Collected Poems (30 page)

into the pool of the mouth as into a genital; the eyelids upper and lower wrinkled like linen,

the blood rims of the eyes too graphically vivid; harsh, tearless, pornographically red —

and you are supposed not to look or look and glance quickly away and not look at the mother,

who signs with a stone shoulder and eyes fixed to the child’s white-gauze surgical cap

that if you do look you are cursed, if you do look you will and you well know it be damned.

Lascivious pity, luxurious pity, that glances and looks and looks twice and delivers the tear

and hauls out of the blind, locked caves of the breast these silent strangles of sobs

that ache but give something like tremulous whispers of sanctity back, psalms of gratification.

Lascivious pity, idle, despicable pity, pity of the reflexive half-thought holy thought

thinking the mindless threnody of itself once again: I watched, I couldn’t not watch her,

as she so conscientiously, carefully wouldn’t watch me; rapacious, pillaging pity: forgive me.

II

SOME OF THE FORMS OF JEALOUSY

Signs

My friend’s wife has a lover; I come to this conclusion — not suspicion, mind, conclusion,

not a doubt about it, not a hesitation, although how I get there might be hard to track;

a blink a little out of phase, say, with its sentence, perhaps a word or two too few;

a certain tenderness of atmosphere, of aura, almost like a pregnancy, with less glow, perhaps,

but similar complex inward blushes of accomplishment, achievement, pride — during dinner,

as she passes me a dish of something, as I fork a morsel of it off, as our glances touch.

My friend’s manner, or his guise, is openness, heartiness and healthy haleness in all things;

the virtue of conviction, present moment, that sort of thing: it is his passion and his ethic,

so I don’t know now if he knows or doesn’t know, or knows and might be hiding it, or doesn’t care.

He is hearty, open, present; he is eating dinner in the moment with his wife and old dear friend.

The wife, wifely, as she pours my wine and hands it to me looks across the glass’s rim at me.

Something in the wifely glance tells me now she knows I know, and when I shyly look away,

reach across for bread and butter, she looks down at my hand, and up again: she is telling me

she doesn’t care the least bit if I know or don’t know, she might in fact wish me to know.

My friend is in the present still, taking sustenance; it’s sustaining, good; he smiles, good.

Down below, I can just make out the engines of his ship, the stresses, creaks and groans;

everything’s in hand; I hear the happy workers at their chugging furnaces and boilers.

I let my friend’s guise now be not my guise but truth; in truth, I’m like him, dense, convinced,

involved all in the moment, hearty, filled, fulfilled, not just with manner, but with fact.

I ply my boilers, too; my workers hum: light the deck lamps, let the string quartet play.

My friend’s wife smiles and offers me her profile now; she is telling me again: but why?

She smiles again, she glows, she plays me like a wind chime; I sit here clanging to myself.

My friend doesn’t seem to see me resonating; he grins, I grin, too, I flee to him again.

I’m with him in his moment now, I’m in my mouth just as he’s in his, munching, hungrily, heartily.

My safe and sane and hungry mouth hefts the morsels of my sustenance across its firmament.

The wife smiles yet again, I smile, too, but what I’m saying is if what she means is so,

I have no wish to know; more, I never did know; more, if by any chance I might have known,

I’ve forgotten, absolutely, yes: if it ever did come into my mind it’s slipped my mind.

In truth, I don’t remember anything; I eat, I drink, I smile; I hardly even know I’m there.

The Cautionary

A man who’s married an attractive, somewhat younger woman conceives a painful jealousy of her.

At first he’s puzzled as to why he should brood so fretfully on her faithfulness or lack of it.

Their lovemaking is fulfilling: he enjoys it, his wife seems to, too, as much as he does,

or, to his surprise (he’s never had this experience before), maybe more than he does.

When they married, it had seemed a miracle, he’d hardly been able to believe his great luck:

the ease and grace with which she’d come to him, the frank, good-humored way she’d touch him.

But now … it isn’t that she gives too much meaning to sex, or exhibits insufficient affection,

it’s how
involved
in it she gets, so nearly oblivious, in a way he can never imagine being.

He finds that he’s begun to observe their life in bed with what he thinks is a degree of detachment.

He sees himself, his blemishes, the paunch he can’t always hide, then her, her sheen, her glow.

Why, he asks, would such a desirable woman have committed herself so entirely to such as him?

And, more to the point: why this much passion, these urgencies and wants, this blind delight?

By a train of logic he can’t trace to its source but which he finds chillingly irrefutable,

he decides that it’s not he himself, as himself, his wife desires, but that she simply
desires.

He comes to think he’s incidental to this desire, which is general, unspecific, without object,

almost, in its intensity and heat, without a subject: she herself seems secondary to it,

as though the real project of her throaty, heaving passion was to melt her mindlessly away.

Why would such need be limited to him: wouldn’t it sweep like a search-light across all maleness?

He can’t help himself, he begins to put to the proof his disturbing but compelling observations.

When they’re out together, it’s self-evident to him that every man who sees her wants her:

all the furtive glances, behind, aside, even into surfaces that hold her image as she passes.

It dawns on him in a shocking and oddly exciting insight that for so many to desire her

some
signal
would have to be sent, not an actual gesture perhaps, nothing so coarse as a beckoning,

but something like an aura, of eagerness, availability, which she’d be subconsciously emitting.

Hardly noticing, he falls a step behind her, the better to watch her, to keep track of her.

Then he realizes to his chagrin that his scrutiny might very well be working on his wife.

In a sadly self-fulfilling prophecy, she might begin to feel vulnerable, irritated, disconnected;

yes, alone, she must often feel alone, as though he, wretch that he is, wasn’t even there.

This is the last way he’d have thought that his obsession would undo him, but why not?

