Orion

Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmas
out of the wind, under Orion,
inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,
which is how anger metabolises,
the end product always a sorrow
of remorse or failure. I would give this anger
to Orion, whom I’ve only recently learned to identify,
forever on his back foot, his stories go
from bad to worse, and the benzene rises
like a prayer, arsenic on the breath
cold makes visible, that makes visible
the cold. A wider range of words exists
to describe effects of cold than heat.
Where somatosensory modalities are concerned
it’s one of the more ambiguous precepts.
Being cold is not the same as feeling cold,
just as Seneca, who wrote on anger,
said it’s different to know a thing
than to feel its truth. In the lab a single rat
restrained on a chill plate
will exhibit robust escape behaviour later
than will several others free
to shelter together in their enclosure
when temperature is slowly but drastically lowered –
I suppose with everything else going on
it can pretend it’s not happening. Deception,
self-deception, advance by degrees,
my dead friend reminds me, and who hasn’t
brought themselves to harm because
they thought they had to? The dead can be kinder
than the living, if you are not related to them.
The anger I would give Orion
is what has been given me, bitter shear
above the sea, empty pockets
planes fall through, and according to the Proverbs
to which I guiltily return,
sliding another out of its pack,
he who troubles his household with groundless anger
will inherit the chaos that some of us
truly seem to prefer. But Orion doesn’t care
what anyone thinks and doesn’t care
when this is weakness. Each day he pursues
what he considers his due
with a traitor’s expectation of exacting fidelity,
no one more full of suspicion,
mistaking anger for courage, for reason,
and the same scorpion kills him.
One could try to filter anger
as a plant might, then through a coarsely-woven
logic, then as would a machine
whose selling points are that it’s cheap
and nearly silent, and still be
unequal to it, smoke rising
to Orion, and my friend, who was not immune
to anger, says I need to look past
the constellation, he can see further than he ever has –
beyond the Horsehead Nebula, De Mairan’s Nebula,
through hallways of the stellar nurseries,
beyond pattern (if it is pattern), and colour
(if it is colour), beyond narrative, he says, Okay
I’m being practical now, there is a clearing.