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A
RECIPE FOR ANXIETY
Literature is achieved anxiety.
-Harold
Bloom
Hitching a ride on your heart-ache, exile the
calendar’s numbers
to the dirt-end of the road’s turn. Set aside days for whispering in
your own ear, years for going astray. Sending all open vowels out
the window of your mouth, keep the consonants for your teeth.
Occasion hell when an advance of ideas runs amuck up
your spine. Take four quarts longing and a pinch of Epsom
salt to the family table. Spread out a wreckage of syntax
and let cool overnight. Wielding a hot quill, write, write,
every morning, a letter to yourself under the bed. Pray
to the chain-gang of childhood that never let you go.
While reciting the Cosmologist’s alphabet, say something
back to yourself, in your sleep. Without telling anyone, rescue
all the half-crayons you can, and take them home as an alchemy
for painting. Launch a page of gray carrier pigeons
toward the past. Now, blindfolded, walk backwards. Undiluted,
walk forwards into the blue requiem of ocean. Then know
how far to walk the sign language of sadness.
THE HISTORY
OF RESTORATION: GRIEF MASK
...and
my brush, continuously dripping onto my face turns it to a rich mosaic.
-Michelangelo, from a sonnet on himself
at work on the Sistine Chapel.
The French flannel
in your hand, soaked in solution, drips
down your raised arm,
round your neck, slipping its tiny wet tongue
between your breasts.
The lacquered color that changed
with soot and grease from tallow of altar candles
now comes shocking as the future in front of you.
Your body is contorted, your arms, white, numb.
Everything is slowing down.You’d rather peel potatoes
with your teeth than see yourself smiling
among the people being pulled with you
out of the shadow of the painting.
But you want to get back to fail
the silence, humiliated idiom, to remember
the original face spilling out into the room.
The windows are open
but you are still running out of air.
Visitors tell you to stay up all night with it, to take
the portrait back to its intended patina,
that all those hours will be forgotten in an instant.
The pain in your legs will be worth it.
You’ll have no time to eat because
this is an ongoing elegy to the body
dividing its image.
How many times
will you clean, salvage, stato d’ animo ,
inhabit the rush of darkness?
Don’t you know: destiny has always been
boring, giving you a glimpse of reconciliation?
And you’ll admit, the face was a catwalk
out of the past, your own receding pose.
There now, don’t despair.
We have always made strangers out of ourselves
by loving others.
FISH MASK FROM THE
WATER
...a rain
of fish did actually occur in 1817, at Appin, in Scotland. It consisted
of a
downpour
of small herrings, a feat that nature repeated in 1830, at Islay, in
Argyllshire.
-William
C. Vergara, Science In Everyday Things
As if common sense had a vendetta
to persuade you nothing is as usual
as it seems, that climbing
the bone ladder from the heart up to the head, or
better yet, from the head down to the heart, you see
the slave of your logic
using a child’s red beach bucket to empty the sinking boat
that carries you both out
to the center of the Atlantic, where you see a blue Palazzo with women
wearing white dance to Rossini’s La
Cenereatola
and you see the Loch Ness monster, green hair of Neptune, and you hear
bagpipes
leading the wind; now, a storm is brewing
in your mind, and your bad behavior comes back to haunt you
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