Vanishing acts & Brass castors
by Doug Ramspeck
[ poetry - november 08 ]
Vanishing acts
My briefcase refuses to go to work today.
It wants to smoke marijuana and read Rimbaud's
"Night of Hell": The mind's a mischief in the countryside.
It wants to stay up after midnight and look
through a telescope at the distant stars.
All that light is antiquated, after all, older by eons
than any other measly thing a briefcase
has ever known, and yet it's shiny new there
in the sky, which impresses a briefcase. My briefcase's
favorite line from Rimbaud is For a long time
I bragged about owning every landscape imaginable
and pissed on the big names of modern poetry and painting.
Sometimes a briefcase feels a little melancholy
in the evenings, especially when the moon rises
like an old white shoe above the willow trees.
And it's one thing to carry Rimbaud close to your bosom
in a flap meant for Important Papers, but it's
another to start re-reading Crime and Punishment
and to wonder if Raskolnikov would place you
in the column for Ordinary or Extraordinary.
My briefcase, were it made of tanned antique leather,
would have a better case, but it does possess
a passion for ferries: it finds something strangely
hopeful about being carried across the bay to vanish
in the city where there are so many others almost
exactly like it, and yet not one can quote
with such disdain from Rimbaud's "Deliriums."
Brass castors
I was walking alone again in the woods
last evening and began imagining myself
hunched and writing a letter, writing by hand,
forming each word on what appeared
to be papyrus. I was writing to Kamala
after she had given birth to Siddhartha's son,
after she was bitten by the snake and was dying.
The subject matter of the letter was
the neurochemical addictive power of dopamine
in rats, and the desk was kidney shaped
and had brass castors. In the letter I began
telling the story of the first girl I ever kissed,
when I was twelve, but then I remembered
that poor Kamala was crippled and in agony.
Once she had taught Siddhartha with her wise
red lips how to kiss, how to give and take pleasure,
but then Hesse had placed into his protagonist's mind
the dream of the freed bird and its discontents,
which can only lead to suicidal thoughts.
There is much to learn, apparently, by being
apprenticed to a ferryman, so I lifted the writing desk
to my shoulders and carried it across the stream
to the sweetgum trees and hickories. I would like
to say that the brass castors bore raw love
into my exposed flesh, that the whip-poor-will
and rose-breasted grosbeak became the Buddha,
but I have read that when we imagine the beloved
the ventral tegmental area of the brain fires up
and sprays its dopamine as arousal and ecstasy.
So on the kidney-shaped writing desk Hesse's novel
was open to page 107, and in dark green ink
I was underlining over and over the line:
Were not all the difficulties and evils of the world
conquered as soon as one conquered time?
I can't express how much the brass castors hurt.
I was in love, and the snake bit into my calf,
and then the leg began to grow discolored
and to swell, and there was nothing left to write.
