This Morning

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,