by Michael Ryan
that unglue from my pots their antediluvian pot-crud
but must have felt like burning hurricanes
to my pint-size off-white faux-porcelain darling.
How could I have blithely slept
while she was being buffeted on the top rack
amid thick glass tumblers and impervious Tupperware?
How could I be so blind to put her
through this recurring Armageddon nightmare
when all she needed was a warm hand-wash
and cool air-dry upside-down on a dishtowel?
Delicate, in truth, she wasn’t. MADE IN CHINA
tattooed on her bottom, she was always cheap
and probably dangerous: her black underlayer
now showing through the crazed glaze like varicose veins
no doubt leached into my blood the thousand times
I filled her to the utmost with dark roast
and took her hot lip between my lips.
At such moments, who thinks what’s underneath:
lead or cadmium or reprocessed industrial waste?
Mornings before the house was awake,
in exquisite quiet and not-yet-light,
I’d cup her tenderly in both hands,
breathing her heat, not needing to speak.
I felt so happily posthumous,
just this side of nothingness, alone but not.
I didn’t need to be anything for her
but an eager mouth—not a nice husband
or good son or even a man—only the unregenerate
consumer that I am. I savored every dram.
Everything later was decaf,
dull paper cups in mousy brown sleeves
served by contractually cheery Starbucks drones
amid chatter and laptops and cell phones.
But I knew tomorrow morning she’d be sparkling,
ready to give back whatever I put in,
and we’d have our time together again,
respite with no pretense of nourishment,
her first bitter droplet on my tongue tip.
How sad that it may have been toxic.
I’d bury her in the backyard like a pet,
except she could pollute the aquifer.
Goodbye, beloved mug. No recrimination. No regret.
(At least until my next blood test.)
I had not one unpleasant moment with you.
Who in the world can anyone say that about?
I’d like to think I somehow gave you pleasure too.
Maybe we’ll meet again in another life,
me the mug next time, you the mouth.
Garbage Truck
Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt
and a distinctive stink that announced
when I was inching down your street
at the regal, elephantine pace
that let my men step down from me running
to heave your garbage into my gut
then fling the clanging metal cans
to tumble and rumble, crash and leap
back to sort-of-where you’d lugged them to the curb
before another oblivious night of sleep.
Did you think life was tough?
I reveled in it, all the stuff
you threw out, used up, let rot,
the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,
vomit and filth, everything you thought
useless, dangerous, or repugnant:
I ate it for breakfast. I hauled it
out of sight. And what did I get?
You were annoyed by my noise.
You coughed at my exhaust.
Your kids stopped playing in the street
to pinch their noses and gag theatrically
with no clue how sick they’d be without me.
I was the lowest of the low, an untouchable,
yet I did what I did and did it well.
Now I am not laughable: a “waste management vehicle”
denatured robotic sanitized presentable.
My strong young men are gone. I have no smell.
I’m painted deep green to look organic and clean.
Your “residential trash carts” are matching green
injection-molded high-density polyethylene
that barely thuds when I lower them to the ground
after I’ve stabbed and lifted and upended them
with twin prongs that retract into my side
so not to scratch anything or scare anyone.
Who can complain? Right there on your street
I mash and compact and obliterate your waste.
You need never give it a second thought.
It’s safe it’s easy nobody gets dirty.
It’s how you want your life to be.
But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life.
Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.
The Daily News
I needed to be made to feel that there was real,
permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation.
Wordsworth taught me this, not only without
turning away from, but with a greatly increased
interest in the common feelings and common
destiny of human beings.
—J. S. Mill
Out walking in my nature-or-nurture,
culture-or-creature, we-are-all-fucked
funk, I wandered like great-browed Wordsworth
lonely as a cloud upon his daffodils,
ruined abbeys, and sagacious peasant workers
eager to engage in earnest dialogue with
and spark a personal-but-socially-useful meditation for
a happening-to-be-strolling-by major British poet
and happened myself upon
a wackily painted California-beach-town clunker
with a strikingly somber
NEVER FORGET GOD white-on-black bumper sticker
precisely centered on its back bumper.
I thought, “That’s straight out of Flannery O’Connor,”
only she’d have the car hurtling through,
packed with a family masterfully
tormenting one another,
or loaded with murderers
on their way to a murder, or idling
while its owner (an itinerant preacher—
half Christ, half con man, all heartbreaker)
performs some grace-provoking mischief
on a spinster. I don’t know who
owns this car and I certainly don’t want to know,
but were he a guest on Wordsworth’s call-in show,
I’d ask him from anonymous distance, “Never forget God?
How do you do that? My faith comes and goes.
I can’t even speak about it without distortion.
Never forget: is that the same as always remember?
