Atonal Breakdown

I was born happy, not knowing about what.

Like Ahab’s hat, I ought to be shrunk

to a speck and dropped by beak into the sea.

I have it coming to me, the way I went

melancholy at the wedding and slunk off

to sleep in the glen of rhododendrons,

the way I find the night sky tiresome,

shabby moon tacked to black.

I was born happy, not knowing about what.

Then came safety pins, bowls

of holy water, caterpillars writhing

in fire in piles of clipped branches.

What life was this, a planet in it,

the dead in flames? Flowers—nasturtium,

delphinium, whatever, so sweet, so strange—

when did I begin to see them

as silent accusations against me? Bad

habit of the brain. When did the sky,

blushing, begin to seem evidence

of a crime I had yet to admit to?

The otter, slippery in her marsh,

the mole in his cellar, some smudge

of trees in the muzzy distance became

my symbols. I’d arrived late, hardly worth

the noticing, amid the rubble

of others’ thinking, a chaos of pig bones

boiled down for lip gloss, cannery ratchets

chewing hands off at the wrist,

pleasure boats, shoulder to shoulder, rising

in the locks, deer stepping tentatively

across megastore parking lots. I step

tentatively, too, bearing my almost-plans

behind my almost-face, my mind a net

any fish slips through, golden, gone.

I ought to seek a new key and new tune,

unhackneyed and true, for child choir and theremin.

I ought to be rethought or forgotten.

I ought to find a rain to wash all I’ve seen

of consequence. This bad tooth wouldn’t hurt me

if  I had no head. No nightmare could haunt me

if  I were vapor vanishing in the dusk.

I was born happy, not knowing about what.