Max Ritvo

There is a white stone cliff over a dropping slope
sliced along with bare trees.

In the center of the cliff is a round dry fountain
of polished stone. By seizing my whole body up

as I clench my hand I am able to open
the fountain into a drain, revealing below it

the sky, the trees, a brown and uncertain ground.
This is how my heart works, you see?

This is how love works? Have some sympathy
for the great spasms with which I must open

myself to love and close again, and open.
And if I leapt into the fountain, there is just no

telling: I might sever myself clean, or crack
the gold bloom of my head, and I don't know

onto what uncertain ground I might fold like a sack.
...

The guardian angel sits in the tree
above the black lip of street
the man walks down.
He calls the man Cargo.

The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man,
and the street he walks is a boat,
the hull like a coal crater.

Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box.

The angels call these overlays dreams,
and believe they crop up because angels
can't sleep but want to — 

space falls apart when you have unlimited time.

•


The cargo is rattling in the boat.
Maybe it's just the waves, maybe it's rats.
What's the difference? Either way: it's the box.

The angel sends the man
a happy vision from his past — the time

he fed birthday cake
to his goldfish
after an unsuccessful party.

The angel thinks he's applying lemon oil
to the creaky, wounded wood of the box.
He knows it's palliative, but it's beautiful.

•


The man reaches the end of the street. He's a sick man
and he starts to ponder death
as he often does these days:

All of death is right here
— the gods, the dark, a moon.
Where was I expecting death
to take me if everywhere it is
is on earth?

At life's close, you're like the child whose parents
step out for a drive — 

everyone else out on a trip,
but the child remains in the familiar bed,
feeling old lumps like new
in the mattress — the lights off — 

not sleeping, for who can sleep
with the promise of a world beyond the door?

•


That night the child dreams
he's inside the box.

It's burning hot, the heat coming
from bugs and worms
raping and devouring one another.

He starts the hard work
of the imagination,
learning to minister to the new dream.

Perhaps all that's needed is a little rain — 
for everyone to drink and have a bath.

Outside: a car humming,
somewhere, his mother's singing.
...

His father told him never start writing
or reading in the middle of a book.

There's a title, don't go on without one.
And he didn't go on without one — he had the title Private.

This was life's taproot — the obedient
boy began always at the beginning.

Books start out with what the boy calls Beauty
— the boat's still in port. The cat's alive. Pantry's packed.

Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense,
what with all the present tense left to go.

Usually, by the first page or second,
a relationship emerges between text and title.

Some of the words blur on the page
and the key ones glow,

as does the title, and a fat red arrow
with two heads connects them. Yum.

It was like owning something. The way
when he paid for a fine hat and put it on,

he felt a circuit through the rim and top
and sides, swilling gray hat blood.

And he felt like his heart controlled this circuit
remotely, via microchip.

If a book could not service him with this truth,
which was all the pleasure in the world,

he would usually stop reading.
He saw the end of very few books anyway — 

who needs two climaxes? After that intense sensation
the book always changed. It was like looking

at a plate of food he'd half-eaten
and had rendered him bloated and nauseous.

Now he is on marches. Now his gun
makes a nest in his arm crook

with nasty red welts for straw.
Now his rear leaks smelly water all day.

His whole life he has balanced himself
on an absurdly slender proscenium

and as he continues to edge out
he can't tell if it isn't maybe a gangplank.

He doesn't like the switch-up.
What's out there? he wonders, in what he'll call ocean for now.

To his right is an alligator. But the head-ridge has no bone.
It's propped up instead by fumes: rich, dark, and pungent.

Far off, men are cradling cracked dolphins.
Arrows of fire shoot out the blowholes. The wounds bleed silver.

Perhaps they are connecting to a title in the sky.
But he's not seeing any of these things.

The world is mostly brown and black,
and smells like a rotting fridge.

What is it? What is it? Is it a hand?
Is it an eye? Is it a hat? It is time.
...

After the cocoon I was in a human body
instead of a butterfly's. All along my back

there was great pain — I groped to my feet
where I felt wings behind me, trying

to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so
after a day of exertion. I called that time,

overwhelmed with the ghosts of my wings, sleep.
My thoughts remained those of a caterpillar — 

I took pleasure in climbing trees. I snuck food
into all my pains. My mouth produced language

which I attempted to spin over myself
and rip through happier and healthier.

I'd do this every few minutes. I'd think to myself
What made me such a failure?

