by Alan Shapiro
not to sound like, saying "Honey, listen to me, honey.
Honey. Honey. I am not your mother. I Am Not Your Mother."
Then she holds the phone away from her ear so even I can
hear the tiny insect-buzzing of what against her ear would be
his shouting back.
Starlight has to bend, the writer says, around that invisible dense
matter,
warping itself in order to be seen.
So even after we factor in the distorting eff ect of time and distance,
the light-years of light-years that light has to cross to reach
us, the visible shapes we see inside our giant telescopes look
nothing like the shapes they are.
There's a white shark on the wall next to the television screen
where I see an aerial view of a funeral procession or a
rally—fists shake in unison, and if the sound weren't muted
I might hear voices chanting, but all I hear around me is a
thick gauze of bar talk and laughter and the woman saying
over and over, honey, honey, listen, honey, honey, while
on the screen I continue looking up at what I'd be looking
down on if I were there:
the massive seething a quivering cell seen under a microscope,
a dense coating of flies on something dead.
Then there's a lake, and a bright red Jeep flies out of it and lands
safely on a dirt road and drives off right to left as if into the
open mouth of the bright white shark.
The writer of the article describes dark matter as a black canvas
on which the visible universe is painted. If that fi gure captures
best the relationship of gloom to glitter, couldn't the canvas
also be the painter, the unseen the conjuror of the seen, as if
the ten percent that doesn't hide were being imagined by the
ninety percent that does?
Dark matter. She is not his mother. She refuses to be his mother.
But there are places in the cosmos, however few and far between,
where "galaxies form where no dark matter is, at least none we
can detect."
In the physical therapy room of the nursing home my mother
placed my grandmother in after she slipped in a puddle of
urine and fell and broke her hip, the old, the damaged,
at various stages of infi rmity, were working with therapists
at different stations in the room—one woman looked quizzically
at her hand, as if it wasn't hers and wasn't not, matter
neither dark nor bright, as it tried to squeeze a yellow ball,
over and over, only the tips of her fingers twitching, while the
young therapist, more girl than woman, kept urging her on the
way a mother would,
though she was not her mother,
saying, "That's it, Lois, come on now, kiddo, you can do it, you
did it yesterday." And nearby, a man wizened to his very bones
held fiercely to the rails of a small track down which he took
unsteady small step after small step, like a toddler crossing wet
stones—he was followed by another woman with her hands
out ready to catch him if he fell. Everywhere inside the room
the young the healthy, the fortunate, were encouraging the
old, the sick, the hobbled—everywhere the old, eyes burning,
were pushing back with all the might inside their bodies
against the dark matter their bodies had become.
Places, the writer tells me, where light too is a force, light too a
kind of pressure
though my grandmother refused it, sitting in her wheelchair, looking
on, her silence the darkest matter, an impossible density
nothing could get around without distortion, broken only by
her saying when my mother came to visit
You are not my daughter, I don't have a daughter,
saying it over and over, as if she knew my mother would carry
the voice inside her ever after, beyond the funeral, no matter
whom she spoke to, or where she went, the voice reverberating
in her voice reverberating in the ones she loved, the
ones who loved her
the distorting effects of time and distance nothing the shape it is
the white shark is swallowing the president who shakes the hand
of another president in a bright room made brighter by the
flash of cameras
and an old man yelling as he carries a child to some kind of safety
from a smoking doorway
the woman flips shut her phone and stuffs it in her bag and disappears
and again the lake spits out the Jeep that lands safely on the
ground and drives away.
III. NIGHT OF THE REPUBLIC
Amphitheater
In the dream time
of the molecular
what persists as
colonnade
or stair is struggling
blindly to hold
back, hold
in, what in it,
of it, every
moment wants
to whirl away
from what it is.
It is a kind of keeping
faith, a loyalty,
the way the garbled
pieces of the
architrave call back
the column that's
no longer there;
how even now
the horizontal rows
of nearly worn-
away-to-nothing
seats rise steeply
all around the inside
of the colossal oval
that encloses
the missing stage
where Pindar isn't
singing, "Take heart,
remember Oedipus:
if a sharp ax
hacks off the boughs
of a great tree
so its beauty spoils and
its fruit fails,
it can still give
an account of itself
should it come later
to a winter fire,
or should it rest
at last on a foreign
pillar performing
its sad task
so far away
from what it started as."
Museum
So much of once
and now and soon
is or will soon be
caught here, framed and glassed—
free of the drifting air—
and hung, so that
the very halls
that lead from room
to room are rooms
themselves that make room
in little dim-lit alcoves
all along them for what
there wasn't room for
in the other rooms.
On the wall outside
each doorless doorway
the audio guides lined up
like black-suited
miniature docents
are waiting to tell the story
of the ambition and the breakthrough
to the early to the later
to the late or belated
recognition of the name
whose final triumph was to
end up in the digital
recording of the nameless storyteller
telling the story
to the inglorious and mute.
All night, inside each
doorway there's an empty chair
that keeps watch
over an empty bench
that watches the cordonedoff
and glassed-in
figures revert to pigments
that revert to dyes,
oils
and the mineral
grains that press
against the glass
to pass right through it
into the air they came from,
alive again—docents of dispersal
drifting from room
to room through hallways
down the marble stairs
out past the headless Winged Victory
they entered by.
