Birthday, Anniversary, Sympathy, Blank

She thought of zoos in parks, how when cities were under siege, during world wars, people ate the animals.

—Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too”

I go to market to buy every card I can think of

but they are out. The racks are empty and I can’t help

picturing a vacant zoo because the animals are eaten

because there’s a war on, and why people say

abattoir when they really mean slaughterhouse.

The clerk informs me, “We are not making cards anymore.

From now on it will be only singing microchips

and hologram cakes, a sexy dream downloaded

into the brain the evening before a big day.”

My order would be too late, anyway. It is your birthday

and they have you in Intensive Care, in the unit

a semiprivate. You think that sounds military and erotic.

Are you sure there are no cards left? “I’ll check,” the clerk says,

pickle-faced, slithering down his corridor of monitors.

A woman on one console goes on and on about satellites,

how every satellite has a pulse, and itinerants from other planets,

if they have hearts, will know what we are, what substance

is beating or brooking or conspiring against us.

Birthday, Anniversary, Sympathy, Blank.

I can’t ever pretend to browse but I somehow like the wall murals,

the idealized George Eliot and her self-possessed smirk,

I can’t remember a word from her novels, have I finished any of them,here I am somewhere between Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda,

and it’s your birthday and Intensive Care has you,

you are expiring and by now you are expired, I’ll have to

redirect the subscription and collect the insurance,

delete you from my database, laser out the tattoo,

scribble the obit, hock the potboilers with your name in them,

white-out the embarrassing marginalia,

suck dry the account, dishonor the ticket, unearth the certificate,

permanently pull the phone like a bad tooth,

chip down the initialed box elder, edit all anecdotes

to the first tense, chuck the leftover tangelos,

let the koi back into the pond, dump your cacti,

scissor your documents because the shredder’s broken,

let your memoirs fall into the bathwater so no one can read them,

think up replies to insults I could never answer,

donate your gabardines, find significance in our ultimate

exchanges, appease your creditors, and saw the futon in half.

There’s always the risk of an invitation finding its way to you,

not unlike the poor dead coffee heiress who got one decades later.

The naked guy sprints around the store,

a rabid mongrel loose in a Vatican.

Those who make us secure will arrive before my clerk.

If someone naked were arrested now would you laugh,

I’m not sure you would stick around for it to happen,

you never cared for surprises, and it’s true, surprise parties were

never a surprise to you, you preferred saying I was invited instead of alive

Copyright 2003 by Michael Tyrell. 

Hemingway

In Genoa, the city the Mary Celeste never made it to,

we eat Panini and drink Orangina at the train-station

eatery, and like that ghost ship, our compass seems

shattered, our tempers flammable as its alcohol cargo,

but ambling even to the gabinetto I keep you in sight

as if I might misplace you, as if that hex might work now

because I wished it once. In clipped, evasive sentences,

we circumnavigate the future, if that’s what it is, 

the way the lovers in “Hills Like White Elephants”

spoke in circles about their secret, a baby, not likely to be born.

The girl, Jig, said the hills, seen through trees, looked like skin.

Will we come back? Our tickets claim a return.

A marmalade-colored tom pounces on bird shadows.

The uniformed students of Genoa throw ice at each other—

to celebrate summer, an ending. If I spoke the language

I’d tell them about Nikes dangling on Brooklyn phone wires:

does it mean school’s over, or a crack-house festering nearby?

When the Mary Celeste was found, and its deck found

desolate, so began the great speculations:

not mutiny at first, but a fever ship, sudden sickness,

as happened in those times. Not for mystery

did those passengers vanish, but you and I

jones for it, GPS maps and glossy guides be damned,

bickering or trailing off, saying please, please, please,

as if Hemingway were writing this

in the wrong country, hills too green to be elephants.

Copyright 2007 by Michael Tyrell.

Courtship

Mother’s so old now she’s almost my baby—

soon she’ll have to go to school.

Death can take her.

He has custody during the week,

I get her on weekends.

On weekends, she and I wait at a bus shelter.

Death’s around here someplace—

no such thing as unsupervised visits, with him.

Our divorce was amicable;

he wasn’t a bad provider,

and everyone says

reconciliation is inevitable. 

And he still has his good points.

He lets the bus complete its route,

he lets the market exist.

One turn down the wrong aisle

and I’m the child again,

a panic, my mother gone—

Strangers all I can turn to,

and one I must marry.

Copyright 2008 by Michael Tyrell.