Poems by Lee Posna

Winner 2004

Shape  

 

I.

Trenton, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Indianapolis,

Chicago, Detroit, Niagara, Buffalo, Trenton.

There is a shape to that.
The shape, before it became visible, was a ray,

the figure in geometry
that has one endpoint with a line shooting
off forever in the other direction.

Before I had confronted a map, the shape

was something like the silhouette of a palm tree

in front of the sun. The shape was not freezing,

or industrial, or tangible.  It was tangent to the sun

and what light has meant for a long time.

The shape was like climbing

a tree and seeing that the world wasn’t flat

or like landing on a wire with both feet

making contact simultaneously.

The shape was not lost or failing

and didn’t even need to cry for help—it was help.

The shape was like finding your old dog

and even your dad in sunny heaven

even though you don’t believe in God.

 

II.

The shape and God are very similar—

they are both pretty, old, tired, and me.

They are both shaped like the universe,

and both have dead stars that look like the only hope of escaping night.

You can send a satellite only a tiny way into them

before it comes crashing back.

Here is the difference: God believes in everyone,

but the shape just believes in me.

 

III.

Driving west along the shape at night,

I saw tiny snow-covered wagons and oxen

like glowing lawn ornaments on the side of the road,

sleeping forever.  It was that time of year.  I doubted them.

I asked God why I became more disappointed the farther I drove,

only to see my windshield get pelted by a satellite.

 

IV.

I didn’t think the shape could fall out of the sky,

but it did like the tornado of maps and bibles

that killed 37 people in Kansas the other day.

When the shape fell, it landed right in my lap

like a ball, or a pyramid,

or a cylinder, or a rectangular prism.

I tried to fling it back up but it just fell right back,

like a dead star,

into my lap.

 

c

 

 

Shape (ii): Ball

I.

Or more accurately, boulder. 

Starts off slow.

There is something about doing something for the first time. 

The country gets sunnier both ways, runs downhill both ways—

I’ve seen the runoff tragically confused: 

the drip doesn’t know which way to drip—don’t put it in a buret  

and no, this property isn’t chaos.  Don’t hold it like a struggling bird, growing larger

and more disagreeable in your hands, twisting you.

Gets faster, unraveling, letting loose the twigs and pine needles

all caught up in the telling.

Only in the winter can you mistake it for summer

from inside the car, and not the other way around—

something about the sun.

II.

Or more accurately, heavenly body.

The shape tangent to the sun is a ball.

Rolling along Route 70, if you look on it, you perish.

Rolling along to meet its Platonic form in the Pacific at sunset,

it’s going to be better than the fourth of July

and your gut’s gonna feel like a crucifix.

Or more accurately, Mercury. 
Closest to the sun.  There’s something rising in my throat,

up from my brain where germs or enzymes put to sleep

something chemical—or maybe God is more.

The temperature’s rising, the sun’s shaped like Africa, only more spherical.

 

III.

In Kansas we fed goats from a 25 cent machine with goat food.

The goats were in a pen a few hundred yards from a dusty

gas station.  They crowded and pushed for the food. 

The shy ones remained beneath a broken down truck. 

I swear one of them was my father, because this is the only way

I get really sad anymore.

Just look into his eyes, and you can see it—

the dotted outline of a perfect triangle, triangularity.

Dad, how did you end up here?

 

IV.

Or more accurately,

Do you know it’s me? 

A few goats escaped under the fence and mingled with us.

Were you ever a caterpillar on a door?  I swore you were once.

Why not a gumball machine? 

Will I see you again?

 

 

c

 

Fishing Line and the Oscillating Universe

 

I’m not sure how the old photos ate—

I didn’t look up from my disco fries

long enough to notice.  Maybe:

 

1. they crumpled around the omelets and, hungry

for the nostalgia emanating, absorbed them; or

2. the omelets absorbed the nostalgia emanating from the photos

and disappeared into a memory; or

3. the waiter took their plates away when I wasn’t looking.

 

If you look at the right angle

you can see the glint of the fishing line

connecting the eggs to the diner to the photos.

