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Being blankets and suffuses, underlies and overlays; nothing
doesn’t have a cover from which nothing isn’t made: everything
is anything you like: constellated atoms spike and swoop
and promulgate their warp and woof to keep you fizzing
in a grand and infinitely busy camaraderie. Biology is physics:
sentiment is quarks. Everything’s a spinning whiz: whirling like
spaghetti twirls on forks: proximities in endless overlapping
families of probabilities and permutations of exacting essences
of star. We like to think we’re taken care of. Perhaps we are.
.
Robert A. Kettelhack
9.29.1945 – 3.27.89
We don’t ever mean goodbye.
Though we think we do.
Life is certain Death’s a lie.
Absence can’t be true.
Twenty-one years have gone by.
Today you're sixty-five.
Skeptically, I watched you die.
To me you’re still alive.
.
Sometimes you wonder if another, blue reality of you
exists in some dimension utterly unshorn and un-bespectacled,
near-sighted, smelling like an animal, but not forlorn –
silent, unattended, fed and watered by an unseen hand –
all the data you are now allowed to intersect
with every aspect of itself without remanding you to hell –
instead a kind of grand slow evolution into something like
an answer – swelling literally into under-standing, where you find
yourself beneath, and looking up, and knowing what was going on.
Today, all huddled on a New York City sidewalk,
was a man who either long ago had stopped his meds –
or who had found another, blue reality in which he sat
silent, unattended, fed and watered by an unseen hand –
all the data he had been allowed to intersect
with every aspect of itself without remanding him to hell –
instead a kind of grand slow evolution into something like
an answer – swelling literally into under-standing, where he found
himself beneath, and looking up, and knowing what was going on.
.
I have one potted plant. I don’t know what it is. Despite my casual
attention to it (it resides beside a kitchen window and gets watered
now and then) it seems to think it’s in some sunny vernal den
of pleasure: a paradise attended to by genius garden angels
in a sweetly apt supernal clime: it could do advertisements of itself
and gather jealous kin around to crowd onto its shelf: it sprouts
green leaves and stalks and nubs of more green leaves and stalks
and nubs – so much so I have had to prop and rope its verdant
now top-heavy growth up by a chopstick (handy! – those thin wire ties
you get with plastic garbage bags): it sags and blasts like some slow
orgasm up towards the sky. Lately it outdid itself: it sent out two thin
soaring flowers, pointing up like penises. Venus clearly is required.
In fullest glory my anonymous enflamed desiring plant yearns now
to further its unfolding story in a dance with the equivalent
of an amenable anemone. And flooding back to me comes suddenly
a flipside vision of the weirdness of the grownup female, back when
I was a gangly boy. I’d gaped at all the work it took to be one –
in the early nineteen sixties when to see one was to see a towering
teased shield of hair and Cleopatra makeup with sharp dangerously
filigreed accoutrements, exotic scents which spoke to me of some
strange battle: none of it made sense. (Perplexes, that premiere
encounter with the arsenal of sex.) And here! – another brash new
flagrancy! – a vegetable flirt! It dropped one of its phallic flowers
in the dirt. I’ve put it in some water in a cup. I’d like to bring it up.
.
Though today it’s sporting three,
the number of its heads is arbitrary –
it may lack a head entirely tomorrow,
or next week be sprouting four or more;
and that it’s mixed, affixed the colors
it has mixed, affixed betwixt and to
its arms and necks and skulls and legs
and shoes and shorts and shirt and stool
it would be foolish to imagine was
symbolic of quite anything. It’s never
leaned toward meaning, but it has
an aptitude – a talent – for serenity.
In fact, the more I interact with its
evolving forms and hues, the more
I seem incapable of pessimistic views.
Today a cool triumvirate of calm obtains
among its thoughtful trinity of faces –
quite replaces any pain or quiver
of bewilderment that I may entertain.
A nexus and a flow, soft scintillation
of synaptic leaps and letting go – its
demonstration that life can build up
and fall apart – lends quite a sweet
emolument to the receptive heart.
.
You’ll always find Roo in his cove –
this cousin of the slithy tove –
congested, rheumy, reddened eyes:
so used to feeling bad, he lies
in some perversity of peace –
so long familiar with the least
of luck with any kind of health –
(not to mention – lord knows! – wealth)
he’s rather learned to like it: thick
with aches, a mild fever, sick
with vagaries that can’t be told.
I come to him when I’ve a cold –
I try to follow his example –
let the misery be ample –
cough, compare our ills, and whine –
till secretly we're almost fine.
.
Colors leech away – leave some traces:
kindergarten tempera paint – childhood
crayon smudges on the faces – and yet
further drained to faintness by the grind
of some dark agency which scavenges
and loots the memory – transmutes
each member of the family into recyclable
commodities your dreams can wield
as profligately in their internecine schemes
as dreams all seem to need to do. Whatever
mystic fluid made up him and her and her
and him and you flows through an artery
that endlessly will bleed for you as long
as you are rankled by the mystery of history –
the doubt – by your determination to discover,
alter, re-create some semblance of what
any of it was about. They may fade
to pallid white but they will not run out.
