For Frank Mir, Re: Your Face

In the evening I sit and smile
at the day's creaking muscles and mind
its heft like a sack of flesh and marrow.
We're the same, in this way, day and me—
Big lumbering things wheedling the
time from an expanse that holds us fast.
Dinosaurs did something similar
in the Cretaceous Period where
they clung like moribund crash victims

to something so large and slippery,
it could only exist to frustrate.
When I chop lettuce, I think of this.
When Frank Mir's face explodes—raspberries
revolting against their delicate
prisons—at the hands of the cretin,
Brock Lesnar, I think of this. And I
weep for the dodo bird who was too
simple to know it was in peril.

I scream in dismay at the common
fleas's impossible task of eating
just a little. Careful! Don't raise the
alarm! I will marry someday and
tell my kids to sleep light because the
world always tiptoes. I'm afraid they'll
not understand. So I'll hold up the
lettuce (finely chopped) and a photo
of Frank Mir (before and after) to

illustrate how we are all ghosts and
we are walking side by side—dodos
angling for a hug from a cold
muzzle. They'll blink back at me confused.
I'll point at the picture and I'll throw
around the ribbons of lettuce. I'll
pantomime first the big bang and then
cells assembling themselves from dust.
I'll tap dance the erratic rhythm

of evolution, I'll show them my
sweat and say, "these are the continents
after Pangaea was no longer
a heart floating in the treacherous
blue. Now it's a broken heart where we
trawl for bits of bone, hoping to find
answers writ in deoxyribose
nucleic acid. But that's not the
point. The point is," and I'll gesture at

the lettuce that litters the corners.
Then their lips will shake like radio
waves and they'll cry. And I'll catch their tears
in my palms to mix with my sweat and
I'll say, "Shh, I know. But look. You're made
of the same stuff as the broken heart
of the world." This will only make them
wail. "Okay, okay," I'll say, "picture
this: electrons." And at this they'll leave.

In 1994, the New York
Rangers finally won the Stanley
Cup. I maintain that it had everything
to do with the tendency of
electrons to be reliably
spooky. And isn't that the truth? Don't
all things hinge upon atomic love
affairs? Like Arturo Gatti and
Micky Ward loved each other with their

fists? Like any great and long-lasting
love whose greatest affection is violence?
This is why the New York Rangers won.
This is why Micky Ward's Pangaea
is drifting apart across the blue.
This is why Frank Mir would not ever
win. This is why dinosaurs vanished.
The lettuce's electrons become
mine. A simpleton bird becomes the

dust. And I sit and smile at the day's
sober commute into the arms of
defeat. And I look at my hands and
wonder not if I'm vanishing, but
if ever I was. And every
night, I wait for the tiptoeing morn,
so I can assault it with all of
my evidence, and I can softly
say unto it, "This is what you have."