by Michael Ryan
Funeral
“Hi, sweetie. Coming home,”
were the last words she left
on your cell phone,
so now, bereft,
you blast them
through rock-concert speakers
as if to annihilate all thought
except of her.
“How about that shit?”
you ask us in the service,
while we get more and more nervous
you’ll collapse
right here and now
forever
during your furious
eulogy of her.
“Hit by a fucking bread truck!
Can you believe it?”
you shout at us. Yes, we can.
No, we cannot.
Husband your grief now,
since you must.
It won’t leave you.
Don’t leave us.
for PML
Ill Wind
Two red birds
high on a wire
one said love
one said fire
Two black birds
deep in a tree
one said you
one said me
But wind came up
and tossed them away
no one hears
what they say
III
Against Which
habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall
and my version
of what I know
is like eye surgery
with a backhoe
on grace
so much beyond
my pitiful gray
sponge of a brain
I’d not believe it exists
except for such
doses of felicity
as this.
Very Hot Day
I know what’s going to happen
to those two plastic produce bags of crushed ice
I perched atop the garden wall:
one’s floppy, droopy, flabby,
its overhanging pooch of ice-melt
already about to pull the whole bag down
into the dirt, bursting it, turning it
into a fistful of filthy gummy polyethylene;
the other’s centered, poised—even
its ice-melt seems to know where to settle
so the bag stays upright and stable:
if it were a person, he’d radiate
smiling confidence and good health,
a team player wanting only to be useful,
to stand as an example of how to adjust
conflicting parts of himself for the general good.
His effortless balance and bright red twisty-tie
might seem flashy and arrogant
were he not so persistently mindful
that he shares the other bag’s fate.
How could he not, since they’re almost touching?
He’d have to be completely oblivious
not to witness the moment his twin
plops into the dirt.
He’d have to know he’s heading there too,
no matter how solid he feels at present—
that even now he’s really broken and helpless
and destined for the recycle bin
where like Almighty God I throw
useless used bags for crushed ice
the butcher gives me to keep my raw meat
safe while I drive home on a very hot day.
Sustenance
Having awakened again at 4 A.M. inside the skull-dungeon
in which my brain’s chained like a nasty old man
grumbling, blustering, keeping me from sleeping,
I focused as suggested on my breathing,
asked blessings on every living human being
alphabetically, one at a time,
except for a certain book reviewer,
all poohbahs owning eight or more Porsches,
most politicians, patricians, and registered Republicans,
gave up, got up, and was being lowered gently
into quiescence by reading good writing
when slambangclang a garbage can
behind the screened window behind my reading chair
upended. Yogis spend lifetimes
emptying mundane consciousness enough
that the body, as if it had been weighted
by thought, might levitate a quarter-inch,
but I shot six feet to the ceiling in a nanosecond,
still seated, hovering like a tenth-ton hummingbird
until nasty old brain-man informed me dryly
what was outside wasn’t human.
I killed my reading lamp and shone a flashlight
through the window: a cartoon raccoon
in cartoon burglar mask dissecting
my actual plastic trash bags with her
dexterous, delicate, spidery claws.
Tell me this animal is not intelligent.
She had climbed onto the garbage can
and rocked it to knock it down.
About me and my flashlight beam
she was utterly incurious.
I wish I were so fearless.
For five minutes of our respective lives
I got to watch her eat some chicken bones
(I thought I cleaned pretty well myself
three days ago), flipping them
like batons to gnaw the ungnawed ends:
neither a strung-out meth head with a handgun
nor revelation engendering enduring peace of mind
but an earthly privilege, gratis,
despite the holy mess she left for me
I’m glad was food.
Earphones
Autumn in our kitchen, hooked up
to a Discman (Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin),
I become the music with earphones on:
no noise-as-usual inside my skull,
I can do things so the doing seems to be coming
from not-me, I am so expert and prolific
at rutabaga soup, peeling and chopping with such prowess,
spicing with panache, fussily tasting and adjusting,
even cleaning the pot and utensils, wiping the counter,
the sink, the cutting board—so happy, my darling,
that I despite myself have made something good for you
you will never have to suffer or work for.
Look, it’s waiting in your favorite blue bowl
with fresh bread and wine beside it.
Come, sit, my loveliness, my blessing:
Come, sit, and eat it with me.
Petting Zoo
I should be able to learn something useful
watching 20 toddlers in a 12 12 pen with 20 animals.
But they’re alien creatures—the kids, not the animals.
The animals are Zen masters: dispassionate, imperturbable,
despite whompings from long-handled curry brushes
distributed by merry adolescent lime-shirted attendants
then wielded as cudgels by the darling torturers.
The sixty-five-pound tortoise especially is getting it.
Three consummate cuties drum Bolero on his shell.
The tortoise is seventeen according to the parents’ info sheet
so he’s in for two hundred more years of this.
