On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Read Free Page A

Black Rider

    There are blows in life, so powerful…
    I don’t know!
    CESAR VALLEJO, TRANS. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN

    Driving past the Masonic graveyard, I see a boy
    skateboarding down the new asphalt of the walk
    that he veers off so he can jump
    and slide along a tombstone.

    He has such faith in the necklace of his bones
    he will not let a helmet wreck his hair—
    why does the brain have to be buried
    in the prettiest place? You little shit, don’t you know

    someone slaved at the brewery to pay for what was
    supposed to stand as shiny as your hair
    two centuries or three, when all your ollies
    will no longer stir a moth or midge?

    But what kind of grump would rather be eaten
    by wind and rain than the glissando of a punk
    riding off with a whump to the door of the oven
    with a few bright flakes of someone else’s death?

Pioneer

    Let’s not forget the Naked Woman is still out there, etched
    into her aluminum plaque
    affixed to her rocket
    slicing through the silk of space.
    In black and white, in
Time,
we blast her

    off to planets made of gases and canals,
    not daring to include, where her legs fork,
    the little line to indicate she is an open vessel.
    Which might lead to myths about her
    being lined with teeth,

    knives, snakes, bees— an armament
    flying through the firmament. Beside the man
    who stands correctly nonerect, his palm
    upraised to show he comes in peace,
    though you globulous yet advanced beings

    have surely taken a gander of our sizzling planet
    and can see us even through our garments.
    So you know about the little line—
    how a soft animal cleaves from her
    and how we swaddle it in fluff,

    yet within twenty years we send it forth
    with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled-grenade launcher:
    you have probably worked out a theory
    to explain the transformation. And you
    have noticed how she looks a bit uncertain

    as she stands on her right leg, her left thrust out
    as if she’s put her foot on top of something
    to keep it hidden. Could be an equation
    on a Post-it, or could be a booby trap—
    now comes time to admit we do not know her very well, she

    who has slipped the noose of our command. Be careful
    when you meet her, riding on her shaft of solar wind:
    you will have to break her like a wishbone
    to get her open, she whom we filled with teeth
    and knives and snakes and bees.

Fireball

    The TV knob was made of resin, its gold skirt
    like a Kewpie doll’s, but it was gone.
    So we changed the channel
    with a pair of pliers (on the flat spot
    on the spindle): chunk chunk
    and then lo, Jerry Lewis. Chunk chunk and lo,
    the marionettes with giant hands. The song went:
    my heart would be a fireball.
And in the chunking
    and the singing and the watching, lo, my heart became one.

    Less pageantry in the now. Say
Sputnik
: no other word
    climbs my throat with such majestic flames.
    Gone, the marionettes in flightsuits made of foil
    gone grainy on the boob tube. The tremulous way
    their bodies moved, my fear for their well-being.
    The comic stupidity of the child,
    which is forgiven. Unlike the stupidities to come.

    The boy had a guinea pig named Fireball, so I taught him
    the song by way of mourning
    when it died. He still possessed his sweetness,
    unlike older sons who think you are a moron without big
    subwoofers in your car. To that son I say:
    you may think you’re one of the alpha-carnivores
    just because you’ve shot many avatars of whores

    on a video screen that you will never have the Cuban missile crisis on;
    you do not even really have the bomb, and how can anyone
    command their cool without the bomb: Sam Cooke, James Dean,

    those boys lived kitty-corner to their annihilation.
    But my son glazes— what’s so special about the past
    when everyone has one? And yours, he says,
    is out of gas. Then vroom, he’s off—
    you might think his car is breathing by the way the windows
    bend. Welcome to the new world, Mom,
    he says, if you hear