Zachary Bos
Thinking of Tomorrow in
a Drowsy State
for JMD
The past drains from the present – Daniel
Hoffman
I really mean to say instead is, come back –
Denise Riley
Lonely from the beginning of time until now! –
Ezra Pound
* *
Tomorrow first thing I’m
going to look
straight into your
sleepy eyes and urge you
to make something out of
the day. Get up,
I’ll say. Shake
off the dust. Get a grip of
your apprehensive,
self-impeding self.
Scrape the green bilge
out of your eye corners.
You’ve got to get to it! It’s time to let
yourself be a person
with full needs and
urges, to be that person
who wonders
in your beautiful
original way.
I know you dream a lot
about going
back to that moment that
peaceful instant
between the ignition of
the cosmos
and its expansion, when
light had yet to
build up speed enough to
latch onto things
like substantial bodies
and glowing gas;
that moment
infinitesimal when
every imaginable life
was nascent
and simultaneous, in the
manner
of compound
probabilities woven
into a self-creating
sphere. That time
when every future was
ready to be
with probability
one. Make today
the day, my dear, I’ll say, the day you
find
a method that beings you
to that moment
when you’ll have all at
once all time ever
to pick out a path of choices that might
to pick out a path of choices that might
in their alternate
dimensional way
permit us to find each
other sooner.
If you can bring us
together a day
or an eon sooner, isn’t
that worth
an afternoon’s
effort? So out of bed.
Let’s get to it. I’ll put the
coffee on.
Only, get back before
the evening’s gone
for I admit I find it
hard to get
to sleep without you.
Fears fill up the room
like vacuum, and past
mistakes foam up out
of the dura mater like
nightmares of
the universal theatre.
If you don’t
know the physics of time
travel, don’t sweat.
I will take a pen and
fill the napkin
on your breakfast tray
with formulae. The
blackletter constants,
the scalloped quantum
diagrams, the squint and
spry equations,
will appear to you as
clear as a love
note left on the vanity
mirror: red
over transparency, and
your face there
tattooed over with math
and affection.
At this moment now you
are deep asleep.
I wish you weren’t. Your bipartite
brow and
lips expanding and
contracting in well
behaved wave forms
making spirals in space
and time, your lungs
regulating, your eyes
shifting under their
seashells. I am so
excited to support your
journey back
to the beginning of all
time I can
hardly contain
myself. O wake up keep
sleeping take me with
you o leave me here.
I’m of many minds about
the matter.
Someone, some sandman or
psychopomp, must
have made an observation
of me: thus
I’ve been split into
gemini selves. O
sleep o wake. Undo my mistakes. Make
tomorrow a better
yesterday. Find
the power latent in your
worries and
fretting that lets you
reign over the branched
paths of instead and
other than this and
only if and might have
been and will be.
I am dropping off to
sleep. Tomorrow
I will encourage you to
go and find
and hold the unhatched
egg whose potency
will let you unmake this
better for us
only please make sure
you let the errors
that let us love each
other be unspoilt.
Make it all different
except for this bed.
Source: www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_391404/Egon-Schiele/Sleeping-Girl-2
NOTES. The image I pair with this
poem, known as “Sleeping Girl” in English, is by the Austrian painter Egon
Schiele. The Hoffman epigraph is taken from “Stop the Deathwish! Stop It!
Stop!”, as appears in Hang-Gliding from
Helicon: New and Selected Poems 1948-1988 (Louisiana State University Press
1988). The Riley epigraph comes from “Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else”, as
appears in Mop Mop Georgette: New and
Selected Poems, 1986-1993 (Reality Street 1993). The third epigraph is taken
from Ezra Pound’s version of a poem by Li Po, “Lament of the Frontier Guard”, as
appears in (New Directions 1949).
Zachary Bos is Publisher
of The Pen & Anvil Press. His previous editorial positions include the role
of Deputy Editor for News from the
Republic of Letters, and Web Editor for Fulcrum:
An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. He is at present Production Manager for
The Battersea Review, and Editor of Poetry Northeast. He studied poetry in
the graduate program at Boston University, and lives in rural Massachusetts. He
keeps a commonplace journal at thewonderreflex.blogspot.com.