Meet the Bear

MEET THE BEAR

by Christopher Childers

A thesis submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Baltimore, MD March, 2016

ABSTRACT

This is a collection of poems exploring contemporary and personal topics in traditional forms.

Advisor: David Yezzi

Reader: Brad Leithauser

TABLE OF CONTENTS Bad Dream ...... 1 Focus ...... 2 Seasonal Condition ...... 3 Anecdote Anatine and Pavonine ...... 4 Tuneless Numbers ...... 5 1. Spiritual Fruit ...... 5 2. Duct Tape: An Ode ...... 6 Rutabaga, Rutabaga ...... 9 Ciara Calls Off Engagement to Future After He Cheated ...... 10 On the Rocks ...... 11 Waiting for Godzilla ...... 12 Song of the Façades ...... 17 On a Rooftop ...... 18 Playing Tennis in a Stiff Headwind During the Baltimore Riots ...... 20 Last Walks of the Crime Lords ...... 21 Tuneless Numbers ...... 22 3. Space Available ...... 22 4. You Can Thank Me Afterwards ...... 23 North Pole, Alaska ...... 24 Saving Face ...... 25 What Do Bears Do in the Woods? ...... 27 An Idyll ...... 28 Same Old, Same Old ...... 30 Confiteor ...... 32 Tonight I Dine on Turtle Soup ...... 41 Deep Tissue ...... 44 Tuneless Numbers ...... 45 5. Ode on Reason ...... 45 6. Kill the Buddha ...... 46 Dreamtime on Yachtboard ...... 48 The Source ...... 50 Aristotle at Pyrrha ...... 52

iii

Something Else ...... 56 Tuneless Numbers ...... 57 7. Avoid...... 57 8. Drinking Song ...... 58 Concession ...... 59 Smile, where are you going? ...... 61 We are such stuff ...... 62

BAD DREAM

Here is a man, a killer from serial TV, who sickens a boy with terror, murders his family, gives chase as he runs to a pillar of the community. He’s helpless. It’s an error. All three of them are me.

FOCUS For M.D.

Past the ringmaster’s threefold rings of fire, the hot coals and the juggler, the elephantine shits, the acrobats flirting with death above their bed of knives; past nuns for hire, past scwewy wabbits leveraged from top hats, and, emerging from his hole, the smuggler; past trophies of past triumphs—lions, wives—

past ear-sieved glops of gladiator brain, a man-sized baby walking his toupée, monks doused in gasoline, cute kittens, casual iconoclasms; past fifty minute crimes, the strutting Dane, sweatshops in China, catwalks in LA; past schooling tribalisms of the industrial outrage machine;

past muezzins chanting out of minarets and echoes of the universe expanding; past burning bush and blasted heath, haruspicator, businessman, and bawd; past pharmaceuticals and cigarettes and where the trillion-jawed, the world-devouring Shiva picks his teeth; past memory and passing understanding;

past prisoners blamed and framed, and past the frame compassing leaders, victims, saints, and rebels; past famines and tsunamis, quakes and lava, the quick, the dead, you focus on the flame you’re sitting in. Your skin blackens and bubbles. The manjushaka and the mandarava release a rain of petals on your head.

SEASONAL CONDITION

The tiger caged inside my throat wakes in the raw patch he calls home, kneading the phlegm-infested loam. He sleeks his menthol coat

and rattles the bars at every leap and paws at speech’s seedy seat. Each snarl shudders me like meat and murders sleep.

He’s never not there. I have known, through seasons when he mostly snores, an animal warmth, and clickering scores of claw on collarbone.

Ours is a cozy kind of hate. We both, for all the growl and scrape, know that he never will escape. Well, we cohabitate.

ANECDOTE ANATINE AND PAVONINE

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks. —Wallace Stevens

Bathed in a radiance of orange and swathed in sapphire stands the sun-king, Amon-Ra, the lionheart, imperious of syllable, imparadised of self, lacustrine phoenix flaming, rostrum parted to impart a bleating blend of bagpipe and kazoo and cartoon door-hinge; this mincing lordling, puffed with visionary pelf, strolls to a duck and fans for her the mirror of all life, all art.

Behold! the eyes of Shiva, hand of Vishnu, Buddha’s light, bliss of the bodhisattva, Lotus of the Seven Seas, bejeweled with cumbrances, no sleek bird winged for flight, but argosied and galleoned with gilded remiges, barbules and barbicels of blue, whorl on whorl, moon-gonged, sun-struck, with Technicolor halo: Hear! He cries his appetite! The duck, alas, forbears to give a fuck.

TUNELESS NUMBERS

1. SPIRITUAL FRUIT

This poem takes its refrain from a church bulletin board in Columbus, Ohio.

God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts God wants free will and devotion, not ifs ands or buts God wants creeds and catechisms, God wants discipline God wants gated gardens where the riffraff won’t get in God wants numbers, God wants names to fill the Book of Life God wants a man to be a man, and Eve to be his wife God wants Christian modesty—no birth control, no sluts God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts

God’s transgressive, God’s a hippy, God wants our free love one holy catholic energy we’re all vibrations of God wants Bach and Palestrina, God wants Kumbaya God wants Alpha and Omega, Yahweh and Allah God wants titles, God wants rings, God wants the Superbowl God wants psalms rung darkly de profundis in the soul God wants alleluias raised like incense from our huts God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts

God wants Isaac and the knife—psych! God says nevermind God wants Job to foul himself with dust, bereft and blind God wants vengeance, God wants mercy, God wants to go steady God wants us to stand and wait and get to work already! God wants alms for the indigent, gold for the Vatican vows of service, vows of silence, vows of Yes We Can God wants hair shirts, circumcisions, death by a thousand cuts God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts

God wants economic growth, and wealth to trickle down God wants to see the waters rise and watch the witches drown God wants Grand Inquisitors, crusades, and infidels roasting in the furnaces of underground motels God wants Creation to bow down and time to be no more the horsemen and the Dragon and the end of peace and war God wants guts and glory, and God wants blood and guts God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts

God wants stylites, scourges, Solomons and celibates perverts, prophets, Borgias, burkhas, holy idiots with excommunication for the you-know-whos and -whats God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts

2. DUCT TAPE: AN ODE

“Duct tape fixes everything!” quoth Brockport Student Government. “Make a wallet! Make a ring! Make a rainproof silver tent!” There’s nothing, nothing it can’t do: Duct tape a tux or dress for prom! Or, if your crush rejected you, a duct-taped box looks like a bomb! Kids at naptime won’t pipe down? Duct tape them to sleepy town! Duct tape can make a nude man king— Duct tape fixes everything.

