The Relative Importance of Two Simultaneously Posed Inquiries

The Relative Importance of Two Simultaneously Posed Inquiries

I.  Adelaide, in the library, waits for
the reference librarian, whose queue is
a few students deep, all, like Adelaide,
resigned to the fact that their journeys, both
academic and practical, at times
need the assistance of others, if not
for the answers, at least for directions.

II.  And while awaiting the meeting with the
patient voice behind the desk, another
question forges its way into her head,
by way of a well-placed poster, asking
what singular book you would choose to
possess if on a deserted island
you found yourself stuck.  She digests this line
of inquiry, elevated now to
a level of relevance higher than
the one that placed her here at the outset.

III.  Suddenly immediate, terribly
intriguing, and, hopefully, woefully
irrelevant, Adelaide is sent to
this imaginary island, casting
one-by-one her books into the sea,
watching as they float, the water wetting
the pages, facilitating the waves’
complete consumption of this cerebral
collection, sinking to the ocean floor,
sliding down her spinal cord and out of
the realm of possible choices to answer.

IV.  Adelaide never does decide which book
she’d read while conceivably mortal, which
one would provide for infinite inter-
-pretation, the same pages different
each time that her fingers touch and turn them.
What is more, she has now forgotten the
reason why she placed herself into this
queue, a fact which, as it is her turn to
pose her question, causes some discomfort.

Man Hands and Woman Wrists

Man Hands and Woman Wrists

Traveling north one year ago, she sat across from me on the train, trying so hard not to look like she was trying so hard to blend in, or at the very least, not to attract the wrong set of stares.  Her hair could have been naturally grown out past what it would have been before she was her, but given the copper color and very even length, I am dubious; her clothing fit, sufficiently, but no more than that.

The thick, broad jaw line might have been a suggestion, but as I continued my study of her down the shoulders, over her silvered, jingly wrists, I came upon the giveaway:  her broad, not entirely depilated hands clutching her purse, still stiff, perhaps genuinely leather, who’s to say, with a quiet, nervous ferocity as her eyes darted around, trying to discern if her cover had been blown and with what consequence.

Upon spotting those living exhibits of evidence, I greeted the revelation with hesitation, regret; after all, she was working with such visible effort to be that which was meant, but not granted, my analyzing eyes being a tiny, perceptible prevention towards that achievement.  Her glance when briefly our journeying scans found themselves upon one another snagged, one of mild trepidation, was also eager, even thankful for the attention.

I wondered about her, as I exited the train, and asked myself, among other, more meaningful lines of inquiry, what for her might feel like home, and who, ultimately, she was looking for to look for her.

Before He Was Lyle

Before He Was Lyle

I.
The students look at him as he is wheeled
into view, on a cold metal table
in a cold metal room; a few turn their
heads, to the side, away, and back again.

II.
They had read of him before this moment,
of his profession, cause of death, mostly
true, mostly from cancer of the lungs (he,
it turns out, was a smoker of no light
breed), and learned of his profession, past.

III.
He was a baker and a husband, the
effects of the former apparent in
his muscle structure, and the latter of
which manifested itself, perhaps
with his cigarette affliction, were he
here to narrate the exact reasons why.

IV.
From his shoulder injury, they learned of
his military service, before he
was a baker or a husband; where he
served was not revealed, as it bore little
relevance to the analysis of
his body, its quirks, their education.

V.
He couldn’t have predicted the nature
of the conversations that would go on around
him while the students cut and poked (of the
weekend plans, the latest test, the gossip),
or the fights that would erupt (over who
carried not their weight, over who was too
stressed out, over what they were observing),
or, for that matter, what would happen to
his body, when he signed it over to
the scientific community of
the young and hopeful, the poor and sleepless.

VI.
Soon, though, his head will be removed, and the
procedure will call for the students to
place it upon his chest, and obey this
they doubtless will, for this is their first year,
too early to question, to pressed for time
to ponder what Lyle would have thought if
he had known that he was to end up so
oddly respected and strangely arranged.

