When I first switched-up from the
studio,
I was sure this one-bedroom was
haunted.
My framed prints rattled,
which could easily enough
be the roadwork outside,
the way those Iron men
broke up and peeled asphalt down
to what seemed like the
lithospheric plate,
like a violent exfoliation on a cratered
face,
and then they laid down the new,
rolled over and over it—
re-facing, I think it is called—
jackhammers thrumming a crescendo
of vibrations like bass drums striking
this hundred-year old building
with magnitude three earthquakes.
Still, the damage was limited.
It was only the Franz von Barrow
print that fell,
the one of a woman hooking a
languid finger
into another’s cunt
and the monkey masturbating another
with an umbrella.
Glass splintering into a thousand
treacherous diamonds
I’ve never been sure had been swept
up.
The Mexican sex sculpture—
the one with the woman riding top
and all those lips agape in one
ecstasy or another—
broken too.
The Jesus prints and, thank god,
the ambiguous Picasso lithograph,
they stayed nailed in place.
I re-packed Inanna to keep her
safe,
and called my ghost a prude,
worried myself with thoughts of
what she’d do
if I ever started fucking here
myself.
I’d been woken enough
in a hypnopompic fog
with images of someone standing
beside my bed
cradling an axe
and of a woman huddled in the
corner.
This apartment felt so sad,
especially in the coat closet
which was colder than the rooms
and desperately in need
of a coat of paint,
its wall paper striated
like mal-nourished fingernails,
and what might have once been
rose-tint faded
to a nicotine-stained sorrel.
It got so that I called it the
source,
as in Let me grab my coat out of the source.
Due to the disadvantage of age, of
course,
the last tenants died here.
First the wife went.
The husband hung on another twelve
years,
quietly going about his shopping,
heating canned food on the hot
plate.
I walked up too quickly on him
once,
outside the back door,
and startled him.
He fell and I couldn’t quite catch
him,
but pushed him against the door so
he rather slid down,
smooshing cheek prints all over the
glass.
I don’t think he weighed ninety-pounds,
and still
I couldn’t hold him.
Three weeks later he was gone;
I’m sure, part of me was at fault.
But what if that’s not how it
happened?
The Ghosting?
What if I am avoiding my own
bone-deep exhaustion
from too much sex and too little
love?
I wished I’d installed a toll booth
in the studio so that after the men
left
I’d at least have something.
Suppose I hated being reminded of
sex,
that I purposely didn’t choose
large enough nails,
didn’t hammer into the studs,
found patches in the lathe
that were already failing, knowing
that one good bump, one more shake
and the prints would fall
as assuredly as I had fallen?
What if the ghosts were angels
instead of devils, going about
their charity?
What if this is it?
What if being alone is the best
I’ll ever do?
What if it comes down to it,
being alone isn’t chance,
but is my own design?
For three days straight,
and eventually once a week,
I lit my smudge stick,
blew plumes into the source, into
every corner,
imploring the dead to slip out
through the cracked windows and
door,
to move into whatever light they
were able to see
and let me get on with my own
business;
which was mostly figuring out
where everything should go
in a building not designed for
people with so much stuff—
all these crates of books
on meaning and being,
appliances I never use,
clothes enough
for a different self each day—
and still
this resistance
to living my life alone.