Duct tape is amazing! Duct tape is a sublime instrument of hazing, accessory of crime!

Got an unregistered vehicle? Duct tape! Duct tape is the greatest: Just tape your plates and skip the toll. Or try this frame-up: Snag a sadist with pain pills, duct tape, and rough sex; enjoy a beating with a thong, then call the cops and blame your ex! Trust me: Nothing will go wrong. Ski-mask lost? Here’s a disguise: Duct tape will hide your face and eyes! Although the aftermath may sting, duct tape fixes everything.

Close an open gash! Heal an unsightly wart! Secure your cocaine stash or a case that holds up in court! Rip it at night and a spark will wink with a sudden blue, or tie up a friend in the dark if that’s what you’re into.

“Duct tape is America!” a congressman makes bold to brag of an oil pipe patched in Ouachita with duct tape and a garbage bag. A man born woman hates the rack he duct-tapes down in secret rage till the blisters weep on his breasts and back, while Sappho sings on the New York stage and yanks duct tape from her naked skin, setting the griefs she’s swaddled in free in her aria to ring. Duct tape fixes everything.

Duct tape your heart with ice cream! Duct tape your food with bacon! Duct tape your sagging cross-beam and pray that you awaken. Duct tape yourself together, you can survive most weather; but use it on a heating duct, you’re fucked, fucked, fucked.

A bride too big for her wedding dress in a duct-tape corset walks and beams; duct tape in all their crevices binds tires and rest homes at the seams. Laid off, her father getting worse, with aging leaflets Angelique duct-taped her first designer purse: Segue to a Detroit boutique. And, in a moonlit field, a tent sleeps silver under the firmament. Wake up, untape the flap, and fling. Duct tape fixes everything.

RUTABAGA, RUTABAGA

auditis aliquid novus adicit auctor

The rhubarb-rhubarb walla-walla Polly-phony of crowd-parrots filling Valhalla or La Scala with peas and carrots, peas and carrots; the murmur-murmur repetitions of bays and basins, over, under the bombinations of bee-nations, the hurly-burly of the thunder; the babies burbling yadda-yadda ballyhoo and gardyloo, till the bubbles mama, dada, barbar sound a lot like you: Echo echoing her hearer, Narcissus listening to the mirror.

CIARA CALLS OFF ENGAGEMENT TO FUTURE AFTER HE CHEATED —Us Weekly headline, 8/13/14

Isn’t it always like this? At the start it’s chocolates, then a 15-carat ring and you’re locked in: What will your Future bring? Turns out, a baby and a broken heart. Well, he can’t play you like that—you’re too smart. You’ll hit the gym, go back to modeling, and when the world is at your feet, you’ll sing. The record of your heartbreak tops the chart.

But baby Future wants his Pops again, and nightly crying spoils your beauty sleep. Sometimes the mask beneath your mask won’t keep the skeleton from showing through the skin. Then the doorbell, and you smell something sweet: Chocolates in hand, it’s Future, that old cheat.

ON THE ROCKS

All he had ever tried was to find balance, the kind that comes of reading and riding water. Hence the gin. The marriage was for ballast. But the nature of a river is to wander, unsheathing boulders hidden in their billions as waters fall and currents turn toward winter. Another drink. Preservers become burdens so quickly, and then float off in the welter.

Enough of that. Tomorrow is for crafting a raft out of the wreckage, lashed with failures. He’ll start at dawn, when it breaks bright and ashen. Tonight he’s on the river, drifting, drifting, nudged by a thousand hands as soft as flowers into the headwinds rising off the ocean.

WAITING FOR GODZILLA

This is the way the world ends: You have no idea what’s coming! The lights fail. Outside, past scientists engrossed before a row of monitors, two alien, red-eyed windows pulse in a massive, calcified, clawlike cocoon. Kill it! one says, and tracks of Tesla lightning lash out and subside. Readings flatline. A flashlight sweeps the cracks: Slime. A gray tip, moving. Then out the huge leg breaks.

We want a hero—no uncommon want, when talking heads are dishing out the glory. Whole cities rubbled hardly get a grunt without a human face and human story. We want a family, not an allegory: A pretty mom, cute kid, and a dreamboat soldier-daddy with Grandpa on a foray into the darkness and the danger’s throat. (The men adventure; Mommy stays home to emote.)

Japan. Lights haywire. Big slick legs like pistons pound down on scaffolding. Whatever’s waking crawls forward screaking, crunching all resistance. The lights are fibrillating, the plant breaking up: Pincers churning, hooked hooves raking steel cables. Towers, bridges lurch like swings. The spore-birth in a strobe of his own making discos destructively, then spreads his wings. We nosh on popcorn, wait for future butcherings.

Our hero watches—nothing can be done— as the plant crumbles and his father dies. The spore wolfs down a sub—a nuclear one— near Honolulu, where our hero flies, of course. Another hatched spore, super-size, a female, tramples Vegas to the ground as Elvis sings ‘The Devil in Disguise.’ All three keep moving, San Francisco-bound. We hope some bigger, stronger Answer may be found.

Meanwhile the people spin their wheels and wait: the generals like fishermen go on baiting their hooks with nukes, losing the bait; our hero rescues someone else’s son— what are a million dead if he saves one?— and wifey weeps into her cellphone, caught between the monsters and the megaton time-bomb they’ve nested in. Everyone’s wrought precisely to revolve the mighty wheel of Plot, to which our hero is obedient. Too much real personality’s a mess. The skyscrapers have toothmarks. What we want is incarnation of enormousness; we want the cities stomped like a wine-press. The formulas are a consoling chorus: Our hero’s acts are bravely meaningless. This world’s a broken watch. The people bore us. Godzilla, save or savage, only don’t ignore us!

