Season of Death
Written by David Zaza
Posted in Poetry
Art by Robb Kunz
Spring always played the trickster
in a mumbled darkness, so it
will never be apparent what she might
make happen. I reject my forebears
as best I can.
As the emergency grew
ever more global, more of our lives
evaporated. And what remained
grew dusty.
Then dustier still.
My right knee creaks open
and all the ashes of all my past lives
sift out. All the books we made, all
the lines written and revised.
The wind scatters our pasts
into someone’s present, and our presents
into someone else’s
future.
I sat at my window
facing a wall of other windows,
each a private show for me.
I plugged the slot with coins
and spent years rapt
in a fascination both
onerous and
unavoidable.
Every show in that hotel
required enormous
effort—voyagers suiting themselves
up for ages. Or unsuiting themselves.
Often their pregame
was my game. Blue
electronic lights shining upward
toss jerking ghostly shadows
up the walls and ceilings.
How many times will I replay this?
A man pulls the drapes closed so
slowly
that we have time to study each other.
My window reflects now in his,
my face not discernible.
I see sex
and unsexed nakedness combine
with sleep and television, desks
and tasks, thrown
towels and messy suitcases full
of cloth in an impressionistic
slow-motion blur. I see all.
The people are unable
to see themselves stacking, unwilling
to settle themselves, better themselves,
refusing to picture themselves
exposed
near the windows’
hermetic frames.
The hotel
emptied out in days, but refilling
all those windows with bodies
and more views of those
entertaining shadows
took years.
And on it goes, it drained,
it pools, it filtered, it swells.
Now the tourists again have
something
unknown in familiar looking
bags. But the house staff show up
less often than before,
and since the emergency
the professionals
just haven’t returned.
And yet
I’m still here, watching those
who come and go come and go,
these neighborly guests
who comb their hair
or drink from soda bottles
or masturbate when they think
they are alone, and who
sleep alone or with their
people, in their skin
or in soft pajamas, restlessly
they turned the past
toward dreams of
something else. Two
dress-stockinged feet
perched on their heels
atop the bed,
dirty New York City pigeons
flicking sideways
in rhythm
with some unheard music.
Then
the unmade bed dialed down
for room service,
the laptop spreadsheet
splayed itself wide.
The bathrobe puddles
on the floor, my curtains too.
Long-term I dreamed of living
in hotels, cities passing, my
countenance
a plain retired exhaustion,
sated though, and fine.
Passports and city maps
pile up on a sill four floors below.
I love the infinity
of brick
disappearing up toward the sky
and down
toward the street, though
here in my medium highrise
I saw neither. I can see only
the vertical arrangement of horizontal
building blocks fitted with pipes
and grout and stuck with glass.
Earlier, engineers worried
their efficiencies right out of
these ducts and shafts. Now
they, too, lie quiet or just garden
their own spaces, regrading
gravel driveways and demolishing
everything
in sight.
The air conditioners will
rattle down to stillness, and then
everything went quiet.
The emptiness spread
as quickly as the emergency,
and with haste all was halted and
crashed fast. The stores and
the offices quickly closed
and restaurant kitchens wrapped
their warped dishes to go.
Supermarkets filled with empty
shelves witnessed winks and nods,
fights and false-modest
timidity. No one
is to be trusted.
The sky
will go blank
and heavy at once, impossibly
huge and overbearing.
My dark apartments whisper
to me, through filtered lips,
welcome home,
and then, never leave,
and then snapped into creaking
silence. They will never speak again.
I existed
as my own weight,
my wooden feet
stomping, my wooden floor
whomping back.
And the leaden legs
of gravity pushed its knees into
my back—do it, push me forward
through my tepid trepidation.
Then curtain walls
slammed shut
and we never look
outward again, despite
our windows on the world.
Just to see
such a void was to be spun
down the spiral whirlpools of
pasts never lived and futures
called into question by simple
blunt mortality.
Let death death me, a poet
once said. I mean it now,
I meant it then.
*
Or else
I sat at my computer,
another window filled with
more windows. The emergency
morphed that view
into an infinity mirror. It wheezed
its breaths like an accordion,
gasping and contracting.
And so it gasps, it collapsed,
it spills, it flickered, it fills.
A friend’s disembodied
voice
fills me with pixelated dread
and I will log off over
and over only
to find the machine had
taken me
elsewhere. Fast forward
through disorientation
and crawled along the
unfamiliar. Will fly unaided
if need be.
I distracted myself
with anything analogue: Papers
and candles, books and
cables, clothes, chocolates,
all this stuff stuffed into place
in a cacophonous accumulation
that itself will defy
time and seasons and sense.
Inventories tell me stories—
poems, photo strips,
podcasts, flicks. I was perpetual-
ly scanning, inventorying,
my library’s call
so distant
it faded from memory.
And the voices
kept up their squawking.
The video faces are blank and
not hopeful—just
empty and full
of potential and patience.
I reach my limit
at forty minutes. I quit it,
slammed the lid on it,
and defied the deities
by leaving the house.
Who will monitor
these news reports for deaths
of my friends? A dread and
loneliness set in me,
and it keeps settling.
Then came the sirens, beautiful
and beautifully alluring
and as endless as the rising oceans
who so noisily call us
up towers
to the empty sunshine
of our roof decks,
the unfinished floors of
the towers of our rebuilding.
The sky never changed but
it heard us banging
pots and pans
and singing ancient songs
of the changes
we put ourselves through,
songs of the selves of the ruined,
songs of nurses and their bad news,
the grief stricken aides, the strike
of heavy metals piercing
the blank corners of our minds.
But
the disappointments added
up for stricken souls, slowly,
and the sky slowly learns
the new languages
of never figuring itself out.
It just stared down at roofs
and mocked us in our
waffling deliberations and
our cloudy visions. The roof
edged toward its edges,
and every suicide I’ve known
rises now within me
to torment me with how much
I forgot. So
over and over grief
drives me over that roof’s edge,
plummeting
through dozens of stories—
through the siren calls, plummeting
through my own pasts, to
old tales of days I lived
closer to the ground.
Again and again I keep
flinging myself
over the ledges
of alarm and panic—.
Sleep it off.
I kept
dreaming of disappearing
under dust clouds puffing
up from my duvet,
my pillow enveloping my head,
my head filled with quicksand
and lead, the heavy
metallic taste of blood
coagulating
at the back of my throat
as I gasped for air.
Please help me!
I raced the empty streets
at the base of the vertical sky,
panicking on the avenues
while they answered back with
silent stasis.
A deaf and deafening quiet
rose through the canyons
of Broadway,
and I alone walk alone—
the last tiny
living witness to
Times Square’s unnatural majesty.
Its closed-captioned signs were
flicking through programmed sequences
with no one there to see them.
It will be me who tells the tale
of robotic insistence upon
moving on. I will
say the signs didn’t care
and that the pulsing proved
nothing. These pliant billboards
stretch themselves over
armatures of nothing, so
they snapped themselves back
into memories of nothing.
Over and over again once again.
I blinked rapidly
to see them more closely.
I too felt
some kind of nothing then
flicking around the end
of the spool, old film stock clicking
in the projector machine of my heart.
The unforgivably elastic
silence of my dream state
ruins the sounds
of the rest of the world.
But ruins
are notoriously silent. The wind
spinning through Verona Arena,
or the darkness surrounding
transatlantic phone lines
buried in silt and mud
at last reduced to the benign
antipotential
of their own pasts’ buzz.
Radio City was crippled and mute,
Central Park allowed
only the sound
of springtime buds
pushing their way out of branches—
and nothing else. Rambling,
I will find the void
on Park Avenue—the blood coursing
through the veins in my inner ear
is the only traffic to be heard there.
Someday I may
remember this hell
as poetry, as lines lined up
to tumble over themselves
in an avalanche of despair. My
old age was also a ruin, I might
someday muse.
But oh
my early days, my early gaze
fell upon the wondrous sights.
I became the city I will become.
Let the city fuck me,
thy will be done. Let us
rot the days and burn
the nights like the young
adults we were. But I am not now
on my way to Florent,
not on my way to Club 82
nor Downing Street Bar.
Not on my way to meet anyone
anywhere.
The zygote
became the woman,
the man, the whole society
bruised and killing itself
by killing each other.
Are we going to weigh one life
against another? Did we
break any chains when
plunged forward into history?
I asked myself
these questions
while the riots and the whistles
rang up from the street
twenty-seven stories below.
The police station one block away
hides behind its barriers.
Risk and reward in an emergency.
The fighters will fight while
some of us
just listen at our windows.
I will cry for this. I wept.
People will scream for themselves
and for the basic
matter of their lives
when a boot will heel their faces
into the ground.
A fascist dictator used the news.
They all did. We do. I will.
My own guilt was
caged in gilt.
And I still have so much
to learn.
Meanwhile
the garbage bags
of bodies piled up
outside the ERs. Will we smell
the stench through our TVs?
