Collected Poems (20 page)

precisely scored — no rests, diminuendos, decrescendos — silencing, and silence.

FLESH AND BLOOD

[1987]

I

Elms

All morning the tree men have been taking down the stricken elms skirting the broad sidewalks.

The pitiless electric chain saws whine tirelessly up and down their piercing, operatic scales

and the diesel choppers in the street shredding the debris chug feverishly, incessantly,

packing truckload after truckload with the feathery, homogenized, inert remains of heartwood,

twig and leaf and soon the block is stripped, it is as though illusions of reality were stripped:

the rows of naked facing buildings stare and think, their divagations more urgent than they were.

“The winds of time,” they think, the mystery charged with fearful clarity: “The winds of time…”

All afternoon, on to the unhealing evening, minds racing, “Insolent, unconscionable, the winds of time…”

Hooks

Possibly because she’s already so striking — tall, well dressed, very clear, pure skin —

when the girl gets on the subway at Lafayette Street everyone notices her artificial hand

but we also manage, as we almost always do, not to be noticed noticing, except one sleeping woman,

who hasn’t budged since Brooklyn but who lifts her head now, opens up, forgets herself,

and frankly stares at those intimidating twists of steel, the homely leather sock and laces,

so that the girl, as she comes through the door, has to do in turn now what is to be done,

which is to look down at it, too, a bit askance, with an air of tolerant, bemused annoyance,

the way someone would glance at their unruly, apparently ferocious but really quite friendly dog.

Nostalgia

In the dumbest movie they can play it on us with a sunrise and a passage of adagio Vivaldi —

all the reason more to love it and to loathe it, this always barely choked-back luscious flood,

this turbulence in breast and breath that indicates a purity residing somewhere in us,

redeeming with its easy access the thousand lapses of memory shed in the most innocuous day

and cancelling our rue for all the greater consciousness we didn’t have for past, lost presents.

Its illusion is that we’ll retain this new, however hammy past more thoroughly than all before,

its reality, that though we know by heart its shabby ruses, know we’ll misplace it yet again,

it’s what we have, a stage light flickering to flood, chintz and gaud, and we don’t care.

Artemis

The lesbian couple’s lovely toddler daughter has one pierced ear with a thin gold ring in it

and the same abundant, flaming, almost movie-starlet hair as the chunkier of the women.

For an entire hour she’s been busily harrying the hapless pigeons of the Parc Montholon

while the other two sit spooning on a bench, caressing, cradling one another in their arms

then striking up acquaintance with a younger girl who at last gets up to leave with them.

They call the child but she doesn’t want to go just yet, she’s still in the game she’s made.

It’s where you creep up softly on your quarry, then shriek and stamp and run and wave your arms

and watch as it goes waddle, waddle, waddle, and heaves itself to your great glee into the air.

Guatemala: 1964

for Loren Crabtree

The Maya-Quechua Indians plodding to market on feet as flat and tough as toads were semi-starving

but we managed to notice only their brilliant weaving and implacable, picturesque aloofness.

The only people who would talk to us were the village alcoholic, who’d sold his soul for
aguardiente,

and the Bahia nurse, Jenny, middle-aged, English-Nicaraguan, the sole medicine for eighty miles,

who lord knows why befriended us, put us up, even took us in her jeep into the mountains,

where a child, if I remember, needed penicillin, and where the groups of dark, idling men

who since have risen and been crushed noted us with something disconcertingly beyond suspicion.

Good Jenny: it took this long to understand she wasn’t just forgiving our ferocious innocence.

Herakles

A mysterious didactic urgency informs the compelling bedtime stories he is obsessively recounted.

Misty, potent creatures, half human, half insane with hatred and with lustings for the hearth:

the childhood of the race, with always, as the ground, the urgent implication of a lesson.

Some of it he gets, that there are losses, personal and epic, but bearable, to be withstood,

and that the hero’s soul is self-forged, self-conceived, hammered out in outrage, trial, abandon, risk.

The parables elude him, though: he can never quite grasp where the ever-after means to manifest.

Is he supposed to
be
this darkly tempered, dark fanatic of the flesh who’ll surely consume himself?

Or should it be the opposite: would all these feats and deeds be not exemplary but cautionary?

First Desires

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew anything at all about the music,

what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of the orchestra each represented:

there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thinnings, the winding cries of change

that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of you and then apart from you.

And even when you’d learned the grainy timbre of the single violin, the ardent arpeggios of the horn,

when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left, an ache, a sense of longing

that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the dominant’s resolve into the tonic,

as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you knew it was more likely) you.

The Dirty Talker: D Line, Boston

Shabby, tweedy, academic, he was old enough to be her father and I thought he was her father,

then realized he was standing closer than a father would so I thought he was her older lover.

And I thought at first that she was laughing, then saw it was more serious, more strenuous:

her shoulders spasmed back and forth; he was leaning close, his mouth almost against her ear.

He’s terminating the affair, I thought: wife ill, the kids … the girl won’t let him go.

We were in a station now, he pulled back half a head from her the better to behold her,

then was out the hissing doors, she sobbing wholly now so that finally I had to understand —

her tears, his grinning broadly in — at
me
now though, as though I were a portion of the story.

