The Human Condition

After Magritte (1935) and Leone (1966)

Doctors promise it is not so, but I swear I am
going deaf in my left ear. Unequivocally, this is
more humiliating for them than it is for me.

After all, I have done the tests, snapped my fingers
on left and right, heard the difference in pitch
like the small slaps of waves under the hull.

Once, in a floating hotel, I was given no pillow,
told the sound of the river would be my cushion.

Still, I couldn’t fall out of time there, couldn’t still
the thrum of my pulse: something about sweeping
and ticking, the dull shush of the sand.

It’s like that sometimes on dim afternoons,
a slow wade into late lunch and oyster crackers,
when the real sense of small apocalypse creeps in.

It rolls by, the tumbleweed a minute before high noon,
the shrill, smoking, wild-west beat like boiling water.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, each passing like a hiccup
because the throat makes no such distinctions when parched.
It simply cries out, then sleeps.

In the Western, the cowboy hero. Drygulched
when he least expects it. Bandits rustle his steer. Revolvers pop
like whips. Again and again, owl eyes stare with apathy.

There is much in this world that is unspeakable,
and so much silence worlded by its thingness.

Like the leeward side of a mountain, which is deserted
by the rain, lying in its shadow. The silent rock as it stands.
There is only one thing in the universe that is like an ocean.

Somehow, it all spins like a quarter on the sticky bar counter,
the illusion of fullness, a silver berry, for a second. Then the drop.
Something about sweeping and ticking.