Ocean and sky anneal a single sheet of steel; the shorebirds wheel and vanish overland. A dog leashed to a tree yips at the swollen sea, jerks free and, terrified, sprints from the sand. Behind him, in the rearing crest, the inexpressible embodiment expressed:

He comes! With fire and flood He rises from the mud, up from the slime and time of the sea-floor. He comes with flood and fire, rising from the mire and fury of the planet’s veins and core, the ancient alpha-predator crackling with radiation from the deep earth’s core.

He comes with scales and talons to restore the balance upset when prehistoric powers wake. He comes with tidal wave and He destroys to save, who makes earth from its roots to surface shake: The ancient alpha-predator hunting His ancient prey, the parasitic spore.

He comes in CGI to swat a giant fly and to decapitate a giant beetle. But since omnipotence is lacking in suspense, first comes a half-hour of climactic battle: The Big Guy falters, seems to fail, till swinges the horrible flyswatter of His tail

and sideswipes the batlike male onto a spike of skyscraper that stakes his carapace; then grabs the female’s chin and pumps His fire in until her belly unglues from her face. The ancient alpha-predator pounds His chest and shakes the speakers with His roar.

Godzilla, next to you, what can our hero do? Just get the nuke offshore and save the day. Thus the human darer corrects for human error, while freaks of nature bow to Nature’s sway, whose Top Enforcer roars and clenches then dives back down, where He lurks listening in the trenches,

ear to the planet’s heart, for when the spasms start again and He must answer what He hears: Which is the sound of breaking glaciers, waters waking, trash plashing in the ocean’s plastispheres, the glug of oil and algal growth discoloring the gulfs with the dead-zones of both,

the high hush of heat thickening and populations sickening, of starfish melting in the current’s lap, bats wasting with white noses, bees littering the roses, and nausea foaming flammable from the tap, and pipelines ranting as swamped nature eyes with a reptile grimace each bankrupt legislature

and us, still circling round the same small plots of ground, racking desires up along with debt, glued to the latest race, crisis, or fall from grace, convinced the next thing is the biggest yet, while Washington and Hollywood churn out their resolutions for the partial good,

and we wait for the future to cauterize and suture our loose ends into one organic plot, when Nature will repair or cancel Nature’s error and our stupidities are clean forgot; wanting to be wanted, sick to Twitter-trash some prick, or catch a trashy flick,

or be among the chosen when all is scorched, or frozen, and stars fall down like figs and exeunt, the sun goes black as hair, the moon bleeds through the air, —Forgive us, for we know not what we want!— and heaven’s scroll is rolled up tight and the old Dragon undersea returns to light –

It’s over. Son, wife, hero are hugging at ground zero. Godzilla’s fêted on the evening news. We walk out popcorn-flecked and rush to vivisect the holey plot in internet reviews, but note that, all things being equal, it beat the last one. Now—the long wait for the sequel.

SONG OF THE FAÇADES

We houses see eye to eye. We know our places. We show to passersby impassive faces:

Locked mouths and a glassy stare and bricked-up brains. But there’s not much we share behind the panes.

Except some nights, in winter, with no one around, there rises from one’s center a low, round sound.

Singing—but not in words, or from any throat— a bass too deep for birds; a belly note.

Perhaps just a fidgety boy practicing horn: No cause for surprise or joy, nothing to mourn.

In love or insomniac, he thrums the rooms. Breath seethes from every crack. The whole block hums;

the necks of the streetlamps crane, the night-winds start, and walls absorb the strain of life at the heart.

ON A ROOFTOP

July 4, 2015, Baltimore

From this remove, we watch the show: Thumb-prints of color pock the sky like a crime-scene, then vanish over parties, buildings, squalor. Under the moon, luminous puffs of chintz bloom through the suburbs, drunken voices holler Born in the USA, proudly off-key, Roman candles or shots pop in an alley, sparklers are flung too soon, sirens keen far-off, and we all brace for the finale, as rockets bright with ash dissolvingly redouble. Flirting falters. Couples spoon.

Up close, it all looks bigger than an IMAX: Crowds gasp and sigh at fleeting and re-forming spheres of experience; whole planets die in star-crossed semaphores bursting to climax. From here, I look to the moon’s cold, lidless eye, witness to clouds kicked up on the Serengeti, the Great Wall, Antarctica as it midwives the wind’s titanic wars, Auroras storming— against the electric gridlock of our lives, how small are they, these handfuls of confetti? In front of me, a fire-fountain pours

18 a turbid fantail upwards, as we pour ourselves out to avow, in brief displays of beauty, that we’re here to stay. For now. The nearby rooftops mirror our lights with more, a sparkler pops, and no one’s hurt somehow, though each year limbs fall victim to the light, and nurses perk up at the accident. Our fountain, burning clearer, swells to a blaze, an opened vein of flame. Another spent round of ammo goes cracking through the night, and still the sirens singing, circling nearer.

PLAYING TENNIS IN A STIFF HEADWIND DURING THE BALTIMORE RIOTS

Release at last. So long pent-up, our muscles make their own music and bodies feel their force and freedom: cracking racquets rally rockets, except in the stiff slant of the wind (spiked, as it happens, with a sting of smoke) my shots slow, sit, while his strafe by boosted ballistically by the breeze. Keeping alive requires quickness, planning, precision, a little luck. Yet even this unfair fight feels good— sweat and struggle assume the human birthright of bettering each balked drive, while the blind pulse that powers power says to itself, Survive, survive! Time to switch sides. Through swigs of water, a chinook chugs and chops downtown. With the wind behind me, I can’t help winning, and the wheel turns— attack, retreat— beneath the sun’s burnt yellow ball. Aggression goads us. We keep going. A framed shank shoots over the fence. The black groundsman lobs the ball back.

—Baltimore Country Club, April 28, 2015

LAST WALKS OF THE CRIME LORDS

Four am. Exhaust and petrichor. Lamplight and drizzle hang their tiny nets. Over tapped awnings, windows in the sheer facades wink off or on like cigarettes cupped by thin souls beneath—a businessman here, a cleaner there. One smoothes his suit. Out of nowhere a new wind needles in. The empire of the rain is absolute. Lindens are soughing. Far off, a marquee flashes, and nothing, nothing is invisible. A dark sedan, rounding a corner, splashes the half-moon puddled underneath a wheel.

