Collected Poems (23 page)

Never rue: that old longing rather that the past would be always the portal of touching possibility:

to say I am the life and was the life, to dying say I am still the matrix and again the fire.

Cowboys

The science-fiction movie on the telly in which the world, threatened by aliens with destruction,

is, as always, saved, is really just a Western with rays and jets instead of pistols and horses.

The heroes crouch behind computers instead of rocks, but still mow down the endlessly expendable villains

who fire back but somehow always miss the stars, except one, the extra-lovable second lead,

nice guy, funny, a little too libidinal, who you know from minute one will teach us to die,

in his buddy’s arms, stoical, never losing sight of our side’s virtues: community and self-denial.

On the other channel, Pompeii: Christians, pagans, same story, them and us, another holy mission,

the actors resonating with deep conviction, voices of manly sanctity, like Reagan on the news.

The Marriage

The way she tells it, they were in the Alps or somewhere, tall, snowcapped mountains anyway,

in their hotel, a really nice hotel, she says, they’d decided that for once they’d splurge.

They’d just arrived, they were looking from their terrace out across a lake or bay or something.

She was sitting there, just sitting there and thinking to herself how pleasant it all looked,

like a postcard, just the way for once it’s supposed to look, clean and pure and cool,

when his hand came to her shoulder and he asked her something, “Don’t you think it’s lovely?”

then something else, his tone was horrid; there was something that he wanted her to say —

how was
she
to know what he wanted her to say? — and he
shook
her then, until she ached.

Fifteen

for Jessie

You give no hint how shy you really are, so thoroughly your warm and welcoming temperament masks

those confounding and to me still painful storms of adolescent ill at ease, confusion and disruption.

Our old father-daughter stroll down South Street these days is like a foray into the territories —

the weighings and the longings, young men, men of age, the brazen or sidelong subliminal proposings:

you’re fair game now, but if you notice, you manage to keep it unimpeachably to yourself,

your newly braceless smile good-humoredly desexualizing the leering and licentious out-there.

Innocently you sheathe yourself in the most patently innocuous and unpremeditated innocence;

even with me, though, your kiss goodbye is layered: cheek toward, body swayed imperceptibly away.

Sixteen: Tuscany

Wherever Jessie and her friend Maura alight, clouds of young men suddenly appear like bees.

We’re to meet in Florence at the Ponte Vecchio at nine o’clock: they’re twenty minutes early,

two vacationing Sicilian bees, hair agleam like fenders, are begging for a kiss good night when we arrive.

At San Gimignano, on the steps that go down from the church into the square — such clean breezes —

two Tuscan bees, lighter, handsome: great flurried conferences with references to pocket dictionary

to try to find out where we’re staying, how long staying, how get there … impossible, poor bees.

A broad blond bee from Berkeley at the bank in Lucca; in Pisa, French bees, German bees …

The air is filled with promises of pollen, the dancing air is filled with honeyed wings and light.

Thinking Thought

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes — often — still say when I’m trying to convince my inner self of something.

“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want to stop to rest now, not already.

“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear, why procrastinate, why whine?”

All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being only sometimes subject to the will,

that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly, obstinately impotent.

“Oh, soul, come into my field of want, my realm of act, be attentive to my computations and predictions.”

But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s old act of dissipation and removal.

Oh, the furious illusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions and discursive chains of hope.

Jews

She could tell immediately, she said, that he was Jewish, although he didn’t of course
look
it,

it was his … seriousness — and she wanted to take the opportunity because she met so few these days

to ask him some questions about the vision a Jew would have of some of the unfortunate attitudes

she felt were being promulgated — oh, Lord, again — in this terribly provincial, conservative country.

She’d been a leftist in the old days, when it was still worth being one, she’d admired Jews then

and still did: they were so much more aware of subtleties, of implications in the apparently innocuous.

Here, for instance, the old anti-Semitism, little explicit, little said in public, but people like us,

sensitive to that sort of thing, surely
we
knew: couldn’t he sense it just in the
tone
of things?

Snow: I

All night, snow, then, near dawn, freezing rain, so that by morning the whole city glistens

in a glaze of high-pitched, meticulously polished brilliance, everything rounded off,

the cars submerged nearly to their windows in the unbroken drifts lining the narrow alleys,

the buildings rising from the trunklike integuments the wind has molded against them.

Underlit clouds, blurred, violet bars, the rearguard of the storm, still hang in the east,

immobile over the flat river basin of the Delaware; beyond them, nothing, the washed sky,

one vivid wisp of pale smoke rising waveringly but emphatically into the brilliant ether.

No one is out yet but Catherine, who closes the door behind her and starts up the street.

Snow: II

It’s very cold, Catherine is bundled in a coat, a poncho on top of that, high boots, gloves,

a long scarf around her neck, and she’s sauntering up the middle of the snowed-in street,

eating, of all things, an apple, the blazing redness of which shocks against the world of white.

No traffic yet, the
crisp crisp
of her footsteps keeps reaching me until she turns the corner.

I write it down years later, and the picture still holds perfectly, precise, unwanting,

and so too does the sense of being suddenly bereft as she passes abruptly from my sight,

the quick wash of desolation, the release again into the memory of affection, and then affection,

as the first trucks blundered past, chains pounding, the first delighted children rushed out with sleds.

