Read an Excerpt
The Last Two Seconds
Poems
By Mary Jo Bang Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 Mary Jo Bang
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-901-0
CHAPTER 1
THE EARTHQUAKE SHE SLEPT THROUGH
She slept through the earthquake in Spain.
The day after was full of dead things. Well, not full but a few.
Coming in the front door, she felt the crunch of a carapace
under her foot. In the bathroom, a large cockroach rested
on its back at the edge of the marble surround; the dead
antennae announced the future by pointing to the silver mouth
that would later gulp the water she washed her face with.
Who wouldn't have wished for the quick return
of last night's sleep? The idea, she knew, was to remain awake,
and while walking through the day's gray fog, trick the vaporous
into acting like something concrete: a wisp of cigarette smoke,
for instance, could become a one-inch Lego building
seen in the window of a bus blocking the street.
People sometimes think of themselves as a picture that matches
an invented longing: a toy forest, a defaced cricket, the more
or less precious lotus. The night before the quake, she took a train
to see a comic opera with an unlikely plot. She noticed a man
in a tan coat and necktie who looked a lot like Kafka.
The day after, she called a friend to complain about the bugs.
From a distant city—his voice low and slightly plaintive—he said,
"Are you not well? Is there anything you want?"
COSTUMES EXCHANGING GLANCES
The rhinestone lights blink off and on.
Pretend stars.
I'm sick of explanations. A life is like Russell said
of electricity, not a thing but the way things behave.
A science of motion toward some flat surface,
some heat, some cold. Some light
can leave some after-image but it doesn't last.
Isn't that what they say? That and that
historical events exchange glances with nothingness.
YOU KNOW
You know, don't you, what we're doing here?
The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless.
We're watching the spectators in the bleachers.
The one in the blue shirt says, "I knew,
even as a child, that my mind was adding color
to the moment"
The one in red says, "In the dream, there was a child
batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting
that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends
with the body making a metronome motion."
By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically
side to side while making a clicking noise.
His friends look away. They all know
how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch
because we have nothing better to do.
We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd
will rise to its feet when prompted and count—
one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred,
three-one-hundred—as if history were a sound
that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss
with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this.
The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.
MASQUERADE: AFTER BECKMANN
We're sitting here quietly.
You're feeling your arm, I'm feeling my face.
We're supposed to stay quiet
and live the waiting life.
We were told to be a portraitist's object
and imitate a sad fate.
We are a skull times two.
We're supposed to stay quiet.
Herr Moment is looking
at a watch that says now.
Its red face reminds me of the eye of an ogre.
Its shiny rim reminds me
of Herr Moment's handcuffs.
I don't want to speak
about what can't be fathomed—
mourning and missing, rings cut from corpses,
Herr Moment's refusal to show his real face.
AT THE MOMENT OF BEGINNING
1.
A cage can be a body: heart in the night
quieted slightly; mind, a stopped top.
Clock spring set. Hand in motion.
The fact of the hollowed nothing head.
How did we come to this? Inch by inch.
I was born, borrowed from the beast;
I was now property in a country
where chain reigns—the empire city of I.
2.
So, the empire: the breath, the legend
Of the well-guarded hell.
One comes to tell you
what you should have done differently.
I think, I say, and I am not you.
In the margin of fear I heard a woman
convincing me to listen.
"Listen," she said, "to the doctor."
3.
The city before this was nothing
but swirled sand in a storm.
Nothing turns back. I saw a fluttering
I recognized in the distance.
Out of nowhere, there was red:
the furnace and the beating heart.
Every giddy excess behind the beginning
was also leading to the emphatic end.
WALL STREET
The trapeze artist above
is invested in space.
She attends to the arc the bar makes
the way you'd watch a movie
where a star who looks like you swings on a swing.
It's true you know how to wait
although I don't know that
that counts as knowledge.
I heard a banker say to Monsignor this morning,
I'm certain God wishes me well.
A rat's face at the window next to me
is stone and the wind isn't blowing.
A rat's face sometimes reminds me
of what one sees in a morning mirror:
nose, eyes, a head, some hair.
Five racehorses, neck to neck,
each with four feet off the ground:
yet another classic example
of time seeming to be standing still.
Everyone with money knows that
flying from Pisa to France is a pain
since you have to change planes in Brussels.
As I said to Monsignor this morning,
I'm certain God wishes me well.
THE STORM WE CALL PROGRESS
Strum and concept, drum and bitterness, the dog
of history keeps being blown into the present—
her back to the future, her last supper simply becoming
the bowels' dissolving memory in a heap before her.
A child pats her back and drones there there
while under her lifted skirt is a perfect today
where a cult of ghost-lovers predicts a rapture
but instead remains to inherit varicose veins,
rubber knickers, douches with bulbs, douches with bags,
girdles in a choice of pink, red or white,
and in rubber, silk or twilled linen, enemas, clysters, oils,
balms, and other Benjamin etceteras burrowing
like scabies into the brain's ear as it listens to the click
of the next second coming to an end.
Throughout,
the senseless waste of reaching up to pull down
a machine-made device from the rafters, a beatific
mythical magical deity. Sturm und Drang, storm
and stress, turbulence and urge, turmoil and ferment.
