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  for my father and Sarah

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Little Voice

  Never Before

  Yellowtail

  You Have Astounding Cosmic News

  Poem for Tony

  Poem for John McCain

  When It’s Sunny They Push the Button

  Work

  Lesser Heights Are Bathed in Blue

  Minnesota

  Starry Wizards

  Paper Toys of the World

  Poem

  Poem for Ferlinghetti

  III

  Journey Through the Past

  Travelers Among Mountains and Streams

  Poem for San Francisco

  Kingdom Come

  Letter to a Lover

  Frankenstein Love

  White Castle

  Screaming Skull

  Ceasing to Be

  Sad News

  Poem for Jim Zorn

  The Pavilion of Vague Blues

  Fortune

  Charmer

  This Little Game

  To a Predator

  Global Warming

  A Summer Rainstorm

  The Painted Desert

  For You in Full Bloom

  This Handwriting

  IV

  Come On All You Ghosts

  About the Author

  Books by Matthew Zapruder

  Links

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  I

  Erstwhile Harbinger Auspices

  Erstwhile means long time gone.

  A harbinger is sent before to help,

  and also a sign of things

  to come. Like this blue

  stapler I bought at Staples.

  Did you know in ancient Rome

  priests called augurs studied

  the future by carefully watching

  whether birds were flying

  together or alone, making what

  honking or beeping noises

  in what directions? It was called

  the auspices. The air

  was thus a huge announcement.

  Today it’s completely

  transparent, a vase. Inside it

  flowers flower. Thus

  a little death scent. I have

  no master but always wonder,

  what is making my master sad?

  Maybe I do not know him.

  This morning I made extra coffee

  for the beloved and covered

  the cup with a saucer. Skeleton

  I thought, and stay

  very still, whatever it was

  will soon pass by and be gone.

  Aglow

  Hello everyone, hello you. Here we are under this sky.

  Where were you Tuesday? I was at the El Rancho Motel

  in Gallup. Someone in one of the nameless rooms

  was dying, slowly the ambulance came, just another step

  towards the end. An older couple asked me

  to capture them with a camera, gladly I rose and did

  and then back to my chair. I thought of Paul Celan,

  one of those poets everything happened to

  strangely as it happens to everyone. In German

  he wrote he rose three pain inches above the floor,

  I don’t understand but I understand. Did writing

  in German make him a little part of whoever

  set in motion the chain of people talking who pushed

  his parents under the blue grasses of the Ukraine?

  No. My name is Ukrainian and Ukranians killed everyone

  but six people with my name. Do you understand

  me now? It hurts to be part of the chain and feel rusty

  and also a tiny squeak now part of what makes

  everything go. People talk a lot, the more they do

  the less I remember in one of my rooms someone

  is always dying. It doesn’t spoil my time is what

  spoils my time. No one can know what they’ve missed,

  least of all my father who was building a beautiful boat

  from a catalogue and might still be. Sometimes I feel him

  pushing a little bit on my lower back with a palm

  made of ghost orchids and literal wind. Today

  I’m holding onto holding onto what Neko Case called

  that teenage feeling. She means one thing, I mean another,

  I mean to say that just like when I was thirteen

  it has been a hidden pleasure but mostly an awful pain

  talking to you with a voice that pretends to be shy

  and actually is, always in search of the question

  that might make you ask me one in return.

  Schwinn

  I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,

  and I’d like to quit the committee

  for naming tornadoes. Do you remember

  how easy and sad it was to be young

  and defined by our bicycles? My first

  was yellow, and though it was no Black

  Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity

  I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,

  chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods

  with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear

  family in a television show totally unaffected

  by a distant war. Then we returned

  to the green living room to watch the No Names

  hold our Over the Hill Gang under

  the monotinted chromatic defeated Super

  Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly

  caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building

  on K Street NW where a few minor law firms

  mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers

  and Meat Cutters. A black hand

  already visits my father in sleep, moving

  up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will

  never know a single thing anyone feels,

  just how they say it, which is why I am standing

  here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,

  doing what I’m supposed to do.

  Automated Regret Machine

  My friend and I were watching television

  and laughing. Then we saw

  white letters begin to crawl along

  the bottom of the screen.

  People were floating on doors and holding

  large pieces of cardboard

  with telephone numbers sc
rawled

  in black fear up to the helicopters.

  The storm had very suddenly

  come and now it was gone.

  I saw one aluminum rooftop flash

  in sunlight, it would have burned

  the feet of anyone trying to wait there.

  My friend by then had managed

  to will her face into that familiar living

  detachment mask. I thought

  of the very large yellow house

  of the second half of my childhood, how through

  my bedroom window I could reach my hand

  out and upward and touch

  the branch of an elm. At night

  in the summer I heard the rasp

  of a few errant cicadas whose timing

  devices had for them tragically drifted.

  And the hoarse glassy call

  of the black American crow.

  Though I am at least halfway through

  my life, part of my spirit

  still lives there, thinking very soon

  I will go down to the room where my father

  carefully places his fingers on the strings of the guitar

  he bought a few years before I was born.

  Picking his head up he smiles

  and motions vaguely with his hand, communicating

  many contradictory things.

  Poem (for Grace Paley)

  People say they don’t understand poetry.

