Six Poems by Eric Anderson
My First Funeral
I was the one they made climb in the casket. I was just a boy,
and I thought the sleek corners looked like a sports car, tight
through the turns, tires squealing.
Everyone was dead except for me and the morticians,
who were all dressed like chauffeurs. One of them reached
towards me, his gloved hand trembling.
When he closed the lid, the inside of the coffin was
like driving a country road at night with no headlights. I
pretended to have my hands on the wheel and that I knew
where I was going. My knuckles brushed the satin lining.
I kept saying Vroom. Vroom, and my voice sounded
funny, like the opposite of an echo, and I could feel the whole
world in there with me when I let go of the wheel and fell
endlessly into the dark.
Parsley
The garnish should be simple; if we sprinkled the plate
with diamonds, no one would care about the food.
Many other things in the world are similar to parsley
but nothing else is exactly parsley.
The leaves seem whole but they are leaves leaping from leaves.
I'm sorry
I ever looked at it.
If I think too long the world aches with impossibilities.
I don't want to let go, even of this disposable thing,
which was hardly ever alive
but still died
in the middle of a moment,
with those green hands busy
making claims on all that light and air.
Losers
You never forget the names of the kids who ate paste;
all the others fall away like algebra lessons
into the mysterious oblivion of normal life,
while the mind rewinds
through looped elopements into the past,
where the ones who wet themselves, or worse, still rise
ashamed at the stench and damp revelations, forever ours,
staring into our faces as we shine, Better you than me,
or those other faces dark with hours that yet could be.
Or may have been already:
the serious cases, with braced legs or eye
patches or motorized chairs, return eternally, asking
question marks with their curved spines, fused
fingers and thumbs punctuating their hands' sentences,
faces gasped back into one long breath.
Even those few who died:
it would seem like mercy to let their misery be forgotten,
though this would be cruelest of all-not to them,
but to us, if we had to quit bringing them up at class reunions
or parties where no one ever met them, this confederation
of cautions. "Remember this," we say, or "I knew this kid once,"
though it's only ever us, aliased, abused, but no longer alone.
The people next door are pig people.
I've seen them at their troughs, and when Mr Pig Person weeds the flower row along the front walk, his pants droop and his tiny corkscrew pops out.
They don't seem to care if anyone knows; that's part of what makes them pigs. Mrs Pig Person came over the other day reeking of mud. She has piglets every spring. Little oinkers. All summer they squall for her many teats.
When we invited them to dinner, Mr and Mrs Pig Person asked us to scrape our scraps onto their plates. It's hard for them to handle utensils, but sweet the way they try.
The Pig People are religious and talk of heaven all the time. In the living room, we heard the piglets telling our children our whole family's going to hell. Or, that we might already be there. It seemed pointless to argue! For Pig People, hell is living somewhere you have to pretend you aren't a pig.
On winter nights, through the closed windows, we can hear the Pig People squealing as they make more Pig People. My wife and I sense we should do our part, too, propagate our species, but we keep tilting our heads in the same direction until we give up on kissing, and out of frustration I dive towards her breasts, going back and forth, pretending there's more
-six, eight, twelve-
until I feel
as if I'm climbing down
an endless ladder, into a well, under the earth,
where the many limbs of my greedy siblings
kick and buck and knock me loose.
O, Mrs Person, I say. What else can we do?
The neighborhood changes, and still we believe in peace.
About these rumors I'm an ugly bum
Whole rooms full of people used to say I was cute; I made
auditoriums sigh.
There's a picture of me, sepia tones, standing on stage.
The photographer must have been stationed in the balcony,
because it's impossible to say if the hall was immense or I
was only the size of a button.
While the white line around me makes it appear as
though the photo has been doctored, I assure you it isn't,
unless you consider what God Himself did when He cut me
from the fabric of the universe and pinned me at that exact
moment to that exact place.
There are a dozen little girls surrounding me and still
I'm the cutest. There are angels painted on the ceiling and I'm
cuter. There are actual angels unseen in the air, and those
angels feel ugly and stultified.
My feet made sounds too soft to be heard, which only
made everyone listen harder. I wasn't a great dancer but my
looks and exuberance made up for it. My confidence welled
upwards. I remember jumping, my tiny hands on my hips. I
remember the infinite collision of my cells. I remember
starting to age.
The Problem with Bullets
It's hard to hit a man with something so small;
it doesn't seem fair. I'm trying
to make a better bullet. First of all,
I've made them bigger, the size of fists,
which is also the size of the human heart.
The bullet should be as big as the target,
which is why I'm making even bigger bullets,
the size of coffins, and during their flight,
the bullets spring open, so they can
swallow a man whole. Just in case I miss,
I've put attractions in the bullets to lure
the targets inside; wide screen televisions,
free t-shirts, four star meals, football stadiums.
Don't ask how; the process is complicated,
and patented. I'm going to be rich.
I've put windows in my bullets so I can
make sure I haven't hit the wrong people;
I hate to miss. I'm working on bullets
the size of neighborhoods
and cities, continents; I'll have a bullet
as big as the world by the end of the year.
The gun, however, remains problematic.
I'm going to need help with the carrying
and the aiming, if you're interested. We can
kill everybody, everywhere.
artwork from a print by Eric Anderson