A Longer Poem which is Seeking a Home (Hint, Hint...)

THE VIETNAMESE DEER REFLECTION STATION

1.

And the unknown deer came out of the jungle to walk on its hard little toes in the station, which was largely empty. A deer the size of a chihuahua, with inquisitive nostrils that rarely stop quivering.


2.

The station is mostly empty, though there are long mirrors and large benches and a clocktower that believes in ideas beyond architecture. Some clouds. Some useless memories of ex-lovers and timetables.


3.

Or the hissing seafoam of illusions. The memory of timetables that no longer exist. Held like the thought that someone named Rilke or Lucretius was once a certain arrangement of thoughts held together. Convincingly a person. Some dark clouds are trying to convince the sky of something.

4.

And the question may be asked, "Are you convincingly a person?" The answer may determine whether you live or die. This may be in a hospital, a courtroom, a sex club or before a French tribunal while heads are severed, roll to cheers in the background across cobblestones, and someone is doing a fabulous impression of Boy George or Caesar. Someone may be exceedingly happy.


5.

They usually are...


6.

The Vietnamese deer who has just come into existence walks on his little toes that sound like plastic. No, don't call them toes. Hooves. Keratin. Like your hair. He walks through the empty plazas of the station, snuffling the air like a German poem right after someone important (a pretty concatenation of somethings) has been snuffed like a candle.


7.

This lingers like the question, Whatever happened to Kafka's sister?

In the open air of the station.

Kindly.


8.

You are surprised to find yourself the Station Master. But this is a dream and you are responsible for civic spaces. That's always the dream somehow, isn't it? Government is the art of tending civic spaces of the surreal. Lorca whispers this. He's been attractively blue-tinted by Ted Turner. He lisps: "Plaza doblada."

The terrible liberating dream, no? President = dirty junkie mariposa.

9.

The deer the size of a chihuhua has emerged from the jungle. The deer that didn't exist. Until Tuesday. He or she walks across the perfectly shaped squares of stone that constitute the floor of the imaginary city. You listen to the interrogatory click-click of the toes.

10.

The dream that you have killed someone but cannot remember who or why. The dream that someone has mailed you a death rendered very small, the size of a toy that fits in an envelope. The dream that the mirror is in cahoots with an entirely different nature.

11.

The usual millstones lovers put around each others's necks.

12.

The Albatross in the kitchen at 2 a.m. while you're snacking. Poe comes in the back door of your house, apologizes in that almost charming junkie manner of his, and goes out the front door, leaving it stand open to the December wind. You cough, and go back to bed.


13.

The children have a stuffed representation of the Vietnamese deer already. His ghost is already being prepared. You giggle like some of the crowd must have done when the heads rolled across the cobblestones and people cheered. The shapes of the clouds above.

14.

The shape of the head of Charlie Chaplin. The shape of the head of Marie Antoinette. The shape of the head of the head of the human family. The shape of anonymous in a blurred tintype.

15.

Marie Antoinette was to have escaped to northern Pennsylvania. A town is still named for her in preparation of this imagined escape. It's still exceedingly rural, mountains and river and bears. The idea of a town set like an imaginary meal at Versailles. The pheasants would have charmed her. The peacocks would have felt a pique of jealousy.

16.

Franz Kafka was already on the train. He had already ridden past 1941, 1943, 1946, his face pressed against the glass. The Holocaust happened in Prague in a tiny rectangular theater first.

He shot. He scored.

17.

The deer doesn't sense that you are the Station Master yet. The deer doesn't know that the Dream has appointed you Station Master.

You think maybe if you are quiet it will go away.

18.

Imagine the person who laughed the least in a long life. Imagine the person who laughed the most in a long life. These two people need to inhabit a very old, very tall house together. Just once before the end of time. The Real World Louvre: a Handful of Young Androgynous Drunk Punks in the museum, filmed. They destroy twenty centuries in their bitch-fights.

19.

The Vietnamese deer is walking through the large empty plaza of stone, mirrors, clock towers. Clouds are moving above and in puddles on the stone floor. Nature is attempting convincing modes of discourse. Why is the deer not engaging these overtures for discourse like a composer?

But wait...

20.

The Vietnamese deer is suddenly music for a few bars. Then a dead lover who liked red shirts. Then a madwoman who thought George Clooney stole her ovaries.

Then the Tribunal of Real World extras we all loved.

21.

The deer walks by the empty stores which are dark. He click-clacks past The Seller of Albatrosses. A cardboard cut-out of Rimbaud smiles like 1896.

22.

Eileen Myles wanders through the Station and you duck in your office. You are afraid to let her see you dressed up as the Station Master. She is holding a cup of coffee and a newspaper like a baby and is talking to herself. She walks right past the deer saying "Fucking Guido."

23.

And I say to myself, I look upon it as a great gift never to have known you in this lifetime. Never to have rubbed elbows with you, smudged minds with you, killed in theory entire species of creatures who convinced themselves into existence by hanging albatrosses upon one another's necks like millstones.

24.

