The Best Seat Not in the House by Gregg Friedberg

GREGG FRIEDBERG

THE BEST SEAT NOT IN THE HOUSE

GREGG FRIEDBERG lives in Ohio and Guanajuato. He’s happiest creating series / sequences of poems, like this one: loosely narrative, a matrix of themes considered from various perspectives. In addition to The Best Seat Not in the House are the following: The Elopement, a novel comprised of a sequence of poems What’s Wrong, a sequence of poems Choose Just the Right Eye, a collection of poems Would You Be Made Whole?, a collection of unruly sonnets The Artist’s Reception, a sequence of photos paired with texts Why We Polka, a play Mr Godiva, a Shakespearean tale in five acts Me Gustaría Decirte Algo / I’d Like to Tell You Something, poems with facing-page Spanish translations by Humberto Hernández Herrera Some of the poems from The Best Seat Not in the House have been read by the author as part of the lectura series at Casa Cuatro and el Viejo Zaguán, Guanajuato, Guanajuato. Embajadoras Press Ontario, Canada Copyright © 2010, 2017 by Gregg Friedberg ISBN-13: 978-1-988394-02-2 Cover: “The Sacrifice of Isaac”, Caravaggio (or possibly Bartolomeo Cavarozzi) c 1598

For Jemima, Kezia, and Keren who, though fair, never breathe easy.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface

Voices you slept and woke to • 9 Marquis & muse • 10 Meaning spread thin • 12 Incompleteness theorem • 13 The way I do the things you do • 14

Too much with you • 17 Le petit Faust malgré lui • 18 The open road • 19 Seer • 20 Then another • 21 Children and princes • 22 At six boots • 23 Le goût de la boue • 24

3 One key fits all • 27 Wave with a bite • 29 Your trial • 30 Eine kleine Ironie • 32 The engine of meaning • 33 Phantom boudoir • 35 Snuff • 36

Faux finis • 39 Notes toward a boy mowing • 40 Like Sodom on the brink of destruction • 41 Between-wars suburb • 43 Recidivist • 44 Alla prima • 46

5 How you figured me out • 51 No eyes atop your head • 52 Golden age • 53 Bathetic fallacy • 54 Exquisitely • 55 Blind • 56 How a troubled boy’s different from a troubled thing • 58

Merely biding time • 63 True to form • 64 Gone too far. Too far gone. • 65 About to play dead • 66

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An abridged edition of this work was published by Main Street Rag in 2010

PREFACE Whether author or God, it’s his own redemption – his or hers – the creator seeks, creating. A desperate quest, but something must be done. Redemption’s most convincing that’s hardest won: The worse, the better, the Redeemer’s Rule. So more comfortably accomplished through a proxy in a subordinate frame of reference. If I’m God, I’ve got no choice: my creation’s all I’ve got. And though my surrogate – character or creature – must suffer, suffer awfully, he – he or she – mustn’t be purely victim. Else I were purely monster! He allows, at times his abuse is just desert. Between pleas for forgiveness he rails at me. Between episodes of torture I pity him, hold out hope. Can I really redeem myself by shunting my predicament to the next story down? redeem him whose proxy – presumably – I am? And what choice has he, my creature, but likewise to undertake his own redemption? by his own Word tease a cruel world out of the Void . . . and though the suspicion of depravity will nag at him too.

VOICES YOU SLEPT AND WOKE TO The take and give of your mother, the give and take of your father, the murmur of voices you slept and woke to inside the womb. Tucked in a basket in the midst of a picnic: something in the grass slithered right up to you. At roadside, your burnished thumb open for business. In a window, expecting. Skyblue and tempest, palace and hovel, musk and citrus, song and howl, dance and sickbed â&#x20AC;&#x201C; vary the spices, salt to taste, but it all came to this: your waist in a wrench of beastâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paws, your nape in the vise of his jaws, while he poked about in your cozy foyer. Crawl back to, climb into the lap of those voices that gave you meaning? that you gave meaning to? You were crying then too, suspicious and wet. You forget.

