Cheeks


"My life is short
and uninteresting," the poet
Arda Collins writes.
During the credits after
Agnes Varda's Vagabond, ebs weeps
in their seat beside me. I do not weep,
but feel, strangely, elated, also
terrified. I read about
a clown class exercise where
the clown has to make everyone in the room
belly laugh. What ends up happening is
everybody cries, including
the clown at the center. I like the way
the poet declares herself
not herself inside the poems. Who was I,
to insist my life should be
interesting. The weeks I read
Simone Weil on the train I felt calm.
I like how in another film
it's impossible to tell which
version of the world is better,
or sicker. I could understand, almost,
a bad political reading of this,
suggesting no future
was possible. Maybe I was becoming
confused in my oldening age,
oldest I had been yet. I felt
I had to brace for a new face
descending at great speed, having invited
something hard and dry
to enter. Biology, I could see,
was a stain on a window. A face
warped in a mirror. Another person,
outside, can be better
at observing certain patterns,
as can a poem. This year, my astrologer says,
I should go to the desert
on someone else's money.
My hairdresser, also an astrologer, says
I must have chosen
to bleach my hair because
of a shift in Pluto. The first
astrologer uses medieval techniques
invented before people
knew Pluto existed. They couldn't
see it. One version of truth
holds another truth inside it,
like a child, or a seed inside fruit.
I had never been, really,
to the desert, except an afternoon
in Joshua Tree where I felt
I briefly left the planet. A sign explained
bees will land on your arms to drink
your sweat. I imagine weeping
in the desert, bees slurping
from my eyes like fountains.
What really happened was
I swallowed someone's cum
in the shade of a red rock face.
I never know what to do
with facts like these, declarations. My life was
small and uninteresting, which
I believed in. In Vagabond, the woman
makes her choice for freedom
and never questions it. She is not
searching, quite, because
she seems to have already found
it. It's the world that asks questions.
The faces of goats crowd the frame.
We lie in the grass among the dead
and listen to a crow. The sun
can be described in such a way
as to seem menacing. Why, Mary asks,
does sun feel so good on its first
spring day and then, midsummer,
we yearn for gray. Psychology
asks us to treat a question
like a problem. A question is
a sign banging against its hinges
in the wind. The new chicken place
across the street is made from
the bones of the old chicken place,
painted orange-red. A squirrel
dies in the vent. I want to say
the rotting smell lasts for weeks,
but I don't know how long it lasts.
It's still happening. I told
my students I hated a punchline
ending for a poem. This made
one of them write a thousand jokes.
This was my own story
playing out with the roles shuffled.
The filmmaker said she wanted
to give the character in one film
something to say so she wrote
her own film. This was what
it felt like to have a life.
There was someone else's life
you were improvising dialogue
inside. I rearranged the books
on my shelves to give the unread piles
a new pattern, into which
my eye might enter. The cat
was dying in my bed, as he'd been
for weeks, a long rest period
at the end of his brief life.
I found this experience a solemn
duty, interrupting my own rest
as he knocked over a water glass
and stepped on my hair.
The old woman in Vagabond
knows her nephew is waiting
for her to die, bringing flowers.
She and the girl laugh
and laugh at this. In the audience
we laugh. I can't stop giggling.
She is so near to dying,
and so alive. No one sees her,
really, as alive, except the girl.
The girl so near to dying herself,
though she doesn't know it,
only we do. This is
the beginning and the end
of the movie. And also how
its middle unspools into a life.
We are looking at someone
already dead, as she eats
stale bread with dirty hands.
I can see each film
asks a similar question,
one I cannot summarize
with precision, about where
life is, how it accumulates,
what is possible outside,
to the extent an outside
exists. I can feel the poem
seeking after its concluding
thought here, by which I mean,
my mind seeking after
its concluding thought here.
A thought is already dead,
having arrived somewhere expressible,
unlike feeling, which is never done,
and thus alive. Like ebs
weeping next to me at the movie,
for the girl in the film,
and for Varda, maybe, now dead, or for,
I don't know, some past self.
Outside the movie, the moon
is a low, foggy sliver in the west.
On the drive home,
we discuss the film we saw,
and the others we'd each
recently seen. I consider whether
I could be happier, resolve
some of my life's problems if,
instead of writing poems, I simply
said things out loud to friends.
One day, you could walk into
a town square in search of bread
and find yourself smeared
with wine-colored paint. The question
is about solitude and freedom.
There is some other
story playing out I cannot see
or comprehend, where even
asking questions like this
is an answer to some question
I'll never even think of.