So this guy walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Sorry,
the bartender says, I only sell atom smashers
And the guy says well isn't that America for you—
every happy-hour Nelson's a homemade physicist and no thank you,
just an ice cold one, but it's too late—suddenly, he's on his butt
in a ballfield where handsome men are chasing a ball over grass
sad grass, yellow like the hair of his once-young mother!
and again he says, no thank you—I've seen this movie before
And the bartender says it's a joke and you're inside its machine...
Hey, the guy wants to say—I'm not the guy—I'm me
I'm just a guy who walked into a bar. I'm just a guy who retreats
to his car for a private cry. Instead he sniffs and cries out—
The sky smells like the bologna from when I was a boy!
Ahh, says the bartender, ahh yes. Someone has left
the refrigerator door of the cosmos open a crack
And the view! cries the guy. The beauty of an atom smasher,
says the bartender, even from the cheap seats you see
clear into 1952. And the guy, squinting into the distance,
starts to bawl. Maybe it's the vendors hawking
commemorative popcorn, or the programs promoting emotion
("the matter of the universe!") printed on material whose pulp
was milked from the trunk of a winesap apple tree, but—
What's the matter? says the bartender. And the guy says,
I'm confused. Am I allowed to be homesick in a joke?
Yes, the bartender says. It's elemental, the bartender says—
How streets are downtrodden atoms and falling leaves are aflutter
atoms and beer is over-the-moon atoms. The moon's an atomizer
of all matter's perfumes: And the guy starts to parse it out—
Wait, I'm not smart, but if emotion's a material substance
then when a leaf falls in my lap and I hold it,
like an about-to-be-abandoned baby, I'm touching "aflutter" in 3-D?
Dear fluttering leaf!
Streets—I'm sorry for stepping on you! Apples—for coring you, and beer—
* * *
A guy walks into a bar,
—actually just the beer-drinking bleachers of a ballfield—and says
is this some kind of joke?
Well, says the bartender who has observed the little lamb
and the tyger burning bright and tickled their particulates,
because your life has lately been stagnant, we have yoked you
to a joke and we await the gasp that will gas up the cosmos...
Just then, there's a hit at the plate—and it's going,
it's going—gone to smash the guy in the skull
And since baseballs are made of nostalgia atoms, the guy,
with concussion, says I want to buy a coke for a nickel
I want to install apple pie perfumemakers in the crotch of every tree
Bartender, bring me dried nosegays! Start the stalwart pageants!
And the moon's spritzing its perfumes and the phlegm is thick and fast
And the bartender says time to wallow in byproducts:
Where we planted peanut shells, we got shaky, palsied trees
Where we planted nickel cokes, we got nicked cans
Where we planted baseballs we grew large, sad eyeballs
as we watched for something to grow. Still, still
we atom-probe: In a dark building a child is
about to be born. The smell of bread is about to
break. And our guy is going, O spring evenings!
How I used to stand yelping in the alley by the bakery...
Who are these boys throwing baseballs? Who is this baby?
O bartender, tell me, what is the message in this light rain?
But the bartender's dark eyes are flying
over centerfield, over the rooftops and watertowers of the joke's
universe, over alleys and cold valleys of refrigerator light
toward an aptest eve where these street kids are hurling a ball into
the moonlight and the moonlight is curdling into freon...
The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?
There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl.
At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.
One could look at the picture and say everything is in order.
No, I say, I cannot see the radiation.
The radiation poison, she says, sits
inside the apple and the apple looks pretty. Then she singsongs,
Bury the apple and bury the shovel that buried the apple
and put the apple-burier person in a closet forever.
We are both thinking Then bury the burier.
Both thinking of her picture with no people.
The poison sits inside the people and the people
still look pretty, she says. Still, she says, sweetly, Away with them.
The child is not a flincher, which is why I love to tell her stories:
Of the poisonous man who tumbled into the cold sea
and turned the sea poignant.
His bones glowed in the cold deep like dying coral.
His ribcage was a cave for small, lost fish.
