OwlOutlier

poor man

everyone knew
he was going to do it
the entire neighborhood
he told everyone
one-on-one
soberly
quietly
he’d reached the end
he knew it wouldn’t be pretty
either way he chose
so he picked the lesser evil

his dead dad’s gun
would get him through
as it had protected him
in that rough part of town
more than once
he said he knew the place
out in the country
some meaningful mountains
and that view at dawn
the women he had loved
listened next to him on couches
holding his hand and head
some donated a night of forgetting
for old time’s sake

someone took his dog
a drug dealer friend
shed a few tears

then he was gone
just the way he said
being a man of his word

whatever other faults he had
he joked he only had one
“the size of San Andreas”

he wasn’t old

and the obituary
since they cost money
was short

and just said
he died
“after a brief illness”

and that old red Chevy pickup
he gave to his brother
with family photos
boxed in the trunk
memories to cover up
that last bit of horror
and mess

was stolen the next day

and never came back

To the Christmas Mouse

We have killed all your children and your siblings and your parents. You are the last scamperer, secretly gnawing on dry pasta packets and inexplicably draining every single Taco Bell sauce packet in the junk drawer. Even the hottest ones, you freak. You have outsmarted every single live trap, refusing to be repatriated. You have outlasted the master killer cat who took out your family and friends. He proudly tasted blood of your kind just days before his long illness finally took him. We never see you, only hear your constantly gnawing teeth. The new cats are spoiled babies. For now. They hunt toy mice, not real mice. They know you exist, smell you, but consider you a half-interesting distraction. A t.v. show in which they quickly lose interest because there are no pictures, only smells and sounds. They don’t know how to lie in wait like the patient old cat. REQUIES CAT IN PACE. So these are your salad days. You thrive and enjoy the warm kitchen. When L. put the snap trap in the drawer, at first I said “yes,” then “no” minutes later. I had made him run out to pick up the death traps. I couldn’t bear to think of it not striking your neck just right. I couldn’t bear to think of you squirming in agony. He was furious. He triggered the little executioner’s copper wire on the trap with a pen and threw it in the trash. I wasted money on death. (Wouldn’t be the first time.) I rebaited the pathetic live traps. Surely some bait will work. I hate your little turds. I hate finding them in the bottoms of book boxes. You shit on our literature. I pray that you die of old age, without producing a hundred more children. We know how your kind is. Stay invisible. Keep your poop in some tiny corner of dust if you can’t go outside like respectful animals do. Yet it’s cold as the grave out there, plunging towards zero. Food so hard to find. And you crazily think this is your home. Just please stay invisible or die, and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Fisherman

An old man sits in a creekside chair where his father sat for years. He looks down into the stream where his father fished, endlessly reading it. The blinding pages of sun-dazzling water have him in their spell. He must have read half a novel of that shimmer just that afternoon. It might as well be dancing golden fairies throwing their dust in his rheumy eyes. He’s hypnotized, smiling. On his lap is an open book. His fishing rod is propped up beside the chair, resting in a forked branch spiked into the earth, the way fishing folk do it out in the country. You notice the delicate fishing line extends not into the stream, but into the book that rests on his body. You watch the nylon filament twitching where it enters the book. Clearly, he has a bite on the line. But he doesn’t even notice this twitching. He’s lost in the book of water. The golden arabesques and strange alphabets fill his eyes, while the things swimming in the book feed on his bait. When it starts getting dark, he reels his line in and closes the book. He smiles when he remembers this is the same book his father could never finish either.

Dream

I had a dream about you,
she said in the long naked morning of the bed.
He turned to face her, one eye open.
You had gone missing, it was terrible.
She said. And stared emphasis.
He smiled, then briefly laughed and closed his eyes.
Everything goes missing, he said.
Your slippers, the Roman Empire,
your pet goldfish when you were eight,
the digits of pi after 3.14…
His eyes were still closed. He smiled
stillness into her, from his blindness.
We are different species, she said.
Everything missing is here, is terribly here.
And she looked at the morning of birds
in the window, losing and finding each other
in flights that seemed sentences of a sort,
in the blue wish of space to hold something.
His blind hand went up and down her long leg
as an apology or feint or Mesmerism.
The morning has such naked long legs
because it is a Sunday. He thought. How wonderful
it is to go missing or forget, he promised
her in his terrible way like a general
whose only battlefield was sheets.

