Collected Poems (54 page)

Frog

Naturally Annie Dillard

knew when she inserts at the outset

of a book a water beetle’s

devouring a frog

that the description would shock —

the bug injects enzymes

that dissolve the frog’s “organs

and bones … all but the skin…”

and sucks the poor

liquefied creature out of itself —

but I doubt if she’d have guessed

how often her awful anecdote

could come back, at least

to someone like me, always

with revulsion and terror.

Last night I woke in the dark

with “It burns!” in my mind:

the voice was mine, the tone

a child’s anguished cry

to a parent, the image the frog,

and the thought — is that the word?

I hardly knew where I was —

was that this was worse

than nightmare, to regress

awake from the realm of reason.

Dillard is erudite, tender

and wise, and she can be funny —

remember her imagining

literally replicating a tree? —

and she understands always

where our animal nature

ends and our human begins,

but this, slayer and slain,

cruelty and, she says it herself,

“the waste of pain…”

When I look down in

the murk of the brook

here, I see only chains

of bubbles rising

sporadically from the slime.

Are there beings there, too,

living their own fear-driven

dream? Is the mud itself

trying to breathe?

If so, must it hurt?

Prisoners

In the preface to a translation of a German writer,

a poet I’d never heard of, I fall on the phrase

“He was a prisoner of war in a camp in the U.S.”

and a memory comes to me of a morning

during the second war when my parents,

on a visit to the city they’d grown up in,

took me to what had been their favorite park

and was now a barbed-wire encircled compound,

with unpainted clapboard barracks,

where men, in sandals and shorts,

all light-haired, as I recall, and sunburned,

idled alone or in small groups.

I’m told they’re German prisoners, though I know

nothing of the war, or Hitler, or the Jews —

why should I? — I only remember them

gazing back at us with a disconcerting

incuriousness, a lack of evident emotion

I’d associate now with primates in zoos,

and that my mother and father seemed unnerved,

at a loss for what to say, which I found

more disturbing than the prisoners, or the camp,

a reaction my mother must have sensed

because she took my hand and led me away —

the park had a carousel, she took me there.

Are there still merry-go-rounds,

with their unforgettable oom-pah

calliope music, and the brass rings?

If you caught one, you rode again free.

I never did, I was afraid to fall;

I’m not anymore, but it wouldn’t matter.

I go back instead to those prisoners,

to the one especially not looking at us,

because he was shaving. Crouched on a step,

face lathered, a galvanized pail at his feet,

he held — I see it, can it be there? —

a long straight-razor, glinting, slicing down.

Wood

That girl I didn’t love, then because she was going to leave me, loved,

that girl, that Sunday when I stopped by and she was in bed in her nightgown,

(it only came to me later that somebody else had just then been with her),

that girl, when my hand touched her stomach under her nightgown,

began turning her stomach to wood — I hadn’t known this could be done,

that girls, that humans, could do this — then, when her stomach was wood,

she began turning the rest of herself to perhaps something harder, steel,

or harder; perhaps she was turning herself, her entire, once so soft self,

to some unknown mineral substance found only on other very far planets,

planets with chemical storms and vast, cold ammonia oceans of ice,

and I just had to pretend — I wasn’t taking this lightly, I wasn’t a kid —

that I wasn’t one of those pitted, potato-shaped moons with precarious orbits,

and then I was out, in the street — it was still Sunday, though I don’t recall bells —

and where is she now, dear figment, dear fragment, where are you now,

in your nightgown, in your bed, steel and wood? Dear steel, dear wood.

Fire

An ax-shattered

bedroom window

the wall above

still smutted with

soot the wall

beneath still

soiled with

soak and down

on the black

of the pavement

a mattress its ticking

half eaten away

the end where

the head would

have been with

a nauseous bite

burnt away

and beside it

an all at once

meaningless heap

of soiled sodden

clothing one

shoe a jacket

once white

the vain matters

a life gathers

about it symbols

of having once

cried out to itself

who art thou?

then again who

wouldst thou be?

We

A basset hound with balls

so heavy they hang

a harrowing half

inch from the pavement,

ears cocked, accusingly

watches as his beautiful

mistress croons

to her silver cell phone.

She does, yes, go on,

but my, so slim-

waistedly

does she sway there,

so engrossedly does her dark

gaze drift

towards even

for a moment mine …

Though Mister Dog of course

sits down right

then to lick

himself, his groin of course,

till she cuts off, and he,

gathering his folds

and flab, heaves

erect to leave with her …

But wait, she’s turning to

a great Ducati

cycle gleaming

black and chromy at the curb,

she’s mounting it (that long

strong lift of flank!),

snorting it to life,

coaxing it in gear …

Why, she’s not his at all!

No more than mine!

What was he thinking?

What was I? Like a wing,

a wave, she banks away

now, downshifts,

pops and crackles

round the curve, is gone.

How sleek she was, though,

how scrufty, how

anciently scabby

we, he and I;

how worn, how

self-devoured,

balls and all,

balls, balls and all.

Saddening

Saddening, worse, to read in “Frost at Midnight”

Coleridge’s ecstatic hymn to his newborn son, Hartley,

for whom he imagines “all seasons shall be sweet,”

and to find in the biographies how depressingly

their relationship deteriorated when the boy was grown:

the father struggling between his dependence on opiates

and the exertions of his recalcitrant genius, the son trying

to separate from the mostly absent but still intimidating father.

