The Heist
Transportation’s tough,
if you want to be transported:
the blockbuster museum’s hush
is uniform, like sand.
Adjust the audio tour,
and behind the curtain
of information hiss
streams of static—
what’s art but marked
exits, the urge to piss, flush
and run? Up wheels the guard
on his silent scooter.
He’s cranky: all day paintings
murmur Take me please
in modern and archaic
tongues. Meanwhile out
beyond Bernisse, two thieves
remove their gloves as light
pours through barn-slats.
Under layers of linseed oil
Gaugin’s La Fiancée warms
with pleasure: finally her body
is moving unpredictably,
like everything worth redeeming.
The Amp
You visit Ireland so late
in life you’ve seen the sights
before you see them:
Blarney Stone, check.
Bog mummies, check.
Kilkenny. The Cliffs of Moher.
Then on the Sligo High Street
a man in scuffed boots
plugs a mic
into a portable amp
and starts to sing, horribly.
You retreat
into Teague’s Discount Shoes,
but “Benny and the Jets” follows you,
horribly, horribly,
through the open door,
down aisles of brogues and heels.
The shoe clerk shakes her head.
God bless his voice, she says,
and you feel a jolt,
like a plane landing
in a country where you are still alone
but less divorced
from the buried stones, the ruins
of the old monastic city.
Apocrypha
The cat slumps dead
in the vet’s arms,
his weight exact at last.
Cats are engineered
to pad from year to year,
their skeletons light
reversible equations
aloof from paradoxes
posed by humans,
and yet this cat
is simultaneously
too fixed and too free
to burn or bury fully,
like the Holy Trinity,
or like memory,
and so his cells
chill slowly, settling
into the planar ambiguity
of El Greco’s Pieta.
Even St. Paul sanctioned
the apocryphal Bible,
the one with the parable
of a cat that out-leapt
Jordan’s depths. In death,
does the spirit begin
to move, or does it rest?
The cat replies both
in a dialect that’s 90% water,
because, as searchers
and divers know,
after a corpse sinks
it reverses course and floats.
Reading Trouble
“Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
When the first Starbucks ever
opened in downtown Seattle
I went there on a semi-date
with a kid who later OD’d,
but who really died of dyslexia:
if he’d learned to read
as fluently as he dreamed,
he could’ve finished high school,
and lived to see Starbucks
go viral from Seattle to Milwaukee,
which makes me want to bring coffee
to that dead kid, David Lee,
except it’s expensive and hard
to order: no medium, no large,
just veni, vidi, vici,
as if the most blah transaction
could go all Virgil’s Aeneid,
could go all Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
even in Wisconsin,
and it can,
but you have to be a reader.
Unfair, unfair, sings the land-
locked mermaid over the door.
But she too comes from a book.