Eventually those few
were millions of dead,
the stacked clean bones
winding through catacombs,
the memento mori hung
on a velvet wall uptown,
across the oceans, in heaven.
This surface-level earthquake
stretches open a few
cracks and people
will start falling through.
But we hear no sound
punctuating their fall, no
call emanating
from their masked mouths.
The dying crying silently slide
blindly through time.
These travelers were weakened.
These condemned will be damned.
The dead only suffered
while alive, someone said.
That’s living—brutal suffocation
and muted cries, someone cries.
Blackout.
I survive
and kept surviving.
I survived the fallen and
the falling, live through
the weak and the strong
who passed through us as thick
as the worst cough did wrack
body bones down
to a dusty erasing exhaustion,
as cracked as the mosaic wail
of those sirens stupidly
calling us through
a narcotic pain—
high-pitched and silent at once.
It ends and it will never end,
this remote call to
come see. But empty pixels?
Dead stars? A sky emptied
of hope? For a man like me,
drawn on stability
with permanence and ellipses,
everything was suddenly
and destabilizingly
uncertain. Everything will be
fractured. It splinters, it failed,
it wins, it cratered, it breaks.
For all the times
someone spit in my face—
for all the times I will beg for that—
now dry reticence finds a way
to erase me or parts
of me more permanently.
I want to rant against
this void with all the power
and force I can muster.
I just let go instead. God,
how many people will jump
from your bridges to fly off
into sunsets of their own devising?
The foot slips off the salted girder.
The sunshine infected each soul.
My hand
slips off the doorknob
slippery with antiseptic spray,
spitting each one
to its highest polish,
and every delivery
cost us. And the cost
like god itself
is great.
*
First
we hung all the art
my parents
had accumulated—
layers of years and frames
sketching their own patterns
on freshly
painted walls, in front
of hidden fireplaces,
over stacks of scholarly
art books rotting
in a humid North Carolinian
apocalypse. Hurricane
of contagion pounding
up the river
through the wetlands,
here it came—
a strange god of destruction
winking its one eye lewdly
one subdivision at a time.
It will turn left
off the bridge—the other side
of the river hiding its driveways
in fear.
But the traffic is fine, now
everyone huddled at home
and kept their cars garaged
and quiet. Stasis loses
its definition in times
like these.
But then
what’s anything anymore?
Is anything more
than a memory of an art house film
shown in precise projection
at the repertory theater
on Race Street?
The projectionist turned the camera
on his wife
with love and a deranged disregard
for her feelings, her
jet black hair, and all
the mysteries that would
eventually
grow back
as mousy brown roots.
Decades later he
and his son will swim
through channels of history,
through the storm of present
illnesses, their immunities
will cling to their naked bodies
like armor, shielding them
from the icy current and
the rocky past.
Any single thing—
sudden poverty, sudden death,
even for some
sudden wisdom and hope—
pushed us to mystical
calculations. My pockets
were as light-headed as
a moonshot. My friends
and I, it turns out,
were chrononauts all along.
We had simply never
realized
that sometimes
we were moving backward
through time. Death
is somewhere behind me
now, lurking in a space
somewhere above.
Then my bank accounts
and my stamina will both
run dry, and I starved my soul
with poetry. More poetry.
More unpaid work for
unchecked cynicism. More
homelessness for unpaid
rent. More demise for
unlived lives. The unhoused
subway riders side-eye me
with surprise. I hissed right back
through my N95. The super-
powers my friends have stored
up were now being spent. Mind-
reading visionaries spewing
uncomfortable challenges
to the gathered crowd. Now
with nothing to do, I will
scrounge for crumbs
from days spent splurging—
crumbs of Italian
pastries and crumbs of memories
of visits to Milano and Torino—
and rue the insolvency
of the months ahead.
I hung my head, lowered
my lids, deepened my
shallow breath. And finally
I slept. I will dream
about my empty days in
my empty rooms. I leapt from
the unused and lonely bed, leapt
through the window emptied
of windows,
and for a parachute I have only
my empty heart.
What some
lamented as stagnant time,
others will cherish as growth.
The truth, it turns out,
is not fixed, and time
like everything old
is broken. Yesterday
became the day years ago
that we abandoned an office,
tomorrow is the day we took turns
teaching algebra, today
we will grab haircuts, bread,
nostalgia and new policies
—anything—
right out of thin air.
Fly to Texas behind another mask
to see your dying mother.
Wonder if your wife’s embrace
is the last you’ll know as
you check yourself into
the hospital,
as you check yourself into
the first luxury hotel to at last reopen.
