The Do-Over. Kathleen Ossip

For Andrea Forster Ossip (1944–2008)

      Andy was my stepmother-in-law.

      Dimension means nothing to the senses, and all we are left with is a troubled sense of immensity.

      —Charles Dutton, early Grand Canyon geologist

      Death is not what you think it is; it’s actually what I think it is.

      —Mark Waldron

1

A. in May

      Alfresco on a chairbed the woman confirms the natural.

      Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless.

      Disgusted and hopeless at being related to her,

      Relating to her is what keeps me alive.

      Even the unfair trees and the lawn are alive.

      Alive with beating life she flies in the face of

      Five w’s: what when where why why?

      On the chairbed she is breaking out of the sun and the lawn.

      Really, out of the sun and the lawn and the trees and me. I am

      Still studying, aren’t you? Whether we accept

      These processes or are repulsed by them, we are still studying,

      Each of us one cell in a universe of process.

      Realm of the universe, hers, and realm of the bourgeois dah-dah-dah.

      On the chairbed, in the sun, she’s turning yellow.

      She’s part of the carbon cycle. I toe several pits on the lawn.

      She’s been eating cherries and has dropped pits on the lawn.

      It’s natural to have lost my breath and found several

      Pits on the lawn.

Mother’s Day

      I had no mother, I required none.

      I believed in mothers like I believed in the pyramids.

      They were complicated too. Monumental but hollow. Dusty but beautiful. Mathematical and confusing. Birth, I believed,

      was the brilliant upheaval. Now I see Death is another.

      When I think of mother,

      you are the image I think of, like a sun. I mean that

      I’m not supposed to make friends in a poem, which should be mathematical and confusing. You are not my mother. I required none. You are a friend who couldn’t help but mother

      and now a mass blocks the sun. I want to take your kindness and put it in my hair.

      The image is dead! Long live the sensation.

“I’m afraid of death”

      I’m afraid of death

      because it inflates

      the definition

      of what a person

      is, or love, until

      they become the same,

      love, the beloved,

      immaterial.

      I’m afraid of death

      because it invents

      a different kind of

      time, a stopped clock

      that can’t be reset,

      only repurchased,

      an antiquity.

      I’m afraid of death,

      the magician who

      makes vanish and who

      makes odd things appear

      in odd places—your

      name engraves itself

      on a stranger’s chest

      in letters of char.

Ode

      I sing of a most beautiful man in a factory in Longhua. Fifteen hours he sails among the never-finished piecework, his voice winding in rhythms and phrase groups, sumptuously so. Through the gold-blue day, through the edgy night, his tempestuous mind, the planes of his face amplify Plato. He returns to the dormitory, solitary among many, which makes him beautiful.

      •

      If I can create the man,

      Beauty can’t redeem

      the iPod nano

      made in a five-story factory

      secured by police officers.

      •

      Or an ode to flowers, borne in pairs on threadlike stalks.

      Ode to a pond, a pool.

      To a willow pattern on her good plates.

      •

      If she were well and in Longhua

      and in the factory and thrown together with him

      and they shared a meal and she spoke Cantonese

      or he spoke English and overcame

      his desolation and distrust

      she would befriend the man.

      •

      The man tries to make a point, a new point, his own point. But no boss wants that. They only want points they already know, or just quick flowing motion, no points at all.

      •

      Healthy is probably the word we use most.

      The voice sounds heedful, over-ovened—rhetoric on a scooter.

      Extend the dots: griefshock by Xmas.

      •

      Ode to the container and the thing contained.

      Ode to a well-lit room.

      Ode to a pearl ring on a warm, fat finger.

      Ode to the outskirts of never.

      May this ode assert nothing.

      •

      In a sleep state she is aware of many persons in her: one a cruel dominating man, one an embryo, one Jesus, one a charming flirtatious girl without care, etc.

      •

      In this expanse, a governance powders, fragile. I’m a cipher, he said, but his friend didn’t know what “cipher” meant. On the silent video, a balladeer shatters human dignity.

      •

      In the dark of the year, the holly wind-holdy, thoughts were and are.

      •

      The beautiful man is a well. The beautiful man is a mirror. The beautiful man is a valve. The beautiful man is a plug and socket,

      it being impossible.

      The man becomes a travelogue, death a bonus gift if you act now, love a regiment of twinges,

      it being impossible.

      •

      He is stately and elaborate and speaks for himself, without any music at all.

      •