Late Empire. Lisa Olstein

      if not here then where, exactly, am I

      supposed to insert myself? And if we’re talking

      movie stars, Mark seems to be doing it right.

      At least, anyone who still manages to be sexy

      even when you know you’re being played

      must be the good kind of wrong. Imagine,

      Mark writes. Imagine, is what he dreamt

      last night, imagine a world, and then

      I lost track of what he was so artfully made

      to be saying, but dinner was involved

      and a chance at something, a chance

      for something, a chance. Mark, what if

      by chance I met my true love when I was

      too young to know to keep him? Mark,

      what if by character or by foolishness

      or by fate sometimes good people are

      inexorably drawn to their own demise?

      Marked by desire is usually code for something

      catastrophic and even when we try to focus

      with quiet minds and pursue the animal

      feelings within us with only the most

      measured sighs, so often something

      catastrophic is what turns up in the late light

      of early night, like you did on Annette Bening’s

      porch in that movie and even as a loser,

      Mark, you were sexy, but less so, I’d be lying

      if I didn’t admit. Line, please. Just give me

      a hint. Actually, let’s take ten, I need

      some time alone in my trailer. Sometimes,

      we arrange in our minds a thousand goodbyes.

      By arrangement, a funeral publicly can be

      held to honor a body not present or, privately,

      for somebody technically not dead yet.

      Final arrangements may be made in advance

      and locked in a drawer in a sealed envelope

      with to be opened in the event of my death

      scrawled elegantly across the seam.

      Imagine, the next e-mail in my queue details

      arrangements being made to honor a man

      who made arrangements for the dispersal

      of his modest assets by embedding subtle clues

      only his family would detect in the arrangement

      of the phrases of what turned out to be,

      and probably he knew it, a farewell letter

      his cellmate memorized the night before

      his ransom came through. The cellmate’s, Mark.

      Like so many of the best parts of ourselves,

      like so many of the characters we like to watch

      you play, he was the good one left behind.

      QUESTIONS ARE AN ATTRIBUTE OF GOD

      Light a steeple bright enough and blind

      the bats will come stitching white

      against the torn black cloth of sky.

      All these years and still no one knows

      what draws the moths and their buzzing

      relations with tired jaws, or at least

      no one’s told me. We know enough

      to stop and look up, but not one thing

      more. They look like manta rays

      riding moony ocean waves, like lumens

      let loose from a drunken ray gun.

      I’m not necessarily convinced by ideas

      that have been around so long it seems

      their time must have come, but coyotes

      do fill the night with tricks when they

      throw their voices from bedside lamp

      to rising sun, and reincarnation is one

      explanation for some kinds of otherwise

      inexplicable love. Forever my horse

      has thought he is descended from unicorns,

      he tells me over and over with the one

      brown and one blue lake of his eyes

      and doesn’t bat a lash when I tell him

      unicorns only ever inhabited brutally

      the northernmost seas. He just champs

      his bit a little and stamps any nearby puddle

      and refuses to blink, as if to say, yeah

      well, what’s all that about you and whales

      and the scaled digits of your precious thumbs?

      On the 2× life-size statue of the saint

      beneath the steeple beneath the moon,

      the most realistic way to depict the eyes

      is the inverse of true: pupils a bolt of stone

      and all around them nothing but absence.

      THE DISASTER

      The disaster ruins everything.

      There is no reaching the disaster

      this way, the disaster threatens.

      The disaster is separate, the disaster

      does not come. We suspect the disaster

      is thought. To think the disaster,

      we are on the edge of disaster

      already. When it comes upon us

      the disaster is imminence: disaster

      detached from the disaster. Time

      belongs to the disaster. The disaster

      has always already withdrawn,

      there is no future for the disaster.

      The disaster is perhaps related to

      forgetfulness, the disaster not thought—

      not knowledge of the disaster,

      knowledge disastrously. The disaster

      is perhaps passivity. Night, white

      sleepless night, such is the disaster,

      night lacking darkness, night separated

      from star. The disaster exposes us

      with respect to the disaster. Nothing

      suffices. The disaster would liberate us

      if it could. The disaster does not

      impose itself. The disaster is not

      our affair. The disaster takes care

      of everything.

      NIGHT PEOPLE

      Your