Establishment of purpose:

This sentence might begin a short story, but it is not particularly charged nor meant to be. Like everything else, it is tentative; I am here to find out where my words have gone. Some have strayed, and I mean to gather them from the lines of verse—like file cabinets—that arrange and order each syllable. Some of my language, I believe, has strayed among those musty records of voice. Until I recollect them, then, I wish to avoid commitments.

The family incubator hums along in the sodden silence
and my cousin the Victorian and I try to
dredge up the roots of this watery quiet.
Our intimations lodge under our fingernails:
we turn our necks to each other, see,
and slide our eyeballs through the midnight dark
like ball bearings noiseless in oil.
It is not late enough yet. The humming fairly
bubbles, and the orange fluorescence is a feathery
fungus sprouting from these eggs. My hand touches his
and there is electricity between our wrinkled thumbs.

The poet breaks up his language:

On an advertisement or piece of packaging for “Rasildon Bond Blue,” the poet has doodled a clown in the corner and written elsewhere:
  attached      attached
graet        great
scool    ch  shool      schoo

Paul is an old man and his skin is thick from decades of cigarettes and pipes. He does not like to stand up and sit down: “I guess I was in college and my girlfriend had just broken up with me or something.” His voice has the faintly rounded vowels of a New York accent. “Or I broke up with her.” He begins his story grumpily, but a wicked smile flits around the corners of his shaded face. Everyone is quiet, face open to the floor or neck stretched to watch the old man’s glass-blurred eyes. “Whatever it was, I was young and wonderfully depressed. I decided I was going to swim out—I think I was at the beach, I don’t know why I was at the beach, I was at the beach—I decided I would swim out and just keep swimming until I disappeared. Like an ellipsis. So I’m swimming.” One of us shifts in his chair and Paul is leaning slightly forward, fingering the crease in his brown pants. “I’m swimming and I start to notice something floating around me.” Someone smiles with vague and unfocused eyes. “The whole time I have these images in my head, words, of my own abstracted death. Abstracted because I’m outside of it, because it’s not really me dying, it’s some idea of me, but very real because I imagine heavy red cloth at the funeral and sleek shiny black wood (it’s so real I can see my reflection in the black polish of the coffin) and everything very weighty and rich and me just some vanished dot in the ocean. And the whole time I hear my mother telling me to bring an umbrella. ‘Bring an umbrella, Paul, bring an umbrella.’ Anyway, I notice something floating around me, and it’s shit. Floating in great glops all around me, me swimming into my vanishing point in the ocean, dotting off gracefully, like I would’ve wanted to… But there’s shit bobbing all around me. It must have been from some ship or something. I’m still hearing my mother about the umbrella and I’m thinking what the hell kind of thing I would do with an umbrella and how much it smells and my coffin suddenly getting all dirty and the images in my head and the shit floating around me, water shit and shit shit, all around me and in my head. What I’m doing is ridiculous, and I know how ridiculous I am, how ridiculous the red drapes and the umbrellas, and I start laughing, real good, and swim back.”

Hey, you, where are you going,
with your golden cane of wood?
I’ve forgotten the route—my memory slowing—
I’d tell you if I could.

The poet rearranges his language:

Empty, irresolute, ashamed,
when the sacred texts are named,
I lie here on my bed apart,
and when I look into my heart,
I discover none of the great
subjects: death, friendship, love and hate—
only old china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

“But they both exist,” he told Frank, when the latter friend (nudgy? I don’t know) expressed consternation over two irreconcilable versions of the same poem by the former. You lose the nakedness of the first version in the second, Frank said, but the stanza order is much better in the second than the first. I tried to splice the two—first and second—but the second wouldn’t integrate the first and the first wouldn’t integrate the second. First and second, second and first.
“Yes.”
Frank continued: Why did you change the first? Why create the second? Why sacrifice nakedness for order, order for nakedness? Do you prefer first to second, second to first? Which do you prefer? I like the movement of the second, the rawness of the first. It’s a problem: second and first, first and second.
“But they both exist.”
Yes, they both exist.

The wheezing sea rests its leaden stomach
and spume collects on the shore like words
clustered at the top of a blue blank page.
If you dip into the vast emptiness
of that sheet the suffocating marvels rippling
are sure to drain your human breath
and stuff wide echoes in your human ear.
Seagulls caw and circle over the blankness
like thoughts. Their cries contain the rumble
of unseen boulders.
      If the water weren’t
so heavy, the sea would eat the moon;
but that pale-faced jester, rolling about,
jingles his stars and drinks of his sky:
“Come, friend water, join me up here,
I know that you can fly…”
So that deep-chested giant, wet as the rain,
leaps at the moon with a violent joy.
The moon sees the sea, jumping so earnest,
and laughs and laughs and laughs again.

The poet struggles to retain a foothold, scrabbles for language:

On a sheet of white paper, back and front, are phrases and sentences violently scratched out with angry pencil. This handwriting is not the poet’s usual handwriting, which is small and cramped in lopsided squares and triangles. This is a large, free, looping cursive. Only one phrase, towards the bottom of the second side, is not obscured:

My mind can’t hold the focus for a minute.

