Now We're Getting Somewhere Read online

  NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE

  POEMS

  KIM ADDONIZIO

  FOR THE MAKERS

  Everybody knows the captain lied.

  —LEONARD COHEN

  Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  CONTENTS

  I.NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

  Night in the Castle

  Black Hour Blues

  Fixed and In Flux

  Animals

  Comfort of the Resurrection

  Grace

  High Desert, New Mexico

  Signs

  The Earth Is About Used Up

  In Bed

  II.SONGS FOR SAD GIRLS

  Wolf Song

  Song for Sad Girls

  Résumé

  Telepathy

  Small Talk

  Ghosted

  August

  Winter Solstice

  All Hallows

  AlienMatch.com

  To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

  Ways of Being Lonely

  Guitar

  III.CONFESSIONAL POETRY

  IV.ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS

  People You Don’t Know

  Ex

  The Truth

  Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions

  The Miraculous

  Arrival in Italy

  Still Time

  Happiness Report

  I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats

  Art of Poetry

  Babies at Paradise Pond

  Little Old Ladies

  Death & Memory

  Stay

  Acknowledgments

  I

  NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

  NIGHT IN THE CASTLE

  I’m not sure what to do about that scorpion twitching on the wall

  Maybe I should slam it with this book of terrible poetry

  or just read aloud to it until it dies of a histrionic metaphor

  bleeding out on the ancient stones in a five-octave aria

  If I get a little drunker I might try to murder it with my sandal

  I gave up on mercy a while ago

  That’s what happens when you live in a castle on an artist’s grant

  You look at the late-afternoon Umbrian light smearing itself over the tomato vines

  & feel entitled—like an underage duchess whose husband has finally died of gout

  leaving her free for more secret liaisons with the court musician

  She might even have poisoned the duke, the lecherous shit

  It’s hard to remember what life was like before this

  & I don’t want to, I want to stay here & poison the king next

  I want to be a feared & beloved queen ordering up fresh linens & beheadings

  locking up bad poets in their artisanal hair shirts

  torturing academics with pornographic marionette performances

  Meanwhile the scorpion is still there twitching slightly

  reciting something about violence & the prison of ego

  & I can hear the clashing armies on the wide lawn outside

  sinking down into history & then standing up again

  BLACK HOUR BLUES

  Nothing is the new black’s shit soundtrack.

  The elk’s black blood leaks from the roof rack.

  Black the prospects of the destitute sick.

  Blackberries suppurate in the pie tin.

  Green cards burnt black in the gas-lit oven.

  Black mold loitering in the privacy of prison.

  Black Deepwater Horizon pelican and dolphin.

  Through Standing Rock a black worm crawls.

  Black Baltimore Mali Iraq Sudan Cambodia Sinai Selma Uh.

  The darkling beetle raises its black back and runs

  through the black Ghost Ship and Grenfell Tower ruins.

  Black Syria Somalia Ferguson Uh Attica Gaza Yemen Huh.

  Black heart weighed against an ostrich plume.

  Blindfolded goddess, long sword drawn

  nowhere in the Oh come down come down.

  FIXED AND IN FLUX

  The cicadas swarm the pines all summer,

  the males flexing their tymbals to make

  the horrifying sound that will attract a mate.

  The new people are fidgeting in strollers,

  running on little piston legs

  hard toward the street, toward the breast

  and then the beer can, and soon

  the breast again. When one door closes,

  another floats downriver

  under the night sky. Nine planets

  seemingly forever and then suddenly

  Pluto’s demoted. The king is dead!

  Long live the king! Existentially,

  we’re either crawling toward

  a top-shelf margarita being perfected by

  adorable six-winged angels, or else

  getting puréed in a food processor

  on a decapitated mountain.

  Meanwhile, a sea worm slithers through a mortgage.

  72% of Americans believe in angels,

  no wonder that parasitic amoeba got elected.

  Meanwhile, a lake comes to realize

  it’s now a grenade.

