Paul Watsky
More Questions Than Answers
tel-let
2001
for Clare and the Boys
There are 100 copies.
Copyright © 2001, by Paul Watsky.
tel-let
325 W. Tyler, Apt. B
Charleston IL 61920-1865
USA
Relative Unknowns
Three Poems for Jerry Kilbride
Propriety
The haiku poet Shiko (1665-1731)
"was said to be shamelessly ambitious," (Blyth)
a fault, the critic believes, that cost him
friends. Did his personality hurt his career?
Basho tolerated Shiko, who "wrote
an enormous number of books,…
[and] set up his own school in Mino,
which lasted a long time."
Who are the unambitious poets?
Shakespeare? Whitman? No. Emily D.?
Far from it. Unconfident? You bet, but
that other thing? Perhaps Em,
a good, decent girl on the surface,
tampered with her ulterior motives.
What might a wheelless carriage bring?
At any rate, not friends.
Under the Best of Circumstances
Life slowly erodes like lying
on a neatly-made bed, back aching
just a little, petting the old cat,
and maybe soon we’ll take a nap.
Yesterday I read with amusement about Bokudo,
an Eighteenth Century sword-sharpener
and writer, whose "favorite subject was drowsiness,"
his lasting fame deriving mainly from one haiku
about the new leaves of a spring morning,
which concludes, "It’s no wonder I’m sleepy.’
A friend of mine also laughed
but pointed out that given his job
Bokudo couldn’t nod off during long hours at work
and expect to keep all his fingers.
Two weeks ago I’d cut my thumb cleaning
a pocket knife, while looking out the window towards trees.
A Week After My 54th Birthday
I remember there are worse fates than once resembling
a gifted child but having lacked follow-through,
such as, I never died insane at the end
of World War II, the way Hisago, born 1890,
did, with "many enemies and no friends,
at home and abroad," according to A History
of Haiku.
The fallen leader of a coterie
of female poets, and "passionate,… she was always
in love with somebody,… [oh] woman with one
thought I mind." Excessively sensitive
regarding self—take her lament that moonlight
pierced her "thin clothes/ to the very skin"—
she may have been proportionately callous towards others.
Tombo means "dragonfly," kawazu "frog."
Kana is used for emphasis. Wa kata ka
"Got it?"
Her reputation burgeoned posthumously.
z
Formerly Candlestick Park
(unzen koan)
A large Toro’s tidal sound,
reflected off 55,000 empty seats,
waxes, wanes as the mower passes me,
circles home plate the wrong way,
then heads up the left field line,
turns clockwise and paces the ground crew’s
solitary hoseman towards a fresh bib
in right center, where his benign
wetting of the warning track resumes.
August 1, the midseason dying
from old age, Giants on the road,
and afternoon sun flooding over my proper
shoulder like a well-trained reading lamp.
Limitless blue sky, just the place twinkling
popups love to disappear, ascends
beyond the light stanchions.
Seems any minute
it could recur, the glacially slow preamble
to a game-winning grand slam,
or an accretion of bleeders, muffs, and bad
hops tailor made to leave me dry
though with a nasty hangover.
Far as I can see,
I’m the only one sitting in the stands,
a lonely oxymoron, Stadium Man,
compound of ancestor worship and future
excitation, monumentally adept
at the traditional baseball thing—waiting,
right now while officials print
my Pennant Race Plan tickets,
which guarantee playoff admission rights
contingent on the if of squeaking past
L.A. thanks to yesterday’s dramatic
last-minute acquisition, three
good pitchers who join the team
in Cincinnati..
But it’s always waiting—
for the garlic fries, for a catcher with power,
for the line drive to hook foul,
for an out-of-options rookie
to clear waivers, for the injury
report, for a rain delay to end,
for next year. Eliminate the waiting,
and what’s left? What’s left of life?
Big Museum
My boss, the world’s greatest bird stuffer,
was a childless old man, Curator Emeritus,
without anyone to mentor except me,
who had hoped for a summer job in Mammals, Paleontology,
or, put crudely, Bugs, but was happy enough
anywhere behind the scenes, barring Janitorial, Cafeteria,
Coat Check, and the Gift Shop, even felt satisfied
transcribing to a gigantic catalogue volume, in India
ink, sixteen-hundred-and-seventy-two
field labels hung on the dried-out legs
of Dr. C’s last Belgian Congo collection,
and then printing teeny-tiny with a brass-nibbed
pen officially-numbered duplicate tags
to flap beside the originals.
By winter,
now working Saturdays, I had learned appreciation
for artistry, having progressed from his immaculate, sculpted
skins, each accurately plumped-out
with cotton spooled on an African porcupine quill—
the only perfect wand—to endless contorted
European sparrow flocks, shipped decades
earlier, long strings of them shackled at the feet.
These dusty dead appeared to have been crushed in the gutter
by wagon wheels, and expressed such horror I imagined
them noticing hell’s brewery truck, an instant late—
quite unlike the master’s equatorial peacocks,
honey-eaters, weavers, permanently asleep
in fire-proof trays, tucked shoulder-to-shoulder,
preened.
He had intended teaching it all
to me, his last, but doggedly ambivalent, hope,
plainly metamorphosing into an English major.
Step One,
Getting a Corpse,
despite the urban ban
on firearms discharge, should have been unproblematic:
"Look under the viaduct, where starlings roost,"
(where the diseased ones, moribund, fall). I did,
during a rainy, guano-dripping dusk. Found nothing.
He assumed I lied, and stomped back to his office,
same style as when he’d realize several times a day
I couldn’t understand his Latin jokes. Disqualification!
