Collected Poems (32 page)

He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since we walked in, although you seem not to notice particularly.

Only sometimes, when your gaze crosses his, mightn’t it leave a very tiny
tuft
behind?

It’s my imagination surely, but mightn’t you be all but imperceptibly acknowledging his admiration?

We’ve all known these things; the other, whom we’ve never seen before, but whose ways we recognize,

and with whom we enter into brilliant complicities; soul’s receptors tuned and armed;

the concealed messages, the plots, the tactics so elegant they might have been rehearsed:

the way we wholly disregard each other, never, except at the most casually random intervals,

let our scrutinies engage, but then that deep, delicious draft, that eager passionate appreciation …

I tell myself that I don’t care, as I might not sometimes, when no rival’s happened by,

but I do care now, I care acutely, I just wonder what the good would be if I told you I can see

your mild glances palpably, if still so subtly, furtively, intertwining now with his.

I’d only be insulting you, violating my supposed trust in you, belittling both of us.

We’ve spent so much effort all these years learning to care for one another’s sensitivities.

In an instant that’s all threatened; your affections seem as tenuous as when we met,

and I have to ask myself, are you more valuable to me the more that you’re at risk?

Am I to you? It’s degrading, thinking we’re more firmly held together by our mutual anxiety.

If my desire is susceptible to someone else’s valuations of its object, then what am I?

Can I say that my emotions are my own if in my most intimate affection such contaminations lurk?

Still, though, what if this time I’d guessed right, and what if I should try to tell you,

to try to laugh about it with you, to use our union, and our hard-earned etiquettes to mock him,

this intruder — look — who with his dream of even daring to attempt you would be ludicrous?

There would still be risks I almost can’t let myself consider: that you’d be humoring me,

that the fierce intensity of your attraction to him would already constitute a union with him,

I’d be asking you to lie, and doing so you’d be thrown more emphatically into his conspiracy;

your conniving with him would relegate me to the status of an obligation, a teary inconvenience.

This is so exhausting: when will it relent? It seems never, not as long as consciousness exists.

Therefore, as all along I knew I would, as I knew I’d have to, I keep still, conceal my sorrow.

Therefore, when you ask, “Is something wrong?” what is there to answer but, “Of course not, why?”

Soliloquies

1.

Strange that sexual jealousy should be so much like sex itself: the same engrossing reveries,

the intricate, voluptuous pre-imaginings, the impatient plottings towards a climax, then climax …

Or, not quite climax, since jealousy is different in how uninvolved it is in consummation.

What is its consummation but negation? Not climax but relief, a sigh of resignation, disappointment.

Still, how both depend upon a judicious intermingling of the imaginary and the merely real,

and how important image is for both, the vivid, breath-held unscrolling of fugitive inner effigies.

Next to all our other minds, how pure both are, what avid concentration takes us in them.

Maybe this is where jealousy’s terrific agitation comes from, because, in its scalding focus,

a desperate single-mindedness is imposed upon the soul and the sad, conditioned soul responds,

so fervently, in such good faith, it hardly needs the other person for its delicious fever.

Is there anything in life in which what is fancied is so much more intense than what’s accomplished?

We know it’s shadow, but licentious consciousness goes on forever manufacturing … fever.

2.

The stupidity of it, the repetitiveness, the sense of all one’s mental mechanisms run amok.

Knowing that pragmatically, statistically, one’s fantasies are foolish, but still being trapped.

The almost unmanageable foreboding that one’s character won’t be up to its own exigencies.

Knowing one is one’s own victim; how self-diminishing to have to ask, “Who really
am
I, then?”

I am someone to be rescued from my mind, but the agent of my suffering is its sole redemption;

only someone else, a specific someone else, can stop me from inflicting this upon myself.

And so within myself, in this unsavory, unsilent solitude of self, I fall into an odious dependency.

I’m like an invalid relying absolutely on another’s rectitude; but the desperate invalid, abandoned,

would have at least the moral compensation of knowing that he wasn’t doing this to himself;

philosophically, his reliance would be limited by the other’s sense of obligation, or its absence.

This
excruciating, groundless need becomes more urgent, more to be desired the more it’s threatened,

while its denouement promises what one still believes will be an unimaginably luxurious release.

3.

I try to imagine the kind of feeling which would come upon me if I really were betrayed now.

How long would I remain in that abject state of mind? When would it end? Am I sure it would?

What constitutes a state of mind at all? Certain chunks of feeling, of pleasure or pain?

I postulate the pain, but can I really? My mood prevents it. Is that all I am, then, mood?

Sometimes I feel firmly socketed within myself; other moments, I seem barely present.

Which should I desire? Mightn’t it be better not to feel anything if I’m helpless anyway?

I try to reconceive the problem: I am he who will forgive his being wronged, but can I know I will?

All my mind will tell me absolutely and obsessively is that its future isn’t in my governance.

Might that be why the other’s possible offense seems much more
rank
than mine would ever be?

My betrayal would be whimsical, benign, the hymen of my innocence would be quickly reaffirmed.

Hers infects, contaminates, is ever the first premeditated step of some squalid longer term.

I would forgive, but suspect that she might already be beyond forgiveness: whose fault then?

4.

What would be the difference? The way jealousy seeps into my notions of intention and volition,

the annihilating force it has: mightn’t it be grounded in the furies of more radical uncertainty?

That nothing lasts, that there’s no real reason why it doesn’t last, and that there’s death,

and more maddening still that existence has conjectured possibilities of an after-death,

but not their certainty, rather more the evidence that any endlessness is mental fiction.

