The Projector

Faith, if you had it, could go missing

Prayer, if you knew how to do it, was a kind of trick

It helped to think of something big, like a sky burning pink

The tree I fear will die or be cut down by the one who owns property

Property being bigger than myself, the ownership of it

People gather on the legal strip of grass between curb and road

I wanted not to feel so sick with dread, but I did feel it

An aluminum can of water cost almost $4

I had it, and I would have it, but didn’t know how

Children on skis, the way some people’s lives unbent

Blackberry bushes growing in the woods outside a second home

A kind of bitter, eager fury that bites down on my throat

Having attended, for even a moment, a private school

What it meant, to be insulated from the so-called public

Staring at a beautiful hand on the train, a child with glove in mouth

As if anything unified such a procession of human life

The fragment fails to uphold anything like rebellion

Face of a new baby, seasick feeling of time annihilating itself

Some having ascended a ladder I had never been able to see much yet climb

An invisible rose tracking its invisible scent

An invisible bird who eats as its meal invisible bread

A woman’s only film found on reels in the studio garbage

Having lost the plot, I had only the sense of time repeating in vast, ugly loops

Perhaps my great accomplishment would be having had ideas, unrealized

The gorgeous single paragraph I wrote, unable to be written any further

The invisible apartment in which I lived with my invisible rent

Having attempted to outrun an unhappy marriage and found myself in a clotted field

Milk, left to sour, to make something more profound

Salt, which permeates the air, drying out one’s pink mouth

What will the baby's life be, my cousin asks, and I can’t answer

Darkly, with a sweet, purple urgency, desiring to go inside

What a mother was, I guess, a kind of vast, pink shield

The other child named Stephanie on the bus after her mom died, unfathomable

As if, my cousin said, everyone was entitled to a child, in the so-called normal way

There were futurities and distances about which I found it impossible to speak

My cat, after the enema, leaks dark shit around the house

There is no dignity, at the end of one’s life, nor the beginning

The circle was complete, the woman said, walking into sunset

Film on the subject of pornography, offering a kind of treatise on the eye

I’m just interested in the projector, I said in a message

Like how it flamed out of me, a violent gaze

I understood, in the cold morning light, the kind of knot it made

Invisible lock around invisible throat

Invisible knife vibrating under invisible pillow

Soon, the man says, they’ll have torn down every good, old house in this city

Beautiful to watch a man, even a killer, walk sorrowfully in front of a mural

Like what if you couldn’t help yourself, even if you wanted to

This was the real dream content, the fear of relief, clock unwheeling itself

A lapse, an error, a folded string of felt hearts

Desiring the kind of cluttered, easy beauty of one who enjoyed their life

A bare, seaside landscape stripped of romance

Having once been pressed against a tree in that forest, that cemetery

As if what made me alive was too much greenery to endure

Exactly at the point where the system transcends itself

My life given a responsible, feline focus, a serious understanding of faith

Imagining two cats named Gravity and Grace, like in a film

Like the absent novel with which I occupied my mind could come to exist

It was about shopping, and then about nothing, therefore, once named

Unable to, it was true, do anything but add to the pile

As in, an organizational system, socks knotted in pairs

On index cards, a kind of forgetful beauty, the system and its rupture

Each year each sweater made a little worse, almost unnoticed

Stale bread made edible by soaking in milk, ale, water, wine

Quality, the videographer says, meaning made with care and intention

What it did to one’s spine, to sleep and walk on unkind surfaces

Wasn’t worth thinking about, really, one’s teeth, until midlife

Someone says they like my hair, which I am about to cut

To my friend I said if you once did, then you still would

Then I stopped being able to believe it myself

First Reformed

“Thought is something the brain secretes.” — Bernadette Mayer

Shock reverberates through a life like rings of a tree.

I was trying not to think bleak thoughts.

Why, for instance, did I have to feel the spill of oil into water, from which nothing can be redeemed.

A woman describes Cabaret, the Nazi faces in the mirror, watching with grim certainty.

A human life was a struggle against all the wrong forces.

Life annihilated itself, laying down its tracks in the snow.

They fixed the organ so that God could enter the church through song.

“I don’t feel very much like singing,” sang the singer, in the voice of a soldier, in an age so long gone it feels like snow.

I knew what it meant to walk on a long road in a snowy New England, what was at the end of it.

