A short, tragic affair he
thinks
and immediately corrects himself.
Tragedy
implies loss, and the downward slide.
Hair
plugging the bathroom sink, spine
ripening
to an extravagant hump in a cold
room in Pittsburgh.
He can't even remember her face.
Italics
are a useless perfumed brood
he writes
on cocktail napkins. The emphasis
should be the absence of punctuation,
importance
defined by the absence of importance.
The way
the shovel defined the Civil War.
Don't
explain it, she said once. The third
time she left he sat in his kitchen
for six days. The mathematics of
loss
involves calculations inversely
proportional
to the sum of the parts. Descartes
was
a coward who slept with his first
cousin.
Sherman lusted after his sister
and burned
Atlanta instead. A simpler way of
saying
it would go something like: A
man
who walks alone on a beach at
night
without a stone in his hand does
not profit
from considering how cool, how
smooth
the stone might have been lying
quietly
in the pale belly of his hand.
Dreaming,
he trades his kingdom for a legion
of skilled
monkeys. His monkeys for the hinge
that resists
unhinging. The hinge glistening
in the empty
doorframe, the miracle of friction.
He knows
this isn't the point. This is the
point
where the monkeys start typing.
Ted Williams
he thinks, I want to be Ted Williams.
So accurate
that the strike zone is defined
by what you don't
swing at. Going out not with a bang
but with a by
god bang. Or the longbow
at Agincourt, his body
lengthening, curving, strung with
plaited horse
hair and drawn tight. The thrum
in his bones
as each arrow flew in a tight, lethal
arc. All
this time you've been thinking
of bathos
she says. Or perhaps pathos. Tragedy
implies
a tragic flaw, and speed, quick,
like a cat. Get the fuck
out of my head he tells the cat
crouched beneath
the dead television.