  Meaning how must we proceed. Be extremely

  tempered. Dream a careful dream. People

  say we’re living a quiet life, lost in a forest

  of pronouns, asleep for a thousand years.

  People said his wife passed through him

  an arrow made of smoke. People say whatever

  you do don’t hitch a ride on a sepulcher.

  People said it was the future then, and we

  liked falling into mirrors. People said

  we were never sorry we couldn’t travel both

  and be one traveler. People said what

  was it like. It was like an airport terminal

  without any televisions. Like waiting

  a long time for a door to arrive. In Outlaw

  Josey Wales Chief Dan George says that

  rock candy’s not for eating it’s for looking

  through. In 1981 an announcer said Ralph

  Sampson’s so tall he could reach out

  and touch Uranus. I was thirteen, Earth

  was a couch, without any irritable reaching

  after fact or reason I placed thousands of

  Sweet Tarts into my mouth. Five years

  later someone said they saw Diane P.

  kissing a girl in a car, and they punched

  the window on the passenger side

  in and I laughed, and it’s all been as

  people say downhill from there, meaning

  until this moment I have been coasting,

  but from this one forward Grace I vow

  I shall coast no more.

  Pocket

  I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely

  dangerous. Like knowing you once

  bought a headlamp in case the lights go out

  in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head

  and your hands will still be free. Or

  standing in a forest and staring at a picture

  in a plant book while eating scary looking wildflowers.

  Saying pocket makes me feel potentially

  but not yet busy. I am getting ready to have

  important thoughts. I am thinking about my pocket.

  Which has its own particular geology.

  Maybe you know what I mean. I mean

  I basically know what’s in there and can even

  list the items but also there are other bits

  and pieces made of stuff that might not

  even have a name. Only a scientist could figure

  it out. And why would a scientist do that?

  He or she should be curing brain diseases

  or making sure that asteroid doesn’t hit us.

  Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate

  is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I tried

  to think about it harder for a while. Then

  tried standing in an actual stance of mystery

  and not knowing towards the world.

  Which is my job. As is staring at the back yard

  and for one second believing I am actually

  rising away from myself. Which is maybe

  what I have in common right now with you.

  And now I am placing my hand on this

  very dusty table. And brushing away

  the dust. And now I am looking away

  and thinking for the last time about my pocket.

  But this time I am thinking about its darkness.

  Like the bottom of the sea. But without

  the blind fluorescent creatures floating

  in a circle around the black box which along

  with tremendous thunder and huge shards

  of metal from the airplane sank down and settled

  here where it rests, cheerfully beeping.

  After Reading Tu Fu, I Emerge from a Cloud of Falseness

  wearing a suit of light.

  It’s too easy to be

  strange. I glow

  reading a few pages

  of an ancient Chinese poet

  to calm me, but soon

  I am traveling down

  terrible roads

  like an insect chased

  by golden armies.

  Then I am tired in a little boat

  filling with smoke.

  Then in the seasonably

  cold morning I am

  once again missing my friends.

  Some have been sent

  to the capital to take

  their exams or work for a while

  or be slowly executed. I

  cannot help them, I am trying

  to build a straw hut

  beside the transparent river.

  The sky is a perfect

  black dome, with stars

  that look white but

  are actually slightly blue.

  I have two precious candles

  to last me a night

  that has suddenly come.

  I feel the lives of cities

  drift through me,

  I am a beautiful scroll

  on which the history

  of a dynasty has been written

  in a dead language

  not even one lonely scholar knows.

  I see sad crushed plastic

  everywhere and put

  some thoughts composed

  of words that do not

  belong together

  together and feel

  a little digital hope.

  The Prelude

  Oh this Diet Coke is really good,

  though come to think of it it tastes

  like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,

  or an acquaintance of chocolate

  speaking fondly of certain times

  it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,

  or nothing remembering a field

  in which it once ate the most wondrous

  sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese

  yet still wished for a piece of chocolate

  before the lone walk back through

  the corn then the darkening forest

  to the disappointing village and its super

  creepy bed and breakfast. With secret despair

  I returned to the city. Something

  seemed to be waiting for me.

  Maybe the “chosen guide” Wordsworth

  wrote he would even were it “nothing

  better than a wandering cloud”

  have followed which of course to me

  and everyone sounds amazing.

  All I foll
ow is my own desire,

  sometimes to feel, sometimes to be

  at least a little more than intermittently

  at ease with being loved. I am never

  at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk

  and look at the brightly colored

  houses filled with lives, not with night

  when I lie on my back and listen,

  not with the hallway, definitely

  not with baseball, definitely

  not with time. Poor Coleridge, son

  of a Vicar and a lake, he could not feel

  the energy. No present joy, no cheerful

  confidence, just love of friends and the wind

  taking his arrow away. Come to the edge

  the edge beckoned softly. Take

  this cup full of darkness and stay as long

  as you want and maybe a little longer.

  Burma

  In Burma right now people are screaming.

  Inside their monasteries the monks are sealed.

  “Blood and broken glass.”

  I feel I would drink a glass of poison,

  In order to help,

  But that’s probably a lie.

  Another perfect day filled with perfectly vertical light and crickets.

  I feel the presence of lithium.

  They are pumping it into our waters.

  I want to do important work.

  People not places are haunted.

  Who is in that chair?

  I want to stop pretending.

  I don’t feel like I’m pretending,