This is a good page.
It is blank,
And getting blanker.
—Larry Levis
Class, let’s celebrate the loss
of another calendar,
crumpled like a dismal essay draft
in a trashcan that is itself
crumpled and dismal. Happy New Year.
Hallelujah, I resolve to stop speaking
in metaphors: everything I say
shall be journalistic and literal,
and I shall report all events exactly
as they happen. Example: The stars
are a many-necked necklace.
Crap, I’m a failure.
The sky over Atlanta is almost pointless,
literally: three, maybe four stars,
the stubborn ones, dying
to stir any of you into what
my old mentor calls a long stare. If only
you could be dwarfed yet heartened
by the night sky over Valentine,
Nebraska—miles and miles
from any star-dissolving metropolis,
and from whence is visible
the entire cosmos, the Milky Way
swaying like a hammock over the Great Plains.
Class, in Valentine the cosmos sings.
If only you could listen to each holy eon.
And while you’re looking up
eon, let me tell you a bedtime story.
Not so long ago, in this very galaxy,
I heard one of your peers debating whether
or not to take Astronomy next semester.
He thought he would “look at clouds and shit.”
The End. The abyss
will swallow him and not even bother to spit
out his skeleton if he fails to discover the Grand
Canyon of himself—the Self
sedimentary, microscopic in the belly
of each erosive eon. Yes, Class, more eons.
Eon eon eon eon eon. Such is long staring.
Some say we are the universe
dreaming. But Cloud Boy must be
giving it nightmares. Because what else
could terrify a universe?
The Big Crunch? Falling? Being chased
by a bully universe? Imagining names
for every thing—some Adam
armed with ambition and a label gun?
Or maybe just Cloud Boy
seduced by the city’s reflective glare, raped
by the clamor of pop culture, O child
of star-dissolving technology, O non-starer.
As always, Class, you’re bored.
All right, then sing “Auld Lang Syne” with me.
The song reminds me of Scotland,
though I’ve never been to Scotland,
reminds me of my grandmother sailing
the gulf of her final years.
Sing it, god-dammit.
Extra credit for crooning.
Extra credit for knowing what crooning is,
my darling hip-hop dawgs and gangsters,
my dear bitches and hos, my precious
groupies of the insipid pop star, my sweet
little Emo babies lapping the whiny amnion
of MTV. I remember when it was born, that pop-
cultural Big Bang.
This was years before you were even a puff
of hope inside Mama’s brain, a speck
of amino acid in Daddy’s spine….
Hallelujah cubed, multiplied by amen.
That should have been your midterm.
My esteemed bizzles, if I had a dime
for every time popular culture acted
sensibly, I’d have a nickel.
Joel, your eyeballs are nickels: dull,
worthless. Melanie, your skull
is a cradle of ill-chosen words—
O flambiguous Melanie, O jankless jankey.
Robin, while the planet’s tectonic
plates are held together by your bubble gum,
they nevertheless grind toward catastrophe.
Sandeep, even your cells drool,
bored with the tiresome lecture
of your body….
Class, I’m tired. I’ve just arrived
from Luquillo—jewel of the Atlantic.
My DNA is still looped into hammocks,
stares off across tropical cytoplasm,
lagoons of primeval goo,
mitochondrial reefs, a dense nucleus
of sea-reflected stars….
Learn this well: my DNA shall not be
juggled with—it is, after all, an acid.
Ralph, I’ve dipped your prose
in acid: may your syntax improve,
may your adverbs bubble and dissolve.
Wendy, may you wander in late
to your own burial,
and may your closed casket gasp
open before swallowing you, Wendy.
Alex, Alex, Alex—plagiarist
of a memoir, may you discover the remote
little island of your own history,
O conquistador of Failure, O Captain Sloth….
Class, I envy your infinite room
for change: 18 years old—what will happen?
At 18, I was your ancestor: same thumping
leg, same uninventive sarcasm
(my poor mother), same lack of verve,
same blind worship
of over-rated troubadours.
But at 32, the song remains the same:
yawning mailbox, mugs of ale, smashed
alarm clocks. Smashed alarm clocks
litter my apartment: wherever I walk,
I kick through their broken skeletons….
Can a person change at 32?
Can he get new molars, a new spine,
a new soul? I don’t know
what a soul is. My father would be damned
to let his boys grow up
in a haunted house, cowering
in the cobwebbed attic of Religion.
Is the soul a haunted house?
Does it have paws, jaws, retractable claws?
Is it a machine, a black hole,
a hailstone? Does it glisten like pollen?
Is the soul a honeycomb?
A sailboat? A willow? A ribbon
of neurons? Class, there’s your god-
damned final exam. You’ll earn one
of two grades: an A for showing
a proton of self, or an F for throwing
a wrench into the cosmic loom.
Nancy, don’t worry—you’ve missed nothing
but the point. Emily, I lied—nobody cares
about the cuteness index of your fucking
puppy. Rebecca, may your trite suburb
be flattened by a cyclone
of cliché, and may you dangle
à la participle from the village gallows.
Stephanie, I wish you would drop
me a line next spring—you, the only one
for whom my little bells toll.
Antonio, may the hip nightclub you deem
a temple be evacuated during a scourge
of nauseating semi-colons. And Farley,
did you dream of a swarm of F’s—thrumming
mosquitoes envying your luminous inaction?
Class, I’ve tried to teach you
that you cannot toss envy into a corner
trashcan, that you cannot crumple
infinity like a hundredth essay draft.
More abstractions: absence, apathy,
arrogance—all lined up alphabetically,
the dictionary of your lives….
Alas, I cannot teach you how to learn
who you are, how to be perceptive.
Example: I’m certain
that not one of you has been paying
attention: do you really think
I’m writing to you from a vast continent
of ice and stone, a place where the stars hang
from their cosmic hooks, and sway?
Ah, but I may as well be: the horizon
circles me, white and empty, a new page,
gloriously, gloriously blank.