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. -- p2: defenestrate --

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