Technique Two: Melancholy and the Music at the Entrance of Paradise

Originally published in Stone Highway Review, Issue 2.2

Technique Two: Melancholy and the Music at the Entrance of Paradise

The new technique involves closing
your eyes firmly so that the entrance to paradise
is easier to find: you are waiting for a feeling
that is like finding the bottom of a pool
with your bare feet.

It is best to remain perfectly rigid,
though we are all subject to emotion
and the things a body will do.

A cellist lost in an airport is a drop of water,
which means there are I-don’t-know-how-many-thousands
of cellos in the air when it rains.

The next technique involves humming to yourself
at an avant-classical concert in a cathedral
they built in your largest arteries.
This is good for depression and headaches.

They call it soul, but they mean something
between flashlight and cloud.
Instead of my heart, I have arranged
a bouquet of doorknobs.

The next time it rains,
I’m going to take the invisible h’s
from the third stanza
and jettison them into orbit around the sun.

Here, take hold and turn.
Open it.
This machine was made for you.

We took all this time and still found
the terminal full of ghosts, invisible threads
that would lead us deep underground, through doors
that are not doors but organs.
Things will be arriving there, damp with rain.