By the Numbers - James Richardson

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      comes back to life. O god, it’s all so realistic

      I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

      Such a relief to burst from the theater

      into our cool, imaginary streets

      where we know who’s who and what’s what,

      and command with MetroCards our destinations.

      Where no one with a story struggling in him

      convulses as it eats its way out,

      and no one in an antiseptic corridor

      or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains

      staggers through an Act that just will not end,

      eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

      Actually Persephone loved his loving her,

      dark-browed, so serious: it proved something about her.

      And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself,

      her brightness was more beautiful than beauty

      and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back

      it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers

      he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary:

      he is angry at his heart and hurts her.

      Demeter gets confused. Did a god steal her daughter,

      or has she been living all this time in Manhattan

      with her difficult husband, difficult job, difficult cat

      and visiting once a year? Her love for what is lost

      spreads so thinly over the planet

      it’s not love anymore but weather. She goes to the police:

      Benson and Stabler find her story dubious.

      More so when they learn she never had a daughter,

      though she was one, and that her vaunted power over harvests

      apparently doesn’t extend to her wilting houseplants.

      As for those Hellish threats on her machine?

      Phone records show that dark voice was her own.

      Actually she has bipolar Multiple Personality Disorder,

      solution to all plot dilemmas. Fair enough,

      since cop shows can’t say what we’d say: Life is a dream,

       and we are everyone we dream.

      When they come to get her,

      her hands are clawed in the chainlink of the playground.

      Hades, Demeter, Persephone form in her face of cloud.

      She’s watching, of course, two girls on swings,

      one going up while the other goes down.

      I is not ego, not the sum

      of your unique experiences,

      just, democratically,

      whoever’s talking,

      a kind of motel room,

      yours till the end—

      that is, of the sentence.

      The language, actually,

      doesn’t think I’s important,

      stressing, even in

      grandiose utterance—

      e.g., I came

      I saw I conquered—

      the other syllables.

      Oh, it’s a technical problem,

      sure, the rhyme

      on oh-so-open

       lie, cry, I,

      harder to stitch tight

      than the ozone

      hole in the sky.

      But worst is its plodding insistence—

       I, I, I—

      somebody huffing uphill,

      face red as a Stop sign,

      scared by a doctor

      or some He She It

      surprised in the mirror.

      I take Saturday’s unpopulated trains,

      sitting at uncontagious distances,

      change at junctions of low body count, in off-hours,

      and on national holidays especially, shun stadia

      and other zones of efficient kill ratio,

      since there is no safety anymore in numbers.

      I wear the dull colors of nesting birds,

      invest modestly in diverse futures,

      views and moods undiscovered by tourists,

      buy nothing I can’t carry or would need to sell,

      and since I must rest, maintain at several addresses

      hardened electronics and three months of water.

      And it is thus I favor this unspecific café,

      choose the bitterest roast, and only the first sip

      of your story, sweet but so long, and poignantly limited

      by appointments neither can be late for, and why now

      I will swim through the crowd to the place it is flowing away from,

      my concerned look and Excuse me excuse me suggesting

      I am hurrying back for my umbrella or glasses

      or some thrilling truth they have all completely missed.

      Faint bronze of the air,

      a bell I can’t quite hear.

      The sky they call gunmetal

      over gunmetal reservoir,

      the launch, aluminum,

      cutting to the center,

      waters bittered with the whisk

      of aluminum propellers

      (your gold drink stirred

      with a gold forefinger).

      *

      Faint tinnitus,

      where is it?

      Air silver with a trillion

      wireless calls,

      stop-quick stop-quick

      of sweep hands,

      crickets and downed lines,

      their sing of tension,

      that out-of-earshot

      too-bright CD sun,

      the heads of presidents

      sleet sleet in your jacket.

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