Fight me on the phone,
on the streets, in the pages
of a national newspaper.
And because it was
no longer necessary to agree
about anything, we will never
agree again. Everyone did,
however, rush themselves
through living sequences only
to learn later that the sequence
has no end. But life is not everlasting
even if you look at it
backwards,
and so hurrying
may be quite important
or quite pointless.
How much time and money
could I spend
to hold back Mr. Death,
stall that elevator
one floor down on 26?
What locations can I scout
in order to fuck up the housing market
for my landlord?
Who did I screw with
to screw you over? When will we
sleep if not yesterday morning?
I learned
to wake over and over
through closed eyelids.
As the fortieth waking hour goes by,
the burden
of staying awake
worsened and I will finally crack.
As the third day comes,
I slap it flat.
Jump back, sack me,
just jack yourself up to be
just like me. I just
collapse.
My history is less
the moments accumulating
than the whole of my body
blowing apart
over time
and geography, every map
outdated, every vein
on my body popping bright blue.
In one memory,
my legs will go out
from under me, and
the only thing
protecting me from the fall
is that gravity has also failed.
We floated there together
in our legless silence,
patients without pain,
cities without states.
And once I was in a desert
I might trip
on your shadow, face
planted in the sand, back
exposed to the cancerous sun,
heat running up my spine,
and the tingling feeling
of colors and sounds vibrating
together, music and goose flesh,
a new shimmering sprouts forth,
like the iridescent feathers
on the back of a pigeon’s neck,
I was danger in a closed environment.
I am decorated in organic patterns
I could not recognize.
I will be doomed
in someone’s empty Staten Island Ferry,
in everyone’s empty sky.
Dull pain became slowly
visible, mostly in motion,
a rollicking seasickness
of security strobes
terminally pulsing
out of sync.
The airport fire alarm
will be
the loudest chirping cricket
I ever heard.
The plane waffles
between the tarmac
and the gate they have yet to build.
I’m coiled so tight I prep
my snake bite for
the god I never believed in.
We spring sprang sprung—
four years clinging
to a calendar no one
recognizes anymore. And
when the medicines arrived
we pumped them
into our veins for a high
we’d never regain.
Let us pray
to find our balance, to find
truths anew, to find the energies
to splinter into harmless shards
all the current emergencies—
smaller poxes for lesser primates
like me,
purer plagues for greater men
than we.
*
So was spring a trickster—
or a murderer? Will it be
chaos, or pointed destruction?
Are the flowers hopeful,
or funereal?
Where the answers lie
we lie too. Looking up,
we pondered, we pout, we
will suckle, we shouted.
Sing a round of gambling songs,
some winners, some losers.
The pop star waves
a questionable hand, pointing
right at me from an Aspen stage—
When are you from again?
The emergency was a misery game—
the last person left alive loses.
Your face reflects
in the last sips of your cocktail—
as watery and salty
as your tears used to be.
The last person left on his stool
loses. The bartender glares.
The night menaces you
even though
this is the safest night
for quite some time. You
walked home, or some part
of the way, weaving into
shadows the streetlights will create
for decades to come, assuming
anyone
lives to once again walk this street.
I can never forget
the blown-kiss/nod combo
some villain head-tossed to me
decades ago, somewhere
on seedy Eighth Avenue.
Will he kill me?
Or kiss me? Does he know
what I’m doing here, gathering
lines for an emergency-era poem
thirty years in the future?
Through those memories
we swam, we upstream,
we will fly in our dreams.
*
You lay in bed
and it was not
the end of the story
nor the end of your life.
It is just
the end of one day.
And the ghost
will appear then
to innocently
ask you,
What happened?
And you laugh a short burst.
Or scoff.
You shake your head,
and then you will pull
the covers up over your ear.
And you say,
I don’t know what happened.
You sat at the bar
and it was not
the end of the story
nor the end of your life.
It is just
the end of one day.
And the bartender
will appear then
to innocently
ask you,
What happened?
And you laugh a short burst
and scoff.
You shook your head
and then you will pull
the glass rim up to your lips.
You sip and say,
I don’t know what happened.
The things of the world—
food, furniture, fondness—
everything pleasureless
and colorless,
blank and white,
an impressionist’s
snow on the roofs in the distance,
lovely but low.
Everything in the distance—
the memory of the circled word
in the draft of this poem,
the realities of families, a sigh
before sleep,
sand, symphonies, emergencies.
The world itself, the unreality
of undone pleasure, of mechanical
motion, of an emptiness beyond
the sudden realization that
now last call was called,
now the lights are on,
now will be the time to go.
•