by Mark Bibbins
13th Balloon
MARK BIBBINS
COPPER CANYON
PRESS
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Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
13th Balloon
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Mark Bibbins
Copyright
Special thanks
Why is there so much useless suffering. Why is there.
—Gertrude Stein
13TH BALLOON
As a house burns sparks
land on the roofs
of houses nearby
Some of them also will burn
Some of them will not
Someone asks Are there people inside
Sometimes there are people inside
They may walk out alive or be carried
out alive they may be carried
in pieces they may
be carried in bags they may
be carried in smoke
Others in dreaming may wonder
whether they ever will wake
from the endless dream of sparks
clinging to their roofs
floating through their windows
landing on their beds
///
A few months after you died
I came home on a black and freezing night
to find a small cardboard box
on the steps outside my building
I opened the lid and inside
was a single newborn animal
hairless pink and clean
a rat a guinea pig I couldn’t tell
Was it moving I don’t remember now
why can’t I remember that now
It can’t have been moving
it couldn’t have
been alive
I considered my cat asleep
in my apartment would he
kill this creature if it lived
Did I have any milk
and how would I get any milk
anyway inside this tiny thing
that surely could not be alive
What kind of person
might have come and left
a baby possibly dead
animal there in a box
on my stoop what kind
If this was a test I failed it
I carried the box
three long blocks
to the river and threw it in
I have never so much
as in the moment the box went under
the surface of the water
stabbing and stabbing and stabbing itself
with the moon’s million obsidian knives
wished that I were dead
If death is a test I fail
If death is a test I pass
///
During the storm your ashes drop
out of the sky in clumps
and birds with sutures for eyes
peck the outline of your silhouette
onto the trunk of a petrified tree and clouds
shit mud on the sheets at night
and the trees piss phlegm and weep blood
that covers the ground and we slip and we crack
open as faceless birds descend to drink
as they hideously flap their hideous wings
and gorge themselves on ashes and pieces
of teeth and fragments of bones
that once were yours
Featherless birds dive into the furnace
where you burned
They swoop in and out of the windows
of hospital rooms and heavily horribly swirl
against what could be clouds or could
be the ashes of others we’ve burned
until the last of the birds engorges
itself on so much of your death that finally it
bursts like a boil in the sky
///
What might anyone have made
of you and me as babies
born into the mess and ferment
of the late 1960s
Working-class babies born to parents
who themselves were babies
during World War II
Were they worried already
about Vietnam or about some other
monstrous hand that would grab us
from our cribs by our feet
and throw us
into the war that would be
the war after that
They could not have known
that our war because everyone
lands in one
would be with a virus or that one
of the hands that failed to close
quickly or tightly enough around
it to stop it from killing you
would also belong to the state
At the beginning of every war
every baby is replaced
with a picture of a baby
In every eclipse the sun
is replaced with an x-ray of the sun
///
A person I knew for a short time
a short time after you died
guessed incorrectly that I would sleep
with him and furthermore that I slept with
a copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
next to my bed Though wrong
on both counts he was right
when he said I blushed absurdly
and too easily
but when I told him about you
he was taken a little aback
perhaps surprised that I had lived
through anything
I should remember now
what Velvet Underground song
after I turned him down
for the last time he left
on my answering machine in order
to convey that I was no
longer worthy even of his disdain
I never told him the book
that was next to my bed was the copy
of The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara
you had given me before you died
Yesterday someone told me that Frank’s friend
the painter Mike Goldberg had died
and from here I can see myself
in my tenement room
on a night more than two decades gone
opening to Frank’s birthday ode to Mike
when I reached down
to the floor next to my bed
to pick up the book that had been yours
///
Since you died the house style could best
be described as leaves that cling
; to trees too long into winter
I understand how
to miss a hint
as I regularly watch the anger
harbored against queer people inflate
like innumerable soap bubbles
in what passes for real time A truce
can soothe for as long as it lasts
and the extent to which it’s meant
I set foot in a jungle once
so I know
how things on Earth can work
There were fewer animals than
I expected but I did see some
leafcutter ants and I climbed
an ancient pyramid and may
have heard a monkey
before returning to the lot
where the bus had dropped me off
Near the gas station some children
were taunting a dog
with awful mange
On the way back
to the beach town where I was staying
a unit of young soldiers
stopped the bus to search
for whatever a soldier searches for
I remember their rifles and their boots
and their silky eyelashes and that they
looked like children to
me then
To whom must they look
like children now
///
Scraps of magazines
hoarded by boys
in our fort in the woods
The pictures were what nude women
cavorting in a gym
nude women lying on a tile floor
I told myself not to look
at the boy next to me
in the horny grim leaflight
as he studied page after seedy page
I told myself don’t wish
for us to be nude together now
nude in the branches nude in the clouds
