  Plans to pull his inner and outer lives apart.

  Hopes online is where love becomes clear.

  Doesn’t know his friends. Cannot make it cohere.

  Just got cable. Is unable to state his decision.

  Feels like a knife balancing on its own incision.

  Home

  You leave your emotions all over the apartment

  like the empty glasses you leave all over

  the apartment, wine rings at the bottom, dregs

  I mostly fail to scrub out. I feel you

  seething under every paper towel, starched

  and stained with coffee and applesauce.

  I pick them off tables like a quiet maid.

  You know I shiver at the mess, left in trade

  for the piles of my books left blocking,

  then killing your thirsty plant, for the dishes

  piled high in the sink until you can’t

  rinse your hands or find a fork. You spread

  your books across my side of the bed.

  While you sleep I press my foot against your leg.

  Fame

  I sleep like a rock usually, snoring like a rock grinder.

  Mostly it’s Brenda who can’t fall asleep—any reminder

  of tomorrow’s work, or today’s, makes her thoughts spin.

  When I’m worried awake, it’s mostly about dying, or Cal, alone—

  who will take care of him when Brenda and I are dead?

  But sometimes I like to think of my writing with sweet pity.

  It’s a delicious hurt, this kind of self-indulgent drone

  in which two of tomorrow’s readers remember me:

  “He was a prolific small press poet, good, not great.

  His wife was a major writer. I think I used to own, or read,

  one of his books—it was sarcastic, grumpy, and grim.

  A very minor Robert Lowell, with a dash of James Tate,”

  is what I imagine they’ll say when they look back,

  “and he died sometime in the 2030s of a heart attack.”

  The Past Ahead

  I find myself looking forward to the past,

  confident remembering will lengthen it,

  that even forgetting will make it last

  a little longer, as all the amassed

  memory returns in flashes bit by bit.

  It seems so accessible, so near, the past,

  as though it were my own very vast

  place, neither behind nor ahead, easy to visit.

  The fact that it doesn’t last

  makes no sense. I hardly have to cast

  thoughts backward before I inhabit

  —so why not look forward to?—the past,

  full of real things I can pick up—the glass

  dancer my mother loved, the statuette

  my father bought her for their last

  anniversary, the anniversary of which just passed.

  She’s dead; that’s all that caused their split.

  She’s all I’d go back for; otherwise the past

  is forgettable at last. The dead last.

  Like an Answer, Yes

  Death will come like a cool glass of water,

  like one among the countless leaves you see,

  like a car, any car, driven by a son or daughter,

  and like an answer, yes, but there are so many

  for each question, and, anyway, the right one

  is only right when it happens to be.

  It will come in a last breath, or just after breath is gone,

  or just before a first breath, or one squarely

  in between, a deep breath, say, along your daily run.

  It will come like a wish fulfilled, a wish barely

  made, which, once granted, is always

  different than what you wished. Be safe; wish warily.

  It will come like money, which usually pays

  the same—there’s always less and always more.

  It will come like a messenger from yesterday,

  who, though you can’t enter, holds open a door,

  or, even before you bring her home, your new wife,

  who is already carefully keeping score.

  But it’s not death that scares you. It’s the rest of your life.

  BOOK TWO: A CELEBRATION

  Beginnings for an Essay in Spite of Itself

  I can’t precisely say how but I always knew, for instance, I might. Yet in my dream he was standing and dirty playing in the dirt while those of us on the committee drank and deliberated and our dear one took care distractedly. I have to go somewhere in a car. And so it begins. Or so it begun, and it goes on.

  I’m thinking of something. It almost starts as a finished product, loose, changing (kind of like how Saul Bellow used to phone Ringo Starr all hours of the night), so things won’t feel out of place or, worse, rejected. It might be what goes on in that head of his.

  Because ninety-nine percent of secrets are kept by accident, those revealed on television let alone social media account for less than the way the sun is so small. It can’t be seen from another vantage point in the universe, should anyone attain such a perspective alone. The phone rings, but I wouldn’t have wanted to answer it.

  I don’t believe any of that about the self in the world being parceled out, not really being the self, and I have no faith whatsoever that the “I” in one sentence bears any relation to the “I” in the next. The reader could close his or her eyes and reopen them on someone else’s prose.

  Ever in the midst of a fashion show, the heart is concerned about career. The part of you that was laughing at you is still laughing at you though now another part, not the one the first part was laughing at, but another that was watching for a while, is laughing at the laughing part.

