The Book of Goodbyes Page 2
that one time
you got drunk
and fucked around
with some of his friends
and he cracked 6 beers
and felt old and drove
to the cemetery
and pissed on yr father’s grave
here he comes round
the corner—
Are you writing about her?
I hope you’re not
writing about her
If we went shopping
I mean today dammit
you could ask why
I’m sleeping with him
then push me
into the hangers
I’m not supposed
to try you on anymore
The dead walk into poems
all the time
Nobody complains
INTERMISSION
TINY AND COURAGEOUS FINCHES
Iguazú Falls, the Argentine side, a cave,
behind the water, two tiny and courageous
finches, Bitto and Marcel, spend the day
flying in and flying out.
Bitto is most proud, daily caw, paid
vacation and space to think aloud.
He likes knowing where everyone is
and that where they are, he is far from.
He keeps his finch friends, outside,
keeps a wife, Lydia, who works domestics.
Marcel comes to the job stoically,
not as proud as Bitto, with not
as many friends. He is big, rigid,
balks at the thought of changing
for anyone, an ounce. He likes to read
the classics, Hesiod, with rules,
everything no nonsense, such as—
“Take precautions, do not dawdle,
have some brains, be honest.”
Why were they, from all finches, picked?
Bitto thinks it due to he was a great
rambler once and rambled to Uruguay
and rambled on back. Marcel thinks
it due to he was exiled, he was a great
pain in the ass once, and in front
of the Minister, called Kate a flaccid,
incompetent whore and told her
to get lost in the Arbolis.
This was his way of saying: I love you
little bitch finch. Why must you prune
the tails of others? Bitto and Marcel
live well together. They work out
the kinks, where to poo and how much
privacy to give. Bitto has even grown
a little fond of Marcel, the older,
the literate, the one who says less.
In this Bitto sees the finch he would
like to be. For now Bitto delights the people
who visit the Falls, flies in singing
weeeee flies out singing wooooo.
Bitto tried to explain to Lydia
the water, wide blue, the pressure,
the pinch, the wee-woo of it,
the climax, he called it,
which ticked her off and meant
many nights of scavenging
extra tacky shit to nest her with,
a gold thread, a baby’s bib.
In return, she lays a good egg.
She lets him do what he wants.
She listens to his day. “Today,
a family of four, Denmark.
The lady took pictures, the man
thought of sneaking away,
the daughter of ice cream, the son
of pillaging, something or other.”
Marcel, in a rare breach of silence,
said, “You know why all those photos?”
“The Falls are pretty this time of year?”
“She thinks if she takes enough
and if everyone is smiling and if
she places them on her mantel—”
“What is a mantel?”
“She will not be alone in the world.”
Bitto said he liked the idea of a mantel.
Bitto told Lydia he liked the idea
of a mantel, would build her a mantel,
when they grow old in the Arbolis.
Marcel flies the Falls, his left wing
aching, will there be no stop?
He cheeps for the children,
holds his poo and acts happy.
He sees that Bitto is happy
and it irks him because
to be happy requires it seems
some lying and good timing.
So Marcel cracks a seed and works
on his index of every time
a finch appears in print.
He dreams of someday turning
the index into an anthology, which all
finches will read with interest,
thereby validating his work and they
will present him on the mountain,
during the yearly festivities, where
all finches gather. This gathering
arouses in Marcel a sense of place
in the world, an ambition to congregate
with other finches, as long as they
know him by nametag only.
Once Marcel allowed himself
to be known, with Kate, on the mountain.
She asked the basic questions—
How many finches do you flock with?
Do you want to sit on my eggs?
Where do you see yourself in three days?
In the cave, Marcel thinks of Kate,
how she looked perched on the crag
that first afternoon. She liked to read
the surrealists. Her chirping
did not aggrieve him as other chirps did.
While Marcel saw himself as a loner,
a misanthrope, Kate was a weirdo too.
Giving things up, Marcel thought.
He might give things up for Kate.
Bitto did not make such sacrifices.
He kept Lydia in thick leaves.