Don’t look at the other boy
in case he sees me looking at him
Look down at the dead leaves
on which are projected
nude photos of me nude photos of him
nude photos of him all slippery with me
Don’t look for the two
of us nude on the rocks
where the sunlight cuts through
the two of us
nude at the edge of the stream
Don’t look at him don’t look
don’t look at his hand at his crotch
better to look at the ground instead
///
When I was a teenager I smugly told
one of my teachers I wasn’t worried
about going to hell
because all my friends
would be there too and she just
as smugly responded
Yes but you won’t recognize them
Now when I ride the escalator
to hell I have to kiss
everyone on it
even the drug lobbyists
but we’re all fine now
very wealthy down here
Drop a kiss on the floor of hell
the three-second rule applies
I may not care who
I’m kissing anymore
but neither do they
Hell is full of delicious flowers
and we keep scooping out
deeper hells for their decapitated stems
How cold could I have been to have said
that this is the way Celan ends
Celan ends Celan ends
not with a bang
but a river
Woolf too I mean
wind any creature tight enough
pull any creature loose enough
it does what it has to do
Still the flowers I can hear them
are singing Don’t leave
you haven’t finished
eating us yet
///
You and I never called each other
by the name we shared
It would have been like eating an echo
each of us checking
opposite sides of a two-way mirror
for fog left by his own breath
Months after you died I saw someone
in a nightclub in a different city
than the ones in which our story crossed
itself out
someone who knew us both
but as it turned out
not very well
He looked shocked to see me
a look I didn’t need him to explain but
Holy shit he said
I thought you were dead
We celebrated my notdeath with shots
of something too sweet and an hour later
I was vomiting
into a mop bucket
in a corner of the club
The coelacanth was believed
to be extinct for millions of years
until the sea coughed one up
off the coast of South Africa
after a great storm
Its name comes from the Greek koîlos
meaning hollow
///
One of the only facts I can find
online about you is wrong
You didn’t die on a Saturday night
you died on a Tuesday
It was a Tuesday morning the sun was frozen
and Mars or Venus barely glowed somewhere
or Mars was hidden in Tuesday
or Venus had broken into a billion splinters
of ice and covered the grass
outside the hospital
and the sun dragged with it your death
from the frozen pit
out of which daily it rises
Unless I too am wrong and Thursday
was the day
the nurse called and told us It’s time you should
come now he’s getting ready to go
Ready to go after how many times we thought
you were going or were ready
to go or had gone
after how many times I’d arrive
at the hospital
thinking it would be the last
only to find you
sitting up doped up cockeyed grinning
You’d lift your head a little
and say Hey what’d you bring me Boo
and I’d climb into the bed
with you and say Nothing good just me
///
William S. Burroughs said cut
into the present and the future leaks out
When I cut into the past
what leaks out is you
///
I grew up nowhere
near a sea We had swamps
and ponds and creeks
and deer and jays
and every now and then
we’d find perhaps the tracks
of a fox in the snow
but no sharks no jellyfish
no rays burrowing in the sand
When we are young we wish
with uncertain fervor
for what is not at hand
The first time I kissed a man
I was seventeen and he turned
out to be a minor criminal
He said his name
was Rich and whether true or not
it seems at least fitting now
Where he grew up
who knew for sure
the South or so he said
which was also where the army
put him for a while instead of jail
for forging checks or so he said
But before he told me that
he told me he was bi
and his drawl made him sound
like a handsome sheep bah
The kiss was real at least
One night he’d said we should pull
into someone’s driveway
as I d
rove us home from the mall
where we stood bored in stores for hours
and called it work I bobbed
in the fading waves
of that kiss for days
The first time I saw the ocean
I was twelve and the body
of water was technically a sound
Connecticut January freezing rain
I could only see a few yards
through the fog that turned
everything gray as a sock
Alongside a breakwater
lay a tangle of garbage
and next to that the black
and brown back end
of a German shepherd
sticking out of the sand
///
We didn’t have a word for us but what
could have been the word for us
Not lovers
though we loved
Not boyfriends though we were
friends and still
boys in most ways when you died
Not partners though we parted
These last two I realize
are false cognates
the first of which derives from sharing
the second from taking leave
I have only language for you now
a language
that morphs like a virus
to elude to survive to connect
but I still don’t
have the word
///
Come on stage and be yourself,
The elegist says to the dead.
—Mary Jo Bang
From here I can see a fountain
and a statue of a president
against a backdrop
of not yet spectacular oaks and maples
rows of your friends
in white folding chairs
Whatever flowers would still
have been thriving in the park
in the middle of September
I’m sure we were grateful for
When it was my turn
to speak at your memorial
what did I say
a version of you aren’t really dead
or see you again some useless thing
any other deathstruck boy
lightly educated at state and city schools
might have said
Had I the gift of song I might have sung
as another friend sang
an optimistic Irish song
Afterward we collected
the chairs to take back to the restaurant
from which we’d borrowed them
and where you used to work
We turned off the microphone
and wheeled the podium away
Is there any song and if there is