Michael Jauchen
And he reared up the court round about the tabernacle and the altar, and set up the hanging of the court gate. So Moses finished the work. Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. (Exodus 40:33-35)
We place
everything we know
into a box,
packing it so
tight, locking
it away,
labeling it
with a name
we will
recognize when we finally
get there. And
why not? History
supports us in
this.
The Israelites
did it.
The tabernacle.
That ark of the covenant.
All those
divine laws packed away into that mnemonic,
tiny Decalogue
(and am I wrong to covet
my neighbor for
being such an organized gett?).
And so we do it
too. We form boxes too.
Cf. all those
poems I’ve given to you.
Those serieses of
stringing
words hopefully
holding something
perfect and
worthwhile inside, those perfect in-
side rendered
serieses of Jack in the Heart words able to wind,
then spring,
then hopefully send
out warm
meaning showers when
the box opens
to
empty out among
us (but ‘specially among you).
But there’s a
well-known beware
lying somewhere
in there,
because those
great ceremonial openings are always a little too much,
remember? And
each box must
have its lid.
Moses’s did,
veiling his
face on that Sinai descent.
He knew the
released contents
of that box
(that particular one marked “God’s Parading
Backside”)
would enter those thirsty Israelite mouths, deteriorating
the muscles in
their chests, aging them, akin
to those
Germans when they in-
vaded that
relic later without divine authorization
in the
Spielberg dark of an excavation
chamber instead
of ceding it to the museum like a good
Indiana would.
And the same
goes
for the stories
of my own heart, those
kept tight
under the lock and key of scribbled etchings.
Raise the lid
off that darkness and hear the retchings
of grackles in
the heavy
Texas
mid-morning. It’s funny really. They’re such heavy
boxes, aligned
there on that
sole powerline
(a long box of
voices and light) leading to the mouth
of the box on the
pole stuck in the box named South
Dallas Dirt
(“Across that river is everything ‘Not
Dallas’”) which
lies in the box
named Texas, a
state
sitting on the
bottom of box States
United and the
earth is a box marked Land
and Sand
and Oceans and
Waves and even our
universe,
though it is expanding at each of our
outbreathings
(but really,
expansion
implies
edges, doesn’t
it? implies that the great sight
I fear when I
look up at night
on my
Grandmother’s Iowa farm is only a great
exaggeration),
is only an unfrightening light year x light year x light year crate.
But why is that
so? I mean it’s always the same.
It all goes in
a box with a locked lid and a name.
I think the
point is that whatever is
inside there
hurts more than hurt because
it’s both hurt
and laughter, see?
And in every
box, they’re in
there together.
And the two of
them in there at once is too much for us ever
to want to
remember. We can’t open those boxes because
inside them is
the vision of God’s great glory, true, but it is also his great anus,
far from us in
the distance and hurrying
away too fast.
And just the thought of one little lick of that sight sends us scurrying
back inside the
cleft to our toolbenches,
sanding wood
and screwing hinges,
assembly-lining
those boxes
complete with
quickly forgotten combinating locks.
You sent back
the diary I stitched for you
because you did
not want to
remember me
anymore, and,
like every
other Christmas
for the last
six years, to
avoid a silly argument
with my
parents, I went
to church. The
pastor there,
Pastor Randy he
wants me to call him, declares
the Devil lives
in overhead projectors on the fritz
and a mouse
running mid-prayer across the candlelit
sanctuary
floor, disturbing a somber silence. And as much as I try to grin
(and I do, it’s
a mouse, it’s so silly) I can only sit wondering again
if there really
can be
belief or love
without geometry or mathematics. I think I can see
those mousefeet
now,
making their
way, random and slow,
across that
vast sanctuary wilderness of sand, and
those prints
behind him remain as a record, a constellation, an ever expand-
ing relic. And
look! Hurry! Look close! I want to say
I can see them
spelling out the letters in your name.
for
Patrick McNamara and Tommy Two Times
L’Arrivéê
[d’un train en gare] was a visual tour de force, and audiences are said
to have stampeded at the sight of the locomotive barreling toward them from a
distant prospect into the foreground of the screen. (David A. Cook,
A History of Narrative Film)
Where are the
days of the lone harlequin juggling knives passed hand to
hand with a bookkeeper’s precision?
The cadenced
bend to unbend in his left knee (a retraction into the push
up of retrace) completes the aesthetic line
of the whirring
steel arc, knighting our jester with a counterpoint sharpness
of his own. Here’s an amazing thing:
on the museum’s
third floor the phenakistoscope slowed, and I think I
remember wondering if the, it was
only for a second,
knives might fall, the ceased whirring then spawning its own
second sequence, some new melodrama
involving a
severed thumb, his left foot run through by a falling blade, a rumbling
ambulance of some kind. Enter the mumbling
ringmaster
pissed-off at the compensations coming out of his pocket. The wheel
slowed, the fool’s knee straightened and
bent again a
last time. And
the knives rested mid-toss, any notion of their capacity
for brutal amputation remained only a
stored potential
energy per
square inch per square inch. The sign beside the display can explain
better than I can how animation works. I
read
it then but
I’ve semi-forgotten what it said. We’d smoked a lot of marijuana
that morning and I was convinced I was
losing my front tooth.