TUNELESS NUMBERS

3. SPACE AVAILABLE

Now Jeffrey stuffed the corpse in his sedan, soon as he found his drinking buddy dead, then took his wallet, poured one out for Stan, and paid a stripper to sit on his head. They nabbed him where the chain of charges led: Burrito Barn, mid-nachos, pretty drunk. What was he thinking? He just shrugged and said, “Anyone can fit inside a trunk.”

The theme was Wild Things. She was lean and tan, in a tight dress, her lipstick Jungle Red, redolent of musk and marzipan. But she preferred the college kids instead. Rejection. Then the knife. And as she bled, the moon’s pale bulb was cut off with a thunk. Away in a new limousine they sped. Anyone can fit inside a trunk.

Winnie Ruth Judd was fighting for a man. She won. She found a cleaver in the shed (those were big women) and she hatched a plan: Pack, stow, and ship them; have deposited. She showed up at the platform, but soon fled: Her luggage was too heavy, and it stunk. No loopholes for the well-built or well-fed: Anyone can fit inside a trunk.

One question stalks the lofty and low-bred, and that’s “Do I feel lucky?” Do you, punk? Repeat potential is unlimited. Anyone can fit inside a trunk.

4. YOU CAN THANK ME AFTERWARDS

If a man tries to kiss you, fight. Men don’t kiss men, except at home. Don’t worry if your socks is white, your shorts don’t fit, you got no comb. Drink vino by the jeroboam, but grappa’s like to make you ill. Be fair and friendly. When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

In Milledgeville, we raised you right: please and thank you, yes’m, no’m. We’re nothin if we’re not polite. Sip Coke, not them frappes with foam: you ain’t some fancy gastronome. They’re slow as get-out with the bill. Ask for expresso. When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

The bus gets crowded; just sit tight, like a good Christian—don’t elbow’m, and when they elbow you, keep quite. St. Peter’s is pretty as a pome, but Georgia’s got the Georgia Dome. Tip waiters, hold the door, and still remember who you are. In Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

Tell the Pope, Chow! Adios! Shalom! The Palatine ain’t Pecan Hill. And say you’ll do as you done in Rome back south of Macon, in Milledgeville.

NORTH POLE, ALASKA

We named the town “North Pole” to draw toy-makers, but no toy-makers ever came. Two thousand souls on as many icy acres are subject to the name.

Here the chief industry is Santa Claus. Each Christmas, letters come like snow. Bigger than God, his plastic image awes and never answers No.

He never answers, we do—play the merry brat-coddling ventriloquist on our official North Pole Stationery. They’re all on his good list.

I see them in their towns’ gridlocks of light yearning toward us with hearts of honey, while winter hones the knife of appetite. At least we’re making money.

SAVING FACE

Make sure the patient’s “set” before you start. You’ve scooped the brain and disinfected tissues and cavities. The blood’s collected, trachea tied, organs and heart extracted, and the spine corrected. Out of technicianship, you rise to art:

this blank is someone’s happy memory. Cosmetics are a must—the skin should look as though it’s glowing from within. Apply the makeup evenly on eminences, scalp to chin. (“Character lines” are smoothed by gravity.)

No one will notice if you botch the ears, but the nose, yes, so get it right. Harvest the eyes, and sew the eyelids tight— leaks from the skull resemble tears. People expect repose and light; a look of “Christian hope” has made careers.

Bruise bleach can help, and, sometimes, suicide— monoxide lends a rosy hue, but jaundice is a nightmare to undo. Don’t talk: survivors can’t abide the heartlessness you’re hardened to, the mysteries you’ve seen demystified.

If you need friends—you will!—they’ll be your friends. As listeners go, they make the best; you each play doctor to the other’s rest. What living you can reap depends on if you function while depressed, and how you camouflage unsightly ends.

Exacting work, being a scapegoat— ignored, exiled, not exorcised. Expect to be respected and despised. Smile like you have the antidote. Never be bloody or surprised. Always greet people in a clean white coat.

WHAT DO BEARS DO IN THE WOODS?

The closest she came was a big pile of shit steaming among the berries where he fed. I said he’d been eating squirrels by the looks of it. She said, Where is he? where? Just wait, I said. I said I’d radio Jake to get the suit and growl and wave his arms as we float by. She laughed and said I shouldn’t be so cute. I said I’m always cute. I like to lie. She was the cute one—leggy, still illegal. Tan, a little squirrely, always giggling. She gasped and squealed when a divebombing eagle made off with a caught trout alive and wriggling. Where is he? where? she cried. Oh, he’s out there, I said. You’ll have your chance to meet the bear.

AN IDYLL

I guess you didn’t get my messages, or you’d have called. You’re sleeping. For Christ’s sake, it’s afternoon! This staying up all night— you know that alcohol will kill you, right? You really ought to take care of yourself—no one else will, God knows, not in this world sick from its appetite for pharmaceuticals and GMOs. And marriage is far as ever from your mind? I’ll never have grandchildren. I’m resigned. For the best, I suppose: the bastards only want to rob you blind. Did you sign that petition? How hard is it? You have to fight Monsanto! And come visit. Come visit! Though I hate this neighborhood. Didn’t you know I moved a year ago? I loved my old house so— it had a garden and a creek and good dog-loving neighbors. They detest dogs here. They kicked me out—the landlords lost their shirts, went under, and the bank foreclosed. Sheer incompetence and failure everywhere. The house stands empty while the owners owe. Here the construction’s flat-out a nightmare, the air is full of dirt, and a new Walmart’s spoiling the tableau of Mount McLaughlin. It hurts, all of it hurts. But I have one point in particular making me sad. My street had this one small thing to redeem it:

a peach tree, old and dying, but with such sweet peaches, like perfect concentrates of sun, you’d think they’d siphoned all the life it had. I cared for it—the owners didn’t care— and each week only took what I could eat. But I’ve had my last peach. See, yesterday, when I went out on my morning walk, a man came with a bucket and a minivan. I stood there watching as he picked it bare and drove away. I hate him like the devil. It’s a crime! And now your father!—well, another time. It’s over now. I can’t believe that poor tree will bear again; from now on, I will have to buy my peaches at the store. Come visit! We’ll go hiking, and explore the mountain practically at my back door. I love you, too. Goodbye.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

So Mr. Auden and Mr. Strand walk into a bar. Auden sips a martini, dry. Strand has caviar.

