Come on All You Ghosts (5 page)

III

Listening to Neil Young in California

is like throwing away the old pills

that used to cure something and turning

your face towards the day, i.e. the ocean

filling the window with grey boats

floating in totally bright present aloneness.

For several weeks on my laptop

I had a picture of the space shuttle docking.

Then I replaced it with the ravenous

woolly adelgid covering a blighted eastern hemlock.

One branch looks like a limb

destroyed by an improvised explosive device.

Friend whose father is dying,

let us exchange dreams.

I am strong enough for yours

and you can move

down the long boring beige literal corridor

and replace the batteries in the thermostat,

fingering a diamond hair clip.

Today I have the feeling no matter

which way I turn my head I am

into ideas like everyone is freer than me

painlessly bonking whatever

is the mental equivalent of my nose.

My actual one itches, it's the plum

trees shedding invisible sexual particles.

Onto the streets I go and see the horrible

charming Victorians of my new home

San Francisco where I have moved for love.

Like purple plastic wedding dresses

they are ready to be left out imperviously

in the rain. Let's put down the book

about the later phase of Le Corbusier

when he planned the perfect harmonic

Indian city of Chandigarh and pick up

one about makers of an early type

of Japanese kimono called the kosode.

On them sometimes artists painted

landscapes such as
Kosode with Tree

and Flowering Plants
by Sakai H
ō
itsu.

Like the little figures in the picture

through the picture we journey slowly

with our eyes closely observing mountain

formations, a waterfall, trees, a village,

and tiny figures of travelers just like us.

Once the silk over someone's body

rippled, now the kimono hangs

on a wall. Oh lifestyle! Oh cake!

Between my ears is drifting now

the strange translucent golden word

axolotl. Through its whole life it never

grows any older. Through its shoulders

you can see its blood. Thousands of miles

away THE EAST a kingdom covered

by giant clouds. Where was I born? Among

human faces, deep in the sun of a real

young mother, under blowing unmagical snow.

Afternoon, almost

too bright to stare at directly,

also contains dark shapes. Black windows

in the old converted warehouses

filled now with new industry.

Shadows cast by telephone poles. So many

wires everywhere, how is it

I have never truly seen

all the infrastructure and methods

over my head everywhere

in this city I go? I think

they are quite beautiful. Always

the wires are unexpectedly framing

parts of the sky and all

natural and human things it contains,

making transitory paintings the very

subject of which is cloud motion. Truly

I fear animals. Now I am growing

very analytical. A kind of

peacefulness into me carefully

moves like a grasshopper

into a room full of totally believable metal

grass and trees. There is one great bridge

at the edge of the city falling asleep. And another

humming an orange welcoming song.

She asked me how long it will be

until the giant black rose

she has seen in her dreams

bursts out of the ocean just beyond

the walls of the circular city

and drips molten fire on the heads

of likenesses of the smiling gods

who sent a message from outside

our solar system crying

and swearing to protect us

if we built them. Quite

a long time. Probably many

hundreds of years. First we must

build the circular walls,

then the towers and the steps.

Then we must build the satellite array

and send it into the atmosphere.

And we don't have that

technology yet. The scientists

who can dream of building it

have not yet even been born. So

for now I say to her let us live

here in this apartment and make

sounds of love on this futon

while outside the window the orange

extension cable strangles

the white and green flowering branch

and monks cry anciently on the radio.

Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport.

My heart feels like a field of calves in the sun.

My heart is wired directly to the power source of mediocre songs.

I am trying to catch a ray of sunlight in my mouth.

I look forward to showing you my new furniture.

I look forward to the telephone ringing, it is not you,

you are in the kitchen trying to figure out the coffeemaker,

you are pouring out the contents of your backpack.

I wonder if you now have golden fur?

I wonder if your arsenal of kind remarks is empty?

I remember when I met you you were wearing a grey dress,

that was also blue, not unlike the water plus the sky.

They say it's difficult to put a leash on a hummingbird.

So let us be no longer the actuary of each other!

Let us bow no longer our heads to the tyranny of numbers!

Hurry off the plane, with your rhinestone covered bag

full of magazines that check up on the downfall of the stars.

I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the moving stairs.

I think there was a movie once

where Frankenstein fell in love with a vampire.

A small mummy at first interfered

but later provided the requisite necessary

clarifications. He can only

meet you at night. Her face

is scarred in a permanent expression

of doom, but her bolt glows whenever

she sees you. The rival for the vampire's affections

was a vaguely feminine zombie. Frankenstein

felt not very mysterious. Many different

feelings cycled below whoever's

skin she had been given. Did they even

belong to her? In the many pages

of the book of love this is only one story.

But everyone goes through it once. The main

question is, will you be the one unable

to control your temper, sewed together

as you are from the past? Or the one

who always ends up turning away in search

of another likeness?

In Wichita Kansas my friends ordered square burgers

with mysterious holes leaking a delicious substance

that would fuel us in all sorts of necessary beautiful ways

for our long journey eastward versus the night.

