Kent Shaw

How many people eventually fit into people’s lives?

Lakes have a simple machinery that is so easy for the lake to operate.

So when you really start spending time at the lake,

looking at it while you talk with family,

and some friends come by, and they’re looking at the lake, too,

it feels like breathing.

Like your breathing is a system with levers and pulleys

and other people breathing, too.

Like if you were scrolling LinkedIn

and everyone was someone you went to college with.

And twenty years ago, they were already successful.

Now they appear to be living at the lake.

Or streaming a mini-series featuring families like them living at the lake.

A lake house, where lake water has been poured into it while everyone was watching TV.

A lake house like a tea kettle.

A lake house with people inside trying to drown themselves

so nothing else they do with their lives will be better than this week at the lake.

People are people. Said Depeche Mode. Enjoy the Silence. Also Depeche Mode.

Now which is it?

         *

A machine assembled beside a lake where people can go,

and it feels like music

and that feels like God

or at least calling yourself “God,”

like when people are worshipping God using musical instruments,

and listening to them play feels like being at the lake

with the simple machines inside the lake

compounded by so many other machines nearby.

A machine attached to the musicians’ arms and legs,

circulating air through their lungs so they can accurately perform on period instruments.

A machine that was retired for its cruelty.

A machine designed to appear like a metallic box,

yet offering an extensive toolset for extemporaneous music composition.

What is inspiration? The machine openly inquires.

What is the end?

Where is the lake?

And what are the people doing at the lake

while they listen in on the performance?

         *

It is said Hernando de Soto was searching for a lake of melted wax.

Every June people came to him with directions.

“You are an asshole.” They said to de Soto.

Then they gave him the drawing of a wax lake.

With crayons that had floated to the top.

So many things De Soto’s people were doing wrong.

And they kept living with wrong.

In the 21st Century, we like to believe we’ve lived through the worst wrongs.

We like looking at the future with the worst thing taken out of it.

Like eventually we’ll end up at a lake.

It might have mosquitos.

And a bowl of ice cream will likely melt in someone’s lap when he falls asleep

listening to the rhythm of water beneath the dock.

Days are filled with the simplest nuisances.

Like someone saying, “You’re OK.”

These nuisances are so fond of you.

There’s a lake outside the picture window.

Just give in.

         *

One day a lake will find another lake. And they will be named after people.

And the land around them will mainly be about people abandoning everything except for other people.

Because a lake that has finally discovered its lake is complicated.

Like a relationship. And people when they are moving in sexual ways

because there’s other people around.

How many times will relationships be required?

How many people in relationships will surprisingly require a book of fiction between them.

Or ropes tied in symbolic knots. Or a television left on in the living room.

Maybe a radio. But no one listens to the radio unless they’re at the lake.

And it’s unclear whether a relationship is more expansive than a lake.

Because relationships at a lake are complex. They are a lifetime.

         *

All the people living together living

like water moving to other bodies of water

a living ocean if you’re looking out at the water

with others sharing the same view.

“That’s some view.”

And you can’t tell if they’re saying that because of the water.

         *

Every morning on my trip to northern France I woke up to draw a lake

that made me feel the way Mont St. Michel makes me feel.

Something dignified and oddly understood.

Like looking at Mont St. Michel,

and I think someone somewhere probably understands me.

They have an aerial view of my life.

A view that resembles a castle but it’s really a monastery.

And a view where Sting is in the background

singing that song about a fortress.

And it seems like he understands something,

but I don’t know what he understands.

I don’t know if this fortress he built

around a woman’s heart was good for her.

Or for him.

If they’d only spent some time together at the lake.

Listening to each other breathe.

The sound of a rotating electric fan.

Someone opening the refrigerator.

Then opening a can of soda.

A breeze off the lake.

Someone’s calling, but really

it’s just the phone from next door.

Ministering CPR to an already breathing animal

I planted bamboo around the perimeter of our house, because it made everything more domestic.

Like we could build a small patio beside the bamboo.

Read books about bamboo.

We could nail a blanket to the individual trunks,

and when our daughter crawled beneath it, she was living in a tent.

And there were more spaces still.

Like the thickness of bamboo, and the thickness of our home life,

our TV schedule, the constant deliveries from Target and Home Depot,

the schedule for clearing out the garden, the gutters,

the ivy that is continually growing over our front porch.

