Elegy from a Nightingale’s Point of View
Twit twit . . . jug jug . . . Tereu
He came as if in exile to a docile
West, having long ago forgiven
his exes who
univocally seemed to be at
their wits’ ends when not
having premonitions about him.
He seemed too
disorganized for the Murphy bed
in the Peter Pan apartments on
Second South where, at 47, he
committed himself to never
reaching adulthood. Where he
fancied his collections of fine pens and
razors. Where on occasion
he’d artfully shave a woman’s
leg
then paint her biggest toenail
obsidian, blowing on it till it
was as hard as glass. Then he’d
measure out
a coffee spoon of cocaine
powder over the tip of it, and
up across the arch of her
foot, sometimes trailing it off
all the way to her knee cap. You’d
have to lie perfectly
still while he scraped toward your
middle with his straw,
afterwards fastidiously
licking with his king-
of-cat’s
tongue just those places where
the coke had been.
He wanted to be like the man in the
Magritte painting whose
head
was only sky----absolved of all of it and
all- absolving----
but maybe he wasn’t able
to forgive the rapist of Philomel.
And maybe behind the fleshy
mask of his face was the
smooth face of a
newer mask. Maybe he
did eat that much
speed. Maybe in some book a
picture of a train had
spoken to him, saying:
Take me to the city built
entirely of slaves of love,
and so he’d taken it (the picture)
somewhere, having wanted to see for
himself a city built by
losers or lunatics---- his twins.
Maybe dying was
a consequence of his
rejecting certain commonplaces
widely proliferated in this time,
the one perhaps which
claims a poet’s life,
well, matters . . . I
do think it was all
let go by him finally: the
girls with no tongues who
took his poetry workshops, the
flies around the soda cans,
the song
96 Tears sung by that
LA punk band (as if
by a fly, the 96
tears coming out of its 96
multi-prismed eyes . . . ),
the migrant workers’
banda music, the problem in
Utah of getting a
martini dry. I’ll do
anything for you, he whimpered to
Bank of America in
the middle of the night once, pounding his
hand against an impenetrable
drive-through window drawer until
he shattered a bone: just let me have a
little of my own money . . . If the
bank had been a
woman, it would’ve
given him what he
wanted. In
fact, a woman I
know came
forward with some
cash that night and
he left town with her,
looking from behind as if a
plump fetus were
pushing its head down through his
shirt collar, and I
never saw him again. Maybe
it was his
tongue on my kneecap.
Maybe his baby-face, or his
rough beard or the
wind coming in freezing form
the Uintas. Maybe the
way he assumed we’d all been
forced to
do things that were,
in some other life, unthinkable, and
because of that, we were all both
guilty (of the knowledge)
and of the deeds,
whatever they were, and also
(just because, without
a need for explanation) just as
innocent as
morning. Always starting with
pure emptiness and
forgetting our alibis. Some songs were
prettier, he’d said, despite
the rudeness of our bringing them.
Maybe that was wisdom. Maybe it was
nothing but a kind of
genius for seduction. At
any rate, the time he
dipped a razor edge
into the artery behind my
knee and
blood shot back, staining his face, I
forgave him, almost instantly----so
difficult to see a person
wreathed like that----
and starting to weep. Or laugh. You know,
there was no stopping it.