Jeffrey McDaniel
Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back
I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.
The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.
Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.
A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,
I surrendered my identity in your eyes.
Now I’m just like everybody else, and it’s so funny,
the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.
I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?
I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.
Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.
I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.
I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.
————————————————————————————-
The Day It Rained Splinters
Lady Liberty, I understand your confusion, watching
that first plane smash into the skyscraper, but surely
you could’ve swatted the second one from the air,
or at least leaned forward and caught the people
who leaped. They jumped as humans and landed
like meat. If only we’d put a hose in your fingers,
not a torch, you could’ve doused the flames. And where
was God? Perhaps blessing some other country
for a change, as our fifty lucky stars sank into us
like shark’s teeth. The sky was a big black cloud,
and the cloud had feet. Now the celestial scoreboard
reads: Allah 1, God 0. Soon the blood will flow,
but with so much dirt in our throats, how can revenge
taste sweet? Carnage Asada is what they served
in the voluptuous borough of grief, lifting the hem
of mayhem, feeding us a glimpse up the skirt of eternity.
Photos of the missing taped to every phone booth.
Operator, call Batman, tell him we’re stuck
in the first act of a blockbuster, and there’s no
normal to return to. Normal is entombed in the debris,
the l demolished like a building, the O a fireman’s mouth
opened in scream, as F-15’s scrape like the nails
of a prostitute down the sky’s chalkboard. What
yardstick gets used to secure a measured response?
Already scuba divers have plunged into the melting
pot. I hope they dig with sacred shovels, for there are spirits
in that rubble, the closest thing we have to holy
land. But maybe those buildings were phoenixes. Doesn’t
our language suggest that mess is merely a stop
on the way to messiah? Before squashing all Arabs
into a sentence, like a four syllable word, with only
one meaning, we should see what becomes of the ashes.
Maybe a dab of those cinders will make irises
bloom in the retinas of the blind, hair sprout
on a bald man’s scalp, tulips erupt through
sidewalk cracks. I mean, haven’t they already
succeeded in making compassion gush from
the tough leather of every New Yorker’s heart?
