I set out on my morning walk with the dog – the same routine as always (what other kind of routine is there?) – pee on the front lawn by the road (the dog, not me), first by the granite boulder on the east side of the lot, then by the pole that supports the basketball hoop on the west side of the lot.  Up went the hind leg, then out came a stream of deep yellow fluid.  The dog is a standard poodle, the runt of the litter and smaller than you’d expect for a standard poodle.  I call him a substandard.  When we brought him home last year, the kids named him Brutus.  In fact it was James who named him.  Jessica was barely talking then.  The most she could manage was a slurred “Bus, Bus.”

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I thought I’d use Earth Day to inaugurate a new project:  an eco Sci-Fi allegory in which humans have to wrestle with their own tendency to devour all their resources.  It’s tentatively titled 23.44 degrees (the angle of the Earth’s axis in relation to its orbital plane).  I’d aim to post a short chapter each week or so.  Kind of a serialized approach to writing a first draft.  To produce a futuristic dialect, I’ve invented a linguistic mashup of German, French, Latin, Greek, and Celtic(ish) tongues thrown onto English, like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas.

Chapter one introduces the narrator, a man named Aruda Jafman, who used to serve in the Emisso fleet of interstellar scows, but has retired planetside.

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In ‘63 with gas turned on,
Head in the oven and gone,
Her final poem bristles like a crime scene.
I scour for clues but find none,
No more than for any other cosmic lie.
I read her backwards:  Ariel to Colossus,
Steaming upriver to the heart of darkness,
But no one waits for me on the jetty.
At the waul of a baby, I’m shaken awake.
My instinct is sound: read backwards.
All words begin in death.
All life, too.

_____________

Ostensibly, this poem is a response to the news that marine biologist, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, committed suicide on March 16th, 2009.  But that’s just an excuse for me to ask, yet again: what is it we do when we write poetry?  what is it we do when we write anything?  That’s the same question that the Easter story asks.  It’s a question that sets the Word and Death in conversation.

Project:  Hughes, Edward
Interview:  0031957 (Voice Calibration)
Interviewer: Ginsberg, Alan

So ya, man.  Name?  Hughes.  Ya.  Ted.  So ya, man, I worked on the GB20 design team.  You owe me.  You owe me big time.  In fact, you guys should be on your knees kissing the ground we walk on.  We hit a veracity factor – nine point seven – unheard of.  Most people – even the pros – most of them couldn’t tell the difference.  The new bot could lie, it could laugh at a private joke, break out in a sweat under pressure.  We made a bot with Asperger’s Syndrome, another one with social anxiety disorder that would fall down and have a panic attack.  We even did a bot that would tic under stress.  Annoying as all hell, but that’s what the loved one wanted.

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I had forgotten to take my meds again – not just a one time thing, but an “Oh shit” sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach when I saw a full bottle of pills sitting on the window sill above the kitchen sink and realized a whole month had passed me by and still I hadn’t opened it, not even once – which explains why I found myself back in the hospital doing all the usual stuff again (you know the drill):  morning exercises in floppy slippers, and group therapy with sobbing anorexic girls sitting next to anemic glassy-eyed postpartum moms, and pleasant one-on-ones with nurses who tried to look interested in all my boring crap even though I’d caught them checking their watches, and the arts and crafts time where I used child-safe scissors to cut out pictures of emaciated models which I glued to construction paper while I drifted off into my mid-afternoon stupor, and then, to round out another lovely day, a chat with my psychiatrist, Dr. Melvin, a gaunt man with pale complexion and black hair whose invitation to join him in his office never failed to fill me with a weird foreboding calm, the way I imagined it feels for death row inmates who’ve gotten the first injection – the one that relaxes them – and even though they know the next injection will kill them, can’t help but relax.  I figured it’d be a big mistake to let down my guard while I was having a session with Dr. M., though I couldn’t say for sure what would happen if I dozed or daydreamed or gave him any other excuse to step out from behind that big pretentious desk of his and come a little closer to me.  It was just a gut feeling I had, a dark knot that twisted low in my bowels and left me feeling like I might dump everything into my underwear.

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