Fish Rain
It’s rare, but it happens:
A waterspout forms near land
and raptures the fish to the sky.
We’re not quite sure what happens next.
Well, we know that many die,
that some are shredded by the winds,
that some are frozen into chunks of ice,
and that some, some survive
even after the cyclone stops,
and they exist up there a while.
Maybe they’re pummeled
but supported by the currents
in the clouds, the way you keep
a tennis ball in the air
with a single racket—kept up
until they aren’t and fall,
and even then some survive
to drown on land. What must it be like
to die after that ascension?
Before, life was so much hunger
and short-lived satisfaction,
but mostly buoyancy
without knowing that word
or any word. Yes, they’re dumb,
but surely they know or sense
something is ending,
one eye focused on the ground
the other on the lost sky—
and the water an absence,
a memory they can’t remember,
while that human sound of wonder
starts up when they’re found
and can’t, I imagine, help them.
A Work in Progress
And maybe, he thought as he left the party—
his friends’ drunken singing becoming faint,
their voices less distinct with distance—maybe
he wouldn’t be so sad if he just accepted the fact
that he would die and then be forgotten,
as would everyone else he loved, and that nothing
he could say or do or think could go against this
ravenous oblivion, making stoic resignation
not only healthy but wise, probably the one way
to score a point in this blowout. Then again,
maybe taking nearly forty years to say this
wasn’t so much a triumph as it was pathetic,
his poor sulky ego finally giving up
its security blanket of vague religious feelings
to wrap himself in the secular fatalism
he loathed but knew was his. So if the Devil appeared
on the dark path he considered taking home,
and, for a little fun, decided to interrogate him,
he would not admit that he once believed poetry
could somehow save himself and his loved ones
from nothingness, the way he wouldn’t confess
to having liked a band he liked but knew was bad—
that is, he believed it knowing his belief was wrong,
but not any more wrong than his friends
who tried to drink or eat or drug or fuck or pray
their way out of despair, the couple, for example,
he saw kissing in his carport at another party,
one he had hosted a few months back. Maybe
in the thrill of ditching their respective spouses
drinking martinis and eating cheese in the kitchen
with the other guests, they had forgotten
he had already left to walk his dog—who, after all,
leaves his own party to walk his dog in the dark?
He watched them from the unlit cul-de-sac,
not wanting to ruin anyone’s life that night,
or any night, and hoped they’d stop. Instead
their mouths parted a moment, and she laughed,
pulling the man’s shirtfront toward her
hard so they kissed again. And at this point
a workshop, exasperated, would ask, justifiably,
what this poem’s about. “You want to kill yourself,
don’t you,” one reader might speculate, to which
I’d stutter, “No.” Then someone else would ask,
“So what should we make then of the ‘dark path’
‘the speaker’ ‘considered taking home’?
Which would prompt a third to join: “Yeah,
he’s leaving his friends to go...where?
Into the dark! But why not just say you’re empty—
why this sidestepping metaphoric anecdotal bullshit?
And can anyone tell me why the Devil’s there?”
What I wouldn’t say is that I tried to imagine
why anyone would care about private pain,
however acute, when, as I write this, children
are crying because the state has separated them—
children and their parents—and placed them—
children and their parents—in detention units
that many call cages because they look like cages
and are in fact cages; meanwhile, a man in Dallas
or Seattle or D.C. is living the last week of his life
because a police officer will soon shoot him
in what the state will label “an incident”
that will begin when someone, an elderly man
or woman, undoubtedly white, peers through a curtain
of cable news, sees an African American
walking on the sidewalk, and is unable to think
anything except “he’s a threat.” “The state is ill;
therefore, I am ill,” my friend Paul wrote
after being diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him.
Or, if I shifted the focus of that sentence a little,
I could write instead Paul writes, because the poem
in which those lines appear, as an event in language,
is still happening. So Paul writes. Whitman writes.
Bishop writes. Claudia writes. All while the state is ill.
All while the state murders and bombs and tortures
and seizes. Now he’s so far from the party
he can’t hear its joy or see the constellation
of string lights above the lawn. The path is dark,
very dark, the sky ridiculously crowded with stars,
and many of his friends have died and he feels
both lonely and selfish—what would the dead
and dying give to have the time he has ahead of him?
And someone might point out that that’s just
another way of making himself feel bad, the one thing
he’s certain he’s good at. The Devil doesn’t appear.
But there is a skunk rooting through the grass
for snails, looking, as skunks do, slightly serpentine,
the rising moon announcing her white stripes,
an animal no one will let me turn into a symbol
of terrifying hope, because Robert Lowell
has already done that, and I have to tell you
the couple kept on kissing and I said nothing.