And that there might be a God, a potentially beloved other who
would
know, this, and everything,

who already has sufficient knowledge of our fate to heal us but may well decide not to do so.

How not rage, how, in love, with its promises of permanence, the only answer to these doubts,

not find absurd that this, too, should suffer from foreboding, and one so mechanically averted?

Might jealousy finally suggest that what we’re living isn’t ever what we think we are?

What, though, would more require our love, our being loved, our vow of faithfulness and faith?

And what would more compel that apprehensive affirmation:
I’ll love you forever, will you me?

III

She, Though

Her friend’s lover was dying, or not “friend,” they weren’t that yet, if they ever really were;

it was another girl she’d found to share the studio she’d rented in an old commercial building.

Both of them were painters, the other serious, hardworking, she floundering and unconfident.

She gave you the feeling people fresh from art school often do that the painter’s life

would be just fine except for all those hours you had to put in with the bothersome canvas.

“Lover” isn’t quite the right word, either: the couple were too young, “boyfriend” would be better,

although, given the strenuousness of their trial, the more grown-up term could well apply.

He was twenty-three or -four, a physicist who’d already done his doctorate and published papers;

he had cancer of the brain; it had only recently been diagnosed but the news had all been bad.

I forget exactly how I met them: there weren’t that many writers or artists in our city then,

we mostly knew each other, even if our fellowship seemed more grounded in proximity than sympathy.

She
and I, I suppose I should say, once almost had a thing; she asked me to sit for her,

and when she’d posed me and was fussing with her charcoal, I understood why I was really there.

I was surprised; though we’d known each other for a while we were casual friends at best,

we’d never expressed attraction for each other, and I remember feeling sometimes that she resented me.

I had a reputation as a worker, even if I hadn’t published anything except some book reviews

and a criticism of an art show, but she may have felt I had more prestige than I should have.

I had nothing particularly against her; maybe the tenuousness of her involvement in her work

and what it represented to me of myself made her less attractive than she might have been.

I distrusted her, wasn’t sure why she wanted me, but wasn’t anyway about to get in bed.

Her signaling was pretty raw: she’d take my head in her hands to move me to a new position,

then hold me longer than she had to, and she’d look intently
in
my eyes instead of at them.

Finally she just said, “Let’s do it,” but I turned her down, in a way which at the time

I thought was very bright but which may certainly have had to do with how badly things turned out.

I told her that I liked her but that I could only sleep with girls I loved, really loved.

She accepted my refusal in the spirit I’d hoped she would, as an example of my inner seriousness,

and as also having to do — through I don’t recall what track — with my dedication as an artist.

That dedication, or obsession, or semblance of obsession, counted for much in those days.

For most of us it was all we had, struggling through our perplexed, interminable apprenticeships.

We were trying to create identities as makers and as thinkers, and that entailed so much.

I never realized until lately just how traumatic the project of my own self-remaking was.

I wreaked such violence on myself; the frivolous, not unsuccessful adolescent I had been

had to be remolded from such contradictory clues as I could find into a wholly other person.

I’d been an
athlete,
for heaven’s sake, I’d been a party boy, I hung out, I drank, I danced:

one New Year’s Eve I’d set out to kiss a hundred girls, and nearly had; that kind of thing.

Now who was I? Someone sitting hours on end going crazy looking at an empty piece of paper.

Everything I’d learned in college seemed garbled and absurd: I knew nothing about anything.

All I understood was that I wasn’t ready for this yet, that I’d have to reach some higher stage

before I’d have the right to even think that I was someone who could call himself a poet.

We must have all felt more or less like that, though it seemed important never to admit it.

“Morally perfect yourself, then you’ll write a poem,” I read somewhere not long ago: is it true?

I don’t think I know yet, I surely didn’t then, but that was what we’d somehow come to,

a mix of saint and genius, neither of which we ever in our wildest ravings dreamed we’d be.

Maybe that was why we liked extremities so much, and mental dramas; we spoke forever about
limits,

things like microcosm-macrocosm, or the way the solar system and atomic model seemed to match:

probably we thought that, on that wide a scale, we’d at least be sure of being
somewhere.

We loved it when things went so far they turned into their opposites; the courteous criminal,

the rake who in his single-minded lust achieves a sanctity, the cabalist obscene with bliss.

There were always remnants of religion in our schemes; somehow from the mishmash of our education

we’d decided that you didn’t practice art for its own sake or even to be competent or famous;

it was all supposed to be a part of a something that would lift you to another realm,

another mode of being, where you’d attain the “absolute” — a word we loved — along with “mystic.”

But there was even more than that; art was going to be the final word on all else, too:

morality, philosophy, religion; if there was a God, wasn’t He the God of Dante or Bach,

rather than a theologian’s or a prophet’s, unless they dreamed their visions, too, in poetry?

When we thought of social issues or of politics, it was always with as audacious an immoderation.

“Justice” meant the universe of justice; the ideal, platonic shape, something in your soul

that mirrored an imaginary, perfect state, at which the particulars of real life could only hint.

History for us was the history of arts and letters, anything of moment was attached to that.

So young we were; we had theories about everything, life, the soul: Did art spring from neurosis?

Was its insanity redemptive? Were you damned by art, exalted? It all depended on the day.

But being young wasn’t the whole problem; there was moral character to be considered, too.

That girl, for instance, in that enormous studio: it irritated me the way she’d waste her time,

puttering, reading magazines; she spent more effort sending slides to galleries than painting.

She’d been in some group exhibitions — she wasn’t without talent — now she’d convinced herself