with their leaves like words in a dictionary
you can imagine touching
but never quite reach
and feel a little power and wonder
who is truly happy
the tyrant was a very geometric planner
so he built these boulevards
and homes with their metal mansard roofs
that tilt a little backward
making attics
people like to live in
even though the rain
is loud as it falls easily off of the metal roofs into the street
outside the window I see green leaves moving
closer to each other in the breeze
over a comically diminutive black electric car
a woman wearing a blue cloak
touches a device in her hair
this morning you left
by means of the futuristic light-rail system
today my mouth
is an artificial lake
I am too tired to swim across
later I will read
but for now I must sit very still
and think of the city
as a body that changes
and probably will not live forever
or an instrument that plays a giant song
no one will ever be large enough to hear
roads lead to the peripheries
dizzyingly through the two chief lungs
which are two great forests
full of trees filtering the air
my particular lime green railing
tings
again the song begins
This Handwriting
This afternoon I heard
the small voice speaking again,
though no one was there.
I could not hear the words
though from the helpless
complicated tone I knew
it was something like
someday you will realize
you already know you must go
elsewhere to be free.
Maybe the white island
with just a few necessary buildings
you saw once from above
as if you were flying.
All your friends in gentle
laughing disputation are already
waiting. For now I settle
for trying to picture
each of their faces.
But when I close my eyes
I just keep seeing this horrible
actual sunny floor I have
scattered pages of my handwriting
on, searching for a pattern.
And also this table. Upon
it lies a yellow book containing
a translation of the half-burned
gospel that says often Jesus
kissed Mary on the mouth.
Reading it makes me feel
as if the true future like the son
of a dethroned king long ago
hid in a cave, trying to silence
its breathing. The great
black indeterminate stallion
pounded implacably by.
Now there is only silence
like an auditorium after
a modern composition
had just finished perfectly
destroying our foolish
cherished ideas of music.
When I think very hard
about my thoughts they seem
to me to be very small horses
attached to invisible reins
attached to facts. And what
of my memories? Like sleeping
in daylight. A decade ago
I lived in Massachusetts,
a shallow terrible installation
leaking smoky versions
of myself, each in turn
emitting weak soluble ideas
like people care only because
they do not even know
they feel they must. And now
I am here in California,
happy to be though always
part of me is thinking of my friends
and their shadows, patiently
waiting for my shadow to join them.
IV
Come On All You Ghosts
1
I heard a little cough
in the room, and turned
but no one was there
except the flowers
Sarah bought me
and my death’s head
glow in the dark key chain
that lights up and moans
when I press the button
on top of its skull
and the ghost
I shyly name Aglow.
Are you there Aglow
I said in my mind
reader, exactly the way
you just heard it
in yours about four
poem time units ago
unless you have already
put down the paper directly
after the mention
of poetry or ghosts.
Readers I am sorry
for some of you
this is not a novel.
Goodbye. Now it is just
us and the death’s head
and the flowers and the ghost
in San Francisco thinking
together by means
of the ancient transmission device.
I am sorry
but together we are
right now thinking
along by means
of an ancient mechanistic
system no one invented
involving super-microscopic
particles that somehow
(weird!) enter through
your eyes or ears
depending on where
you are right now
reading or listening.
To me it seems
like being together
one body made of light
clanging down through
a metal structure
for pleasure and edification.
Reader when I think of you
you are in a giant purple chair
in a Starbucks gradually leaking power
while Neil Young
eats a campfire then drinks
a glass of tears
on satellite radio.
Hello. I am 40.
I have lived in Maryland,
Amherst, San Francisco,
New York, Ljubljana,
Stonington (house
of the great ornate wooden frame
holding the mirror the dead
saw us in whenever
we walked past)
New Hampshire at the base
of the White Mountains
on clear blue days
full of dark blue jays
beyond emotion jaggedly piercing,
Minneapolis of which
I have spoken
earlier and quite enough,
Paris and now
San Francisco again.
Reader, you are right now
in what for me is the future
experiencing something
you cannot
without this poem.
I myself am suspicious
and cruel. Sometimes
when I close my eyes
I hear a billion workers
in my skull
hammering nails from which
all the things I see
get hung. But poems
are not museums,
they are machines
made of words,
you pour as best
you can your attention
in and in you the poetic
state of mind is produced
said one of the many
French poets with whom
I feel I must agree.
Another I know
writes his poems on silver
paint in a mirror.
&nb
sp; I feel like a president
raising his fist in the sun.
2
Reader, it doesn’t seem
very strange to be
here in this apartment
thinking of you
and how we will someday
(right now!) be together.
I hear hammering,
workmen are fixing
the front steps,
as I step out over them
into the morning
my mind is wearing
a black suit
like a funeral director’s assistant
prepared for very serious work
that has nothing to do with me.
Now in the café
very carefully blasting
my veins with coffee
asking what do we know
and what can we learn?
above me a painted waterfall
and stars on the ceiling
all this peace
makes me feel queer
the mysteries
the mysteries
we could never have predicted
they become our lives
and less confused
calmly in them
we rotate not psychotic or tragic.
