Plundered Hearts (11 page)

Angles are calculated. The computer beeps.

Saucers close on a flatness further compressed.

There’s an ache near the heart neither dull nor sharp.

The room gets lethal. Casually the nurse retreats

Behind her shield. Anxiety as blithely suggests

I joke about a snapshot for my Christmas card.

“No sign of cancer,” the radiologist swans

In to say—with just a hint in his tone

That he’s done me a personal favor—whereupon

His look darkens. “But what these pictures show …

Here, look, you’ll notice the gland on the left’s

Enlarged. See?” I see an aerial shot

Of Iraq, and nod. “We’ll need further tests,

Of course, but I’d bet that what
you’ve
got

Is a liver problem. Trouble with your estrogen

Levels. It’s time, my friend, to take stock.

It happens more often than you’d think to men.”

Reeling from its millionth scotch on the rocks,

In other words, my liver’s sensed the end.

Why does it come as something less than a shock?

The end of life as I’ve known it, that is to say—

Testosterone sported like a power tie,

The matching set of drives and dreads that may

Now soon be plumped to whatever new designs

My apparently resentful, androgynous

Inner life has on me. Blind seer?

The Bearded Lady in some provincial circus?

Something that others both desire and fear.

Still, doesn’t everyone
long
to be changed,

Transformed to, no matter, a higher or lower state,

To know the leathery D-Day hero’s strange

Detachment, the queen bee’s dreamy loll?

Yes, but the future each of us blankly awaits

Was long ago written on the genetic wall.

So suppose the breasts fill out until I look

Like my own mother … ready to nurse a son,

A version of myself, the infant understood

In the end as the way my own death had come.

Or will I in a decade be back here again,

The diagnosis this time not freakish but fatal?

The changes in one’s later years all tend,

Until the last one, toward the farcical,

Each of us slowly turned into something that hurts,

Someone we no longer recognize.

If soul is the final shape I shall assume,

The shadow brightening against the fluorescent gloom,

An absence as clumsily slipped into as this shirt,

Then which of my bodies will have been the best disguise?

In the men’s room at the office today

some wag has labelled the two stalls

    the
Erotic
and the
Political
.

The second seems suitable for the results

of my business, not for what thinking

    ordinarily accompanies it.

So I’ve locked myself into the first because,

though farther from the lightbulb overhead,

    it remains the more conventional

and thereby illuminating choice.

The wit on its walls is more desperate.

    As if I had written them

there myself, but only because by now

I have seen them day after day,

    I know each boast, each plea,

the runty widower’s resentments,

the phone number for good head.

    Today’s fresh drawing:

a woman’s torso, neck to outflung knees,

with breasts like targets and at her crotch

    red felt-tip “hair” to guard

a treasure half wound, half wisecrack.

The first critic of the flesh is always

    the self-possessed sensualist.

With all that wall as his margin,

he had sniffed in smug ballpoint

    
OBVIOUSLY DONE BY SOMEONE

WHO HAS NEVER SEEN THE REAL THING.

Under that, in a later hand,

    the local pinstripe aesthete

had dismissed the daydreamer’s crudity

and its critic’s edgy literalism.

    His block letters had squared,

not sloping shoulders:
NO,

BY SOMEONE WHO JUST CAN
’
T DRAW.

    Were the two opinions

converging on the same moral point?

That a good drawing
is
the real thing?

    Or that the real thing

can be truly seen only through another’s

eyes? But now that I trace it through

    other jokes and members,

the bottom line leads to a higher inch

of free space on the partition—

    a perch above the loose

remarks, like the pimp’s doorway

or the Zen master’s cliff-face ledge.

    
THERE ARE NO REAL THINGS

writes the philosopher. But he too

has been misled by everything

    the mind makes of a body.

When the torso is fleshed out

and turns over in the artist’s bed,

    when the sensualist sobs over her,

when the critic buttons his pants,

when the philosopher’s scorn sinks back

    from a gratified ecstasy,

then it will be clear to each

in his own way. There is nothing

    we cannot possibly not know.