Gardens

The ever-consoling fantasy of my early adolescence was that one day time would stop for me:

everything in the world, for however long I wanted it to, would stay frozen in a single instant,

the clock on the classroom wall, the boring teacher, the other kids … all but someone else and me,

Arlene and me, Marie and me, Barbara of the budding breasts, Sheila of the braids and warming smile …

In the nurse’s room there was a narrow cot, there we would repair, there we would reveal ourselves.

One finds of course to one’s amazement and real chagrin that such things actually happen,

the precocious male, the soon to be knocked-up girl, but by now that’s no longer what we care about:

what matters now are qualities of longing, this figment, fragment, its precious, adorable irresolutions.

The Star

Though he’s sitting at the restaurant bar next to the most startlingly glamorous woman in the place,

who keeps leaning against him, alertly, conscientiously, even solemnly attending to his every word,

the very famous ex–basketball player, when he isn’t dealing directly with her or one of his friends,

seems enormously distracted — whenever he can retreat into himself he does, his eyes drift away,

he takes great care to listen to what’s said but the listening never really overtakes the waiting,

for whatever is happening to be finished so that something new can happen, something different, else:

even when strangers stop to offer homage, to pass a moment in his presence, though he’s gracious,

his attention never quite alights but stays tensed away, roving his dissatisfactions like a cat.

Kin

“You make me sick!” this, with rancor, vehemence, disgust — again, “You hear me?
Sick!”

with rancor, vehemence, disgust again, with rage and bitterness, arrogance and fury —

from a little black girl, ten or so, one evening in a convenience market, to her sister,

two or three years younger, who’s taking much too long picking out her candy from the rack.

What next? Nothing next. Next the wretched history of the world. The history of the heart.

The theory next that all we are are stories, handed down, that all we are are parts of speech.

All that limits and defines us: our ancient natures, love and death and terror and original sin.

And the weary breath, the weary going to and fro, the weary always knowing what comes next.

Fire

The boss, the crane operator, one of the workers, a friend of somebody in the junkyard —

whoever it is who watches me when I pull up to see the fire in the cab of the huge derrick,

the flames in crisp, hungry, emphatic shapes scaling the suddenly fragile-ribbed steel tower,

considers it a matter of deep, real suspicion that a stranger should bother to want to see this:

slouched against a stack of rusty, dismembered fenders, he regards me with a coolness bordering threat,

a wariness touching frank hostility, while, from a low warehouse building across the street,

another person, with a bulky fire extinguisher, comes, like someone from the UN, running,

red-faced, panting, with a look of anxious desperation, as though all the fault were his.

Dignity

It only exists in us so that we may lose it but then not lose it, never at all costs lose it:

no matter what the gaffe or awful error that we’ve made, on the spot we reassume ourselves

rapidly enough to reconvince ourselves it never happened, never could have happened, until,

perhaps, much later, in another life, another universe, one lonely evening, gently reminiscing,

sweetly sorrowing for this, sweetly fondling that, something brings to mind another night,

that
night, when you lost … what? your composure? yes, you’d thought then you’d lost composure,

yes, the muscles of your stomach knotted up against your ribs, your hands trembled, but now you know

you lost more than that, yes, much more than that, but that was then, surely not again, never
now.

Fast Food

Musingly she mouths the end of her ballpoint pen as she stares down at the sheet of paper.

A job application: lines, boxes, blanks to fill, a set of instructions, that logo at the top.

Name and address, she’s got that; phone number, age, high school, height and weight: that.

Then number problems, addition, subtraction, a long, long division … she hasn’t got that.

It’s blank next to that, the page is white next to that, her eyes touch down on the white near that.

Never so white was white as that white: oh, white, angel of white, never were you so pure,

never were you so seared by anyone’s eyes and never so sadly bereft when eyes lifted away,

when eyes left you and moved, indifferent and cool, across you to the waiting door, oh, white, white.

The Orchid

with thanks to Curtis Ingham

“Tell me to touch your breast,” I wanted to say: “Please, please, please touch my breast,”

I thought she wanted to say, but was too frightened, like me, too overwhelmed, too stricken,

like me, with the surges and furies of need; our lips, locked, ground together again and again,

we were bruised and swollen, like lovers in stories, sweating like lovers in bed, but no bed.

Then I heard, I thought, “Touch me,” and ecstatic, I touched, but she brushed me away like a fly …

No, still held me, only my hand fell like a fly, her thirsty lips drank from me what they needed.

My testicles shrank, the orchid I’d paid five dollars for, hooked to the wires of her bra,

browned, faded, crumpled between us, as the orchid of memory crumples, mummified like a fly.

The City in the Hills

Late afternoon and difficult to tell if those are mountains, soft with mist, off across the lake,

the day’s last luminosity pale over them, or if a dense, low-lying cloud-bank is holding there,

diffusing the dusk above the cottages scattered charmingly on the just-discernible far shore.

A tumultuous chimney of shrilly shrieking starlings wheeling and turning over the wharves

abruptly unwinds a single undulating filament that shoots resolutely and unwaveringly across,

and now the old white steamer with its grainy voice of sentiment and resignation sets off, too,

to fetch the happy-ending humans implied so richly by the tiled roofs against the pines behind

and by the autumn air, its biting balm sensualized now by the inhalations of the eager evening.

From the Next Book by (…)

… The part where he’s telling himself at last the no longer deniable truth about himself.

He’s remembering his sins, the grosser ones he sublimated for characters and conflicts,

and the hardly noticeable omissions, especially from his early time, which he realizes now

he tended, cultivated: seeds of something which would someday bear fruit, achieve their grandeur.