Hearsay
They say that I was born in February, in a hospital in Midtown, while it snowed. It is legend. There are photographs. They say the blue bathing suit with the little green frogs was my favorite. They say that those are my mother’s sunglasses, pointing at a naked boy wearing nothing else, in a Polaroid, laughing. My first birthday and the big stuffed dog? I remember that dog but I don’t remember getting that dog. It seems like I always had that dog. She would sleep in bed with me—endlessly vigilant, black plastic eyes flashing hallway light if anyone opened the bedroom door—along with a real cat named Good-For-Nothing Layabout Cat. That’s you, they say, pointing at a photograph—a little boy at his first rodeo, in a baby-blue cowboy outfit with suede fringe, standing awkwardly and squinting into the sun—but they aren’t pointing at a photograph, they are pointing at a story, how this and that and something something. What does it take to own the myth? Why build a self from this? It makes me uncomfortable, my story—part insight, part anecdote—started by unreliable people at cross-purposes. And which photographs didn’t get saved? And which photographs didn’t get taken? I never figured out who named the cat but everyone took credit for it.
Landmark
All night, all the cities in the thickening darkness. All night, all the roads. All night, all the houses with their punched-in eyes in the sickening, sickening darkness. I slept on the roof. I slept in the yard. I slept in the closet, under the cuffs of a dozen shirts when I thought there was something in the room with me. There was nothing in the room with me. I slept. O pioneers, I kicked in doors. The sound of hooves. We must not tarry. Night has descended and all its stars, they crackle and burn while I am left here, silent in the dimmed arena. I swear to god, there must have been a day on the beach or a secret dip in the lake after dinner. I must have walked all night against the wind once, trying to get somewhere. There must have been. I slept on the plaid couch. I slept in the house with the red kitchen. I fell out of bed and slept on the floor in a square of astonishing moonlight. I crawled there, hand over hand, from the darkness of a terrible dream. Believe me, something is heaving, incomprehensible. The house is filling up with strangers and the picture frames fall off the walls. There isn’t a word for it. Metal, powder, rust, a pear; even here a night flight, a tense change, struck like a bell. What’s that in your drink? Have you been here long? O why won’t you love me, love me? There isn’t a word for it, moonlight, slippery. There isn’t a word for it, moonlight. Through every window at once. I concentrated on the moon. I dug a hole in the sky and called it the moon. A hole in the sky and we call it the moon.
Cult Leader
I don’t think my mother wanted to be a cult leader. I’m not sure they wanted her either, but the guru was ready to retire and my mother had charisma and a living room large enough to accommodate everyone. Her boyfriend at the time was a walk-in: a man so previously sad that his original self had left its body and something else had grabbed the wheel. This new thing was driving the car and sleeping with my mom. I have been sad but never have I actually left my body. My mother has been sadder, but it never made her a poet. I practice my sentences. Sadness is overrated. She did her cult-leading by the book until she finally had her epiphany while cleaning the bathroom: You are where you are. Deal with it. She had her followers practice doing the things they were afraid of, the things they hated, and the things that bored them, in an attempt to overcome their reluctance and their vanity. The goal was acceptance, eventually bliss. They were sad but hopeful. The cult was a place for them, the way church is a place for sinners. For legal reasons she was only a cult leader on the weekends. Tuesday and Thursday nights she held group therapy in the living room while I did my homework in the kitchen. Weekdays she saw clients in her office, which was my bedroom. Damaged people would sit on the couch and unload their emotional problems all over themselves. At night, I would unfold the couch and sleep in it. Some nights I climbed out the window. She didn’t notice. She kept a note taped to the refrigerator door—Surrender your attachments. It seemed like a mandate that self-erased: Keep on struggling to stop your struggling. I don’t think it meant what she thought it meant. I didn’t like the implications.