Flecks of his glowing skin joined with green algae
on the sea surface, where, on a boat, his widow choked
as she looked down the sun shaft for her husband's greening body.
What is sunlight through seawater most like
but the strange green fire
that burnt the man?
—Who had worked atop a steel hill until a whale—
a great green whale—bumped into the continental shelf
and the steel hill cracked and its poison leaked out.
And the man began to melt...
What I am jealous of in the child, what I really detest in her
is how she nods
with kindergarten grace and finality. Primly, into her pinafore,
she tucks what I've told of the story.
On the refrigerator her picture looks so pretty.
There is no end to the green or pollen or the feeling of the bees coming.
Or of a hill and sky of poison.
On fire, the man working on the reactor must have looked wavy—
like a man trying to ride a humpback through the fast green sea.
Her picture on the refrigerator looks so pretty.
When I wake her from her nap I will ask
if the dark green slashes are meant to be
radiance, not plain grass.
The infant asleep in the trough is a Buddhist.
This time of year is very, very old. Over eggs,
that is all we can conclude, us who are asleep,
who are dreaming this long dream.
What if this infant could be awoken?
There is someone in heaven who for centuries
an infinite number of centuries, has been
perfecting himself. Is he here now with us,
watching for a red globe to roll off the tree into
wretchedness? To pick up the crying infant is to
teach it trust and love. But to suffer:
babe-in-the-manger, we will all be
the dead man if we live long enough. If we are
even alive. I am not sure that I exist right now,
actually. (I have been a word in a book
I have been a tree
high, high above the Tuileries!)
This infant must learn to cry itself to sleep.
This infant must learn to dream itself awake.
Please god continue my own dreams into
infinity: must get glitter glue to spell our names
on the stockings. No, must awake from this
world. He is crying. No not “he.” Say “it is
crying.” It is snowing. It is crying. This time of
year is old. The cold and dark: were they
not made for us to hold the infant against?
Shouldn’t we name ourselves and the things
we love? (darcie.carl.remy.fiammetta.december)
Of the six destinies they say to be human is the
hardest but it is the one I have loved the most.
Perhaps because I have not suffered enough.
This time of year might be ancient. Older than
suffering. If this world were a dream, we would
speak of it, for the root of dream is noise. Yet!
The infant is he who is unable to speak… It is
unspeakable. The infant cries. It pains me.
Oh brusque intuition, oh illogic answer…
I will arrive at you.
The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?
There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl.
At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.
One could look at the picture and say everything is in order.
No, I say, I cannot see the radiation.
The radiation poison, she says, sits
inside the apple and the apple looks pretty. Then she singsongs,
Bury the apple and bury the shovel that buried the apple
and put the apple-burier person in a closet forever.
We are both thinking Then bury the burier.
Both thinking of her picture with no people.
The poison sits inside the people and the people
still look pretty, she says. Still, she says, sweetly, Away with them.
The child is not a flincher, which is why I love to tell her stories:
Of the poisonous man who tumbled into the cold sea and turned the sea poignant. His bones glowed in the cold deep like dying coral. His ribcage was a cave for small, lost fish. Flecks of his glowing skin joined with green algae on the sea surface, where, on a boat, his widow choked as she looked down the sun shaft for her husband’s greening body.
What is sunlight through seawater most like but the strange green fire that burnt the man? —Who had worked atop a steel hill until a whale— a great green whale—bumped into the continental shelf and the steel hill cracked and its poison leaked out. And the man began to melt…
What I am jealous of in the child, what I really detest in her
is how she nods
with kindergarten grace and finality. Primly, into her pinafore,
she tucks what I’ve told of the story.
On the refrigerator her picture looks so pretty.
There is no end to the green or pollen or the feeling of the bees coming.
Or of a hill and sky of poison.
On fire, the man working on the reactor must have looked wavy— like a man trying to ride a humpback through the fast green sea.
Her picture on the refrigerator looks so pretty.
When I wake her from her nap I will ask
if the dark green slashes are meant to be
radiance, not plain grass.
Once a Day Poetry 