I’d bought a cone of solid sugar and a box

Of tea for the saint himself, a flashlight

For his son, the saint-elect, and bubblegum

For a confusion of small fry—the five-year-old

Aunt, say, and her seven-year-old nephew.

Nothing for the women, of course, the tattooed,

One-eyed, moon-faced matron, or her daughter

Whose husband had long ago run away

After killing their newborn by pouring

A bottle of cheap cologne down its throat.

This was, after all, our first meeting.

I was to be introduced by a Peace Corps pal

Whose easy, open California ways

Had brought a water system to the village

And an up-to-date word to its vocabulary.

Every other guttural spillway of Arabic

Included a carefully enunciated “awesome,”

The speaker bright-eyed with his own banter.

We sat on a pair of Kurt Cobain beach towels

And under a High-Quality Quartz Clock,

The plastic butterflies attached to whose hands

Seemed to keep time with those in my stomach.

At last, he entered the room, the saint himself,

Moulay Madani, in a white head scarf and caftan

The fading blue of a map’s Moroccan coastline,

Its hem embroidered with geometric ports of call.

A rugged sixty, with a longshoreman’s jaw,

A courtier’s guile, and a statesman’s earnest pauses,

He first explained the crescent dagger he fingered

Had been made two centuries ago by a clever Jew.

Then he squinted for my reaction. I’ve no taste

For bad blood, and gingerly cleared my throat to say

I was inclined to trust any saint who carried a knife.

From a copper urn, glasses of mint tea were poured,

Of a tongue-stiffening sweetness. I was allowed to wave

Away the tray of nougat—or rather, the flies on it.

Sipping, I waited for a word, a sign from the saint.

I’d wanted to lie, as if underground, and watch

Him dig up the sky, or stand at a riverbank

And have the water sweep off my presumptions,

Have him blow light into my changeling bones.

I wanted to feel the stalk rise and the blade fall.

I wanted my life’s arithmetic glazed and fired.

I wanted the hush, the wingstroke, the shudder.

But sainthood, I learned soon enough, is a fate

Worse than life, nights on call for the demons

In a vomiting lamb, a dry breast, a broken radio,

And days spent parroting the timeless adages,

Spent arbitrating water rights, property lines,

Or feuds between rival herdsmen over scrub brush,

Spent blessing every bride and anyone’s big-bellied

Fourth or fifth wife, praying that they deliver sons.

I thought back to the time, not ten feet from him,

I heard a homily delivered by old John XXIII,

Sounding wholly seraphic in his murmured Italian.

Ten interpreters stepped from behind the throne.

The English one at last explained the Holy Father

Had urged us all to wear seatbelts while driving.

My heart sank at its plain good sense, as hymns

Echoed and golden canopies enfolded the pope.

How like home it seemed, with my own father

A preoccupied patriarch of practicality

When what was wanted veered wildly between

The gruff headmaster and the drunken playwright.

Instead, I got the distant advertising salesman,

The suburban dad of what turned out to be my dreams.…

Dreams that, decades later, back at my hotel in Fez,

A bucket of cold water was suddenly poured on.

I’d gone to the hamam, stripped, and lay on a pattern

Of sopping tiles that might have spelled God’s will.

Steam shrouded the attendant methodically soaping

The knots of disappointment he’d knuckled in my back.

He paused. I drifted. [
Yowza
!] I looked up

At a bald, toothless gnome in swaddling clothes

On his way back to the fountain for more bad news.

Something in his bowlegged walk—perhaps the weary

Routine of it—made me think of the saint again,

Of how, when tea was done, and everyone had stood,

He reached for my head, put his hands over it,

And gently pulled me to his chest, which smelled

Of dung-smoke and cinnamon and mutton grease.

I could hear his wheezy breathing now, like the prophet’s

Last whispered word repeated by the faithful.

Then he prayed for what no one had time to translate—

His son interrupted the old man to tell him a group

Of snake charmers sought his blessing, and a blind thief.