It's all a little touchingly pathetic. To live like this,
a grown creature telling ghost stories,

staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours.
And even over dinner or in bed — 

still hearing the stories, seeing the pictures — 
an undertow sucking me back into myself.

I'm told to set myself goals. But my mind
doesn't work that way. I, instead, have wishes

for myself. Wishes aren't afraid
to take on their own color and life — 

like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet
puffs out his cheeks and strips them bloody.
...

When I close my eyes there's a white key.
But maybe it's a box, so I can't press it.

The sides are shell blue, but I can't check
without turning the box. The musician

told me his sister and he would say Morgem
and expose the teeth and flare the nostrils

to express a particular affection. The white box
won't say Morgem. Or Corbemsalad.

It must be a heartbreaking desk.
It says to be in on a secret

just means to know you're in a secret — 
the pleasure's like two people

beheld by a third in the act
of making meaning.

It says on one hospital floor
the humans die.

Another they give birth.
A third they grow new chins.
At a fourth they're lopped.

When the floors mix by mistake,
it's usually in the middle
where the desk rasps

under husks of  ink, and the nostrils
grow for air. We talk, never sing,

because music gives the god room to stretch
and the god kills by growing in the head.
...

Two bedtimes ago, through my window,
I heard a cat get eaten.

As the cat split, it sounded like
a balloon string put to scissors

to make curls so the birthday boy
would smile extra wide.

Last night, by the same window,
I heard mostly my breath, inside of which

was a small baby suckling
my air for his milk.

When I bolted upright, the baby
grew up into a carpenter,

nailing his brains into the side of my lung
to babyproof the light switch.

Flip the switch and it lights
a picture of my emaciated, sore-ridden bum

for my breath to laugh at.
Why is my breath so unlike yours?

My ears? Why do I only hear such unnatural things?
Although, come to think of it, death is completely natural.

I'm just exasperated. Everywhere life-sounds
swarm this, our shared pond, like mating turtles.

Cars whoosh, schmoozers hum,
snakes spit poison, Martin and Martina say yes

and sob and hold, but my ears fill up instead
with eggshells cracked by the bumbling parents.

I cleaned my left ear out,
but my nail cut the drum.

It filled with water
and is deaf for now.

I'm leaving the right one dirty. No sudden changes.
Keep everything dry. Let it figure out a way to heal itself.

And me:  just practice living with yourself  deaf.
Sometimes your brain is as unwelcome

as muscles or guns. It's obvious to others. Maybe even
everyone. Don't wish for anything. Don't get organized.

Don't buy a book. Don't go to bed early.
Seek out beige, in foodstuffs and landscapes.

Chew gum if  you're overwhelmed.
You're in this alone. That means there's nobody to stop you.

You're almost at the finish line.
But first, you have to pick a finish line.
...

A lavender fog breeds with our children.
Our girls are dying on the roadsides,
their wombs pried open by the scramble that grows inside.

Save us from the lavender fog — 
it's the ghosts of your dead people,
who have never bothered our village before.

Their shapes convulse in our water sources.
When we get close enough to hear their ghostly voices,
they say yum-yum pleadingly
and shout out better better as in I'll get better.

Some of our children have taken these as lyrics.
Your ghosts are corrupting the youth.

Stop using us as musical instruments,
this is a great taboo you have violated!

Go back to making tubes of wood vibrate
and scraping your goat gut.
...

For the first time tonight,
as I put my wife to bed
I didn't have to shove her off me.

She turned away in her sleep.

I wondered what was wrong with my chest.

I felt it, and the collar bone
spiked up, and where she'd rest
her cheek were ribs.

Who wants to cuddle a skeleton?

My skeleton wandered from the house
and out onto the street.

He came, after much wandering, to the edge of a bay
where a long bridge headed out—
the kind that hangs itself with steel

and sways as if the wind could take
away its weight.

There were mountains in the distance—
triangles of cardboard—
or perhaps the mist was tricking his eyes.

The instant the mist made him doubtful,
it turned to rain.

The rain covered everything. The holes
in his face were so heavy
he wondered if the water was thickening—
if he was leaching into them.

He panicked. Perhaps he was gunked up
with that disgusting paste,
flesh, all over again.

If I were alive I'd have told him
I was nothing like what he was feeling—

that the rain felt more like
the shell of a crab
than the way I'd held him.

That it felt more like him.

