The End of the West Read online

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  for Pig

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Nervous System

  Scary Parents

  Some of the Men

  Kings

  My Autopsy

  Returning to Church

  Little Prayer

  My Father Full of Light

  Late Meditation

  Into the Earth

  Good Friday

  My Dead Friends Come Back

  Ode

  We Did Not Make Ourselves

  Seeing Whales

  Marco Polo

  Wang Wei: Bamboo Grove

  The End of the West

  About the Author

  Books by Michael Dickman

  Links

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  Nervous System

  Make a list

  of everything that’s

  ever been

  on fire—

  Abandoned cars

  Trees

  The sea

  Your mother burned down to the skeleton

  so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the house again, exhausted

  in slippers

  What else?

  Your brain

  Your eyes

  Your lungs

  *

  When you look down

  inside yourself

  what is there?

  You are a walking bag of surgical instruments

  shining from the inside out

  and that’s just

  today

  Tomorrow it could be different

  When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on a windowsill

  The voices of my friends

  in the sunlight

  All of us running around

  outside our

  deaths

  *

  Someone is here

  to see you

  again

  Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of them like a child

  walking down a hallway

  at night

  Make room for them—

  they’re very tired

  I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me

  where the language begins

  to end

  and

  down

  Scary Parents

  I didn’t shoot heroin in the eighth grade because I was afraid of needles and still am

  My friends couldn’t

  not do it—

  Black tar

  a leather belt

  and sunlight

  Scary parents

  They filled holes

  all afternoon

  then we went to the movies

  *

  The shit-faced gods swam upstream inside them and threw wild parties

  and stayed up

  all night

  Under their tongues

  between their toes

  their stomachs

  All over their arms

  wings

  did not descend to wrap them up like babies

  As promised

  Still

  there is a lot to pray to

  on earth

  *

  Everyone is still alive

  if not here then

  someplace else

  Climbing out of their arms

  Resting their heads

  On what?

  No one is singing us

  to sleep

  Ian broke his mother’s nose because she burned the pancakes

  She left hypodermics

  between the couch cushions

  for us to sit on

  Some of the Men

  I had to walk around for a long time before I could see anything

  The leaves

  circling down the street

  imitating the insides of seashells

  imitating

  my fingerprints

  I could sense my father

  sitting alone in his little white Le Car

  staring off at the empty parking lot

  No radio

  No wind

  No birds

  Just some guy in his car looking out at the blacktop and the shadows of telephone wires

  It isn’t a sad scene, not really

  Some of us are getting

  exactly what we asked for

  Some of us

  don’t even have

  to wait

  *

  Think of my grandfather, still drunk or asleep, passed out on top of my

  grandmother

  so she has to wait for him

  to come to

  along with the late

  Redwood City morning

  the light skipping in

  across

  the swimming pool

  The smell of failed sex

  bourbon and

  chlorine

  Dead cigars

  He taught me how to swim

  with one of his hands beneath my legs and another beneath my stomach

  how to cup my hands, how

  to turn my head

  Inhale and exhale

  and move gracefully

  through liquid

  *

  Look at

  Josh’s father—

  Stumbling into the bedroom at three in the morning the two of us asleep

  and all that moonlight

  and beat his son’s

  head against

  the headboard

  You fucker you fucker you asked for it

  The moon

  His jaw splashed across the pillowcase

  *

  The Parietal Temporal Occipital

  The Atlas and Axis

  Spheroid and

  Spheroid

  The real smile

  real grin

  Your movable and immovable joints

  Your eyes

  your orbits

  Sutures

  If given the chance

  I would

  break them all

  *

  For a long time my grandfather

  tried to kill anyone

  who came near him

  Wives

  Daughters

  Stepdaughters

  What is it called when insects are stuck forever in a kind of amber?