Our life is already a metaphor for bamboo.

And now that we have new neighbors moving onto the block,

we should signify who we are.

Our last name, a perennial that blooms every spring.

Our daughter who likes to call herself the peanut butter between us.

She’s the TV remote between us. She’s the third helping of stew.

Or the last time we had dessert,

and how we rationalize having dessert again tonight.

There were family crests invented in a time before historical reckoning.

And they stood for a family’s smallest desires.

And how they would fit those into a fortress, should a fortress exist.

That’s what it felt like inside their home.

         *

When we go on vacation, we arrange for a king-sized bed.

We buy snacks from the vending machine.

We put the remote between us and watch reality TV late into the night.

Unlike Tracy Emin’s unmade bed. The food wrappers and crumbs

and magazines opened to some story, but who cares what the story’s about.

The sheets left like they were when she woke up one morning.

Which morning?

Had someone been there the night before?

It doesn’t really matter.

It was a fortress, and then it was an artwork worth millions of dollars,

held in a private collection and sometimes displayed in museums.

Part of the exhibit includes a series on family crests.

And where do you go after that? 

         *

Unlike living and living and living.

They say bamboo can live anywhere.

And this would be a convenient metaphor to explain an emotion.

Disappointment. Sometimes lust.

Or the feeling you get when you’re driving long distances.

Are you aware bamboo is among the family of grasses?

Is it possible the bamboo has become intimately involved with its host subject?

I have seen gardens introduced to bamboo, and it was bamboo talking for the rest of the night.

Bamboo is them meeting them for the first time and they’re really excited about it.

         *

The Sting song about a fortress and a heart and someone that heart belonged to.

Dear Sting, I wrote, what if there was bamboo inside that fortress?

What if that chasm keeping you from that heart was filled with bamboo?

What if you just reconvened that whole song

about people and a fortress to a thick bamboo forest?

Would it change the meaning of the song?

         *

Congenital heart failure is a Father’s Day gift where

all the photographs of my father are rolled into a ball

and held together using twine.

Every summer I am watching my wife age.

I am watching the trees in our backyard leave.

I look at myself in the mirror and notice something different about who I am.

I am was now.

I was always aspiring to was. I knew was would come,

and I am unsure whether I was ever really prepared.

The funny pattern of a Japanese beetle flying into my window,

like what does a window do to an insect?

A whole age of loneliness. And looking.

All last year people were dying like it was nothing new.

A year of never.

A year where people could actually joke about never.

We grew never in our yards, and it was hard for the postman to get through.

Everyone eventually will never, of course. Like me.

Just lingering on the not-never or the assiduously never.

Or my supervisor commenting I’ll never be more than a congenital heart failure,

and I know that failure is inside my DNA just waiting for the right chance.

All the right chances including all the right times I keep living through today.

Or yesterday when I was at the museum.

And the art piece was called Pasture Song.

It was the feeling of wind when it blows through the dry grasses.

A long wind. Then a receding wind.

But instead of grasses it was reclaimed bowstrings

hung from a wooden beam. Soft.

And even softer when the wind moves through it.

For this past weekend you could be rolled into those strings

like they were forming a cocoon.

For how long? I asked.

How long would it take? They replied.

Privacy is an inside, or like always is inside each one of us

No artist would travel the same road twice.

Though he might appreciate a road so much he would build another road

to be exactly like the first road he traveled.

But it probably feels like some art piece, or a photograph, or a video installation

where they’ve turned up the volume so the only thing you can hear is the artist

walking on gravel, but that’s not even what the road was originally made of.

         *

In grad school there was a man who perfected the art of the penis.

He talked a lot about penises.

He said John Keats probably had a very small penis,

because he was so short. This man was very tall.

And I believed him.

I was considerably shorter than him.

And I’ve never seen another man’s penis erect

but I am sure this man’s was probably very large.

Because that’s what he always told me.

And, like a Grecian urn, I am a willing listener.

Like a painting by Agnes Martin, I am repeating, repeating.

An artist using the same hand on the rest of the art piece hoping to discover the same brush stroke,

the same tone of voice.

I was a man while I stood next to that man at a public urinal.

He was still talking about his penis.

I don’t know if I was supposed to be looking. And maybe I did.

It doesn’t matter now.

And perhaps it is a testament to what art can do that Keats couldn’t forget.

A man’s penis, even a small one. The shape of a Grecian urn.

And somewhere between them sat truth, or beauty.

But who really cares?

It was all so tired. Such a defeat. I felt like a horse pushed head-on into a farm shed

that was recently converted into an art museum or a natural history museum.

Where is it they keep Grecian urns? Crying emoji. Urn emoji.

The spirit of Keats.

The kite my grad school friends were flying in that park

across from the Menil Museum. What an urn, that kite.

I wanted to invite the class over to my apartment that smelled so much like cat shit,

because I still hadn’t scooped the litter after a week.

And while everyone was reading their papers on Keats and urns and beauty,

sipping a reasonable red wine,

sampling some cheese, maybe dolmas from that one high end liquor store,

it would smell like cat shit.

And my cat would be staring every one of them down,

because he hadn’t shit for the last three days out of spite.

         *

There are people talking about God and His resemblance to an urn

who feel as though they are in possession of multiple tongues.

Hairy tongues. The tongue from a catbird. Or a cardinal.

The tongue of a 5-year-old who slurs her speech a little bit,

and you keep mishearing what she just told you.

And you go through what she was saying to you again and again.

The pleasure of an urn with a poem written about it.

The pleasure of reading that poem every semester in a college classroom,

and the professor going all sorts of hyperbolic

about how important and beautiful and truthful this poem is.

And then someone cues up a YouTube video

with a mash up of the professor making the same speech,

in the same blue sweater, semester after semester.

It’s unclear who believes him after seeing that.

Whether to believe him. He has notes for the speech.

But he is so passionate. Is he speaking in tongues?

Is it a tongue fashioned from previous tongues?

His own professor’s tongue?

Some ridiculous panel focusing on poems about urns,

and then the whole panel devolved into a discussion of this one urn poem.

And in the end one professor had fashioned an urn

from old notebooks, and the members of the panel

each cut out their tongue and placed it inside.

Then they passed it around in an offertory for others to insert their tongues,

or their poems about tongues.

To never say anything else about this poem again.

For the truth in beauty and the beauty in truth, there is nothing left to be said.

         *

Like that art piece where Joseph Bueys made an oversized felt coat and matching pants.

He wore it to an art museum, then he threw it on the floor.

And for some it was a political message,

and they couldn’t not hear how the suit was a horrible tragedy,

or the suit was originally sized to fit the artist,

and now the suit hangs on a wooden hangar in galleries across the world,

or the suit was what it means when an artist repeats himself,

“This is my suit. Remember me.”

And behind the performance, a man with a miniature man inside him,

but no one ever hears his side of things.

         *

I want an American version of an American poet who loves Keats so much

they would own a bust of the poet, which they keep on their bookshelf.

And I can download a game off the internet that lets me into this room

with a hammer and photographs of vegetables or toddlers in toddler-sized costumes,

and I can arrange an art installation

where I send them a Grecian urn with an arrow pointing at some structural flaw,

so the urn will collapse on itself after a few years.

And a message will have been stored inside this urn the whole time,

“How’s that for truth?” Or is it beauty in the age of artisan bagels?

And whole television seasons dedicated to people finding love in less than 90 days.

How about the poetry of perfectly spaced aisles at a grocery store?

How about the upscale shopping mall in Natick, MA that sustains this long sweeping arc of a walkway,

perfectly aligned and extended for 150 feet.

Something that cannot possibly last forever

and it’s settled so impressively with the present, this moment.

I just posted about it on Instagram.

And you can trust me on this one. No truth lasts forever.

As attested by the fortunes of the great 20th Century.

Every day it fails to live up to its own statements.

It is said that on Sigmund Freud’s death, an attendant poured his ashes into a Grecian urn.

And they set the urn on fire.

May the truth set you free again and again.

         *

And this is why all the nice things are saved for museums.

And only destroyed once they’re inside a museum.

Or just like those one-minute sculptures by Erwin Wurm,

where you are told to make your body into a Grecian urn,

or make of your body a truthful and beautiful instrument.

Make it last for only one minute.