MARQUIS & MUSE You want attention. Nose my hand. Paw it. The tease of the third dimension. Hard to resist. How to play you? Naked, staked on a hill? All manner of creatures picking at you. Want up on my shoulders? Prime me with your promise, sweet and sour down my collar. How about I set you in a window? I like you behind the crossed panes. My distressed damoiseau sans merci. Press your nose to the glass. Flange your face with your hands. Lick the glass. Turn me on. Mimic my shuttling hand? Do you mock me? Or I you? Are you keen for my mind, repulsed by my flesh? Or vice versa. Scarcely an hour ago you bloomed

from my pencil onto the page. I couldn’t stop staring, played you like mad at first sight: crèche after Calvary, gallows after guillotine, deflowering after deathbed, crib after cage after coffin after confessional. I confess, I can’t get enough. How is it for you?

MEANING SPREAD THIN Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so little meaning in the world compared to what there might be. You feel this most sharply after visiting some storybook place. There everything means and not just incidentally. You wish the world were like that. At least your neighborhood, at least for a day. Alas, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only the thinnest smear of meaning over the great canvas, a few dabs of it here and there. Worst of all, the blank spot is you.

INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM Isn’t that a key on the marquetry table? Real, if anything is. Might give you the royal treatment, it might. All you know of it, though, is a dull ache against your liver, the crowding of your heart. Before you were Jack in a box, things were real: raw, right up against your skin, scraping, poking, stinging – demanding shares or entry. You were more of a thing yourself beneath the exuberant muss of your hair. Filthy but pure. Then you pounded your gavel – some thing close at hand – called Chaos to order, patted yourself on the back. Your house divided. Art whittled in the trenches. Grace mumbled under fire. Beauty skimmed from the rot pot. You lost sight of the hole in your back?

THE WAY I DO THE THINGS YOU DO Very young, very hurt, very old you don’t contain yourself well. You leak. The thingness of yourself obtrudes. Shitty buttocks, snotty nose, pussy sheets . . . and, of course, the holy waters, blood and tears. In the intervals you make a show of continence – the facepaint of ordinary health, a hopechest of whole things – but all the while you want to be inside someone. Or have him inside you. Such is the mess of passion. I can’t do without. Without the plot won’t thicken, its twists go slack. The sense of a thing cool in itself is whetted by that very thing in a sweat. Some day you'll hold this against me.

TOO MUCH WITH YOU Lovers . . . tormentors . . . the levers that dispense your crusty crumbs, your drip of bitters . . . So easy to induce dependency! I never meant to. You should be out on your own, picked on by bodies, if not your own size precisely, at least in your miniature league. When they abuse you, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plain, not vexed, reconcilable with the sky and the squirrel, with a fart or a bleat, a sucker half-sucked expecting to be sucked again but then tossed aside.

LE PETIT FAUST MALGRÉ LUI In the crook of a tremulous arm a man who called you son held you on a single tremulous knee, your tremulous thighs slender as his sinewed arms, the tractor firing beneath you, rutting the earth to and fro. Why did you bolt that harness of love? What devil of a divinity, of a poetaster spooked you? The treads grabbed and graved you, the prongs exhumed you, the devil rested, my ground prepared. You knew you were broken past fixing, smiled up at the limitless blue, at the awful, dumb gape you’d called dad. You couldn’t just leave him that way – that would be thinking of yourself only. So you made the bargain that ever since you’ve been bound by and back in the game stood shaky, brushed yourself off and giggled for his sake, hurried to the house, made up a scrip, a grip of your dolls, spit-polished your thumb and set off, sworn to live for my sins.

THE OPEN ROAD Fool’s gold and lizards, cheese stand and buggy wreck. Alas, you’re you through and through, passing through like a flu from outer space. Unless held up. Knocked down. Highway-robbed. Joy-ridden. Impresarios of one stripe or another. Sexor cash-hunger of one whim or another. They’ll try you in roles, one after another, according to the color of the whites of their eyes: blood, bile, or gall. To the style of their tongue: fork, knife, or spoon, leave you lashed to a signpost for the buzzards and ants whose specialty’s the last word. “If you’d lived, you’d be home!” But spared that and godsped, hop along, indulge. The road’s free with its sideshows: wells of magma, pillars of ash, and tar pits keeping my secrets.

