Brandon Krieg
Wrecked Eclogue
Boanerges. Someone asks me on Monday
How was your weekend and I can’t remember a thing
I’m lost among the aisles, the displays
and reach out as if to touch a screen,
as if to “find in page”
I am writing out a check and I miss the autocorrect
for a word easy as “grace,” writing “Amazing Graze Church”
(I can only laugh, though it isn’t even funny to me)
I want it to autocorrect the rain I want it to autocorrect your face
*
Shantih. I was moved almost to tears by the sale mug’s quote:
“If we are gazing at the green leaves of spring,
what have we to renounce?”
I liked it so much I made it my status,
and you whispered it to me, “what have we to renounce”
and came the third time that day. I saw in your eyes the threshold crossed
when that stubborn gland finally unclenched its cloud
of distance and forgetting, and you were not you, not anything,
a body dropped from the sky onto my body,
a canceled mass canceling me,
and when I could work myself free
I went out to the staircase above the interstate
to let the tidal wash of tires fill my skull,
to find the mountains in their places
on a billboard advertising a Western state
*
Bo. On the call he claimed they could fracture the wellbore
at ten thousand feet for greater extraction,
ejaculating the proppant into the formerly inaccessible hydrocarbons,
boring where no hole was, inducing it to stay open by
increasing the pressure
and I remembered how the doctor told me he fractured
the tibia and fibula, driving the cobalt, titanium, tantalum
implant home with heavy sledge,
and I thought some day they’ll open my coffin
and find that custom joint sitting there
like a grail written over with the runes of my DNA,
and they’ll read it and resurrect me whole in a lab, knee and all,
and if they do it right, don’t be surprised
if I don’t call out your name
*
Sh. After my lunch meeting, a little buzzed, I glimpsed
through stories of smashed factory windows:
the river for loading,
the sky for emitting,
the wharves sunk in the river and the rain
sunk in the river,
the snow on the pool covers and oaks,
the dripping egg shells and the missing child,
the brass stars on the works, the garlands
on the lintels, nobody starving, everybody recovering,
the teens feeding at the skillets,
the sunset a trick
of stoplights and black cables, the Sundays
recycled of other Sundays,
the news on its loop, so small
I could wear it on my finger, reminder to forget
the sky is to receive
the reactor’s cumulus, woodsmoke and meatsmoke,
the river is for loading
vaccines and gaskets, the nationally-ranked
surgical ward is for the postmortem all
seem to be reading already and impatient to read
*
Bo. That reminds me, when I arrived at the inspection early,
I walked through the wetland sanctuary
donated by the energy company, a plot
more or less situated in the shadow of the new plant,
and I couldn’t help remembering our weekend trips
when the kids were young, to that lakeside site,
where they waved sparklers around the fire
with druidic fascination, until Tara waved hers
in the face of the two little ones, and you
stepped in and accidentally burned Maya’s neck.
In the morning cold I saw the hundred charred sticks,
paper tanks and bullets, empty bottles of our independence
in shards and shreds on the gravel and blown into the bushes,
and saw a heron in the shallows, the first natural thing,
and thought, we could have done this all at home
*
Sh. And that’s when we put the firepit in our backyard
and made the kids wave their sparklers from different decks
because we couldn’t deny them that simple trick
of potassium perchlorate, titanium, dextrin,
to induce the ungrudging expected
dopamine flood—
like when the river from decades of effluents
caught fire,
and a something else
lit the faces of the nothing but
*
Bo. Where do you want to go
now that the credits have ended
and no credit was given to us?
*
Sh. Boanerges Jones
put away your phone, Lost Childhood is lost.
Hold my hand beyond the gas flares on the plains,
name with me the constellations we have never seen
as if they had never been named.
Bo. Event Chain, Big Optimizer, Little Already?
Sh. No, Please. Try harder. Pretend you are you and I am me:
Green Gazer, Sparkler Terrace, Burning River.
Bo. But, Shantih, was that us or
was that on a screen?
Sh. I don’t know. Sometimes I forget, even,
how to spell “luv”
in the already
exhausted
adulthood of the world.
Bo. X-c-h-a-n-ge? X-t-r-a-c-t-i-o-n? X-l-o-v-e? XX
over the eyes after interval n . . .
Sh. No, Please.
Pretend it’s me and that I will die.
*
Bo. I pick up a tongueless
shoe on the beach, Shantih.
I will never have been.
Sh. I see tall maples growing
from the roof gutters of the shuttered factory, Boanerges.
I will never have been.
Bo. I could blast the mountaintops and fill the valleys,
Sh. I could slash the forests and silt-out the streams,
Bo. I could stack sturgeon on the beaches in piles to burn,
Sh. and Bo. If only to be able to say I’ve found what I was looking for:
a place I don’t care if I never get back to.
Except—all that has already been done for me.