Defenestrations

Tristan Egolf (1971-2005)
What sustains you when you forget
your days barefoot in Paris,
wooing and begging, pawning novel
or guitar, or nights squandered
dishwashing in Lancaster,
when you can’t press your life in glass
like a rare species of fly,
and can’t remember what it was like
shoving fist and crowbar against
a VW bus, a bottle into a wall
of bottles, nor remember the sound
splintering, nor the dustpan
and sweep, nor the square of plywood
where you had set shard and sliver
and polymered a windmill,
when you can’t think of the elegant
rigging of pirate radio
spitting Iraq and black-sacked heads,
and the beer and thong hugged hips
of the Smoketown Six
stacked in a near naked pyramid,
or how, as the motorcade
passed, and sprawled, cuffed
in the grass, a knee in your back,
a lens caught you smirking,
when you forget Ralph Doyle
heaving a cinderblock
then himself through the display case
of a bookstore storefront, lifting
a mannequin, (Reparations-
he called them) only for the cops
to follow a trail of parts
and find, huddled on an island
in the middle of the campus pond,
Ralph rocking in his odd
unmedicated way the torso.
Copper, Copper, never catch us…
(I heard Ralph married, has a kid.
Shane’s back with The Pogues)
What spell, what mocking,
what chant keeps you waking,
when the pill and thorzine
drunks riding a late night line
nod off or drown alone in
the subway’s ambient roar,
when you want to go with them,
raft and river and rail,
want to lie down and sleep,
want to feign sleep like a swan
or rat in a dog’s mouth,
when you can’t tell the taste
of anything good
is courtesy, and love a vandalism
no restitution absolves,
and forget how a song
– Tweedy, Elliot (one’s trying;
one had it hard, much
too hard) – can coil around you
and stay long like a patient snake
wary of its own grasp,
like a sweet wandering note
off Jeff Buckley’s tongue
(trees filled with gypsy moths
when he went) when you tire
of hollering over a field
of barn swallows careening
in the freshly turned air,
of the barn air reeking lacquer
and turpentine, the alchemy
of jars sealed by mouths
of friends who poured themselves
down in, when you grow
suddenly sick of your own breath,
the stench of your sincerity, words,
(could we have said
or failed to say, could we have
crammed your life, left,
or leapt on the pile, listened…)
What sustains you when no longer
a prop your boyhood
shotgun cocked against your head
and the quiet won’t quit,
can’t take, being torn, when you are
about to make a window where
there was no window, is this
swath of Pennsylvania gray,
low-down February,
a diner, a plate of kasha
smothered in gravy, this girl
in a plain Sunday dress
as she presses her mouth against
the pin-holed end of an egg
and empties her lungs, this glass
clouded with paint, tulips, this waiting
where your closure is not
yet steeled, your grief intimate,
where you are and are not
what the world breaks against,
the wet hairs of a cheap brush,
the bluing unfinished sky.

James Hoch