You Must Remember This (2 page)

The dark oaks creak with the dead

weight that hangs from their limbs—

ropes taut with bodies barely turning.

We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,

looking out across the charred fields

and the smoking timbers of a farmhouse.

By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears

into dreaming orchards thick with bees,

but now in the chill of morning it is mostly

the scrape and croak of birds just starting in.

Someone has knotted an enemy banner

to the tail of an ass to drag the muddy lanes.

But the ass stands rooted in a ditch,

shredding weeds with a ripping sound.

Up on the wall, a woman works the crowd,

making the rounds with a steaming sack of corn.

People buy a roasted ear for warmth,

holding it snug inside their hands for a long while

before peeling back the damp husk.

Memory

It was not yet light.

I heard my father stir.

I crept downstairs

in my pajamas to listen

as he sent my brother

to find his spirit animal:

If it is a crow it is a crow
,

and you will not go hungry
.

I want it to be a bear

or a wolf
, my brother said.

If it is a crow it is a crow
,

murmured my father.

The door whuffed shut

and cold ascended the stair.

After a long moment

I walked into the kitchen

where my father sat.

I want to seek mine
, I said.

Your what?
he asked.

My spirit animal
, I said.

He laughed and pointed

to the broom closet.

Check in there
, he said.

Maybe the mop bucket

will be able to teach you

how to hold your water
.

Very funny
, I whispered.

My father shrugged,

What do you expect?

You're a closet Slovakian
,

and your brother is simple
.

Last week at the library

he checked out the phonebook
.

As my father spoke,

I heard the staccato

footfalls of my brother

and his curious gait.

The door burst open

with a gust of cold:

A bus!
he said.
Huge

as the sperm whale!

The mirror of my soul

is a crosstown bus!

My father smiled,

Good for you, Jeffrey!

His face was frank

as an open sail. Then

he looked at me and

mouthed these words:

The steam that blows the whistle

never turns the wheel
.

Now that I am a man,

I can clearly recall

how snow sifted sideways

through the air, how

I never had a brother,

how my father yearned

to be elsewhere, how

I longed to board that

crosstown bus and sit

quiet in the weak light,

using a stubby pencil

to draw the curious

members of my new

family, smiling there

on those paper napkins.

Soirée

Your humor is deft and cutting

my fingers off one by one,

she said as we left the party.

I started up the car and said:

Every joke holds one blade inside

the breast pocket of its coat

to open things and liberate

the world of unremembered light.

This exchange took place without words.

A snowbank leapt into the headlights.

The car seemed to know the way home.

Until that moment I had been waiting

to put my mouth over her mouth

and breathe the ferment of the evening.

This might have led to touching

the soft parts of our bodies together.

Instead we fell asleep, tongues

heavy in our mouths like fish.

When They Meet, They Can't Help It

His obsession is a cart drawn by muscled oxen

over rain-softened roads. Salt marsh spreads evenly

on either side. Reeds stir like fine hair in the breeze.

The land seems flattened by the heat. The wheels

crush white bits of shell into densely packed mud.

Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks

in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the

dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the

animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.

The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,

drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the

driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.

The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving

through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality

of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.

Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.

The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers

motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted

to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite

through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal

and fear—if pressed, he could name neither impulse.

His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could

calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling

neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they

open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,

while the silence holds, he thinks of what they've done

and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this

forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.

She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What's the sound

skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?

If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things

are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner

thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.

Clockwatcher

The night is not a hole

to fill with your thoughts.

It is not a sock to stuff

deep in the gob of morning

and hope the sun has

soiled itself there on the couch

where it collapsed after the gin.

The sun can be so tiresome.

The night is not a black dog

snuffling around the muskrats.

The night refuses to stumble

through Byzantine circuits

like loose electricity. The night

has no limbs. It never stutters

or grabs. It settles in like

a headache: there before

you know it then a pressing

darkness stained with light

and you wish you'd taken

that handful of crumbling

white pills before it came.

Atlas

When they lead you into the room with the blind man

and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face

so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails

that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight

and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat

because once he has confirmed the bones of your face

fall into line with his memory of the bones of your father,

he will offer a tobacco-stained smile and a wine-tinged

exhalation and announce, yes, you could only be
his
child,

all the while fumbling for the greasy string around his neck

to withdraw from inside his shirt a key that still holds

the warmth of his chest when he drops it in your hand.

The map is in the box, he'll say. The box beneath the bed.

You expected worn parchment or carefully folded vellum

but not this sturdy clothbound book. It is not merely a map.

It is an atlas, replete with indexes, charts, and translucent

overlays that display your various organs, followed by veins

and arteries traced in red and blue, and then the delicate lattice

of nerve endings that lace your body. The fine white crescent

scar on your forehead is indicated with an asterisk to footnote

the make and model of the car door that delivered the blow,

back when you were a boisterous child. The final overlay

takes care to reproduce the actual melanin of your skin tone

and quietly highlights this fact by including a small inset box

that offers the proper ratio of ocher to umber so that the hue

can be replicated by the paint department at any hardware store.

The thought of inhabiting a room the exact color of your skin

crosses your mind. You flip to the index and begin thumbing

through the italicized headings. The word
orgasm
catches your eye.

It is followed by a list of subheadings tucked into parentheses:

(first, last, multiple, most sustained, most frightening, inadvertent,

nocturnal, diurnal, induced by: stuffed animals, Bulgarian cuisine,

silk bedding, musical role-playing fantasies, velvet; see also:
sneeze
.)

It is all here, you realize. The manual you suspected and sought.

With a start you flip to the final section, and see it bears the title:

Future Accomplishments
. You are uncertain whether to continue,

knowing that the first item on the list could quite possibly be,

1.)
Currently Reading Future Accomplishments
and no matter how

quickly you begin skimming over the text your eyes will alight

upon only those words, and you will settle into a whirling pause

which comprises the rest of your life, reducing it to an infinite

bumper sticker: The Future Is Now, Is Now, Is Now, Is Now

but if you do proceed you will be delighted to discover this is

not the case. This is not some sort of cheap rip-off of Borges:

there is actually a numerical list of deeds, some quite surprising.

It gratifies you to know you will one day befriend an orangutan.

Of all the things on the list, this is the one you will carry with you

once the book has been returned and the lock has clicked shut.

Many years later, while those at your bedside await your last breath,

you remain serene. There has been no orangutan, you murmur.

No orangutan whatsoever. In this moment, you begin to recover.

The Difficulty of Holding Time

The silliness of clocks and watches,

weather vanes with no wind, spinning

to correlate a thing they don't measure

but suggest. Perhaps a large ceramic

bowl with its round mouth opened

always to sky would be more accurate.

Days pass: the sun rides its staring white

road. And
again
. Always
again
, opening

and closing like a dutiful flower. You

put entire hours in your pockets and later

find nothing but lint. You slip a minute

into your coin purse and it transforms

into foil wrapper. You chant
is
and
is

and
is
which already
was
before touching