Who remembers anything always?” At that point,
he’d probably answer, “Just a minute,”
and, switching the control dial back to Flannery O’Connor,
he’d reach into the glove compartment
for the gleaming, silver, startlingly high-tech
automatic pistol and the pack of evangelical pamphlets
from which he slips one with a rubber-band snap
that makes me jump as if he’d clicked the gun,
a pamphlet that on my walk home I would curl into
a little glossy telescope, focus on a flower,
and toss into the next garbage can
after this unwordsworthy contemplation of nature
reminded me to retune and retune
and retune my attention,
which the car had already done,
it being
adorned, as I have not yet said, with multicolor
lightning bolts, asterisks, question marks,
and squiggles, a ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger (I think)
that no doubt in previous incarnations
served emotionally less expressive owners
ferrying children to soccer practice and doctors
and all the-world-is-too-much-with-us getting-and-spending
required of us to earn moments of private life and quiet pleasure
(its dead shocks perhaps once cushioning
the hurried rhythms of backseat lovers)—
whose paint job (whatever muted colors it had been then)
now features a purple trunk-spanning skull and crossbones
above the NEVER FORGET GOD bumper sticker,
and one modestly trussed mermaid in red-polka-dot halter
reclining along the entire length of the passenger side
from rear to front fender, with what little space
left in the negative space around her
maniacally scratched in with tiny druidic glyphs,
which, could we read them, would rebuke us
for our idolatrous, splintered common life.
Splitsville
If you get yours I get mine.
How does never sound to you?
As long as I can laugh I’m fine.
I can’t believe this all is true.
If I were gone you’d be all right.
What is that supposed to mean?
I see you’re looking for a fight.
You are such the drama queen.
Let’s get the hell out of here.
I’m simply not leaving yet.
Everything you say is fear.
Maybe you ought to buy a pet.
What do you want if I’m not it?
If you don’t shut up, I will scream.
I feel like such a piece of shit.
I thought you were a living dream.
Melanoma Clinic Infusion Center Waiting Area
This ravaged man, this human specimen:
extra-high black nylon windbreaker collar
zipped up, extra-wide soft floppy hat brim
yanked down—to spare beginners here his creature
face and spare him being seen:
eyebrowless and -lashless, chemical-
burned inside-out and outside-in:
irradiated, interferoned, Dacarbazined, his skull
a scar he looks out from through the Gitmo slit
between upturned collar and downturned hat brim
at the doings of what must seem another planet
than the one he’s on inside his body killing him.
How he bears it he’s not telling. Not telling
may be part of the how. Maybe he’s been given
access now to such unencumbered clarity of feeling
it makes what can be spoken sound like pidgin,
and so he rests in articulate silence,
communing like Buddha with his own spirit.
But probably not. Probably the malignance
eating his being, minute by minute,
has beaten him into its mute instrument
of pain and loneliness and fear.
There may be sweet freedom in the firmament.
Not here.
Open Window Truck Noise 3 A.M.
Gear-grinding, sure, but the woman dreaming in 4F
sees the monster spawned by her boss’s daily belittlements
devour in one roaring gulp both the Smith Barney courier
in the apartment across the air shaft who comes home from work and strips
to the black Brazilian thong he likes to parade around in
and his insomniac schnauzer that yaps at fire-escape cats.
What monster is this? There’s no name for it,
nor for the rancor that forms it
nightly inside her brain, and it is merely a chimera
safely encased in thick skull bone,
but on the morning she spies the suddenly kimono-clad courier
feeding his schnauzer a croissant, she remembers
what woke her was her boss drilling her skull a borehole
for the monster to fly out like a cockroach
that owns her and walks her to work on a leash.
Daredevil
Although he’s only seven, you can pick him out
from other first-graders: he’s the one wearing
a smirk that says, “What are you afraid of?”
maybe also to himself, if he already suspects his fear
won’t ever be crushed no matter what he does.
But he’s got to try. He snatches spiders bare-fingered
to wave in girls’ faces, bites a worm in half
dangling the two ends from his mouth like fangs,
somersault-dismounts from the jungle gym
the other kids climb off of when he climbs on,
and when he lands unhurt there’s that smirk again
that mocks us for our cowardice.
Don’t hate him for it. It is his only happiness.
Here I Am
on a subway station bench
next to two teens, one pretty, one not:
the pretty one keeps saying how much
she’ll miss the unpretty one, kissing her cheeks,
while the unpretty one looks down at her lap
saying no you won’t no you won’t until the train comes
and on goes the pretty one still smiling,
twirling her red plastic clutch, singing goodbye
I’ll call you, and the unpretty one just sits here
like a stone, even after the train is gone,
even after I write this down.
Sabbatical
I’m full of feelings, all of them boring,
so today I let my poem take me
where it wants to go, as if the where
were a patio overlooking Lake Como
where Bellagio Fellows discuss the quattrocento
over a rare Barolo and my poem
were a complimentary airport minivan
driven by a spiky Iraqi
bursting with bitterness that pops
his English inflections like an M-16
which for all I know he wore over his shoulder
day after day in sucking desert heat and fitted
with a nightscope and slammed the butt of
into whatever wasn’t moving fast enough.
A Round
Where am I going? The grave.
Who am I being? The slave.
What am I leaving? The fun.
Who will be grieving? No one.
How can I touch you? No way.
Will I ever reach you? Someday.
Why do I need you? Ho ho.
Where will I meet you? You know.