It Might as Well Be
Which is a state
If the weather holds
And the wind arrives timely
If it’s right it’s easy
As being hit by a car
Or scooped from a litter
Happiness for everybody
And a carbonated lime drink
With a talking sailboat
Finishing my sentences
At moments you think for me
Little boat
Little squire
I bequeath you everything
But we’re not there
Yet are we
I was saying
Where am I
Am I at the last place
No there is no such thing
As the last place
Do you like that
The way that sounds
It’s a little routine
Each night before the loss
I say it to make myself happy
Expand the definition
Do you ever feel unhappy
With meaning
With its beknighted box song
Do you ever want to leave it
In the sand
Beside something valuable
Swim for a while
Then move down the coast
To some happier town
Some call that lunch
Others call it a way of crying
I prefer not to say
I am not ready
I had a moment
But it was lost, lost, lost
Whom did I lend my readiness to
It must have been someone special
Or maybe it was a kind stranger
Anyways
Least now I’m even
No one is ready
Readiness is post hoc
These days we are early
We are ahead
We are leveraging
We are not ready
We are in pursuit, we are gaining
And the dark line of trees, up there
You can smell the cut grass from here
The stomp of the feet on the grass
Like the clicking of the tongue
In an empty room in mid-July
They are all empty these days
No one is working or studying
Or if they are
They are doing it while walking
They don’t have the rhythm
Who gave the rhythm to me
I don’t know I just woke up with it
A toy in my bed
I had one of those moments
Where you think everyone is at war
And only this will save you
But you have forgotten how to use it
Or it, you
Which is it
We don’t know
And yet
Day to blank
We march off
Or was it rowing
Or were we pulling up
Lifting the words from the earth
Take home pay low
Exposure to sun high
No talking during that
Something quite like dancing
I am from a place
Where there was nothing quite like dancing
Do you ever get sad when you think of what you did
Memory is your hand on the floor
Face down on bed
A fly on your bare back
The open window
A shade
No books left on the table
Everything trying to get out of the room
As if there were a sun in there
Too bright
But the radio ripples
Someone is up
You have awakened without perspective
You cannot remove yourself
This is the way an asteroid feels
Do you know why the asteroid is sad
The asteroid is sad because
He cannot taste lemonade
When you try to tell him
When everyone tries
A name cries out downstairs
Mini-interview with Max Winter
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
MW: I think the first time I woke up in total darkness and didn’t really have any idea where I was probably shaped me the most. Hard to say at what age this occurred; I would have had to have been an early teenager because before then I wouldn’t have known that I didn’t know. Few people who don’t write poetry understand the feeling of delirium that can come over you when you’re starting something, or perhaps working with it, as if you’re stepping out into air, no threshold beneath you, just language, in whatever form you choose to use it, but regardless, just words. Better than space travel, and with no hope of financial reward, and beautiful for being so.
HFR: What are you reading?
MW: Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls; Kristi Maxwell’s My My; Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House; Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “It Might as Well Be”?
MW: I was trying to pick up Highway 101 and turn it around in another direction when I realized it was already going in that direction. I was trying to look over my shoulder with such intensity that my head would pop off and float clear of my body. Have you ever been to California? I was trying to set the quadratic equation to music and rebuild it as a lighthouse. I wanted to choose a state and then flood it with black light. Suddenly, around 2:12, I noticed Meaning working on a pole, out by the street. I went outside and looked up. I asked the man where he was from and he said Time Warner sent him. Though this answer didn’t satisfy me, really, I let Meaning keep working, near the tree line, until finally I decided to offer him some relief. Would you like to sit down for a while? I asked. He answered in a sing-song affirmative, as if he’d been waiting for me. We sat together in my basement apartment for a while. There was a bowl of old hard candies between us. Finally he took one, bit down on it, and broke a tooth. Then he ate the whole bowl. He didn’t stop eating until he had broken every single one of his teeth. He stood up at this point, did a little bow, said, Back to work, and left. Without thanking me, even. I never saw Meaning again.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
MW: I have one hand on one gear and one hand on another and … I don’t know, really, I’m waiting for the machine to tell me what to do. Aren’t you? Does it seem hot in here?
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
MW: We aren’t nice enough to each other to merit a political spectrum. We are good at licking ourselves clean, but we don’t know how to sweep, or rake, or mop. Television has improved, but what about everything else? If I had a dollar for every time someone said we were in a state of emergency, I’d have a lot of dollars, but the minute I took my eyes off them, they would disappear. I think it’s high time we started making buildings shorter, writing more letters, eating cheese sandwiches with pickles, and buckling down on whatever great document it is we’re supposed to be working on. The radio says “Who let the dogs out” with almost no sense of urgency but take a look at those dogs. What’s not to be urgent about? Are you surprised, really, that there’s less snow than usual? Are you surprised that your inner ear is acting up? Do you find you don’t understand words anymore? I just let them go around me until I catch my breath. Listen up: here it is. Go somewhere. Find the smallest park you can. Ask everyone to leave, if anyone’s there. Bring nothing, only yourself. If you have something, throw it away. Sit. Breathe. Let the sky go dim around you. It will, anyway.
Max Winter’s books are The Pictures (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and Walking Among Them (Subpress). His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, The Paris Review, Plume, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He has published reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications.
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Heavy Feather Review 