There was:

 

1.      Keith in the Plainsboro track sweater, and

2.      John in the yellow stained Hotdog Johnny’s T-shirt with his arm around

3.      Pete who didn’t have a shirt on.

 

They never stopped smiling,

even during silence.  They were probably thinking

about the time I fell off the boat when we went fishing

after graduation.  We were a ray, an endpoint on zero,

the line shooting off to the left into a sugary negative infinity,

projecting beyond the first meetings.

It was impossible to go forward.

When my face got tired I got up

to go to the bathroom and they sat there

like stale display cakes.

My face got caught in the fishing line and I was dragging:

 

1.      the omelets,

2.      the photos, and

3.      the diner

 

The diner started folding in on itself,

all the lines pulling the walls and booths

inward toward the focal point.

The place grew dark.

Biographies crashed through windows

and formed a black spinning mass in the center

of the room.  It was the oscillating universe

in effect right before my eyes.

 

There was sufficient mass right here to halt the expansion

of the universe.  It was their smiles. 

Only ancient aliens could have arranged their smiles like that.

They were as heavy as petrified organs, as dense as estranged lovers,

as sad as a black hole, as fragile as the key to the present dropped

and lost in a sparkling gutter contracting into a primordial handshake.

They were as flimsy as fishing line.

 

c

 

 

Edged

 

I saw you, spider, hesitate before entering a shadow.

I wished eight were the world to you when I misplaced: 

What’s a good name for a god?

Let’s hold hands. 

I’ll take two of yours into each of mine

and we’ll creep together into the night

because someone said we’re sad and leaden.

 

Standing on the edge of the shadow, a shore:

the tide exhaled as long as it could into faint stranglings,

the fizzy summits rising to our toes,

just out of reach and then back to its dark snoring.

I’ve seen Niagara Falls in the winter at night

and it sounds like that.

The baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring

in the high cabinet—it tastes like that.

It smells like fear mixed with lost dead hermit crabs,

like caged spirits in filth.  It’s floating

like a dream where I’m hugging unshowered guilt

and patting. 

 

We paused there, barely able to persuade a wisp of light

to take a hike.  We were frail. 

I said, Let’s sweep together into the night

and no one will notice us dancing through the death of innocence

or wilted leaves or whatever.

 

c

 

 

Shape (iii): Rectangular Prism

 

I.

The Shape was driving west in a rented van.

The Shape saw a beautiful bird.

The Shape let the bird hold them, navigating through the sun’s benign inhumanity.

 

Our cars like dominos falling and we, crushed each time,

across trapped thoughts like Nebraska, countries like space.

Nebraska has fields of packed ruined cars, trucks, tractors:

wilted, lost narratives that push up dandelions like:

Why don’t we throw all our garbage here?

Why not, after this?

Is this place someone’s unrealized dream of a golden whirlpool?

We see it from passing cars. 

But a few accidents, a few bad dreams and we’re sitting

in one of those ruined cars, in the middle of the field. 

Stuffed with straw.  Alone to scare.

 

II.

I want it. 

You can never change where you’re from.

I don’t want the accent.  Or the lifestyle.  Or the isolation.

I just want it. 

We pass cows on hills, cows on plains, I pick one out,

imagine that I am him, or her rather. 

I am the brown cow third from the back of the herd, in a field in Wyoming. 

I am the black cow facing away twenty yards removed

from the rest on a gentle slope in South Dakota.

What am I?  What is this unbearable not-wish?

 

When I am a cow, the grass is my wispy cathedral:

it’s easy being holy with hooves, the ground is god, and still alive;

and life is an unintentional prayer,

a slight breeze of a whisper, the aching force

beneath the throaty plains, the swallowing.

 

III.

I am waiting for a great flood to go down,

I am sleeping against the soil, the car floor,

to dream for what will be uncovered.

 

I see fields of old soggy shoeboxes

rise up like the dead from a swamp,

but who has time to check them all, or even one?

 

IV.

I see a sign that says:

Welcome to Nebraska.  And beneath: Welcome to the highway,

welcome to a patient, hungry dimension, a mind of swaying grass,

stillness like a buried mirror. 

