LOVE

If you forget your friends, even if you forget them all
   And insult poets—
      God forgives that. But hold out some hope
         For lovers and their strange minds.

Because, honestly, is there life anywhere else
   Now that fake Virtue rules everything?
      Whatever we believed in wandered off, whistling
         Like a god, and left us here.

Still, however barren the year proves,
   Almost at the right time, from under the snow,
      A greenness—the fresh grass—sprouts up,
         And sometimes a bird sings

While the woods slowly expand and streams move—
   At midday, the breeze is already warm—
      Then finally the right moment comes
         For a sign of the better times

We still believe in, where something that’s enough in itself,
   Pure and clear, out of a shining, copper
      Ground, can grow—Love, 
         Incomprehensible, a gift from God.

Some rift in reality lets this one plant
   Scatter its seeds from heaven, and it’s kept
      Alive by invisible nectars and the effortlessness
         That radiates out of work’s core.

Let it spread into a whole field, a thinking, feeling stretch
   Of full-flowered world. And the words we share in love
      Will be the language there—here—even now,
         Where we carry like the sound of laughter.

LOVE LANGUAGE

New company started it. Only 
in the afternoons when he
had us, he explained why they
were with him. He wasn’t
flaunting, but living openly, and mom’s 
thinness—we should ask her—had  
nothing to do with him. So we did. 
Looking back, it’s clear what
she wanted to say.

                                   Determinant  
as these things seemed while we  
watched their hair and skin shine 
through the divide, they were more  
like cinderblocks than gophers.
Whether we built pools or bank  
branches—should we want to  
undermine it? Overcoming  
recreating and overcoming each
time, we had the rest of our lives.

UNDERPASS

Coming over it for once, seeing it from above,
coming to this spot and seeing Route 20 bend.
13’8” plus the unknown height of the train carriage, plus my own  
height––I had already been fighting the cabin light to see. 
I was close. The closed Tae Kwon Do house,
the island between these three roads, the yield sign, flagpole, 
      billboards, 
the landscaped embankments––

it’s nameless. We’re coming to it, a turquoise trapezoid 
cut through the hill. I took you here, not specifically. 
We passed, blinking, through both of them…Anyway, 
I went countless, with you and others, to get to the lake.
The lake is proof.                   And a train rips into sight 
just before we dip beneath its quarter mile of cars. Simultaneity.
Simultaneity. Then the bridge erases a second of rain.

A GHOST

And so it came to pass, not long after, that it nailed rain.
Both kinds, human and divine. 
Living on rice and living on beans and rice, 
I can reach into another life.

GHOSTS

“Your messages to send, if you’re him,
to their names @yahoo.france,
your hand over them waiting to touch and send them—
It’s like reaching in the dream…”
The footage of the woman sleeping rolls. She’s reaching.
“you reach in real life
but there’s only air so you can’t grab…”

“Oh my,” she says. “I think it was a glass!”

“That is its whole life. Think about that.”

He was talking about the ghost, the “phantasm.”
“It’s what I keep saying. Well, the spirit of the thing, 
the spirit of the things I said to her,” says the other man.
“And when the hunter comes here and asks,
‘What would you be willing to sacrifice?’ 
Why I’ll—well, I will!”
“Mmm,” the host says. “You will… what?”

“Why—”

“Don’t say it, Mike!”

“Why, that I’ll—”

“Oh, don’t say it!”
“That I’ll move. I’ll move… Why—if we have to.”
“That’s it,” said Bill, killing the volume, 
“it’s for re-sale value! Look how clean 
everything is, how high the ceilings seem. 
That’s the question, right, do people buy the house  
after because it’s haunted or because it was on T.V.”
I said, “We have a––”
“No, ours is smoke,” he said.
“Not even. You can tell smoke is… is there.
You can’t really tell this is there.
that’s how you know it’s the embodiment 
of post-colonial consumer capital––
no supply, no demand, but we’re still buying.
We’ve got this ghost on rent.
We’ll sell people the idea of the possibility of escape,  
right, the ghost is outside. And what’s great is, 
it’s already right there, the escape, 
in their money. Literally inside the money.
Just buying feels great.
You’re a unit of its exchange.  And that’s freeing. 
But right then, after you’ve bought the thing, 
you’re unhappy again. Why?
You’ve bought something you don’t need.
You’re burdened. What do you do with this thing?
You can’t throw it away––that would be wasteful! 
Even if you bought an idea, you’ve got to hold on to it.  
And what’s more, getting rid of it would be a decision, 
and that’s just the thing we’ve been trying to get 
away from––”

“How many takes,” I said, “do you think it took?” 
“To get this actor to seize even half-convincingly?”
“Before it attacked her.”

“That’s not even her!” said Bill.

“Ours is better,” I said. “Do you remember
What Christine used to say?”

“Sure, she’d say
you only ever see it in the kitchen.
Yeah, no, no one’s ever seen it anywhere but the kitchen 
and you recognize this catch
like click, click, click, click air
at the line, you know, where the space changes  
like you’ve got to acknowledge it before you enter.
But Christine would be like,

‘Don’t you think, sometimes, that it’s only ever this, 
only exactly this?’ I guess she meant banality, 
or some harmless lack of evidence, 
the condition that should you want to 
you could so easily explain away––
a grieving widow sees her husband standing in the snow
the rest of us only see her grief, 
her grief explains the ghost.
We only see you responding to your own life’s scale 
and not the explanation, no kind of truth but an alternate, 
only the thing, we tell ourselves, you can’t see.
You change. Fine. Good. And you see what you were, vaguely, 
but what is it that you can’t see? That’s a koan, friend.
Your lucky number’s 12.”

“But you don’t even believe in it?” I said.

“Is it late at night?” he said. “Am I alone?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very late.”

“Am I alone?”

“You’re not alone.”

“Am I alone?”

“No. You’re not alone.”

“Hello?”

“Haha,” I said.

“Maybe somewhere, if I’m coming home from somewhere  
where there were a lot of people and all the lights 
are on and the blinds are up so you see light 
in the windows and nothing outside except red flashers 
in the distance and there’s a window open,
so I go back there and it gets inside me, and I seize.”

“When it gets inside you?”

“When it gets inside me.”

“You guys are trying to make fun of me,” 
said Marie, trembling up, almost in tears.
I’d forgotten her.
“You’re crying?” Bill said. “Oh shit. 
I mean to it—”
“I don’t need this,”
she said. Her hair was perfect, pulled tight back 
into a perfect bun, and she had on a gray dress 
with sparks in it. “There’s no need. 
I’m not crying.” But her tears were huge now, 
one from each corner of the left eye rolling unevenly,  
one starting fat from the inside corner of the right. 
“The two of you,” she said. “The two of you 
are already… are dead already.”
I felt disgusted with our conversation,
for having upset her, and maybe for conversation in general, 
but I was still curious about it all
and how her insistence on this presence, this inactive being––
“It’s active!” she said once. “It combed the ends of my hair.”––

well, in truth, I never carried the thought even so far.

“Mark,” she said, turning to me. “I’ll put a little life 
in you just so you can know.
I want you to know what it’s like. Only you. 
I’ll whisper it to you,” she said, and she approached, 
took her middle finger, wiped the fat, right tear. 
Then she wet my ear.

____

Jake Fournier is an EMT-Basic living and working in Albuquerque, NM. He researches abolitionist poetry and ethnopoetics in the American West, and he teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His poetry has appeared recently in Annulet, Lana Turner, and The Yale Review.

Note: The poem "Love" is a loose translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s "Die Liebe."