Bookstore
As if hallucinations made of words
could hallucinate themselves beyond the words,
out of the books, out of the newest
on display behind the window, and the ones
on tables in the gloom or ranged on shelves
in different sections; out
of the pages building to betrayal,
out of the spectral signatures
of doom of boredom of deceit,
after the stranger comes to town,
before the girl's disgrace, before
the shadowy flood or fire,
the bodiless mimicries escape
tonight the tangling plot lines
into the bodies of the couple
kissing outside the store,
into the ardor of the way they kiss,
he leaning against her leaning back
against the window, his hands flat
on the glass above her head,
hers on his hips to draw him
farther forward while her leg rubs
up the inside of his thigh
and down, and up again,
higher and still higher,
while the books behind them keep their own sweet time,
serene because the wraiths return,
inevitably, tomorrow or next week
or years away and a cooler hand
will take the book and open to a passion much
more desolate for being mutual
and new and never ending
till the page is turned.
Barbershop
"Beauty falls from the air."
—Thomas Nashe
Eternity is the spiral up the pole
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday's Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting.
Time is the electric
razors upright in their chargers
beside their teeth-like
att achments, and the scissors,
the clippers, the trimmers,
on the mirrored shelves
attached to mirrors
that the big chairs face,
unswiveling.
Eternity
is the swept floor,
the bald air,
the faceless mirrors,
while Time, and its one idea
of beauty falling,
is a book of blank pages
ghostwritt en by
Eternity in vanished
passages of hair.
Post Office
A convex mirror tilts downward from the corner
where wall and ceiling meet
behind the nearly room-length counter.
In the center of the mirror
what's beyond the counter
bends a smaller version of itself above the counter
out toward itself below it
while the room's periphery
curves back into the dark
the center's bending from.
Parallel to the counter
the rope barrier
strung straight from post to post
curls into itself within the mirror,
though parallel to it and just as long
but too far back beyond the mirror's border
to be caught within it
there is a narrow table
with pens at intervals
that hang at the ends
of silver chains
or lie in a silver tangle on the surface—
while one chain dangles penlessly
like a silver snake's sloughed skin.
The mirror is a litt le world, a globe, a map.
Back against the far wall
there's a wider table
for the giant book
of everywhere
and slots and holders for every size
and kind of envelope or label
all of which tonight are unaware
of the out-of-the-blue
or dreaded plea plaint news
or notices they'll be tomorrow—
And if the mirror is a map
this table is the blank space
on which the mapmaker scrawls—Here Be Monsters.
Here be indecipherable codes,
unreachable addresses,
every letter a dead letter,
unclaimed, untracked,
from no from
to no to.
Convention Hall
There was the amplified and echoing
"optimistic hatred of the actual"
that every flag waving
to make it so kept
waving to the joyous rhythm of
even after
in the docile chaos of a
confetti of balloons
tumbling out of darkness
high above the lights.
Look at Us, the anthem,
Look at Us, the shield,
the sacrifice—
but look
at how unfillable
the cavern of the Great Hall is,
more vacant and silent
for the stage dismantled,
the massive absence
of the cheering and singing; look
at how the last of us,
our delegate
torch in hand
sleepwalks in patrol
patrolling nothing
like a soldier "in the
midst of doubt, in
the collapse of creeds"
who doesn't know
the war has ended,
behind enemy lines
no longer there,
obedient to "a cause
he little understands,
in a campaign
of which he has
no notion, under
tactics of which
he doesn't see the use"—
moving in darkness
from light to smaller light
along the catwalks
through the tunnels
over the swept floor
to the farthest exit sign.
Government Center
All of the old buildings that surround it
with their embellishments,
their frills, their flauntings,
have turned away, embarrassed
by how nakedly
outside
outside is here.
At night especially,
nothing is not exposed
to whatever it is
that's looking out
from within the rising of the set-back
or jutting, many-angled
brick and concrete large
to small to smaller openings
that swallow
whatever light they cast.
At Washington and State,
the wide brick stairs lead up to wide brick stairs
up to the bricked
expanse, the brick field of the benchless plaza
edged here and there by lampposts whose light
spotlights the litt le public trees
that tremble leafless
and raw in stone tubs
for everyone
who isn't there
to see.
If you were there, walking,
you wouldn't be able to tell
the sound of other footsteps
coming toward you
You'd have to hurry not to feel
the feeling of what it is
you're being told
about the feeling of being
looked at, looked through, tracked
by every brick
and concrete
angle of the opaque
openings you can't look up at
into
as you hurry past.
Courtroom
Hillsborough, North Carolina
Everything inside the room
looks upward
through penumbral zones
from the ghost ship of the gallery's
galley-rows of benches to the
waist-high balustrade
that is the barrier
we call the Bar, and from
the tables beyond the Bar
to the lectern facing
the high desk
we call the Bench,
behind which
above the flag we call the Flag,
high on the wall to where
the circle of the seal is
across the bott om of the outer
rim of which
the legend in a language
no one speaks
is speaking silently to no one:
Esse Quam Videri—To Be
Rather Than to Seem—
Like what? the two girls
staring out inside the seal
appear to ask, like what?
in white robes—
Greek or Roman, Roman or Indian?
a Roman's seal's Greek fantasy
of an Indian princess and her att endant,
the princess seated
on a tree stump, on a beach,
the water calm behind her,
as she looks down
past the Bench, the Bar, the strict rows
of low benches in the gallery
where the absent galley slaves
lashed to the public oars
are rowing nowhere
and so can't notice
that a ship over her shoulder
(is it the ship they row?)
is sailing straight for the horn of plenty