SEER The dark boy behind the diamond-braid fence holds a rag that drips smutty water. According to my pencil he does windshields and spectacles – the sightseer’s friend. Eyes you awhile, then comes over to me, studies this page. Swaggers over to you, jeans full of dust in the cuffs, full of him in the crotch. Picks his nose, works out our connection. Now the litter’s atwitter like hatchlings. Swaggers back to me – really swaggers. ¿Algo para él? he asks, presents his illustrated palm. ¿Cómo no? I scribble a prayer, press it onto the skull and crossed bones. He swaggers over to you, flourishes it like a magician, pokes it through a diamond, slips it into your pocket, then threads through a sorry corner of his rag and wipes your specs.

THEN ANOTHER You’ve been hurt, diminished, crawled out of town, down to Cleopatra’s Bottom, into the standing water, the bluepocked moon in the water wobbling in your wake. A soft lump in the swamp – nits pimpling the surface around you, you’re as vulnerable as any thing, to thugs of every profession, fairies of every persuasion, to their definitions of you. You played too dangerously. Your luck took a turn for the worse. Then another. You were stripped, laid out on the surgeon’s table, stippled with grease, your leg fast asleep. He tucked in his napkin, took up his knife and fork. You crawled through the night out of town, dragged your carved leg just here into this pool of blue-pocked moon.

CHILDREN AND PRINCES are the risk-takers. They can’t stand to stand in a perfect tableau everlasting. It gets on their nerves! No sooner’s the castle complete, their thoughts turn to the siege. They launch their missiles, squeal with glee, jig around the ruins. Mercy, you plead. Why aren’t you like other boys, keen for a hard knock, a black eye, a scraped knee? Happily ever after’s too little to ask, don’t you think?

AT SIX BOOTS

These boys standing over you – are you their concern? They shift their weight, scuff you with their boots. In excited conversation you can’t follow. Not English, not your dialect of Gibberish. You’re all in silk, belted with gold braid, lips rouged, breath licoriced, heart pounding the pavement. Let your thighs fall open, your fingers splay, bask in the fluxy mist of the sentencing, the scissored sun of the gesturing. Take a lazy lick at a boot – what’s that beauty? A candy wrapper only inches from your nose, its allelujahs cancelled by a tire track. Once it held a sweet the size and shape of your toe. Consider what it means to lose your sweet – and a dimension. How that decreases your exposure. How it reduces the interest others take in you. How it makes it easier to settle gladly for less. But this raises a question or two: Has anything ever been whole? Why has anything ever been unwhole?

LE GOÛT DE LA BOUE If you don’t like cringing at the bases of things, suffering love at worm level, the gauche minuet of horny-toed shoes, flirting with rubbish and dairy-queen twists of dog shit, then pray Caesar’s men to mock you, to crown you, give you a leg up. But maybe you’ve got le goût de la boue. Has that ever occurred to you?

ONE KEY FITS ALL The counter-terror lad. Prone, his banded arm bound to the other behind his back, the key-hole covered by his terror-proof vest, and the key lying inches away, just beyond his reach. Wound up, is he free to act as he will until wound down? You want him to be. You’re seasoned enough to be bored if he only wandered in circles, faltered and died.

Then thwart.

You want a will to abet. Hope to pique.

Then dash.

Passion play.

Yes, it were cruel if he weren’t just a toy, if you couldn’t wipe the tears and hurt away. Back on the shelf for another day! Odd he never mentions the hole in his back, seems never to recall the wind up or down. Perfectly complicit in your fantasy. Shouldn’t he be?

Do you recall when your back was bared, when you were wound?

WAVE WITH A BITE Your feet are white flags. Your cock’s the pin on a dud grenade. Your hair’s a goose chase. And your eyes! Your eyes are war rooms with doll babies inside! Animals are coming: Manbeasts. Priests. Judges. Poets. Lord High Execs. Fathers Various & Sundry. Closing in. You on their mind. Already you smell the dank of their mantles, the gore of their lip rouge, the bitters of the creatures caught in their clipboards. It’s uncomfortable waiting for meaning. But no meaning fits that you’ve tried on yourself. You, on your own, lack conviction. Are these the pictures you work yourself up to? Is this the peg you work yourself onto? they’ll demand, call some god to witness, then force a fit, like the wave with a bite after toothless millions that collapses the cliff.