But I wasn't alive—
I was the ghost in the bridge
willing the cars to join me,

telling them that death was not wind,
was not weight,

was not mist,
and certainly not the mountains—

that it was the breaking apart,

the replacement of who, when, how, and where
with what.

When my skeleton looked down
he was corrupted

in the femur by fracture,
something swelling within.

Out of him leaked pink moss.
Water took it away.
...

I touch my palms to the floor
and granite rhinos surge up my arms
and lock in my shoulders.
Water flecks on my back
and my head is shaved
by bladed cream.

But then my time in my body is up
and it's time for my mind:
It seeks wisdom
and the rhinos fall into a well,
their faces falling apart—

I want to know what their last words are
but their lips are fading into the purple.

I put my hands into the ground again
but rhinos come only for the body
and never for the mind.

I used to want infinite time with my thoughts.
Now I'd prefer to give all my time
to a body that's dying
from cancer.
...

It is rare that I
have to stop eating anything
because I have run out of it.

We, in the West, eat until we want
to eat something else,
or want to stop eating altogether.

The chef of a great kitchen
uses only small plates.

He puts a small plate in front of me,
knowing I will hunger on for it
even as the next plate is being
placed in front of me.

But each plate obliterates the last
until I no longer mourn the destroyed plate,

but only mewl for the next,
my voice flat with comfort and faith.

And the chef is God,
whose faithful want only the destruction
of His prior miracles to make way
for new ones.
...

I am writing you from the bathtub
where I am trying to ease my joints.
The pain seems to move from the front half
of a joint to a back half.

I can't track it across my body.

My pain is mild but deep—like it's reminding
my body of something it once was.
It thinks I'm a baby:

Look at the oatmeal prepared for you daily,
and your electric blankets,
and it's me you choose to lavish your attention on?

You have so much more than me,
though you had me first, when you were a Worm.

This pain thinks thinking is idiotic, embarrassingly juvenile,
and I'm proof of that.

And it's not even the pain foremost,
it is the story of me in pain that is paining me.

I am possessed with self-pity,
and it is expressing itself
out of my mouth. It sounds like a whole flock of sheep suddenly

realizing the flock is an imposed externality.
...

I found myself unable to consume
the scallops after reflection—
their whole lives were
eating and suffocating.

This is much sadder than tortured people—
in extreme pain we leave our bodies
and look down to commit the pain
to memory like studious angels.

The waiter brought me two fortune cookies.
One future was traumatic enough.
I decided to open just one cookie—
the one on my right side.

It said in blue on a thin white strip,
You must learn to love yourself.

*

The cookie was much less sweet
than my psychiatrist.

Earlier that day he said he was proud
that was my tumors grow
my self-loathing seems to shrink.

My teeth made the cookie blades
that cut my tongue, and I spat it out.

I was seized with a question for Dr. Possick,
but he was on the other coast, fast asleep.

I would've asked
If all of me is the part that's loving
what is left to love?

*

I was suddenly overwhelmed with certainty
that the second cookie could answer my question.

I imagined the paper as a body—
a second body for me,

baking in a clay oven
half beneath it and half overhead.

I didn't open the cookie, though.
I have to grow up at some point—

my imagination can't always be kicking fate
as if it were the floor at a stupid party.

*

But when you decide someone has something to say
their silences speak to you too—

The cookie's clear wrapper had a rooster printed on it,
the lamp's reflection made a little sun
clutched by the talons, deep in the clay:

What is left to love
is the part of you that is already dead.

*

The dead part of me
is very busy preparing heaven for the rest.

He envisions it as a dream cemetery:
no rabbis, wildflowers and scrub everywhere,
rolling hills with nothing marked,

computer chips clipped to the ears of the dead
so that loved ones can visit the exact spot.

He is unskilled with his hands,
but he's moneyed and shouts well.

It's hard to love people committed to projects:
when I tell him he's abusing the labor

he smiles proudly and says, God can only do good,
I can do good and bad.
...

Today I woke up in my body
and wasn't that body anymore.
 
It's more like my dog—
for the most part obedient,
warming to me
when I slip it goldfish or toast,
 
but it sheds.
Can't get past a simple sit,
stay, turn over. House-trained, but not entirely.
 
This doesn't mean it's time to say goodbye.
 
I've realized the estrangement
is temporary, and for my own good:
 
My body's work to break the world
into bricks and sticks
has turned inward.
 
As all the doors in the world
grow heavy
a big white bed is being put up in my heart.
...