Collected Poems (38 page)

Surely as symbol, a petal of sympathy caught in the perilous rift between culture and chaos,

not as the nightmare she’d be, a corpse with a slash of tardy self-knowledge deep in its side.

What Hercules sees as he pounds up the bank isn’t himself cremated alive on his pyre,

shrieking as Jove his Olympian father extracts his immortal essence from its agonized sheathing —

he sees what’s before him: the woman, his bride, kneeling to the dark, rushing river,

obsessively scrubbing away, he must think, the nocuous, mingled reek of horse, hydra, human.

Instinct

Although he’s apparently the youngest (his little Rasta-beard is barely down and feathers),

most casually connected (he hardly glances at the girl he’s with, though she might be his wife),

half-sloshed (or more than half) on picnic-whiskey teenaged father, when his little son,

two or so, tumbles from the slide, hard enough to scare himself, hard enough to make him cry,

really cry, not partly cry, not pretend the fright for what must be some scarce attention,

but really let it out, let loudly be revealed the fear of having been so close to real fear,

he, the father, knows just how quickly he should pick the child up, then how firmly hold it,

fit its head into the muscled socket of his shoulder, rub its back, croon and whisper to it,

and finally pull away a little, about a head’s length, looking, still concerned, into its eyes,

then smiling, broadly, brightly, as though something had been shared, something of importance,

not dreadful, or not very, not at least now that it’s past, but rather something … funny,

funny, yes, it was funny, wasn’t it, to fall and cry like that, though one certainly can understand,

we’ve all had glimpses of a premonition of the anguish out there, you’re better now, though,

aren’t you, why don’t you go back and try again, I’ll watch you, maybe have another drink,

yes, my son, my love, I’ll go back and be myself now: you go be the person you are, too.

Time: 1976

1.

Time for my break; I’m walking from my study down the long hallway towards the living room.

Catherine is there, on the couch, reading to Jed, the phonograph is playing Bach’s
Offering.

I can just hear Catherine’s voice as she shows Jed the pictures:
Voilà le château, voilà Babar,

and with no warning I’m taken with a feeling that against all logic I recognize to be regret,

as violent and rending a regret as anything I’ve ever felt, and I understand immediately

that all of this familiar beating and blurring, the quickening breath, the gathering despair,

almost painful all, has to do with the moment I’m in, and my mind, racing to keep order,

thrusts this way and that and finally casts itself, my breath along with it, into the future.

2.

Ten years from now, or twenty; I’m walking down the same hallway, I hear the same music,

the same sounds — Catherine’s story, Jed’s chirps of response — but I know with anxiety

that most of this is only in my mind: the reality is that Catherine and Jed are no longer there,

that I’m merely constructing this — what actually accompanies me down that corridor is memory:

here, in this tentative but terribly convincing future I think to myself that it must be the music —

the Bach surely is real, I can
hear
it — that drives me so poignantly, expectantly back

to remember again that morning of innocent peace a lifetime ago when I came towards them;

the sunny room, the music, the voices, each more distinct now:
Voilà le château, voilà Babar
 …

3.

But if I’m torn so with remembrance in
this
present, then something here must be lost.

Has Jed grown, already left home? Has Catherine gone on somewhere, too, to some other life?

But no, who’d have played the record: perhaps they, or one of them, either one would be enough,

will still be out there before me, not speaking, perhaps reading, looking out the window, waiting.

Maybe all this grief, then, was illusion; a sadness, not for loss, but for the nature of time:

in my already fading future, I try to find a reconciliation for one more imaginary absence …

All this, sensation, anxiety, and speculation, goes through me in an instant, then in another,

a helplessness at what mind will do, then back into the world:
Voilà Babar, voilà la vieille dame
 …

The Coma

for the memory of S. J. Marks

“My character wound,” he’d written so shortly before, “my flaw,” and now he was dying,

his heart, his anguished heart stopping, maiming his brain, then being started again;

“my loneliness,” in his childish square cursive, “I’ve been discarded but I’ve earned it,

I’d like to grow fainter and fainter then disappear; my arrogant, inauthentic false self.”

“My weak, hopeless, incompetent reparations,” he’d written in his loneliness and despair,

“there’s so much I’m afraid of facing, my jealousy, my inertia; roots are tearing from my brain.”

And now, as he lay in his coma, I thought I could hear him again, “I’m insensitive, ineffectual,

I seethe with impatience,” hear him driving himself with the shattered bolt of his mind deeper,

“It’s my fault, my arrogant doubt, my rage,” but I hoped, imagining him now waking downwards,

hoped he’d believe for once in the virtues his ruined past had never let him believe in,

his gifts for sympathy, kindness, compassion; in the ever-ascending downwards of dying,

I hoped he’d know that his passion to be goodness had made him goodness, like a child;

not “my malaise, my destructive neurosis”: let him have known for himself his purity and his warmth;

not “my crippled, hateful disdain”: let have come to him, in his last lift away from himself,

his having wanted to heal the world he’d found so wounded in himself; let him have known,

though his crushed heart wouldn’t have wanted him to, that, in his love and affliction, he had.

Proof

Not to show off, but elaborating some philosophical assertion, “Watch her open her mouth,”

says the guardian of an elderly, well-dressed retarded woman to the little circle of ladies

companionably gathered under a just-flowering chestnut this lusciously balmy Sunday.

She moves her hand in to everyone else an imperceptible gesture, her charge opens wide,

a peanut, to murmurs of approbation, is inserted, though all absorbed again as they are,

nobody sees when a moment later it slips from the still-visible tongue to the lip, then falls,

the mouth staying tensely agape, as though news of a great calamity had just reached it,

as though in eternity’s intricate silent music someone had frighteningly mis-struck a chord,

so everything else has to hold, too, lovers strolling, children setting boats out on the pond,

until the guardian takes notice and says not unkindly, “Close, dear,” which is dutifully done,

and it all can start over: voices, leaves, water, air; always the yearning, sensitive air,

urging against us, aspiring to be us, the light striking across us: signs, covenants, codes.