YOUR TRIAL You spoke softly, hard to hear above the buzz of the neon, the wheeze of the bailiff, refused to drag your leg behind you, wheel it in a barrow, flaunt it on the table, which cost you sympathy, threw up your hands but dammed your tears. Each day meanings were tried on you and rejected. Each day you went back for more. Outside the courtroom you ran the rose, resilient track â&#x20AC;&#x201C; kind to your leg, a lap farther each day, never hid your faulty form, made the best of what was left you, rang dumbbells in a chamber of mirrors: on racks a halt Bengali boy atoned, his home under water, his people brown buoys bobbing in the flood. Darkness grew from his armpits down to the hem of his shirt. A fortnight passed before you dared say a word to him: then he held your ankles and you held his,

you shared a paper cup of chocolate, exchanged the hot breath of your exertions, and the waters subsided. Through that night in your cell, between bouts of drowned juries, hung boys, you flooded three clear-plastic cups, set them on the sill, and at dawn the wizard sun turned them gold. You stood on your tiptoes, looked out. Be careful what you dream.

EINE KLEINE IRONIE Not the sentence of big-wigged men? (Shameless they asked, Have you no shame? behind a bench laid with tablets, a gavel, and flies belly up.) Nor of death-masked youths hard with dogma and zeal? (You studied their crotches while they looked to heaven, some other boy’s seed on your chin.) If you were never in the dock, cuffed and shackled, on no altar, bound nor gagged, if nothing more deliberate than a mishap in traffic, an off note of the spheres, a stumble of the dancer with thirteen left feet condemned you, then any solemn meaning proposed for you, noble or ignoble, dries up. Instead ironical ones sieve from all of your mouths, bearing mock witness. Or no witness at all. And once it’s done (not to be undone, prig that I am), with spit and my rubber I’ll tidy up after you. Rub you in? Rub you out? The work’s the same.

THE ENGINE OF MEANING It’s poised above you, ready to prick, and your old sense sieves out of you, runs to the edge and spills over. Your new sense gathers like incense, thick as the mattress, dark as the headboard, what, you realize, you’ve been waiting for but had no idea of. A pang of pleasure over a drone of pain. Concentrated as nothing has been since the pure start broke into pieces. You played with the pieces, cutting your fingers. Didn’t know why. Nothing made sense. It hadn’t occurred to you, you’re a piece, too. Blackhairy limbs arc to the key – who is this Manbeast preparing your meaning? Abraham your father. Amnon your brother. Why does the act matter?

Because meaning costs, darling, and hard, fast meaning costs dear. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the transaction called human. If sacrifice were revocable, then all sense would be called into question, become unmoored, unhinged, threads in the wind . . . The act seals. Breaks a seal. Means: whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done is done.

PHANTOM BOUDOIR How about a break? Find some crate to nap in. Or a chaise longue at water’s edge: you’ll be a picture longing upon it, browsing the harbor from the best seat not in the house. In the storied towers, along the skeleton quays dusk turns up the lamps of chance romance, and on barges and tugs, longboats and skiffs the lanterns of safe distance. Through the murky purple you’ll make out a figure – tentative – could use a little meaning, you think. It occurs to you, you could, too. Appeal to him? Not by name but direct from the gut, by means of that lower telepathy. Before you make up your mind, he’ll squat, hide his face, and for his sake so will you.

SNUFF No, you might say to your executioner. Or Yes. Thin ejaculation, either way.

FAUX FINIS Like a thing you bear the meaning you’re given. But unlike any thing you take it to heart. So that if at the last moment – everything ready, old meanings sealed and shed – the dagger’s stayed, you lie suddenly void. So let down. Lift yourself on an elbow. How to fill in the blank?

NOTES TOWARD A BOY MOWING My hand’s teaching you, shuttling slowly below the sill, about the boy mowing the common, breaking the Sabbath. He’s carved clumsy initials on the bases of birches, sparks a knob of granite now and again. Woke the dog, then seduced her! To the lord of the land complain, to the tablets and gavel of village council! Vainglory his standing blue veins. Go down, stand in his way, peep into his shirt, into the shimmery vale of sweat, wag your finger: mustn’t pet her Every one of his fingers a mischief . . . and the salt licks of his golden calves.