Her Ascension in a Dancing Dress

Her Ascension in a Dancing Dress

She appeared in the paper after her death, and from that, I learned things about my grandmother.  For before an Easter Sunday heart attack which began the eleven month countdown to her expiration date, my recollections are scenic, stuck – they are extant objects without time:

her favorite overstuffed chair in which as a child I liked to spin and in which, while her lifelong husband made her breakfast, she quietly died, the blue linoleum suitcases in my parents’ bedroom every Christmas, the number of candles on a white birthday cake, her commentary on men with pierced ears (they just want to be girls).

But when I read the paper, she existed beyond these snapshots – a gymnast to the end, she, in that final year, apparently did a split in front of a group of my second cousins right on the living room floor, oxygen mask and all.

My education continued at end of the service, next to a crying cousin whose emotions I could not comprehend, when the man at the funeral home noted to the unsuspecting audience that Dorothy loved to polka, so it was only appropriate that we listen to a song from one of her favorite cassettes.

And as the tuba began its two-step fanfare, I remember wanting to smile, not knowing if I could, wanting to find this somewhat funny, not knowing if I would be judged or hastily smitten.

And I wondered if anyone felt in that moment out of place, askew from that which was.

Finding no answers, I shrugged, continued the solemn hanging of my head, my downcast eyes staring at the laces of my new dress shoes, kept my confusion to myself and imagined her dancing towards the gates, dressed in pink and green and patterned lace.

While She Waited

While She Waited

When were you first licensed, the woman asks
as I try to get an insurance quote.
And then I remember the April that was
the springtime of my junior year in the
corridors of my high school, just having
the previous month completed my first one-
year anniversary with a girl who
would in her time reveal herself to be
anti-Semitic and mildly racist,
with a bit of a drinking problem to
round it all out.  As I knew her back then,
though, she was the object of my teenage
love, the subject of my stumbling verse,
the cause of a deteriorating
relationship with my mother.  April,
my junior year in high school, when sex was
new, pure and the source of irrational
action, of police tapping on her mot-
-her’s car, of fights and confessional con-
-versations, admitting fault, guilt, fault, flaws.

Bear with me, I plead, still trying to re-
call the year in which all of this happened,
when I would start driving the two of us
to her house, where, if time before I left for
work and time before her mother got home
permitted, we would, all of it quickly,
de-robe, deflower, entice, enjoy, and
then listen for the garage door’s gears to
start their turning, allowing her mother’s
car, whose windows had last week been rapped by
an officer, to pull in, to release
a smiling woman who would insist
I eat something before I went to work.

I’m twenty-three, it’s 2007,
I continue to calculate as the
woman chuckles, I hope still patiently,
so 2000, then, I guess, on April
seventeenth, triumphantly delivered,
I exhale and I listen to her typing.

The Eiffel Bridge

The Eiffel Bridge

The man has to his name a lesser creation,
a bridge in the small city of Oporto,
a place he knows not, beyond the width
of the river that his model, upon completion,
stood and stands.

The bridge, it seems, serves more than its
intended purpose, as UNESCO, bridled body
that it is, has noted it and thus the world has, too.
Beyond the cars that cross and the photos that span
the pages of glossy books, much to the
dead architect’s potential, pointless chagrin,
the metallic intersections of the bridge’s entrails
apparently serve as a most convenient starting point
for youthful suicides, with taught ropes
moaning to the river in an attempt to
clear their names of responsibility.

And if not ropes, then a drunken jump, a teary
and isolated farewell, with eyes focusing as they
turn on the black and shimmering surface
whose dimensions and reality become ever
more appreciated as the heavenly body
and the body in motion swallow, surrender,
respectively, with respect.

Swingset Mathematics

Swingset Mathematics

Upon reaching the swingset, trailing far behind those children, those beautiful little creatures, screaming with delight at not having fallen and scraped their knees, who had already discovered how to be fiercely competitive and narrowing the range of possible career paths (consulting, investment banking, insurance, home-making, cocaine), a small group of my friends gathered around the two swings which we were able to obtain owing to their sufficiently fast legs and somewhat established standing amongst the fairer ones, enjoying their metaphysical places at the tables of their juvenile Olympus.

