The Drowned World
BY PATRICK S. ROGERS
I wake before dawn
trying to remember
that one about the priest,
the rabbi, the polar bear
on an airplane—
grinding coffee I lose the thread,
How’s it go again? then it’s bird noise
outside—chirping and chittering
—congress at the cypress—try to
crank the window open,
gear won’t mesh, then I remember,
there is only one parachute—
what do polar bears know
about parachutes——what I know
about polar bears, but to make it work
what do I need to know—loose—
the set screw in the hand crank
—to work, does one thing need
rely on another—dig the corner of
Modern garbage disposal units are the best. My folks always had one. Whenever I went without, I felt like my food wasn’t chewed properly, like the nutrients couldn't spread out. In the seventies you felt disposal in your bones; those units made the ground shake. These new ones I wouldn’t know was on; little sound, just a swish, I might even forget and walk away, except I had just toggled the switch. Imagine if I said things like lackadaisical or other unwieldy shit. In the nineteen seventies my mom used to make this thing called skillet supper. It was noodles, some kind of canned tomato product. Now, as I think of which product I have to apologize, the television jingle, inside my head, sounds like a malfunctioning machine, a decentered rotor or a sprocket on a spindle winding up. I’m sorry, but once it starts I can’t turn it off.
chipped fingernail into
the tiny groove and turn
—the nail tears off
and it’s going R rated now
—whiteness in the cabin
goes all red in a banquet
of sacred organ meats—
the screw twists into place—
maybe they weren’t men
of god at all—the gear meshes,
I crank the window open
to the bright and brittle
—or maybe the sacrificial
structure and their degrees
of difference is what makes them
sacred—chittering and chirping—
birds fill the tree till it bends
—flit to the yard-wide fig—
will birds miss it
All the leftovers saved. Leftovers for lunch, leftovers for the road, in Tupperware, congealed masses; food pressed for ready consumption. Sound familiar? Sounds practically like something else, like hardening. Food congealing, forgotten? Three months in the back of the fridge—green fuzz—poked with a fork dust shoots out; great fun for scaring your sister.
when the fig is razed
for condos—maybe the two argue
about the parachute—
now the birds blanket
the dew damp lawn—burst back
into the cypress—black cat slunks over
fence—then silence————I think
I lose it altogether—birds or cat
don’t need know what I know
and—I think about eating
unpaid parking tickets→slow
internet speed→sleeping family
—SHIT, drop the sugar bowl—
a mostly sleeping family
—polar bears→forever swimming
—cat creeps toward the cypress—maybe
birds get away—maybe the cat eats—
maybe the window works
if
I don’t have a sister. Does that sound irreverent? I want a new whisper quiet garbage disposal so as I can run the thing at night without waking the kids, and who doesn’t want that? Who doesn’t wanna grind discarded food waste into a slurry paste to send out to all the little fishys? But rather hear all this prattle as an annoying buzz or hum, might keep us awake, like the fridge at night or… My mother would find one of those cubes of food, before dawn, dump it out into the sink in one solid thunking mass, right over the hole, over that black maw and mash it down with a fork. Before she would flip the switch she would turn on the faucet and let water fill the sink.
Just this morning, before I dug into the fridge looking for leftovers, just this morning, while taking out the trash—did I say morning? I meant middle of the night, some unseen buzzing, did I say I took out the trash? I meant to take out the trash, at least I think I did, meant to take it out—I mean, or maybe when I did, I mean take out the garbage, outside looking for something to do like take out the garbage, it was then I found a mylar star filled with helium tethered with pink ribbon to my address sign. I would call it a balloon, but somehow, here, that doesn’t sound right.
I get the polar bear thing right—
please let me get this thing
—I wonder, as cat slithers
the lawn, besides bird meat,
to what do cat aspire—
and then, it don’t care about my lawn
allusion to landed gentry
—birds don’t know
they are colonizers—
cat definitely don’t know
what color it is—
My pops used to say
there’s a joke in every sandwich
What are the arrangements
of egg snacks, beside the road
to hell? Everything plunging,
now runny with organization
They always forget
eating is violent. In the eyes of
Does the sound—balloon change it into some round oblong thing? When it was shaped like a star, like a cartoon star, or like it wanted to be. It sagged though floated just above the ground and when I cut the ribbon it felt lighter. Imagine a balloon filled with helium freed from its tether and I know that sounds heavy handed, dramatic, I may have even said out loud before I thought it—Animistic Fallacy—but that was how I honestly felt it—Hey little guy, now you’re lighter.
Imagine what you can do now without all that added weight? I wanted to let it go and watch it float up into the foggy sky, watch until it disappeared. I let it go but something pulled it into the upper branches of a tree, a maple I think. I stood looking up into the tree, expecting something to happen, maybe the breeze would shift how it was caught, but nothing happened or it was like nothing happened. Leaves obscured my sight of it and when I moved directly under where I thought it had drifted, there was nothing there. I mean of course the tree was there and I was there looking up into it, but I couldn’t see the saggy beige Mylar star.
a sandwich
Even a ham sandwich
and its reflection of
Is still a sandwich
The real plot invisible
Page after page,
or bread, packaged, sliced
as in a loaf. Unstitched,
speaking for sand.
They say there’s a sandwich
in every beer, bubbles escape
the void, squeeze out
of the blue, out of its inside.
No sandwich ever chose
to be eaten, much less
to be a sandwich
Touch where it leads to war
The structure of a sandwich
is not a joke.
