“All good writing is swimming under water
  and holding your breath.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the photograph, Zelda wears a fur and hat.
Scott has on a top coat and gloves. It’s winter.
He said Zelda had “an eternally kissable mouth.”
Said that he loved stories of her in Montgomery.
He’d begin: Montgomery had telephones in 1910.
It’s April. A warm day. Magnolias are blooming.
Zelda—ten years old—has rung up the operator

to dispatch the fire department. She climbs out
onto a roof to wait rescue. Lots of white blossoms
are falling on small shoulders. Landing in her hair.
She’s sitting, smoothing her dress when they come.
Whatever else, they looked swell in photographs.
He’d say, Zelda drew flyers from Camp Sheridan
who did figure-eights over her Montgomery home.

They crashed their biplanes trying to impress her.
What he would never say: Then she married me.
As if what happened to her later was his fault
or a series of regrets for which he was to blame.
In 1921, each existed to watch the other move—
This Side of Paradise was a hit, he was soaring.
Zelda wanted to soar herself. Float like a ballerina.

At the end of the day she wanted what she wanted:
a ticket out of Alabama. Excitement. Breathlessness.
After her third breakdown, the years in sanitariums,
visitors whispered, She was a beauty once. Trapped
at last in a burning asylum, the fire real, Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald died locked in. Screaming to be rescued.
He would’ve been dead, buried, for years by then.

My parents sat me down in front of a circular-screen tv.
Shoved a white Tupperware of buttered popcorn in my lap.
And I saw the actor George Hamilton lip-synching Hank Sr.,
singing onstage at the Ryman Auditorium, the Grand Ole Opry.
My parents had spun his records most nights on an RCA turntable.
So what if the sheet music flying by in black-and-white montage
bore the likeness of Hank and not George Hamilton. So what if Elvis
tested for Hank and was rejected by Miss Audrey. And so what if she,
Hank’s wife, Miss Audrey, a redhead, was played by a platinum blonde.
Hank Williams sang about a light and dark that he carried, of shared pain,
of the burdensomeness of being poor and alive and just trying to hang on.
The gospel of the heartbreak that happens all the time to ordinary people.
So what if Hank slumped over on the road somewhere in West Virginia.
Died without any memorable last words in the back seat of a Cadillac.
He was on his way to a New Year’s Day concert in Canton, Ohio—
we were in Ohio, refugees from the collapse of the price of coal,
he was one of ours, a friend. What’s a little morphine sulfate
with a shot of B-12 (and a booze chaser) between friends?

At dawn the actor who will become a star as Superman
looks out at Mount Lee, the sign Peg Entwistle launched
herself from in September of 1932, leaping to her death.
Reeves is depressed. He isn’t unhappy enough yet to do
what Peg Entwistle did at 24—leap from the top of the H.
Same letter Albert Kothe, blotto-drunk, destroyed in 1940
in a 1928 Model A Ford. The original Hollywoodland sign

had 50-foot by 30-foot lighted letters and was rebuilt in ’49.
This isn’t that sign. Just the same dangerous neighborhood.
George Keefer Brewer, whose real father is living in Illinois,
thinks his name is Bessolo because his mother said it was.
She said his father committed suicide. Told an elaborate lie.
Whoever he was, he’s George Reeves now. And isn’t about
to forget he had flame-orange hair in Gone With the Wind.

He’s been drinking and hangs his head out the car door.
He doesn’t think, Here’s a metaphor for how hard a life
can get. He boxed as a heavyweight and can take a punch.
This is something else. He’s thinking of rain. Needing rain.
How, when it comes, it blows across these desiccated hills
in waves that gust and trail off like the scarves of skaters
or the cape of some Promethean shouldered superhero.

President Harry Truman’s Eldest Grandson Offers a Thousand Paper Cranes
    from the City of Hiroshima to a Bronx, New York High School
 
The high schoolers are listening to the grandson of the dead President
who dropped not one but two atomic bombs on the Japanese.

A lovely, insolent child with henna-highlighted hair raises a hand.
Asks if survivors feel any bitterness after all this time.

Three white-haired women are seated onstage in folding chairs.
There is a microphone center stage. The arithmetic

of ages in 1945 is calculated by the less math-phobic.
One of the women rises. Walks to the microphone.

Says, in English, Remember. In jeans and a Giants sweatshirt
the grandson hands off the chains of origami birds

as if time and space and memory are folded into shapes
that say what they say, which can never be enough.

From the rear of the gymnasium a rude noise and laughter
like lightning then thunder after an apocalypse.

Houses in towns in the Midwest are built close together,
meaning when January winds scald raw the exposed skin
gusts travel in peristaltic waves. Spaces between houses
funnel a national anthem of snowfall and arcing drifts.
For months, everything is translated into Winterspeak.