I have lived in the black crater
of feeling every moment
is the moment just after
one has chosen forever
to live in the black crater
of having chosen to live in the black crater
and therefore I know
exactly why David Foster Wallace
took his life away from himself
even though he was also taking it away
from everyone he knew.
This morning I was woken
by soft sour breath
a slight fleck of metal
in the organic
like a field of titanium gravestones
growing warmer in the sun.
I could breathe it for hours
but now it is gone
which is ok as long as long as the exhaling
somewhere else continues.
Her job is to incrementally
regulate the conduct
of those who regulate
the city and mine is to be
happy for a few moments thinking
I could actually be
one who is happy watching
afternoon fog pour
predictably down
into sunny Noe Valley
from cold Twin Peaks.
3
If you know
the story of Marco Polo
you know after a long journey he came
upon the Mongol armies sleeping
and wisely turned back
already composing
a much more fabulous story
than not being able
to report being torn
apart by four horses
attached to his limbs.
From then on wherever
he went or did not he brought back
wondrous marvels and lies.
In this poem
every word means exactly
what it means
when we use it in every day life.
So when I say I went
to the grocery store
and felt too ashamed
to ask where are the eggs
only a very small part of me means
I have returned to report
we have by our mothers
been permanently destroyed.
When the president
opens his hands
a door knob
made of an unnaturally
heavy substance
floats up to the blue
door to the worry factory.
Open it and down
drift all the 21st century
problems, stick out
your tongue and maybe
you will taste sunlight
and maybe ash.
Go little president!
We are all blowing
into your wings!
We promise to no longer
be transactional
in our personal dealings!
We promise no longer
to know some things
are important but one
does not need to know why.
If the heart makes
the sound of two violins
sleeping in a baby carriage,
then new technologies
cannot make us
both more loyal and free.
Wayward free radical dreams,
I want to be loyal,
I say it once into the darkness.
Come on all you ghosts,
try to make me forget you.
4
Come with me
and I will show you
terrible marvels.
The little cough I heard in my mind
was one I remembered
my father made just as he died,
we weren’t sure
if it was his last breath
or just some air left in his lungs,
not that it matters.
Please don’t feel the least bit sorry
for me or yourself,
everyone you have ever seen
has a dead father,
some are just walking around alive
but it’s temporary,
so bring your sorrow
for everyone out into the street,
in the sun. If a nation
can fall asleep
it can wake up not
exactly angry but a little dizzy
with pleasant hunger.
A glass of juice.
A melancholy. Then remember
we all have something important
to do today in the sun.
Come on all you ghosts,
all you young holding hands
or alone, all you older
people and people of middle
indeterminate age,
we need you, winter is not
through with us.
The sea seems more
than a little angry,
and over it blows
a very cold breeze
that is also the color grey.
In this room with its black desk
sometimes I hear
the crystal factory whirring
under a sky
the color of black
tabletops entranceways
and dead light bulbs.
Are those your hands
on the switches
ghosts? All day I have been
feeling blind, dizzy and enclosed,
as if I were being carried
in the hand of a great being
who insisted he was still
but I could feel the motion.
5
Come on all you ghosts.
Bring me your lucky numbers
that failed you, bring me
your boots made of the skin
of placid animals
who stood for a while in the snow.
Bring me your books
made of blue sky
stitched together with thread
made of the memory
of how warm
even the most terrible
among us has felt
the skin of his or her beloved
in the morning to be.
Come on all you ghosts,
try to make me forget
one summer lost
in a reservoir and another
I keep in my chest.
Come on all you ghosts,
try to make me repeat
the most terrible thing I said
to someone and I will
if the mind of that someone
could ever be eased.
Come on let’s vote
for no one in the election
of who
is next to die.
Come on all you ghosts,
I know you can hear me,
I know you are here,
I have heard you cough
and sigh when I pretend
I do not believe
I have to say something important.
Probably no one will die
of anything I say.
Probably no one will live
even a second longer.
Is that true?
Come on all you ghosts,
you can tell me now,
I have seen one of you becoming
and I am no longer afraid,
just sad for everyone
but also happy this morning I woke
next to the warm skin
of my beloved. I do not know
what terrible marvels
tomorrow will bring
but ghosts if I must join you
you and I know
I have done my best to leave
behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.
About the Author
Matthew Zapruder is the author of two previous collections of poetry, American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon Press, 2006). The Pajamaist was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. He is also co-translator from Romanian, with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2008). German and Slovene-language editions of his poems have been published by Lux-books and Šerpa Editions; in 2009, Luxbooks also published a separate German-language graphic-novel version of the poem “The Pajamaist.” A collaborative book with painter Chris Uphues, For You in Full Bloom, was published by Pilot Books in 2009. His work has appeared in many anthologies, including Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll; Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything; and The Best American Poetry 2009.
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