Letter from Brooklyn (2 page)

SINGLE MAN'S SONG

After Al Purdy

After he makes love to himself

the not quite middle-aged single man

listens to his sigh

sail to the end of the room

With pants around his ankles

and wearing a grey wool sweater

she called his rat suit

he peers at his cock's sad pug head

and returns to the Kraft Dinner

he has been eating with a ladle

astonished and a little frightened

by his immense freedom

He does up his buckle

and walks out the door

taking pleasure

in not knowing the precise nature

of his fashion crime

only that he's committed one

if not several

and that he'll get away

with them all

As he clashes down Queen Street

the oak leaves applaud

I am myself again

he sings into the wind

Not that she would have stopped him

from wearing that sweater

only told him the truth —

that he looked bad

Freedom it occurs to him

is no one caring

what you look like

At home he imagines someone watches —

imagining otherwise is unbearable

but he cannot call this witness god

and instead thinks of himself as on a TV show

where he is a lovable sort

for wearing such an ugly sweater

but knows its magic was contained

in her dislike

in the way she gave so much thought

to what he did

and sometimes hated what he did

but never loved him any less

It was just the day before

when he took relief in draping

his sweater over the sofa

and flinging his underwear

to the four corners of the earth

but he now hangs his rat suit carefully

and the scratching of the hanger's wire stem

sliding along the aluminum

is a chime bringing him back to a moist day in April

that felt like November

when despite her protests

he bought the sweater

for the change in his pocket

He only said then he liked it

not that he pictured clear as the day before him

a widow in a time of war

knitting the sweater's basket weave

in a cabin where a doe slows by a window

and stretches her small mouth to a birdfeeder

half full of rain

and her slender legs are momentary sundials

but all of this goes unseen

by the woman

as she draws the needles together

and then pulls them apart

in a time and place

where what mattered most

was staying warm

BIKING DOWN A COUNTRY ROAD
IN SOUTH-WESTERN MANITOBA

The bales are fat as boulders.

At your back, the hill of silos and the feed factory —

red as the sun in
The Grapes of Wrath
, the book

you stayed up half the night reading

that made you understand something

about your father. Life settles like dust

inside some men. And the train tracks you passed,

three and a half miles back, must not depart

much from the ones his brother lay upon

decades before, as though he were

a coin, and the bridge you passed

an hour ago isn't that different from the one

his niece leaped from last week, drifting

like something stirred from a field.

And the sky above the prairie is pink

as the pills your mother popped,

making her belly a salmon-filled river.

Before you the dry land is still as a frozen river.

You hear your father's voice

on the phone, last night, telling you

what happened to your cousin. Hear

his breath push the dust

when he says he wants things to be

different while there is still time,

as though he has found a track

to lay your life upon while you wait

for the train to change its shape.

As he speaks you fear that he might breathe

his dust into you. Or that he already has.

The flies rise from the roadside marshes

in the fading yellow of the day, and pelt

your helmet like sheets of rain.

You are far enough down this road

to no longer see the lights of town.

It is so flat you see the precise point

where you see no further. You stop and stare

into the limits of your sight, glad to be alone.

If someone else were here, they might ask

what you're looking at. And what

could you say? You'd say

“nothing” and look away,

as you look away now

at the nothing all around

and crowding in.

THE OPPOSITE OF CUBISM

You were the sum of the things you once did.

Sentences a series of used tos and stills. Used to:

cocaine, dance for money, thought

about dying a lot. When we met you had begun

to work in an office. Still: wrote poems and songs. Still

dyed your hair from blond to red according to the seasonal shifts

within. Looking back, there was a winter you were

mostly in love with me. It was written in your faded hair,

the colour of blood retreating. You told me with your unstill hands. Come here,

but not for very long, you were saying. I don't know

what you were saying. We fucked nightly

in the glow of a Pentecostal church. Its signboard punch lines

greeting our naked and smoke-drawn bodies. It didn't take long

before we stopped even deserving the love we had

for the person we were betraying.

How hurt she will be when she finds out we told

one another, solemnly, piously.

Then we started writing poems to each other

and they were bad, but worse were the poems

we would write at each other. The last time we made

love, I woke as you were leaving for work. My flickering eyes

making a slide show of you putting on your face,

pulling your suit on. Then gone.

I stared at your minimalist room: a guitar leaning against the wall

and little else.
Girl with a Mandolin
, absent the girl.

If there were truly an opposite of cubism,

not a singular point of view, but none whatsoever,

I was looking at it. I left your house as the morning sun soaked

the brown brick of the church and walked homeward for hours.

I stopped in nearly every personal landmark along the way

and stayed awhile in the lobby of the hospital I had surgery in

where the three of us, I include myself here, fell in love with me

for about two weeks. That was five years ago.

Your hair has remained a single colour in that time,

and I find there is nothing your husband says

that is true. He doesn't lie. Just has nothing true to say.

You know this. It's your final small betrayal.

Even though it has little to do with me. Or rather

that's the precise nature of it. You live in the suburbs. You are

pregnant. Have stock options. Believe in the free market.

Think I need to grow up. Your husband throws his garbage

at the sanitary workers' picket line

and you laugh. You are the opposite

of your list of used tos and stills.
Girl with a Mandolin

absent the girl, absent the mandolin.

THE LIGHTHOUSE

It has something to do with the osprey nest like a black spool of yarn

sitting empty atop a telephone pole, and the beached, rusted rib bones

of the oil tanker and the seaweed snaked

through sockets of a car engine. Something

about how little this place resembles the postcards.

