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POEM BY ZACHARY BOS FOR JMD



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

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.

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