| Kim Addonizio USA http://addonizio.home.mindspring.com
THE NUMBERS How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans, with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted in not sleeping, how many in sleep--I don’t know how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again in the course of an ordinary hour. I don’t know how God can bear seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and burnings, the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts. I want to close my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep moving toward a fence. I want to count them, I want them to end. I don’t want to wonder how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down, which of them will wander the sidewalks all night while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say one true thing about it---how often have I tried, how often failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I can’t help asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks, with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames before covering the eyes. I’m tired, I want to rest now. I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple name without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?
NIGHT OF THE LIVING, NIGHT OF THE DEAD When the dead rise in movies they’re hideous and slow. They stagger uphill toward the farmhouse like drunks headed home from the bar. Maybe they only want to lie down inside while some rooms spins around them, maybe that’s why they bang on the windows while the living hammer up boards and count out shotgun shells. The living have plans: to get to the pickup parked in the yard, to drive like hell to the next town. The dead with their leaky brains, their dangling limbs and ruptured hearts, are sick of all that. They’d rather stumble blind through the field until they collide with a tree, or fall through a doorway like they’re the door itself, sprung from its hinges and slammed flat on the linoleum. That’s the life for a dead person: wham, wham, wham until you forget your name, your own stinking face, the reason you jolted awake in the first place. Why are you here, whatever were you hoping as you lay in your casket like a dumb clarinet? You know better now. The soundtrack’s depressing and the living hate your guts. Come closer and they’ll show you how much. Wham, wham, wham, you’re killed again. Thank God this time they’re burning your body, thank God it can’t drag you around anymore except in nightmares, late-night reruns where you lift up the lid, and crawl out once more, and start up the hill toward the house.
LAST CALL It's the hour when everyone's drunk and the bar turns marvelous, music swirling over the red booths, smoke rising from neglected cigarettes as in each glass ice slides into other ice, dissolving; it's when one stranger nudges another and says, staring at the blurred rows of pour spouts, I hear they banned dwarf-tossing in France, and the second man nods and lays his head on the bar's slick surface, not caring if he dies there, wanting, in fact, to die there among the good friends he's just met, his cheek in a wet pool of spilled beer. It's when the woman in the corner gets up and wobbles to the middle of the room, leaving her blouse draped over a stool. Someone is buying the house a final round, the cabs are being summoned, and the gods that try to save us from ourselves are taking us by the neck, gently, and dropping us into the night, it's the hour of the blind, and the dead, of lost loves who come to claim you, finally, holding open the swinging door, repeating over and over a name that must be yours.
TELL ME I am going to stop thinking about my losses now and listen to yours. I’m so sick of dragging them
with me wherever I go, like children up too late who should be curled in their own beds
under the only blanket that warms them. I am going to send them home while I stay
at this party all night with the loud music pumping and the dancers moving gracelessly under the lights
and the drinkers spilling their scotches on their sleeves. I am going to join them. I’m going to drink until
I’m so wasted I forget I have children, I’ll dance until I ache, until I make a spectacle of myself.
So tell me. Tell me how you hurt even though I can’t help you. Tell me
their ages, how they keep you up nights, how sometimes you wish they were dead
but keep finding yourself gazing at them tenderly while they sleep. Then, please, dance with me,
hold me while we fool ourselves they aren’t out there, pressing their damp
hollow faces to the windows. Tell me that if we kiss a new one won’t start to slip
from each of us, tell me you can’t already feel the little hole burning in your side
or hear the others moving over to make room, shrieking and clapping with joy.
© All Copyright, 2001, Kim
Addonizio. |
