—John Wieners
I begin in my coffin-sized home*
knowing
dark. *Here there is no toilet,
only a sink, the flow down its
drain slowed from these nearly
suffocating years. I don’t want
to talk about it. But I once moved
coolly from state to state. Before
the days when doing so meant
out of the frying pan into the
fire. Memories of July 4th ammo
pop and splatter in my head,
echoing nostalgia’s warmth and
that life-long era of progression,
the only one we knew, that stirred
such giddy optimism. That is until
the men, still chewing at bones—
mouths with canine teeth too intimate
with flesh, the gnawing and split
ting of it—swam from the tops
of their towers and over the Rockies,
the Ozarks, the Appalachians, dove
into the Pacific, and from its deepest
caverns sought that thin line of light
toward which to aim before their
aqualungs were blown up by
the brine. They thought that
golden sliver of shine would
show them to the surface,
lead them to the moon they’d
seen but never felt. Instead,
with fingers welded to elaborate
triggers, they would rule the
planet with such fear they’d
frighten even (or especially)
earth’s most naive inhabit
ants. Upon overladen thrones
they survey their kingdoms of
cartographers and so-called
space explorers, who are
all anxiously at the ready,
mapping the cleanest ways
to the dark side of the moon,
that goofy golf ball in the sky.
These rude rulers wonder where
it goes when it is gone, which is
when they cannot see it. And
like men with no memory, for
that is who they choose to be,
joy and terror fill their soulless
selves as they walk from mountain
top to tops of further mountains,
careful of the boundaries that are
invisible, craven for that chalk-
white grief-filled glimmer that
never fails to startle each into
a dumb shock when it is caught
but with a glance from the corner
of a shrunken yellowed eye.
