PEARL
My poems will make me not be alone, happening like a train whistle happens, late at night when no one writes it, an echo of parallel loneliness, dinosaur-solemn, a moon through the tender air, seeking its reflection among my fingers, trembling ferns, and rolling off
to explode on the surface of water, a sweaty dancer, radiating shards of bright green steam, an atom bomb, a roar of shrapnel
releasing me.
There will be no metaphors ever again, but only an empty lakebed.
My fingers will not be nerveless ferns, my thoughts, not the surface of water.
No poems will plunge like overweight dancers.
There will be no such thing as train whistles, no mangrove groves or citrus roots.
No one will have heard of an “antler of meaning,” no words will ripple or swoop.
The tremolo of longing will lie in its bed, sentences slashing through the window, and I will shut it, finding sleep.
By the time I wake, I will have forgotten.
II.
After my poem has happened, I will wish I could take it back.
The curtains will hang limply and I will stare into my hands, imagining all the might-have-beens
fixated on the moment I could have discreetly replaced the moon with a harmless, ordinary light-bulb.
I will shamble between the burnt-out meteorite and the lip of the ancient lakebed, staring into the wasteland a single metaphor could repopulate, if only there were any left.
As decades pass, the elements will exhume the petrified remains of metaphor fragments
which I will desperately try to reassemble:
I will attach the cow-thick, bovine vertebrae of one metaphor to the hollow, avian femur of another.
I will draw the cartoonish, popular culture face of Mr. Wilson on the skull of one metaphor, staging soliloquies of surpassing tragicomic pathos with my bearded self, while praying for a Dark Romantic lightning strike to animate the Dr. Frankenstein contraption of another.
I will make use of complex aleatory devices that require armies of critical exposition for one metaphor, and shamelessly use my position of institutional authority to advance a “metaphor agenda” for another.
I will apply for government money to create a metaphor museum, showcasing a disappointing hodgepodge of fossils.
I will build an enormous industrial assembly line and mass-produce hundreds of thousands of scientifically identical plastic metaphors and get you to buy them.
I will expand on the ideas of both a metaphor museum and a metaphor factory ad nauseum, until they become so unwieldy I extract them as separate Codas to Pearl.
III.
Nothing I try will work.
Metaphors are dead
and moons no longer walk the earth.
I will return to the husk of the celestial boulder and do what I can to fill the days.
I will still feel loneliness, but it will be an inchoate blob of loneliness, no different than anyone else’s.
Burly men will return the mismatched skeletons from the museum to me in boxes.
At first, I will take them out regularly and touch their dimensional surfaces, exploring the fading tactical resonance of what they used to mean.
As time goes by, I will take them out less and less.
IV.
Early one morning I will rise from my dingy sleeping mat and walk into the desert wastes, taking nothing with me
disappearing from the face of the earth, for all you know
until, years later, I return, a sarcophagus-strange dishrag of my former self
to walk with you a final time
to remind myself what the face is for
to remember all the varied textures
of the psychic flavors of life
so that I might surrender them
and go out into the night.
V.
Aeons crush by above me.
Memory turns to legend, and even legend will have sunk
into wine-bright seas of dust
when at last they cough out my bones
in a time so distant, not even my greatest metaphor
could have walked halfway across.
Clasped in the hand-like cage of ribs, for you to find, a final poem
a dust-polished pearl, much like a stone:
The pearl-white gleam will bite and flicker
teeming with dry roots
a leafy fern in a dry place
a white-knuckled grip in the sandy scree
ashborn, a germ of the seasonal fires
awash with surrendered brightness
the curling, electrical tendrils
of the neon sign of life
a thing, once sent, that cannot be called back
an irrevocable marble
with a secret name writ on it
compacted and polished in the heart of a muscle
around a fossilized shard of shrapnel
impervious to metaphor’s gleam
but very, very bright
a thing, once given, that cannot be revoked
a jesus noise brokenly leaping
in columns of thick, white smoke
a moon as common as you are
a quotidian rock of miracles
both a spirit and a bone
a machine of living ghosts
gleaming unobtrusive and time-clean
alert to your Morse code blink
my poem will have happened like a foghorn happens
at sea where no one writes it
dispersing the gloom like a lonesome moon
no longer alone.
