The Day Before Zero
By Rich Ives
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Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com. Tunneling to the Moon and Light from a Small Brown Bird (poetry, Bitter Oleander Press) are both due out in paperback in 2014.
By Rich Ives
1.
The surface of the nervous river rumpled out
as if it had just experienced something illicit,
which it had, although
this time it may have been with
one of its own constituents.
When we arrive at the end, there is nothing,
after which is not nothing but less than nothing
because of what came before,
but is only never having existed truly nothing?
You ran from your mother, who ran from her mother,
who existed for you only as an abstract idea.
Do something.
2.
What were you doing in 1938? seems like a thoughtful question to me now that I’m old enough to find reason less a reason for many things I wonder. I’ve tried often to remember my birth in 1951 because I don’t believe anything people tell me. I’m still not convinced my dead former neighbor isn’t historically accurate, disguised as a yellow dog with a festering wound on its nose or a gas playing with the filament of a light bulb that nervously refuses to go out.
Right now I’m watching a sock. I filled it with Niger Thistle and hung it in front of the kitchen window, and it’s bristling with goldfinch and siskin, but sometimes, I admit, such thoughts have stayed behind and mocked me until I looked off to the side and could see them dancing in the spaces between the ones I hadn’t remembered. It’s a delicate operation with questionable tools, and not all of my thoughts were so happy doing this, but all of them were doing it.
I’m also listening to the voice of a pebble through the window because of what looks like blood holding on to it before rain washes it, as if I could understand its explanation of the architecture with such attentions. Blood needs a plan, I thought.
But I’m not the kind of fool who asks What is the wind? and tries to answer without dying. Still, I’ve noticed I need a little more room to put on my pants now, and I’m wondering what I should offer to recognize the wind’s birthday every single day of the year? More obstacles?
3.
Zero is not a number, nor is it an absence.
Once named, it can no longer mean what it is.
It has taken me many years to get to the beginning.
I erase those years. They are nothing. I do not exist.
Now it is possible for you to make me happen.
In the painting, the dead boy is so young and small
that his coffin carriage is pulled by two black-faced lambs
and shaded by a pair of ethereal dove wings, and in
my dream of the painting, which arrives before I sleep,
I remove the glass of water from the dead boy’s chest.
We’re having a party, and the party is
not having a lot of fun with us, and now
we’re celebrating a birthday, but the
day is just getting older and more belligerent.
Memory: If you live long enough you’ll want
to do what you used to do without thinking.
You can ask me things for which there are no answers.
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Rich Ives is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. His book of days, Tunneling to the Moon, is currently being serialized with a work per day appearing for all of 2013 at http://silencedpress.com. Tunneling to the Moon and Light from a Small Brown Bird (poetry, Bitter Oleander Press) are both due out in paperback in 2014.
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