until the metal drills into my sole.

I shake my vial with its jabbering pills.

I pour whiskey into my whiskey.

Then I pour it down my throat. Once while I joked

with the boys by Dempsey’s locker, a group

of rotted teeth fell out. And Dempsey winced!

Tried to look away. (I’m proud to say

the space still gapes: I never got a bridge.

Why hide? That gap is me now, all the way.)

Champ, I warned the boxer, that kind of girlishness

will get you in the end. And then

I stuck my tongue through that bloody place

and sang “La Marseillaise.”

Philip Larkin’s Koan

PHILIP LARKIN’S KOAN

In the perfect universe of math it’s said

the world’s eternal aberration.

In fact, we should be less than dead,

math itself disrupted for matter ever to be read

as real. A thought so hard to fathom that The Nation

in its article on math has said

we lack the right imagination: the human head

will not subtract itself from the equation,

zero out the eager ego to be less than dead.

Did the numbers hunger for mistake, for fun upend

themselves to recalculate our infinite extinction?

And was existence meant for all, since it could be said

without our numbers others might have thrived:

the black rhinoceros, shortnose sturgeon—?

Articles of horn and scale both less and more than dead,

figurative dreams that now haunt us in our beds.

Memory’s another flaw in our equation. Was it The Nation?

I forget. Regardless, I know that someone said

in a perfect universe, we’d all be dead.

Once

ONCE

white field. And the dog

dashing past me

into the blank,

toward the nothing.

Or: not running

anymore but

this idea of him, still

in his gold fur, being

what I loved him for

first, so that now

on the blankets piled

in one corner

of the animal hospital

where they’ve brought him out

a final hour, two,

before the needle’s cold

persuasions, he trembles

with what he once was: breath

and muscle puncturing

snow, sudden

stetting over the tips

of the meadow’s

buried grasses after—what

was it, a rabbit?

Field mouse? Dashing

past me on my skis,

for the first time

faster, as if

he had been hiding this:

his good uses. What

a shock to watch

what you know unfold

deeper into, or out of,

itself. It is like

loving an animal:

hopeless, an extravagance

we were meant for;

startled, continually,

by the depth

of what we’re willing

to feel. The tips

of the grasses high

in the white.

And the flat

light, drops of water

on the gold

coat: the red, the needle

moving in, then out,

and now the sound

of an animal

rushing past me in the snow.

Saturdays at Reynolds Work Release

SATURDAYS AT REYNOLDS WORK RELEASE

I remember never being afraid, because they said

the crimes they committed were small,