I also identify with the shampooed pin-curled potbelly pig
sporting a saddle on which is strapped a stuffed bunny
whose sewn-on smile riding above the mayhem
is as maniacal as a crusader’s charging into battle.
The actual bunnies, by contrast, all would go AWOL:
they escape one toddler only to be scooped up by another—
also a metaphor for parenting (but a useful one?),
including parenting an only child like mine.
My darling to
rturer is a fierce creature. She pets me
precisely when she pleases, but it inevitably fills me
with immeasurable sweetness. Talk about addicted to love:
at her birth, my well-being vaulted out of my body
and lodged itself in hers. I’d much rather die than she die.
If these bunnies turned to vipers, I’d dive in to save her.
This makes me a garden-variety parent.
All we garden-variety parents elbow-to-elbow around the pen
have read that petting zoos swarm with E. coli bacteria
and have noted the baffling stack of unwrapped cookies
grinning innocently from a shelf bolted on the pen’s gate
alongside the antibacterial-wipe dispenser.
My daughter methodically zigzags through the other toddlers
to cuddle every single animal. The ones too heavy to lift
she pats on the head, including the tortoise, whose skull
extends from his shell because it’s less noisy, if more risky.
She has mashed ants and snails and watched transfixed while I killed
what she called a bitey spider but apparently hasn’t applied
their mortality to herself and so radiates the confidence of a god.
Every thing in the world is here for her to play with and be delighted by.
Every place in the world welcomes her wholeheartedly, including this one.
After she has cuddled or petted every animal exactly twice,
she wants to spend quality time with her favorite:
a newborn chick that does not want to spend quality time with her.
Each time she unpries it from the belly fur of an angora rabbit
it thinks is its mother, it dives out of her hands as from a burning building.
So she settles for her second choice, the potbelly pig,
and unseats the stuffed bunny with a gladiatorial swat
and tries to mount the saddle, repeatedly and fortunately
unsuccessfully (quick pig) until I lure her out the pen’s gate
by dangling before her nose a big infectious cookie.
As she grabs for it, I snatch her hand and wipe it thoroughly,
then her other hand, then every square millimeter of exposed flesh
up to her armpits—any place that could have touched an animal
or a kid who touched an animal—while she howls like Achilles
dipped into the River Styx. I frisbee the cookie into a trash can,
but buy her a popsicle, which stops her howling
as if she had never been disappointed and never would be again,
not so much forgiving me as entirely forgetting
as she takes my hand with her unoccupied one
for us to go into her next-moment adventure
hand in hand, for now locked together forever.
Campus Vagrant
“I no longer privilege myself,” he says,
then makes his hand into a blade,
a chest-high single half a prayer
with my dollar he didn’t ask for
slotted between his thumb and forefinger
as if in the cockpit of a rocket
that suddenly thrusts above his head
and snaps back to his chest, a blade again
he playfully jabs at me and folds into his pocket,
from which it emerges as his empty hand—
this sequence performed with practiced quickness.
“Did you stab me?” I ask. “Am I dead?”
“I stabbed you alive,” he replies merrily,
his face lit up red as his Angels cap
with the halo at the apex of the A.
“Do you play for the Angels?” I once asked him.
“I play with the angels,” he answered angrily,
and flicked my dollar crumpled back at me.
“Don’t patronize me. I’m not crazy,” he said.
I stick to our script strictly now,
although there’s more I’d like to ask him.
I don’t know how to “no longer privilege myself,”
if that means waking to egoless consciousness
in which fear and greed become so painless and harmless
I could float circles above them
like the halo on the logo.
My dollar vanishes into his pocket
and his hand always comes up empty,
but only after his ritual gesture
up to something other and higher
then down to himself to stab me alive
enough to love my life more
desperately as it disappears.
This Morning
My daughter was crying before she went out to play
because the sunscreen on her face made her hair sticky
so when she tried to put on her glasses
that have rubber cables that loop behind her ears
she kept snagging her hair
and hurting herself. She cried, “My hair won’t stay back”
so I said, “I can hold your hair”
and gathered it into my hands to cup behind her head
while she pulled on her glasses, and when I did
I felt beneath the unearthly lightness of her hair
the ridges of her skull. Her skull’s a little asymmetrical—
we didn’t lay her on her stomach as an infant
because she had neurosurgery when she was seven months old
for a birth defect, a tethered spinal cord, a minor spina bifida
she probably got because her parents were so old
she had to be conceived in vitro.
But who knows? She’s almost eight now.
Why it happened doesn’t matter to us anymore.
She must be checked neurologically every year.
The spinal cord can retether until she’s fully grown
and fray essential nerves that allow her
to walk and control her bladder.
When we take her to the doctor’s for her checkup,
there are kids in hockey helmets and wheelchairs
with their heads lolling and tongues hanging out,
drooling, bellowing, unable to speak with words.
I don’t know how their parents do it—
probably because they have no other choice
but not-doing it, which they couldn’t live with.
So they live with it, and I’m invariably surprised
to see them smile and joke and be patient,