LIKE SODOM ON THE BRINK OF DESTRUCTION What is he thinking? the lord of the land, whose porch you’ll crawl to at midnight against the debris-flushing flood in the road. They’re hellish creatures that belched and rutted among your doilies and dollies. You’ve X-ed the door with a paste of their seed and tobacco ash. What is he thinking? you lay figuring, wanting green pastures, still waters, your hearing, but not your heart, hardened against the shame downstairs. You helped the two strangers – fairy boys – duck into the house. No one with pants on when the sheriff came. Acting on orders, he claimed, wrenched your arms loose of them, took them away. The storm clouds gather, charge the moon – she can’t back off fast enough! Bells in squat towers toll, toll, toll . . . rise, rise, salt your loins like a rabbi and your lips like a glass. Go down, face the torrents, trample the backsliders. Or mutter against them.

On the porch of the lord of the land, against a salt pillar lean your stick figure, study each soggy match that refuses to light. A forked spark in the east reveals those huddled around you: in gorgeous tatters, fractured bangles. Set and patient their faces. Not gnawing their lips, not clawing the backs of their hands.

BETWEEN-WARS SUBURB In certain weather, in certain light even the neatest between-wars suburb smells of decay, appears absurd. Any remains of a life affirm its death. And any latter day’s a forced fit in an old house. All staying on is dumb constancy. Sooner or later even the deepdarkest secret heaves up in the garden or dislodges a brick in the wall and shines in the chink like a leer. You understand this perfectly, standing amid ruins, feeling their freshness, their openness, their willingness to accommodate: past failure since past expectation – each next dilapidation’s pristine. Past meaning, in a word. Meaning’s what soured, what spoiled. Spontaneity moldered to insistence, grace to imposture. Abuse after expiry. Best-guess once upon a time become article-of-faith. Swept away.

RECIDIVIST Let’s say the meaning you give a boy mowing – what ought to be valor – turns impure. And even while he crops and shuttles, ennobling the neighborhood, your hand is shuttling, too. Sentence yourself – your smutty mind – to hang by the neck until . . . Or to genteel labor in a brownstone B&B. It’s seen better days but what hasn’t that’s seen any days at all? Marble baths with gilt fixtures won’t fail to charm the bourgeoisie if the towels are toasty. But the neighborhood’s sinking. Everything’s shuddery. Not a joint stays sealed. If guests are frisky in the shower, they shower the diners below! And the winters: seven melancholy months that get to you after only two – a clattered demi-tasse, a catch in your ‘bonjour.’ And how to welcome gays

but not put off straights? Does he despise the hungry stares? Does she feel like odd-man-out? You think: you’ll never get it right. She dabs her lips, says goodnight, but he stays on, animates, courts the slender boy traveling alone who moves like a dancer with a girl’s face, speaks French like Chénier so softly you scarcely hear. A knee grazes a thigh while they’re laughing. Now while they’re not. The boy looks up, finds you staring, blushes, upsets his glass. A drip begins, quickens, from above.

ALLA PRIMA

Perched on the end of a dock, working your toes – convinced of the gravity of it all, then of the silliness. The boy slack beside you hasn’t a clue, eyes shut to all farces, and you with an arch finger circle the hole in his belly, there where his first engagement was broken off. Lovers are unreliable, you think, finger circling, as lovers, certainly. Some meanings expire more readily than others. I’d rather be a thing, you think, folded and spindled, drawn and quartered, puffed up, blown down, tire-trod. I think so, you think. Meanwhile the prodigal sun’s moved on, left you la vie en rose, and the boy beside you expands, contracts, clutches you, draws himself to you. His lips and tongue come alive on your neck, frisk up to your ear whereinto he breathes love like you’ve swept the stakes, but then

licks it out like it were a mistake! Make believe, you think. At moments like this myths converge, concentrate . . . Anything can anymean. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s human. Really human. The starry curtain falls, the waves clap the pilings. The hurt creature who played your lover sneezes hard, and a blood drip begins from his nose off his lip. So many holes, you think, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the trouble, circle his nostril, coat your finger, paint yourself.

HOW YOU FIGURED ME OUT You were going about our business, making believe as youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d always done. Interpreting this, squaring it with that, connecting the dots. Not rude or boorish, but not afraid to speak your mind. It was hard going. You kept getting it wrong. But kept at it. The perfect protagonist. I was bringing you out in installments, a chapter a fortnight. Yes, a long time to be cliff-hanging, but it kept your fans keen. That was my downfall, the trouble with tricks as treats. This morning, a bit out of sorts, you sharpened a pencil.

