What Are They Doing in the Next Room

Bruce Smith

Are they unmaking everything?
Are they tuning the world sitar?
Are they taking an ice pick to being?
Are they enduring freedom in Kandahar?

Sounds, at this distance, like field hollers,
sounds like they’ll be needing CPR.
Sounds like the old complaint of love and dollars.
Sounds like when Coltrane met Ravi Shankar

and the raga met the rag and hearing
became different and you needed CPR
after listening and tearing was tearing
and love was a binary star—

distant bodies eclipsing each other
with versions of gravity and light.
Sounds like someone’s trying to smother
the other—a homicide or a wedding night.

The television derives the half-full hours.
Time exists as mostly what’s to come.
Losing also is ours…
I meant that as a question.

Is I the insomniac’s question?
Are you a dendrite or a dream?
Between oblivion and affection,
which one is fear and which protection?

Are they transitive or in?
Are they process or product?
Are they peeling off the skin?
Are they Paris or the abducted?

They’re reading something after Joyce,
post modern stuff that can be read
but not understood except as voices
rising and falling from the dead.

Do they invent me
as I invent their faces?
I see surveillance gray wasted
with bliss at having thieved identities.

In the AM, when tú turns to usted,
the sun clocks in to overwrite the night
with hues and saturations and the red
hesitates for a second to be incarnate.

I saw the body of the jack fruit fall. I saw the body of the hero fall, his armor clanging on his body. Then the juice and sutras of the little spell of emptiness or the greater discourse of seed and ovary. I saw the place ransacked to find a substitute for the succulents—the lychee, the peach, the flower infolded in the fig—that give up their season, their nation, [mango, American pumpkin] the famous fated beauty/terror rift before the swoon of the future. I saw that luscious rot. I saw first thieves then police toss that place. I loved that part.

Beheadings, slaughter of the innocents, suffering and sorrow say all the stabbed, ecstatic art of the museums and more of the same says the news, the glowing, after glowing now what, but also in the crowded galleries babies held by mothers looking at babies being artfully held in the celestial rain, the fat buttery ones, part putto, part lard who appear ready to slip from mother’s arms out of the frame into smoke and storm, the non-art part of the world, that disobedient, expensive part like a furious sea you paid to cross in an inflatable plastic raft, a child’s toy in a bath it looks l

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What Are They Doing in the Next Room

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What Are They Doing in the Next Room

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