Pornography
They shot him by the side of the road. The sun was tangled in his hair as he leaned against the car. He fingered his chest, just over his heart, as if touching it directly. —My car broke down. —You need oil and a belt. Take off your shirt. You could consider him compromised. There is no universe where he is not a hitchhiker asking a rancher for help, where he is not plugged in like a lamp. The doctor has to crack the ribs to get to the lungs. The plumber has to pull out the sink to get to the pipes in the walls. The pornographer has to adjust the bodies to catch the slant of the light. He moves them like furniture. In the barn, the rancher spreads a blanket and their clothes fall off considerably. They are technicians. It is a compliment. They clock and clam like eels and the night goes mink. I want to be them. I want to be like them. I want to fuck everything but I don’t want to be touched. It’s awful, my watching: the refusal to participate, the ogling and smug superiority, the approximation of a true desire. It’s fake, but it isn’t. It’s art, but it isn’t. They’re pretending but it doesn’t matter because they’re actually doing it, exhausting themselves as the acting evaporates, peak beauty, that moment—the swan dive, the little death, a bird flying into a kitchen window, open or shut, this or nothing, it strips the bolts. The cameraman is standing very quietly. It looks like he is weeping
Fear
I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves. This is a cold shelf, Sport. A struck bell. I gloat when I say this. I shine in the frost. You are a ham tied up in string. You are pineapples and cherries and ham on a plate at dinnertime. Fate eats you up. We rub against the facts now. My face is a glass jar. My heart is applesauce and a cold spoon. I clear the decks and spend my leverage. The rest is dazzle. You are an obstacle course and I am a pair of dice. You hop, like a rabbit, cabbage to cabbage. I win by a landslide. You are the flipped coin and I am the outcome. I don’t decide, I collect; thumbed scale or not. You hit the ground, or so you say. You can’t unknow the facts so you run faster. You, the boy from bruised tomorrow, under the eaves where everything gets put down. I am a lamp, you are a gun. You spend your bullets on a hat, I burn when touched.
Syllogism
They went to the lake to talk to the fish. You don’t know them. She cut a circle into the ice. The teeth of her new saw flashed in the light. All the arrows of her thinking pointed in the same direction. What happened to her old saw? I can’t tell you everything at once. Let’s say there are mountains. Paint them white as January. The snow falls down. Does she think the fish will tell her something? The thrust of the story depends on the answer, on whether she’s reasonable or not. A boy on a trampoline goes up and down, up and down in his invisible elevator. He is learning how to think about it. He is learning how to feel about it. His face is a newspaper. His heart is sweet candy. The forest is deep and wide. I am trying to tell you something. I set up my premises and they get knocked down. They get knocked down and they get up blurry. The speed of conversation is faster than the speed of thought. It takes too long to say it right. It takes too long because it is a philosophy. The bird has plumage. The mob has torches. This isn’t a story about my day, I am arguing a point. It accumulates. We’re running fast at a plate-glass door. We’re running fast, expecting it will open. I can’t give you what you want, I’m thinking in shorthand: small on the page but big in the head. Something is moving below the ice. I am trying to tell you but you’re not listening. It seems there is no end to this. The snow falls down and the argument jumps its tracks. And the argument begins to weaken. And the argument is beginning to weaken.
History
Stevens had a blackbird. Stein had a rose. Thor had a hammer. He hammered in the morning. Plato had a cave. Noah had a boat. Jonah had a whale. Melville had a whale. Dumbo had a feather. Adam had a rib. Jacob had a ladder. Wittgenstein had a ladder. George Washington founded a nation. We gave him a dollar. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. We gave him five dollars. Harriet Tubman had a railroad. It wasn’t an actual railroad. Magritte had a pipe and a painting of a pipe. It wasn’t an actual pipe because it was a painting of a pipe but really it was an actual pipe in its own way. Sherlock Holmes had a pipe and, separately, morphine. Freud had a cigar and other people’s problems. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Frosty the Snowman had a corncob pipe and a button nose. He got locked in the greenhouse and melted. Eve had an apple. Newton had an apple. Snow White had an apple. The witch had a mirror. Narcissus had a pool that worked like a mirror. It gave him a stiff neck. General Sherman got Atlanta by burning it to the ground. He never looked back. Francis Bacon, like everyone, had less time than he wanted, said I wouldn’t have this body of work if I had been better to my friends. It’s true, he was awful to his friends, but some people don’t even try. They aim low and sleep well. They get nothing. I got a wheelchair, then a cane, and I used to know some things about an earlier version of you. Audubon got all the birds of North America. Darwin got the finches of the Galápagos. Galileo got a telescope. He used it to move the sun to the center of the universe. We arrested him and banned his books. Socrates had a question. Well, several questions. We gave him poison. Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.
