SPLIT INFINITY
It was the split infinitive, to really live
-Edward Kleinschmidt
Waking up wasn’t a clean slate. The previous day stuck.
The little flares in the frying pan reminded us
How much we were alive, how the dropping bomb
Would blow out the day. Think of that tire
On the freeway, the driver holding on, white-knuckled,
All the atoms without crash helmets, the heart
Jumping to the throat. It was to split infinity, to really live.
To see inside things, make those X-ray glasses really work.
Splitting open the pear to its seeds. Pulling the apple core out
After minor surgery. The knife blade wiped off and clean.
I think of my father, that small space of time
He lived in, home from the doctor’s, his internal organs
Outlined in ball-point pen, pointing out what existed
Within. To really live. Heart. Kidneys. Spleen.
Blood cells slip through veins, making only a little noise
About being trafficked in this way. I mention this
Only because I think in circles. Winter ringing
Our ears with the cold. Summer buzzing insistent
As blood heating that which the vessels pass close to.
Though vessel seems a cold word, mechanical, passing
Under the sea, the ship’s prow riveted at the seam. Some
Pentagon code word for disaster. Code words we’d be
Remembering: Nuclear winter. Cold war. Weapons freeze.
Economic sanctions exposing countries to the cold. Cold rice
Caked on plates. A new sound in a minor country–are not
Light and gross bodies incontrovertible? Contrails vaporize
The sky. Some hole in the ozone warms things up.
I could think what it means to really live.
I could melt ice-cubes on my back. | could
Freeze blood, donate it to heat someone else’s body
After bullet-holes or surgery, small red
Explosions heating the bandages. I could cover my ears
Against the bomb, sound out the word
Hiroshima, a sound like fire filling the vacuum
Artists, Like Poets
for Alexandra
Artists like poets — though distant, they’re kin; twin spirits
Lighting paths for one another, complementary stars spun in
Elliptic orbit, colors on the color wheel. Red, green. Orange, blue.
Xeroxed like Warhol’s Marilyn. Endless diptychs, endless
Appositives lying side-by-side-by-side on the beach where
Night tangles sand into their long hair. They
Dream this starry night they want captured, whirlpool galaxies
Rendered impasto — all the rough constellations: Orion,
Andromeda, Pegasus. They want. They want to name them all.
WILLY NILLY
We don’t pitter patter. Our large bones pounce, thrash
through the underbrush, erupt flocks of small birds
from the field. Like bomb fragments, we’ve given up
our language to the sky, tipped the page in the right light
and let the words bleed off the page, soak
into the dust. Think of that ribbon of bats, streaming
from the cave, scattering into dusk — that’s us.
We’re uncivilized and refuse love, its spelling
the quick click of eggshell on frying pan, that audible
sizzle in time. Breaking up our words was easy,
it was cracking the atom — the Big Bang
theory we latched onto in high school, sensible as
steam, molecules bumping elbows, hot and
agitated. Without polite words, our mothers
disowned us, our brothers drank too much
and drowned — not enough jobs at the sawmill,
they said, not enough love. Now, we swim
in the river with nobody’s father, wear our coats
inside out so we may feel rough
leather against our skin and know. Before sleep,
we lie on leaves, let our hair fan out like stars, count
hand-prints we’ve left across the beach — hand-prints
that grow larger by the day until one hand raised
is a shadow on our faces, tipped ink spilling
back into that collapsed star of our heart.
Francois Chan received a MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and has had publications in The North Dakota Quarterly and The Santa Clara Review.
Chantarelle's Notebook 