I'm not leaving this province until I see a fucking lighthouse

I tell you and begin to turn.
I'm going to sit on the beach and meditate

you say, reminding me the boatman will be back

in two hours, and offer me the map, which I refuse.

It has something to do with the moment the ideal drifts

and seeing up ahead that everything that seems to matter

so much, won't very soon.

The rocks along the shore are dull punches

under my feet, and I let the salt-stung air envelope me

and feel what a flimsy partition my senses are —

how it might be possible to let everything in

and listen to the ocean, what it has to say

on the limits of limits.

I am sprinting, tripping with nearly every step,

desperate to reach the lighthouse, miles away. But I stop.

I know to go further will mean a kind of chaos,

the boatman and you, waiting and wondering.

I imagine search parties and you trying, and I can only hope failing,

to believe this too is happening for a reason. Because, yes,

everything does; it's just the reasons are poor. I turn around,

head back to wherever there is for us to go to from here.

I take one last look behind. The lighthouse is white as a cloud

with a halo of dull fire just below its peak, with waves splashed

in still frames against the small distant boulders.

I know it is beautiful but, at this moment, cannot feel its beauty.

Something in me is ruined, which is refreshing: I had thought

everything that could break in me had done so some time ago.

I try a shortcut through an abandoned barrack and find myself

walking past several empty forts; broken windows

reveal bottle-strewn floors and concrete benches arranged
like pews,

reminding me of the wooded seats on the boat here,

where I looked up at you once, and you appeared

not so much like a stranger, but an acquaintance

I had once wanted to know intimately.

I walk through these thoughts till there's only bramble

and the ocean, heard but unseen, at my back. l call

to tell you
I'm lost
.
You ask me
How lost?
And I say

Only a little
. I ask you to tell the boatman to wait.

But he can't. He'll be back for me in four hours.

You say
I'm going back with him
. Since, as you will state later

It doesn't make sense for us both to suffer
.

Later, I will yell. I will rip the blankets off and say

You have no feelings
.
But I have done nothing
, you will respond.

And I will say
Yes
,
that's it exactly
, and yell louder.

I will call you a robot and imitate you speaking in a robot voice.

It will almost be funny. It will never be funny,

but we will laugh about it, years from now, alone.

And it will sound strange even to our own ears

as though it came from somewhere else.

When suffering finally pushes to the surface of your face,

I am both smug and ashamed, and something else.

A feeling that comes with realizing the worst thing about shame

is that it never stings quite as much

as it should. And yet this is the best thing I can say

for life right now, and possibly the worst —

that we get away with it. And it's probably true,

without god everything is permitted,

but I never thought before how this meant

we are also capable of doing so little.

OCCUPY

“We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don't be afraid to really want what you desire.”

—
Slavoj Žižek
at Occupy Wall Street

You look thin again, in that way . . . Bubble. Burst.

More things haven't changed. You still

carry a Diet Coke bottle, half full of rum

in your purse. My first time here since I said

goodbye to all that — those days we traded Taibbi

articles, went to free lectures at the Brecht,

and believed the whole thing was about

to collapse in an instant, like a feeling

between two people that can't be sustained

once the moment passes. “We were blindsided . . .

We didn't see it coming.” You swig

what's left as we watch Seeger's procession

on the bar TV, arrive at Zuccotti. “I'm not

going down there,” you say, “I'm sick of activists.”

ELEGY FOR TEENAGE LOVE

How did we not know it would be so quick

and irrevocable. Our love

of broken snow globes. Of spilled

water and plastic flakes. Of curved glass

jagged in your hands. Of light

held to your wrist like you were

holding your breath. Our breath. We held

the certainty that is the provenance of the young

who know grief a little earlier than they should.

We were hardened alchemists, transformed wise

from hurt. We knew our love was

everything. We hid inside its immense pocket

and it was hard to tell if it might be larger

than our lives or if we just grew very small

inside it. We could not have stayed together like that

and lived. But we compromised, being together

till we ruined ourselves, just a little,

just enough, to extinguish what permitted us

to love that way. We didn't know

we were kind. We knew

we weren't beautiful but we were young

and beautiful for that.

THE BROKEN HEART IS A CLICHÉ

I tell my students.

When you write that,

we hear an echo

of the first heart to break.

And the few after that.

But not your own.

I tell them there may have been a time

when those words would cause us

to hear something

like frozen puddles cracking

under the rubber boot

of a small child.

But these days we no longer hear

a boy stomping just to see how easily

surfaces can splinter.

I just don't hear your hearts break,

I tell them. Inevitably,

there are objections,

for they know very little about most things,

except heartbreak. Perhaps,

not more quantitatively,

but the sound of it is closer

or louder to them

as though another child

knelt beside her friend's falling boot

to be as close

to the precise moment of the break

as possible. I am becoming

too old to kneel

beside thinly frozen streams,

and so I only hear them break

from the distance

of one who passes by hurriedly

on his way somewhere important

like to teach a poetry class.

But my heart does break,

one of the very young will protest.

There just are no better words for it.

It's hard, because

I know what he means,

but I must play numb

for their sake.

Soon they replace their broken hearts

with a simile they believe

will please me. And I know

it does not sound like that

to them. You need to invent

more earnestly, I tell them,

and I begin to sense some tension,

a question about whether that bioethics course

might have been a more enjoyable elective.

Things get worse when I ask

if the very subject of love

is stale. Some agree, because

they think it's what I want

to hear. Not knowing I want

maybe need

them with their freshly broken hearts

to remind me

no heart has

unfolded before like an origami swan

or locked itself like a parent's liquor cabinet

or opened up too much like light collapsing

or just broke

in quite the same way

as mine.