by Mark Bibbins
know how anything escapes
///
Twenty minutes ago I learned
and promptly forgot
the Italian word for watermelon
The news is scrolling by
on a silent TV screen
and isn’t even language anymore
just a digital river of trash
It’s a symptom of living
in danger that my first
response is not to realize
how dangerous this is
I’d rather think of a man
on a verdant hillside
sprinkling salt on the flesh
of a slice of anguria
and the image if not the word
is beautiful enough for now
There’s a song we know that tells us
beauty’s where we find it
but tonight I’m sure there’s even more
where we left it
///
The opposite of irony is not
sincerity it’s hopelessness
Speaking of which I was struck
by how handsome
one of the commuters stepping
over us was as I lay
with ACT UP on the floor
of Grand Central Station
at 5:07 p.m. on January 23 1991
and how effectively that handsomeness
seemed to amplify the anger
in his eyes
Everything about him said he would
be perfectly happy to kick any of us
in the head
for interrupting his timely egress
to Westchester
but he was well enough versed
in the ways of rage
to know what would have happened
if he’d done it
Only now do I recognize the humor
in ACT UP dropping over the arrivals board
a banner that read
ONE AIDS DEATH EVERY 8 MINUTES
and that I was lucky to have the luxury
of deciding not to get myself
arrested that day
Today is March 30
the thirtieth anniversary of ACT UP
and tomorrow Gilbert Baker the man
who created the rainbow flag
will die
Strange not to know whether one’s life has
an asterisk hanging next to it
or is itself the asterisk
Strange to look vainly for oneself in history
and stranger to realize
that there is a chance
one might find oneself there
///
In some ways our story amounted
less to paper
than to staples and holes
Only hours into the weekend you left town
with someone else without telling me
I sensed what it meant
Having swallowed
long ago the placebo of monogamy
I determined not to speak to you again
let alone forgive
I have no idea how much time passed
maybe a year
Now and then our friends would try
to convince me to see you
but I managed to avoid you
even in our shriveled city
and we would not talk again until you called
to tell me you had tested positive
I remember the weight of the phone
in my hand and thinking as I looked
out my window at the simmering
oranges of dusk above the trees
that crepuscular was one of the ugliest words
I could think of
though later it would be surpassed
by Cryptosporidium histoplasmosis
and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma
your official cause of death
I could say I started forgiving you that night
you called and maybe I did but before
me lay two interminable weeks
of waiting for my own results
during which I decided
I would leave behind among other things
this miserable stagnant city we shared
Eventually I and everyone around you
would be all but delirious
with forgiveness and mercy and love
What was that trick
How did you do it
It was as if you’d unfolded a map
you’d secretly been drawing
for us all along a map
of a new and radiant country
across which together we would
carry you as you died
///
In truth I don’t have that many
memories of you left
maybe enough
that were they spliced together
the result would be the length of a movie trailer
or if weighed
would weigh as much as an eggshell
I can remember some things you said
if not verbatim the tone the inflection
and whether they arrived through a phone line
or through the air
or whether you thought something
you were saying was funny
like the time near the end
when you told your favorite nurse
who was trying a new diet
that if she really wanted to lose
weight she should have sex with you
C’mere lemme stick it in you
you’ll lose thirty pounds real quick
We lived on a planet of disaster
We lived in a country of misery
We lived in a state of horror
We lived in a city of scandal
We lived in a house of daily dying
from which to distract ourselves
we sometimes embroidered
the filthiest jokes we could think up
on every available towel pillowcase sheet
I shouldn’t say it saved us
but in many ways it did
///
I remember doing this once as a kid
watching a mosquito land on my
forearm then making a fist
after it stuck its sucker in
the muscle fixing it there on my skin
as my blood persisted in filling
the insect’s abdomen until
it finally ruptured
leaving a smear
of my blood on my arm
Instead of arm I first typed art
I tried changing it and changing it
and changing it again
Now I don’t know what to do
///
There are many ways to get
across a moat I myself have
tried to swim and drowned
every time to the amusement
or indifference of those before
me who succeeded
Someone has taken
to chalking the word ACTIVIST on the castle
walls and erasing it from which blur
emerges the face of Gudrun Ensslin
as Gerhard Richter renders her beaming
geckolike into an ecstatic
future In some countries
instead of police lineup
they say identity parade
In others instead of not guilty
they say not proven
In general instead of victim
we say survivor unless
the survivor did not
Form becomes content
and together they step forward
to accept the prize The prize
is light but has what I’ve ever done
been enough to earn it
The other day I saw some ants
carrying a dragonfly’s head
away from its body
with the astonishing air
&n
bsp; of consensus it seems only ants possess
We tell ourselves
that what a dragonfly sees
looks like what we see
when at the concert everyone holds up
their phones to prove to each other
that they are together
When I checked
a few minutes later the dragonfly’s body
was gone and the head
was still there
Ant consensus apparently was
you know what guys
forget the head
a body’s what we need
///
It’s halfway through October 2017
and today New York woke up finally
to what feels
like it could be fall and the news
that a school district in Mississippi
is banning To Kill a Mockingbird again
and nobody
because white people
are quadrupling down
so spectacularly on their bullshit this year
is surprised
Last week I quoted someone
out of context about irony
and in doing so probably
made myself some extra enemies
Later my friend mentioned
tenor and vehicle
the two components of metaphor
but it’s no use I can never remember
which is which I’m afraid
I don’t respond
to stimuli in the way
