Poems on all the major topics: cats, dreams, and the end of the world.
No roadside attraction invites me to See the World's Deepest Hole but I stop here in dreams, on imagined world's-end roadtrips. I turn off my car, zip up my parka, crunch snow and glass in the overgrown parking lot. Scientists drilled the hole. It ends almost eight miles down in rock hot and plastic. When they had learned what they wanted about what was down there, when the drill mouth had chewed copper and granite and choked on mud "boiling with hydrogen" they welded the borehole shut and left it to the taiga. Some walls are gone, the laboratories looted, but the cinderblock and rebar are pushed clear of the hand-width hole. I kick the rusted plug with quilted boot, sensing the organ pipe voice of the space below. I know I'm safe from that depth—nothing on earth is bottomless, nowhere will I fall forever— still, some things are lost; they aren't buried where people look, where their shovels dig. I don't linger. I hear again the call of far places where I will step unrecognized through undivided rooms.
August 2013
In bad dreams she won’t cooperate. We have time to outrun the tornado but she’s under the bed, her limbs so slippery and she screams when I drag on her tail— or I can’t lock this door, the bolt is crooked, won’t fit and someone is going to open it and let her out where I won’t find her again. In life she’s independent, cleans herself, learns secrets, observes with slow blink or dilated pupil—open door, dark planet, aperture that snaps wide, friction of claws in substrate, rocket launch, escape velocity. Swat of a bandit’s tail warns of concealed weapons, but furred digits accept my clumsy gestures in their tender grasp— nose touch, imitated mew. It’s the end of the world and I have a plan, we’ll walk to my uncle’s place in the mountains in Carolina and it will be safe there but she hates me for cramming her into the cage, cries on top of the pack in the sun, won’t walk beside me, can’t be trusted to hunt for herself, will run away and die like a dumb animal. I only know how to take care of myself. I wake to something tugging, grooming my hair, a sexless mother in her own dream of instinct and origin.
October 2013
On the way to Mars we drill for the landing and do crosswords— trivia of a canon we're forgetting. Fourth grade blurs: something about Mesopotamia, lions in the coliseum, the meaning of thirteen red and white stripes. The gods live on the Olympus Mons, but no one can remember what tickertape parade was supposed to mean. On the way to Mars I dream of snow between stations and red rust falling, of steeples swallowed and quarries filled with slag of bridge and plow. It's quiet. On the way I start to forget the meaning of my name— something about desire or possession. On the surface there will be no saints, no bones. Someday a school, lettuce growing under domes, but no myth ripening to oil underground, no swords in stones.
December 2010
In the last two weeks after I left the rented room and came to stay with a classmate’s family, it was the icy inherited house, the high ceiling, the apples drying over the stove that cured me, the mince pies. It was the kindness, it was— it was sleeping the whole night warm like a little sister on a mattress on the floor, the cold scuttle to the shower, the steam flooding from a plate of eggs and potatoes, carols on the radio, dry toast with butter and jam. It was the antidote to a frozen grocery store aisle where I stood between the American-style chocolate chip cookies and bags of Christmas candy, to walking back to the room alone past all the bridges over the Liffey—each early DART ride to school together was a piece of it, as we ran between the cars to the front of the train while snow fell over the bay, slipped the turnstiles at Pearse Street Station, ran until the flakes melted in the waves.
November 2010
The throttle, the g-suit, the callsign, the rubber sleeves, the formation. The story about being hit by lightning. The squadron on a Saturday but at least take the kids: there are rows of fake switches in the simulator to flip all on, all off, and test flights on the bench-press. The bar songs with the dirty parts disguised, re-rhymed, the crud table, the afterburners, the sortie, the tower, the roofstomp: lexicon of all the nomad people who must have left these rituals for us, although scattered in pieces between Alabama, Virginia, Germany, Rhode Island, Mississippi. The burning piano, solemn prank and memorial for some long-dead R.A.F. aviator, repeated here for the unspoken name and for what might happen. The one about the dead lizard in the Philippines. The broken nose. The war stories, the sand, the contractors on the farm where he grew up, building a silo, who didn't want advice, college boy. Always the catfish meunière on the first night home from the desert. (He said the soft-serve in the DFAC wasn't bad at all.) When I was a baby in Japan, my feet never touched the ground until the box of Tennessee dirt from my Nanu arrived, until the proper ceremony, the flag, all the men in dress blues filling the little house. Never the slightest doubt about any tale in this canon. I have seen the movies. I know fighter pilots are supposed to have a tragic flaw and someone dies before the end. It wasn't like that, but in August on bike-rides we would peel out from the driveway in formation. And at bedtime the trundle bed was a runway: procedure was observed, the tower notified, landing gear extended, instruments checked, and I had to call the ball, Rebecca. It was better than any cinema dogfight. We never needed enemies or flames.
October 2010
There are beds with Navajo blankets in the bathrooms, somehow ominous, showers with ancient soap curds dried up in the drains. For the night when we sleep in shifts, when you take your turn waiting by the phone and the window—for what? The president? Tanks rolling up the mesa? They would send you home, and anyway it wouldn't happen now. The beds are for techs running the accelerator, for geneticists growing things, for nano-stuff or for nothing really, just left over. The site was chosen primarily because it was remote and relatively unpopulated. Still you might want to stay. It could be like a treehouse or when the power went out and we all lit candles, like blankets in the back seat, all-night drives, tornado drills, codenames, science fiction— and maybe it would stop the way you dream about defending your old high school as a fortress under siege, about tunnels, canned food, green glass, the surface of the sun.
September 2010
I. It doesn't seem to belong to the past of this planet with four hearts, two brains, a single testicle— worm with a skull, dark embryo: the hagfish. No child fascinated by dinosaurs could love this living fossil, unchanged in 300 million years. Not petrified, but preserved in thick time on the cold bed of the ocean, so dark, so deep it escaped evolution or was left behind: the round mouth turning like a gear, forever the lensless eye. II. The saltwater crocodile is thriving in the coastal rivers near Darwin, Australia, as dinosaurs burn on the roads in fossil fuel. Long ago, in the ferns, did an ancestor pray for immortality? Now everything familiar is dust and oil. A tagged crocodile leaves the coast, swims far into the open ocean, sometimes reappears hundreds of miles away—and sometimes vanishes. Maybe the tag came loose and sank too deep for radios to hear. Or maybe he paused in the waves, inhaled the salt air once more and dove: deep down, out of time to reptile Valhalla, to take his place among the ferns being crushed to grease in the heart of the Earth.
September 2010
My bike is about to break— it's time to go home. What should I do with it? Release it in the pasture with the cows? It was supposed to be disposable, handlebars loose, the cheapest I could find. Over a bridge and through another town, another road I dream I ride to school on, and there a tree house, someone else's yard. I stop, hold still, don't breathe, can't look away: silver sunlight is about to overflow that long dark cloud on the horizon and spill like mercury into the fields.
January 2010
Your pale streamers don’t come from God or dead ancestors or fire foxes or even from the North pole. I read these things to avoid disappointment. Photographs show deep pink, but this color is imagined by exposures impossible for the human eye. I saw only green bands, needles, curls, and endless columns. I didn’t hear you whispering, or meet you in the woods along the Chena Hot Springs Road. Sometimes now I look at your postcard photographs— multiple exposures, digitally enhanced—and squint, ignoring the pink to remember that anemic green of science and experience. And sometimes now (when I need you) I am wild with superstition. I remember your electric form, I feel your slow stimulus, I look for your tracks in the snow.
September 2009
With thanks to Neruda