Things That Don't Happen
Kim Addonizio
Is there a place they go – the gold stalks, the umbels, the new shoots,
when the seeds rot in the fields or are eaten by birds? Is there a city
someone meant to build
where your car is humming steadily through the streets, while here the
ignition
turns over with a dull sound announcing silence, and you trudge back to the
house,
the appointment canceled, erased from the date book, and a different day
starts, the way
it starts for someone in a farmhouse kitchen, with a mother who’s suddenly
a widow, an uncle who says Don’t let any niggers touch him so that for a
moment
the black coroner lays out the body, and gently closes the eyes while the
wife slips on her old nightgown and the son whispers on the phone
to his lover, and the monsignor prepares his eulogy – this is a eulogy for
the things that don’t happen, for the stillborn,
the unstamped passport, the ring given back or pawned, or simply tossed
into a drawer with the final papers, the ones that say you failed as
everything fails, while each day the tiny accumulations, the insignificant
actions,
destroy those shimmerings in the air, those sparks thrown off, the fire of
the actual
consuming everything. The ice settles in the empty glass beside my bed, a
sudden,
startling click, a latch, an opening or closing, I can’t tell which; I could
get up, pour
another shot, stop trying to explain how it obsesses me, each day
the not of what is: this lover’s mouth and not the last one’s, this dream
that isn’t premonition and vanishes on waking, incoherency refusing
to coalesce, the words stoppered in a bottle that floats to the horizon’s
edge
and goes down, flaring for an instant. And each day the terror, your house
with its blood-smirched doorpost, the angel passing over but stopping
somewhere else:
brains sprayed on a brick wall or leaking into the dirt, bodies in the river
carried down
with the current, river where one fish feels a hook tearing through its gills
and rises
frantically into the air. But why should we be sad; shouldn’t we be breaking
out
the champagne, thinking of the would-be suicide sweating in a room, the pistol
with its rusted firing-pin flung onto the bed, all the black shoes safe in
the back
of the closet; and of the boy in Birkenau, his death that doesn’t happen
so that two generations later, in Brooklyn, a girl can kneel down
to place a small stone on his stone, and stand to brush the dirt off her
knees?
Isn’t the loss held in abeyance each day, the benign tumor, the wreckage
at the intersection where you might have been standing, except that you
caught the streetcar;
but really there is no streetcar, none of this is happening – it’s trying
to but I can’t help
realising how hopeless it is: as fast as I have you step up, pay the fare,
struggle into a seat with your packages, I’ve kept you from a thousand
better things.
I should let you lie in bed late at night, awake but not alone; I should
nestle you
against the one true lover you haven’t let yourself long for in years
but who is finally here, who’s not ever leaving. I should seal you up
with the breast, the kiss. Nightingale, nipple, tongue dipping into the real,
the taste of it, the singing, the virtual lark, the light beginning but not
yet
day, not clothes yet, not shame or betrayal, just the lovers too unironic to
survive
anywhere but here. So this is the end, because I want to keep my stupid faith
in romance, in the idea of love, and if you would just let it go on forever
this way
you wouldn’t have to go out into the nothing where something is waiting
especially for you, though what it is I can’t tell you, only that it begins
as soon as you stop listening, and turn away, only that it happens now.