James Davis May

Fish Rain

It’s rare, but it happens:

A waterspout forms near land

and raptures the fish to the sky.

We’re not quite sure what happens next.

Well, we know that many die,

that some are shredded by the winds,

that some are frozen into chunks of ice,

and that some, some survive

even after the cyclone stops,

and they exist up there a while.

Maybe they’re pummeled

but supported by the currents

in the clouds, the way you keep

a tennis ball in the air

with a single racket—kept up

until they aren’t and fall,

and even then some survive

to drown on land. What must it be like

to die after that ascension?

Before, life was so much hunger

and short-lived satisfaction,

but mostly buoyancy

without knowing that word

or any word. Yes, they’re dumb,

but surely they know or sense

something is ending,

one eye focused on the ground

the other on the lost sky—

and the water an absence,

a memory they can’t remember,

while that human sound of wonder

starts up when they’re found

and can’t, I imagine, help them.

A Work in Progress

And maybe, he thought as he left the party—

his friends’ drunken singing becoming faint,

their voices less distinct with distance—maybe

he wouldn’t be so sad if he just accepted the fact

that he would die and then be forgotten,

as would everyone else he loved, and that nothing

he could say or do or think could go against this

ravenous oblivion, making stoic resignation

not only healthy but wise, probably the one way

to score a point in this blowout. Then again,

maybe taking nearly forty years to say this

wasn’t so much a triumph as it was pathetic,

his poor sulky ego finally giving up

its security blanket of vague religious feelings

to wrap himself in the secular fatalism

he loathed but knew was his. So if the Devil appeared

on the dark path he considered taking home,

and, for a little fun, decided to interrogate him,

he would not admit that he once believed poetry

could somehow save himself and his loved ones

from nothingness, the way he wouldn’t confess

to having liked a band he liked but knew was bad—

that is, he believed it knowing his belief was wrong,

but not any more wrong than his friends

who tried to drink or eat or drug or fuck or pray

their way out of despair, the couple, for example,

he saw kissing in his carport at another party,

one he had hosted a few months back. Maybe

in the thrill of ditching their respective spouses

drinking martinis and eating cheese in the kitchen

with the other guests, they had forgotten

he had already left to walk his dog—who, after all,

leaves his own party to walk his dog in the dark?

He watched them from the unlit cul-de-sac,

not wanting to ruin anyone’s life that night,

or any night, and hoped they’d stop. Instead

their mouths parted a moment, and she laughed,

pulling the man’s shirtfront toward her

hard so they kissed again. And at this point

a workshop, exasperated, would ask, justifiably,

what this poem’s about. “You want to kill yourself,

don’t you,” one reader might speculate, to which

I’d stutter, “No.” Then someone else would ask,

“So what should we make then of the ‘dark path’

‘the speaker’ ‘considered taking home’?

Which would prompt a third to join: “Yeah,

he’s leaving his friends to go...where?

Into the dark! But why not just say you’re empty—

why this sidestepping metaphoric anecdotal bullshit?

And can anyone tell me why the Devil’s there?”

What I wouldn’t say is that I tried to imagine

why anyone would care about private pain,

however acute, when, as I write this, children

are crying because the state has separated them—

children and their parents—and placed them—

children and their parents—in detention units

that many call cages because they look like cages

and are in fact cages; meanwhile, a man in Dallas

or Seattle or D.C. is living the last week of his life

because a police officer will soon shoot him

in what the state will label “an incident”

that will begin when someone, an elderly man

or woman, undoubtedly white, peers through a curtain

of cable news, sees an African American

walking on the sidewalk, and is unable to think

anything except “he’s a threat.” “The state is ill;

therefore, I am ill,” my friend Paul wrote

after being diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him.

Or, if I shifted the focus of that sentence a little,

I could write instead Paul writes, because the poem

in which those lines appear, as an event in language,

is still happening. So Paul writes. Whitman writes.

Bishop writes. Claudia writes. All while the state is ill.

All while the state murders and bombs and tortures

and seizes. Now he’s so far from the party

he can’t hear its joy or see the constellation

of string lights above the lawn. The path is dark,

very dark, the sky ridiculously crowded with stars,

and many of his friends have died and he feels

both lonely and selfish—what would the dead

and dying give to have the time he has ahead of him?

And someone might point out that that’s just

another way of making himself feel bad, the one thing

he’s certain he’s good at. The Devil doesn’t appear.

But there is a skunk rooting through the grass

for snails, looking, as skunks do, slightly serpentine,

the rising moon announcing her white stripes,

an animal no one will let me turn into a symbol

of terrifying hope, because Robert Lowell

has already done that, and I have to tell you

the couple kept on kissing and I said nothing.

Angie Macri