Their final contact has Hartley, a neophyte poet himself —

he’ll never attain stature — abandoning his father in the street,

Coleridge in tears, not knowing, as though he were a character

in one of the more than minor tragedies he might have written

if his life had evolved more fortuitously, how to begin

to reconcile his unspoken suffering with his son’s,

how to conceive of healing the hurt both had to have felt

before each reeled back to his respective isolation.

The myth was already in effect then — Wordsworth’s doing? —

that creativity like Coleridge’s thrives best in seclusion.

Even Coleridge, though his poem takes place with his son

beside him and friends sleeping yards away, speaks of

“… that solitude which suits abstruser musings…”

So generations of writers go off to the woods, to find …

alcohol — Schwartz, Lowry, too many others to mention —

depression, or even — Lowell, one hates to say it — wife abuse.

Coleridge in fact was rarely out of some intimate situation

for five minutes in his life, sharing his friends’ houses

and tables, and there’s the scene, saddening, too, worse,

of the poet imploring the captain of the ship ferrying him

home from Malta to administer an enema to unclog

the impacted feces of his laudanum-induced constipation.

Daily stuff for Coleridge — he hardly remarks it, poor man, poor giant —

excruciating for us, spoiled as we are, sanitized, tamed …

But what does the life — dope, shit, neurosis, fathers or sons —

have to do with anything anyway? Think of innocent Clare,

twenty-seven years in the madhouse, and isn’t there some
fairness,

you might think, some
justice,
but letting yourself think that,

there’s nowhere to go but bitterness, and how regret

that deluge of masterpieces to rejoice in? Coleridge, anyway,

at the end found fulfillment, and Clare, too, if not fulfillment,

then something, perhaps acceptance; even Hartley, too, something.

I was there once, in that cottage, a packet of ill-lit rooms,

at the very spot, beside the hearth, where the poem was made —

(“… the thin blue flame … that film which fluttered on the grate…”).

You could still sense something in that comfortless cell

resonating with youth and hope, which, almost on his deathbed,

Coleridge wrote,
“… embracing, seen as one, were love.”

Outside, the luminous sea, the hills: easy to understand hoping

to stay in such a world forever, and the qualm to tear yourself away.

Shrapnel

1.

Seven hundred tons per inch, I read, is the force in a bomb or shell in the microsecond after its detonation,

and two thousand feet per second is the speed at which the shrapnel, the materials with which the ordnance

is packed, plus its burst steel casing, “stretched, thinned, and sharpened” by the tremendous heat and energy,

are propelled outwards in an arc until they strike an object and either ricochet or become embedded in it.

In the case of insufficiently resistant materials, the shards of shrapnel can cause “significant damage”;

in human tissue, for instance, rupturing flesh and blood vessels and shattering and splintering bone.

Should no essential organs be involved, the trauma may be termed “superficial,” as by the chief nurse,

a nun, in Ian McEwan’s
Atonement,
part of which takes place in a hospital receiving wounded from Dunkirk.

It’s what she says when a soldier cries,
“Fuck!”
as her apprentice, the heroine, a young writer-to-be,

probes a wound with her forceps to extract one of many jagged fragments of metal from a soldier’s legs.

“Fuck!” was not to be countenanced back then. “How dare you speak that way?” scolds the imperious sister.

“Your injuries are superficial, so consider yourself lucky and show some courage worthy of your uniform.”

The man stays still after that, though “he sweated and … his knuckles turned white round the iron bedhead.”

“Only seven to go,” the inexperienced nurse chirps, but the largest chunk, which she’s saved for last, resists;

at one point it catches, protruding from the flesh — (“He bucked on the bed and hissed through his teeth”) —

and not until her third resolute tug does the whole “gory, four-inch stiletto of irregular steel” come clear.

2.

“Shrapnel throughout the body” is how a ten-year-old killed in a recent artillery offensive is described.

“Shrapnel throughout the body”: the phrase is repeated along with the name of each deceased child

in the bulletin released as propaganda by our adversaries, at whose operatives the barrage was directed.

There are photos as well — one shows a father rushing through the street, his face torn with a last frantic hope,

his son in his arms, rag-limp, chest and abdomen speckled with deep, dark gashes and smears of blood.

Propaganda’s function, of course, is exaggeration: the facts are there, though, the child is there … or not there.

… As the shrapnel is no longer there in the leg of the soldier: the girl holds it up for him to see, the man quips,

“Run him under the tap, Nurse, I’ll take him home,” then, “… he turned to the pillow and began to sob.”

Technically, I read, what’s been called “shrapnel” here would have once been defined as “splinters” or “fragments.”

“Shrapnel” referred then only to a spherical shell, named after its inventor, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel.

First used in 1804, it was “… guaranteed to cause heavy casualties … the best mankiller the army possessed.”

Shrapnel was later awarded a generous stipend in recognition of his contribution “to the state of the art.”

Where was I? The nun, the nurse; the nurse leaves the room, throws up; the fictional soldier, the real child …

The father … What becomes of the father? He skids from the screen, from the page, from the mind …

Shrapnel’s device was superseded by higher-powered, more efficient projectiles, obsolete now in their turn.

One war passes into the next. One wound is the next and the next. Something howls. Something cries.

Cassandra, Iraq

1.

She’s magnificent, as we imagine women must be

who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained.

This is the difference between us who are like her

in having been right and disdained, and us as we are.