I read STATISTICS
OF DEADLY QUARRELS. It helped
take my mind off all the wars
plotting them on X and Y
axes. I stretched out on my
beaten-in bed and my head
disappeared in the middle
of my old yellow pillow.
Dark storm clouds then horrible
sunshine outside. Nothing dried.
Pinging outside from a drill
on stone or concrete. Police
throughout the city wearing
new pants, with cargo pockets
because of the increased threat
it was important to stress.
Sleep. Sleep. I will drift into a place
overhung with stars.
Breakfast. The breath
of the August streets, garbage
confounding pedestrians
in the morning. Sleep through this
into a memory of being too shy
to interrupt and say
something: what would I have said?
Dream baffling as the morning.
There is a small
child there. He wants me to read
to him for 30 minutes.
Rocking chair
beside a dirty window
years of yellow paint around the sill.
A few leaves dapple the light
and the smell of frying french
fries is glorious and I
see vermillion in a window box
and my grandmother
tending to her pink flowers.
I'm still sleeping. She can't move
her left side now, she sent me
a letter to my sister
by mistake.
I read some Polish poems
and noticed many of the
poets attended a school
called the Jagellonian
Institute. My head was buried
my wife pulled sheets
over us at 3 AM.
Something in my head wanted
sunrise
The third person who passed me
on the street was wearing a
shirt from Jagellonian Institute
smeared by the horrible sunshine.
I feel sorry for my shirts.
I never wear them.
Carbon and hydrogen atoms have
deadly quarrels. Stars keep spewing
because the laws of physics
cannot be broken,
only ignored. Our house
a terrible current
manifestation of the cosmos
leaks love. Our last
place was comfortably set
above a basement,
haunted by a yellow arm
with fur and enormous claws.
A dark cloud has come
to sit down on us.
The leaves turn silver,
they tremble, they love the world.
I didn't really eat lunch.
Above me one of my shirts
is waving. Goodbye.
I will see you outside in
a little heap on the street.
A birthday party for Jack
The smell of chicken frying.
Glorious.
I inhale it and feel it
at the very tip of my spine.
This glorious energy
is what the ancients called the
Kundalini, the snake that
unfurls from the base of your
spine. Last weekend pot
while the others were sleeping
and in bed I felt this
explosion of good feelings
coming from the base of my
skull. A conveyor,
energy traveling in an ellipse.
The smell of the fried chicken.
Sunlight.
I'm hiding on my belly beneath green
fan blades and an unhealthy
tree. Now a heightened alert
strips away the clouds.
The graph can easily
be ignored. The Earth rotates,
clocks rotate.
My wife washed my hair last night.
I couldn't sleep. I twisted
in the blue and white striped sheet.
High above jet engines growled
in grey jet planes bristling with
50 calibre machine guns.
I must remember never
to quarrel, I'm too poor.
I'm made of stars, we all are, we are
made of hydrogen.
The fan stirs up the droplets.
A black cat sucks on his tail
beside me in bed. Whatever
effect these pills are going
to have it will be as real as waking up,
atoms, atoms, everything is real.
It's 9 o'clock PM.
Carmelized onions smell more strongly here
at the end of the hallway,
like the apartment on 10th
street, when I was cooking I
used to walk to the living
room to check on the progress.
The door upstairs
to the roof was always open,
the house breathed, the house
was open to the yellow
stars, someone could probably
explain it better than me:
the horrible feeling in
the basement seemed to escape.
Every couple in the top
apartment broke up,
fighting each other over
the fire escape and into
our place. We were at the movies.
Now I have a spreading rash
from a tick that bit my ass
in the woods, on a wooded
path to Oyster Pond.
I only went there because
a sign said it was one of
Montauk's undiscovered jewels
The trail opened out
to a clearing, the sunshine
was like a large wet sheet hung
overhead, I thought I could
smell it but what do I know?
Sleep, sleep, soon
the deadly quarrel will be
behind us.
When we wake up
the implications are terrifying.
Warnings from 3 or 4 years ago
threaten commerce. The partly
employed, those like me, don't care.
Diurnal ruptures tremble
on the surface of the sun.
The Earth is dead, not one breath
of wind. The city turns on
tiny fountains in the parks.
Sunspots are rippling outward,
8 minutes later they hit
us. I tell the boy "the sun
is a cruel master." He squirms.
The Geats besieged the Danes,
their deadly quarrel drifts away, it sinks
back down on us.
The sickness has me boxed in,
my legs are drawn up inside
my head, quiet, dark.
Rolling storms on the surface
of the sun, their enormous
pink and green blossoms settle
on our faces. There are cops
everywhere today.
It is also raining white
petals, delicately tinged
with brown, with dead brown edges.
Terror takes me apart and leaves me sleepless.
I have to lie with my sleeping
wife beside me,
she is walking beside the Allegheny River
in her sleep.
She will sit up in bed and cry
just a little
terror. Then she'll drink water.
The doctor has prescribed rain.
A stranger, on the street, says
the sun is about to die,
she claps me on the back, now
go, she says, about your day
knowing tomorrow you will
cast no shadow. A cheeseburger
lights up in my memory.
The red clock keeps ticking
minutes, but are they really
passing? Nothing is changing,
it is the same clock my wife
slept with, slept with it in bed
before I knew her. Then we
met, and the truly blessed, when they
draw the Sword of Resentment,
are showered in blossoms.
When the room is fully dark
I will go to the corner
store to buy a few cold beers.
No one will touch me. I won't
say a word. The strategy
of nuclear deterrence
is working admirably.
On the surface of Venus
perpetually shrouded
in clouds, the part of me I
keep most secret is soaking
in a porcelain bathtub.
And I look at myself there
in the hot water and see
that I am a planet-wide
catastrophe. I sleep
imperfectly, I'm covered
by my wife, she thinks I said
something hurtful on purpose,
she rolls away, down a hill.
Like Johannes Kepler I am going to
digress until I have glimpsed
the co-eternal glory.
A key turns in the deadbolt,
it's my wife, she's home from work.
A new song is sung unto
her green dress and her long legs.
One pleasant summer
afternoon she stooped
to examine the shell
of a bivalve at Montauk
where a red flag flew over
the beach and our intentions.
Her face is more beautiful
than all the physical laws,
and I sat down in the sand
where her elegance began
and the waves and the blue sky
won't end. And I did not even
despair of my salvation.
© 2006 Matthew Rohrer
grew up in Oklahoma. He is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, A Green Light, and two collaborations with Joshua Beckman, Nice Hat. Thanks |
||
  © W.W. Norton |
  © Wave Books |
  © Wave Books |
, and 
. "Statistics of Deadly Quarrels" is from his forthcoming collection 
.
