The Roman Empire

Geographically, the left is almost identical to the right, except that there are paint chips in the flowerbeds, and, on the whole, life on the left seems slightly less civilized than next door. My home is a work in progress. Or maybe the word is regress. If you think of Rome in the 4th century—increasingly Christian, increasingly crumbly—you get the idea.

The brown façade of our duplex has 8 windows on the first floor, divided by 2 doors: 4 for my grandparents and 4 for us. Above that, on the second floor, 4 more windows face the street: 2 for my room and 2 my grandfather’s. Below the cicadas in the tree branches, you can hear his air conditioner hum.

A slightly recessed peak crowns our house. It is not so much a garret as a newspaper hat on a madman. 2 blind eyes stare blankly at the sky. In lieu of a corpus callosum, a layer of lath and plaster divides the attic into two compartments: the conscious and subconscious mind. Each contains relics. Mine also contains aliens—silver invisibilities—gigantic garbage cans with serrated steel teeth. If you step on their feet, their mouths open up. They eat anything—including babies. If you listen very carefully, you can hear them crunching Christmas ornaments at night.

The residence of the soul remains a mystery. I have a feeling it lives in the walls we share—in the hot and cold whispers of air mixing in the conduits of our separate furnaces—our separate lives—in the grilles and grates through which we communicate—if it exists anywhere at all.

So much for my body and soul. The rule here is bilateral symmetry, as it is with most living things on planet Earth. The external line of division between the 2 dwellings is represented by a walkway, disfigured by the stumps of 2 melted crayons—a red and yellow cross—an orange nail in the middle—marking for future generations where my first experiments in light and color were performed.

Stepping over an abandoned magnifying glass and a gold and green box of Crayolas—still open, 2 crayons still missing—we walk with a man (a boy, really, from my present perspective) across the lawn. On the left, around the corner, I point out the gas and electric meter—a sort of octopus with numbers for eyes. When he squats to read our rates of consumption, I watch his t-shirt rise from his teal trousers, revealing a milky slit of skin: an arrow of peach fuzz points down to a new magnetic pole on my compass—one I have never quite noticed before.

When he is finished reading the figures, I ask him if he would take like to take a look at my furnace, too. He smiles. He says, no. He says that he only measures people’s electricity and gas. We have oil heat, he explains, leading me to a greasy fixture a little further along the foundation of the house. I will have to wait for the oilman and his pink hose, it seems. I thank him for coming by and we shake hands. I must have looked disappointed, because he turns around on the driveway and he waves goodbye with his clipboard.

Depressed by his departure—my brother is off having surgery, so I only have my shadow for company—I pick up a twig to sharpen and plant myself on the cold patio. I sit down rather hard and perhaps the faint impression my fanny made on the concrete is still visible. All I know for sure is that we have no chairs over here today. We have no picnic table. Worse, have no garden. Our decrepit garage takes up too much room. Only children grow here, apparently.

My bewildered brother celebrates his first birthday in this very spot in 1971, enthroned on the aluminum and vinyl highchair I have never quite outgrown. I do not remember being invited to his party, although I am sure that I was. It would have been foolish to hire a babysitter to sit with me in the house when everyone else was outside having such a disgusting blast: flinging cake, wallowing in ice cream and pouring out Pepsi. My birthday is scheduled for the following month—September—when I will turn 2—so I am not the star on this occasion. That is probably why I did not preserve the invitation.

I am sure that somebody took a picture of Kyle, which is why I recall the event today. For his sake, I hope the album containing it hasn’t been lost. If it has, these few paragraphs will have to suffice for a snapshot. In a way, I suppose I am like those imaginary aliens in the attic, with one important difference: I am not imaginary. If you step on my foot, even accidentally, I can assure you, I will scream. I might even bite you. It all depends on how big you are and how hungry I am for a spanking.

But if you lock me in a padded cell—a comfortable place like my apartment—if you let me lie down and close my eyes, I can block out the howling maniac in my head. I can hear a chorus singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ If you put a piece of paper on my face, I will blow it off, swing my feet off the bed, pick it up, and use whatever crayons I have stashed under my mattress to draw you a picture. I will begin with a pointed party hat decorated with tiny dancing zebras, rhinoceri, leopards, lions, apes, giraffes and other savage beasts—creatures of the Coliseum—all blowing frilly noisemakers.

My mother beams behind the new Emperor, adjusting his dunce cap for posterity. There is frosting on his face and a fine line of elastic running down his right ear. A drop of vanilla dimples his chin. I see an extinguished candle, too—white with turquoise edges—shaped like the number 1 in the foreground.

I have seen that number somewhere before: maybe in another picture, at another party, sprouting up from the remains of another birthday cake like some lonely column—left over from the temple of Castor and Pollux—in the Forum.

The marble rubble of my Imperium.

I snap the twig.

Back when I commanded the love and allegiance of home.

About Poets

Our words are nothing to live by:
You cannot drink a syllable,
Whatever your capacity.
We say that love will never die
Because the truth is terrible.
Time winks at our mendacity.

So, we tend to be soft-spoken.
We tell dirty jokes, we smile,
We see that no one cries alone.
For this, we may receive a token
For the Ferryman’s turnstile,
To pay for passage, when we’re gone.

Henry A. Norris

Horologist
1906-1970

Maybe the best relationships
are based on little lies.
I know you had a shop,
I know you repaired watches,
dad showed me your workbench:

a bright light up above,
below, a field of felt—
—Elysian fields, maybe—
a million little drawers
full of tiny, shiny parts

that would keep better time.
I see this all quite vividly—
down to the oil atomizer
wearing chain mail.
I told him I remembered

sharing cookies with you.
I was 2 the year you died.
I lied. It would have killed him
to hear the truth. So, I shared
cookies with my grandfather.

