Charon's Complaint

Let’s take today’s tally. 155
thousand across. Plus one roundtrip.
That’s you. That’s pocket change,
all things considered. Still,
business isn’t what it used to be.
Nothing compared to what
I used to earn back in the good old days—
smallpox, plague, diphtheria,
puerperal fever, septicemia—when
spears and swords were all the rage.
The Bronze Age. Homer was quite kind to me.
His doctors never washed their hands,
or bloody instruments, but moved
from gut wound to gut wound like the Fates,
up to their elbows in intestines,
endlessly stitching things
shut. A hush surrounded death
back then. Customs were respected.
A coin deposited beneath
the tongue, or two coins covering the eyes,
these little gestures meant something. That’s
how Alexander came to me, and Caesar,
and countless others I could name.
I never forget a courteous face.
These were the decencies the family
attempted to observe even if
no money could be found. For me,
the thought always counts. I’m not greedy.
I’m not unsympathetic. But
I do have a staff to support. Liability
insurance. Lawyers. Poets
and children under twelve pay half.
Pregnant women and infants
ride free. They always will. But

at least Homer and friends made
the effort. You expect charity. Look.
Don’t take my hand. Just look
at these hideous blisters. See.
I worked my fingers to the bone
during the 20th Century:
The Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele,
The Influenza Epidemic,
Invasion of Manchuria, then
Guernica, Nanking, the Blitz,
Buchenwald, Dresden, D-Day,
Hiroshima, Korea, the killing fields
of Cambodia, Rwanda. AIDS. The list
goes on. I don’t do charity work.
I’m not in business for my health,
you know. I slipped a disk
schlepping those mystified millions
across the River Styx. For free.
Nobody expected that, but I did.
I did my bit at Dunkirk. Look.
All of that beautiful bullion
wasted on bulldozers and gasoline
to burn and bury bodies when
the slaughter organizers
might have left everything in the rain
to rot; or invested in a few clean
shovels, and passed them around,
give everyone a few corpses to cover—
to be recycled, so to speak. Well,
there were a few experiments like that
during the Second World War.
In glades of evergreens. It was good for
trees in Russia, perhaps. It was
a great idea that never took off.
Most everything went into weapons
research: H-Bombs and ICBMs,
things that would never be used.
A dollar here and there for a vaccine.
For polio. A drop in the bucket. That
polio money might have gone to me.
Not a single penny saved—nothing.
Not a smile. Not even from a child
who only experienced polio
as a clunky shoe worn by his aunt?
You ingrate. Nothing for me. Nothing
to cover the 21st Century.
Nothing for your Ferryman. Nothing
but medical bills. More surgery.

Dark Matter

I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman, When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Invert the Luminif-

erous Aether—that thin,
clear, gelatinous goo

light vibrated through

in Whitman’s day—until
his day dissolved—we get

another spooky mess,

Dark Matter, filling up

the void between the stars.

Just as impalpable,
but not so moist, this stuff

we now imagine glues

everything together

remains undetectable.

All observational

data to date suggests

there is nothing there:

our models might be wrong.

Maybe. I’ve stumbled
up against darkness

before, at home, in my

own living room. I

back up a step or two
and I always scream, “Fuck!”

Why should I look up

in solemn silence at
the heavens like the dead

do? I explore the world
like an irreverent man,
like an Astronomer.

That’s how I am. I curse.

I rub my foot. I yawn,
“Lux fiat,” when I see

the universe at dawn:
some book of poetry
I kicked into the light.

Manhattan Transfer

I need to stay awake, except
I can’t. I’m way too tired today
to focus on my future. Now
is all that matters to me. How
to avoid drifting off to sleep,
careening through these tunnels and
forward into history—
doors opening and closing—when
surrounded by Tahiti posters.
I might wind up in Brooklyn or
Oblivion. I might get whipped
by Captain Bligh for signing in
5 minutes late at my office.
I might see something amazing,
too. A dwarf. A suspicious
package. Sex. I always try
to remain alert because,
beside the rapes and suicides,
I read about these rescues and
these babies born on the subway.

Speedos and Space Suits

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: I am here talking with author Eric Norris about his new book of short stories, poems and essays, Cock Sucking (On Mars). Eric, about that title. Cock sucking I can understand. Half of our readers are cocksuckers. The other half are illiterate. That is why they come to us for opinions instead of making up their own minds for themselves. But why choose Mars for sucking cock when you live so close to Manhattan?

ERIC: I have already sucked off everyone worth sucking off in Manhattan, I guess. And the G-Train is terrible, especially on weekends. It is easier to get to Mars than Brooklyn from where I live. In Queens. It’s time to move to another planet. Besides, I have a thing for guys in uniform—lifeguards and astronauts, mostly. I was going to call the book Speedos and Space Suits.

