The Immoral Jellyfish
A whorl of hair locked in the bristles of the hundred-year-old hairbrush: a
sculpture the brush is chiseling, in the shape of the dead woman’s ear
The cicada floating over salvia touches on the surfaces, sifting through its
files, everything in order, a competent desk clerk of the 19th century.
*
The prestige, that it happens, that death comes and swept away a
personality, made us talkative in the hospital waiting room, like children
during a field trip.
*
My shoeboxes were my first poems, houses for my disconnected objects.
Crickets chirped loudly in the forests of shirts and dress pants in the closet.
*
And in the winter the silverfish takes rule of my tub, circling. White sea. The
morning will be dark for five more hours. Much accrues as loneliness.
Pictographs of ice on glass. Bad plumbing of old regime.
*
The scary thing about losing everything, including consciousness, is that you
can really believe right to the end that you are the thing you are losing.
*
In his old secretary desk I find a camera with film inside, set to take the next
shot from his childhood, and a text on the immortal jellyfish, which ages
backwards to its birth, to be the youngest thing on earth, again and again.
*
The earth is my body, I am the tooth, eternity a doorknob, and time is the
string it’s looped to. My life, the instant it takes the door to slam shut.
Deduction
In order to deduct the costs of his office
he had to measure it well and he did,
starting with the window where the sun
shines through the winter trees, spoked
with branches. The sun was one centimeter
thereabouts, and the square of the window
it shined through, the size of a picture
frame. Under the window was a desk
which would have been about the shape
of a six-month old Polish elk, its head lowered
in the carpet’s scythed grass, but the desk
was red, a kind of unnatural cherry red,
so it would have to be called a large
stripped carcass on the tax form. A lamp,
the only artificial fluorescence in the room.
It had two small columns like the portico
of the Temple of Minerva. It was the size
of the end of a tiny harpoon. The chair
could not be mistaken for anything
but tombstone from the back. From the front
it was a child pushing two hands on the ground,
about to stand up for the first tie.
And he deducted himself, the size of
a man at the beginning of the end of
a story, the part where the thing inside him
is given shape in how he describes the sound
of a flute being played by a neighbor, the
cubit or so that held the breath, the fathoms
of the workings of that instrument.