A revolution goes right, then wrong. The right falls
in love with an icon. They force the landscape into a box.
They lock the box with the key inside. The aristocracy
is an improbable agent of change. Whispering
is no longer saying out loud, the all-seeing god a brother
grown bigger by another name.
Adv. sadly
He stared sadly at the ruins of his house. traurig
Er starrte traurig auf die Ruinen seines Hauses. sadly
PROVISIONAL DOUBT AS AN ARCHITECTURAL SPACE
People make the mistake of thinking of impossibility
as if it were a corner visible dimly through a blanket
called "a failed way of thinking" I see the impossible
as an example of the simulacra
that demands that you decide whether it is a new thing,
or simply the old thing emptied of itself.
Remembering the impossible is like remembering
a struggle that shows no signs of struggle but is a record
of a permanent closed door that always looks
as if it just happened. The scene is the early 1960s:
a room, a fog-gray wall, an absence of ambition
as a response to self-doubt. Along the way, the ceremony
of switching on a light, setting a table, the ordinary useless
shapes of the nonchalant. Meanwhile,
the room keeps disappearing like some relentless nothing.
THE TOO-BRIGHT LIGHT WILL WASH YOU OUT
Some photo solution to dissipation, wasting,
some erase of face, some get out of here
and keep going. The sun bleaching you dark
and gone.
But before that you're asleep and dream-sorting
through what will be left behind. A closetful
of dried grass, and a jacket. Two boxes of what.
You've come so far. You've come a long way.
You've gone and you don't stop going.
A year filled with this day, this, this, this day, this,
this becoming a form of sidling up to cessation.
This day, this. Winter will bring emptiness,
emptiness, emptiness; winter will bring emptiness.
All spring, emptiness. All summer. All fall.
AN INDIVIDUAL EQUINOX SUITABLE FOR FRAMING
She is sitting in front of a plate. On it, fresh lettuce and better—a handful of murmur and stir spinning in circles. She offers herself a word of advice: Don't. Says, you'll only pitch forward and start receding into a figure paused to reflect on what's outside the window. Cars backed up for miles. Firefly taxi-light flicker.
The sea, if it ever was, is gone. A rhythmic geometry troubles the horizon. She spends too much time looking at a tree. She sees it but doesn't know it. Which is something like the idea of freedom: it's impossible to achieve and yet the individual sometimes feels free. Inside the mind a vector points to someone subtly rustling the wormhole, which in turn makes her wonder: who is that? Who was that me?
Light under the sky, the window all but closed,
disarray inside, pale gray near white out,
a stone stock-still moment, and then motion,
a woman in that faint place, a surrender to
what can't be escaped. A kind of ever-rest.
Anatomy enough to accommodate
departure in segments, thousands of questions.
The architecture isn't only belated
it's entirely gone and in its place a green
that looks nothing like a life was lived there.
Examples, names, dates, seen
flowers, irises edging a back wall. Where?
Yes, everything said not once but several times.
The flowers coming back in different colors
like communications sound various, dimes
and metal buttons spilled on the counter,
fast film blurred to capture low light. Strange
everywhere. Day collapsing into equal night.
EQUIDISTANT FROM THE CENTER OF NEVER
The door closed on the self she had been and
the outside went soft. A cat brushed by a leg.
A car went over a cliff. The clock minutia stopped
and was hours ahead when she opened her eyes.
The sky opened and let out an image: the optical
illusion of a mountain melting, each former rock
now a bird in the mouth of a cat, or something
like that. Countless snare wires fired in succession,
a tornado continually mimed a bluster on one side
or the other of audible. Everything lasted a second.
RUDE MECHANICALS
Against a white wall
someone's hair was a treetop; the body,
a trunk. It was a time
when everyone said,
"Behind every great veil is only a human."
If there was an overall ethos, it was
self-forgetful guilt and sorrow was real
enough. "I don't know how
the curtain caught fire," she'd said.
And I don't know how reluctance to act
became a machine sucking air
from every sulcus and Grand Canyon
canyon. "Do you like air?"
What could one say to that—
I'll have to think about it?
The waiter came by with the pepper mill.
The barman with his cocktail shaker.
The unsaid was becoming a picture
of sand, land, and nothing.
It was inevitable, she said, that she would
someday stand behind bars
at a window. She could imagine it:
high above an ice-covered expanse
otherwise covered with tin men
and tin women and rude mechanicals.
The noise, she was sure, would be awful.
THE CIRCUS WATCHER
I wear red to match the air
that comes over the fence
and fills the jar in which I keep the day.
I say every dog looks like no other
but that isn't true. Not entirely.
Difference is slippery. I say,
Just look at my head, how it tilts to look up
at these over-large leaves. They're large
and blue, the better to be seen
by my pincushion eye, so bright in the light.
I am sad. I am happy. I keep busy.
I count the eight legs of the tick
on the table. Arachnid and such.
The book I leave open, the wind blows it shut.
In late April I make a schedule: June
to July, July to August. I begin to realize
the circus will be places, minds, people,
pleasure. The drumming all of these.
I practice, when I'm not sure of myself,
this repetition: know, know, know, knew.
I think that chaos fascinates me. I say,
I am part of that,
one of the characters in a cage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang. Copyright © 2015 Mary Jo Bang. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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