On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths Read Online Free Page B

requisite syllables and even
    a seasonal image
    if you consider balmy Mauritius
    with its pineapples and sugarcane.
    And this precision sends me off
    down the dirt road of my fantasy
    wherein my father searched
    throughout the store to find this shirt
    to send an arrow from before the grave
    to exit on the other side of it,
    the way Bash ō wrote his death poem:
    On a journey, ill
    my dream goes wandering
    over withered fields

    It suits my father to have hunted down
    a ready-made for his own poem,
    not having much of an Eastern sensibility,
    having been stationed in China during the war and hating it
    despite the natural beauty of Kunming.

    They say a man dies when the last person
    with a memory of him dies off, or maybe
    he dies when his last shirt falls to ruin. Now
    its cuffs show the dirty facing all the way around
    and a three-inch strip of checkered flannel dangles down
    into my breakfast cereal:
    I have debated many days but
    here it goes—
    snip

    and am overcome by an Asian wash of sadness.

    Because the washer spins so violently, like time—
    perhaps its agitations can be better withstood
    with the last-memory theory, which means that a dead man
    reposes longest in the toddlers that he knew,
    which often are not many,
    children being afraid of old men,
    what with their sputum-clearing rasps
    and their propensity for latching on to cheeks,
    though my father was not much of a child-cheek-pincher,
    not that he had anything against them;
    he had a grandson he tolerated
    crawling under the table at La Manda’s
    where between forkfuls of scungilli
    as his kidneys chugged with insufficient vim,
    he composed his other death poem,
    the one that came in his own words, it went
    Soon I must cross
    the icy sidewalk—
    help. There goes my shoe

Black Transit

    Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk
    crows pour through the sky in strands.
    From a point in the east too small
    to feed your eye on, they pop
    into being as sharp dark stars, and then
    are large, and then are here, pouring west.
    Something chilling about it,
    though they are birds like any birds.

    What’s fishy is the orchestration, all of them
    with a portion of the one same mind: they fly
    as if the path were laid, as if
    there were runnels in the air, molding
    their way to the roost. Whose location
    no one seems to know— if they did,
    you’d think there would be chitchat
    in the market about the volume
    of their screams, as if women were being
    dragged by the hair through the woods
    at night. But everybody keeps mum—
    it seems we’re in cahoots with them
    without knowing what’s the leverage
    they possess (though we can feel it)
    to extract from us this pact, this vow.

Heronry

    Now my body has become so stylish in the ancient way—didn’t Oedipus
    also have a bloated foot? Yes,
    I remember him tied by the ankle in a tree, after his father heard the terrible
    prophecy and left him hanging
    for the animals to peck and lap, same way the dog likes to lap my bloated foot
    when I take off the special socks
    meant to squeeze it down. He likes to eat my epidermal cells before they fly
    off on the air that moves on through
    the tallest trees one valley south, where great blue herons build their nests
    and ride on small twigs up—then gently
    do their legs glide down my binoculars’ field of view. The twigs they ride on
    never crack; how do they calculate
    the tensile strength of cellulose versus their hollow bones? I thought of this
    at the hospital cafeteria
    as I stared down an oldish woman’s half-cubit of shanklebone, exposed
    between her sock and slack: it was
    oldish skin I lapped until scowled at by her companion, who reached to the hem
    of her pant-leg and for the sake of what
    rule of decorum gently pulled it down?

Les Dauphins

    The dogs of the childless are barely dogs.
    From tufted pillows, they rule the kingdom.
    They’d stand for their portraits
    in velvet suits, if they had