d. w. merriman

What put me together like a statue
made out of living human?
The hands of my mother’s womb?
Look here. My own hands.
They make love to no one, they build
nothing. They sleep, they type,
they perform slow errands.
Slave to brain. Pale and repetitive.

Like pulling out a quarter pressed against my palm
I find my personality to be a left-over marking.
An imprint, groove. Songs in the phonograph.
What was chiseled in my grey matter,
oh nobody knows. And these new markings.
The groove usually starts near the periphery
and ends near the center of the record.
An analog signal is continuous, meaning
that there are no breaks or interruptions.

You know how it is. How everything
offers some exaggeration of permanence
BUM BA DUM BUM BAA DUM BUM BAA DUM
and then, happily, leaves us.
As if everything were a form of sound.
As if we traced over our lives and made them sing.
Put one hand in the cold stream and consider
why the water escapes your fingers.
Put one hand in the cold stream and feel
it drool on your palm like a dog’s tongue.
Put one hand in the cold stream, and the memory
of how you once touched fire falls asleep.

The two of them had grown used to arguing all morning, without fatigue. They would never say what it was really about. We don’t love each other right now? If I do love you, I regret it? It was always this way, like a coordinated hunt for something too startled to be approached directly. Hunters of skittish deer. So when the argument left them it was easily forgotten, until of course their next altercation, when they would find some other conduit to indirectly approach what they could not say – we could say that these sorts of occurrences add up to something we could call a ritual, and for them it was a ritual with about as much love and familiarity and comfort as any other. It was especially frightening, then, when they had their first real fight, when the problems the one had with the other were expressed directly and firmly, the way a hunter must feel when the deer he has been approaching suddenly appears too close to the gun; the hunter must fire, for that was the point of it all wasn’t it, and watch the doe’s skull break open or see it hobble as its stomach falls apart and it writhes with understanding – not an abstract patch of color and sound from far away standing and then falling but a real creature, with a smell, facing the gunfire with that mixture of extreme composure and a lack of composure that seems unnatural to us when animals die – unnatural-seeming, in fact, since it is the most natural of all events. Or no, maybe it is the gun which makes its death seem unnatural; nothing in nature explodes so small. Playing God, that’s the phrase. So with an argument like that, what do you do? What?

A romantic comedy is sidetracked by the suicide of the protagonists’s son, forcing the film to become a lyrical meditation on death, suffering, and the perseverance of joy. A spy thriller becomes a surrealist horror as both agents and global criminals reveal themselves as demons of a protagonist’s insanity. A sitcom where one beautiful woman moves in with two beautiful men and one overweight loser refuses to end after its allotted 21 minutes, thereby collapsing the 4th wall and transforming into a documentary on the show’s production team, with the laugh track, camera angles, and style of editing remaining undisturbed. A reality show where 15 contestants vie to gain the most weight in order to win a car and $40,000 becomes a stoner comedy as one man dies from overeating and goes to Hell, where he must abduct the Devil’s wife from the hands of God in order to save his soul and prevent eternal damnation. A documentary chronicling the true life of a Zen monk becomes, at an undistinguished moment, a film about a writer who is imagining the life of a Zen monk, an imagined life which has little to do with principled biography, which remains interspersed throughout the film.

Think of Gabriel Garcia Márquez at home, writing, smoking cigarettes. He knows he can write a masterpiece, and he knows how to do it. My grandparents’ home. That certain tone. In vapors, in colors, in before-words, the blueprint exists. If he does not stalk the tiger and kill it now, it will escape him. So he writes. He writes during the day and smokes during the day until the sun goes down and warms the little room he has been sitting in for so many mornings. He throws away his cigarettes and puts away his book and pen and crawls into bed. He gets naked under the covers and smells of smoke. His wife touches his hair and slowly undresses, standing and leaning on the unmade bed, asking him about the children and about the money. Of course with the money it is worse than he had promised, something which he thought would be easily conquered had revealed to him its true size, it was like lifting up an avalanche, it was like being wrestled to the ground. She knows he is full of lies — it is almost finished, just one more week, I am almost ready — but she loves him and loves his confidence; she tries ignoring it. The idea of a masterpiece, even one that is hidden, even one that is brutal and fights back, is something to be respected. It is like a blind man encountering the ocean. It is like something holy. Of course the blind, like us, must pay the bills. The novel is both his blindness and his way of seeing. It is as if he too decided: “Let me have a child.” It is like a beautiful demon, the unmade book. It is like liquor. Each day they drink from it carelessly. It is a polluted river. It soaks their beds. The novel is everywhere. They smell it. They are eating it. It seeps uncontrollably from the ceiling like wastewater. It warps the wallpaper and stains the floors. Heaps of words. Heaps and heaps of words. It leaks into their little home and smells of their shit.

Before turning twenty-three Hendrik had begun to suspect that, contrary to the longstanding opinions of those who loved him, he was not lazy, he was not necessarily happier being idle, and although he had refused to hold a job for longer than a month, preferring instead to live in Rebecca’s apartment under the premise that he would contribute for his half of the rent and groceries the stipend his parents sent him each month, he really did think he would be happier devoting himself to a life of labor, even if it were, to a some degree, tedious. He was defensive about this. He did not want to be considered lazy or unmotivated. But the notion of working on a schedule was so bewildering to the young man that he feared it, as when he was a boy he feared the naked body of a woman. He was ashamed of this fear. With stupendous bitterness and cunning, he had devised all sorts of tricks and excuses for not applying, for not showing up for work if he did apply, and for the time being those who loved him gave up and conceded to the aforementioned arrangement.

A month after their graduation from college Hendrik proposed to Rebecca. First, he convinced her to drive them both several miles south of town, under no pretext other than you’ll see; second, he convinced her to park beside a field of violets, where he wasted no time in kneeling and putting inside her palm (with the same gesture his father, after he took Hendrik fishing and after gutting the first fish in front of him, dropped the fish eye in his palm) a cold ring with his dead grandfather’s diamond, all the while saying nothing but kissing her ankles and her pale knees and legs, which seemed to him then even more pale and worthwhile and loving, and when she began crying, overwhelmed by what the proposal meant, he was even happier and took her, still without speaking, into his arms, almost pushing her down into the ground, and anyone could have driven past to see them kissing each other as fervently as before they would make love. Three years later she filed for divorce.