On Of Being Numerous 1-22
By George Oppen

They say, I do not want to be that poet who says it is a beautiful evening and the bombs are falling.

There is a joke here.

I

Mia texts. She is admiring the glittering outline of Atlantic City’s promise on a fridge magnet we won today with arcade tickets, and listening to George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous 1-22 on repeat. She is thinking of the girl on the train who approached her, one of many young children on the train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia. On the train we learn the US has bombed nuclear sites in Iran. Instead of one more thing of many things it feels—one thing. Separate. A few moments of silence and then a woman in the back of the train yells something obscene about war and for much of the ride after Mia and I cannot stop laughing. Even amusing is the way the train car transforms from a friendly gift of towards, to a horror film. The children, now screaming. We are frozen in place on an overpass. Light flickering. The walls a nauseating shade of pepto bismol.

I warned Mia, The way back will be hard.

There is, of course, a pleasure in the journey towards and it is not false but it is a pendulum and must be met by its opposite, and it is, here, in the train. In the last hours of the sunlight. In the boozy bubbles of the boardwalk which shift in the evening light transforming into some kind of spirit. Everyone not drinking now, but drunk.

I say, The fall of empire.

We both try to make a joke—there it is on the tip of our tongues—but the only respite to be found is in our inability to access it. Our sameness in failure. We laugh. Harder. Mia and I, a conductor, men and women in varying states of undress, are at a slant. We are tipping.

II

Last week I fell asleep on the shore next to a man. It was overcast and cold, a little rain along my neck and cheeks and toes and the man’s body was long, radiating heat. The sea wrapped around children. The children were screaming.

We watched a flock of seagulls follow a child holding a slice of bread. A poet asks, “Have you ever looked at a slice of bread and wondered if that’s God?” And I think maybe the seagulls have read him. The man explains to me the child is creating a monster. The man says the child is making a very good monster. The wings out like limbs like tentacles like a senate like an accruing series of armies and navies and the inevitable dead. Flies around vomit around. Boardwalk fries. Around my sweat that stinks of beer. I say to the man some days it is immolate or laundry, in a cycle that way. Gasoline or socks. A matchbook. I am wet thinking of becoming ethical, and useful. Useful to the fall of empire.

We might still find the joke. Here?

Today it is hot, Mia’s skin is drunk with oil. I run my hands along her back to make sure she does not burn but am too afraid to allow her to touch me in return. She is alert if supine, the long brim of her hat shading her eyes.

Later, over crab legs, fingers covered in butter and garlic I gesture wide, we are again on the topic of empire, but no language accompanies the hands which move in rejection, in desire.

The circumstances of the shore are correct for the individual and the society and the environment to collapse into one another. I stand in the sea waiting for a wave yeasty yellow piss dripping down my thighs cold toes hot slippery slimy watery cunt dry hot head and merge and consider myself as this combined thing. This monster. A congregation of parts. A union.

We play games in the arcade and I am very good at knocking down clowns with red rubber balls. Much better than Mia is. I am intoxicated with the thrill of inflicting harm.

I think in the train on the perfect evening after the shore about the bombs that are falling and tell myself I cannot really fathom fear or pain and am therefore somehow excused from trying. But that is not fair. I can remember pain.

Also, it is like when my friend’s father died and I told him I could not imagine his loss. And he laughed at me and said, cruelly, I’m sure you can. Why don’t you try harder.

III

I quote a character of Ishiguro’s who dreams the politicians who surround him—who have been plotting throughout the book, bloated schemes, Nazi sympathies—become plants. Peaceful plants resting in the sun. Mia says, Yes we will all be plants. But she is only referencing the inevitable. Instead of a transition into a peaceful people, is the dream only for us all to turn to dust? It feels today in the train that we might.

The baseball player says he heard it took Rome 2,000 years to fall, and he thinks it would take America a lot less. I watch him on a video on a phone on a train that is frozen, tilted a little to one side. Too hot. Nauseating the stench of rancid bodily boardwalk.

The children in the back of the train from Atantic City to Philadelphia are screaming for uncrustables and buffalo ranch pretzels. I think, towards Philadelphia. Forward. I warned Mia that on the train back from the shore I would say all sorts of embarrassingly obvious things.

On the topic of empire I think I have found a joke and it is: As Mia and I lay near the water together, sun drunk, the tide came for our bags and towels and bodies. Again. And again. But we refused to learn and move beyond its reach. The repetitious destruction in some way, soothing. I would drink hot Dale’s Pale Ales from my bag then walk under the boardwalk into the shady dunes to piss them into the sea.