Down time—if one were dealing with a lesser man,
insensible to road kills, who wouldn’t deviate
from his commute to rescue a bloated seagull ripening
in the heat.
Step Two, Deploying Equipment,
largely forgotten, other than what’s abovementioned,
plus scalpels, scissors, thread for suturing,
needles, insecticide, cornmeal—surprisingly—to absorb
secretions, clamps, cloths, final brushes,
RIP, and ample workspace underneath
tall windows overlooking Central Park.
Step Three, Removing the Innards—everything
soft or skeletal but wingtips—totally a matter
of technique. Watch the chief incise ventrally,
sternum to pelvis, standing first beside his shoulder,
then gradually driven further back, daunted by putrefactions
outgassing from our sewage-eating volunteer, until you settle
in the corridor, beyond viewing range, the worst
smell you’ll ever meet just an unpleasant
memory.
Steps Four, Five, Six, etc.,
Filling the Cavity, Sewing Up, Making
‘Em Look Nice—largely unseen due to cringing
embarrassment at being a wimp: Sorry, White Father
with an Iron Nose; Sorry, O Member
of The Explorers Club; Sorry, Significant Nimrod
who shared his anecdote about acquiring the unique specimen
of an unknown species, presumably rendered extinct,
"One morning I was walking along a trail
beside Lake Kivu, and there was a bird
I’d never seen before. So I shot it;"
Sorry, Discoverer Long-deceased, inviting me to contemplate
that small red creature; Sorry for lacking
your company when snow whipped around the planetarium roof;
Sorry, as well, I never fit, taxonomically, any niche
carved by my would-be dads.
It might have cheered them up,
cheered me up, too, eventually, with a definitive
spot in the working museum’s reference library
of skins, each content filed among its kind,
sheltered by floor-to-ceiling metal cabinets—
nesting sites worth coveting, because here
and in our former colonies the trees are coming down.
All Good Things Must Come to an End
Do you need imagination to utilize that?
The way Feynman says you need imagination
for understanding modern physics, spacetime’s
curve, the universe expanding so farlong
into who knows where, when, then—whoomph—snapping back
out of whatever until creation encompasses less
than the average cantaloupe?
Maybe you need
imagination’s opposite, a zest for homilies,
for arbitrary imperatives, and you characteristically respond
with hysteria’s imbecilic aloha to slaps
in the face, "Thank you, Sir, I needed that"
manacling in Authority’s musty cubicle.
I genuinely believe all good things
must come to an end passes for consolation
like a dummy nipple proffered between feedings,
a miniature steering wheel with suction
cup attachment stuck to baby’s dashboard.
Feeling empowered?
If so, you’re ahead
of G, sleepless late one school night
shortly before his tenth birthday, anticipating—
a long-standing bad habit,
crib era, circa age two—
death, mine, his mother’s, his,
both the slow kind with its bleak precursors,
and the fast, its stunning shock, the bafflement
of possibility. He also reminisces, bemoans everything,
especially losing those little diapering games
played in the spirit of fifty years ago:
a middle-aged uncle washes
my socks in the bathroom sink
while I ride the toilet seat cover, laughing
my head off whenever he accidentally-on-purpose
knocks what he’s just wrung out
back into the dirty water.
For G’s sake
I tout rapturous recall—no sale—
bleat simple-mindedly about lifespan,
his vastly far horizon, ripeness
and ebb tie, readiness to depart,
the conservation of matter, energy, how wonderful
nothing’s ever really getting lost.
He keeps sobbing loudly beside me,
in the spare bedroom, crammed with books.
Desperate, I grab The Stuffed Owl,
read him a medley of my favorite non-morbid
lousy poems—big chunks
of Erasmus Darwin—figuring if bathos
can’t jolly him up, the half-understood
dull passages may produce stupefaction.
Twenty minutes, he’s woozy.
I lead him back to where his brother sleeps
tight in metal orthodontic headgear,
where this past week the pet snake buried itself
in excelsior, and waits, under its water dish,
to shed, and where next to the trundle, on the floor,
the chartreuse display of a digital Nickelodeon
alarm clock illuminates time.
Nasty Surprise at an Unfamiliar Bar
after Robin Blaser’s 75th Birthday Poetry Reading
He had the whiskers
and the hat, the wired-
up guitar a real Amish
speed freak timeless
figure meaning interminable
turning his only vocal
control the volume
on himself higher
then higher than higher
then finally stopped
the way a decade
stops
after ten years though he’s still
there he or his father or grand-
father through all the decades
Forties, Fifties, Sixties and a new
decade begins poisoning
one’s mind almost immediately
afterward a sip or two, several
refreshing sentences and he’s
singing again. We left.
On the street my friend
a person’s person nice
disposition starts reblissing
with beautiful poems of two
hours ago the primacy
effect. That’s why she points out
a full moon surrounded
by clear sky.
The lost soul negative
individual yours truly cannot
disconnect from what’s called
the recency effect that bad
thing pursuing like a massacre
through an almost-closed
saloon door obediently
he registers the lunar sublime
but blurts,
"Lycanthropy!"
Sleepover at the Old House
I don’t know where she came from
originally, maybe the South Pacific,
this little flying sex goddess
about eighteen inches long
hanging from a ceiling hook
by string.
Her wings are green
with gold accents, her skin very white,
nice bare breasts, large pixieish
ears, her arms spread and reaching
like she’s about to hug you
even though part of her foot
has broken off.
She’s heading
up the bed in my general direction
but angled so as to miss my face
and sail out the window, taking
her flower-ornamented black hair,
red lipstick, sarong and bangles
to someone more deserving.
Religion
works that way. It makes you think
there’s a profound reason you’re alone.