Free The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang

READING CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS
1.
    Think of yourself as a character. It’s hot today,
    in the house it’s cooler. Cool air rises off the floor and meets
    the heat that inches in through the window.
    Listen to the cicadas, the monkeys.
    Water evaporates. The boat is dragged forward
    along a matched track—to what is that attached?
    Today we will read a book and play in the right chamber.
2.
    At 6:30 in the morning, there was the noise of the cicadas.
    The bus was a lit interior filled with people on their way
    to work as she walked in the dark. A man threw a pail of water
    on the pavement. She went back to the hotel
    and swam in a blue oval pool. The water was warm.
    There was another woman there and the two of them spoke
    about pleasure. The day before she left that city
    she bought a carved ivory figurine at an antique shop
    and smuggled it back to London in her suitcase.
    Sometimes a person knows an act is wrong but does it anyway.
    I myself sometimes don’t know why I do a thing.
    She wrapped it in a black sweater
    and tucked it into a zippered pocket along the linear axis
    of the side of the case. At the airport,
    the customs official asked her to open her suitcase.
    He patted her folded clothes, then closed the case.
    The ivory figurine was “a lady doctor.” In a former era
    it was used to show the physician where the pain was
    while protecting a woman’s modesty. Months later,
    her neighbor offered to take it with her when she went
    to sell a landscape painting at an auction house.
    The neighbor came back to say she’d been told it wasn’t real;
    she’d been told, she said, that it was a Victorian reproduction,
    and worth approximately ninety pounds.
3.
    Here’s the boat: watch it move forward.
    The motor sounds mechanical.
    A light bleeds through the shade.
    Look at the night to the right, scissored by lightning
    Visible rain is whipping the window
    with what feels like fury. Then straight rain with silence,
    until the window is opened.
    When the window is opened, there is the insistently real
    sound of rain. The sound meets the eardrum and becomes
    one with the body. It is as if nature is making a statement
    that sometimes the outside and inside are one.
    Darkness is only a relative
    index of many other aspects of the way light behaves.
    We know the convulsive reiterative mapping— lub-dub ,
    lub-dub, lub-dub —has multiple meanings.
4.
    It hurts here, she says, and points to the torso.
    The ivory woman lying on her side.
    The doctor’s unsettling warning sounds endlessly.
    Thebesian: tragic stories with tragic endings.
    Thebesian veins: tributaries
    draining directly into the cardiac chambers.
    The lightless interior filled with a thick liquid.
    The rain was over. Contained.
    The possibility of restitution occurs to the character.
    The regardless night. Time’s impossible stop. The stars
    that predicted disaster. She was drawn back
    to what she’d once seen on a stage: someone posing,
    saying to the audience, “Look at me, I’m only made
    of cardboard. What real good can I do?”



A STRUCTURE OF REPEATING UNITS
    A lamp is a great gift, I think.
    The brass tack ouch of a hand
    to a hot bulb takes you straight to the top
    of the threshold of feeling. A small plastic
    object held to the cheek is also quite nice.
    I love poly socks, dishtowels with rick-rack,
    a surfboard anointed with one aqua stripe.
    Idle want seems to dog me along a long cord
    that’s plugged into the boot in the mouth
    of the near recent past.
    The plastic,
    we both know, is nothing but a patchwork
    of particles, a mash-up of atoms, petroleum
    before or after it’s oil—but still, it means
    so much more. Something finer than fine.
    Like pearls bred from time and insouciance.
    Or something like that. I turn out the light,
    lock the door, lie down, brush my hair
    from my forehead, and listen
    for the cinematographer to say to the dark,
    Just wait and the world will come back.
    The terror I have, I keep hidden.

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