Nix dreams of his death
in a kitchen underwritten
by cursive vanilla.
In the background,
the miniature TV
displays a pack
of ventriloquists
hooting mildly
as they take down
a gazelle.
The tall bodies
gather around him
in a muffled way,
making warm
parallelograms
of tobacco and wool.
But the world is
no longer the brown,
unthreatening theory
of an oboe. Without
the limitations
of his gaze, all
the cultural pleasures
become confused,
interpenetrated.
Torpid rappers
mumble among
bodkins and doublets,
and the atom smasher
in the garden maze
begins to get big ideas.
Nix landscapes the Grave of the Unknown Narrator
The point is to make it
three-dimensional.
He plants a border
of epistles, humming
a valedictory polka.
He wipes his brow.
More strata needed.
Less oleander in general.
He must admit he never
liked the Narrator. Not
much fun at parties.
Always wanting to
talk about the power
of folk dancing
and the capybara’s
sadness. Incapable
of serious distinctions
like the graceful
transition from golf
course to cemetery.
The turf is much
the same, but the holes
are handled differently.
He stands up and regards
the beige oblong
of turned earth.
However you lay
your body down,
the unreal estate
has its own demands.
Nix, Descending
As he climbs down
into The Query,
he carries only half
a sock and a fever
dream about pool—
a table full of dark orbs that sound
skeletal when they hit their opposite.
Night makes the chasm
into a scale model, a cubist
organ that’s been removed.
The wet karst has the shape
of every last building.
The abstract radiation from millions
of statues’s opiate stares. Not
everyone hates design like this.
But he was fashioned, made to
be swayed by sitcoms and the susurrus
of the studio audience. He feels guilty.
Men came here to
feed their brood,
to try not to lose
a hand or more.
Boys skulked in to swim with a nude,
sip illicit fizz from a can, and ask
something earnest and ignorant.
Act Three is him.
All the emptiness
gets now is a biped with no face
in the dark. The negative
cathedral grudgingly lights the way
down into the intended earth.
These poems are from Nix, a book-length sequence which serves as the refracted biography of a doppelganger figure, a textual interloper drawn involuntarily into various genres and archetypes as it struggles with both narrative and gender instability. The book grew out of an attempt to set aside the primary materials of the self, and confront how we often fall in love with the linguistic environment around an idea, rather than the idea itself. “Nix” (i.e. nothing, nobody, negligible) is meant to complicate notions about originality, and make plain the shaky constructs of contemporary poetry.