Two swinging children with a small gathering surrounding them, the lot of us taking turns so that the aspiring ones such as myself could enjoy pendular flight for a few minutes and feel the joy of ascent afforded with such constancy to the others.  Beyond the expected conversation of Star Wars, teachers, soccer, girls (gross), and singing the televisions commercial jingles we recalled from the previous week, somehow on this particular spring afternoon, with me in bad early nineties children fashion, back on the ground at this point, we began to discuss the various measures by which the world measures time.

With some degree of estimated, inherited accuracy, we were able to identify, enumerate and roughly define the basic units, me refraining after the measurement ‘year,’ allowing the others to stroke their puerile egos while shouting with pride Decade! Century!  Millennium! before pausing.  So what comes after Millennium? asked one of us, possibly me, although I am dubious.  And then one of us, a maladjusted boy from England answered with such convincing certainty a generation that we found ourselves hushed, spell-bound, our eyes whirling, tracing his motion, him pumping his legs and his large, large head, commanding our unequivocal reverence.

I cannot remember when or how quickly this error was revealed to me, nor by whom, but I do recall those woodchips upon which we stood, processing what it meant to span one thousand years, and how radical it must be to exceed even that humungous lump of imprecision; this precocious wonder then oozed slowly over to a tear-welling and tear-suppressed realization of the fact that my swinging friends, our strange ritualistic circle, and myself would all be dead by the time a generation had whooshed imperceptibly past.

The recess bell rang, and we lined back up, good students that we were, to go continue inventing countries for Mrs. Foley.

The Saint-Georges Renovations

The Saint-Georges Renovations

I first mistook the men for squatters,
working amidst the yellow block party lighting;
the dust and their lack of face masks
with no sign of ventilation
lending me to believe that they were there
by mistake,
walking like the exiled from a war long gone.

And every time the train would skip,
going from Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
directly to Pigalle (for eleven months home),
it would slow down, like a trolley in a zoo,
wanting to ensure that we could find those
hard-to-spot creatures in their natural habitat,
to see them feeding, congregating, widening
an entryway, laying down new tiles.

They sealed off the arches with a playground fence,
annulling the aesthetic of white porcelain gaps,
this one of two hundred and fifty renovations
falling slightly short of its intended goal of
un métro plus clair, un métro plus beau –

One cannot blame the architects, though;
it cannot be their fault that that space was a
departure point for the residents of a city
which produced the first sociological analysis
of suicide to launch themselves with swiftness
onto the tracks and into subsequent statistical studies.

When the station re-opened, I still didn’t need it,
as my own stop was one away;
I did find it once, however, when lost
on a run aborted by my nicotine trends,
I came across the melted metal green,
blocks from my flat and months into my year,
acknowledged the consequence of
my lacking curiosity, and then ventured on,
striding, and gasping, before happening
upon a part of town that I had
been advised against entering.

Hands Around Mugs and Subtitled Discusssions

Hands Around Mugs and Subtitled Discussions

Lovely day for coffee –
rain, clouds, hints of sun.
This café is new, and so is the context,
never before has this happened to us
at this time, place, way.

So we start with easy topics, your flight
to trace Joyce back to where he roamed the earth,
and to snap your daughter’s synapses with
things that I have not known either.

Then to what brought me here in the general sense,
the state, the job – what do I do, who is she,
I know it isn’t easy – but then of course the question
why here stricto senso, this coffee shop, you,
this revelation that we have stories, and that
when in other places, our candor surprises even ourselves.

I was just napping in my car, you know,
just resting up before, well, this.

Postcard Coaster

Postcard Coaster

In handwriting worse than normal, she
scrawled down a few sentences hastily conceived,
hastily transcribed, hesitantly dropped into a
mailbox I probably know.

As I open my own, numbered fourteen,
the key jamming as it normally does, the
current created by my swinging the door
catches the card and causes its fall, onto
the cement, sand from last winter still resident
in its cracks.

I read the address, the sentences, and
by the time I reach my apartment door, a
wave has resided, and it’s dead ink on paper,
I try to think to myself, knowing that that
is not yet true, that this is still a thing
to grasp, to which to cling, to read
word by word, letter by letter, pen stroke
by pen stroke, breath by breath by
heavy breath.

It isn’t until the whisky is watered down
that I note what the postcard depicts:
a waterfall which together we’d seen twice
and by the side of which, despite my
suggestion, we did not make love.