The Weight of Paper

Preoccupation with bureaucracy

or better yet equation of my name

with what I deem another’s fate: no, these

don’t eat at me although a paperweight                             

collection by my indiscriminate

mail slot smothers anything that claims I owe                                

more than seventy-six ticks a minute

or my mother a visit and Jell-O mold.

Billing flamingos tinted in. A flowered                    

obelisk. Dark quartz with yellow veins.                              

Oval. Conical. The Eiffel Tower.                  

Bar charts. Additions. My stark minimums.

The Sphinx is always so quick                                                         

off its stack. I know when I am licked.

*

Bill’s Dream

Ordinarily I wouldn’t mention it                 

but this has been a draining week.

I haven’t once dreamed

anything of consequence.

But that can be draining too, week

after week of dreams that make                                          

everything of consequence:

a chicken in orbit, an armless orchestra.

So after weeks of dreams of making it

with Kim Novak in Vertigo,

a chicken in orbit and an armless orchestra

tumble into dream like sweaty strangers.                                        

Because with Kim Novak in Vertigo

the dream is clean, sketched:                                                           

a tumble with a dreamy, sweaty stranger.

Pinch yourself. You’re dreaming.                            

But sketchy dreams really clean you out.

Maybe all dreams are that way. Maybe Kim didn’t deliver,

which puts you in a pinch:                                      

was it simply you in Jimmy Stewart’s well-pressed suit?               

Dreams are that way. Kim didn’t deliver                

and surely you didn’t pluck her from that steeple anyway.          

It was simply you in Jimmy Stewart’s suit, well pressed

to reckon why Kim wore a snorkel in bed.                                                             

You don’t have the pluck for Kim anyway. Sure, you stipulate    

waking from dreams is like losing a rough argument,                   

but reckoning why Kim wore a snorkel in bed—

or was it a rubber nose? a camo negligee?—

is the rough wake from the dream, the lost argument.                  

What argument? What are you arguing about anyway? A dream?

A rubber nose? A camo negligee?

Who are you arguing with?

Anyway, a dream is like an argument

you couldn’t dream up,

the one where you’re arguing with someone

you wouldn’t ordinarily mention this to.

*

Hammocked, Bill

I wave them on and still the clouds don’t act,

just bare their hairline fractures like victims

of an authorless crime, an atmospheric

crash. Let’s just leave it at that. These cosmic

types are everybody’s star witnesses.

In this stratosphere, Pluto may be little

more than a chalk outline, but the battered

cumulonimbus is this close to giving

up Tropical Storm Edgar, which never

even touched it. And that’s vindication

under the bright lights, that’s evidence.

Some will spill guts for a cup of java

or gust of wind in the interrogation

room. Anything at all to build a case.

**

Dan Kaplan’s chapbook Skin, a letterpress, bilingual edition produced in collaboration with Cuban artist Julio Cesar Peña and translator Maria Vargas, is due from Red Hydra Press in 2005. Work recently appears or is forthcoming in Meridian, Spinning Jenny, Forklift, Ohio, Third Coast, Pool, Good Foot, and others. These poems are from Bill’s Formal Complaint.

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