NO EYES ATOP YOUR HEAD No insight into the depths beneath your feet. I’ve just trickled molasses above your cage onto your head. You jump – hiss! I reach in, swab you with a finger. Lick it. You do, but sulkily. I offer my palm. Climb aboard. Set you down beside my foot sinister. You stare at the great toe. Your revenge. As if to say, the rest of me’s not so great. Come on, then. I hand you back into the cage, and you make for your desk. You’ve been writing: a long, discursive piece on the states of existence, the spectrum from pure matter to pure myth, from being merely a thing to being merely meaning. I’ll leave you to it.

GOLDEN AGE Do you remember when you could still run, still grip with your toes and the so-called ball of your foot that great dirtball Earth by its scruff and wheel it beneath you? A wheel you had no choice but to love: it gave you your one shot at grace – glee glinting from your cording legs – grace in spite of those flailing arms, shadow-boxing the dirt they’d divorced. Then you’d finish and fall, dead out of love, the ground ground to a halt, and I’d come for you, test your wee heart-throb with my ink-stained thumb, tuck you into my briefcase and take you home. O les beaux jours! my mind in a free and happy state, delighting in its own activity, the least external impulse enough to set it working!

BATHETIC FALLACY It’s the jig’s-up sun betrays you: simple shiner with no discretion. Who would have thought dumb constancy would be deemed love? That’s the poet’s part in it – preposterous minstrel, tipsy in jingle-bell slippers, fast and loose with equations. The litter and the lizard bask in the blind largesse, wink now and again at a quivering meal in its betrayed hiding place. Was it a wild quip I let slip misled you? led you to expect the music of the spheres but not double-cross accounting? love but not a muffled scream for it beneath quaked ruins? not a red-faced itch below the belt?

EXQUISITELY Rain. The bloom of mustiness as it laid the dust and litter. Gentle but persistent. Like me, I told you. While we stood pondering the ballistic miracle of it, parched and crusty creatures emerged two by two, refreshed themselves. Each bore his or her characteristic cross matched exquisitely to the bearer’s capacity for bearing up. That’s key, I thought, and the thought twinged my heart. I reached for you but missed. You’ve taken to wearing camouflage of late.

BLIND Wicked conquistadors nailed you and the Aztec gentleman your father into a surplus treasure chest, hove you over. Now you’re voyaging darkly on the bounding main, your spectacles star-spangled. I’m taking your words for it, peeping over your shoulder through a hole in the wall. To the best of my recollection you’ve no experience sailing. Lived to write about it, though! And the specs are jolly good, fella, the writer’s special friends. So, what do you say? Is art the forge of hope? Or the refinery of despair? Or a note to oneself of condolence: on the occasion of a stunted morning, at the prospect of a weedy afternoon on the run-down hacienda. Don Hank’s soon to wear a frock, but just now he’s playing torero – cheeky pants, crimson hanky – to your shy bullock: head afuddle and legs atangle. Your specs flash the tease of his cape.

Innocent, is he, of the hole in the wall?

HOW A TROUBLED BOY’S DIFFERENT FROM A TROUBLED THING Kick a stone in the road or a turnip, stub your toe and bleed. Blood can be got from these things if a boy’s in between. You eat bugs, I’ll eat berries. Or vice versa. What fun! I’ll fart and you sing. Don’t cry over milk I’ve tricked you into spilling: declare yourself the Lactomancer, peer into the pool of it, scry a new world in it, work it up in a milk dance or in The Book of Milk, from a cheesy tease in the garden to a sponge of whey on the hill. But remember the cardinal rule: you can’t make a world and be in it, too. That’s a frontier you can’t cross. It can’t really be you on the cross. First your creatures will be things, neither patient nor impatient. They’ll twitch in the pumpkin-shell sun, the frankenstein storm.

Then forces that couldn’t care less. Then – you’ll thicken the plot – intentions that care and contest. Then a boy who asks why he’s here. Tell him he’s made in your image (now that begs a question!), not to trouble much over himself, instead to set something in motion the next story down: cowboys and injuns, foreskins and fleas, cheeks that redden from rage, from shame, and when thrashed with canes – kinky’s great fun, he’ll soon see! Tell him, make meaning for others. That’s fiction. The rest lacks conviction.

