Mary Jo Bang

I Could Have Been Better

if I hadn’t been me but I was stuck

with my head tracking my thoughts,

my self tracing each second back

to a biblical beginning where

A was A and Eve was some elusive

bog-buried Lucy deep in the silt

of a mythic mountain where

Sisyphus opened his red-leather diary

and copied down the same

daily assignment. Once, in the middle

of a disaster, a procedural

policewoman knocked at my door

to ask whether I was all right.

Yes, I said, I was, but only if

we discount the present.

Later, lying in the bed I was born in,

I tallied my many errors, then added

my everlasting love of the few

I’d caught sight of in the midst

of being me. It was as if I had gone

to another country and now

couldn’t return without leaving part

of myself behind. I wanted to say

I love you but each time I tried,

the past tense pushed through.

There at the edge of the water—

Venus was where I’d last left her,

standing on a half-shell, staring hard

at reeds bending in the wind. She & I

both wanted to see something change.

The Doctor’s Monster is Drowning

A cameo radio telescope relentlessly pivots

to record the cosmic energy

continually drifting in from the spiral

maze of outer space. It’s a mirror of a mirror—

the core and substance of it untouched.

That agitated turbulence matches

the bizarre distortion of the light that paints

the face and fills the O. Impartial lightning

strikes the water, then disappears. Electricity.

Like Virgil says, each is pulled toward

one’s own idea of pleasure. The mind goes on

arguing. The watch-dogs bark. Bow-wow.

I close my eyes while forward facing the lake

until I stop, lie down, and look up to examine

the pattern the light leaves. Ophelia,

I think, looking like she’s in a state of thinking

she had never seen anything like it, however,

she had. She drowned. I am as she was

when alive and touching the seam where water

laps over its own edge above and below.

The Crowd Closes In

Above the crowd closing in were the three stars

that stood for three men, plus the constellation

of the girl with her legs apart, delivering

that nebula named The Pillars of Creation.

Rain was now bringing light to the clouds

across an expanse, while I continued on my way

to the scaffold. I had erred. Of course,

there were others before me. There was

Kafka and the problem of the father. Electra

and the problem of the mother. Freud

and the problem of the he, she, or they,

one kept wanting to see through the keyhole.

There was green, and all that green means,

including the neon highway to heaven.

There was C, whom I truly did love once

and S, whom you could say I still did.

As soon as I said it, I knew I was wrong.

When the trapdoor below me opened, I froze

in terror. This after having navigated the way

back from the border known as the brink.

I raised my wrist to my face

and watched as one hand quickly closed the interval

while the other, which had fallen behind,

seemed not to move. I thought, What a big stupid

O, that oculus. It only followed that a snake,

unable to find its way out, would swallow its tail

and pretend to be Other. Then keeping time would

begin, then the perpetual story where the second

in line was a girl who got blamed for nature.

Then the stupid wheel, the stupid pinion, the stupid

sluice, the stupid flood gate, the stupid oar,

the stupid mouth dripping spit and women

sliding under water. Even now, gold is collected

in the front office while in the back, men grunt

and rub their origins as a priest with a money belt

whisks in from the hallway to say, Hey, give us a kiss.

I saw the comic come on and quiet the audience.

I heard her say, “The fool’s job is to make the tragic

seem laughable.” “Now take your medicine,” she said.