Natural resources

They tell you to write what you know,
but I am writing this to find out. Here's
what I am learning: under a bridge

in this city, you can find a detective
who will ask you what to find and will
charge you only what you have left

of future in your pockets. I sent him
looking for a superhero I lost when I
was in blessed high school; "The

Eclipse" I think I called him despite
how obviously unoriginal, and how
little I understand the actual phenomenon.

This detective brought back a real
eclipse instead, in a candy wrapper,
which I know you don't believe.

I remember that I had written, for
the Eclipse comic, the episode where
he is shot and nothing else. I had pages

and pages of him falling out of the
sky, streaking his ball-point streaks.
And you know I'm not morbid. Why'd

I kill him so many times? This is what
the detective told me: you always brace
yourself for shocks, but you're always in their

way, so you get run over every time. Someone
less left-handed would move. Some stop loving
the things they can't know. He popped the candy

in his mouth, like a little kid, and laughed at
all the optimistic birds that look for trash,
the hopeful bats out hunting mosquitoes,

and at me: The Eclipse died because you didn't feel
like living in a cleaved world, he said, and your only sin
is the violence with which you put it back together.

I have stopped seeing this detective, for I find him unwise.
posted by Adam at 11:25 PM [edit]

You can start with any premise

For example, that rockets have just sunk the East Coast
and so there will be no more careful autumns and no
bookshelves where the titles make my teeth hurt
from all the things I want to know. From this premise
you can breed nightmares, or you can start with something

else: that it is four o'clock and we are deciding what to eat.
From that premise you can create starships that choose to land
on only the smallest truths and plant their flags: this belongs to me.
You can create beaches, sunsets, and all the other things we all love
but most of us hate to read about, and these poems you can keep
in your pillowcase or on the roof of your mouth when you are sleeping
alone on the floor, a house where no family lives. It belongs to you.

You can start somewhere simple and end up somewhere
complicated as Mexican ice cream: rosehip, walnut, naivité
mixed with disgust. Or you can start with magic tricks and end
after the party, in the hollow feeling that hangs over all the empty gifts.
This is what you can do in all these worlds that don't exist.

I personally, when the words are willing, like to go back home
but with three new things: a Chilean accent, a sugary spoonful
of hope, and an idea I can't tell you. I empty my pockets
of all their premises on the kitchen table, and like a traveler
home with gifts, I am lighter and more home the more I lose.



posted by Adam at 4:18 PM [edit]

This is cyclical

and the only sound it makes is grief. Thomas
takes his rowboat in to shore, struggles up
the grey sand, kicks it unsuccessfully
from his converse shoes. It is stuck.

How kitchen this night is, and how empty
the containers that I had left out for the lightning.
How lightless. How soft.

Where the tattooed lights once twinkled
a whole world has sanded up: here we are
growing older, here we sell cars and if we don't pray
it's because we don't have the time, not because we
are confused as to what we believe. Here the contaminants
sigh out from the ground, and take what they can, and we go
scraping along in our sneakers to see if they don't come off.

They do, for now. And so I give this to you,
my brother: a poem, an ugly duckling on a river
where all the swans are ghosts. The only sound
it makes is grief through a kazoo--how twisted,
how vague. How cold it was in Puerto Saavedra,
thanks for letting me have all the covers,

and do you remember standing there between milk and stars?
posted by Adam at 12:59 AM [edit]