  ANIMALS

  I think I could turn and live with animals

  —WALT WHITMAN

  O Walt you were wrong, they aren’t placid or self-contained

  I just watched a spoonbill make carpaccio out of a frog

  & crocodiles dining on wildebeests trying to cross the Maro River

  It’s wrong to say O in poetry these days

  which makes me want to have a loud orgasm right here

  in an unashamed animal way

  You must have been looking at some cows on a farm but who wants to live like that

  standing around in a shed with sore tits, shitting claustrophobically

  or standing around shitting & being tortured by flies & eating grass

  I know you like grass but it’s no fun to be a pricey pre-hamburger, ruminating with no TV

  If you’d had a cable subscription maybe you would have felt differently

  watching NatGeo Wild & those exhausted herds on the Serengeti

  Walt, I still love you even if in this instance you might have been a victim of the pastoral tradition

  Let me tell you about animals: The green anaconda swallowed the young capybara whole

  O o oh oh oh OHHHH Walt

  Capybaras are the largest rodents on earth

  I don’t think I’d survive as an animal for long, even a large one—Look at the elephants

  Imagine being murdered & becoming a doodad

  or furniture inlay

  Walt, I actually like sweating & whining about my condition

  Hot flashing & bitching in my cream satin sheets, lying awake drunk & weeping in the dark

  I’d definitely like to own more things

  An electric knife sharpener for instance would come in handy

  for carving up the less fortunate on special holidays

  I want to be lucky as long as I can

  Walt, Walt, I don’t think death is luckier or leads life forward like you said

  I don’t think I’m going to grow from the grass you love

  I’m just going to have one last blackout in a dirty pink lace dress

  & be eaten by tiny ugly legless larvae

  COMFORT OF THE RESURRECTION

  One day everything that’s over or dead

  will come back, oil painting & God,

  chivalry & the kings (even the mad

  old rotters, why not, while the heads

>   of the plotters are removed

  from their iron spikes & carefully glued

  on again)—why not believe in the miracle—plaid

  has already come back so why not the starved

  & flooded corpses, why not fresh bread

  from charred toast, aren’t the grubbers in the cupboard

  constantly churning up from the charnel the old

  ingredients, holy seed, holy blood,

  nothing is ever destroyed,

  but tell that to Marianna whose child

  lived for three days brainless & blind

  close by cheap factories on the filthy Rio Grande,

  tell it to all the ruined & annulled

  residents of the earth, everything

  & everyone will be restored

  & immortal diamonds will soon be yours.

  GRACE

  Let go & let God is my guard dog Beware

  the ragged shithole hordes & bless

  my chrome moly Bushmaster .223 rest

  your asses nowhere near my rod & staff

  I raise my beacon-hand &

  torch anyone who doesn’t believe Jesus

  was calved from a virgin & then ascended

  to his penthouse & will raptor down

  to smite Jews abortionists niggers

  Muslims fags Obama the AntiChrist SATAN

  WAS THE FIRST TO DEMAND EQUAL RIGHTS

  outside the Knoxville Baptist Tabernacle

  while a boy puts his tongue in another boy’s mouth

  & they lie down together shy & barely breathing

  HIGH DESERT, NEW MEXICO

  Temple of the rattlesnake’s religion.

  Deluge and heat-surge. Crèche of the atom’s

  rupture. Night blackens like a violin

  and bright flour falls from the kitchens of heaven.

  This is where the seams begin to loosen,

  where you can walk for miles in any direction—

  rabbit, lizard, raven, insect drone—

  and almost forget the shame of being human.

  Smoke tree. Sage. Not everything is broken.

  Horses appear at this remote cabin

  to stand outside and wait for you to come

  with a single apple. Abandon

  your despair, you who enter here forsaken.

  The wind is saying something. Listen.

  SIGNS

  This morning the East River Ferry is just a boat pulling up to the ugly little park in Williamsburg

  & Manhattan isn’t the underworld projecting its eternal office buildings into those clouds

  The seagull landing on my balcony isn’t an image of transcendence or being destroyed by love

  There isn’t any meaning in things

  There probably aren’t even any things

  which is hard to think about & this morning I don’t want to think about anything

  but I do, I think about . . . things

  as each special, unique individual in the long line below my window steps onto the ferry

  as rain slips down not representing the Many cleaved from the One & black umbrellas unfold

  I think about the giant wax man in the museum with three wicks in his head slowly burning

  & the hollow as his face starts to melt from the inside

  & the heartsick woman who jumped from the bridge, hauled up & covered with a tarp on the dock