NYTBR: Is that all you do, think about swimming and space sex?

ERIC: No, not really. But, I must admit, I do enjoy that unbearable lightness of being. Just floating. There is no point in thinking about sex when you can pick up a guy in the pool. I do have a great deal of fun with the idea of other people thinking about sex, though. The book is really an inquiry into how we do that: how we establish our identities in the minds of others. I start with a poetic device, a supposed poltergeist, the ghost of my childhood, and I move gradually forward in time, from various perspectives, until I pass my death. I use the mouth of the poet as a metaphor.

NYTBR: Like Auden says, “Poetry survives…a way of happening, a mouth.”

ERIC: Exactly. Most of the cock sucking actually occurs behind the scenes in the book, in the reader’s imagination—the only organ of pleasure an author really has access to.

NYTBR: [Tapping his forehead, remembering something.] Wordsworth. Didn’t he say something about the connection between pleasure and poetry in his ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads?’ What was that line…

ERIC: I think it was more than just a line, if I know Wordsworth. He was a bit of a blowhard.

NYTBR: Let me Google it. [Tapping furiously at his iPad.] Here it is:


“Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the Poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure.”

--William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1802


ERIC: See, cock sucking. Sensitivity. A love for Man. For Art. Wordsworth is not my favorite poet, but he was certainly a major cocksucker, in my opinion. Many gay scholars believe that Dorothy, Mrs. Wordsworth, was really a guy in a gingham dress—probably Coleridge, his collaborator.

NYTBR: [Orgasmically, like he just stumbled across video of Kirk Cameron rimming Rick Santorum on X-Tube.] Really?

ERIC: No. That was just a joke told by Lord Byron in one of the lost cantos of Don Juan. Still, it is kind of touching to think of Wordsworth and Coleridge making babies.

NYTBR: You old Romantic. What you are saying is kind of disgusting, if you asked me. Wordsworth and Coleridge. [Makes a sour cherry face.] I would much rather see Keats and Shelley going at it.

ERIC: [Patiently, as if addressing a child.] Poetic tastes might have changed since Wordsworth’s day, but cock sucking hasn’t. We just use different labels to describe our lollipops in the 21st Century. I use the concept of cock sucking for the sake of convenience, as a kind of lyrical shorthand, because I am gay. People would be very put out if I didn’t do something queer in public: blow kisses, blow jocks, dress up, go down, dance, toss beads, or something. To cut through all of the bullshit, I was thinking of calling my book Butt Fucking (On Mars). But I felt that readers would not take the analogy—pardon the pun—seriously. Cock Sucking (On Mars) is very hard work. Mars isn’t South Beach. It is a cold and arid world, awaiting transformation. Mars is poetry.

NYTBR: What is butt fucking then?

ERIC: Butt fucking is earthier. It is different. Anal sex is more like prose. All you need to do is throw on a cowboy hat and yell, “YEEEHAW!” like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. In my book, I try to give the reader a little of both. Prose and poetry. Poetry and prose. Back and forth. Earth and Mars. Interplanetary commerce. Yaweh and “YEEEHAW!”

NYTBR: And comedy. And tragedy. The story of your home. The tale of Takaaki, your boyfriend. In many ways, this is also a very sad book.

ERIC: Sad? It isn’t sad. Life isn’t sad. Life is beautiful: whatever form it takes, wherever we find it.

NYTBR: Maybe sad is the wrong word. Poignant. We see so many horizons here. And so many cages.

ERIC: Maybe I should have named it Speedos and Space Suits, after all. Remember, every horizon is a kind of cage. Even the infinite depths of outer space. We can go nowhere unless we carry a little air with us. On our backs, or in our lungs. As poets, I think that we need to feel more comfortable living with vast horizons. And coping with cages. They are the same thing, really. We need to be able to live in both environments. In a sense, we need them both to survive.

NYTBR: How do you see yourself? In a Space Suit or a Speedo?

ERIC: [Laughing.] Do I really have to choose? Well, I am nearly 44. To be honest, I think that I look better in a Space Suit these days. Still, it is hard to isolate one aspect of myself from any other, everything is connected: what I was once, what I am now. I am different things to different people at different times. Even to myself. When I look in the mirror, all that I see is a jumble of genetic material calling itself “Eric Norris.”

NYTBR: Sort of like me.

ERIC: Not exactly. You are a poetic device. My poltergeist. You are my Ariel. You are free to be anything you wish. You will never live. You will never die. You walk in eternity. Not like me.

Eyes

Deceptively receptive, gay,
they dart, they dip, they dance, they dare
to touch on crowded trains, when they
forever disappear. They share

a similarity to stars
hidden from sight. My eyes remind
my other senses what they are
for me: the fingers of the blind.