Panorama in Night Vision

There are easier ways to die happy.

One day a monkey wrench zips through a store aisle

begging for contact. The next your lost love finds you

dehydrated in the food court. Isolated,

these incidents teach us the wrong lesson, leaving

only the personal hunch to keep scouring the junkyard

for rare samurai swords among the moldy viscera

of old food and metals, but through fusion

you begin to comprehend the use of random coherence,

like an electron. You think dumb words like “fate,” pick

your spilled body off the cold tiles—bump

on your noggin, kinda woozy—and a council of heads

floating over you asks, “You all right there, bub?”

which is the sonic cousin and connotative villain

of babe. You feel like someone pleasure-reading

in front of a live studio audience, that is,

meta, and even more so when it airs

and you’re there to see how stern your eyebrows and forehead

look, as if you were trying to read the backside of the page.

It says, “If you can read this sign, I can’t see you”—

you, the novelist whose protagonist shares your name,

asserting your non-existence; you, sneaky as the p in raspberry,

building statues of avalanches for a figure drawing class;

or you, blasting Schubert in the Whataburger drive-thru,

condescending to your sandwich. You are a composite

of shit, memory, and nightmare, and the lines between them,

within yourself, blur like lighting when you blink.

If the mirror were see-through, the empire of invisibility

could train your shadow to be a ghost. Instead,

the road explodes into an octopus of paths,

a lone flame sparked in the center, and you don’t know

which to take. Your magic trick?

Inventing a new magic trick. Pain gurgles back up

the garbage disposal, helplessly whining, “Water,”

encouraging indulgence in confusing image systems

meant to make you think about yourself

when you’ve done nothing wrong. This whole time

you thought you were nerfed by verdict, allergic to insight,

you were actually compromised by an affinity for falling up,

as the meadows that blurred into bushes and blankets

became prototypes for a new kind of landscape,

while that central flame made fire angels of the grass.

Of course you want the landscape to glimmer,

but you can’t ignore the thousands

of dried-up seeds and scorched roots, and farther out still

some frozen in ice so dense no light could penetrate it enough

to splash them awake. Move out from behind the camera.

Use your hand to block the sun. You’ll see

the trenches in ruin from pole to pole

and only the occasional flashbang from beneath the dirt,

giving you occasion to feel effulgent against the field

but wishing it were greener still—full of fucking flowers!

you can’t believe you think to yourself, you derivate scoundrel!

yet you are here, examining the meadows of dirt, trying to

think of a new word for green.

Like I said, there are easier ways to die happy.

You could squint through the spyglass backward like a straw

and roll the map peeled off the globe onto the table,

trying to flatten out the sides in denial of the warped world.

Does it look ugly to you, in your head, where you can privately

explore the extremes?