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Schroedinger’s Cat and the Last Eclipse of the Millennium
Tourists from Seville gather round Antonio Machado’s grave To argue why he chose to stop running in this town. Collioure in November is barren as the outer planets. Les Templiers Bar and Hotel is only half-full. The mistral Has shut down the lovely balconies along the promenade Where at some point, under the windswept moon, Antonio Machado walks his mother home to die. You can’t tell By the calm on their faces how they’ve colluded like Streetwise scalawags, how they’ve perfected the illusion. No one knows that something is about to come amiss, A pixel will disappear from the screen. The baker is already Filling the alleys with the telltale scent of rising dough. Someone is singing a ballad in Catalan, a language invisible To the naked eye. The rookie legionnaires will come later, But already their coffins float along the estuary Like brightly colored kayaks. The castle’s lookout Is only partly lit to save on gas. War is elsewhere And is always coming near. If you know where to walk You can follow the shape of a swastika. Young men drink In soccer bars, as beautiful as the whores they will fuck tonight, An empire of salt on each other’s skins. Antonio Machado Opens the windows. The African wind blusters in. He has a view of the cemetery. He knows exactly where His bones will continue to die. He clothes his mother In his own suit and fixes his hat on her head. He lays her On a bed in a room they haven’t used in years. Then he puts on her gown, a wig of twigs, her soft red shoes, And lies down on her bed. And just as he knew it, As the moon drowned in the sea, the devil came With the rumbling of the garbage truck, sniffed around, Recognized the nauseating cologne, and took him down, Bones and all, into the cellar of forgetting, where poets Age beyond perfection, condemned to the bitter sadness Of their words. This is how you save someone. This is how You disappear. No one knows what happened. The tourists Still keep coming. His mailbox still gets fat with mail. Nothing gets returned to sender. No one eats the roses.
Hollywood Ending
The bandoneon begins, and now it’s the end of the film with sitars and tambours. Music pledges no allegiance, sound up as the heroine gets her share of madness and ecstasy like all the losers in this loveless town, gets kicked around one night at the laundromat, falls in love, many frames later, with a gangster-poet (perpetual cigarette, disheveled hair). They rent a convertible, kill somebody or themselves. It’s all the same, someone has to break from the weight of all this light, someone has to stand in the panorama of big emotions. The desert shots will be wider than love. Love is not wide, it’s smaller than the human heart, but it casts a shadow from here to Texas. Things die under its shadow, cars and coyotes, anything that moves. The interstate is strewn with wrecks and bones. She sucks him off at the wheel. He loves her more than money. They’re not going to stop until the next stretch of nowhere runs out of gas, until the nodding nobodies sleep off their hangovers in a place no contraband has yet described. Until the highway narrows to a dot of sundown, and their names scroll up against the blacked-out sky.
Schroedinger’s Cat and the Last Eclipse of the Millennium
The one who begins this poem won’t be the same As the one who will end it. Already
Fifteen minutes have passed since I wrote those lines. I take my shirt off. The day is getting warm.
Yesterday I learned two words: Geheim, which is German For secret. Temem, which is Arabic
For plenitude. In a few hours a hundred million people Who do not speak the same language
Will gaze at the last eclipse of the millennium. Bonheur, what a beautiful word when formed by the mouth
Of a French Buddhist. Didn’t I tell you words Should be emptied like a vessel, didn’t I tell you I loved
Schroedinger’s cat. Kept for days in a closed box The cat can either live or die, but until we look
It is neither dead nor alive. Next question. Ask me what light Feels like, at the instant when it falls. The one
Who ends this poem is not the same as the one Who will stand accused and be forced to deny it.
Can sorrow be weighed in gravitons? Is fear genetic? Does the soul know it exists? Does it echolocate its way
In this world, looking for an exit? The inferno that we form by being together. — Calvino. I use these words
To keep from looking away, ensorcelled by the radiantly Mortal, but with zero yearning. X = wonder,
Vivid under the spell’s recurring question: Peut-on Naitre-mourir? Lust kills joy
Instantly: half glass fully empty. Diamond cusp, Be beautiful, brief, and blinding.
Poems by Eric Gamalinda
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