Tangent

On fourth of July, alone in my kitchen and the sound of distant fireworks. I drink cheap Merlot, watch the dark break and enter through the windows. I am all over the Internet, but would rather be all over someone else: a tangent. A tanager. Today, by the river I saw a scarlet tanager. Had only seen them in bird books before, and for a minute all doom lifted. my mood is so easily healed, and then so easily thrashed back against the shoal of its wounding: rocks, jetties. If there were a sea I would calm it with the palm of my hand, and walk across the waves.

But there is no sea

only its sound inside me.

Part the red Merlot! Open the wounds!

Every Easter we would watch Moses and the Ten Commandments, and the sea was jello I heard. They did that effect with jello. Oh me, Oh my… the sigh of an ancient night breaking and entering through my windows.

There is no sea, though I might wish one into being—a red sea, like the

Scarlett tanager.

We open. We close. A series of bivalves, of binaries. Zeros and ones painting the ceiling!

She once laughed because the sound of the word computer turned her on. Odd co-ordinates of language and sky.

I would kill to be the sound of someone’s thoughts, the color of their dreams. Part one. Part two.

It is the fourth, and the sound of the fireworks makes me think of Beethoven composing as the french approached the city of vienna, and he crossing out the name of Napoleon from the Eroica.

Do you bury your dead, Mr. Weil, or do you set them off as fire works?

The scarlet tanager was in the thickets by the river. I thought it was a cardinal at first, or some other red bird, and my eyes finally admitted it was a tanager. The first of my life, and maybe the last.

I draw the sun reversed: things at dusk. The glow of what has already faded. it’s sweet aftermath.

My Aunt Mary died on a day I was supposed to read at Yale, and I was heading back to Binghamton to hand in the grades: ninety miles an hour and tears. And I was supposed to go with a beautiful Polish woman from my church. All the way to Yale! And I thought how I would give anything to be in the living room late at night watching re-runs of Frazier, my aunt wheezing gently on the sofa, me on the floor, my head cradled in my arms. And Yale did not seem very important.

Oh but this bird? It may save my life, and if not my life, then some small part of me that is gone forever—

the sound. What sound does red make? It is color, and frequency, and it must have a sound.

I think of a young women with browned arms playing a ukulele. It is not very lyrical, or like a Scarlett tanager. I think of her often. Could she be my death? She is often morose just to try something different. No emotion has dropped like a mask to permanently fit her soft angelic face. She is singing: “There is a sea, whether you believe it or not. There is a sea Mr. Weil, Mr. Joe, my Joseph. I can not be the sea. I can be the young girl playing the ukulele! In the sun dress. Light splashes. Her finger nail polish is bright, easter egg blue.

But she is the sea, too, and the scarlet tanager, and the sound of the distant fireworks. She is Beethoven crossing out the name of the liberator turned tyrant.

I must claim my death. it is very likely a while from now—perhaps while I am down by the river. And it is dusk. And it is more than dusk. And I am scratchy, and morose. And I feel no one feeling me.