Four Poems

Kwikset
 
That lock we kept on our door
wasn't so much of a lock
 
as a nonbinding contract I kept
with an outside world
 
only vaguely complicit
in our agreement—
 
something we might forget about
if one of us didn't sign it every day—
 
another constant recitation, another
forgotten stretch of road.
 
Have a seat for a moment
and consider
 
how the chair beneath you becomes
transparent once it's assumed, a varnished
 
appendage left to float
imperceptible between things like gravity
 
and friction, knowledge and faith
decipherable as elevator Braille.
 
More and more these days it feels
like everything I do not see
 
flows from beneath the bedrock
of my nervous system
 
in slow, self-supported bursts: black
water that spills out of me when I lose
 
concentration or have a few too many
drinks. There is luck in every failure,
 
even if it’s the failure of a structure or
of a chair, collapsed beneath me.
 
Consider the tender marriage
of bolt and vacancy,
 
how the fluidity of one
vis-à-vis another suggests something
 
entirely new.
How the infinite space between us
 
and the thing I still call me
was never really absorbed by the certainty
 
of my sitting body.
True, that I have never fully
 
accepted the ways
in which the floor is trusted, too.
 
Take the chair
and what it means for you to sit,
 
the lock and what it means to sleep,
and sit, and sleep,
 
or don’t.

***

Tepidarium
 
Pleasure taken from me in one small way or another.
First it was birth, then the circumcision!
 
What to say of the times I see the body of another
intact, swaying in steady synchrony with the steps
 
of a fellow gym member or pool-goer in the tile-damp
locker rooms where, sometimes, I change clothes
 
and other times, too embarrassed to be seen, arrive prepared?
Units of flesh captured fleetingly in my gaze—not so different
 
from those I see sometimes in the cold
confines of my phone screen
 
like objects of boundless pleasure and surprising
precision. They sit, stand, hang, and hunker there,
 
engaged in all the impossible acts I long for
when I'm alone and do not want to be alone.
 
A bath in Budapest where I once spent an inexplicable vacation
gave me pause to consider what I have lost when I steeped myself
 
in its mineral calm across from a man twice my age made
lazy from heat, his mouth agape, knees and belly buoyed
 
to the surface. The dark gap where his upper
incisors might have been winked its static wink at me.
 
How long could he have been
floating there like that, I thought,
 
and then saw how his whole hooded self was there, too,
bobbing along sluggishly (slug-like?) beyond the baggy hem
 
of his trunks. There, its small bulk sustained the slow
rhythm of our sulfur-heavy water, the very fluid
 
that held both of us in place, almost like a hand
that might hold the feathered body
 
of an injured bird, a sparrow, perhaps, something
small but strong enough to resist what might soon
 
be compelled to let it go.

***

 
Thirst Trap
 
For those
experiences we cannot
express inwardly
no matter how clearly
 
their impression
appears in the mind's eye:
a line unbroken
between its two points, not
 
pixel straight
beneath the slow
arc of gravity, not
ambivalent
 
like a scar traced
in a certain angle
of bedroom light. Bless
the wound
 
for what it has changed,
how it heals into itself.
Bless the needle
that threads this new
 
opening of flesh,
quiet as it is
inevitable, extant
in the digital
 
memories it evokes,
a snippet of life
lived within
the mobile app
 
I most associate
with human suffering
plus all my old
friends back home.
 
Here, I upload
a picture of a 43-year-old man
holding a phone and flexing
each muscle in his arm
 
at a weightroom mirror,
a screen that sends it
right back to me:
simple, desperate.
 
I have measured out
a bit too much of my life
with plastic thimbles
of hydrogenated coffee cream.
 
The body, I caption,
was created to store endless
tranches
of strange information.

***
 
Wonderland
 
The first big snow since my divorce
starts to unwind itself this week, gradually,
sort of like a clock running backwards.
 
It would be easy enough to call it
the first thaw since I left, but by the time
evening rolls around it becomes clear
 
that it isn't: a soft white swath of the map
stiffens again like a smear of fondant.
This winter, it was Olaf who reminded me
 
(more times than I care to count) how
important it is to think beyond the logic
of our own conclusions. The absurdity
 
of measurement. When I settle on this,
my daughter implores me to sing along:
Imagine how much cooler I'll be
 
in summer! At my son's basketball game,
I hear a parent from the other team lament
how it will probably be here with us
 
until June, which is all it takes for me
to imagine it, ubiquitous in the interstice
along sidewalks and planting strips
 
like stone walls erected at the edge
of each road that leads me back home
to my overpriced apartment.
 
Imagine seeing it piled high
on playgrounds and Wegmans'
parking lots when school lets out—dingy
 
Everests, engineered
for close-range inspection, the strange
sight of what should not be
 
but somehow is—the unimaginable
made tangible, less resilient as it is
hardened into being.