Collected Poems (24 page)

And the woman he had lived with, and was trapped by and suffered from (not with), that omission …

Something was the matter with her heart, the doctors said, she’d need an operation …

She comes awake, sobbing in the night, holding him (although he really can’t be held by now),

telling him she doesn’t want to die, and him (this is the confession) astonished she’d care.

Native Americans

I’m not sure whether it was Hiawatha or a real Indian who so impressed me during my latency.

My father would read me Longfellow; one of our teachers taught us actual reservation life,

to try to make us understand that our vision of exotics and minorities was so contaminated

that we not only had corrupted ideas of history but didn’t know what went on under our noses.

Whatever the person I derived from all that, I was very moved by how seriously he comported himself:

whether I really wanted to be him, or like him, with that intimidating valor and self-possession,

aren’t really questions at this late date, but maybe that elaborate identity, warrior, victim,

hunter, obstinate survivor, muddled, split, meant more to me than just another semblance to be shed.

Work

Although constructed of the most up-to-date, technically advanced elements of woven glass,

carrying messages by laser pulse, the cable the telephone men are threading down the manhole

has exactly the same thickness and tense flexibility and has to be handled with the same delicacy

as the penis of the huge palamino stallion I saw breeding at the riding school when I was twelve

who couldn’t get it in so that Charlie Young the little stablehand had to help him with it.

How more than horrified I was that Charlie would touch the raw, unpeeled, violet-purple thing,

thinking nothing of it, slipping between the flaring, snorting stud and the gleaming mare,

comely and lascivious, who, sidling under now, next year would throw a mediocre foal, soon sold.

Gratitude

for Steve Berg

I’m scribbling suggestions on a copy of the next-to-final draft of my friend’s book of poems.

When I stop to rest, rub my eyes, and look up out the window, the phone company, at it again,

has a sort of miniature collapsible crane outside, one member, dangling cables from its jaws,

looming weirdly in a long, smooth, effortless arc across my line of sight, white, clean, sleek,

enameled steel, impeccable, like something from those science-fiction flicks my kids are so insane for.

For a moment I let myself envy the people who make those films: all that money, all that audience …

The poem I’m reading now is “Gratitude”: “Sunday. Nothing to do. I park. Stumps. Weeds…”

And there’s nothing much to do here either: all the whole poem needed was to cut a “the.”

Will

The boy had badly malformed legs, and there was a long, fresh surgical scar behind one knee.

The father, frankly wealthy, quite young, tanned, very boardroom, very well-made, self-made,

had just taken the boy’s thin arm the way you would take the arm of an attractive woman,

with firmness, a flourish of affection; he was smiling directly down into the boy’s face

but it was evident that this much companionability between them wasn’t usual, that the father,

whatever else his relation to the boy consisted of, didn’t know that if you held him that way

you would overbalance him, which, when the boy’s crutches splayed and he went down, crying
“Papa!”

must have been what informed his voice with such shrill petulance, such anguished accusation.

Pregnant

Tugging with cocked thumbs at the straps of her old overalls the way hick movie-farmers used to,

“This is the only thing I can wear,” she declares, the halter hard against her heavy breasts,

then her hands encircle the impressive eight months’ globe slung in its sack of comfortable denim.

Not eighteen yet, she isn’t so much radiant, as brides are (she’s not married), as radiantly complacent:

her two friends seem moved by the charming self-attention she graciously allows them to share.

They watch closely as with affectionate familiarity she pushes on the forepart of the bulge,

as though she already felt the brow and headshape there and was communicating arcane greetings,

which she then subtleizes into that consoling feathery, obsessive gesture,
effleurage.

Peace

We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who even knows now what about,

what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws like fishbones,

the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to bed, and through the night,

feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touching, back to back,

the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep us lifting, turning,

through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the aching dark, the weary dark,

then, toward dawn, I can’t help it, though justice won’t I know be served, I pull her to me,

and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive embracing our entire lengths.

Some of Us

How nearly unfeasible they make it for the rest of us, those who, with exactly our credentials,

attain, if that’s how it happens, the world of the publicly glamorous, the very chic, the “in.”

It isn’t so much being omitted, left home from the party, as knowing that we’ll never get there,

never participate in those heady proximities our insatiable narrations ever tremble toward.

What would be there, we ask ourselves. Better bosoms? Better living rooms? Contemptibles.

Still, without it, the uneasy sense of incompletion, not really to have lived all that was to live,

especially knowing at this age how easy it would be now to evade encroachments of the essentials,

those once impressionable, now solitude-inured, scar-tissue-tough tabulas of receptive ego.

Two: Resurrections

Jed kills Catherine with a pistol he’s put together himself out of some plastic play blocks.

Bang! you’re dead. Catherine falls down on the floor: Look, you’ve killed me now, she says.

Jed is neither amused nor upset, but there is something in all this he takes very seriously.

I want to kill you again, he says. Before you can, Catherine says, you’ll have to fix me.

I’ll fix you, Jed says, and runs into the bathroom, coming back with Catherine’s comb and brush.

He kneels beside her and with great solemnity places the brush in the center of her chest.

Then, still silent, still very serious, he slowly runs the comb over her left breast, right breast,

then down her belly, once across the breadth of her hips, then deep into the valley of her crotch.

Men

As the garbage truck is backing up, one of the garbagemen is absorbed watching a pretty girl pass

and a sleeve of protruding steel catches him hard enough on the bicep to almost knock him down.

