Year: 2014

Q: When you answer the telephone, how do you say hello?

Q: Describe the language in which you dream; is that your first language?

Q: Do you wear your skin like a coat, or like a shell?

Q: Should we publish your book— who will read it?

Q: How many letters do they have in their alphabet?

Q: What is the likelihood of getting eaten by a lion penned in a cage?

Q: What is the shortest distance between several broken points on a historical timeline?

Q: How many copies can you provide of your own book?

Q: What is the principle by which mercury sidles and divides?

Q: Have you ever needed to hide your true identities?

Q: Do you recognize the kind of mind that obeys aphorisms about staying in one’s place?

Q: How many words do you believe have no possible translations?

Q: Do you understand there may not be any opportunity to defend your position?

Q: You will have to provide your own reception provisions, including cutlery, food, and drink.

Q: You may stand in the foyer whole waiting for the counter to open.

Q: Please leave your shoes, umbrellas, and wet things in the bin by the door.

Q: Please make sure to leave your registration fee (no credit or debit cards, cash only).

Q: Do you understand the terms, obligations, and penalties involved?

Break glass, pull lever, adjust mask, tighten:
the arrow points all ways in an emergency.

A seat is more than a cushion: it’s a flotation device.
You wrap both arms around it in an emergency.

No need to be polite or fake a feeble cough.
You’re allowed to belt it out in an emergency.

As a child, once, a sudden constriction in breath made me leap
into my father’s arms: was it affection or a sense of emergency?

When a baby threw up clear across the waiting room, she was moved
to first in line. Projectile vomiting counts as an emergency.

We could hear sirens from miles away. A disembodied voice instructed us
to leave our homes, seek other shelter. Where to go in such an emergency?

My girlfriend recounts on the twelfth anniversary of her sister’s death
how she pulled off the highway from a sense of impending emergency.

Breath quickens, the pulse turns restless.
Rising tides find sluiceways in an emergency.

to be smooth as a fig leaf sunning in the yard.

I asked to be light as a circus of speckled motes,
to have the dignity of lanterns on a passing train.

I asked to open like a secret peeling from the bark of a tree,
to close like the hinge of a music box after it has been played.

I asked to bear in my hands the heart hidden in the hills,
for the string to guide me into the labyrinth.

says I am not a copy: most of the time
you don’t even know I’m here. The poem

behind the poem is not your evil twin,
and not your doppelgänger either. You came
into the room thinking Oh what nice

contemporary furniture, what pleasant ambience,
and you were ready to surrender your keys, your purse,
your not-yet-born firstborn to the handsome valet

attendant. But the poem behind the poem doesn’t care
what kind of suit or trench coat you’re wearing,
what kind of cummerbund. The poem behind the poem

is a thin tasseled cord to one side
of the printed drape or the dumbwaiter.
The poem behind the poem is the trapdoor

you don’t notice until the floor falls away
beneath your shiny, pointy, oxfords; and you
are falling into a story that doesn’t seem

to make sense, and so you wave your arms
and yell I’ll sue! except the ancient clerk
yawning at the counter has seen it all before.

 

In response to Via Negativa: An inquiry concerning the poetics of like, whatever.