On the F train
home, we talked about taking a headshot of either you or me,
done right complete with the noir
of a glamorous
hollywood chiaroscuro, framing it, adding it to the empty slot
I saw in the floor to ceiling mosaic of
movie
stars lining
the entry hall on the second floor (the spot just to the left of Dana
Andrews), just to see how long it might
stay
there. You
thought it would be a week before anyone noticed. I thought
it would only take minutes, some woman,
some
valued East Side
donor, walking in, her quick double take, and then her boast to the
curator four minutes later:
“I knew all
along that one was missing something. I could tell all along
it was lacking that certain magic.”
Darlene and I (and I write with a tear gaining strength in the
corner of my right eye) were fated by a porcelain vase dropped and shattered on
the linoleum of a suburban Wal-Mart floor. The source of need for the vase in
the first place was this: On our seven-month anniversary I forgot to buy the
double decaf caramel mochachino which would commemorate our first meeting
(Darlene then saying, “It’s a double decaf caramel mochachino,” and I answering
back, “You need a linguistics degree just to order that,” and then finally her
laughing and taking my hand for the very first time). And I, on a day overcast,
had forgotten it all. I instead errantly set foot into the bookstore and was
introduced to Camus for the first time by pure accident. Returning home at
eight that evening, half-read copy of Myth of Sisyphus in hand, I saw
Darlene there, alone, dejected. She said, “I am going now.” It took about 45
minutes for her to put her things into garbage bags and throw them into the bed
of her pickup truck and drive away. And this is where the vase enters the
story. Darlene was an avid fan of smelling flowers in the afternoon and I
figured she would like something to hold them. So I perused the aisles of
Wal-Mart, which was the perfect place for finding things that I did not know
had specialty shops. And taking a vase down from the shelf, the time seemed too
short before it slipped from my hands and shattered in pieces on the floor. And
I could only stand there looking at those broken pieces, thinking, There is
something important in that breaking of the vase by me. I don’t know what, but
there is something important there.
A tel dig occurs in the hills of Israel to prove, once and for
all, where the city of Kiriath-Jearim really was. Spades spade, brushes brush,
and it’s all performed to the barked rhythm of our none too kindly dig
administrator. And through all these layers of dug clay come broken shards of
pottery that tell stories. And oh, how they talk. Not in the large
grandiloquence like they did for James Michener, but instead through the
smallest and delicate kissing whispers and sideways him-haws. This shard here
tells of a brother in love. That shard tells of a dowry delivered just in the
nick of time. This one here tells of a reconciliation and an eventual birth.
And, as he picks up a shard that is over 3,000 years old, that is when it all
hits our single, unshaven, archaeologist hero (now delicately wiping the dust
from his eye) in the body of his body. He thinks, There have been bodies
before me that were not thinking of me and there have been glances exchanged
over the flickering light of some generic oil lamp bought at a markdown where I
was neither buyer nor seller.
P.S. Darlene, if I could, I would freeze my tears for you and
make them into ice that would not melt. Or, if they did melt, I would wish that
the salt would remain forever on these broken vase pieces lying in front of me,
one day to be chanced upon by a single, unshaven apprentice archaeologist who
could see and recognize in them my own small and delicate (and completely
unmindful of the future) him-haw scrawls.
Poem Written After Writing a Long and Sloppy Free Verse Poem About Mourning
I need to write
a shorter poem
one that isn’t
overgrown
with young ideas
grown too long
and extra space
to wind out wrong.
(Besides it
almost always seems
the only songs
those long ones sing
are tears and
haunts and saddest gleanings
from all my
lonely, baddest dreamings.)
After a Drunk Reading of Pablo Neruda, I Walk Along the Beach and
Think of You
I would recite
“Buscar” for you but I’ve
forgotten the
first two lines. My drunken
words make tra
la las! I’ll find a trunk and
force them
inside! I will send them by night
in waves
coursing the ocean to islands
far away where
idle birds nest in silence;
where along the
sweat troughs of your ribcage,
my mouth, a
slow kettle exhaling fire-
salt and rain
and dumb laughing desire,
will spell an
actor’s fright. Somewhere offstage
to his gone
alchemy beats a clear vision.
Its sounds make
our hero cough his admission:
“Dithyramb,
loneliness, both held within her.
The motion in
sex swerves poems to splinters.”
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Last updated: October 1, 2003.