You Must Remember This Read online

  © 2014, Text by Michael Bazzett

  © 2014, Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

  (800) 520-6455

  www.milkweed.org

  Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions

  Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)

  Author photo by Leslie Bazzett

  14 15 16 17 185 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Bush Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bazzett, Michael.

  [Poems. Selections]

  You must remember this / Michael Bazzett. -- First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-57131-930-2 (ebook) I. Title.

  PS3602.A999A6 2014

  811›.6--dc23

  2014019175

  Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. You Must Remember This was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

  For Leslie

  After Machado

  I

  In Vladivostok

  Cyclops

  The Field Beyond the Wall

  Memory

  Soirée

  When They Meet, They Can’t Help It

  Clockwatcher

  Atlas

  The Difficulty of Holding Time

  The Same Bones

  Some Party

  The Building

  The Sinclair Gift Emporium

  Rather Than Read Another Word

  The Last Expedition

  Holder Strand

  II

  Oil and Ash

  Look, he said, and pointed

  Aria

  from A Natural History of Silence

  Unspoken

  From Chaos

  What Might

  September Picnic

  Interrogation

  Lions

  A Woman Stands in a Field

  The Crisis

  Elpenor

  Look, Overlook

  III

  The Dark Thing

  The Book of _______________

  Nuns

  The Shop Across the Street

  The People Who Came Afterward

  The Professional

  Imperfection

  The Horse

  Now Here, Nowhere

  In the Pasture Corner

  How It Survived for a While

  The School

  The Orangutan

  Manhood

  Foretold

  Binary

  Recollection

  The Last Time I Saw God

  After Machado

  Standing by the water

  I remembered

  the delicate and confused

  dream I had last night

  it was bruised

  even in the remembering

  so these words

  can only glance

  sidelong at the beehive

  that replaced my heart

  with all that pulsing

  making honey from the loss.

  I

  In Vladivostok

  The woman in the dream

  said be careful with your cock

  and I suddenly knew

  in the way one knows in dreams

  that my cock had somehow become

  a lever that might detonate

  a string of bombs riddling the city

  in the way blood clots might lace

  a body in its final days.

  When I realized I was holding

  a rooster, I did not exactly

  know what to say. Perhaps

  I smiled. I don’t know.

  There was no mirror

  and I’ve never been able

  to see myself in dreams.

  Cyclops

  The story is such a story we don’t always stop to think

  about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor

  packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels

  of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how

  utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor

  made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh

  of good friends dispatched while we watched—

  it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.

  Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself

  there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton

  and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself

  after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.

  He’d had plenty of time to think there in that hollow

  belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his

  piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat

  rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.

  And now here he is again groping for his sharpened

  pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.

  He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles

  it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.

  You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened

  tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball

  burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge

  hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,

  the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might

  land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks

  under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held

  high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.

  Maybe then you’d feel the warmth of Polyphemus’s

  wounded breath, washing across three thousand years

  as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,

  inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?

  The Field Beyond the Wall

  We walk to the edge of town: there

  just beyond the wall we see clouds

  of crows and ravens, also buzzards

  teetering down to pick apart the flesh

  that peeks from every flapping shirttail.

  See that belly pale as risen dough?

  The dark oaks creak with the dead

  weight that hangs from their limbs—

  ropes taut with bodies barely turning.

  We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,

  looking out across the charred fields

  and the
smoking timbers of a farmhouse.

  By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears

  into dreaming orchards thick with bees,

  but now in the chill of morning it is mostly

  the scrape and croak of birds just starting in.

  Someone has knotted an enemy banner

  to the tail of an ass to drag the muddy lanes.

  But the ass stands rooted in a ditch,

  shredding weeds with a ripping sound.

  Up on the wall, a woman works the crowd,

  making the rounds with a steaming sack of corn.

  People buy a roasted ear for warmth,

  holding it snug inside their hands for a long while

  before peeling back the damp husk.

  Memory

  It was not yet light.

  I heard my father stir.

  I crept downstairs

  in my pajamas to listen

  as he sent my brother

  to find his spirit animal:

  If it is a crow it is a crow,

  and you will not go hungry.

  I want it to be a bear

  or a wolf, my brother said.

  If it is a crow it is a crow,

  murmured my father.

  The door whuffed shut

  and cold ascended the stair.

  After a long moment

  I walked into the kitchen

  where my father sat.

  I want to seek mine, I said.

  Your what? he asked.

  My spirit animal, I said.

  He laughed and pointed

  to the broom closet.

  Check in there, he said.

  Maybe the mop bucket

  will be able to teach you

  how to hold your water.

  Very funny, I whispered.

  My father shrugged,

  What do you expect?

  You’re a closet Slovakian,

  and your brother is simple.

  Last week at the library

  he checked out the phonebook.

  As my father spoke,

  I heard the staccato

  footfalls of my brother

  and his curious gait.

  The door burst open

  with a gust of cold:

  A bus! he said. Huge

  as the sperm whale!