I think you’d understand
the great necessity of lies
in love. In art. The spring,
the perfect movement, moment,
the whole idea of time.

So, let this be our secret.
I have no memory of
your cookies or your face.
But every line I write
today contains your name.

I saw it on your workbench.
There it shall remain.

Amphibians

My first exposure to this class of animalia came in the form of an ancient iron bullfrog with a maroon rubber gasket and an orange hole installed in his posterior.

After screwing the shiny brass end of a long green garden hose into his sphincter, my grandmother carried him around the corner of the house, and dumped him about 10 yards from her bed of white-purple-pink pansies on the front lawn. Then she returned to the spigot. My brother and I sweated expectantly on our naked haunches—ready to spring on her sprinkler at a moment’s notice. I noticed my brother’s back was striped with shadows. To the vultures on the telephone wires, we must have looked like tigers crouching in the grass.

Heaven only knows what the frog was thinking. He stared straight ahead, as if he had other, more pressing matters than tigers on his mind: namely, the location of my grandmother. Instead of blasting his entrails across the street—as an inept poet would do—leaving frog intestines hanging from the audience’s unfortunate faces—with one vigorous twist of her fist, my grandmother forced this fossil of the 1950s to cough up his rusty guts and resume spitting rainbows across creation.

Greedy children that we were, I suppose you could say that Kyle and I wrestled for the sky that day, dividing the rainbows between us, sousing each other with laughter. We left our grandmother’s thirsty flowers safely unmolested: behind the shallow ditches that marked their borders—their beds—immersed in nutritious mud.

It was an ingenious lesson in pleasure—one that I never forgot—and one that I will deliver to a few spaced-out friends in the dungeon of a sexclub in the Meat-Packing District in the not-so-distant future: where pansies are still almost entirely dependent on hoses and the kindness of a few quirky old ladies for care.

Telescope

Our source of illumination resides in a suburban side street of an obscure galaxy. You will notice it over there—next to Andromeda. The local star—or, Sun, as the system’s inhabitants call it—sits at the center of a swirling conspiracy of clouds, approximately 93 million miles from a mysterious embryo presently coalescing from comets, hydrocarbons, gas and dust, iron and silicon, and other odds and ends left over from The Big Bang.

It may take of eons of patient fiddling, but once I have adjusted my knobs to the proper celestial coordinates, you should be able to see a few plucky photons colliding with a surprisingly lovely little planet, the home world of the human race: a gorgeous globe, completely unique in my experience—green with plants, gray with clouds, and blue with water.

Vivid as it appears to us today, due to the extreme distances involved and the lugubrious speed of light, there is every chance that what we see before us has already evaporated into the void: every tear has fallen, every smile has been erased, the seven seas, once crowded with mackerel, have boiled off into oblivion. There is every possibility that nothing now remains of the Earth except for cinders.

Until the light catches up with facts on the ground, we cannot know for sure. Until then, the Earth will remain as exactly as we see it now, silently spinning, shimmering with magnificence in every atomic detail: from dusk to dawn—across the lawn—to a tree almost eclipsed by the sunset—a trunk almost the exact size and shape and texture of a particular tree I always tried but failed to embrace as a boy.

Perhaps you have seen it yourself, while passing through Buffalo, looking for a good time. One more slight adjustment and a walnut is plainly visible: in July, through the northwest quadrant of a pane of glass (second floor, double-glazed window on the extreme left, mine) at an angle of 15° above the western horizon.

That is me—lifting a filthy screen and poking my face out of the frame, so I can get a closer look at the leaves. I should introduce myself. I am your telescope. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events because my field of view is so narrow.

As you can see, the world in question still revolves around me and I am having trouble sleeping. When I get bored with watching the stars come out through the leaves—they all look the same nowadays—I go downstairs to my parents and complain.

They are sitting on the couch in the living room watching The Mod Squad or something. I do see people running through some sort of tunnel. Maybe they are photons. Whatever they are, I don’t really care. I am the star here, so I step in front of the TV. My three-year-old brother is whimpering again after his surgery. (Glittering scalpel, lazy blue eyeball.) He has been whining for the last hour. I ask if I can go next door and spend the night.

My mother says nothing, but quickly unfolds her legs and goes upstairs to check on Kyle. My father sighs. He stands. He turns me upside down in front of the Zenith, stashes me under his arm, and marches through the living room into another—even dimmer—room, where he sets me down gently and presses a black pasteboard button. Another button pops out of the wall and lux fiat.

In a flash, I am straddling two worlds—the orange carpet in the kitchen and the olive one in the dining room—Hell and Heaven—Heaven and Hell—the difference can be hard to tell without a look at the thermometer. 75°. Fahrenheit or Celsius? Let’s have another look. The thermostat doesn’t say. All I do know for certain is that it is hot, I am almost 5 and I am looking up at my father with awe while he lifts the telephone receiver from its cradle and starts dialing.

The next morning, around 8:30—aroused by the distant squeak of a mattress spring, followed by tip-toes, flushing, tip-toes, silence, and then some inexplicable giggles—the nosy scent of coffee nudges a door open to see if I am up to no good. I am not. I am sitting Indian-style in my grandmother’s pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 26 volume set of books—A Child’s Encyclopedia—that once belonged to my mother.

You might say that this is Volume T. T is my middle initial. T is where we discover ourselves today.