MERELY BIDING TIME What do you mean by that? counting down not knowing what you’re on or counting on, while Abraham implores Yahweh, while Enola Gay wings her horsefly way, while Vulcan clears his throat. Born of pure meaning, dying into it – it’s in the meanwhile you become a thing extra, a bullock loose in my workshop, a thrashing about in my bed, a trivial creature of habit oftener than not. There’s romance and there’s business. The music of yearning. The buzz of having and having to. I know things about you that are useless to me. In your story everything must mean. That’s the cross, it might be said, I bear and on which, most assuredly, you’re crucified. Admired on your way home from the barber’s? Ate a passable supper? Got a laugh at the office? Who cares? Those are the pages to skip.

TRUE TO FORM The dogspel according to you: a dog does what dogs do, is what dogs are. Gospel likewise. Ars poetica too. For lack of a larger context, you say. No chastening space to adjourn to, no bracing elevation to climb to. Can’t, you say. Can’t imagine. Nothing’s infra dig. If it’s gamy, I roll in it. If it tickles, I play into its hands. But there’s hope for me, isn’t there? whose creature – by chance? – is nobler than its creator, who have the example of your virtue. You might say, I’m reforming myself at one remove. Rubbish, you say. Hope’s a side glance in a spare room toward a locked door. The rest is dread. What could I know of that? lapper that I am at open wounds, filling my pen in them. Though, you say, there might be hope for the exceptional dog.

GONE TOO FAR. TOO FAR GONE. Not so long ago – I’m sure you recall – you were in the thick of things, bull’s eye for my slings and arrows. But then you took it all wrong. Without the grain of salt. Snide asides to the audience. Off-the-cuff plays for sympathy. Odd-man-out you’ve proved to be, a threat to the scheme of things – this bawdy house, huckster’s mall. You subvert its dysintegrity! Yours will be a subtle kind of exile: still lit by the equal-opportunity sun, now and again a dustmote’s careless bed. Some twig may yet yield to your hand or fly give you berth. But I won’t be noticing you. I’m closing the book on you.

ABOUT TO PLAY DEAD Tuxedo. Hair slicked. Teeth polished. Trembling. All by yourself you got everything down from the shelf: the taffy noose and candy-cane stool, wing-tipped slippers, the application to the coroner, the no-thank-you note. No, it hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been all you hoped. All you feared, though, and more. Only think of the forks in the forks

in the forks

in the road . . . Ever-branching error, you think. Making love is nothing if not creating the desperate need for it. Like creation generally.

I meant to tell you. Wouldn’t it be splashier out-of-doors, on one of the corners-cum-church, the noose strung from the cross beam? from a gargoyle’s mandible? A crowd will gather – you’re feeling that need, aren’t you? for casual company, the wayward world staggering around you, confetti of error swirling round about you. That will stiffen your resolve. Incognito I’ll circulate, sandwiched between the tablets of my commandments, wear your heart on my sleeve, hand out program notes and party favors, kick the stool to one side. Or a child will who knows not what she does.

About the Author Gregg Friedberg grew up in Columbus, Ohio but for many years has lived in Upper Sandusky, a rural county seat, and nowadays spends half of each year in Guanajuato, Mexico where he participates in the bilingual arts-and-culture scene and gives regular readings. Professionally he’s been a partner in a computer software company, writing applications for Ohio county government, but has always written poetry, is happiest when writing sustained sequences, like The Best Seat Not in the House, loosely but not conventionally narrative, treating a matrix of themes from an evolving perspective. In What’s Wrong, a longer sequence, the first-person narrator is a refugee from American marketing culture. Would You Be Made Whole?, a collection of unruly sonnets, was published in 2015 by Aldrich Press. Friedberg is completing a collection of photographs with corresponding texts, The Artist’s Reception, the result of the black-and-white figure photography project he’s been working on the past several years. The texts, which also tell a story, incorporate some of the wittier comments that have been posted with the photos at the art site deviantart.com. Excerpts have appeared in the art magazines, DayDreaming, Noisy Rain, Vitruvian Lens, and The Male Form (tMf magazine). And for many years Friedberg has been a member of Frank Bidart’s summer workshop at Skidmore College.