Dinosaur
My housemate’s girlfriend has a kid who stays with us half the week. He’s kind of slow for a ten-year-old, but everyone keeps insisting that he’s six. His hair’s too long but I don’t really know what he looks like because I won’t look him in the face. He’ll barrel into the kitchen, saying something about dinosaurs, and stop abruptly, saying You’re not Andy. I never turn around because sandwiches are important and he shouldn’t be encouraged to barrel into a room without looking, thinking that it’s safe because rarely is anything safe, and most people aren’t Andy, and they will just take what you say about dinosaurs and twist it around until you sound crazy. Also he probably has jam on his face and dirty hands. Also I don’t want to turn around and look him in the face and scare him with my face, which is a sad face, the face of someone going through a difficult thing and not handling it very well. He isn’t messy, not really, just too young to understand that you have to clean as you go because messes compound and you have to confront the things you’ve ruined before they drown you in wreckage and filth. Unless he’s ten, in which case he’s old enough to learn. Also he got shampoo all over the bathroom because he was pretending he didn’t know how to wash his hair, hoping someone else would do it for him, but he put on such a good show that he convinced himself that he didn’t know how to do it after all, and he scared himself, which is pretty much what I do all the time, so it was irritating and made me feel self-conscious. If he’s six, he probably looks cute with jam on his face. If he’s ten, probably not. I don’t know what I’d do if he was sixteen, standing behind me with too-long hair and jam on his face, going on about dinosaurs with his dirty hands and not looking up and not realizing that I’m not Andy. When I was in the hospital and my head was full of noise and snow I still knew who Andy was. Also there are dogs. I call them Dog, Other Dog, and Little Dog. I won’t learn their real names. The only reason you name a dog is so you can tell it what to do. I don’t know what to do so I’m staying out of it. I don’t look the dogs in the face either. Once you look something in the face it starts to want things.
Cloud Factory
Zebras have stripes, leopards have parties. Bobcats eat ham sandwiches and crème brûlée. A bird will sit on your finger and tell you a story. A dog will sleep at your feet all night and not overthink it. The dog is chasing squirrels in the backyard of a dream. I was a beautiful day, I was yellow next to pink. I was a brush fire, a telephone. I was, I am. The mayor gave me a sash and a gift certificate for a complimentary dinner. He was very proud. It was a cakewalk. I took the long road to thicken the gravy. I pushed the words around. I pushed them hard. I did it blind, with the pictures in my head, and the technicians in the cloud factory filled the sky: cumulous, cirrus, cumulonimbus. They made some shapes so we could guess. We looked at them. I did. Meaning comes from somewhere. You could feel the figs swelling in the fig trees all afternoon. Imagination—image is the coal that fuels its little engines. Shovel coal. Call it love, call it a day’s work. Keep the furnace burning in the factory. The puff puff puff of possibility. You don’t need to know someone to be their lover, you don’t need to know anything. To get over Ben, I thought about Steve. To get over Steve, I thought about Paul. I went swimming in a blue rectangle. It wasn’t actually swimming but I called it swimming. Around the pool: A thousand grasshoppers. Strawberry cake: If only I had the room. The planes land and sometimes there is luggage, so here’s a little lamb for you. Maybe it’s a cow. And a tree in the background and a bat in the tree like a blot or a stain or a gathering storm. I know, I’m doing it wrong—meow, meow, meow. Big words and pig fat, très estúpido—but then, what do you know, the invisible table reappears. Go ahead and finish the thought. Say the dream was real and the wall imaginary. Fill the sky with clouds. A thought came up to the window and surprised me. And that was that. Nothing but fingerprints on glass. Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the world, I’m just looking at it.
These poems are from Richard Siken’s I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press 2025)
