A PRIVATE WACHORSKI

A Private Wachorski appeared in my dreams.
He was the cold muzzle of a pistol to my head.
In this vision, I lay dead. Private Wachorski
stood over me. He bent down, yanked the wallet
from my pants, and absconded with the money.
I was not dead. I sat up. And from a few clues
I tracked him down in a European city. He was
in a hotel room heating a tin of beans. I watched
him from a window across an alley. Far away,
in a dank valley, a tiny bird envisioned the future
of our race. River waters—icy ones—rinsed
through the darkness at a pace that conjured
the downhill ski-race they would visit as flakes
crusting the goggles of the Austrian flung tumbling
to the safety fence, one lung punctured by his pole-tip.
But none of this occurred to me as I observed
Wachorski. I was in mourning. Perhaps I was
dead. I had no head. By that I mean I had lost
my mind. Or else I realized I had never had one.
It was fun knowing I could descend the stairs,
cross the street, ascend to Wachorski’s apartment
and behead him with the piano wire I’d clipped from
the Steinway of the prodigy in Vienna. And yet,
I just watched him as he read the paper, ate his
beans, drank a beer, and slept. After about an hour,
I leapt from a window to my death.



I  HAVE  TO  SEE  FABER
I have been calling his house at fifteen minute intervals
for nigh three weeks on end. He is not my friend—is he
my foe? Some call him a wanton waiter intent on
ruining the savor of a meal, yet he is not employed
in the service industry. He suffers—it is said—from a
malady which taunts him morning and night. I have heard
that when he inhales, he must bite a pillow to stave off
stabs of pain. When it rains, his bones taunt him 
with a persistent aching that resembles the plight
of the Russian populace. Sometimes they threaten Revolution.
I’ve wondered if the pollution of our groundwater isn’t
the cause of Faber’s troubles—and yet I glimpsed him
three weeks ago thumbing through a volume of Aesop’s
Fables. He clapped the tome shut and literally skipped
down the aisle to the register. I was appalled. I endured
a cinching in my guts. Was this Faber’s double, or had I
set up a fund in the name of a scoundrel? I strode toward him,
my lips curling with rage, yet somehow he was lost
in the mad, pre-holiday bustle. I unsheathe my revolver
and rave on my daybed. I will not rest until Faber is dead!



LETTER  TO  KNUT

Knut, what do you want me to do with all
of these boxes? Why the hell did you keep
so many? Most of them are empty. One was
filled with photographs of someone else’s
life. Knut—whose life was that? I thought
I saw you in the background of one shot,
the one by the mossy waterfall. There’s a blur
of dog leaping for a frisbee. There’s a guy
laughing who looks like Robert Kennedy—
Knut, that’s not Bobby is it? You didn’t know
him, did you? You would have told me. This
box is full of some school’s soccer uniforms.
Knut—that’s just weird. Or were you a coach?
Is that where you went in the afternoons when
you disappeared for a while before dinner?
You did seem thinner with each passing day—
were you doing sprints with the kids? Did you
leave your pipe on the bench? Did you finally
put down that volume of Spengler? This box
is kind of mangled. It looks like someone
hacked it with a machete. Knut—were you
angry? Why didn’t you tell me about it when
we were roommates? All those days you stayed
shut up in your room you could have talked
to me. I know I threw fits sometimes. I didn’t
mean to shatter your viola. I offered to buy you
a new one—I know, it cannot be replaced. Knut,
are you okay? That’s what I want to know. I’m
sitting here alone in the house. It’s starting to snow.



WAINWRIGHT’S  COSMOLOGY

Wainwright’s cosmology is both beautiful
and sundered. It’s a sort of Masonic Fundamentalism.
Or else, you could call him an Orgiastic Baptist.
What are the main tenets of his worldview? You’ll
have to ask him. Once he told me that reality was
a serpent writhing at the edge of its own thought,
awaiting the steps of an aborigine it intends to swallow.
Then he explained that the serpent is hollow—in fact,
he added, it is an illusion, it does not exist. I questioned
the soundness of such a metaphor, but Wainwright
only laughed. He said he was speaking literally.
I showered him with questions—I really want,
I said, to get to the bottom of things. He stopped
laughing, looked me dead in the eye, and asked,
and what’s below that?



TO TOP >