Bitto believed in what he called
“the spirit of the moment”
which is why Bitto enjoyed
his job genuinely. Except when
the ladies of Brazil entered the cave
like this one, carrying a baby,
dropping it into the Falls.
Next an older man, with cane,
who came almost everyday, his wife
had disappeared. Next a couple
from Australia, where ten years
into a marriage, a stall, an impasse.
The cave was quiet for a while.
Bitto thought about Lydia
and building a mantel.
Bitto continued flying in
and out of the Falls, for no one,
for himself, for the spirit.
Sometimes they talked about God
and did he exist. Bitto said yes,
obviously, faith and feelings.
Marcel said no, obviously, science
and reason. Marcel said,
“I am a spiritual person.”
“What is that?” Bitto asked.
“Decency.” / “But wait!
Spiritual means a spirit. Do you
have one?” / “Do I think
there’s a spirit of Marcel? No.”
“Then you’re not spiritual.”
Marcel let the conversation drop.
His wings hurt from flapping.
He could not be bothered with Bitto’s
spirituality, skinny little Bitto.
The closest Marcel came to religion
was when he had to humor Hesiod
who believed in theogony.
Around this time, Kate visited.
“I’m here to deliver a message
from the Minister of Finches,”
Kate said, looking awfully
subdued in her new plumes.
Marcel believed she was not
only there for that reason.
He spent each d
ay sorting
through reasons people came
to the Falls and there was never
only one reason for coming,
there were five or six reasons,
stacked on top of each other,
overlapping each other, contradicting
each other, such that humanity
was a big den of squawk.
Marcel knew Kate must have
asked for the assignment and that
to ask for something was to want it.
“Is there anything you want from me?”
Marcel began, “Is there anything
at all I can give you? I spend
my days flying in and out of the Falls,
which is a testament to my strength,
and though I am not spiritual, I like
the surrealists, and I’ve tried
to write you to describe my nostalgia
for our time on the mountain but I can’t
get it right since I don’t think
it is nostalgia. That implies something
of the past, lost forever, and a sadness,
a gravity I don’t think worthy of us.
Bitto wants a mantel to fill up
with lies and Bitto doesn’t mind
because he lives in the spirit
of the moment, but I want more,
like some guidelines, and to write
the Great Index of Finches, so we
can be happy, and I just said we,
which is what I mean, you and me,
so if you’ve come here as courier
from the Minister of Finches,
and nothing more, then you can go now,
but if you’ve come for other reasons,
stacked reason upon reason, and if
even one of those reasons
tangentially relates to me, Marcel,
then please, speak.”
GO ON HIGH SHIP
The Falls were quiet with Bitto gone
to raise feathers and Kate invisible
on Skype and lone Marcel in the cave.
“I’d rather be a zero than a one,”
Marcel thought, looking up from Euclid’s
Optics. The sun set on the lagoon
as the tourists ambled through the park.
Marcel was thinking of the rescue
of a girl from a nearby jungle and how,
to be fetched out of something,
you had to be in something and Marcel
wasn’t in anything other than a book.
His screen didn’t ring, his job paid in seeds,
he had no credit, no authority. He missed
Kate though he did not admit it, instead
he thought, “Why are ones so strange?
If I chirp once, why do I want, always,
another and am not content until I get it?”
Then he performed an experiment.
CHIRP, sang Marcel and tried to let be,
go on with reading. He couldn’t
and before he knew it, CHIRP, CHIRP.
He felt better and looked to Bitto’s empty
bed of leaves stolen from trees and wondered
what sort of feathers Bitto was raising.
“He is a liar and a thief,” Marcel thought
and knew he was right to think so,
but even lies add up to something.
The Goldfinch sauntered in, half past
six, with briefcase and insurance.
He always talked what-if-something-
happened instead of what-did-happen.
Goldie had these ideas, these grand ideas,
such as “You are only pleased when eating
ice cream,” and “In Key West,” and etc.
Marcel wished Bitto was there.