“If I could do yoga in my suit,” says Strand, “I would like that.” He brushes dust from his lapels. Auden adjusts his cat.

“Aren’t we distinguished,” Auden says. “Good cheekbones. Good jawline. Good noble visages.” Strand nods. “Very leonine.”

“I’d like to tell you a story. I’d like it very much,” says Strand. Silence. Auden’s cat ripples to Auden’s touch.

“I have a distinction to make,” says Auden. “It has to do with turbines, cities, virgins, morals, cats, and me and you.

“For the first point, see Section A of Subcategory 3. Then turn to Section 1.4, cross-indexed at 2B.”

He drains his glass. It gets refilled. Strand regards his nails. Outside, the wind, unbodied, gives brief bodies to the shells

of plastic bags it animates and spirits off, like sails, beyond the square of the window frame. Strand regards his nails.

“I might have thought,” says Strand, “that we would have preferred to stay.” “Perhaps,” says Auden, “we’ve already said what we had to say.”

Nothing blooms in the darkness where the wind blows through the bar. So Strand and Auden rise to go. Don’t ask me where they are.

CONFITEOR

Filling from time to time his "humorous stage" With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That Life brings with her in her equipage —William Wordsworth

1. Some Assembly Required

I cinch my Windsor knot. My hair is gelled in place. I nod to someone I have wrought, but for the mirrored face.

Shirt, tie, shoes, cardigan are picked the night before. My clothes are like a well-dressed man chalk-outlined on the floor.

I put myself together, piece by labeled piece. The animal accepts its tether; my trousers keep their crease.

2. Formative Years

I don’t know how to sing, and I can’t ride a bike. The first was silencing; the second was dislike.

I’d go ten feet and tire— a trike was not a breeze. Mom yanked me from the choir for ruined harmonies.

Shrieking at her, I’d holler and sing until she shushed me, then steal my brother’s stroller and whine till someone pushed me.

She said her ears were aching. She said that I was lazy. Was all of her caretaking so I could drive her crazy?

So long pop, opera, karaoke; farewell the Tour de France. I won’t become Jeff Buckley. I’ll never be like Lance.

3. National Lampoon’s Staycation

I said he was a tourist lost in his own backyard. (I was a brat and purist, and always came down hard.)

Forever out of place and chuckling at treacle, he was like Chevy Chase in an unlicensed sequel.

I mocked his fashion sense, the light buffoonery of jokes at his own expense, and his humility.

I said he was a sell-out: Once he’d loved poetry, but poetry won’t shell out like a law degree.

He kept my taunts inside, and paid my way at school. I write it now with pride— for peanuts, like a fool.

4. Rage Against

The band is in the house. They’re angry, loud and brutal. Even their brooding scowls shriek that escape is futile.

Cowed by the growling “singer,” the deafened house succumbs to anarchy and anger. My brother’s on the drums.

He takes after our father while I am more like Mom. I didn’t want a brother. I wish that I could drum.

Instead, I persevere in dinner-table war. I want it to be clear how far apart we are

and have been all our lives. The screamers scream downstairs. I hone my vocal knives with fingers in my ears.

5. Moving Bodies

My father’s father on his cot, veteran of the Pacific War, thinks of the battles he has fought: Well, guess I’ll have to fight one more.

He lost an arm in a toppled truck. When Memphis burned, he battled through, and mustered a survivor’s luck in the womb of a B-52.

We’re in the ICU together, among the screens and tubes and knobs. Dad reports on the stormy weather. Grandma tries to stifle sobs.

I’m worrying over calculus; my brother talks about his band. He listens but can’t answer us, though sometimes he may squeeze a hand.

A battle comes no one can win. The cold grows in the hands and joints. The lifelines on the screens are thin, and stagger to erratic points.

Mud squelched while the preacher prayed and rain fell on the huddled crowd. A flag was folded. Taps was played. A jet roared over, veiled with cloud.

I talked math problems, while sine curves beeped from the wires in his wrist, and thought of how derivatives at cusps and corners don’t exist.

Grandfather, father, brother, me: I thought of orbits with stars gone, of centers losing gravity. He touched my cheek. Hang in there, son.

6. Accident

I came out gurgling, the cord caught and knotted at my throat, and that was nearly all she wrote, but doctors cut the knot.

Sometimes I think how the lines of life untangle by entangling, and of the breathless infant strangling, and the salvific knife.

Mom cruises now past glacial caves, big ziggurats of winter, with what chill nesting at the center. Her liner cuts the waves.

Sometimes I think of the glacier’s touch, and waters deep as sky— less human and more cold—but I don’t think of it too much.

7. Et lux perpetua luceat eis

—Mozart, Requiem, Introitus

She had to let me go. She watched, through the one-way mirror, the tantrums I would throw in bitter tremolo when I couldn’t see or hear her.

Later, she’d reappear. This ritual of depriving was ordinary living: in time it all came clear.

I study sprezzatura now, and find my key in stoical bravura and light buffoonery. So, when the soprano’s G

drops, as it must, from the high heaven of luceat— why do I think of that? And why do I still cry?

8. Once by the Aegean

Love or fixation? That whole night, mother-like, she held me tight. It was an island paradise, and it was nice.

Wave followed wave, when she dropped me: I tumbled, clothed, into the sea. All my pocket cash was soaked, my cell phone croaked,

and an urchin, on the ladder-rung, fixed a spine in my foot. It stung. I coaxed it out with olive oil, but feel it still.

9. Write It!

I wouldn’t use the word “divorce.” I wasn’t even young. I thought it had demonic force, that once it slipped my tongue,

she’d say, “Now that is mother-wit! Hmm. I need to think”— as if she hadn’t thought of it, and they weren’t on the brink

of drift and dissolution, he fixed in a stale emotion, she tired of attachment, free of pity and devotion.

At least I never blamed myself: I wasn’t young enough. Just the ordinary gulf that widens within love—

a falling out, or waking up? The world starts over daily. I shrug and drain my morning cup if dawn breaks bright or grayly.

There wasn’t anyone at fault. I knew it; was controlled. But nights are long, and spiked with salt, and I was far from old.

10. O Holy Night

I’m home for Christmas. We’re in church, and Carol rises up to sing. Figures, smaller than childhood, lurch to seats. The pews are listening.

Her voice englobes her as thin snow is shaken, swirling, from the sky. The spirit gusts and settles. No body stirs; no babies cry.

Facing the epiphanic strains, a mousy Mary weighs her doll. Pipe cleaners halo angel brains. She may be pondering the call—

received, perhaps, or planned by fate— from the blond Joseph at her side. How long till she absorbs the weight? The notes gust upward and abide

in air above the aging, thinned celebrants like the grace of God, then fall and dissipate, like wind. We suck in breath, and don’t applaud.

11. My Humorous Stage

A joke or cheesey come-on might charm an audience. I mouth my lines and smile to summon the mask of confidence.

The body of love or lust sprawls in the sheets I thrash in. I loom above, and my lips twist into the mask of passion.

Today, beside the grave, weeping is near relief. For all that I can’t help or save, I wear the mask of grief.

I’m having an affair. I threw away my youth. I have so many things to swear, clapped in the mask of truth.

Daily the mirrors change the mask of dailiness. Strange how reflection can estrange what I think I possess:

When my mouth moves, what speaks? Whose hand tips back the flask? What knot of muscle, fear, and sex has made my face its mask?

I wake to chilly air. So much for another night. I mouth my lines and gel my hair and don my mask of light.

TONIGHT I DINE ON TURTLE SOUP

das Schauen des Inneren in das Innere

I have this recurring dream: A turtle treads through broth thickened with roux and cream, churning it to a froth, a deliberate old man on a treadmill at the gym, except he’s in a pan that’s slowly cooking him, and wants to flee, too late, the shelter of a shell where all signs indicate it’s getting hot as hell. And the neck jerks side to side, the mouth makes little Os, fish-dumb, and those eyes wide and shallow. I suppose he belongs to a long line: Reversing the Odyssey, I dreamt, when I was nine, our turtle Penelope (never really ours) struck off from Tennessee, bound for the Land of Flowers and a new family; I, as she fled, gave chase through the southern USA, though at a walking pace, and crying, “Stay! Stay! Stay!” Who knows what that was about, or what the broken hinge was that gave when she crawled out?

At that age, turtle ninjas obsessed each waking dream, taking the ‘savior-freak’ for radical mytheme on Saturdays each week, while Shredder growled, Tonight I dine on turtle soup! and licked steel chops, despite the fact they lived in poop. But my babysitter thought they were the spawn of Satan and a plastics conglomerate, created to fascinate an army of brainwashed boys to pry a manhole cover, to go down with their toys and be lost below forever, following their grinning idols through filth to drown.

For me from the beginning it’s been turtles the whole way down, like the story about the flood whence rose the Great Box Turtle and covered his back with mud from which the world grew fertile, or the subcontinental codger with all of us to bear, the turtle Kurmaraja whose shell is earth and air.

Who knows what it all means, or by what recipe we’re filled up, like tureens, with personality? Who cares? Let it all combine, as on the table set with soup, quail, cakes and wine by the Communard Babette, who in 1871 fled Paris and the theft of property, husband, son, and to Noroway came bereft, and there served such a meal of Potage à la Tortue that, although she wasn’t real, reality changed hue, and the champagne sang in its flute, and the panes were fogged with steam, and grace left the guests all mute in the warmth of a waking dream.

DEEP TISSUE

It’s for their own good. Yes, it’s going to hurt. We settle on a tool— forearm or elbow, knuckles, fingers, palm. The force that we exert should deepen toward the kindly edge of cruel. We tell them to be calm,

to concentrate their breathing and attention on points of tenderness and let go where the pain is. We sink in, drawing a line of tension back toward us, then slowly drag and press away from the median,

keeping the deeper layers beneath the thumb; or else we find a knot and lean in till we feel it softening. Pain thresholds differ: Some require the lightest touch at every spot, and some can’t feel a thing,

however hard we strain. Sometimes they store emotions in the tissues; the muscle is a battery for stress. Warn them that they’ll be sore, that they might have to face some heavy issues. It’s hard work, this release:

Adhesions are like floodgates—when they give, sometimes we weep to lose dysfunction intimate as memory, and pain as dear as love. Keep working till they palpably unclose, then exit gracefully.

TUNELESS NUMBERS

5. ODE ON REASON

Behind the wheel of the black sedan, he’s your getaway driver. Or, when you need a handyman, he’s Red Green; he’s MacGyver. He’s a dab hand, a veteran conniver and survivor. He can build a bomb with a stick of gum. Whatever you’re running to or from, he’ll get you there, and to kingdom come, never a late arriver.

His clever bathysphere can steer along a fault and scan it. His little light rappels down sheer cave-cliffs of basalt and granite. He dishes on the atmosphere of your uttermost ice planet. From quasar to bacterium, whatever you’re running to or from, he’ll get you there, and to kingdom come. Name your flame and he’ll fan it.

If you’ve got a need or a creed, he’s got the theories and statistics. His labs supply the Juggernaut heuristics and ballistics. He builds utopias of thought— no bullshit and no mystics. He spins his rules on either thumb. Whatever you’re running to or from, he’ll get you there, and to kingdom come, with numbers, forms, or bliss-sticks.

He aims his flashlight at the stars. Leviathan emerges. His warheads mean an end to wars. He dreams of Boanerges. He’s haunted by the perfect Ars (well, we all have our urges). Follow his lead, and we’ll blow this slum. Whatever we’re running to or from, he’ll get us there, and to kingdom come, with descants or with dirges.

6. KILL THE BUDDHA

Down every path that matters you have to walk alone, if subtle moonlight flatters Venetian cobblestone, or bloody resin spatters the train to Marylebone; each time the cosmos shatters on TV or telephone, down every path that matters you have to walk alone.

Whether you go in tatters to queue for methadone, are madder than the hatters that milliners disown, or unctuous of attars as Bishops of Cologne, on mountains or up ladders, upstart or epigone, down every path that matters you have to walk alone.

Walt Whitman rants and natters to Emily on her throne, Yeats and MacGregor Mathers summon Al Capone, and all the nymphs and satyrs are dancing en couronne. If every jaw that chatters could parley and atone, down every path that matters you have to walk alone.

Where mousetraps and flyswatters lie broken and flyblown, where heads are served on platters with coffee and a scone, and rivers hemorrhage waters into the ocean’s drone, the darkness briefly scatters within your flashlight’s cone. Down every path that matters you have to walk alone.

DREAMTIME ON YACHTBOARD

A cloudless sky, a Titian eye, essence of lapis lazuli from ultramarine Afghanistan; navy waves on a Prussian prow; cornflower hilltops, cobalt deeps, royal beds where the godhead sleeps; blue ice-flame, blue Leviathan, blue blood, blue lips, blue Curaçao:

There’s something in me would pursue gradations of the living hue, would compass all the Seven Seas inside a sole aquarium, and sift down through the liquid darks below the shadows of the sharks, among the sponges’ memories of kingdoms gone and kingdoms come:

when oceans sloshing in the blood buoyed Noah through the flood, or, lightning-lit on the surge's sheen, the brooding Dove gave birth to Awe, and breathing went from blue and small and cyanobacterial to power, in the Pliocene, Megalodon's abyssal maw;

when testicles rained from above and on the waters fathered Love, who rose fomented out of foam and rode a shell to the sound of flutes, so that seafarers might adore her shrines erected on the shore, and take time from the journey home to goose the temple prostitutes.

I, too, in the creative spasm of hydrothermal ectoplasm put on my first amoeboid face. Lobe-finned, and then amphibian, I was not I when I arose from oceans and from embryos, a sprat spat from the blank of space to aqueducts of Amnion.

To land the ocean, to possess the otherworld of otherness— there’s something in me wants it all, all the salt of an endeavor after a foreign, fugitive indifference if I die or live: The downward blue original, cold and lovely and forever.

THE SOURCE

For three days, they made all the human noise. The river ranted sundry syllables. Herons unflapped their poise. Oars dipped. Salmon leapt upstream. Unmoved by the slow pulse, the conifers wagged their heads at so much choice. The mountain neither approved nor disapproved.

On that soundtrack, she grafted her own matter: That woman, in that outfit—what a riot! I love the water, but I hate rowing and I hate getting wet. So nice! So quiet! I need my Me Time—just shut out the chatter. Honey, regret nothing except regret.

Now, driving home, she blinks and thinks the current is with her still, uphill—has reversed course to speech’s parent, the spring not of her words, but what they meant: the loves, hates, and remorse her substance now, and she only the torrent in which their force is given form and spent,

and maybe because the flow’s unhurried pace had felt like life, that, too, she rides upstream, less to erase mistakes, estrangements, failures to amass thanks, money, or esteem, than wondering if there could be another place than that embarcadero and this pass

where, down below, necessity and will immix their glitterings to cut the canyon, and the whole wood is still full of the needs it feeds and has designed. Impoverished of opinion, the mountain stands. The water flows downhill saying and saying the nothing on its mind.

ARISTOTLE AT PYRRHA

All men by nature seek knowledge. —Aristotle

It’s the eyes I remember—they took in everything. Always looking. No one knew where he came from, but one day there he was, walking the docks and clambering in our sloops, inspecting everything our nets hauled in. At first, he hardly talked, just concentrated, but sometimes asked odd questions, all about the seasons and the movements of the fishes, when we catch what, and where. It’s not clear why we answered him. We griped about the pesky starfish, and how a drought did in the clams; we said the fish leave the lagoon in winter, all but the gudgeons, and—he thought this strange— sea-urchins here taste best in wintertime, when they’re all full of eggs. We said that once we had a wounded dolphin on the boat, and the pack swarmed us till we let it go, and then swam off. And we explained the use of pickles in the eel-traps, how the smell attracts them, and we took him through the marsh where the perch-eggs are wrapped around the reeds like fishing line, and showed him how to dredge the bottom to dislodge the fattest sprats, and how to salt the fry to make them keep. He wrote it down. He wrote down everything. He had a knife. He went around with it and slit things open: Chicken eggs and insects (an insect lives a long time cut in half, he told us) and chameleons, tortoises (their legs keep wiggling when the heart is out) and eels and cuttlefish. He loved them best, the cuttlefish, their colors and their cunning.

He opened them and looked at everything. And shellfish, shellfish, shellfish. Maybe so, I said, but they’re delicious! No reaction. He wasn’t one for jokes. His Greek was funny. Like comes from like, he’d say, unlike from unlike. We nodded as if he was making sense. At night, we talked around the fire. We said that we’d caught fish like sticks, of uniform thickness, black and round. And we had seen creatures like shields, deep crimson, dense with fins, billowing on the waves, and other creatures like penises, with fins where testicles should be; somebody caught one on a nightline. We told how Chians had shipped oysters in and raised them in the straits, where the tides clash; they didn’t reproduce, but sure got big! Of course he wrote that down. And he talked too. He told us animals that copulate have parents like themselves, but animals that don’t, because they lack the organs or the differences of gender, just appear spontaneously out of different species, or from a mix of rain and rotten matter: The sweet rain makes the animals, the rotten matter is residue. He said it happens chiefly in the heat, which causes ferment, and makes things bubble up. He said that sperm is white because it’s hot and full of bubbles. It sounded crazy, yet somehow made sense. He wasn’t done. He said that everything has god in it, that animals are divine, that souls aren’t in our bodies, that although

they make us move, they never move themselves, and that makes them like god, the souls that is, because he sits alone outside the world and thinks it into being, all of us his thoughts, like bubbles, little fillips of foam winking up out of the ocean of his mind, and that what matters is to know his mind, since god’s mind is the soul of the whole world; and all things living, even plants, have souls, and when the body dies, the soul dies with it. He could have started up his own religion! Somebody would have followed it. He said eels are the spawn of earthworms in the mudflats, and flies spring on their own from rotting meat, and mites from wax, mullets from mud and sand, sponges and crabs and oysters come from slime, and mussels send out shoots and bud like onions, and that the queen bee, uninseminated herself, gives virgin birth to the whole tribe, and snails make love, but nothing comes of it. He said in the Crimea there’s a river, Hypanis, that around the summer solstice rolls in its current little sacks like grapes, and when each bursts this winged quadruped flies out, and flies till evening, when it dies. And he said there’s a fish born out of foam when rain from heaven makes the ocean sweet; a sort of sprat, that twinkles on the rollers like silver coins. He said that everywhere is god, and all we have to do is look. At the end we would stand there watching him as he moved solitary through the marshes

and meadows, hunkering down to flowers, or scrabbling under the dock for barnacles and sea-squirts, or pacing the whole length of the lagoon, bending and touching things. After a while, seemed like the animals would come to him, the tortoises, cicadas and chameleons, offering themselves, impatient to be known. We watched him looking out on the lagoon, standing on a rock, just quiet, thinking, his shadow lengthening atop the waves backlit by the sunset, lengthening over the glassy, unreflecting waves, over the wave-tops and the centuries, dark on the shimmer, human-shaped and not. Catch the light just right and you can see it still, if you look. And us, we’re all still here, walking the docks and taking out our sloops, casting our nets and hauling in the catch, filleting fish, and throwing out the guts, but him? We never saw another one like him, and I don’t guess we ever will.

