feint, then give up on Greigii, so perfectly black-backed he flares green and bronze. Maybe tomorrow or the day after Dreamboat will be snatched by a leopard seal, but today he stands on Alta Vista, ecstatic and tall, muddy footprints running like tan valentines up and down her back. We all want to be Dutch Triumphs. A row of clean, dark brown dirt waits behind the shorefast second-year ice. Clouds curl and lift. The sun on the upraised beak of Dreamboat makes it look like he is reaching for the sky one final time, and this time, if Alta will stay just a little bit more still, he is sure he will make it.
Things the Doctor Asks
That is an interesting scar,
were you an especially clumsy child?
Count backwards from one hundred
in multiples of pi. Hold out both hands.
If you die, may we cremate you?
Why does my stethoscope transmit
a dim hum like a hive of bees?
Now get dressed. You mean
you are not dressed yet even
after all this time? Shut up
and stop counting. Open the door.
You will need Diamox, for the Pole.
You will need to shave those parts.
Do you know that you walk around
like a hut with legs?
Girl, Trees, Paper Balloons
1783: How quiet and still the people on the ground
seemed, said the first people to rise
in balloons. Quiet as milk. Somewhere the son
of the son of the son of the man who was the last person to let go
of the line so the first balloon could be free of us
is lighting a cigarette. Heaven is a movie—
even the audience smokes Lucky Strikes.
They have a box there for my memories and in case I burn up
in the light like a faulty meteor I have given them two or three things
to keep such as my mother’s saddle oxfords and the one about
the man described in the newspaper who was dead for three days
in the ocean but woke up, alive, and the one about when the snow in moonlight was whiter than washing machines behind the dump,
and the one playing now, the one
with woodwinds rising as maples seedpod
the tattoos on the slim shoulders of the girl
kissing me like my mouth is a parachute
just about to open.
Last Year’s Checklist
Where are the goggles that protect against magic?
Am I married? Do I have children?
They ask but I do not remember. Yes—
no. Sure. I am practicing how to spit penguins
out of my head like black seeds. Grappa
blurs the Chileans, not later at McMurdo
but before, Rey Jorge, where church is Mexican
blue shipping containers, three pews
and a plugged-in Mary.
Are you my mother
I want to ask the Russian soup
ladle woman with the gold front tooth.
Can you explain it? Oswaldo, laughing,
va va va-vooms his jacket off for her
and pushes his fingers through the cigarette
burns in the chest of his long johns.
He is a mountaineer and paints maps
so he must know why two burned-out Soviet
tanks mirror rust in the puddles of the airfield
but he jumps lenses and escapes just as the patriotic
tuba music of the Motherland fills the dining room
and my heart turns into a bundle
of sparrows and my hands push past
zippers trying to reach in and tuck them
all back into their red folds,
telling them just wait, people are watching,
we will fly around the room later.
I Take Good Notes, Getting Ready to Fly South
An airship or dirigible is a type of aerostat. An aerostat is a type of lighter-than-air aircraft. An aircraft is a kind of bowtie worn by the sky to piss off lakes and swamps, dirt, center-pivot-irrigation, forest fires. Aerostatic aircraft stay aloft by heating gas slowly, over a burner, then using a tube to blow it into shapes, a swan, even a unicorn, what girls like before they like the flammability of boys. The history of flight mostly has to do with blood and ice. No, the history of flight in Antarctica can’t be told just now, it is mostly too sad for this time of night, but for example there were once two pilots, I met them in a bar in McMurdo,
and the first one was telling the second one, shit, I had to turn back. The other one said, well what for. First one, well my hair was on fire. Second one said, I hate when that happens.
Scale Model
Maybe just marine-grade plywood with tar balls
and kerosene: if bursts of fire come in matchboxes,
what kind of holder does Antarctica come in?
Draw this abyss,
art school: make me
a mold of France—all of France—then cast it in white resin.
Set it beside a 1-to-1 replica of Greenland.
Only two hundred more pieces of the basement
railroad