 

Welcome, god.  You’re so close now,

just a few more exits.

c

 

 

Maple Syrup-Drowned Sunrise and the Sad-Eternal Turquoise

 

Rotting things are more colorful—                                

the rotting day is gold swirls and a pink-puddled sunset

shining out from the windows of the bronze.

The beach becomes a morbid fascination.                                                         

Tan is a sunnier shade of decay—                                                        

a toy shovel-full brighter, more dead

than fluid off-white and the yellow tint

of lingering for metabolism to forever pale.

 

The sea is filled with color samples 

floating like something shed—swatches called:

camel, coral, curdled cream, puffed rice, off-white, bleached hide—

enough to dim the secret spry, the oily sheen beneath—

muted, the sinking of a rainbow

begging for black and white.

 

 

c

 

 

Soft Exoskeleton

 

The baby ants swirl like fizzing galaxies,

though their silence isn’t unmistakably existential,

speeding around and around in grotesque geometry,

moving in six square inches

like they’re desperately demonstrating quantum mechanics,

but I’m watching like a car accident

and besides: we already figured out quantum mechanics.

 

The bead of grape soda is gone. 

Searching frantically in disbelief

as though life betrays, as if ideals just went flat,

they scurry on my desk, Escher-esque.

 

Sympathy is hard. 

Sterilizing someone’s paradise

is worth at least a sigh, I think,

and whoever said all we need is six square inches

to survive was right for about eighteen years.

Life is disgusting because it’s small and unthreatening.

I want to be the ants, the ants want to be me.

I want to see my desk burning far away

in the sky, absorbed by an insect constellation,

my papers on fire forever for me to see and to become.

The ants want to stop working so hard, don’t they?

 

They’ve scampered, the baby ants,

erratic and awkward as if someone could just go crazy

when hope is drowned,

as though our watery dreams become cement shoes

and seaweed fills our final vision.

Now they’re gone and I want to follow them

to the tiny crevice where a bug’s ear is unbearably utilitarian,

where personification is crumbs trailing away from our picnic.

I want to go even if it means hunger,

because then hunger would be so tastefully hollow.

 

c

 

 

Weight

 

I used to carry him in the pool. 

Buoyancy.

He dove in, made a tsunami for 7-year-olds—

he was heavy.

It took me as long as it took for fish to grow legs

to build a space shuttle,

and without much astrophysics,

maybe a book or two about

the nine planets and their atmospheres

from childhood.

I buried him on Mars—deep. 

Gravity on Mars = 0.38 gravity on Earth. 

350 x 0.38 = 133. 

I could lift 133 lbs. 

.

Four and a half years

cleans off the bones,

I’d imagine.

They probably don’t weigh

more than 10 lbs.

by now I guess.

About 4 on Mars.

At times I’ve thought

about exhuming them,

but I’d have no way of getting back there,

and no idea where to look.

 

c

 

 

Shape (iv): Pyramid

 

I.

The air conditioning failed in Nevada.

The sound of heavy stone grinding against heavy stone:

looking for the secret block.

There is a shape to that.

It sounds like an ellipse,

an orbit through the quiet interstellar medium,

as existential as the silence of baby ants.

It is the sun behind a pyramid.

Is that a man in robes?  A camel? 

A towering Sphinx?  There is something

in the distance like the silhouette of a spring with palm trees,

sprouting like a womb, heavy with dew,

I felt once in a dream a long time ago.

 

II.

Things are drying up all the time—

mass evaporation, and the clouds are moving on to a planet

that doesn’t put so much into the sky,

a mass migration, but gradual, subtle like brewing an escape.

They’ve got silver linings, too, for backing away.

When they rain their last rain, the universe will not be empty,

but full of possible parallel worlds at least once more:

instead of driving through the desert I drove through Montana,

I drove through Canada, my car broke down in Utah,

I was satisfied with Nebraska and turned around—

it was ocean enough for me.

 

III.

The Shape pushed me like a secret block

toward a possible world, put a shovel in my hand,

compelled me like a slave.

 

Sometimes it’s easy to speed.