  I’m sick of death & sick to death of romantic love but I still want to live

  if only to rearrange the base metals of my depression

  like canned lima beans on a mid-century modern dinner plate

  My last love had beautiful green eyes

  Eyes like two caged parrots refusing to say anything

  Eyes like two rivers filling with toxic runoff

  Maybe later today the sun will come out & smile like a kind nanny

  but it won’t be a kind nanny, or even a mean nanny, shaking me hard

  One day it will just cool, like . . . a star

  When the clock says 11:11 it doesn’t mean

  the design of things has risen to the surface & been made manifest

  It means I’m still here hours later watching the boats dock & then leave without me

  It means the people who commuted across the river to work on Wall Street

  are still there, their eyes like suitcases of small, unmarked bills

  & everything is going to change for the worse

  THE EARTH IS ABOUT USED UP

  like a sodden tampon & no place to throw it away

  like an armpit-yellowed vintage blouse with see-through pearl bubble sleeves

  like a tissue travel pack in a foreign bathroom & you have to squat over a hole in the floor

  The earth is about used up, is the point I’m trying to drunkenly steer through the potholed streets

  into the suburban garage of your ears

  though you probably already know what’s up with the earth, but I am telling you because

  because because because because because

  The earth is about used up

  like the preserved atrophied brain of a retired NFL defensive lineman leaking cryoprotectant

  like the tender ass of the cow & the large heart of the racehorse

  like a wind-up ladybug, ladybug

  crawling in decelerating circles on LuxTouch marble tiles inlaid with precious stones

  Even the ocean is gasping for air

  while someone smokes a cigarette through their throat-hole

  & sodas go flat in the heat

  & a stack of National Geographics bloats in a rained-on cardboard box in a fallen shed

  some animal dragged itself into to shit away its life

  I’m standing on that box with my teeny megaphone, bringing you the news you know

  wildly virtue signaling waving my mortal handkerchief dropping it at your feet

  where it burns it burns here I don’t want it you take it please you take it

  IN BED

  The world is like an ugly person you’re supposed to love for their inner beauty

  but some people are just ugly—if you poke them with a short needle

  you find badly lit rooms of cheap wall-to-wall carpet

  & metal shelves of racially insensitive trinkets

  so it’s often better to avoid them completely

  & mind your own business . . . in bed

  Today is a good day to get things done . . . in bed

  An atmospheric river has closed the zoo, the elephants are trudging through the mud

  Trees are falling over like myotonic goats & not getting up again

  At the bottom of the river you’re in a cozy submarine . . .

  Cats asleep on either side of you . . .

  as you think about Colette, who spent her last years in her apartment in the Palais-Royal . . .

  with her phone & books & papers

  Time wrote that her novels were about “quietly desperate women in love & in bed”

  but that’s all the women I know except for the ones

  whose beds are shallow graves

  Sometimes it’s fun when in love to grow loudly desperate . . .

  and write about it . . .

  especially when your lover has left you alone . . .

  to be cradled by your Microbead Boyfriend Pillow in its striking azure T-shirt

  There are so many things you can accomplish, at home . . .

  You can meet all sorts of lovely people . . .

  You can fake an orgasm to hurry things along . . .

  because you would rather be out having brunch with bottomless mimosas

  or binge-watching other people having sex

  With a man or just some sperm & the right equipment you can get a baby

  & then bring it in bed to sleep with you

  until it grows up and leaves you alone . . .

  But beds are not just for sex or procreation

  or sleep, or sleeplessness smoldering with 4 a.m. d
read

  Beds are for living! Beds are for life . . .

  & for memory, as you lie between cork-lined walls

  writing very long sentences in French

  Sometimes I’m so happy

  I want to kill myself first thing in the morning to make sure I die . . .

  under my white organic ruched duvet cover

  like a marmot burrowed deep under the snow

  who can’t wake up from hibernation

  while others crawl out, ravenous for spring

  II

  SONGS FOR SAD GIRLS

  WOLF SONG

  At the party they’re all wearing swan suits.

  The fur on your back thickens. You’re slicked

  against the wall of the flow-through kitchen

  between your ex and his girlfriend.

  You’d still like to devour him as you once did,

  but you are trying to become human.

  Though also you are starving,

  sick of scavenging nuts and berries,

  gnawing the occasional biscuit.

  You want to take down a caribou!

  You want to tackle a moose and rip open