Repression

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches and sad softenings,

I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought were evidences of repression,

sexual or otherwise, now seem, in other people anyway, to be varieties of dignity, withholding, tact,

and sometimes even in myself, certain patiences I would have once called lassitude, indifference,

now seem possibly to be if not the rewards then at least the unsuspected, undreamed-of conclusions

to many of the even-then-preposterous self-evolved disciplines, rigors, almost mortifications

I inflicted on myself in my starting-out days, improvement days, days when the idea alone of psychic peace,

of intellectual, of emotional quiet, the merest hint, would have meant inconceivable capitulation.

Como

In the Mercedes station wagon with diplomatic plates the mother has gone out somewhere again.

The husband is who knows and who cares where in his silver Porsche nine-twenty-eight.

As they come across the dismal hotel garden from their after-dinner promenade along the lake,

the three noisy, bratty kids are all over the pretty German teenager who minds them.

One tugs at one hand, another at the other, the snotty baby pulls at her wrinkled skirt and wails

but for all the
au pair
notices they might not be there, she might be on the dance floor at a ball.

It’s not until the grizzled kitchen mouse-cat strolls out on the path that she comes to life,

kneeling, whispering, fervently coaxing the coy thing with tempting clicks and rubbings of her hands.

One Morning in Brooklyn

The snow is falling in three directions at once against the sienna brick of the houses across,

but the storm is mild, the light even, the erratic wind not harsh, and, tolling ten o’clock,

the usually undistinguished bells of the Sixth Street cathedral assume an authoritative dignity,

remarking with ponderous self-consciousness the holy singularities of this now uncommon day.

How much the pleasant sense, in our sheltering rooms, of warmth, enclosure: an idle, languid taking in,

with almost Georgian ease, voluptuous, reposeful, including titillations of the sin of well-being,

the gentle adolescent tempest, which still can’t make up its mind quite, can’t dig in and bite,

everything for show, flailing with a furious but futile animation wisps of white across the white.

Self-Knowledge

Because he was always the good-hearted one, the ingenuous one, the one who knew no cunning,

who, if “innocent” didn’t quite apply, still merited some similar connotation of naïveté, simplicity,

the sense that an essential awareness of the coarseness of other people’s motives was lacking

so that he was constantly blundering upon situations in which he would take on good faith

what the other rapaciously, ruthlessly, duplicitously and nearly always successfully offered as truth …

All of that he understood about himself but he was also aware that he couldn’t alter at all

his basic affable faith in the benevolence of everyone’s intentions and that because of this the world

would not as in romance annihilate him but would toy unmercifully with him until he was mad.

Alzheimer’s: The Wife

for Renée Mauger

She answers the bothersome telephone, takes the message, forgets the message, forgets who called.

One of their daughters, her husband guesses: the one with the dogs, the babies, the boy Jed?

Yes, perhaps, but how tell which, how tell anything when all the name tags have been lost or switched,

when all the lonely flowers of sense and memory bloom and die now in adjacent bites of time?

Sometimes her own face will suddenly appear with terrifying inappropriateness before her in a mirror.

She knows that if she’s patient, its gaze will break, demurely, decorously, like a well-taught child’s,

it will turn from her as though it were embarrassed by the secrets of this awful hide-and-seek.

If she forgets, though, and glances back again, it will still be in there, furtively watching, crying.

Alzheimer’s: The Husband

for Jean Mauger

He’d been a clod, he knew, yes, always aiming toward his vision of the good life, always acting on it.

He knew he’d been unconscionably self-centered, had indulged himself with his undreamed-of good fortune,

but he also knew that the single-mindedness with which he’d attended to his passions, needs and whims,

and which must have seemed to others the grossest sort of egotism, was also what was really at the base

of how he’d almost offhandedly worked out the intuitions and moves which had brought him here,

and this wasn’t all that different: to spend his long anticipated retirement learning to cook,

clean house, dress her, even to apply her makeup, wasn’t any sort of secular saintliness —

that would be belittling — it was just the next necessity he saw himself as being called to.

The Critic

In the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, where all the bums come in stinking from the cold,

there was one who had a battered loose-leaf book he used to scribble in for hours on end.

He wrote with no apparent hesitation, quickly, and with concentration; his inspiration was inspiring:

you had to look again to realize that he was writing over words that were already there —

blocks of cursive etched into the softened paper, interspersed with poems in print he’d pasted in.

I hated to think of the volumes he’d violated to construct his opus, but I liked him anyway,

especially the way he’d often reach the end, close his work with weary satisfaction, then open again

and start again: page one, chapter one, his blood-rimmed eyes as rapt as David’s doing psalms.

New Car

Doesn’t, when we touch it, that sheen of infinitesimally pebbled steel, doesn’t it, perhaps,

give
just a bit, yes, the subtlest yielding, yes, much less than flesh would, we realize,

but still, as though it were intending in some formal way that at last we were to be in contact

with the world of inorganics, as though, after all we’ve been through with it, cuts, falls, blows,

that world, the realm of carbon, iron, earth, the all-ungiving, was attempting, gently, patiently,

to reach across, respond, and mightn’t we find now, not to our horror or even our discomfort,

that our tongue, as though in answer, had wandered gently from the mouth, as though it, too,

shriven of its limits, bud and duct, would sanctify this unity, would touch, stroke, cling, fuse?

Conscience

In how many of the miserable little life dramas I play out in my mind am I unforgivable,

despicable, with everything, love, kin, companionship, negotiable, marketable, for sale,

and yet I do forgive myself, hardly marking it, although I still remember those fierce