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"Being Pharaoh"
My grandmother turned into an old man,
deaf, with a hairy chin. It is August,
the damp painting of nights—I am
gradually building my own underworld
not just with prospective grief but
wires to hold up the asphodels.
Into it, a whole migration of shapes
skinned by light, pears gone
flat, and cars, and shadow like a floored heart.
They're the file of a river
and the Greeks had a river, the Romans.
The Egyptians who civilized the dead.
Tonight I am sic of every man
and his past. And the past is tired of his
request that it love him. I am trying
to make my bed. I am trying to keep
an angel from cracking my hip. The moon's
sleeve is flipped back in a drawer . . .
Thrush, you little singing spade—
I'm an unforgivably domestic mourner
and I might sleep through someone's
late supper, or hunger, just think how
oblivious he will be. While I am in
the dark rustling my own inventory:
Each time we fall out of love we
say it wasn't really love at all as if,
landing, a plane would say no, not
actual sky. While I am in the dark
getting fit for an afterlife. Admit
we never know the difference, like the woman
who stands up in the cinema and becomes
the black keyhole we peer into. I am
trying to keep her head down. So long
even her mother and mother's mother
turn blue. I am trying to keep
the ancestors out of the bedroom
so I can conceive a new face and new
arms, the feather trees across
the river, the curious shore dog.
Keep the distance simple like the top
deck of the parking garage from which
we can see the hospital. The present
may bond to any molecule, future
or past: My parents were kissing
while someone dragged the body past
the doorway, bag zipped to the chin
on the gurney, the head wound in white gauzes.
My father hadn't taken off his mask, still
hissing oxygen, and Mother was bent.
Of all things I've seen it was
old love that kept them from seeing.
Beautiful discretion, what moment will you
save from me? This should have been
a dream, something to wake from
but I never do. I am trying.
I will be pharaoh yet—
sealed with tiny boats and slavish
figurines. I am sick of every face
floating a sex by itself. Take in
this lampshade and these
curtains. Objects are memory.
As a child I pictured the soul as a glass
wing, fluted, gelatinous, detached
as my voice under water. I made it up
a body—a paperweight—no snow
in the water, no water under the earth,
no music ever again in my hair, after
my hair. The dead will point to it,
What was the name for this, point to my hand,
What was the name for this? One life
has been mine so long, streets
and bicycles, monuments
descend in it. In the bedroom a shirt
has fallen on shoes. Keep me
from seeing: Moon wanting into the dark
like the torn from—
the photograph—
it is August. One woman is so long
longing does not come out of her.
But this time I have loved you
so long I become
the boy you were. I must still
be alive, for everything is changing and
incomplete. Half a tree, half
drives its shadowy web near the shutters.
August has just turned September. The ancestors
want 4,000-year-old grain, hard as quartz,
in grain jars. All I have are cigarettes
What a night this is. What a night.
I'll like down and my pillow will thrum
like a machine. I'll go barefoot
to the window, see if any light is
still on in any house. Who else
is afraid of missing something. Who else
knows one thing God can't enter
is my memory: I, a minor
twentieth century poet, the first
of September, 4 a.m., finish one thing.
—Beckian Fritz Goldberg
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