I was outside touching my hand to the rough

surface of the original White Castle. I was thinking

major feelings such as longing for purpose

plunge down one like the knowledge one

has been drinking water for one's whole life

and never actually seen a well, and minor ones

we never name are always across the surface

of every face every three seconds or so rippling

and producing in turn other feelings. Oh regarder,

if I call this one green bee mating with a dragonfly

in pain it will already be too late for both of us.

I am here with that one gone and now inside this one

I am right now naming feeling of having named

something already gone, and you just about to know

I saw gentle insects crawling in a line from a crack

in the corner of the base of the original White Castle

towards only they know what point in the darkness.

Near Geneva the Hadron Collider

lies underground. Almost

complete, whispers the giant

screaming skull. Your species

is obsessed with the search

for tiny links in the chain you do

not know leads to the collar

of an enormous dragon. You

have fallen completely in love

with metal thinking. You are in great

immaculate aluminum vats

that make the tiny workers

in their suits and helmets glint

a ferocious silver cooling

sections of the giant collider

and preparing to send pulses

of proton beams through it

in opposing directions. Detectors

will sort the microscopic

particles searching for the elusive

Higgs boson or strangelets.

For years beneath the sea I have

been dreaming of the proper time

to emerge and signal my ally the Sun

to rain fire down on all

your towers. Together we

with our retarded cousin the Moon

would watch your cities sink

into the boiling oceans. You search

for the grand unified theory

but will find only a tiny black hole

we will all be sucked into.

And now I will never have my revenge!

The idea is simple. Lucretius wanted to rid

the world of death fear by writing

On the Nature of Things.
He says we fear

death only believing the mind somehow

continues even after the skull that holds it

is broken and harmless vapor leaks out

into everything dissolving. It's

true I fear my death, but I fear

the death of others more, because that's

a death without death through which

I must live. Or I fear my death

for the death others will have to live through

without me. That and probably pain

are why people are afraid. Anyway a world

without death fear would be even more scary.

Not that it matters. Death and fear. One

hand of steel, one of gold. Even you

wouldn't know which to cut off or reach

out for first, Lucretius, because it is always

very dark here in the future.

We have some sad news this morning

from Mars. But I'm thinking about lions. Someone

said something salient and my head became

a light bulb full of power exactly

the shape of my head. Sinister thoughts

at the Xerox machine. A chat with a retired

torturer. Now the sharp blade. Apparently

some solar wind pushed a few specklets of actually

not red but grey Mars dust through the seal

into the vacuum where the very tiny oiled hydraulics

of the light from the distant future collector seized.

What was it my brother said to me once? Like

a vampire bat on a unicorn Change rides

every moment. Houston is full of dead elephants

and empty labs experimenting on silence, open any mouth

and out blows some hope in a binary data stream.

in the photograph you are holding a green helmet

and smiling directly into the future

but
the straight and the square rarely advance

a Chinese poet working a minor bureaucratic post

a few miles north of the capital

wrote 1200 years ago

when they called the emperor The Immortal

I know you tried

but a falseness runs through all our dealings

a seahawk is not even a real bird

and somewhere it is still 1976

and I have just lofted

a football over the head of my very cold brother

who turns in his blue down coat

that used to belong to me

and runs with his arms stretched

out as far as he can

towards the pine trees

and I fear when he comes back

he will tell me something everyone knows

In the airport bar the lady singer's

voice reminded him of a blue

praying mantis he had seen

in a painting riding on

the shoulder of a very young

knight into battle. She was

singing about how she felt

always full of emptiness. He could

almost physically grasp what

that meant. Then he did.

Then he knew he would never

be happier than when he was

living in that medium-sized

Midwestern city, writing stories

about the lives of the inhabitants

of its highest skyscraper.

He could see exactly what

it looked like then, shining upward

like an ancient lighthouse

in the snow. He saw a man

with a beer reading a book

called
8 Amazing Things You Do

Not Know.
Now she was

looking at him, singing about flying

in wondering circles above your life.

On the placard it said she was

available for all events except funerals.

Her name was Lady McDust.

I went last night to see a Chinese movie

with an old friend who seems to love

everything. Equanimity I can only

aspire towards like a leaf or a reflection

of a tower in a pond. The entire

movie took place inside a storm

of totally synthesized feelings. A father

and son leave the city on a desultory

journey out into the countryside

for the mystical purpose of dropping

a stone into a well. Periodically they are

assaulted for a time then joined

by monks who guard citadels presumably

filled with riches or ancient instructive texts.

Every time just as I started to like

a character he would be assassinated

right before my eyes by ninjas or meet

some other horrible unjustified fate.

One particularly mild Shaolin monk leaned

against a wall and his shoulder fell off

and his hair attacked his face. Fortune

said the subtitles is a giant dragon

with flowers in its antlers. A widow

in a white dress appeared in the father's

dream then emerged into the actual

world and caressed the face of the child.

They walked off towards the well. The stone

glowed in a close-up. Decades passed.

Then the music suddenly stopped

and I found myself holding an empty

bag of popcorn I don't remember eating.

Goodbye I said to my friend but she

had already long ago gone off into the future

to feed her brand new digital snake

a couple of digital crickets.