“I feel I should be obsessing about things more” no one says,
looking down at the school art creations of their children
in the kitchen trash, like we’re saying it’s the child in the trash,
or that each thing is all things. It’s one thing to understand yourself,
it’s another altogether to know what to do with what’s left of Friday.
How you can spot faces anywhere, for instance. In clouds, tortillas.
Pareidolia, thank you. How a face is the first thing Eliot puts on sticks
he picks up while we’re out walking, and we know it’s going to be difficult
getting him to part with that stick now. How we’ll have to end up
sneaking it out of his room later, or let it sit with the rest of his
face sticks, its little face staring up at me. Look, it’s nothing personal,
it’s just business. You’re a stick. Questions arise, like Q: How dark
can it get? A: Darker. That sort of thing, as the attic and garage
fill with sticks, as the drawers and shelves fill with sticks, stockpiles
around the house, a kind of hunger that reminds us of being
human, as I’m looking at another thing—this time a ping pong ball
—that Eliot’s brought home with a face drawn on it.
People are smarter when they’re a little hungry, I’ve read.
It makes the ping pong ball look hungry, a disembodied, hungry head,
a forever hungry head, which is how we talk of ghosts, how we think
of them as hungry and blind and confused. We pick up
the hungry ghosts of this world and imbue them with projections
of ourselves and dance. But only for those a little hungry.
For the chronically hungry, the truly hungry, the degradations
pile up and pass by with the well-fed, between meals crowds,
searching for something about the world in their lives. I also want
to be good and smart watching TV, the lives that will never be mine
that I can draw my face on. Episode 130, where the Dukes are forced
to bond with their sworn enemies—Boss Hogg and Rosco—
as they are held at gunpoint by a gang of robbers at the Boar’s Nest.
And Tom Wopat, twenty years later, stands next to me
on a hotel elevator in New York, holding his shoes. “Nice bag,”
he says about the bag I’m holding. For a moment,
every anticipation is equal, every thing you come across.