Secrets

I didn’t know that the burly old man who lived in a small house like ours down the block in Newark

was a high-up in the mob on the docks until I was grown and my father finally told me.

Neither did it enter my mind until much too much later that my superior that year at Nisner’s,

a dazzlingly bright black man, would never in those days climb out of his mindless stockroom.

The councilman on the take, the girl upstairs giving free oral sex, the loansharks and addicts —

it was all news to me: do people hide things from me to protect me? Do they mistrust me?

Even when Sid Mizraki was found beaten to death in an alley, I didn’t hear until years later.

Sid murdered! God, my God, was all I could say. Poor, sad Sidney; poor hard-luck Sid!

I hadn’t known Sidney that long, but I liked him: plump, awkward, he was gentle, eager to please,

the way unprepossessing people will be; we played ball, went to Chinatown with the guys.

He’d had a bleak life: childhood in the streets, bad education, no women, irrelevant jobs;

in those days he worked for the city, then stopped; I had no idea of his true tribulations.

As the tale finally found me, Sid had a boss who hated him, rode him, drove him insane,

and Sid one drunk night in a bar bribed some burglars he knew to kill the creep for him.

I can’t conceive how you’d dream up something like that, or how you’d know people like that,

but apparently Sid had access to tax rolls, and rich people’s addresses he was willing to trade.

Then suddenly he was transferred, got a friendlier boss, forgot the whole witless affair,

but a year or so later the thieves were caught and as part of their plea bargain sold Sid.

He got off with probation, but was fired, of course, and who’d hire him with that record?

He worked as a bartender, went on relief, drifted, got into drugs, some small-time dealing.

Then he married — “the plainest woman on earth,” someone told me — but soon was divorced:

more drugs, more dealing, run-ins with cops, then his unthinkable calvary in that alley.

It was never established who did it, or why; no one but me was surprised it had happened.

A bum found him, bleeding, broken, inert; a friend from before said, “His torments are over.”

Well, Sid, what now? Shall I sing for you, celebrate you with some truth? Here’s truth:

add up what you didn’t know, friend, and I don’t, and you might have one conscious person.

No, this has nothing to do with your omissions or sins or failed rectifications, but mine:

to come so close to a life and not comprehend it, acknowledge it, truly know it is life.

How can I feel so clearly the shudder of blows, even the blessèd oblivion breaking on you,

and not really grasp what you were in yourself to yourself, what secrets sustained you?

So, for once I know something, that if anyone’s soul should be singing, Sidney, it’s yours.

Poor poet,
you’d tell me,
poor sheltered creature: if you can’t open your eyes, at least stay still.

The Widower

He’d tried for years to leave her, then only months ago he finally had; now she’s dead,

and though he claims he hates her still, I can tell he really loves and is obsessed by her.

I commiserate with him about her faults, her anarchic temperament, her depressing indolence,

the way she’d carried on when he’d moved out, spying on him, telephoning at all hours,

until his anger moves towards malice, bitterness, and he attacks her even for her virtues,

her mildness, her impulsive generosity, then I don’t quite disagree, it’s too soon for that,

but I at least demur, firmly enough to alleviate my already overcompromised conscience

but discreetly enough to allow him to reexpound his thesis that her frenzied desperation

at their parting was one more proof of her neurosis, and had nothing to do with her dying,

which was just a cardiac, a circulation thing — how primitively Freudian to think otherwise —

though he and I both know, as surely as we’re going on with this, on and on with this,

she brought about her death herself, as much as if she’d shot herself, and he,

because he still loved her so but found her still so impossible to love, as much as let her.

Money

How did money get into the soul; how did base dollars and cents ascend from the slime

to burrow their way into the crannies of consciousness, even it feels like into the flesh?

Wants with no object, needs with no end, like bacteria bringing their fever and freezing,

viruses gnawing at neurons, infecting even the sanctuaries of altruism and self-worth.

We asked soul to be huge, encompassing, sensitive, knowing, all-knowing, but not this,

not money roaring in with battalions of pluses and minus, setting up camps of profit and loss,

not joy become calculation, life counting itself, compounding itself like a pocket of pebbles:

fester, it feels like; a weeping, unhealable wound, an affront at all costs to be avenged.

Greed, taint and corruption, this sickness, this buy and this miserable sell;

soul against soul, talons of caustic tungsten:
what has been done to us, what have we done?

My Book, My Book

The book goes fluttering crazily through the space of my room towards the wall like a bird

stunned in mid-flight and impacts and falls not like a bird but more brutally, like a man,

mortally sprawling, spine torn from its sutures, skeletal glue fragmented to crystal and dust.

Submissive, inert, it doesn’t as would any other thing wounded shudder, quake, shiver,

act out at least desperate, reflexive attempts towards persistence, endurance, but how could it,

wasn’t it shriven already of all but ambition and greed; rote, lame emulations of conviction?

… Arrives now to my mind the creature who’ll sniff out someday what in this block of pretension,

what protein, what atom, might still remain to digest and abstract, transfigure to gist,

what trace of life substance wasn’t burned away by the weight of its lovelessness and its sham.

Come, little borer, sting your way in, tunnel more deeply, blast, mine, excavate, drill:

take my book to you, etherealize me in the crunch of your gut; refine me, release me:

let me cling to your brainstem, dissolve in your dreaming: verse, page, quire; devour me, devourer.

Time: 1975

My father-in-law is away, Catherine and I and Renée, her mother, are eating in the kitchen;