I know what you’re thinking. I thought it too. Maybe I did leave the garbage disposal on, or I was cold, or I felt weird staring up into a tree, not to look at the tree but looking for something that wasn’t in it and maybe I imagined someone, a neighbor, or something darker still, someone else kept awake by a buzz or hum, looking out their window, looking at me, looking up into a spreading tree trunk like a spiral staircase
I’m not sure I can take credit for what I mean. I mean why’s nothing in this world the way I left it? Just yesterday, a note on my windshield, intentionally left blank. I mean I think I know what it wanted to say; when you drive your car at sixty now it will shimmy and shake. I mean I think the person who left it was a poet with their own car, leaving mine askew in the street. I mean, I don’t know what I mean, though a balloon, an enclosed tube attached to a hole, I mean I know I lost my wedding ring and I think I know where I left it, after pulling one off, I think I left it on the back of the toilet. I know what that means when my body fails me, say flipping
The argument begins
with my sweetie devouring
a plate of spaghetti
and meatballs
Not my or this sandwich
and though I have less
of a problem with my or her mouth
full of sandwich
Except for the violence part, I said
there is nothing funny about snacks
then I remember the one
about the guy at the Cadillac dealership—
and I think it is okay,
I think I got this one—the birds know
about the cat, but I wonder
if the cat knows they know—maybe all
want to hear this one—
the dinner table, and even though mashed potatoes fix ham to the plate, I rolled a rib last week, dragging a filled pallet across ribbed concrete. A pallet filled? The bones shift, the loose thing sliding. I think you don’t know what I mean. I think I might be mean to my body. They used to call it self-abuse. I mean it’s possible my body might think for itself; the way nature arranges itself according to what?
I now know why we shrink wrap a pallet. She used to say, men make the best vessels. I know when my body fails me that way of meaning, an alert to that corny metaphor of a shrink wrapped pallet. Did she mean men craft the best vessels or that men are the vessel? I know that my body means to say. I know that my body isn’t being mean to me. It is a clanging. The clang of a rib, this rib against the inside of my shoulder blade. I now know I need a reason to flip the dinner table. I know it is not enough to want.
I tell them—the cat looks up,
the birds quiet—
it goes a little something like this,
NO! In fact it goes
exactly like this—guy leans
on an El Dorado—
staring off→ into space—
dealer walks up
asking if he’s thinking about buying
a car—goddamn cat is
so close to the birds I wonder if
the birds are hypnotized—
won’t be able to get anything done
if I don’t get this
right—Okay, guy says,
Oh, I know
The body wants the body, not in part. A border or frame have a center, sides, but there are no sides to a void. It is not a pun if both mean to empty. Balloon reminds me of that time before dawn, while the tide was going out, I watched a piece of foam in the river, caught in an eddy between the dock and a splintered piling. I remember hoping to see the foam break apart, and while some chains of bubble sheared off, on each twist and twirl, the piece of foam kept stacking up upon itself. I watched the thing until I stopped seeing it. I watched the thing until I think I might have hypnotized myself. I remember it left with the tide.
I can’t keep still or sometimes I move without thinking, like tripping on a crack in the sidewalk, I like to imagine I might laugh as if surprised, though I bet I just as much mutter fuck then look around to see if anyone saw. I wonder if I don’t think fingers as I make a fist, or toes and feet as I trip. And yet I do without speaking, but how would I know? If they say such a thing as muscle memory, at which point does my body begin to improvise? I like to think it might begin in my toes. Like when I once came to in the middle of driving without knowing where I had got to. Where did I go while my body drove? Some unseen buzzing. What if I were to let it do what it wants to do? Where then would it go, what then would it do?
I’m buying a car—cat takes eyes off
the prize, glances
again at me and I imagine
it thinking—
I’m trying to work here
—I tell them, same here
and before I finish
telling the rest of the thing,
say—out the window
and I imagine
all that I say
catching wind to my neighbors
and beyond
I was just thinking
about a polar bear.
They say an octopus thinks as much with its limbs as it does with its brain, that it has some brain in its limbs. I suppose I would too if I had seven hands. But what is it with folks who seem to want to walk out into the middle(1), as if someone else. Maybe, as I think the wind blows, you feel it pull, as if someone else said the subject cannot transgress the frame, and maybe here that some one else, I fear, my mom actually walking into that traffic, who did or didn't make enough quick meals for leftovers, leftovers enough for each day of the week. Why, like a thousand Chinese mystics on the edge of a cliff; looks can be receiving. Why can’t I exert a might on my body, think what a body might mean to itself? Think it might say to slow, stop looking down, don’t look at the hands? Start seeing around? What the Chinese meant by slaughter the chicken to scare the monkey. Like seeing a person walking with two cups of coffee and knowing they are not lonely
The people seem to like it when I admit this body vulnerability, but I don’t think this is what they meant. By this I don’t mean self-abuse, though there is that too. Leaving my wedding ring on the back of a toilet. We were supposed to start in the light, but our ennui like the largesse of fall. I don’t want to look at pictures of what I am looking at right now, light wavering through white laundry or trying and catch the breeze as if through leafless trees. The note on the windshield intentionally left blank and my car left askew in the street. I stood looking up into the tree, expecting something to happen, maybe the breeze.
(1) of this poem, of traffic, of the road, of nowhere, of your conversation, of the night, of this dream
Patrick S. Rogers writes in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, two dogs, a cat.