He clutches at his arm, limping heavily across the sidewalk, obviously in quite serious discomfort,

but the guy who works with him and who’s seen the whole thing absolutely refuses to acknowledge

that his partner might be hurt, instead he bursts out laughing and starts making fun of the guy,

imitating the way he’s holding himself, saying, “Booby-baby want a kiss? What’s mattah, baby?”

Now the one who’s hurt, grimacing, says, “Christ,” shaking his head, vigorously rotating his arm.

Then, “You prick,” he growls, and with a clunky leap and a great boom kicks the side of the truck.

Shame

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,

offhandedly mentioned to me in a conversation with some friends that although at first she’d found me —

I can’t remember the term, some dated colloquialism signifying odd, unacceptable, out-of-things —

she’d decided that I was after all all right … twelve years later she comes back to me from nowhere

and I realize that it wasn’t my then irrepressible, unselective, incessant sexual want she meant,

which, when we’d been introduced, I’d naturally aimed at her and which she’d easily deflected,

but that she’d thought I really was, in myself, the way I looked and spoke and acted,

what she was saying, creepy, weird, whatever, and I am taken with a terrible humiliation.

On the Other Hand

On the other hand, in Philadelphia, long ago, at a party on Camac Street on a Sunday afternoon,

a springtime or an early autumn Sunday afternoon, I know, though the occasion’s lost

and whose house it was is even lost, near the party’s end, a girl, a woman, someone else’s wife,

a beauty, too, a little older than I was, an “older woman,” elegant and admirable and sober, too,

or nearly so, as I was coming down the stairs, put her hand on my hand on the landing,

caught me there and held me for a moment, with her hand, just her gentle hand, and with her look,

with how she looked at me, with some experience I didn’t have, some delight I didn’t understand,

and pulled me to her, hard, and kissed me, hard, to let me taste what subtle lusts awaited me.

The Fountain

Two maintenance men need half the morning probing just to find the ancient cut-off valve

which is locked tight with rust so that they have to wrestle it with penetrating oil and wrenches

until the flow begins to falter, then arrests, the level in the basin hesitantly lowering.

Now they shovel at the copper drains, mossed and caked with leaves and scraps of sandwich paper;

now a fishy fragrance fills the atmosphere although there weren’t and never have been any fish,

and all the gods and goddesses, the Neptunes and the dolphins and Dianas, shed their sheen,

their streaked bronze re-emerging, dimmer now, paler, to its other element, while underneath,

a million filters from a million cigarettes tremble in the final suction, worming at the slits.

The Latin Quarter

All the Greek restaurants in the old student neighborhood have pigs roasting in their windows.

From morning until dinnertime the plump sucklings deliciously darken, rotating dutifully

on the blackened spits which enter by the anus and exit from angry wounds between the eyes.

One’s front legs have been neatly trussed beneath it, like a running horse from
Horn and Hound.

Another’s have been wittily arranged to cover its squinting eyes, like someone being “it.”

In one place, no pig, just a singer, on a platform on a stool: a young man with a
balalaika.

On the floor in front of him, a television screen in grainy blues shows him again, but from behind,

so that, standing listening to his voice come through the squeaky speaker, we can be there, too.

Rungs

When we finally tracked him down, the old man (not really all that very old, we thought)

who’d made the comfortable, graceful, elegantly mortised chairs for all the farmers’ kitchens

told us, never even opening the heavy iron gate into his yard, that he was through, retired,

done with it, and no, he didn’t know anybody else who made them now, no one, he was the last.

He seemed to say it all with satisfaction, or at least was anyway unmoved by what it may have meant,

leaving us to back away, apologize, get into our car to make an awkward U-turn in his unpaved lane,

suffering meanwhile pangs of conscience and regret for honest good things gone for good,

all the innocence the world was losing, all the chances we’d once had, and lost, for beauty.

Normality

“Sometimes I feel as though all I really want is to take his little whizzer in my mouth …

Didn’t you ever feel anything like that? I mean, I’ll be changing him, and he’s smiling,

kicking his legs like crazy, and I can tell he’s really excited and I know
I’m
excited

and I think how clean and pure and soft he is down there, and that wonderful
smell,
you know,

at first you think it’s the powder you put on them but then you realize it’s them,
him,

it’s his goddamned intrinsic odor, I could eat it up, and what would be so wrong with it?

I’m not trying to shock you; I mean, maybe if you let yourself, you’d feel things like that …

Maybe it’s you who’s fucked up and repressed; I’ll bet what I feel for my baby’s
normal.
”

The Storm

A dense, low, irregular overcast is flowing rapidly in over the city from the middle South.

Above it, the sky holds blue, with scattered, intricate conglomerations of higher clouds

sidling in a much more even, stately procession across the dazzling, unsullied azure.

Now the lower level momentarily thins, fragments, and the early sun, still sharply angled,

breaks through into a finer veil and simmers, edges sharp, its ardent disk gently mottled.

Down across the roof lines, the decorative dome of Les Invalides looms, intruding on all this,

and suddenly a swallow banks around its gilded slopes, heading out but veering quickly back

as though the firmament, figured by so many volumes now, were too intimidating to row out in alone.

Blame

Where no question possibly remains — someone crying, someone dead — blame asks: whose fault?

It is the counterpart, the day-to-day, the real life, of those higher faculties we posit,

logic, reason, the inductions and deductions we yearningly trace the lines of with our finger.

It also has to do with nothing but itself, a tendency, a habit, like smoking or depression: