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Three Poems
by Max Sheppard After Kafka on the Shore Suddenly, beneath the clouds-- descending from bruised night like a conclusion toward the Earth-- a strange melody plays. Words chain together like dead lights strung in the trees. I think of empty bowls in my room. I think of stories I forgot to tell you, the ones I can’t remember. I wait for the end of a journey that cannot end, aisles always rushing toward another gate. B21 A15 B26. They flip the entrance open, adhered to this time like trees rooted, inescapable time. Soldiers in lost woods. Taut rope. My body like a blurred line in the billowing fourth dimension. Disappear in every way, disappear into the center of the elm and birch. In the pith of my head, fingers of ghosts grasp at the fuselage, sinking us to the grey world below. The ending is always less than you expect. Door shut. Shore melt. Earth reappearing. Simulacra converging in the sound of a giant flute, that world hazing away like a lantern carried into a blizzard, the light paling, like a laughing corpse, into the darkness you put inside me. When You Are Ready To Drown And suddenly, the music is quiet. The sacrifice of known moral grounds is necessary for the development of great nations someone says. I put my hand into a small well. Your body can be a small well. I can fall into your body and wake up drowning in the words you keep in there. I swam for many years. I was never a star athlete. But swimming in a well is different than swimming in a pool someone says. Someone has never been inside you. Dead batteries in my mouth. Live rounds in my jogging pants. I am running from something very large. I shoot a very large gun but the gun only shoots blanks. I am running from an empty coat filled with the outline of a person. No stone unturned. I shot out the bowels of a sleep I couldn’t shake and I have been swimming in a black pool in the darkness in the darkness in the darkness ever since. So it goes, two red violins playing underwater. How hard can you listen? How hard can you get when you put your hand in your pants finding only your empty hand? Bloated corpse on the shore. How can you be sure that you meant to eat that last meal? How can you be sure that you wanted a choice? How can you know when the person on the other end of the line is sure? I turn my hand over and I see fifty different ways to feel for you. A hundred to look for your ghost. One to go to sleep. One to make the sun set. One to turn you on and off until the bulb burns out. Butterfly Killer Across the ocean, the sand is in its billion pellets. Stare into the glowing television. There is nothing to do. Lift your hand to point an object at another object, and press a button that allows escape from the body. People run, on the screen they move across the beige toward black shadows. They look like small mice escaping some black hand. The shadows stretch across the ground like a large animal is standing somewhere off camera. The smoke moves along the ground. It is an uneasy cloud that has come to visit. Outside, the light has come on. You walk to the window in the pantry, scan the yard for something living, the light flooding into a dark, frozen world. Choose to ignore this, turn away your wandering gaze. Say words about a place you have never been. Say that this is the apocalypse because truly, you have no scale on which to judge. In the living room, watch blurry images shift across sparkling pixels, and know these are humans. Look into the eyes of a man who says words you don’t understand. Glare of a blade the only contrast against the velvet-black figure Another man kneels on a banner of script so foreign. The bag around his head means he could be anyone; means he could be you or me. When they pull the bag off there’s nothing there. The man on screen drops his blade and looks into the bag like a surprised magician, and, like a magic trick it is empty. Enjoy, from the comfort of your home, sink into the fleshy cushions, change channels of light into what you desire, like molding, or like the press of a button the world changing course with fractal neurons firing-- this is your greatest power. Here’s mine: I look into the camera. I smile at you as you watch me on the screen. I hold the bag in the air like a net without the holes. The black smoke plumes into me, air wavering in a heated aura. The real trick is to catch the smoke while it’s young like baby birds, or butterflies fresh from their primordial ooze. If I can just capture enough of this darkness I can capture this metamorphosis. |
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