SOMETHING ELSE

You're there. I'm here. Between us is the talk: Divorces, movies, science, and the doubt we'll ever have our humors figured out; but what I want to say is that the shock of being here with you makes my heart knock, that nature is a door, and we're about to go along the ordinary route. I'm only partly thinking with my cock.

Later, in bed and silence and arm's reach, with love, if that's the word, for now at bay, we sense the solitude that wells in each. The world is something else, and turns away the speaker from the objects of our speech, still charged with all that I – we – cannot say.

TUNELESS NUMBERS

7. AVOID

for JW & RSG

There’s something that you have to do—you can’t remember what, or else don’t have to, or don’t want to, but you really ought to call, or write, or exercise, or choose. But you do not. It’s so small. It’s a glitch beneath the floorboards, it’s a door you do not enter; it’s a ritual tap-dance around a megalithic center; it’s the itch of bruises purpling and of encroaching winter it’s the drone— it’s the drone, drone, drone under all.

At the edges of your vision, in the basement of your brain, on the ledges of unreason where the rock reveals the vein, where the hedge is the horizon and the mind unwinds its skein, it abides. It’s the flaw within the ointment, it’s the guest in the machine, it’s the straw beneath the straw beneath the straw that scraps the scene, it’s the drawl that underlies your own, the face behind the screen in the bone; in the bone, bone, bone where it hides.

It’s the iron in the bloodstream, it’s your anti-matter double; it’s the siren that sighs to you and that warbles you’re in trouble; it’s the lyre in the library, the rub within the rubble; even so, you flex your phantom limb and you don’t pick up the phone; it’s not urgent—there’s no deadline!—it’s like nothing that you own. Will you wake up on a Sunday? Will you roll away the stone? You don’t know. You don’t know, know, know, know, know.

8. DRINKING SONG

The wind is moving in the sheaves; the sheaves are threshing thin. The mind is moving and believes in gin and aspirin. A cloud is lowering that leaves small compass to begin to patch the leaky thoughts and eaves the wind is moving in.

The wind is moving in and out, aloof symposiarch. Turning about it and about the mind is in the dark. Hey, Thaliarchus, say what spout will quench the restless spark, or what the crow, the drunken lout, means with his grating Hark?

The wind is shouting. Let it shout and let the planets spin. Dark within and dark without I’ll take my medicine. Hell is another name for doubt and certainty for sin. The certainties are moving out. The wind is moving in.

CONCESSION

for RGK

Although we hadn’t spoken in ten years, you came to me last night. There was a party. We walked around the edges of a room— all 19th century mahogany with molded paneling and velvet curtains— you with your long slow stride and dainty step that rocked you upward, briefly even taller, I stumping on below. The light streamed in of early evening, summer in the south, on drinks by the divan, above the hardwood, on leather armchairs, clocks, lamps, credences, the grand old bookcase, fireplace and mantle, so that they all seemed glowing from inside, dark-gleaming, elegiac. How could it be so dark and light at once? Your voice was still pure southern velvet, soft-patinaed, rich, with accurately clicking consonants, well-aged and warming as good wine. You said, “I got your manuscript, but have to go. We’ll talk more later. Focus on the poems. We’ll talk of poetry and many things. Although—” Your throat massaged the open vowel, your voice went up in pitch, and your hand with it, and you rocked upward, heel to ball, and all the conversation stopped and turned towards you, but you were smiling, mouth and eyes, in which the room’s ghost-fireplace was lit and winking, not interrupted, not unsatisfied, and with a teacher’s kindness said again, “Yes. Although.” It was a question, an acknowledgment of possibility, a tunnel through the dark, a letting go.

It was my dream, and I awoke in tears. Virgil and Prospero, old spirit guide, although you have been dead ten years, although the light-dark theater is just my mind, although I take your meaning, and will follow nowhere a guide can lead, although I know the young step from the shadow of the old, the worlds revolve, the stars spit out their dust, the generations wake in tears, although you gave this poem to me, to finish it myself—there’s nothing I would rather do than go back to that room and talk with you.

SMILE, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? —Rilke

for PCD, 1994-2014

You knew the way a smile, a joke, a shoulder-tap, can straighten an errant soul better than any map.

We know that your gift sluiced up from a well of lack; lost, you could find the lost, and grin, and guide us back.

Now, when we need consoling from the void place of today we feel your smile upwelling; we know you know the way.

WE ARE SUCH STUFF

Something, slow but perceptible, is moving. He watches, supine on a concrete slab,

the clouds process—a trilobite, a crab, a battleship, a poof—then slip beyond

the library’s Greek names; brimming with blond shadows near sunset’s tipping point, they pour

their glow around a smoky ochre core. A slight breeze hints at fall. The clouds heel-toe

their stately chorus line, seeming to grow and shrink; pulsating, lighter now, now fuller.

The roofs and bricks are stained a Roman color; the quad, the dome, the people have begun

to follow where the clouds go, shot with sun. Something is coming, something else is going;

he watches, fraught with knowing and unknowing, and never would have thought it, but it’s true—

the sky is wholly empty now, and blue.

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

Christopher Childers graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2005 and taught Latin, Greek, and Creative Writing at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware from 2005 – 2014. He has poems, essays, and translations published or forthcoming from The Yale Review, Barrow Street, Rhino, Agni, Parnassus, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere, and has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly fellowship. He is currently at work on a book of translations, under contract with Penguin Classics, of Greek and Latin Lyric Poetry from Archilochus to Martial.