On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Read Free Page B

singing, it ain’t a song.

To Carlos Castaneda

    After the physics final, Gina and I, in our mukluks
    scuffed past the swanky shops on Sherbrooke
    then climbed the mountain in the city. December 5,
    1975: I tried to will myself to have a vision, though the stars
    would not cooperate— instead of a sweat lodge
    or a kiva, the warm-up hut at the top of Mount Royal
    looked completely un-aboriginal, a replica in miniature
    of the Château de Versailles. With night all around us
    cold and thick as glass, I don’t know how the starlight
    managed to pass through it to sting me, it was hard enough
    to lift my hand to knock the door, a joke,
    it was so late. And here past the midpoint of my life
    I think I’ll die without a paranormal apparition
    to which I could wholeheartedly attest. I am not sure
    I even have a soul, a corny soul, a little puppet
    made of cream and feathers. Yet the door
    did open (turned out to be only six p.m.)
    and the old man said,
Ah jeunes filles, il paraît que vous
    avez froid.
Then he unstacked two chairs and set them
    down before the fire, still chewing its meal of logs
    in the giant hearth. Inside the château of our silence,
    we sat and chewed our lips: wasn’t the sacred knowledge
    supposed to involve telepathy with animals, and astral travel
    to planets made of light? Kindness (b) seemed too corny
    to be the answer (
Restez ici pour le temps que vous
    voudrez
) though we were given no other choice
    except (a) his sweeping, and (c) the mice inside the walls.

300D

    When he was flush, we ate dinner
    at Tung Sing on Central Avenue
    where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic
    bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-
    and-sour pork— what else
    was there to care about, except his sleep
    under the pup tent of the news? And the car,
    which was a Cadillac until he saw how they
    had become the fortresses of pimps—
    our hair may look stylish now,
    but in the photograph it always turns against us:
    give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976
    he went to see the enemy, the man
    (with sideburns) who sold German cars
    and said: take it easy, step at a time,
    see how the diesel motor sounds
    completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink
    around the block in the old neighborhood
    where he imagined people (mostly black: by now
    his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,
    then cut) lifting their heads to look (-
kuh
).
    And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung
    back into the lot to make the deal, although
    to mitigate the shift in his allegiances
    (or was this forgiveness?— for the Germans
    had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)
    he kept the color constant.
Champagne,
    the color of a metal in a dream, no metal
    you could name, although they tried
    with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now
    though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump
    of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.

Photograph: The Enemy

    Great-Uncle Stefan wears the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s sailor suit,
    its cap flat and black, his long
    dark hair pomaded in a stiff
    blunt skirt behind his neck.
    There’s something about the nose’s
    bulb-and-nostril conglomeration that we share,
    and though I’m not a man I like to think
    I am a sailor, with a waxed moustache like his
    whose curled-up ends provide
    an occupation for our nervous hands,
    twirling it so as not to betray
    with a squint or smirk his sympathies,
    which lie with the murderer Princip.
    Who shot the Archduke in Sarajevo, where
    it took me a long time in the assassination museum,
    reading Cyrillic via the osmotic method
    of translation, before I figured out
    Princip was the hero of the place: a person
    could match her feet with his imprinted
    in the sidewalk and pull the trigger of her fingers.
    And enter the fantasy of being The One Who Caused
    The Greater Past, which I could not resist:
    my knuckle crooked, and clicked.
    However I did spare the Duchess