Sometimes it’s hard to get up to the speed limit,

like your foot weighs nothing, like it has no reference.

 

IV.

With the rain falling in sheets filled with green crayoned cacti,

I thought what if:

instead of driving, I stayed,

the balloon didn’t get carried away with flight,

the cat was sacred, I played baseball as a kid,

instead of dying, he stayed.

What if that last possible world looped around and reconnected with this one seamlessly?

If one day he came here, into my basement, and said,

This place is a mess.

 

c

 

Westward Song

 

The pale blue cadence drifted like a cartoon music note

in her room even when she wasn’t home,

floating up and away and then

rising through the carpet once again—perpetual,

like the ghost of a stream.  The note is from

 

a song twisting through the air, a smoky helix,

yet to be inhaled through his fingers,

those of an inarticulate lover, a musical savant.

 

It curls like a feigned flu, winding through ticket stubs

and deflated balloons pinned to the door,

a heart pounding more subtly than a bare wall.

 

He would come to her room waiting

for her to return from work, and find himself humming

the song, improving it, experimenting with dissonance.

 

He would turn on the television, wonder

what the deaf hear when they see music notes in closed captioning,

and think it might be something like what he feels

with his fingers inside her.

 

She would come in, inhaling the notes,

which would remain innocuous

until he played them. 

Seeing her was like putting on winter clothes for the first time

in the fall. 

She loved to wear him.

 

She wondered what state he visited this time,

wondered how transcontinental dreams were more exciting than sex,

how he really saw her body.

 

He wondered about his distant libido riding in the echoes of a westward train,

how loneliness became so amazing with another body,

and at his relief in being done with it, being able to enjoy her company

without this gentle requiem playing so loudly. 

 

He always fell asleep first, but the song

kept him awake tonight glowing in the light from the computer screen,

dangling from the ceiling like a mobile of punctuation marks.

In this light the barred eighth notes looked like question marks

in a font too big for the answers they began.

 

She slept too well.

Looking at her face makes him wonder if he’s ever

said something hurtful to her in his sleep.

 

c

 

Gail Effects Butterflies

The hill is swarming with butterflies the size of gnats,

so small she can’t tell they’re breathing

anything as frail or hot-blooded as the discovery of a state

she had never been looking for.

It looks like she’s saying no, but she’s turning

her head to the peripheral butterflies hinting at leaving,

sweeping rain into her idea of California.

They’re fluttering, beating detachment into the bright flat air

that settles in shafts like deserted hallways and shines

like copper or certain kinds of melting.

It rains in California two weeks later.

Seasons don’t matter anymore.

Vibrations carry, a sunny helix relaying

through rocks and trees, resurrecting

them with the consciousness of stability,

soaking them with a tint only perceptible to animals

and people she sees in animals.

She drives away in the rain and the windshield

wipers are just not fast enough for this song.

c

 

Horses or Gambling?

 

Was it the horses or the gambling?

I figured it out: my father was God—

faith died a shadow,

so what could be more logical?

And now I can’t ask him why he went.

We mixed his ashes into dirt

on the finish line at the race track.

 

The sun outshines him,

but one day he’ll rise again

like the thought of an afterlife

in the midst of a stomach virus,

or a beautiful face forgotten.

 

He is having another heart attack in a photo.

This one is a lot slower—slower than growing old,

which was his biggest fear.  Every day

his lungs lose the amount of air it takes

to remember my first time on a roller coaster.

His eyes seem more forgetful every day,

like he really is growing old.

The picture looks the same, but the expression

in his face has changed from

I’m with you in spirit to

I’m with you in memory to

I’m with you in nature to

I’m lost to

I’m scared.

 

He’s standing in front of a tree in the photo,

but it might be another family’s photo album, the summers of years past

become unrecognizable, strange, new, fresh.

I can insert memories, though the old ones weren’t bad,

and recreate an entire childhood from the air

that has left his body.

In the new childhood

we will always be having a barbeque,

the sun will always be shining,

we will always be smiling,

I will always be five and skinny

and running through sprinklers.

He will be five too, the world will always weigh five pounds

and there won’t have to be an end.

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