I Would Like To Step Out Of My Heart And Go Walking Beneath The Enormous Sky

Where did my life go? Jimmy Stewart asks in It’s A Wonderful Life
and he gets more than he bargained for, a big time unmistakable
blast that can’t be explained. Hello, sister. Hello, tattoo. It’s Friday
so I’m taking the next few days off, not thinking about anything
really. Which can be sad, as there’s so much that needs
and so little offering. Example: 50% of panda births
result in twins but panda mothers usually abandon one.
This article goes on to say that pandas in captivity will be fooled
by their keepers, who switch the twin cubs every few hours
to trick the mother into caring for both. It’s nice to be tricked
into goodness, sort of how we sold giftwrap in grade school
for what I remember being a good cause. Maybe it was just
money. And a pizza party. As long as there’s pizza you’ve got
my loyalty, would have been my slogan. As long as there’s something in it for me
says the gremlin in me, a capitalist, knocking a little cane against the
sidewalks and ramblas of my brain. And that’s what I’m thinking about,
too. For instance at our current income and savings, Hannah and I
will be able to retire at the age of 103. Pretty good if we live
to 120. We’ve started tricking ourselves to spend less, so instead of ice cream
we eat nothing, call it “reverse dessert.” Now we’re cooking with gas, Steve says,
somewhere in California, I presume, as I haven’t spoken to Steve in a year, and it’s my fault,
as I’ve been aloof and overwhelmed. Maybe I’m being tricked into being bad
by having this job and responsibilities, some April Fool’s the universe plays
that lasts a life. Can’t get away from it. Like quicksand, the quickest of sands.
I want to be different we all say all at once, and for those who practice, now
is the appropriate time to shout jinx! or be condemned forever or seven
seasons. Which may bring on the sensation that everyone’s a confederate
of an experiment you’re not in on, or are but aren’t supposed to know.
So they call red purple when asked and you just: conform. Now red is purple.
It can get pretty whacky even for the pope, who must get so tired of playing
middle man. Which is why his robes weigh so much, and when he walks
the invisible boulders in a cairn on his back stay perfectly straight.
I know what you’re thinking: this is a lot of thinking for someone
who claims not to be thinking. Sorry, but my Clarence The Angel isn’t here.
In the film the icy river goes hungry and in life the demon I was going to meet
on my nightly walk nowhere the worst year of my life was left waiting,
flipping his black coin. Other times I’ll just fall asleep standing
up, black out mid-stride, come to a few steps later down the hall,
unsure how I got there. It’s like a virtual reality experience
of how one might experience reality. It goes and it goes like a softball
in a Richard Hugo poem. We can’t explain but we can. How
my student who’d been a bit of a wallflower suddenly, reading Natalie Diaz,
came to life, how after that it was clear they would never be the same,
touched as they were by a hand inexplicable. Which is something
we can explain but only in prefab shapes and colors. Or another student,
learning English, who kept saying “devil’s lobbyist” instead of advocate,
and I like that. That there is a special interest the lord of darkness has and needs
representation for among the muckety-mucks who make the law.
I think she was trying to play devil’s lobbyist to argue the atomic bomb
is good. Look, she says, at how it deterred (my word) a war between the US
and Russia. Or how an invasion of Japan would have made an estimated 2 million
graves which one afternoon of horror helped avoid. If I start arguing I’m arguing
with no one, as my student went home (to Portugal?). Now my niece (not really
my niece, more my cousin’s daughter but there’s no term better than niece,
so there you go) has arrived, and is making a pretty convincing sales pitch
for gift wrap. If we can help her she’ll win a trip to the jellybean factory. (Jellybeans!)
We buy two rolls, one with miniature reindeer and one a sort of psychedelic
kaleidoscope. Fun, but I’m still thinking about this picture of a girl after the bomb fell,
who lost her sight, called The Eyes That Saw The World End, and what kind of world
this is, while the impossible-to-account-for keeps coming back, hungry dog
at the back door of the restaurant. It seems a good idea, human, to explain these things
as though bugs from a distant continent pinned behind glass. Their various lengths
of antennae. The splayed wings and iridescence. You could even imagine one long ago
flying just out of reach of a forest on fire, the city of trees popping below, a city
swallowed by the light of heaven, a million hands broken in applause.

Jeff Whitney’s most recent chapbook is Sixteen Stories (Flume Press). Along with Philip Schaefer, he co-wrote Radio Silence (Black Lawrence Press). His poems can be found or found soon in Adroit, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch. He lives with his wife in Portland. For more info, visit www.jeffwhitneypoetry.com.