Free The Last Two Seconds by Mary Jo Bang Page A

BOX
    Think of me as a plant stand turned animal.
    Something to hold, or be held.
    Think of a pandan matte black and white.
    It’s easy. Or at least not too terribly hard.
    Think about the danger of night
    as the lid of tomorrow tacked to a wall.

THE ELASTIC MOMENT
    Ice in a glass at the height of a heat wave.
    Then a sleep lull that sends you
    to the airless inside of a Halloween hat.
    Goodnight.
    Then a sled, two mittens, and a film
    with two women—one black in black satin,
    one white wearing pearls—watched
    in a paneled room brought in from an era
    that’s over. Good-bye. Outside,
    a dust-covered dog’s grave. You, your back
    tacked to the seat, basket-weave plastic
    on plastic, drive by—your mind
    tuned to the news, a glut of miasmic static.
    You, a light-bulb filament substitute
    for the flame that stands for the awful truth:
    the dead of war will now be unknown.
    We don’t know, the fire says.
    At home, the bird’s last cuttlebone
    is a stripe of white in an empty cage.
    Human failings are human failings.
    Forgive me.
    The streetlamps above emit a halogen haze.
    The light makes it easy to think
    everything here is reversible.

STUDIES IN NEUROSCIENCE: THE PERPETUAL MOMENT
    The mirror is a formula for when the open door
    closes on a clock and starts countless wires firing
    in rapid succession. The self can’t be made visible
    outside the brain. Define resuscitative: heart beat
    brain bed occupied. Discernable action: the way a,
    or the, transparent top of water
    in a glass or on a lake sends back light at an angle.
    Optics are not always involved
    in how others see that face you call your elastic face.

A ROOM IN CLEOPATRA’S PALACE
1.
    Flies and a fan and a pillar
    in this or that arch of the empire.
    Space is such a pain: cars shooting by like bullets,
    palm trees pinned against a wall,
    a helicopter wasting away the above.
    This is the world at one on a street
    where the angles of architecture meet
    and point west where the end of a tunnel,
    unseen but assumed, is draped
    with a blanket of crêpe
    that it’s easy to mistake for night—
    [ a woman’s mouth-made swearing ]
    CLEOPATRA: And I’m entangled with it.
    And now: what to do with the fact
    of the once-blue above, the mind cloud
    tinted pink with particulate matter—
    a pollution that looks like a postcard.
    CLEOPATRA: I’m saying yes
    to whatever you’re saying: an asp in a basket,
    betrayal and horror, a room that tilts inward,
    natural vice, the smell of sweat, wasted lamps,
    petty lives born to murder and war.
    The delicate undid disaster of all good things.

2.
    The smug see me as nothing but negatives:
    pout-mouth petulance, underwear lust,
    a city of mystery in which pathos and greed
    stand empty as high-rent apartments
    with coffin-shaped plate glass vents.
    Inside, the dead are resting
    on expensive brocade sofas.
    I have stun-gun marks on one arm; there’s a fig
    at the edge of the myrtle-leaf rug.
    The snake is acting like he likes me.
    The dimpled boys are practicing their onion-eyed dirge.
    I don’t like it when time ticks back
    to where it’s just been. It takes stamina to do what I do,
    day after day on my barge.

3.
    During performances, I was devoted
    to miming the plans of others: the room,
    the walls, the people listening,
    the drowning from time to time, whatever.
    Watching invariably begins with a glimpse
    of awareness, followed by not knowing
    what will come after.
    I sat in a straight-back chair, lead beneath
    my feet. There was a wide arch to the right.
    Do you ever think? Yes. No. I don’t not
    for an instant. I open my eyes,
    it’s still the present.
     
    Enter a Messenger
     
    Was this done well?
    Who’s to say?
    Make me up like a manikin
    with a cosmetic palette. Tired now?
    I know I am. Add a bed, and a sea overtaking
    a city. Now draw something
    that looks like a blown vent of blood
    and a pinching sense of regret
    over some wrong done.

COMPULSION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: PRINCIPLES AND