Bitto liked to take Goldie’s words
and muck them so that Goldie’s words
on nothingness became in Bitto’s beak—
“Nothing that jizz and nothing that jizzm.”
Today, all business. “We should insure
your left wing,” Goldie said. “What if
it gives out permanently?” Marcel flapped
the wing to show it worked.
Goldie opened his briefcase, pulled papers
from it and set them on the dirt. “What if
a giant sloth lumbered in and wanted
the cave for himself and used the pages
from your books for toilet paper
and ate you?” “If I’m eaten, what do I
need insurance for?” Marcel said.
After all he was not in anything,
not in trouble, not in a bind, not in
a socioeconomic climate of anxiety,
he was just a finch. “Besides,” he said.
“I have never seen a sloth. I’m not sure
sloth exist and suppose they do, what
would an animal of gargantuan size
want with a cave of this size?”
“You never know,” Goldie said,
wetting a talon with his tongue.
It was getting late. Marcel wanted
to return to reading Euclid. He knew
what was next: the Grand Ideas
Monologue that Goldie gave and when
he delivered it, he liked his listener
to interrupt him and say, “Go on, high ship.”
Goldie began: “I got married, I lived
a long life with a wife who stopped
reading my poems when I was forty as if
I died and my poems with me.”
Go on, high ship. “So I traveled
south the country, all became hysterical
to me, ki-ki-ri-ki, no rou-cou, no rou-cou-cou.
I was losing my mind, and in losing it,
I realized I had nothing and nothing had me.”
Go on, high ship. “I told my biddy,
I don’t love you. If I said I loved you
I meant the nothing that is.”
Go on, high ship. “I’m in love with
plough-boys and old women in wigs
and bowls and broomsticks and paltry
nudes and dwarfs.” Go on, high ship.
“I’m in love with Florida and Havana
and the Carolinas and Hartford,
but mainly Florida.” Goldie wet his talons
and bowed his head. Marcel thought
his was an old story and he an old finch.
Since he was so unhappy, Marcel figured
he should do something, become
the what-did finch. But you can’t tell
finches what to become.
Later Marcel had difficulty falling asleep.
I will not think dirty things. I will keep
the brain sharp for Euclid, honest for Hesiod.
The cave was cold. Marcel saw the folds
of Kate’s plumes near her breast and while
it wasn’t dirty, it wasn’t clean either,
what he was thinking, and Marcel said, No.
That is all that was, that is what-did.
That is done. He turned his thoughts to
Goldie, poor Goldie, wetting his talons.
The moon shone on the lagoon like
a giant sloth. Marcel fluttered close
to the wall of the cave and fell asleep afraid
and began to have his what-if dreams,
of Kate, of high ships, of twos and threes,
like all what-did finches do.
MARCEL ADDRESSES KATE (AS HE WOULD IF HE COULD)
When the call came for me to join Bitto
behind the damn Falls, did I not challenge
the appointment, did I not appeal to
the High Courts and wait in the dark offices
of tree holes and check the box to describe
myself as too birdbrained? Did I not
beg to stay in the Arbolis with you?
Yet you have not returned to me.
Hesiod into your ear when all you
wanted to do was sleep and sometimes
all you wanted to do was pluck me
and that was, will always be, fine by me.
If I quote the Greats too much, know it’s
because I’m afraid of you, yep, yep,
how you puff up your feathers, you know
how you do. I’m talking out loud again
to the can of Brahma, Sage of Seven
Ages, Father of Creation: No, I won’t
shut up. I’m talking to Kate.
Also when you entreated me
to buy a machine, a machine to show us
what we look like when we’re looking at
a machine, I suffered the wages,
the setup and download to find you,
wearing all your feathers, cheeping
with 36 other finches, none of whom
concern what I have to say here:
I am the original plagiarist.
Yet you have not returned to me.
Daily I withhold from one million
strangers, though they be willing.
I withhold the ability of my
cyber gender and this is a stupid
point I agree. No one wins for withholding.
What else can I say? I’m winging this.
At least when we were speaking in our
deplorable way that was something,
that was some smutcaw we had,
and seduced me you did in manners