  Then he got sick

  and he was going to die anyway

  and he stopped

  trying to kill people

>   Then we could fall in love

  *

  My father’s advice is claustrophobic and flat as it fills the soft leather booth inside the restaurant

  Birthday lunch

  Red neon

  Cigarettes

  What you need to do

  is join the Army, the Marines

  something

  You need to be taught a lesson

  *

  Some of the men are standing in their backyards at night, looking up

  at the stars

  listening to the freeway

  Their hands in their pockets

  Everything’s just

  as it was

  My hands

  in my pockets, curled

  into tiny

  fists

  My belt buckle

  gleaming

  Kings

  Our crowns look nothing like his crown

  needles and light and

  needles of light

  fingers

  stamen

  Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash

  or ripped out by hand

  Our capes are bath towels

  wrapped around our necks

  and fastened with

  giant safety pins

  Not ermine, not

  rabbits

  I ran around the neighborhood playing King of the Block

  in my red underwear

  The trees didn’t bow

  I was not on fire

  as he

  passed by

  *

  None of my friends

  are kings

  anymore

  They used to be good at being alive, pointing their index fingers at

  the trees, passing

  invisible sentences

  proclamations

  knighting the birds

  one by one

  All down my street the new fathers

  beat the kingness

  out

  of the

  kings

  when they came in for dinner

  and when they

  went to bed

  The birds knocking against the windows

  in the wind

  and he wasn’t in the wind

  *

  When I think of him now all alone

  he looks like a mouse

  King of the mice

  He’s white like we all thought

  red eyes

  red tongue

  yellow teeth

  Scampering across the kitchen floor in the middle of the night when

  we wake up

  and want to make a sandwich

  Listen, when you turn back into nothing and disappear forever

  down a hole in the floor

  I want to go with you

  But we can’t go

  What a motherfucker that is

  The kitchen window

  the only light

  for blocks

  Now we’re going to know what it feels like

  My Autopsy

  There is a way

  if we want

  into everything

  I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the small

  and glowing

  loaves of bread

  I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress

  floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks

  like water at night

  The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese poems

  You eat the forks

  all the knives, asleep and waiting

  on the white tables

  What do you love?

  I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on despite

  worms or fire

  I love our stomachs

  turning over

  the earth

  *

  There is a way

  if we want

  to stay, to leave

  Both

  My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air

  Particles of skin

  The invisible floating universe of kisses rising up in a sequined helix

  of dust and cinnamon

  Breathe in

  Breathe out

  I smoke

  unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes

  from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them

  here, and I’ll smoke them

  there

  *

  There is a way

  if we want

  out of drowning

  I’m having

  a Gimlet, a Caruso, a

  Fallen Angel

  A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, Stinger, Angel Face,

  Corpse Reviver

  What are you having?

  I’m buying

  I’m buying for the house

  I’m standing the round

  Wake me

  from the dash of lemon juice

  the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy

  and the two fingers of gin

  that make up paradise

  *

  There is a way

  if we want

  to untie ourselves

  The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark

  There are lots of stories about intestines

  People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake

  The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new bright

  plastic curled around

  the older brother

  Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned

  Some people climb them into heaven

  Others believe we live in one God’s intestine!

  A conveyor belt of stars and saints

  We tie and we loosen

  minor

  and forgettable

  miracles

  Returning to Church

  Walking through the snow with her was enough, quiet enough, white

  breaking beneath

  our boots

  White then dirt

  White

  then concrete

  Not a word

  I watched the black branches of the oaks gliding above us

  like the shadows of koi

  Shadows, she was singing

  Shadows!

  *

  I had forgotten

  all the promises they make

  at church, singing

  or

  not singing—

  A new body

  A living water

  I wanted to be very still and listen to her voice moving out in front of me

  There are two houses

  The dark and quiet

  house of God

  and the house of her

  voice

  *

  The light through the stained-glass window was snow

  Do you want to be home forever?

  It’s all right if you do

  Kiss me in the pew among strangers who aren’t strangers but His

  other homeless children

  The light through the stained-glass window

  was snow, not Grace

  not Spirit

  Not, lightly

  His fingers

  *

  Everyone’s so nice!

  And they don’t even know me, they don’t think they have to, hand

  after hand

  they take my hand

  A prayer of bone

  The old, beautiful

  Wurlitzer rising

  behind us