A woman among admiring men is already in the broadest sense a potential object of desire,

but a woman with a sharply heightened awareness of her most elementary sexual identity,

as his wife by now would have, with this jackal, as he now sees himself, sniffing behind her:

wouldn’t she, even against her best intentions, manifest this in a primitive, perceptible way,

and wouldn’t men have to be aware, however vaguely, that some sexual event was taking place?

Mightn’t the glances she’d inspire reflect this, bringing an intriguing new sense of herself,

and mightn’t this make even more likely that she’d betray him in just the way that he suspects?

Yes. No. Yes. He knows that he should stop all this: but how can he, without going to the end?

The end might be just the thing he’s driving them both towards, he can’t help himself, though,

he’ll dissemble his fixations, but if there’s to be relief, it will have to wait till then.

Baby Talk

Willa Selenfriend likes Paul Peterzell better than she likes me and I am dying of it.

“Like” is what we say in eighth grade to mean a person has a secret crush on someone else.

I am dying of Willa liking Paul without knowing why she likes him more, or what it means.

It doesn’t matter, Willa has insinuated cells of doubt in me, I already feel them multiplying,

I know already that a single lifetime won’t be long enough to extirpate their progeny.

Willa likes Paul better than me but one summer day she’ll come out to the park with me.

Why? Did she pity me? I don’t care. We’re there, we’ve walked, now we’re resting on the grass.

Is this rest, though, to lie here, Willa so close, as lovely as ever, and as self-possessed?

I try, too, to calm myself, but the silence is painful; is this because Paul’s in it, too?

Do I suspect it’s that of which Willa’s silence is composed? If so, of what is mine composed?

We lie there just a minute, or a year, the surgings and the pulsings in my heart and groin

are so intense that finally Paul’s forgotten, only Willa’s there with me, my docile longings.

Willa’s turned towards me, her eyes are closed, I bring my face down closer, next to hers.

Astonishing that Willa should be in the visible with me, glowing in the world of pertinent form.

I move my lips towards hers, I can’t resist, only this much, this gently, but then, no,

with one subtle shift, the mildest movement of the angle of her brow, Willa repositions us

so that my awkwardness makes absurd my plot of our participation in a mutual sensual accord.

With what humiliating force I have to understand I’d been suffering an unforgivable illusion;

I’d believed that for a little moment Paul had left us, but he’d been there all along,

with the unwavering omniscience of a parent, the power of what someday I’ll call a conscience.

What had ever made me think I’d so easily obliterate him from the fraying dusk of childhood?

Weren’t we contained in him, held in him; wouldn’t fearful heart forever now falter in its flight?

The Question

The middle of the night, she’s wide awake, carefully lying as far away as she can from him.

He turns in his sleep and she can sense him realizing she’s not in the place she usually is,

then his sleep begins to change, he pulls himself closer, his arm comes comfortably around her.

“Are you awake?” she says, then, afraid that he might think she’s asking him for sex,

she hurries on, “I want to know something; last summer, in Cleveland, did you have someone else?”

She’d almost said — she was going to say — “Did you have a
lover?
” but she’d caught herself;

she’d been frightened by the word, she realized; it was much too definite, at least for now.

Even so, it’s only after pausing that he answers, “No,” with what feeling she can’t tell.

He moves his hand on her, then with a smile in his voice asks, “Did you have somebody in Cleveland?”

“That’s not what I was asking you,” she says crossly. “But that’s what I asked
you,
” he answers.

She’s supposed to be content now, the old story, she knows that she’s supposed to be relieved,

but she’s not relieved, her tension hasn’t eased the slightest bit, which doesn’t surprise her.

She’s so confused that she can’t really even say now if she wants to believe him or not.

Anyway, what about that pause? Was it because in the middle of the night and six months later

he wouldn’t have even known what she was talking about, or was it because he needed that moment

to frame an answer which would neutralize what might after all have been a shocking thrust

with a reasonable deflection, in this case, his humor: a laugh that’s like a lie and is.

“When would I have found the time?” he might have said, or, “Who in Cleveland could I love?”

Or, in that so brief instant, might he have been finding a way to stay in the realm of truth,

as she knew he’d surely want to, given how self-righteously he esteemed his ethical integrities?

It comes to her with a start that what she most deeply and painfully suspects him of is a
renunciation.

She knows that he has no one now; she thinks she knows there’s been no contact from Cleveland,

but she still believes that there’d been something then, and if it was as important as she thinks,

it wouldn’t be so easily forgotten, it would still be with him somewhere as a sad regret,

perhaps a precious memory, but with that word, renunciation, hooked to it like a price tag.

Maybe that was what so rankled her, that she might have been the object of his charity, his
goodness.

That would be too much; that he would have wronged her, then sacrificed himself for her.

Yes, “Lover,” she should have said it, “Lover, lover,” should have made him try to disavow it.

She listens to his breathing; he’s asleep again, or has he taught himself to feign that, too?

“No, last summer in Cleveland I didn’t have a lover, I have never been to Cleveland, I love you.

There is no Cleveland, I adore you, and, as you’ll remember, there was no last summer:

the world last summer didn’t yet exist, last summer still was universal darkness, chaos, pain.”

Meditation

You must never repeat this to
him,
but when I started seeing my guru was when I got pregnant.

I’m not bothered to think there’s a connection — we’d been trying so long — but he would be.

He doesn’t like my Baba, he says that he’s repelled by him; I think he’s really envious.

But why? Just because I believe in one person doesn’t hurt my feelings for someone else.

You’re supposed to give yourself to the guru, that’s the whole idea, not
that
way, though.

He makes so much fuss: Baba is a fake, Baba is a pig; he says that I should leave him,

but he knows I won’t: if he made me choose, I don’t know what I’d do; and there’s the baby.