What I Assume

Mirrors on the Inside

Must have been some miles
through cringing and crunches on a winter sidewalk
this guy comes in and orders coffee black
bits of ice hanging stuck in his silver beard,
his breath still warm enough
to fog in his glasses completely.
I noticed. He nodded.
“They're mirrors on the inside,” he says,
“but I can see my whole face twice in them.
Imagine, seeing your self up close
each time you come in where people are,
every flaw, every scar, every
unshaven needle of hair.
All the time.
It'll drive a man to kill, if he doesn't
find a way out.

“But if I take these glasses off
I'll trip over the chair just sitting down,
straitjacket and entangle myself just
getting this damn coat off.
I'd even miss my mouth when
I mean to sip the mug, and then
sue you for making the coffee too hot."

I smile, he grins. Then blows his heat up
refills himself with fog, and explains,
"So I keep them on, I try to ignore myself,
and stare at the glass itself,
the gray ghost wrapper
that I control.
It fades away again and again."

April 30th

Snow runs straight across the road parallel and pale gray,
plankton on the unseen currents.
Normally Summer upstages Spring here,
but this time April ends with this howl,
having inhaled numberless seasons of mockery.

A magician, before diving in the tank
to break his breath against death,
first fills his blood with euphoria,
and stores it.

Everything is backwards.
I've wakened from the walking sleep of day
ending the warmest April in this freezing fool's night;
The heater in my car feels cold like a vacuum;
Classical plays on the punk rock station;
Twenty minutes ago my head rested on my wife's warm ribs,
who scratched my hair-thick head.
My nose whistled, a mewing puppy,
comfortable and quiet in the face of peeling laughter
the universal joke whispered every day.
I've never caught the punchline, but I've heard enough;
even though they get the details wrong,
details don't matter.

The universe, they say, will contract like an elastic band,
and with itself bury itself,
or it will expand until the elastic breaks.
And if it contracts, it will expand.
either way it must have somewhere to go;
oblivion or persistence—involuntary either way.

And now the snow has stopped, on the road:
remnants of a light Spring rain.
And the car has warmed.
And the green light grins, Go.
Go to a place you never go
for a hot drink and a cinnamon roll.
The light licks it's green lips,
Go,
and,
There's nothing you've forgotten,
nothing left at home,
except the funny passing moments
you call love.

Eventually the puppy will begin
to dig holes for his bones;
not out of practicality, but because they are so precious
he knows not what else to do.
He'll plan to come back,
but never will,
having forgotten the holes and the bones, and any
way, having
somewhere better else to go.

This is one of those poems that has not yet been found by it’s reader, but I refuse to forget it, because it hints at a great and preposterous anger that I still feel from time to time. I once had someone tell me he didn’t like it because it was cliche, a notion I reject more now than I did then.

I wrote the title in French not to be artsy or obtuse, but because the first draft of this had been in French, written during the semester when I took a couple French classes while finishing my dumb thesis.

Have I talked too much? It’s not usual, but like the long quote that precedes this short poem it just feels right to over-introduce sometimes.

Un Ciel en Hiver

...these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Melville, Moby Dick


A fingernail clipping glows in the sky,
    Hangs there,
    mere years from a white sparkling fly,
whose dead, lonely shell still clings to the shades
of unending sharkskin midnight palisades.