Re-Facing

For Don Wilson
(c) 2007

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 attributed to the roadwork outside, the way those Iron men

with their furrowed brows 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.

But 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 all been swept up.

And 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 and sobbing 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, it’s 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, flushing chemical spills.

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?

When I switched up to this one-bedroom condo it felt so large.

I suddenly had space to breathe, could move about

without climbing over the bed, and suddenly I wished

I’d installed a toll booth in the studio so that after the men left

I’d at least have something.

What if I liked these new-found choices even if they were as banal

as in which room to place the television set, and not

whether or not to entertain wearing jeans instead of lingerie?

Suppose I hated being reminded of sex, that I purposely didn’t choose

large enough nails, didn’t hammer into the studs,

but chose the 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?

I liked it better when I was young and everything was potential,

at least that is how I like to remember it, some enthusiastic awe

I’m fairly certain I never had, at the romances I saw as kernels

about to unfurl rhizomes & shoots, at the poems I swore would flow

like blood from a broken vein. And while it is not my intent

it surely seems to be my purpose to repeat this story,

this unending angst I thought I’d finally outgrow,

and at last find some solace, some satisfaction at conclusion,

at one suitable connection. But what if this is it? 

What if being alone is the best I’ll ever do?

What if there are no more decent men, or they’ve all been snatched up

by women with more clarity, by women who don’t feel

like the dog kicked one too times, cowering in guilt and despair?

What if it comes down to it, where being alone isn’t chance,

but ends up being my own design?

And so 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 its own sad

assemblage of 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

for every type of food possible, none of which I’d ever cook,

but kept in hope of one dinner party or another,

and enough clothes to drape on a different face each day for years,

that and ruminating upon my resistance to traveling my life solo.