I try to imagine madness, to visualize claustrophobia—to feel it—but there seems to be no hope for any dynamic understanding. What I see is an eternal moment, not grating hours; I see insanity, the institution, in roaring revelation, but I do not feel that teetering border-state, the rattling train of in and out that goes and goes and goes. Memory is genius, really: I strain to create these memories.
I see a man who chops off his own hand and spits on it with a single word. The brain thuds against the padded walls of the skull and sound dribbles out of the mouth like a paralytic’s drool. My words hijack images and scatter across the asylum courtyard, chattering in their corners. Where is the logic to this insanity? Where is the truth?
A more sober language inscribes the suicide’s arm, more honest than the wild eyes of a McMurphy. Scar tissue writes as slow as the most labored composer and chooses its words more carefully. These few syllables are its only speech, leaden.
Others widen their mouths and simply empty themselves of sound, like chutes of grain rushing from ship to factory. Their tongues are visible, they see with their throats. But there are only vowels—hollow, pungent. No consonants.

It’s not much fun writing about these breakdowns after they themselves have broken and one stands stickily splattered with patches of the momentary bubble. Health; but not of the kind which encourages the backward look.

I rub my whirring eyes
like winding a projector
and the day before me on the screen
flickers.

This moment is my invention because I write; the future is the stuff of verbal memory. I sing and my song of potentiality is just as real as the rain, just as potable. No dryness scalds my throat. My soul runs in rivulets down streets and gutters, over parking lots and slaughter house floors, through sieves of greens and salmon-peppered dams. I bleed into the edges of the desert.

my stiff boat chafing on the stiff embankment

Rushing is my language!
Nimble is my tongue!
Like a ball flung up my speech has its trajectory
of lilt and memory, yes,
but there is bewitchment in its apex.

Children go crying up and down the stairs
I have no reason to be here

At the infinitely momentary moment
of its slow reversal—
pinned in air like a skewered butterfly—
language seizes permanence;
subject to every crossly contending universal force
it sighs into eternity
and remains there even after it has fallen.

The flags are rattling out a tattoo:
in a few minutes
the rain will break out of the clouds with a shudder;
smell and liquid will thicken my humid shirt,
saturate my voice and drag it
to the pocked pavement,
there clinging like the soaked clothing.

The poet rinses off his language:

I was overanxious to expose myself.

Sorrow dispersed in the snow-buoyed air because the trees cast blue shadows and I shared a sled with a friend. I laughed louder and louder, trying to make myself hear the joy and catch it like an ear cold; he laughed too. Down slight and icy slopes of streets we forced the sled to whip up a measure of carelessness.
The old streets are no longer horizontal…
my eye is firmer than my step.
Only five minutes before another hush of snow and silent sadness had settled on the city; hairy crust of white ice on my unraveling gloves had melted on the radiator with a sizzle. We couldn’t get much speed and the sled-rope cut our new-chilled fingers, the snow drifts hugged our feet. It was a beautiful blue darkness and we shared one sled between us.

Some companion from the other place,
a message, too well drawn for me

The poet seeks a whole language:

He looked for some flight that could contain
the violence flitting about in the blue
shadows, but outside, in the cold’s whisper,
as in his snowy soul, only warm
howls filled the vacant twilight. Breathe,
he told himself, and find an answer.

“Where to?” The other expects no answer,
because their gloved palms each contain
the other’s home. “In winter, to breathe
is to steal the sky: gray is sharper than blue;
it chills the lungs and helps to warm
the feet,” he thinks, thinking in a whisper.

For these two there is no need to whisper,
though still so much is implied without answer;
their smiles are loud and forward and warm,
full of the miscellany that smiles contain.
Now, though, every exuberance is shaded in blue
and platitudes hover regular as breath.

It is laughter that forces echoes to breathe
their accusations in knowing whispers;
both remember a room with light walls of blue
and plan for a future without any answer.
Playful noise is, right now, enough to contain
that bellowing sorrow that fills them and warms

their swelling gut. Gloves and hats do not warm
them, though heated in the dryer, and the air they breathe
only chills and fills the stinging lungs with all they can contain.
Underfoot it crunches and glistens and whispers:
They are young, love has no answer.
Deeper and deeper through the blue.

With the evaporating light, the darkening blue
shadows melt over the thickening snow in warm
puddles. To say it is a sorrow of days is no answer.
Each groan grows independent and struggles to breathe;
in such rounded sounds we find no space to whisper:
there is only so much silence they can contain.

I sketch my answer in blue neon:
each time we breathe we will whisper, listening or not,
and then see what warmth we can contain in our ever-rushing sleds.

Grand Finale:
I have listened to him read on tapes. Entering the echoing stairwell I thought I heard the poet’s thickly stentorian voice, but it was just a construction worker.

Alex Borinsky