The saint pushed me away, took one long look,

Then straightened my collar and nodded me toward the door.

for Jane Garmey

To disbelieve in God—or worse, in His servants—

               Of old incited mobs

    With stones or stakes grimly to atone for what,

               Like a bomb not lobbed

But planted in the garage of a mirror-skin

               High-rise, has from deep within

               Too suddenly exposed

    The common desire to learn

               Less than had been supposed.

Bedsores, point shaving, a taste for sarongs. There are signs

               Everywhere—like the thumbprints,

    Say, of thin-lipped men or sluggish women

               On an heirloom violin.

So mine is the culture of laugh track and chat room.

               Authority’s foredoomed.

               Where is distance, and what

    Can frighten or inspire, condemn or redeem?

               All transcendence is cut

With a canned, buttoned-down, fork-tongued coziness.

               The stars are hooded now.

    The heart’s cloud chamber weeps its nuclear tears.

               My nails are bitten, and how

All-consuming my vanities, the fancied slights

               To my air-kissing appetites.

               Millennial echoes

    Fill the abandoned stadium. Homeless

               Frauds crowd the two back rows.

Compel them to come in, the evangelist

               Insists. There are empty

    Seats at the table for minims and ranters.

               Join the ancient family

Squabbles—whose is bigger? who deserves more?

               Prophecy’s the trapdoor

               Whose fatal saving grace

    Leads to listening for a voice within

               That doubles as self-praise.

His lips cut off, and flames at work on his bubbling guts,

               The wandering monk is tied

    To his own refusal—a book or belief.

               The scholar, for his pride,

Is whipped, branded, and in midwinter sent out

               On the road of his doubt

               To perish of the cold.

    Judge and martyr each invokes God’s mercy

               On his innocent soul.

There goes the pitiful procession of mumblers,

               Slave masters and skinheads,

    Witches, dealers, backwoods ayatollahs.

               And here am I, tucked in bed,

Wondering if I believe in anything more

               Than my devotions and four

               Squares. And if forced to say,

    Wouldn’t I deny even you, love, for a future?

               Who spoke the truth today?

in the old oxblood edition, the color

    of the mother tongue, all foxed and forked,

its threadbare edges dented, once a fixture

    in the second-storey Kirchstetten

room where day by day he fashioned the silence

    into objects, often sitting on

Poy–Ry,
say, or
Sole–Sz,
and after his death

    sent packing from cozy Austria

to Athens, where fortune dropped it from Chester’s

    trembling hands into a legacy

that exiled it next to page-curling Key West

    and finally to Connecticut,

is shelved here now, a long arm’s-length from my desk.

    What he made of himself he had found

in this book, the exact weight of each soft spot

    and sore point, how each casts a shadow

understudying our hungers and our whims.

    If history is just plain dull facts,

the facts are these, these ruling nouns and upstart

    verbs, these slick adjectival toadies

and adverbial agents with their collars

    pulled up, privileged phrasal moments,

and full-scale clausal changes that qualify

    or contradict the course of a life.

This book is all we can remember and dream.

    It’s how spur gears mesh and rocks are parsed

into geodes, how the blood engorges

    a glance, how the fig ripens to fall,

or what quarter-tones and quarks may signal deep

    inside a precise idea of space.

It is to this book he sat for the lessons

    the past had set him—how our Greeks died,

whom your Romans killed, how her Germans

    overreached, what his English understood,

how my Americans denied history

    was anything but an innocence

the others had simply skimmed or mispronounced.

    He knew history is a grammar,

and grammar a metaphor, and poetry

    nothing more or less than death itself—

it never lies because it never affirms.

    From the start, squinting at the propped score

with Mother in their duets at the upright

    or biting his nails while arguing

the quidditas of thuggish jacks-in-office,

    he knew what he called truth always lies

in the words and so in this dictionary,

    which like him has become a conscience

with all its roots, all its ramifications,

    meanings and examples down the years.

It was on this book he sat for the lessons

    learned five inches above a desk chair,

five inches to lean down closer to the page,

    one volume at a time, day by day,

slightly above the sense of things, but closer

    to what tomorrow so many others

will consider to have somehow been the truth.