Benjamin Paloff Poetry

BENJAMIN PALOFF

That the Hour of Parley Is Dangerous

This is an intimacy, but I’m not going to let you turn it into a night made of midnight. Truly, sincerely. Do not doubt me. Think of me as an incomplete fraud, an animal with a dull coat, your sincerest detective. Give me my power, but don’t give me too much. I am not plotting against you, and even if I flatter myself that I’m not someone you want to fuck with, go ahead. It’s open season on stealing rich guys’ wine, and every hitman has his shtick. You think I’m being funny when I say I got a safe filled with drugs, passports, and money. Like everyone in a superhero movie who is not a superhero, I am not not plotting against you. It’s amazing how blithely a cop will enter a criminal conspiracy, and I want to be that for you, the hero’s hero, two lives bleeding on each other’s uniform. Think about how we can all think pretty much the same thing, that every little thing, every big thing, this thing, that thing, is all really one thing, the sort of thing where if we spend our whole lives studying that thing, with ourselves in it, we’ll still never know what the thing is, so you might as well try to do good, though you’ll never be sure what that is, either. It has been painful, hasn’t it, learning to value your life? Some nights, before sleep comes, I suddenly have to ask my honey if everything’s gonna be alright, and from the darkness my honey answers, Uh-huh.

On Ceremony in the Interview of Kings

Just look what I did to the world, casting to ominous ends, alluding to gardens and mornings, rising to wake through the bends. I sample, unfurl, make unmade bedways sailable, all to inform the newborns your name has come available. I’m writing to tell you I’m heading out to keep vigil over the inebriate vultures asleep in your sigil, maybe discover a new way to foretell the next branch of our tree that’s ribboned to fall. I’ll be looking for signs long after you’re gone–the white-tailed kites and their murderous majesty—of what your departing signs might have been—the black-tailed jackrabbits, the opposite, obviously. Am I bracketed by parens, in twos, your handle in lights, your feet without shoes? In dying, and not in death, you structure the merger of hearing and listening, not unhostile, not incorporate. A christening? Each parent, the giver and the give. Twice lost, each one that I outlive.

That Men Must Not Be Too Hasty in Judging of the Divine Decrees

I have only ever been summoned as I’m leaving forever, to the disappointment of the sad little part of me that lives to sit in judgment, and is doing so now. For the time being, this is the least haunted house I have ever lived in. Now, after it rains, the whistling frogs have no idea what they’re whistling for, and I can hear their ignorance in a memory, I see it in the giant-squid-eye-sized glory of the white hibiscus and in the hogweed’s impersonation of the bishop’s lace, of the queen’s lace. Lace: the word alone is a deception, a danger to us all. Today, I will save no one. Were the park no longer effervescent with fireflies and bats, the moon would be a thing in itself, but no, not now. The neighbors in the blue house on the corner are bringing their daughters home from something, and the air is close to perfectly poised where the pendulum between climate extremes, the extremes as currently defined, bottoms. So, sorry, now the moon is nothing, afraid of bill-collectors, lacking GPS, chemically forlorn, withdrawing in that way that can only happen when the thing is distantly present, in any glib reference to “the Now.” I’m not saying some gods won’t take pity and reflower her. Later, we’ll know. We’ll see her, if it happens, all around the lakeside or among the reeds by the retention pond. Or else here, in this very bouquet.

Benjamin Paloff is the author of the poetry collections And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon. Twice a fellow of the NEA, his recent poems have appeared in Conduit, Interim, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.