  The most painful are the things you would do most tenderly. An ending isn’t a cure for anything, yet, as a child, I believed myself fated for greatness or luck so dismal it could be a kind of greatness. But I would still have had to make all these choices, which is why all poetry has been suspended.

  The earth and moon will fall out of orbit if either closes its eye. So it is with the two of us. I want to have the nature of an essay—a hypothesis, proofs, a conclusion—crossed with that of a confession (here is what I did and why; I regret but would not have done otherwise)—but the various sentences should ignore each other, have ends that simply won’t knit together. Perhaps in the middle the piece could mention itself as a clue.

  But is it truly suffering if you survive, are remade, even enhanced? Is suffering an upgrade, a walkway toward booby-trapped tune-ups? Whoever answers gets $3,000 from the Administration for the Preservation.

  Bragging rights to him who suffers most, to him who suffers most dramatically. The performance of suffering is a social contract between person and pain and fans taking notes against the dawning of their own pain, like the day a ship first leaves port marked with a soldier’s beautiful scar.

  A nest of flowers: what made it? A bird?

  If only I could start to speak from his vantage point rather than my own, to know what he does, to be one of them, lucky few. Every night for an hour in his bed crying like a staple in his foot like he wants to spit up blood before finally letting himself fall.

  He was so tired, speaking of the luck when a lion crosses your path.

  Life is not an antidote to itself. That’s how plaque was discovered between most library books. Snow fell, denoting a required field. You have mixed feelings aboard the train speeding from love to love, where you can sense me grinding.

  Thank you for grinding. You could be so sad if only you’d try. She who looked upon you would weep. She who touched you would grow cold. She who talked with you hours into the night w
ould tomorrow find only water where her ears had been. She who promised her life to you would have all the tears she wanted and good company beside every deathbed.

  I wanted my story sideways, without asking anything of anyone or presuming I felt anything anyone else couldn’t. I wanted, finally, to author a story that wasn’t mine in particular, but belonged to me and anyone who read it, a story no one would be jealous of or shun, a story no one would ask questions about nor be able to anticipate, a spontaneous story as old as a fable, a story someone could give back to me as a gift. I’d be so grateful.

  Grief: A Celebration

  Heaven must be dying on time

  at the end of a long life, family

  at hand, goodbyes hovering

  like hummingbirds, which,

  if one is absolutely still,

  sometimes land on a finger and sip

  honey as if from nowhere. One would feel

  full as at the end of a rare meal

  prepared by an old friend, for which

  one has brought a dessert to say

  thanks. Whatever one feared,

  it did not come to pass, as it never

  does, at least not quite

  as one feared. There is nothing

  to regret because all has been

  forgiven, and, anyway, this was

  a trial run. And so, when

  a newly-minted angel

  of death comes to the door—she has just

  earned her wings, her flight

  was unsteady—your family offers

  a drink and a seat at the table, which,

  of course, she politely declines,

  before you joyfully take her hand,

  walking backwards toward the exit,

  both of you blowing kisses and

  laughing like newlyweds boarding a cruise.

  The distance between us is

  actually composed of time

  more than space, though there is space

  between us, too, but it’s not

  as important. Celebration

  can be a kind of grieving, an aspect of grief

  and vice versa, which is to say

  grief is not necessarily sad. I’m lucky

  to have had these few loved ones

  die on me, and these few others

  live on as though dying, on the

  very edge of death, an impurity

  that nonetheless cleanses, like

  the subtext of a very long,

  meandering sentence trailing off.

  Adulthood came early,

  swooping like a hungry owl, beautiful

  and dangerous. That

  is what I wish someone would offer:

  absolution. Great responsibility

  overcame me, an illness, a revelation

  as when in Swann’s Way little Marcel

  is absolved, his “unhappiness . . . regarded

  no longer as a punishable offense

  but as an involuntary ailment which had been

  officially recognized.” Is a few more

  hours of childhood so much to ask? No,

  but it is far too much to grant.

  And who might one ask, anyway,

  without annoying them?

  The children everyone loves seem to know

  the answers already; they ask

  the questions just to be polite.

  Nobody knows at the beginning.

  Only gradually, as the beginning

  begins to end, and then after it’s over,

  but before the very end, does the self

  reveal to the self what the self

  has always known.