In homes, to music, closing credits roll a disclaimer:
No animals were harmed in the making of this film.
But these citizen-animals are harmed, complicit
in their subjugation. Most have become fluent
in thousands of dialects of silence. However,

if history is to be trusted, soon the few will resist.
The horizon line will be radiant with grievances.
Squalls between structures will approximate voices.
There will be a surf in the air. A tide. Sun-cut waves—
some waves defiant as they break into less brilliant light.

Snorkeling in Waimea Bay off Kamehameha Highway,
I cramped up and had to be hauled into a catamaran.
Pulled from that surf of light, my legs trailed droplets.
Onboard, I found a seat in a white chair that swiveled.
Was handed a can of beer from the Styrofoam cooler.
The group I’d come to Oahu with swam like dolphins.
I.T. professionals from Silicon Valley. Consultants
dragging the chains of corporate bonuses, cocaine.
Razed marriages. Endless blended drinks in tiki bars.
The captain hated them as an example of something.
Enlisted me in that by virtue of my being different
and from Ohio. Part of what is beyond argument.
I told him I wanted to write poems about the ocean,
the way waves stammer to shore in light that thrills.
Wanted the strolling motions of clouds in the words.
If I was from Ohio, I was no particular threat to him.
He said he’d visited the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton.
Shorebirds gyred above the boat as we drank our beer
and he wrestled aloud with the question of who we are
when we aren’t filled with the activity being beautiful.
I was surprised at what easy targets the Californians
were, given that these swam with a piscatorial grace.
Spent money like lottery winners. The captain told me
he had pitched the woman the catamaran was named for
over the side. In high seas. Said his first mate threw her
a lifeline. Hauled her from the water and saved her life.
He said the two had then married. Moved to California.
The captain spat out the word California, made it snap.
The rest of that day is a wash to me. The coral hearts
beating frond-green, and beckoning yellow, shapes.
The hundreds of species of salt-water fish darting
and passing like the early promise of Creation.

Begin with Meg Ryan faking it, astonishingly well,
for a starry-eyed Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally.
Responses from the eatery throng in a crowded diner
reducible to the line about wanting a little of That.

Meg’s character is no screamer. Just loud enough
to make news of war what it always is, the Expected.
To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson: Since the first I had,
the worst I had was good. Luckily, archival footage

doesn’t survive or exist for most of us. Take L. W.
who insisted we have sex in a strange bed in the loft
above a sleeping friend and his wife. Consider how,
even with pillows to muffle pleasure cries—her idea—

nothing stifled her ecstasies. Consider the next morning:
the two of us famously shy upon reflection. I’d been told
from a snickering apartment manager, more than once,
to keep it down. Never mind the manufacture of units;

never mind the drywall between domiciles was paper-thin.
What happens in Newark, Ohio should stay in Newark, Ohio.
But it’s work, love. Why shouldn’t getting the desired result
become a communal matter of fact—like that the universe

is 13.7 billion years old—a thing for which we have proof?
Is it bragging to reflect on all that it took to allow another
to overlook how sound carries? To disregard physics and
acoustical mechanics and inhabit an hour with abandon?

I nominate a tri-colored field of light in Ohio.
This January lake, the visiting handful of geese.
One nominee has to be blackness retreating
inch by inch beside that requisite star field.
We know enough about flags not to need one.
It is no surprise a nation enlists cryptograms
to rally those forgetting that danger attends
living and breathing. Yet what astonishes
isn’t that we are alive but how tentative
is the hold we exert on any part of that.
If spirit imbues the embroidered rag-fabric
and represents dawn, this highway by fields,
then tell that truth to the sweatshop worker
stitching together whatever she is handed.
My heart will not give up on this country.
I’ve struggled with the best and worst of it.
Like any Old Testament diviner wrestling
the intransigent angel to procure a blessing.
These days, I still use words like republic
but pledge allegiance to thread-nothing.

In the political novel The Iron Heel Jack London says the conflict
is always there, in our economic system, between capital and labor.
You can hear it in the way Janis belts out One of these mornings
you gonna rise up singing. Hendrix tosses in the lead-guitar-as-
exclamation-point so Janis can sing Child, you’re livin’ easy
and be sure we know the irony is that it’s a dream. Not real.
My friend, Stevie Conley, was at Woodstock. He tells me
Janis got falling-down drunk. That she talked a lot of shit.
She’s not talking shit here. She’s got a fear in her voice
says Jack London is right and we’re, all of us, doomed.
This version of the song is about that struggle between
wanting and needing and then receiving what you need.
The real trick is getting you to believe your daddy is rich,
your momma good looking. That we will rise up singing.