I’m supposed to
I tried looking up
the size of a blue whale’s heart
and it turns out no it’s not
as big as a small car after all
but the National Geographic website
reassures everyone that it’s still pretty big
and that the blue whale’s heart
needs a better metaphor
The website asks
How big is your own heart
When we find out
that the president has made a joke
about the vice president wanting
to hang all the gays
our hearts are not surprised
nor is it exactly surprise I read
on the apostle Thomas’s face
where Caravaggio has painted
him slipping with Jesus’s help
one finger into the hole
in Jesus’s side a hole that resembles
other things that also are holes
We’re told it’s doubt that drives
Thomas and perhaps that’s close enough
It looks like he’s about
to stroke
the human heart
of Jesus but for the fact
that the hole is on the wrong side
///
What is missing from the trees
What is missing from a life
color sucked from the spines
of books by the sun
When I look into my life I cannot name
the trees but when I touch the books
on my shelf it’s as if I might
feel the trees in them
Where are the people who would have heard me
call you by any of the nicknames
I had for you and what
would I by any of them be called
Would I be called witness
a word that in Greek is the same
as the word for martyr
one for me and one for you
From here I can picture almost
dispassionately a book whose cover
shows the shadows of both of us
exchanging places in this word
///
One night John Ashbery came over
for dinner and I had on
The Disintegration Loops which he guessed
was Brian Eno which is an excellent guess
Later he praised
the potatoes dauphinoise
that I had made without realizing
that’s what they were called
John and I were both from upstate New York
so one of the first times we met we gossiped
about which weathermen on the local news
we thought were handsomest up there
The day John died I was stuck
in a motel technically in Provincetown
but less than a hundred feet
from the Truro sign
In my suitcase was a copy
of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
so I took it to the beach in the rain
and read from random
pages to the mist and the gulls
“Father I thought we’d lost you
In the blue and buff planes of the Aegean:
Now it seems you’re really back.”
“Only for a while, son, only for a while.”
We can go inside now.
It was the smallest my voice
had sounded to me in years
though maybe that’s what let the wind
carry it farther
Walking back across the beach
to the hotel I saw
a dead horseshoe crab
that from even a short distance
seemed like it could have been
alive but who can tell with
such an ancient thing
The corpse looked like it was made
of hammered gold
covered in sand and wax
I walked away from it
I went inside
///
In case what Yoko Ono said is true
that to name one’s enemy in one’s art
injures the art more than the enemy
I won’t tell you who
is president now
I forget the name of the woman
who gave you acupuncture but not
of your ex-lover who mornings
toward the end washed you
when you could no longer walk
to the bathroom
We argued over which of us
would give you your sponge bath
each morning I ended up
able to bear it once
I forget who brought
to your hospital room
a single gardenia blossom
because you loved Billie Holiday
but I haven’t forgotten the name
of the man who at the party after
the reception after your memorial
flung himself into a fit of wailing
next to the margarita machine
He wailed out of grief over you
and because as we would learn
but did not yet know
he had it too
For years I would say magnolia
when I meant gardenia
and would flinch whenever I smelled one
all sweetness and rot
How many thousands
of stories like yours
have been told
and forgotten how many
stories of lovingly durable nurses
of hospital sheets of IV tubes
dripping saline and morphine
How many stories of drugs
that would haul you
along in their wake for a while
but finally
let you sink How many versions
of your scrotum
becoming so swollen
that the only thing I could think of
as I dabbed it one morning
with a washcloth
was a grapefruit
then couldn’t eat grapefruit for years
///
After a thunderstorm
a writer told a chapel full of people
about the time he showed his brother
the story he was about to read to us
What it was about I can’t
recall something terrible
<
br /> and meaningful to both of them
and probably to those of us who had
assembled in the chapel
to soak up terror and meaning
or at least to extract
some of the latter from the former
After reading it his brother
had gone out to walk his dog
with the story still in his pocket
Lacking anything suitable he used
some of the pages to scoop up
the dog’s shit from the sidewalk
I’ve never felt I’ve known
a story well enough to make
such practical use of it
In August of 2001 I was walking
with poets in Copenhagen
and we encountered on the sidewalk
a smallish pile of dog shit
into the center of which
a handwritten note had been stuck
Maybe one of us decided
it was a poem
Whatever it said we couldn’t read it
written as it was in Danish
and though at least one of us
considered it no way
were we going to pluck it out
and bring it back
for our new Danish friends
to translate
Out of the body come
the usual questions
How are we supposed to tell
the difference between stories and poems
between author and speaker
between terror and meaning
between owners and dogs
between all of us living
and all of us dead
///
Twenty years after you died
I am still seeing sometimes
around Manhattan one of your exes
also named Mark
because that’s how our story
has always told itself
Mark and his dogs lived
in the same building downtown
as my friends and their dogs I assume
he didn’t recognize me
and what would I even have said
as we passed in the lobby
Hi you might not remember me but
Recently Mark and I ended
up seated at adjacent tables
at a restaurant in the Village
where I lacked the nerve to bring myself
to lean over to my friend
and say Don’t look
but that guy over there
My friend had been talking about
colony collapse and poetries
of witness but I was too distracted
to listen I felt like a bee
who’d been heading
for honey and gotten trapped instead
in tar
Recently I read that saving the honeybees
would no more save all the bees
than saving the chickens would
save all the birds
I often confuse
a sense of futility