  There are some things you don’t

  write down, not secrets, just facts

  beneath the necessity of articulation,

  of a minor frequency, a local broadcast

  in the beat-up, way-out town

  in your heart, where some uncles live

  without wives or other serious ties

  to women. These are things you know

  to be true, which would be truer

  if you found words for them,

  as if they were discovered by someone else

  who told the whole school before

  you got there one fateful morning.

  Don’t pretend there isn’t a high school

  in you you just can’t graduate:

  you’re not popular there, but at least

  everyone knows who you are.

  It’s one place you’ll always belong.

  Another one about trying to grasp

  time, to grip it like a rough rope

  sliding through blistering hands,

  in which each of his chances

  scuttles beyond him, in which he

  imagines that through description, naming,

  he might make more of his time.

  Let’s get to work, try and calm down.

  Let’s be nice for a change. Who are we?

  It’s the two of us—you and me—or just

  myself and another self, also mine,

  but less so, like a little cousin,

  a drop without a pool to join.

  Is it strange that I sometimes feel

  like an intruder in someone else’s home town,

  despite, or because of, having been invited?

  The mind is a little party where one stands

  in the corner and waits

  for a fantasy girl to stroll up

  and coax one into conversation. Of course

  she won’t, so one is merely waiting

  for an appropriate chance to leave.

  As soon as one such occasion

  disappears, another comes into focus.

  What would it feel like to live

  forever? Would you forget sometimes

  and assume your death was inevitable,

  that this might be your last taste,

  only to be struck dumb, suddenly robbed

  of your appetite, when you recall

  that you have more time ahead of you

  than the gods, who will die

  just before you do, when the last atom

  of your faith expires, O old one.

  Even the gods have their doubts.

  Even they can’t scratch every itch.

  If you could feel no pain, wouldn’t you

  long for it, try and try to hurt yourself

  just for a change? Even the gods need a break.

  And there’s description: as if

  to get into words, and therefore into

  the mind, what the eyes

  or the ears or the fingers detect

  could keep the fleeting world

  from fleeing. Who hasn’t

  chosen a particularly delicious

  memory over, say, a tedious half hour

  while a band plays and everyone

  is watching them, no one watching you?

  You’re free to think? Words are souvenirs.

  If I could be anywhere now, wouldn’t I?

  Not because I would make different

  choices, but because it pains me

  to think that I now no longer

  have the option to have made

  different choices. Which is another way of saying

  no matter what we did we would end up

  at the end of the long hallway without

  doors or turns, just a straight,

  inevitable passage, like a bad idea.

  Nothing feels right. Feelings

  are like someone else’s clothes.

  Nonetheless you might be identified.

  I make lists when I’m most afraid,

  as though, if I just keep at it,

  I will finally get home to where

  my mother and me are how we were.

  Life is as fragile as a sheet of bible paper.

  There is only one world, and no one makes it

  all the way there. I say things like that

&
nbsp; to myself to explain everything I love,

  which is trending toward decay.

  You are always preparing, preparing,

  and then nothing happens,

  an eventuality for which you were unprepared.

  At the very core of fear is the obvious,

  too deep to see and too simple to understand—

  professionals have died trying, their bones

  lining the path that leads

  to the answer, which is complex

  but also the same text as the one

  inscribed on a plaque by the entrance.

  I have yet to meet anyone so different

  from anyone else I’ve met. I even recognize

  myself reflected in the puddles of others’

  mistakes. Did you ever notice how

  they pool, making rainbows?

  Upon first publication, each page

  is like a temple along the pilgrimage

  to that most holy shrine, The End.

  And so I took the easy way, if only

  because I was surprised I found it.

  I’ve been tempted since to try the hard way,

  just to compare or to have something to say

  to the next in line. But there are some steps

  you can’t retrace, because something

  swept over the footprints behind

  or I really wasn’t paying attention. It seems

  —doesn’t it?—like the whole world is erased.

  There really is no distinction

  between worship and superstition.

  The heavens are wide enough to hold

  everyone’s cries, but too wide

  for anyone to hear them. You have

  the very pervasive sense that if you just

  keep talking you’ll make it,

  though embarrassment is only a symptom

  of what truly unsaddles you.

  You are almost across the covered bridge.

  Once on the other side, though, you’ll see

  another bridge, this one uncovered.

  The snake swallows its tail despite the taste.

  You imagine yourself old amongst trophies:

  the thick volume of collected works,

  dozens of toothy children beaming