Preface

Where in this hospital is your prevention ward? I can see the doctors’ bar, the nurses’ casino, a vending machine filled with post-cards. Am I always writing home? My symptoms are chronic fear of being thrown through my windshield, the taste of copper and cadenza, a lazy eye when I drink too much or not enough. I am a student of my habits. The waiting room is filled to capacity; will you offer me a bed? In the elevator, waltzing with the janitor, he told me there is plenty of room if you’re willing to work. I can empty a bedpan if you’ll loosen my strait-jacket, I could serve you for dinner if you’d let me out of this room.

From (Opera)

The Brothers, Perdendo and Perdendosi

*

Our father was coal at the bottom

of the ocean. We named him In Rilievo,

his voice a brash horn. We slept in a room

with his pet snake, its heat lamp

our nightlight. Dear brother, can you remember

sharing the futon, a blanket, the occasional sob

from the prey in its tank, how the reptile

crushed and consumed? It all seemed so ordinary then.

An orchestra of small insanities held together with catgut.

*

He’s predicting lottery numbers again

and what’s worse, he won. Illegally

driving a new motorcycle past my apartment,

the stop sign an idle revving, unnecessary

and abandoned, he is what I expect we’re all

worried to become. Or some inherent fear

of mine that I attribute to everyone. Like illegible

signs in the distance of a foreign city

which exists only for me. I am sure

you have yours.

*

Dear Perdendosi, the garden

is full of garter snakes. Fields

of dahlias for acres and acres.

Each sunrise is a forest-fire,

our backyard a miniature sun.

Dear rational-hemisphere, every day

cars pile up on the nearby highway:

their drivers tossed like iron nickels.

I am the fountain, you are the wish.

Dear brother, I think I’ve gone blind.

*

“Where is my carousel, where is my pyre?

Where are the children, where is the choir?”

He uprooted his molars, his mouth a tattered cape,

a redundancy, irreparable and void, his voice

trembling vibrato, a howl an empty, how silent

the song can be sung, its lack of music somehow

louder because of it. “There is a whimper,

there is a funeral, there are the six

pallbearers dressed up.”

*

I was a child with an insect on my palm.

The sun on the canal, a crushing gesture

of water and light. In Rilievo

dressed like a wolf. Wind-struck

and hungry, the hair behind his ears

so much like mine. I am trying

to capture sap with thimbles.