And I say to myself, I consider it the greatest honor to have known you in this lifetime. Ever to have had your perishing before me, like a snowstorm going out upon a lake in full sunshine, a homeless President singing to himself in a cardboard box, and all the pretty deer-toes of your poems clicking across the linoleum of my mind...


25.

The lake is only a disfigured rectangle. This was someone Russian in 1914. A watery green rectangle. It gave me hope.

26.

Xenia carved in marble. Somewhere in the Station. The Vietnamese deer has found a marble box of flowers and grasses and feeds now as the clouds go overhead and over feet and over vertebrae and over language. And under language. And through language. And outside language.

27.

And now someone wonders what the Vietnamese deer tastes like. Then several people wonder about this. Then a culture wonders.

28.

And you know the Holocaust was a what if? thought experiment. Germans like what if. They like it even more than David Hasselhoff.

29.

A child is up all night conversing on the internet with a colorful video avatar of another human being, thousands of miles away, distorted, an old man inside an old woman inside a house. The old man is eleven years old when he talks with the child. A ruse. The kitchen in that house is full of Albatrosses...the cupboards are overflowing.

His mother screams for help when she shoves them back into bread drawers and cabinets, but the old man (her son) never comes to help.

She beats the Albatrosses with large wooden spoons and curses her dead husband.

There is, saddest of all to admit, a picture of the Vietnamese deer held to the refrigerator in this house by a neon orange magnet in the shape of a letter of the alphabet.

30.

The Vietnamese deer is almost through the Station. You stop for a moment and stare at the shape of your feet in the bathtub. Your naked leg looks Roman. You are jealous of the composure of your toes.

31.

You try snuffling like the Vietnamese deer, practice by looking in a mirror. You want the nostrils to flare as dramatically as the deer's but standing in the shadows doing this you look ridiculous.

Some ghosts of children are laughing at you. Probably they belonged to the previous Station Master. Or one of Kafka's stories, one of the ones that leak and the landlord has been told repeatedly about it he keeps saying he will do something about it but he won't you just know he won't because he lies. He lies.

Who knows with these things.

32.

Literature is the dispossession of the ghost. The Vietnamese deer emerges. About as plausible as Mozart returning.

33.

I exorcise you, Susan Noel. I exorcise your thirteen year old beauty as moist and promising as a half-opened peony bud and your thoughts ants scribbling energy around the peony head constant joy and drawings of clothes and the doll clothes you sewed and the vampire stories you loved and told the lovers you imagined at thirteen and how memorably you sang and always remembered all the words to the songs on the radio and the people who picked on you for your love of vampires and your mother who maybe loved strange men and made bad choices for your Hungarian grandmother who didn't speak English who you haunted because she believed in spirits and the beauty of your body running through the tall grasses of the unowned fields where we played after school where the buildings were empty except for junkies who wouldn't harm you because you were so beautiful and haunted already. I exorcise you, ghost. Friend. Friend forever child whom I love. I exorcise you who lost your mother at thirteen who lost your life at thirty-six who lived in a small apartment until you died and married someone in a last minute mystery none of us know him or understand did he kill you did you die did you care? I exorcise the beauty of the train of Kafka going through the Holocaust going through you Susan Noel this all happens very fast somewhere outside our slow lives and speaking all these words while you run through my mind that does not exist any more than the peony's hard head and the ants scribbling it to open like a religion for I don't remember feeling anything like regret ever you say is that bad?....

34.

And said I'm sorry. I'm sorry I never existed...

This was a character in a book.

35.

You don't have to be lonely. The Vietnamese deer says. Entering the anthropomorphic circus. The Deer says to the Stationmaster, You could be Andre Gide or something. You could write to boys who don't exist. You could write to children who don't exist.

36.

Your children.

37.

And I say, "Well, what's on t.v.?

38.

I guess I can be the Station Master for a little bit. I'll just sit up here in the tall stone tower and sing Alanis Morrissette or something. Thank you, snuffling Vietnamese Deer.

39.

The tiny Vietnamese Deer the size of a chihuahua says, you should call the poem "The Vietnamese Deer Reflection Station."

40.

I want to give someone a German umbrella that was manufactured in the year 1939. That has a handle of horn. I want them to open it in their living room and leave it there like a satellite dish. Or a crow being murdered in a Francis Bacon painting.

41.

The poem says stop talking about us you're starting to annoy us.

42.

Okay, I say, playing with the Albatross around my neck like a tongue fingering the socket where a tooth was, or a lover remembering an ex pulling down their underwear teasing and laughing, or a cat's first sweet bite into the silken neck of a bird while the bird screams the name of the universe.

I will be the Station Master for a little bit.

The Vietnamese deer appears briefly to say goodbye to humanity. Right before it leaves the storybook's imaginary pages.

With its hoofprint dipped in ink, it signs my belly.

Some children shiver and imitate its snuffle in a classroom somewhere halfway round the world.

43.

Do you think Francis Bacon was lonely?

44.

I'm falling asleep. Which Francis Bacon?

45.

Oh, never mind.

46.

In a dream, I search for someone to whom I can hand over the Keys to the Station. I will practice my poker face, my real estate agent face. Like the train we are all on, I talk in my sleep all the way past morning.