Outside You Cannot Breathe
Bait for the stricken, stale, red-checked eye,
these placid, flashy fish describe, without parole,
the same unbeginning figure-eight. Trees
scud on the glass; buildings, their windows likewise
scummed with sunset (as if inside were fire)
dissolve to sham sea-forests, miniature shipwrecks
beside which a Santa Claus plants, in mossy pebbles,
an American flag. It wags like a dog’s tail, indolent
as the fish who forget, every three seconds, where they’ve been,
spared thereby what could be called (like hell) a satellite of itself.
Christmas has been cancelled, kids, and these recursive
prisoners remind, without remembering, without not
butting their pouted mouths against the doubled watcher’s
watery half-inward gaze, of just that, dead mid-thought.
Hostage to an arrested attempt at self-discovery
but missing by whole measures the errant leisure
such delayed arrival might deliver, repeatedly, like an insult
to the brain, they circle inside us who also eat
our own refuse in a möbius-noose of non-achievement.
Too many fatted vapidities packed into the body’s
fifty-gallon vat, like death-in-life, like what a laughable
idea about death life is. Fish brain swimming inside
the larger, wastefully-spacious human brain,
bent in every direction back in on itself, a failed
escape artist, wriggling outward into further fetters-
for our first act, we use the word malapropism in-
appropriately, because there is no outside; outside
you cannot breathe. We talked, my friend and I,
about last night last night, trying to unsay what
kept getting said just as fast. Tragic to truly think
that all thought to be thought must obsess its own
unsound and groundless prepossessions. We are
repeating ourselves, we said again, and so we were.
- Jasper Bernes, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries
these placid, flashy fish describe, without parole,
the same unbeginning figure-eight. Trees
scud on the glass; buildings, their windows likewise
scummed with sunset (as if inside were fire)
dissolve to sham sea-forests, miniature shipwrecks
beside which a Santa Claus plants, in mossy pebbles,
an American flag. It wags like a dog’s tail, indolent
as the fish who forget, every three seconds, where they’ve been,
spared thereby what could be called (like hell) a satellite of itself.
Christmas has been cancelled, kids, and these recursive
prisoners remind, without remembering, without not
butting their pouted mouths against the doubled watcher’s
watery half-inward gaze, of just that, dead mid-thought.
Hostage to an arrested attempt at self-discovery
but missing by whole measures the errant leisure
such delayed arrival might deliver, repeatedly, like an insult
to the brain, they circle inside us who also eat
our own refuse in a möbius-noose of non-achievement.
Too many fatted vapidities packed into the body’s
fifty-gallon vat, like death-in-life, like what a laughable
idea about death life is. Fish brain swimming inside
the larger, wastefully-spacious human brain,
bent in every direction back in on itself, a failed
escape artist, wriggling outward into further fetters-
for our first act, we use the word malapropism in-
appropriately, because there is no outside; outside
you cannot breathe. We talked, my friend and I,
about last night last night, trying to unsay what
kept getting said just as fast. Tragic to truly think
that all thought to be thought must obsess its own
unsound and groundless prepossessions. We are
repeating ourselves, we said again, and so we were.
- Jasper Bernes, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries