Fire Season

In moth season I levitate because of a married man,
the sound of my own desire keeps
me awake at night, keeps me tossing four-feet
above the sheets, I imagine us powder-thrashing
like moths at a screen—

On the roof of his car, off route 14,
it feels like 1955. We watch the moon squeeze itself
between the earth and the sun. It’s
hallucinatory, the sun is a shrinking slice of light. We
can’t touch. I am already casting hell-grey shadows,
eclipsing his wife. It’s so devastating
we must not look directly.
His voice, If I live my life right, I’ll die on the moon
looking at the earth,
looking at all the people I love, and all the people
I once loved. A married man
pushes the atmosphere and I levitate above
the forest, this moth season behind me,
he murmurs—soon this will all be on fire.

on the top shelf of my book case
between a guide on egg identification
and my grandfather’s red Darby Bible.
A friend told me it’s like a smoker keeping
cancer in a box of Winstons. I don’t have any
idea what that would look like, but it sounds
nothing like the intricate, calcified
crystals my kidneys turn out from time to time.
Snowflakes cast in stone, the color of raw
sugar, each one a different, unique pain.
They clink in the shaker when I bring
it down to make a deposit. I never look
at them, but I know they’re beautiful, coral-
like, tempered and porous like an ostrich egg.
Sometimes I wonder if Jesus
ever had kidney stones, if his doctor
recommended drinking a six-pack in a warm tub.
I wonder if that centurion’s spear tore through
years of scar tissue––if Jesus said to Thomas,
“This is where they were.”
But the old Darby has nothing on Jesus’ kidneys.
I think if he had kidney stones he would keep them
in a salt shaker on his top shelf between
a six-pack of Fat Tire and his grandfather’s
copy of Song of Songs.

He is the biggest clown I ever saw. He must be close to seven feet. And built. This guy is built. He could take out a football player if he wanted to.

It starts to rain, and all the people crowd under the overhang and wait for the bus. Everybody tries not to make their staring obvious. But the clown knows. And we know. And everybody pretends they’re minding their own business until the little girl and her Daddy walk up.

“A clown! A clown! Daddy, it’s a clown!”

Everybody smiles and figures they’ve got carte blanche now to stare at the clown and the little girl.

The clown doesn’t crack a smile. He doesn’t check his watch that has no face. And he doesn’t even work the leash with a bunch of fur on the end of it.

“What’s in that bag, Daddy?”

“That’s where he must keep his tricks, Honey.”

“His tricks?”

The clown lights a cigarette. He looks bored to hell. Everybody is now disappointed. He isn’t doing anything but waiting for the bus. He shifts and stares down the street–looking, waiting–as if he were a businessman or something.

“What’s his name, Daddy?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

The little girl has two pigtails and is infinitely cute. Her father has a big grin on that would make him look simple in any other circumstance.

“Hi, Mr. Clown! I’m Emily.”

The clown looks down at the girl named Emily and takes another drag on his cigarette. He gives her a pained smile and looks away.

“What’s your name?” says Emily.

The clown pretends not to hear her. As the rain continues to fall, people look at their feet or at things far away.

“Excuse me, Mr. Clown . . . But won’t you tell me your name? I told you mine.”

“Roger. Now go away, kid, I have gas.”

Emily goes back to her Daddy, smiling like crazy. Everyone else is confused, not knowing whether to be upset or happy.

The bus pulls up. We all get on. The clown sits near the back. Of course, all the people on the bus are secretly staring at him.

“You’ll have to put out that cigarette, Bozo,” says the bus driver.

The clown puts the cigarette out on the palm of his hand and sits down.

“Are his feet really that big, Daddy?”

“I don’t think so, Emily.”

“Sure they are,” says an old man carrying a club of cheese.

“Harry, quiet,” says his wife.

Harry and his wife are sitting next to the clown and across from Emily and her Daddy. The cheese must be at least a yard long judging by the size of the bag.

“Is that a provolone in your bag?”

“Why yes. Yes, it is.”

Harry’s wife smiles. “Our son gave it to us this morning as a present.”

Harry and his wife seem like a nice old couple. They are well-dressed, and they do not smell. The only problem is that Harry has a hole in the crotch of his pants. And no one seems to notice this but me. Perhaps everyone is too busy looking at the clown. It also seems that Harry doesn’t believe in underwear and the horse is about to run out of the barn.

The clown has closed his eyes and everyone is wondering if it’s the beginning of a trick.

“The clown is sleeping, Daddy.”

“He’s not asleep, Emily. He hears everything you say. Will you just look at those ears!”

“Clowns never, ever sleep,” says Harry.

“Shush, Harold,” says his wife.

Harry’s little friend is completely out now and growing. But still, no one takes notice but me. I pray that he shifts the provolone to cover himself.

“Clowns don’t sleep, little girl,” says Harry. “They don’t have to. Their whole life is just one big, long dream.”

“Bullshit,” says the clown.

“What, er . . . ” Harry is confused now. He starts to cough and fall out of his seat. His wife yanks him back in place but his coughing does not stop.

“Now look what you’ve done to yourself,” says his wife. And she beats him on the back, apparently in order to make him stop coughing. “It happens all the time,” she says. “Whenever he gets excited. A good bang on the back is the only thing that stops it.”

Meanwhile, Harry’s horse is running up alongside the provolone.

The bus driver takes a quick glance in his mirror. Just an old man coughing his guts out. The driver drives on.

“Daddy, what did the clown just say?”

“Nothing, Emily. He’s sleeping now.”

“But I heard him say something, Daddy.”

The clown still has his eyes shut. Harry is coughing and gagging.

Emily runs up to the clown before her Daddy can stop her. She pulls on his orange, baggy pants.

“Mr. Clown! Mr. Clown!”

“Emily! Come back here right now! Leave the man alone!”

“He’s not a man, Daddy. He’s a clown!”

“Bullshit,” says the clown.

“You are awake!” says Emily.

Emily’s Daddy pulls Emily back to her seat.

“That’s not a nice example to set for a child,” says Emily’s Daddy. “What kind of a clown are you?”

The clown opens his eyes. He bares his teeth. “Look Mister, I am not a clown. Especially not right now. OK? I may look like one, but I’m not. So leave me the hell alone!”

“Watch your language, pal. I’ve got a little girl here, in case you didn’t notice.”

“The clown looks mad, Daddy.”

“Clowns never get mad,” says Harry in-between another cough.

The bus pulls to the next stop. The clown gets up and heads down the aisle.

“Goodbye, Mr. Clown,” says Emily.

“Goodbye, kid,” says the clown.

“Don’t talk to that man, Emily. He’s not a real clown.”

“He’s not?”

“No, Honey. Real clowns are funny.”

The clown stops and turns back around. He looks at Harry, who’s still clutching his provolone and choking and being beaten by his wife’s bony hand.

“You want funny?” says the clown. “Well then look at that!” The clown points to Harry’s penis sticking out of the hole in his pants.

Harry’s wife screams while Emily’s Daddy rises and heads for the clown. “You son of a bitch!” says Emily’s Daddy.

Emily’s Daddy goes to throw a right but the clown grabs hold of Harry’s cheese, pulling it clean from the bag, and whacks Emily’s Daddy smack across the forehead.

“Hey there!” says the bus driver.

“Fuck you,” says the clown.

The driver stops the bus. People rush for the doors. Emily’s Daddy makes a second lunge for the clown, but he is knocked back down with the provolone. The bus driver is making his way down the aisle. He is big, but not as big as the clown. Whack goes the cheese across the driver’s face. Down goes the bus driver, and out of the bus goes the clown.

The bus driver yells, “Police! Help! Stop that clown!” And the policeman on the corner springs into duty and tackles the clown. But the clown is crafty, and he is able to struggle free, his back to the wall.

“Put down that cheese!” says the policeman.

The clown swings the provolone at the policeman, who makes a tactical block with his nightstick and knees the clown in the groin. The clown crumples in a heap. The rain lets up. The cop goes over to handcuff the clown, who springs to new life with a one-two punch into the policeman’s jaw. The policeman is down, and the clown is gone.

I grab the clown’s bag of tricks and take a cab back home with the treasure. I lock the door and draw the shades. I sit at my table with the clown’s bag. Inside, I find the remains of a chicken dinner with a plump drumstick miraculously untouched! As I slowly take one bite after another, a smoldering laughter rises strong from my throat. The laughter soon wracks my body and I laugh and I laugh until the laughing is not funny anymore. I panic with the thought of never stopping. Staring into the black yawn of the empty clown’s bag, I laugh helplessly at the nothingness inside. I pray for the trick to end.

Barbarians

 “ . . . what shall become of us without barbarians?”
 —C.P. Cavafy

Lank-haired, logger-bearded, Josh and I shove
 into Sudsucker’s Pub like hungry bears
down from the hills. Normally, we’d shun
 this den of cooler dudes than we.
But we’ve lived two weeks in Canadian woods—

slept in my truck, wolfed fresh-caught
 Kamloops trout, Life cereal, Wonder Bread,
speaking, for laughs, like Conan the Barbarian:
 swearing by Crom, who metes out dooms
from his great mountain—who hates weaklings,

and gives his people only courage, plus
 the strength and will to kill their enemies.
We’ve done our biz under towering evergreens,
 ransacked an old fishing lodge, and seized
what pleased us, leaving the rest to rot and feed

the fragrant pines. Now, feeling tall
 and hard as pines, we scorn these frat boys
and yuppies hot to bed the coeds,
 secretaries, and receptionists who sip “Slow,
Comfortable Screws Against the Wall,”

and try to think they’re living high.
 Two beauties—Blonde and Brunette—do
the coo-and-tease with polo-shirted frat guys:
 a freckled red-head; a dark-haired pretty-boy.
“By Crom,” I say, catching the blonde’s eye,

“you’re a bright fish in white water.” “True,”
 says Josh. “And you”—the brunette—
“bear twin mountains fetchingly.” “Who
 are you assholes talking to?” snarls Pretty Boy.
“A miracle,” I say. “The dumb shall speak.”

I can’t believe we’re doing this; but
 after weeks of practice, words flow easily.
“Tell me,” Josh asks Red. “What is best in life?”
 “What the fuck?” he replies. “The fuck
is good,” Josh says. “Best, though, is to crush

your enemies, see them driven before you,
 and hear the wails of their women.”
“Hear that shit?” Pretty Boy asks Red.
 “You fags best boogie while you can,”
Red sneers, then pushes Josh. I raise my hand.

“Stay,” I command. “Let’s step outside and see
 whose deeds shine mightiest.” “They’re crazy,”
the blonde says, and shoots a scorching look.
 “No sweat,” Red says, flexing his fists.
“We’ll clean their clocks. Be back before

you can say shit.” “They’ll clean our cocks,”
 Josh calls, “before they eat our shit.”
Outside, we’re wrapped in Stygian mist.
 “Sorry, guys,” Josh begins, “I don’t know what
got into me,” then crotch-kicks Pretty Boy,

who drops and writhes. My kick—astonishing
 to me as to Red—barely clips his hip.
He staggers. I scream, and swinging war-ax fists,
 rain on him my rage at cities that kill
wilderness—at mobs that trample fish,

animals, birds—at lawyers, politicians,
 brokers, bureaucrats who prate, remit,
accrue, abate, comply—the rich, popular,
 lucky, whom I see, clear as a hawk
in mountain sky, will always lord it over me.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” Josh yanks me off of Red,
 then runs. My frenzy drops like a swiped coat.
“Cops could come,” I think, and—Jekyll
 breaking free from Hyde—hammer for home.
When, in a week, I start my first job—teaching

8th-grade History—my hair will be short;
 my knuckles, healed. Tonight, I slink
toward sleep while Crom the Merciless, who scorns
 all prayers, does not attack from his mountain—
just spits my way, and turns his muscled back.

The unexpected connection
unloading groceries. The purple eggplant
molded perfectly to your hand. I bend
to close the dishwasher and turn
into you. A mimic dance, a moment
where we roam, dip into cups and pockets
before the call goes out: all hands report!
Move to the bedroom, quickly shuck shirts
and jeans and socks and tangled bra
all helter-skelter, dive under covers.
The mail slot bangs. The neighbors
with the yapping dogs chat just beyond
the window. We keep quiet, cram
our greedy mouths full of the other’s tongue,
grip the handholds God so knowingly provided
and hang on. We riot in silence.
Quick as a summer shower it passes, trailing
a sparkling curtain and the scent of wet pavement.
We collapse, spent, sleeping the incautious sleep
of unlooked-for victory.

Golden teeth glistening
In the mouth of the city
Silver clouds colliding
At the tongue tip of day.

Bite off all darkness
They whisper
And chew the light well.

Emma Faesi: Although you’ve written prose and translations as well as poetry, you remain best known for your poems.  Do you think poetry chose you, or you chose poetry?  Either way, how did it come about?

Robert Pinsky: From as early as I can remember, I have thought about the sounds of words and sentences: at night, in my bed, as small child, tapping the rhythms of sentences on the headboard with my fingernails. That habit of the ear has been my compass and my engine, all my life.

EF: What does your writing process look like today?  How has it changed over the years?

RP: “Writing” is not the most accurate word for how I work. Nearly always I begin a poem with my voice, sometimes compose most of the first draft without touching paper or keyboard. The work of composition can happen while driving a car, or in the shower. Yeats is supposed to have said, “I get a tune in my head.” That sounds right to me: sometimes, the words aren’t there yet but your voice has discovered the essential pattern of pitches, grammatical energies, cadences. It’s much more like noodling at a piano than like writing a term paper.

On the other hand, the process of revising and refining can consume a lot of paper!

EF: How do you know when you can call one of your poems finished?  What inner voice tells you that you’re done?

RP:You run your voice over it, as you run your hand over something you are sandpapering.

EF: Your literary lineage can be traced to Yvor Winters.  What other poets and writers have had an impact on you, and how?

RP:Francis Fergusson, author of The Idea Theater, was my teacher at Rutgers. His idea of action is tremendously important. William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot.  Willa Cather, Nikolai Gogol, Isaac Babel, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll. The first great poets in English, George Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Fulke Greville, John Donne, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell. John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. The Odyssey, in Pope’s verse translation and E.V. Rieu’s prose translation. Dante.

EF: In a time when prose poems can run on for pages and some free verse poems skitter across the page word by word, you tend to maintain measured stanzas and an adherence to form.  Are these formal decisions made for a reason, or are they simply the method that works best for you?

RP:Simply what works for me. The triads of William Carlos Williams, the sentence-to-line in Yeats and Jonson, the syntactical be-bop of Elizabeth Bishop (see “At the Fishhouses”), the musical grace of Campion, the momentum of Greville, the unrhymed pentameter of Stevens in “Sunday Morning” or Frost in “An Old Man’s Winter Night”: all those have absorbed me.  While on the other hand I’ve never had much interest in “forms,” like sonnet, villanelle, sestina, all of that. I’m nuts about lines, don’t care about forms.

EF: In your poem “Shirt,” you begin and end in the present, but in the middle you provide a vision of low-wage labor, the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and even slavery in an example of how a simple object can tell a story of great events, even horrific ones.  However, at the end, you state that you are “satisfied” with it, which seems to indicate you’re able to shrug off the history and just wear the shirt.  Is this a choice to move on from the past?  Is it a method of going through day-to-day life, as we all must do, surrounded by objects weighted with negative baggage? 

RP: “Satisfied” is not “gratified” or even “content.” And certainly not “satiated.” The garment worker and the customer wearing the garment in the poem are both satisfied by certain details (color, fit, feel), that enable them to get on with their lives– not necessarily satisfied by every aspect of those lives, together or individually. The word “and” is important in that sentence: “both her and me.” In different and similar ways, the worker and consumer (most people are some of each) take part in a system.

EF: You say, “Translation, always, is a matter of degree.”  How did you become comfortable with the idea that no translation will ever be an exact copy?  How do you untangle the meaning from the original language, and then seek to repeat it in a different tongue?

RP: Writing a poem is always a matter of degree: you never get exactly and completely everything you want. Even the “Ode to a Nightingale” is a great, great translation of an original in the sky, or if you prefer in the mind of God. For me, the way I make translations, it is not significantly different from writing a poem.

EF: From 1997 to 2000, you were the United States Poet Laureate.  What duties are assigned to that title?  Which were your favorites?  Least favorite?

RP: No duties to speak of. It’s an honorary title, not a job. Fortunately, thanks to having Maggie Dietz as program director, thanks to Cliff Becker at the NEA, thanks to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton White House Millennial Celebration, thanks to Boston University, we were able to create the Favorite Poem Project, those books and videos and the summer institute. The Favorite Poem Project, I think, is significant, in ways beyond any title.

EF: In “The Uncreation,” you wrote “And sometimes even machines may chant or jingle / Some lyrical accident that takes its place / / In the great excess of song that coats the world .”  There could be two (and probably many more) readings taken from these lines: that poetry is natural, unstoppable, and gloriously universal, or that poetry is so pervasive that individual contributions don’t matter.  Which reading is truer for you?  Both?  Neither?

RP: Both.

EF: In “ABC,” you were obviously working with the exercise of beginning successive word with the following letter of the alphabet.  Was this simply an exercise that turned into a fantastic and often-anthologized poem?  How often do you give yourself writing “assignments” like that?

RP: The alphabet-thing is based on one of my insomnia games, Forms like that in my poems have less to do with writing and assignments than with being a certain kind of weirdo.

EF: You make Biblical references in your work, or invoke the gods and rituals of ancient societies, but you’re not above writing a line like “And Buddha the dog-doo you flick” in “First Things to Hand,” in a prime example of juxtaposing the sacred and the profane.  Are juxtapositions like this your way of saying the vastness of human experience has room for both Jehovah and dog-doo when put on the page?    

RP: If the sacred is not somehow in everything, including the profane, then it is nothing.

EF: “The Figured Wheel” weaves concrete images into an abstract idea.  How did you choose the images and physical places that ended up in the poem?

RP: The poem reflects the actual processes of my mind– a jumble of meanings, not meaningless, but jumbled. And the poem with its –what? its rotating eruption?–  of details, things, ideas, reflects my intuitively or psychologically rather non-linear, I guess cyclical relation to time.

EF: Do you believe that poetry is essential to contemporary America, or to contemporary civilization in general?  Will poetry stick around, despite reality TV and twitter?

RP: In a survival race, I am quite certain that poetry will long outlast reality TV and Twitter. I’d bet my life savings on it in a second. Do you think the bookmakers in Vegas would take that one? (They are probably too shrewd to touch it.)

The onetime magazine Newsweek once proclaimed poetry to be dead . . . . guess what happened.

EF: During your term as Poet Laureate, you started the Favorite Poem Project, which is now used as a resource for teachers and a model for community events.  How did you form the concept for this project?  Are you pleased with its success?

RP: Every July, the Favorite Poem Project sponsors a one-week Summer Institute for K-12 teachers: the teachers get the videos and the anthologies. Poets like Louise Glűck, Carl Philips, Mark Doty, Heather McHugh give talks and readings, and the teachers meet by grade level to generate teaching ideas, projects, lesson plans based on the idea of poetry as an art: the poem as an audible work of art, not an exam question.

EF: In your eyes, what needs to be done to keep poetry alive in contemporary consciousness?

RP: Poetry takes care of itself. All art does– that is paramount.

What else? Well, the poetry organizations could do more to support teachers and librarians who are already doing a good job. The organizations and foundations waste a lot of time and money on silliness: how to make an Emily Dickinson costume for Halloween, prizes awarded to different categories of poet, poems in text that hops around on your iPhone, poetry soap, poetry aquarium gravel, etc . . .

It might be better to simply encourage libraries, schools, community centers to bring together different kinds and levels of activity: the local amateur poets in writing groups and readings with MFA students. The FPP’s Summer Institute is a joint project of BU’s MFA program and BU’s School of Education– why doesn’t every university that has an MFA program do something with the same university’s school of education? With local high schools?  Some do, and more should.

But really, that’s not essential: art takes care of itself: its appeal is endless, like the appeal of cuisine beyond nutrition, lovemaking beyond copulation, dance beyond locomotion. Poetry meets a fundamental craving, the mind meeting the body in the sounds of words.

After we felled the Noble fir, you washed the sap from my hands. In the sink, the soap and the sap and a nest, a bed of needles. You read my future in their pattern: You’ll do this, you’ll do that. It will be this way. True, all of this happened: a pair of hands in the mirror, a gathering of dark matter. We traced the lines of pine in the white basin and left the tree outside, a cut thing.

We axed the tree and left it overnight. In the morning, its branches were traced with the evening’s weather, each needle made clear by the frost that encased it. In this way I can approach any past: shake the snow from the limbs, bring the body inside.

Somewhere further north, elk wander into the next season and pine needles bend to wind, collecting along the banks of the river. A different kind of departure: a man who locks eyes with a woman in a mirror and will not look away, or the movement through town of a hearse with no body inside.

All sorts come to tell their stories. Grudge Wright makes bad jokes about his bad jokes, safe here from heckler-thrown tomatoes. Reverend Dave recounts the day he saved Pastor John from strychnine poisoning, thanks to the Lord’s divine intervention, of course. Countless citizens come with conspiracy theories and claims of abduction, waving blurry photos of UFOs, swearing the device in their hands, though it looks like an eggbeater, is actually an alien probe. Sometimes I feel like the personal psychiatrist for the whole town, but no one comes here to lie on a red couch and work out their problems. No one comes here to talk to me.

They often forget I’m here, behind the TK-780, a dinosaur of a camera, a relic from broadcast past. I operate the lights and the soundboard, too, and I sweep up the studio when we aren’t live. I pretty much run the place now—after the programming director, Mr. Diamond, died and the station switched to cable, no one else saw the point in continuing. One person could operate the station just fine, and that person ended up being me. This wasn’t how I’d planned my life. Margot and I were supposed to get out of here together. I’d dreamt of Tinsel Town when I was a kid, but after all my applications to film schools were answered with regretful rejection letters, I got the cameraman job here, at Winesburg Public Access Television, WEEP-TV.

The station is housed in a little building out on the outskirts of town, the transmission tower right behind it, concealed in an old grain elevator. When I started, we had a whole crew working lights and sound and editing, even though our programming was mostly tapes of church sermons and community theater, old home movies thought valuable only by the people in them, or the people not quite in them, the hands guiding each home video camera’s Cyclops eye, showing us what they saw in the little league pop flies and amusement park vacations. Mr. Diamond liked to make sure there was programming around the clock, so we scheduled interviews with citizens, filmed documentaries about Winesburg. We aired them late at night or on holidays, those rare moments when no one else had a show they wanted us to show.

I asked him once why he bothered to do this, why he gave himself—and us—more work. He was always chewing on a cigar, speaking out of the side of his mouth, but he took it out when he answered me. He said, “People in Winesburg are constantly looking elsewhere, out into the world, saying nothing happens here.” Nothing happens here. That was something Margot had always said, something she wrote in her letters to me. “But things do happen here,” Mr. Diamond said. “They happen all the time.” He said it was up to us to show them, to provide the proof.

Margot kept asking when I was going to meet her out in L.A., where she was singing old soul tunes in bars. She said a record executive had given her his card after a performance, that she was waiting on him to return her call. I told her I was just saving up the money and then I would pack up and join her. For a while that was true. When it wasn’t anymore, it was because I felt like I couldn’t abandon Mr. Diamond. I didn’t want to let him down. I wanted to see what he saw in Winesburg. I wasn’t going to leave until I saw something happen, something I could tell Margot about, a story I could tell people elsewhere when they asked where, exactly, I was from.

Back then, everybody in town still watched WEEP-TV. This was partly in hopes of seeing someone they knew up on screen, to feel like secondhand celebrities. Mostly, though, it was out of necessity: there were only twelve channels on the dial. It was a canal of channels, a channel, a main stream mainstream. Today, there are thousands, gulfs of them, seas. We don’t see the same seas, aren’t caught in the same currents anymore. Sure, the public still uses the public access studio, but nobody watches what anyone else airs: the lonely librarian, acting out scenes from Little Women, urging someone, anyone, to pull that book from the shelf; the man who has personally handled all the job outsourcing in our town, now trying to outsource his own job; the schoolchildren with their hands mittened in multi-colored socks, button eyes and felt mouths, their nonsensical puppet shows that always end with a shark-finned sock appearing and tearing through the other socks, ripping their sock-skin away and leaving their hand-like skeletons exposed and human and wanting not to speak but to be held.

Some of the younger kids don’t understand how live television works, and they rush home after their broadcast, hoping to beat themselves there, turning on the television and looking for their own eyes looking out at them, the afterimage of their image, after.

Friends and parents and grandparents and sons and daughters and coworkers and ex-lovers and mothers-in-law and brides-to-be all make promises to watch the shows of their loved ones when they air, but no one ever finds the channel on time, they always just miss it. Or maybe they forget. Or maybe they can’t find the remote. Or maybe they’re just busy. Or maybe something better is on: the big game that’s a tie in the fourth quarter, the six o’clock news, the talk show host saying stay tuned we’re coming right back after these messages, music videos on one of the channels that still plays them, the sitcom with the theme song everyone knows all the words to tonight at eight-seven-central, the nine o’clock news, the series premieres, the season finales, the biopics and reality shows, the cartoons and standup comedy specials and on and on and on until someone turns it off.

Margot’s letters to me had long since stopped when Mr. Diamond jumped from the top of the grain elevator. He left me a tape, with instructions to air it on WEEP-TV daily. But the tape didn’t have anything on it. Frame after frame of black blank nothingness. I don’t know what he meant to record on it, if he’d meant to record anything at all, what it would mean if he hadn’t. Sometimes, though, I air a couple minutes of the tape, maybe an hour, just to see if anyone will call, will ask to speak with the manager, will tell me that the station is off the air.

And sometimes, late at night, I air the old Super 8 films I made as a teenager, the ones that failed to get me out of this town where I used to think nothing happened: the campy sci-fi epic about alien bootleggers during prohibition; the heist movie where one actor plays all the characters doing the heisting, as well as the prized object being heisted; the romance that failed because she left and he stayed and that’s just how it was, how it had to be.

And some of those sometime sometimes, I turn the camera on and stand in front of it. I look up at the blinking lit-up letters spelling ON AIR in the air. I imagine the bubble-round coelacanth-eye of the TK-780 lens drip dropping this little drop deep into the great widescreen digital sea of static snow and scenes not being seen. But maybe there’s someone sitting at home, unable to sleep, unable to find anything but infomercials and scrambled smut and a listing list listing what’s on the other channels. And then, there: a man, me, staring out from the screen, unmoving and silent. The person sitting at home, the audience, my audience, leans close to the television set, watching, anxious to see what I’ll do.

Look. I am opening my mouth. Tonight’s big show is beginning to begin. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t touch that dial. Something is about to happen.