“museum house,” “graph paper” and “mike”

if the world continues on

long enough, past

you and me and everyone

we know, will every

house be a house

where someone famous once

lived, every home a museum, except maybe ours,

the single house of no history, where we and

many simply passed

time, and, in that state

of notable anonymity, will our house become

exceptional?

 

you turn, to work on your computer, because

it’s winter and Saturday and you have nothing

left to say; last night I said let’s take the bus

because no one really takes the bus to Providence

for dinner anymore

 

                                      we sat in the eighth row

                                      and were the only

passengers until the hospital when three

others boarded for downtown; the air

was still and piercing cold

when we sat down for tacos; later

at the dive bar we scored the sofa

and the band played rough covers

 

you drank and I didn’t and in the car

home you leaned your head on

my shoulder like a girlfriend, or

maybe like a wife unlike mine

 

in college I’d take the M4 down

to the museum twice a week,

spending an intense half hour

alone with

a painting or two; when we went

together

we’d endure longer, but

we’d pass the pictures quickly

sometimes pausing only long enough

to snag the painter name and date

 

the less we touch the more charged

is each point of contact and when

we don’t want to get all

the electricity

started

we avoid

each other all the more

 

I think more about my bicep tear

than about your nipples and

it wasn’t always that way

 

each fall RISD would produce

a catalog of art lessons for kids,

like what I’d later know to be

a college course catalog; elation

at being able to sign up for

mixed media medievalism at

age nine

 

                    one time on the way

into the museum for classes

they had artificially fogged up

Benefit Street to film a commercial

for London Fog and some woman

in heels and a trenchcoat walked by

 

today I would fantasize

we made stained glass out of colored

tissue paper and clay

maquettes of crusaders in the room

with

the sepulcher and the crucifix

 

I have to believe the money

my mother invested in those art lessons

returned something more

than fractured images of a young

boy in a borrowed frock

 

which may be why I have chased

a deer of aestheticism through

the thickening woods of middle age,

 

why I see still in your silhouette

a form famous also in my eyes

 

we have been

to so many museums together and

seen there

all that’s been picked

as worth our seeing; outsider art

and Carracci; on the walk down

the hill from the Capodimonte

because we couldn’t get a taxi

we walked by the salted cod

stalls and under the laundry lines

and through the heaps of garbage

against beautiful carved apartment

building facades and wondered

what’s the difference between

the two; the Choice of Hercules

freshly revisited in our minds

 

you always returned, and me,

but on different days; here,

in this non-museum of a house,

furnished with time alone,

no plaque

the grid lifted

from the surface of the paper and twisted

like early computer graphics in

EPCOT commercials that looped

in the Polynesian hotel room

before there was a volcano pool

these were certainties: storylines that glued

as backgrounds to the cyclorama of my childhood

vision; I could see

them chronologically, a dream

of castles and knights, the western

frontier, colonial exoticism, the promise of the

future; and me in them – Robin Hood, Crocket,

Livingstone (my mother gave me that one), Kirk;

unbranded, untethered, unexplained

in grade school math time I memorized multiplication

tables; they were my tables, my foundation, my ticket

to space or whatever

it was going to be, beyond the low

stone wall outside the plexiglass windows

that even then had started to cloud up and yellow;

when the building went up they were glass and proud,

but adults learn that exuberance of construction fades

into duty of maintenance; the glassblock clerestory

atop the interior wall must have been stunning until,

after kids figured out how to lob stones, they covered

it in plywood; inside it was eerie to see the punctured

opalescent blocks backed in opaqueness or unfinished

lumber; you knew without knowing that it was

someone’s failed dream

the first time I found out about

graph paper my world became

more ordered, the idea that someone had figured this out,

long ago, for me to rediscover; five squares to the inch, each

box an increment of something, a hole where a something of my

imagination would fit

to have it all worked out, to lay down your narrative, and then,

despite its orthogonal logic, to see in watercolor flesh

soft edges and unarticulated maybes that pull you through

each box of each calendar day

crossing the street at night after a blizzard

when the sidewalks weren’t shoveled

but rather plowed in

walls six

feet of snow

 

crosswalks to nowhere

blocks away                                         sprawl

 

he was hit                                              by a driver found

not at fault neither speed nor impairment a factor

 

mike didn’t drive himself

now decades after he’d come back to

the place he grew up

he’d get friends to take him to

city meetings to weigh

 

in on planning and zoning

land use restrictions

traffic patterns drainage setbacks pollution

airport expansion pedestrian safety

 

he’d been an engineer

knew government process like

the back of his hand

his hands both

palms up on

wet asphalt

last gleaming

 

he fell where, yes, in the city,

but it wasn’t on the city that he was struck down

because it was a state road

                                                                               and it wasn’t the state

to be held to account

because he wasn’t

sprawled out along one

of the designated crosswalks they’d so kindly established

in the general vicinity                     not the driver, poor guy,

 

because why was mike there crossing the road anyway,

why did he need to get home on the other side

 

the cars never stopped moving,

north and south and south and north

four lanes

sounding off the

preternatural buzz of tire treads on damp pavement

 

who could expect the sidewalks to be cleared

after such a momentous storm just the week before

 

certainly not a burden for taxpayers to bear

or abutting businesses who had no place

in their parking lots

to put all that snow

 

the crews should be commended

for doing all they could

working overtime

to keep us all, well,

not mike, safe

 

first report was critical but stable condition

then the news he was dead a day later

no transition no reason no time

for transfiguration, no desire, of course, for reflection

beyond the red and blue lights in the puddles

of snowmelt,

slicked with oil,

cleared the scene

and, of course, no one to blame