Stethoscope Poem by Tom Sleigh

i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949-2017
the unified field

It wasn't that there was anything to say
that would stop him from feeling this way — the X
of himself splayed out in space

where gravity was weakest. He and his father
and talkative mother
suffering tiny strokes that took away

this syllable from this word, that syllable
from that, all this lay
in one pan of the balance scale

while in the other there was nothing but dark matter
and the cosmic inconsequence
of his literal physical heart beating.

And then the unified field, faced with its own emptiness,
bent down to his chest as if to listen.


a toast to pavlov's dogs


Oh Leash held by a hand I can't see, here
in the laboratory where nothing can change
and where yips and bites are fine-tuned to the pack's mentality,

am I one of his dogs, the three-legged one that knows nothing
of my lack except for how I bark, growl,
and whine to be let in? Am I the salivating triangle

guided only by my nose that keeps me
on the move in my limping trot away from you, Leash, yanking
me back from all the filth I want to shove my nose in?

Why won't you let me go free? The sad gestures
of our growing intimacy is a reflex we
can't escape or express: sometimes, emotion is just mange.

So Leash, here's a toast to my lab pals: August, Fast One,
Pretty Little Lady, Joy, Beauty, MiLord, Clown.



the judgment after the last


What would we like to see happen?
Would we like to drive nails into our hands?
Would the shame engulfing us like flame

on a computer screen make us understand
that throwing a match into the Grand Canyon
while snapping a selfie, and never once thinking

how far that match falls, is the original sin
that a donkey's ears twitching
as we ride it to the bottom reveal as the truth

about our consciences? How many nails
will we need? Go to the movies, do research,
be the Regulator forced to kill kill kill

and that's when we'll find out just who we are
or if there's anything like "who" anymore.



mission


It's not simply that the palm trees are on fire
but that they waver up more fire than fire,
brighter and harsher and more intoxicating

than the flames spreading ever thought of being — 
the thick black smoke turning noon to midnight
rears up in a wall that nobody can see

over or around or through even as this nobody
comes crashing through the screen
right into my living room: poor nobody! In this loneliest of times,

he tells me how much he loves me, how his lack
and mine feel somehow the same and that the flames
crawling over him have become his mission:

burning, he erects a burning house of smoke
we can neither live in or abandon.



sunday is never the last day of the week


Using zip ties and Velcro to strap on a homemade bomb,
who is to blame, who should have told us
that on the far side of the screen in this Sunday calm

our generation has had its time? In that corner
where we slept together so many nights, yes, in that corner where
the bed of the dead lovers has been put out with all the other

Monday morning trash, there are always two doors
opening and closing as one of us goes out and the other comes in.
Why couldn't we show our love for one another

the way the void dissolves into the zero? Why did the animal
grafted to the human find such satisfaction in explosions? Darkness
to darkness, ashes to ashes, the animal to the human,

why shouldn't we take pleasure where and when we can — 
provided this is pleasure, provided that the body isn't null.



last rites


Even if the suit they dress me in for my funeral
is dry-cleaned at Perfection Laundry, then washed
and washed in the blood of the lamb, the knees

will still be muddy from kneeling down, the sleeves,
mismatched, will tell their own threadbare tale
about the breath of life breathed into tabletop dust.

What would the naked man and woman and talking snake say
about the god who no longer remembers if they're forgiven
or not? Listening as a kid to the old stories,

there were never enough beanstalks and giants
and Jacks. Now, the pallbearers pick up my coffin,
they carry me out to the ruined cathedral where the saints'

wooden faces, frozen in their homely expressions of grace,
are shadowed by flocks of  blackbirds whirling past.



coda: the hunger artist as a senior citizen


Nowadays, in my cage
in old straw, where
my brother keeper

forgets to come feed me anymore,
at last I'm fasting for its own sake,
not to break records I've broken

a thousand times before.
Besides, nothing could be easier
than to starve forever

if the food they keep on
giving you makes you sick.
This hunger is a moment's

vision that will persist
in a pillar of radiant house dust.