Illness
4 Idiom of the Entrepreneur
5 Then After
6 Election Day
7 Two Surgeons
8 The Diner
9 Player Piano
10 When the Buskers Leave Town for Good
11 The Kind of Life I Always Wanted
12 The Door
1 Field Kabuki
2 The Game
3 The Very Very Important Benefactor
4 The Story as It Was Told to Me
5 The Portrait of What Is Not There
6 Habeas Corpus
7 Nobody
8 How I Came to Rule the World
9 As You Left It
Acknowledgments
ONE
WHEN I CANNOT SLEEP—DAY SIX—A LETTER
The wind is having its way with the house tonight,
with the windows.
It’s finally possible
to undress myself like a Corinthian. I remove
the crickets
from my pillow, place the clock
facedown, lay my brass collar stays
in a leather box.
It’s my turn to suffer.
The stovepipe gnaws through the room like an emperor
who’s lost his voice,
and you’re at it again,
burning laps in the ambulance
out on the frozen lake.
Everything seems
like something you’d say to me
in a small town
to keep me breathing like a little beast—
skein of brant breaking heavy, some cut-loose
kindling. Neither of us
has been perfect.
I carry my fistful of pebbles,
you still threaten to swallow them down
when I’m distracted, lost
in a squall of chrysanthemums
and the weird. Place the world
back in orbit—
I was mistaken. If you do not
come closer, we will not
need our umbrage.
It is not snow that covers us,
nor spooks, nor wind, just as
this isn’t a shadow
(say stranger), or the carrying off
of one animal in place of another.
TO BE A GOD
Starting now, I’ll do everything
as if I were a god.
I’ll walk from a dark room
as a god walks from a dark room.
I’ll speak to strangers
as a god speaks to strangers.
When it’s time to say something important
I’ll rise from my chair
as a god would
and speak in my
celestial certitudes.
There will be no more
lap-sitting,
no more stories
about my days
as a barback or a ferryman
or a farrier.
There will be fewer hours spent tuning
my piano
and patting my hunting dogs
or remembering
my youth. When I need you to hurt
I’ll put you to sleep as a god puts you to sleep,
I’ll play my discordant harp as a god plays a harp,
and the effects will be the same.
The noise of the bramble
never leaves me.
I bless the cedar. The months go by. I bless your saw.
When you need
me
