UDP 2006
FLIGHT TEST
Lewis Warsh
{1}
Sometimes the road is familiar—you don’t turn back The door of heaven swings open on its hinges Memory is only a word in italics breathing fresh air You wear my clothing inside out Leave what you said in parentheses so we can read it again I pretend to be the child I used to be The age of unhappiness withered into fragments
Did I squeeze
through the turnstile to remember the pain? Let me relax on a sofa while my uncles recite the Torah. My hands favor cloth, but detergents are necessary to clean the plates.
{2}
a 3-D image of a mummy is me & the screen goes blank what I do is copy something someone else wrote down my memory is walking ahead of itself & won’t look back
{3}
The notion of authenticity still seems to have some value: experience suspended in mind glazed over by despair. Often the kingdom of heaven eludes me too. I see it from a distance but I can’t go in. (And even if I could go, no one I know would be there.) There’s something about yourself you don’t like, but what is it? I spend my afternoons lying to myself in a storm of illusion. Can’t think back any further than yesterday. It’s no picnic.
{4}
I tried to start the car but the battery had died. I left the car on the street & they towed it away. It’s been a long time since I walked through this neighborhood. I used to buy milk at the bodega on the corner. It’s the only place open late at night. This neighborhood has changed in the years since I lived here. I lived in this neighborhood ten years, but it’s not the same. You can point at the windows & say “I used to live here.” The bodega on the corner now an animal clinic.
{5}
I was thinking aloud but no one heard. My words were the songs of birds on a summer morning outside a deserted shack in the middle of nowhere. Even the air vibrated in horror like a car alarm after midnight rattles the silence of some sleepy town. I thought of Fra Angelico & the Dominican friars scraping paint onto the walls of Saint Marco in Florence, poring over their tomes in their tiny cells, & for a moment I wanted to be like them, enclosed in my own aura like a cobra shedding its skin. All the world has to offer I’ve already rejected. Selfconscious to the core, I dismantled what remained of my being in midstream & built out of nothing a universe for my eyes only.
{6}
The words get caught in your throat as you speak. A kind of emptiness floats down like happiness from the tops of the trees. An audience of one gives comfort to the living. Some men in kilts were playing bagpipes on the beach. The point of a pyramid casts a shadow on the sand. The stars hang weightlessly over the city, waiting for rain.
{7}
They say that the novel was based on something that happened to the author, so that in order to understand what we’re reading we have to read the story of the author’s life, side by side. It would seem that every piece of writing should be accompanied by the journal that the author kept at the time he or she was writing. To create a new level of artifice? Maybe, or maybe as a way to absorb the pain of trying to extract a tincture of reality from the smokehold of the imaginary. Never say “should.”
{8}
Somewhere a beer can rattles in an empty icebox. And the wind turns against the leaves mounted like prey above the fireplace. A moment later I heard the engine of the patrol car at the end of the drive. My feet were secure in the stirrups but my horse wouldn’t move through the gate. I was living a one-armed life in a house with a braided rug. I flew, helmet in hand, at whim over the dust on the floorboards. She took off her shoes & put her money in her socks & put her socks in her shoes & got into bed. He entered a room where the truth was distorted & enjoyed himself. Don’t want to do anything that might give someone I don’t know a false impression. You hear what you want to hear, a new criterion for misunderstanding —cup, saucer, hot plate, lip
balm, scissors—the contact between clothing & skin. Imagine the face of a man, but it isn’t a whole person, leg twisted out of shape, swollen glands. The largesse of eternity simpers in the palm like an agate. A bad day with snow in the air & no one’s looking.
{9}
You remove the blinders for a moment & see the light & then it’s gone The bodies of the people who died in the car bombing were lying on the floor of a makeshift morgue I always thought religion meant peace, but now I know it means death The water from last night’s rain swirls at my feet as I step off the curb I try to imagine the future when the people who began the war go on trial for all the children who died Here’s the mire & the quicksand & the cans of petrol on the side of the road You can invade any country you want, whenever you want, without asking permission It’s just a matter of time before the bombs start exploding on crowded streets, & the subway cars hurtle off the side of the bridge
You can create your own hell on earth, but leave me out of it You can die from eating too much as easily as you can die from hunger I will eat whatever falls from your plate
{10}
Volunteer firemen prostitute themselves on a bed of fresh linen while the flames tattoo the brick wall of Chase Manhattan leaving nothing but scorched tootsie roll wrappers & Bazooka gum cartoons on my map of the world an area of blue lightning & purple hair
{11}
Heat Wave 1996 Tonight I made steamed vegetables & rice for dinner & Max & I ate together in front of the TV. The Simpsons. Earlier I ate a sausage on the grass in Central Park, with Coral, & before that a simple breakfast: toast & coffee. Later I had another coffee in a restaurant on Madison Avenue before taking the N train back to Brooklyn. Somewhere along the way I ate a few carrots & made a salad. It’s mid-May, about 90 degrees (at 10 pm) & I’m wearing a blue work-
shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Max is on the phone with his girlfriend. The window to the porch is open & people are laughing in their gardens. Bill Evans is playing “Nardis� in Paris, Buckwheat scratching at the screen.
{12 }
Listing these things for you, there was only one thing & it was gone. The list between us is not a laundry list of items. On the other hand it isn’t a composition of notes, nuts or bolts. Time flies through it like numbers. The list is numbers.
{13 }
A year’s supply of venison was left on our doorstep. And the cars were rerouted because of a crash on Route 9. It would seem if I rolled over in my sleep you would be there, but you’re not. A small tugboat just unloaded its cargo on the base of my spine. You can smell it for miles, up the airshaft to infinity.
{14}
Where two roads meet & one river, “let’s go home.” Here where the river meets the shore, call it home. An in-flight movie, the scatter of moonlight over the page. But if I hold this page up to the light, what do I hear? Rescued from the field of desire (she was my friend, first, then my lover). The danger of taking a bath when you’ve had too much to drink. I hold a letter written for my eyes only up to the light. I was thinking back on that point in space, the way my legs began trembling in the airport in Lhasa. The night I slept on the floor: was she my lover or not? Can’t meet me halfway, since I only seem to be there, half-naked.
Yet a whole self can appear out of solitude, without invective, to pause at the end of the street where I’m waiting. The mist of endings.
{15 }
It’s 90 degrees out & the street is slightly uphill. Two clouds in the shape of two yaks appear in the sky. There’s another life with its own chronology & all you can say is hello, goodbye. A paper bag filled with simple ingredients. Are you talking about yourself, or someone else? I need corrective lenses to read the small print. But my eyes are tired & I could be anywhere. It’s a good idea to walk slowly in the heat, but now I am running down the steps of the subway. The nurse has a name with three syllables, accent on the first. The firebug sets the pulpit ablaze. I stand at the crossroads, Our Lady of the Snows. A dog might speak in a human voice. There’s a pork store on the corner, a shredder for old sleeves. It could be the last stop if you don’t watch your step.
FLIGHT TEST by Lewis Warsh The moral rights of the author have been asserted. Ugly Duckling Presse 2006 www.uglyducklingpresse.org Ugly Duckling Presse is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and a registered NY charity.
This book was designed, printed and bound in an edition of 300 at the Ugly Duckling Presse workshop in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The text is set in Baskerville, the titles in Copperplate Gothic Bold. The plates for the letterpressed cover were furnished by Boxcar Press in Syracuse, NY. Thanks to Materials for the Arts and to the Fund for Poetry for supporting this project. The author wishes to thank Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich.
The first fifty copies of this book have been numbered and signed by the author.