Bang - The last two seconds : poems

Graywolf Press Copyright 2015 by Mary Jo Bang This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals.

To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-704-7 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-901-0 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2015 Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950982 Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design Cover art: Kikuzo Ito, Speeding Monorail: On the Precipice , 1936

She slept through the earthquake in Spain. The day after was full of dead things. Well, not full but a few. Coming in the front door, she felt the crunch of a carapace under her foot.

In the bathroom, a large cockroach rested on its back at the edge of the marble surround; the dead antennae announced the future by pointing to the silver mouth that would later gulp the water she washed her face with. Who wouldnt have wished for the quick return of last nights sleep? The idea, she knew, was to remain awake, and while walking through the days gray fog, trick the vaporous into acting like something concrete: a wisp of cigarette smoke, for instance, could become a one-inch Lego building seen in the window of a bus blocking the street. People sometimes think of themselves as a picture that matches an invented longing: a toy forest, a defaced cricket, the more or less precious lotus. The night before the quake, she took a train to see a comic opera with an unlikely plot. She noticed a man in a tan coat and necktie who looked a lot like Kafka. The day after, she called a friend to complain about the bugs.

From a distant cityhis voice low and slightly plaintivehe said, Are you not well? Is there anything you want?

The rhinestone lights blink off and on. Pretend stars. Im sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave. A science of motion toward some flat surface, some heat, some cold. Some light can leave some after-image but it doesnt last.

Isnt that what they say? That and that historical events exchange glances with nothingness.

You know, dont you, what were doing here? The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless. Were watching the spectators in the bleachers. The one in the blue shirt says, I knew, even as a child, that my mind was adding color to the moment. The one in red says, In the dream, there was a child batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends with the body making a metronome motion.

By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically side to side while making a clicking noise. His friends look away. They all know how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch because we have nothing better to do. We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd will rise to its feet when prompted and count one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, three-one-hundredas if history were a sound that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this.

The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.

Were sitting here quietly. Youre feeling your arm, Im feeling my face. Were supposed to stay quiet and live the waiting life. We were told to be a portraitists object and imitate a sad fate. We are a skull times two.

Were supposed to stay quiet. Herr Moment is looking at a watch that says now. Its red face reminds me of the eye of an ogre. Its shiny rim reminds me of Herr Moments handcuffs. I dont want to speak about what cant be fathomed mourning and missing, rings cut from corpses, Herr Moments refusal to show his real face.

A cage can be a body: heart in the night quieted slightly; mind, a stopped top.

Clock spring set. Hand in motion. The fact of the hollowed nothing head. How did we come to this? Inch by inch. I was born, borrowed from the beast; I was now property in a country where chain reignsthe empire city of I.

So, the empire: the breath, the legend Of the well-guarded hell.

One comes to tell you what you should have done differently. I think, I say, and I am not you. In the margin of fear I heard a woman convincing me to listen. Listen, she said, to the doctor.

The city before this was nothing but swirled sand in a storm. Nothing turns back.

I saw a fluttering I recognized in the distance. Out of nowhere, there was red: the furnace and the beating heart. Every giddy excess behind the beginning was also leading to the emphatic end.

The trapeze artist above is invested in space. She attends to the arc the bar makes the way youd watch a movie where a star who looks like you swings on a swing. Its true you know how to wait although I dont know that that counts as knowledge.

I heard a banker say to Monsignor this morning, Im certain God wishes me well. A rats face at the window next to me is stone and the wind isnt blowing. A rats face sometimes reminds me of what one sees in a morning mirror: nose, eyes, a head, some hair. Five racehorses, neck to neck, each with four feet off the ground: yet another classic example of time seeming to be standing still. Everyone with money knows that flying from Pisa to France is a pain since you have to change planes in Brussels.

Strum and concept, drum and bitterness, the dog of history keeps being blown into the present her back to the future, her last supper simply becoming the bowels dissolving memory in a heap before her. Strum and concept, drum and bitterness, the dog of history keeps being blown into the present her back to the future, her last supper simply becoming the bowels dissolving memory in a heap before her.

A child pats her back and drones there there while under her lifted skirt is a perfect today where a cult of ghost-lovers predicts a rapture but instead remains to inherit varicose veins, rubber knickers, douches with bulbs, douches with bags, girdles in a choice of pink, red or white, and in rubber, silk or twilled linen, enemas, clysters, oils, balms, and other Benjamin etceteras burrowing like scabies into the brains ear as it listens to the click of the next second coming to an end. Throughout, the senseless waste of reaching up to pull down a machine-made device from the rafters, a beatific mythical magical deity. Sturm und Drang , storm and stress, turbulence and urge, turmoil and ferment. A revolution goes right, then wrong. The right falls in love with an icon. They force the landscape into a box.