It's 11 PM exactly, April 19, 1999,
one month before my 30th birthday,
and there's something wrong with me.
I've taken to reading the great books,
for one thing, the greatest books.
I'm talking Aristotle. I'm talking Dickens.
I get up early each morning, and
open the books. I read. I read.
They attach themselves to me like tumors.
I don't know what they are talking about.
I can't tell you a single thing they said.
Maybe they didn't say anything. Maybe
what they said doesn't say anything to me.
II
Late at night, I close the books.
I walk around my small office, pick up
things I no longer have use for--
an empty can of Tab, a pencil,
a loose leaf notebook with records
where my poems have gone, or are.
My feet and hands are cold, like soldiers
hurrying from Russia. My back aches.
There is a pressure in my chest.
Is it right for one my age to be so familiar
with death, to know it intimately,
like a shadow nipping at one's feet
two minutes before noon. I remember
in the great books a lot of nouns,
and for every noun was an adjective,
sometimes two. I say my name to myself
and try to think of an adjective for it.
I can't. All the life in the great books
are in the adjectives. I am nothing but noun.
III
Solid. Death is, I think, solid. The body
in rigor mortis. The noun is solid.
It is what it is, nothing more, no matter
how adorned. The body grows cold,
like ice, which is solid, solid, solid.
The body grows into the noun, the name.
The body refuses to move. It is a rock.
What am I doing reading the great books?
All my company is dead, made solid
as a book, the rigor mortis of thought.
Nothing lives that doesn't run. I close
the books, wait for them to come to life,
to run off, to ask my adjective, instead
I feel the solid night, my cold feet crack.
IV
Is this a confessional? Is this a morbid realism?
I don't care. I never wanted a poem to be
anything, and I mean that sincerely.
What have I to confess to you you yourself
have not admitted to your life in the dark,
alone with your own noun name, your cold hands
reaching for the light of a stubborn dawn.
There is only one confession: I have lived.
Confession is adjective on the noun of life
after life, of past, of all your dead noun yous
lined up behind you from this last second
to your first. A secret has passed unbroken, a life.
I confess to you now I have lived.
V
It is quiet when I read the great books,
like a coffin. Some say they have no qualm with death,
it's the dying they don't want. Me,
I can take the dying, if it'll mean I'll become well again.
I picture my body rotting
in the grave, my face shriveling on my skull,
my eyes melting into the sockets like
ice in a huge white cup. I see my skeleton falling
to pieces. My noun name covered by moss
on the tombstone. I will be burned, I tell myself.
But, no, I am too hungry for life, too hungry
for each cell inside me to go on, even without me.
Where does this hunger come from?
The great books? I picture the great writers
in a mock heaven. Shakespeare's a pile of bones
tossed in the corner, Milton's blind eyes black
in the skull, Dante's elbows begging
for the inferno. It's quiet when I read.
None of the great books says anything.
VI
Now it is my stomach, now intestines.
Which part of me will be my Brutus?
Pancreas? Liver? Kidneys? Et tu, Brain?
VII
The letters get smaller every day,
my voice weaker. I listen to the pages turn.
It is all air, a puff of wind, nothing else.
If I were to burn the great books,
all of them, they would dazzle
for the life of the fire, then blow away,
ashes running to die among other ashes.
Miscarriage
I sat on the tub railing
holding her hand
while she was on the bowl
naked from the waist down
her eyes shut tight
as she strained to hold it inside
there were droplets of blood
on the green and beige tile
like evidence at a crime scene
she squeezed my hand
so hard her knuckles turned white
we had been on the bed laughing
making shadow puppets
with our feet
on the peeling yellow wallpaper
the radio had been on
I could still hear it playing a muffled tune
in the bedroom down the hall
a tear formed at the base of her eye
disappeared for a second
then gushed forth
like a crazy solitary soldier
across the bloody field of her cheek
she looked at me as if at a stranger
she might have met once
many years ago
then another contraction
shook her like an epileptic
and she turned toward the sink
her face collapsed like a bombed church
with one complete convulsion
she braced her right hand on her leg
and I heard a sound
some lonely echo beneath her
a rock hitting water
she turned to me once again
and the bathroom got suddenly dark
as if a cloud shifted under the light bulb
then she released my hand
looked down at herself
and drifted off to some far place
where only mothers and babies can go
James Valvis
James Valvis has published widely in both print and online journals.
His publications include, Midwest Quarterly, Wormwood Review,
Sulphur River Literary Review, Chiron Review, Pearl, Sheila-na-gig,
Slipstream, Thunder Sandwich, and Zero City.
He is the author of two books, most recently The Winters in
Jersey, a collection of short stories, put out by Mt Aukum Press
in 1999.
