Scatter Plot

I would never compare men to God, but let me start
by saying—names or not—they all respond, or don’t respond, to you.

The vacuum sucks a desert from the carpet—varoom, room. You enter
and say words to me, words I do not hear until you tear the cord-head out,

“—nothing,” you say, “happens in a vacuum.” An argument
proceeds from here, and you tell me to go to hell. I think I would like hell—

Hell, at least, is just,
                                  its pain intelligible—unlike this world so full
of double standards and double talk and the double question,

So this is or is not about my faithlessness?

I thought we’d live
                                happily ever after—ha, ha, ha. I like to laugh,
an art that’s empty and not tragic. Now Monday, on the radio, I say:

Bombs kill civilians in Kabul, a parade moves down South 4th Street.
Of course I would never compare the two, all events are separate, discrete.

But they happen simultaneously. And from behind a sound-proof pane,
my boss gives me two thumbs up. Anything is
                                                                            better than dead air.

The only constellation I can recognize, Orion’s Belt, lowers in the sky.
Nothing surprises me.
                                     Art has not taught me to be ethical, but

the form of this feels wrong, wrong,
                                                          wrong. We weren’t meant to be just

bright points in space and time.

There were supposed to be cords, strings connecting us, if only
in thought. And the cords were supposed to mean something to you

as well. I care for nothing
                                          in your absence.





From Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). All rights reserved.