Question

What happened to that little girl with her white cat,
on the street of the falling bombs,
the girl too small for that large love
she held under its arms, using her arms
the way her mother had done with her
as a baby, on the Gaza streets?
She was too small to support the weight
& the cat dangled, as everyone saw everywhere
it is hopeless. A machine gun would hammer space
with terrifying staccato death. A bomb
would fall through an apartment building,
all the way from the penthouse garden
to the basement where a family of twelve
cowered in embraces. And these explosions
shivering the precious cargo of our lives to bits
would send the white cat scurrying in terror
from her arms forever. What happened to
the white cat, the girl, that street of breathing buildings?
What happened to the photographer who took
the picture? Pieces, pieces, and more pieces.
What happened to the America who watched,
who merely watched, who merely? What happened
the the people who danced in a trance on October
7th of death. What happened to the men who
tortured children to death in peaceful settlements,
children they could see through chain link fences
for years? What happened to students in demonstrations
calling for an end to war and an end to Jews also?
We do not see the answer to the questions
the photo asks of us. We know the white cat
ran away in terror. We know the little girl looked
for her beloved in the endless Guernica none of us
can ever escape. The love too heavy to carry
runs and hides. Send more bombs until we do not see
them, the people beg. Erase them and my fear,
the children who hate my children. The people scream
in terror and joy and pain and in childbirth on battlefields,
they scream too. The white cat hides at the end of the world.
A small girl searches for it everywhere. She does not
give a damn about the bombs falling and the men
screaming the solution to the world, all around
her tiny body. When someone grabs her body
and absconds with her life, her tiny arms are still open,
her hands still reach through wildly vibrating space
back, back to the moment before,
when the white cat was still in her embrace,
when she had hope to save both of them.
What happened to the world that believed
in rebirths like Renaissances and enlightenment
that was not the light of burning bodies?
What happened to the white cat? What happened
to the arms of the young girl? What happened
to the tiny hands that reached and gestured
in the deafness of space as they carried
her away from her will and her love?
What happened in the dreams of the white cat
if it ever slept again? What happened?
When the presidents and the generals speak
every day about ‘small arms,” is this what they mean?

Waking

Atop a paperback copy
of Karl Ove Knausgård’s
My Struggle, knocked off
a book pile in the night
by the cat who is ancient,
who we fear is dying,
who still kills occasionally,
before some reach the safety
of the humane traps,

a few perfect mouse turds.

()

I talk to you across a forest of people, but it is doomed semantic air. The sounds scatter and lose their force to push atoms around. All the seeds in the sentences float away but it is not like milkweed. Nothing is reborn where it touches earth. I say an echo is dying semantic air. But the things I say to you are changing as they wander. What if there were a planet where something I said to you could echo around for a year and come back completely changed. You would still hear it in my voice. But it would be a liar. It might be the sort of lie you need and embrace. Some bodiless thing taking possession of you. And you would accuse me. Please check your calendar to verify you are not replying to mere echoes of something I said.

listen

The crickets pretend to be one massive cricket. The size of the night. No night has ever had a size. It’s all in your head, something says. September. You’re not old. You’re their age. A matter of months or billions of years, finding a balance. Somehow the same. We’re all slowing down together. We touch in a space where semantic air meets the ear’s inner membrane. The weird sounds of a day twisting into a sort of DNA. And your mind splicing, recombining, while you sleep. The child in a dream wanders the field of wildflowers, lovely mutations. Go back further. Go back to your mother’s voice. It’s near the edge of the golden field. No words live here.

(september)

Tonight was the Supermoon. And I know you wanted me to see it. I did. That orange blistered planet that follows us around. I stared at it from a parking lot where only my car remained. Why does it seem to still want something from us? “Take me photo,” she seems to say. God, what happened to her? When I got home, it was late. I stared into an empty white bowl as I filled it with the cat’s fresh water. It was so satisfying. Her perfect emptiness. The way it glowed up at me in my hands. The bowl in my hands. My thoughts nothing more than its moonlight.

A Thousand Years from Now

A thousand years from now, no one will know what we were talking about. Scotch tape. Milk. Mailbox on the corner where you would run to drop a letter in that metal swinging mouth before the pickup time. There goes the little mail truck. You missed it again. The languages that were buzzing like bees all over the planet, angrily, will have calmed down. The languages will have flowed into each other like violent seas that chilled out, that connected to become one languid ocean with slight tides. The libraries will be everywhere, inside us, nano-libraries of all the dead and their voices with us. The dead inside our bodies streaming through our blood, talking when we are ready to listen. They will tell us of wars. And we will wonder what that was like. We will listen to thousand year-old-haiku about crickets translating the stars at night. And we will go to the balcony and listen to those same crickets. Sometimes they will all stop their chirring at once. It’s spooky. As if the universe stopped moving. That rare moment of listening. Someone will think of touching someone they don’t really know at all. In that moment. But there will be a thousand years between them. Between their rare dark bodies. Because most of the body is inside. Most of the body is darkness. So they will smile into the night and just go back to sleep. Sleep, the eternal thing. We are only the rare haunting of sleep. Something flows secretly like milk, into the quiet infant. Something flows like ink. Back a thousand years ago, when there was ink.