writes too many singsong rhymes.
Too many times we have been belated.
When he died, I started wearing Dad’s watch
until the strap broke and it got lost.
Idle hands operate on mundane memories:
How I could never hula-hoop. Afternoons walking
the track. A life-sized motorized Santa Claus
of which only its pelvis moved. Air Cadet weekends
tucked into a Windsor Park barrack three blocks
from where my father was conceived. Do the things
from which people protect you tend to be the very things
you need? Then, an interruption—impromptu college
lecture on criminal obstruction and the concept of mens rea.
The PowerPoint says: ceci n’est pas un “PowerPoint,”
but: For the mid-term exam, brainstorm a theory of life
as the hardest, drunk scavenger hunt that [never] ends
with the onion-skin myth of pearl-pure intent.
II.
Santa comes down the chimney and I vanish
up it in a cloud of self-smoke. He calls his alternate
troupe of elves who wear brown shirts
and keep stricter lists than their merry master.
I become the hot puff that beckons
the neighbour kid’s asthmatic lung from within.
Soon, coal will be the most prized gift
I steal a look into Santa’s sac of loot: an alp
of children’s shoes, one stuffed with cold foot,
a sit-in of dolls with eyes that don’t close,
a mint of necklaces that could dry-drown any digger,
grave- or gold-. Busy urban laundry room
on Christmas so we go for a swim on the third floor.
My friend pushes for the sauna. I say, Just a few
minutes more? For, I have always panicked in steam
rooms with those fuming showerheads and heart-
heavy doors the non-existent locks of which I am certain
will malfunction. My head is a mimetically sealed
chamber I’d shut down if only learning I’m Jewish(ish)
could have killed my catholic(ick) compunction.
A performance artist once sliced onions with strangers
until they could stop, be held and cry. Sentiment:
another airborne disease to pantomime
over salted-maple pecan pie and no-whip chai?
I stick sweetly to the words that sorrow whispers
into my thighs with perfect elocution: you may know
the problem. You are not not not the final solution.
III.
Just a list of clichés about my cheap selfhood
clattering like drunk Yahtzee or Boggle or Trouble
or another game that’s louder than les manifestations
casseroles. Dice fall out with no black dots.
Boggle’s cubes settle down but show only Qu,
X, W and other dead letters. In the mirror
I see professional photographers whose boon was 2002.
Getty Images must have hired them to retake
stock photos of Manhattan air; I double-dog dared
myself to snap a still pre-pill with morning hair—
to take a picture that aims to conceal what only used to be
there. The security guard says I am too fat to sit
on a painted pony that does not move. Another
mirror shows me the abandoned scaffolding
of the most recently failed Oak Island treasure hunt.
As I fall, may the skyline look like an architectural
kaleidoscope. May I not have to remember Mies
van der Rohe or bad trips. May I fall asleep
on the way down to make the euphemizing
of my eulogy and obituary easier. “He died peacefully
in his sleep, surrounded by the wet-grey concrete
modernism about which he felt ambivalent at best.”
May I dream in that cattiest of naps that we had all
risked more. That my Jewish dad might have reached
down to me, honked my schnoz and flipped
a kid script, taunting: You’ve got my nose.
Obituary
I would never write an obituary ahead of time.
It would be written badly, adjective- and adverb-
weighted to anchor you (or you) inkly to the ground.
Self-fulfilling prof, you see? (Apologies.)
My obit will not place paper dolls over wet wounds,
will
