playing for god

d.h. lawrence

Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

is also the title of a poem by kathleen graber. i can't copy and paste it.

i got into kathleen graber initially thru ultra bouge new yorker, which apparently was taking a break from robert pinsky for one issue and decided to publish the poem below, which i can't render single space for reasons beyond reason.


The Magic Kingdom

And as in the daily casualties of life every man is, as it were, threatened with numberless deaths, so long as it remains uncertain which of them is his fate, I would ask whether it is not better to suffer one and die, than to live in fear of all? —St. Augustine, “City of God.”

This morning, I found on a slip of paper tucked into a book

a list of questions I’d written down years ago to ask the doctor.

What if it has spread? Is it possible I’m crazy? I’ve just returned

from Florida, from visiting my mother’s last sister, who is eighty

& doing fine. At the airport, my flight grounded by a storm,

I bought a magazine, which fell open to a photograph

of three roseate spoonbills tossing down their elegant shadows

on a chartreuse field of fertilizer-production waste.

Two little girls emptied their Ziplocs of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish

onto the carpet & picked them up, one by one, with great delicacy,

before popping them into their mouths. Their mother, outside

smoking, kept an eye on them through the glass. After my cousin died,

my father died & then my brother. Next, my father’s older brother

& his wife. And, finally, after my mother died, I expected

to die myself. And because this happened very quickly

& because these were, really, almost all the people I knew,

I spent each day smashing dishes with one of my uncle’s hammers

& gluing them back together in new ways. It was strange work

& dangerous, even though I tried to protect myself—

wearing a quilted bathrobe & goggles & leather work gloves

& opening all the windows, even in snow, against the vapors

of the industrial adhesives. Most days now I get up late

& brew coffee & the smell rises from the old enamel pot

I’ve had to balance under the dark drip ever since the carafe

that came with the machine shattered in the dishwasher last month.

One morning I found a lump in my breast & my vision narrowed

to a small dot & I began to sweat. My legs & arms felt weak,

& my heart thrashed behind its bars. We were not written

to be safe. In the old tales, the woodcutter’s daughter’s path

takes her, each time, through the dark forest. There are new words

for all of this: a shot of panic becomes the rustle of glucocorticoid

signalling the sympathetic nervous system into a response

regulated by the sensitivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

And, as I go along, these freshly minted charms clatter together

in the tender doeskin of the throat as though the larynx

were nothing if not a sack of amulets tied with a cord & worn

around the neck. But I tell you I sat on the bathroom floor for hours,

trembling. And I can tell you this because the lump was just a lump

& some days now I don’t even dread the end although I know

it will arrive. The garage is filled with buckets of broken china.

The girls chased each other & waved their arms, casting spells,

the trim of their matching gingham dresses the electric pink

of the birds’ wings. They turned each other into princesses

& super-girls & then they pretended to change back.

Oh, no. You forgot to say forever—they took turns repeating

with dramatic dismay, melting into puddles of themselves,

their sandals & sunburned knees vanishing beneath their hems.

inferno

disco fever & spring fever & now
no work no sleep only dance all the time

summer is already coming, already came and went

this is another poem by michael earl craig

COOKOUT
They had friends over for a cookout.
Quite a few people came.
They grilled salmon, knockwurst, bratwurst, burgers.
Six people brought potato salad.
After midnight, when everyone had left,
he felt drunk and laid down on the back porch.
There were bottles everywhere—some in clusters,
some standing alone or on their sides or in the hedge.
Miller, Molson, Lowenbrau, Budweiser, Bud Light,
Coors, Coors Light, a few Amstel Lights.
It all made him think of nothing. His mind
had been racing lately… now it slowed down, down…
he laid flat on his back, feeling his head
rock ever so slightly on the boards
where only an hour ago people had walked, danced,
stood laughing or arguing, holding hotdogs, eating coleslaw.
The wind came howling now, blowing dust and sand.
He had no idea where his wife was.
Had she gone somewhere? He couldn’t say.
His head, rocking right and left on the boards.
A little slack now in his cheeks.
I would imagine he felt it all slipping gently away.
The season was changing. It grew very cold.
Then snowed lightly. The wind and blown sand
picked the faded labels off the beer bottles.
The house filled with cobwebs and kids from town
looted the place—took the grill, the stereo,
then all the furniture, appliances, rugs,
teacups and towel racks.
Two years passed. This asshole was out!
The landscape had been denuded. There once
had been Hungarian partridge and bougainvillia.
Now there was nothing. And yet his chest
raised gently, paused, and lowered…
raised gently, paused, and lowered….
Some say he’s “pissed it all away.”
Others say he knows exactly what he’s doing.