The cup full of amber liquid, how it accrued meaning.

Meaning pooled in the street, an electric green liquid in which orange leaves curled, soaked.

Meaning was a bed of feathers in which a chicken came to roost in its own dead air.

A brain was like an animal, in that it moved, generating fluids.

I woke up bleeding, which happened hundreds of times.

I woke up with the cold net of the future braided to my eyes.

The desire to pray is also a form of prayer, the preacher says, which implies a hope I cannot bear.

The church emerges out of darkness while names unscroll onscreen.

A poem could not contain a film, but gesture at its grandeur.

I looked back and there was a long trail of blood in the snow.

I looked ahead and ashes mixed into a poisoned estuary.

A bird died against glass, a bird died eating trash.

One was meant to believe as well in perseverance, the unbridled creative possibilities for survival.

This had the property of applying a soothing balm on a blade as it sliced into flesh.

I slept in sheets that smelled faintly of piss.

Every day it got worse, it being conditions, the life we bore.

I had to find new forms of belief, a future that could exist, without constricting.

All anyone had to offer was endurance, sweat, the gritting of teeth.

Barbed wire wrapped around a human chest, like a rabbit.

There was love, and it had everything in it, and then it was gone.

The bleakness of personal suffering blooming out across a neighborhood.

Everywhere, trees blossom pink, in unseasonable warmth

It felt like yellow left, and then yellow did leave, gingkos dropping their leaves into golden piles.

A universal human condition of peering into unbearable darkness, historic.

One could find in the past comfort or horror, the pitted tunnels underlying the house of God.

Of the women in my family, I said, they survived.

They married violent men and made children and didn’t die.

It was a small comfort, back there, licking honeysuckle from a fence.

A farmhouse stood against a bare, mid-Atlantic sky.

A distant beach receded, further and further, until it disappeared.

The grey coast jagged with rocks and snails.

Some are called for their loneliness, the preacher says, an ability to sense the emptiness in all things.

For what had I been called, or why hadn’t I.

“I cry at the start of every movie,” a woman sings.

Human instinct for life against the limits, cold shearing blade.

A desire to be entertained by brutal, American spectacle.

A camera on a pregnant woman weeping while her husband rages in an antiseptic room.

I call this reality, and am made smaller.

The camera pans overhead deserts, tundra, forests, ocean, oil rigs, lumbermills, trees ravaged by fire.

The real detective sounds like a fictional detective, speaking into a tape.

Evil at the heart of American culture, and me enjoying it, on screen.

If I had to live with my own small miseries, and not turn them into anything.

If great art could not save me, because I could not make great art.

This lacerated more than any other indignity.

The sense of something larger, they say, offers resolve.

The smell of liquor on a woman who sobs in the back of the room.

The smell of death on a man who looks with sober eyes into the future.

The worse times will begin, he says, and a woman’s face remains calm.

It wasn’t God, who was wrong, but man.

I could see the kind of desperate pain that drove one to a cold, bare church.

Hope and despair poured into the same cup, pink opaque liquid pluming inside whiskey.

The only consolation was the thought of no consolation.

And yet I had once woken with faith and good cheer, on days like these.

The night did offer a soft regard, with blue gravity.

If I thought of a brain leaking in a jar I felt sorrow.

If I thought of the dead, life crushing itself, an abundant throttle.

This instance of futurity specific, yes, but also historic.

Once, a man lived who had to look out at a city gnawed by death.

I was not special, in this regard.

One way to endure the wave is to study the wave, its subtle textures.

The cloth containing blood and metal, a stripe of stars.

In a spare room, with a lamp like an eye.

The cold could widen one’s capacity for warmth.

The cold could enter one’s bones and, seemingly, fill them with air.

What even was the point of all this dutiful weeping.

A kind of puny and pitiful mourner, installed at the edge of a painting.

One had one’s repeating hands, and a fly that seemed to live forever, making itself again and again.

If, at the end of life, one had a vision of great love..

If slowing down meant the process of residual accretion.

If attendance to one’s suffering made one into a resolute mammal.

If winter meant knotting a frayed rope.

The discrete period one was in the middle of, without edges.

The sanded down memories of the city’s past, implying the shuttering of its present.

Having once loved a place, and felt it go hollow.

“All we really want,” the preacher says, “is emotion.”

The margin between truth and honesty, truth and description.

What a man writes and what a man means, or lives.