  The mirror of my soul

  is a crosstown bus!

  My father smiled,

  Good for you, Jeffrey!

  His face was frank

  as an open sail. Then

  he looked at me and

  mouthed these words:

  The steam that blows the whistle

  never turns the wheel.

  Now that I am a man,

  I can clearly recall

  how snow sifted sideways

  through the air, how

  I never had a brother,

  how my father yearned

  to be elsewhere, how

  I longed to board that

  crosstown bus and sit

  quiet in the weak light,

  using a stubby pencil

  to draw the curious

  members of my new

  family, smiling there

  on those paper napkins.

  Soirée

  Your humor is deft and cutting

  my fingers off one by one,

  she said as we left the party.

  I started up the car and said:

  Every joke holds one blade inside

  the breast pocket of its coat

  to open things and liberate

  the world of unremembered light.

  This exchange took place without words.

  A snowbank leapt into the headlights.

  The car seemed to know the way home.

  Until that moment I had been waiting

  to put my mouth over her mouth

  and breathe the ferment of the evening.

  This might have led to touching

  the soft parts of our bodies together.

  Instead we fell asleep, tongues

  heavy in our mouths like fish.

  When They Meet, They Can’t Help It

  His obsession is a cart drawn by muscled oxen

  over rain-softened roads. Salt marsh spreads evenly

  on either side. Reeds stir like fine hair in the breeze.

  The land seems flattened by the heat. The wheels

  crush white bits of shell into densely packed mud.

  Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks

  in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the

  dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the

  animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.

  The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,

  drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the

  driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.

  The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving

  through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality

  of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.

  Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.

  The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers

  motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted

  to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite

  through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal

  and fear—if pressed, he could name neither impulse.

  His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could

  calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling

  neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they

  open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,

  while the silence holds, he thinks of what they’ve done

  and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this

  forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.

  She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What’s the sound

  skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?

  If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things

  are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner

  thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.

  Clockwatcher

  The night is not a hole

  to fill with your thoughts.

  It is not a sock to stuff

  deep in the gob of morning

  and hope the sun has

  soiled itself there on the couch

  where it collapsed after the gin.

  The sun can be so tiresome.

  The night is not a black dog

  snuffling around the muskrats.

  The night refuses to stumble

  through Byzantine circuits

  like loose electricity. The night

  has no limbs. It never stutters

  or grabs. It settles in like

  a headache: there before

  you know it then a pressing

  darkness stained with light

  and you wish you’d taken

  that handful of crumbling

  white pills before it came.

  Atlas

  When they lead you into the room with the blind man

  and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face

  so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails

  that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight

  and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat

  because once he has confirmed the bones of your face

  fall into line with his memory of the bones of your father,

  he will offer a tobacco-stained smile and a wine-tinged

  exhalation and announce, yes, you could only be his child,

  all the while fumbling for the greasy string around his neck

  to withdraw from inside his shirt a key that still holds

&nbs
p; the warmth of his chest when he drops it in your hand.

  The map is in the box, he’ll say. The box beneath the bed.

  You expected worn parchment or carefully folded vellum

  but not this sturdy clothbound book. It is not merely a map.

  It is an atlas, replete with indexes, charts, and translucent

  overlays that display your various organs, followed by veins

  and arteries traced in red and blue, and then the delicate lattice

  of nerve endings that lace your body. The fine white crescent

  scar on your forehead is indicated with an asterisk to footnote

  the make and model of the car door that delivered the blow,

  back when you were a boisterous child. The final overlay

  takes care to reproduce the actual melanin of your skin tone

  and quietly highlights this fact by including a small inset box

  that offers the proper ratio of ocher to umber so that the hue

  can be replicated by the paint department at any hardware store.

  The thought of inhabiting a room the exact color of your skin

  crosses your mind. You flip to the index and begin thumbing

  through the italicized headings. The word orgasm catches your eye.

  It is followed by a list of subheadings tucked into parentheses:

  (first, last, multiple, most sustained, most frightening, inadvertent,

  nocturnal, diurnal, induced by: stuffed animals, Bulgarian cuisine,

  silk bedding, musical role-playing fantasies, velvet; see also: sneeze.)

  It is all here, you realize. The manual you suspected and sought.

  With a start you flip to the final section, and see it bears the title:

  Future Accomplishments. You are uncertain whether to continue,

  knowing that the first item on the list could quite possibly be,

  1.) Currently Reading Future Accomplishments and no matter how

  quickly you begin skimming over the text your eyes will alight

  upon only those words, and you will settle into a whirling pause

  which comprises the rest of your life, reducing it to an infinite

  bumper sticker: The Future Is Now, Is Now, Is Now, Is Now

  but if you do proceed you will be delighted to discover this is

  not the case. This is not some sort of cheap rip-off of Borges:

  there is actually a numerical list of deeds, some quite surprising.

  It gratifies you to know you will one day befriend an orangutan.

  Of all the things on the list, this is the one you will carry with you