Plundered Hearts (12 page)

The hard part is not so much telling the truth

    as knowing which truth to tell—or worse,

what it is you want to tell the truth, and how

    at last one learns to unlove others,

to uncast the spells, to rewind the romance

    back to its original desire

for something else altogether, its grievance,

    say, against that year’s dazzling head boy

or the crippled wide-eyed horse you couldn’t shoot.

    And, as innocent as the future

porno star’s first milk tooth, the dictionary

    has no morality other than

definition itself. The large, functional

    Indo-European family

will do for a murky myth of origin,

    and the iron laws of shift and change

go unquestioned by the puzzled rummager.

    Our names for things tend to hold them fast

in place, give an X its features or its pitch,

    a fourth dimension of distinctness.

And what may seem vague awaits the Supplement

    just now pulling into the depot,

late as usual but looming through the steam.

    Words have their unflappable habits

of being, constellations of fixed ideas

    that still move. Sentimentality,

Snobbery, Sympathy, Sorrow—each queues up

    at the same window. No raised eyebrow

for the faked orgasm or press conference

    to issue official denials.

No sigh for the botanist’s crabbed notebook.

    No praise for the florilegium.

No regret for the sinking tanker’s oil slick

    glittering now off Cape Flattery.

No truck with bandbox grooming, fashion runways,

    the foot binder’s stale apology,

or the dream’s down payment and layaway plan.

    Everything adds up to or sinks back

into the word we know it by in this book.

    A believer in words—common prayers

or textbook theories—this wrinkled metaphor

    of the mind itself abided by

what grave and lucid laws, what keen exemptions

    these columns of small print have upheld.

He could be sitting beside one, chin in hand,

    listening to a late quartet, a gaze

on his face only the final chord will break.

    Here is that faraway something else,

here between the crowded lines of scholarship.

    Here is the first rapture and final

dread of being found out by words, terms, phrases

    for what is unknown, unfelt, unloved.

Here in the end is the language of a life.

Half my life ago, before retiring

    to new digs under Oxford’s old spires,

as a part of his farewell tour of the States,

    one last look at the rooms of the house

he’d made of our poised, mechanical largesse,

    he visited my alma mater.

The crowd—tweedy townies and student groundlings—

    packed the hall and spilled over the lawn

outside, where the lucky ones pressed their faces

    to windows suspense was steaming up.

How did I find a place at the master’s feet?

    My view was of the great man’s ankles,

and close enough to see his socks didn’t match.

    I sat there uncomfortably but spellbound

to his oracular mumble. And later,

    after the applause and the sherry,

while he wambled tipsily toward his guest suite,

    I sprang as if by coincidence

from its darkened doorway where I’d been waiting.

    But, well, waiting for
what
exactly?

Suddenly speechless, I counted on a lie

    and told him I knew his work by heart

and would he autograph my unread copy.

    He reached in his jacket for a pen

and at last looked distractedly up at me.

    A pause. “Turn around and bend over,”

he ordered in a voice vexed with impatience

    I at once mistook for genuine

interest—almost a proposition, in fact.

    The coy young man I was then is not

my type, but I can recognize the appeal.

    Even as I wheeled slowly around

and put my hands on my knees, I realized

    what he wanted, what he’d asked of me.

To write in the book, he required a desk.

    My back would do as well as any

Tree trunk or cafeteria tabletop.

    Only years later did it make sense.

By then I’d figured out that he’d been writing

    on me ever since that encounter,

or that I’d unconsciously made of myself

    a desk so that he could continue—

the common imagination’s dogsbody

    and ringmaster—still to speak up,

however halting or indirect the voice.

Today, sitting down at six to darn the day

    with a drink, I glanced across the room

to my desk, where Wystan, my month-old tabby,

    lay asleep on an open volume

of the wizard’s unfailing dictionary,

    faultless creaturely Instinct atwitch

on a monument. How to sneak out past him

    for the sweating martini shaker?

My clumsy tiptoe prompts a faint annoyance—

    a single eye unlidded, a yawn,

his right paw, claws outstretched, pointing to
soodle
.

    Weren’t these—the cat and book, or instinct

and idea—the two angels on his shoulder?

    Together, they’d made him suspicious

of the holy crusade, the top of the charts,

    compulsive hygiene, debt, middlemen,

seaside cottages, crooners, Gallic charm,

    public charities, the forgeries

of statecraft, the fantasies of the bedroom,

    easy assumptions, and sweeping views.

The kitten’s claws have somehow caught in the page

    and puckered it so that, skewed sideways,

it resembles—or rather, for the moment

    I can make out in the lines of type—

the too often folded map his face looked like.

    Protect me, St. Wiz, protect us all

from this century by your true example.

    With what our language has come to know

about us, protect us still from both how much

    and how little we can understand

ourselves, from the unutterable blank page

    of soul, from the echoing silence

moments after the heavy book is slammed shut.

The room with double beds, side by side.

One was the bed of roses, still made up,

The other the bed of nails, all undone.

In the nightstand clamshell, two Marlboro butts.

On the shag, a condom with a tear in its tip

Neither of them noticed—or would even suspect

For two years more. A ballpoint embossed

By a client’s firm: Malpractice Suits.

A wad of gum balled in a page of proverbs

Torn from the complimentary Bible.

His lipstick. Her aftershave.

A dream they found the next day they’d shared:

All the dogs on the island were dying

And the birds had flown up into the lonely air.

    Through the peephole he could see a boy

Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.

    There was the carpet, the second-best

Chairs, the old chipped washstand, all his dead parents’

                         
Things
donated months ago

                         “To make an unfortunate

               Crowd happy” at the Hôtel

               Marigny, Albert’s brothel,

Warehouse of desires

And useless fictions—

    For one of which he turned to Albert

And nodded, he’d have that one at cards, the soon-

    To-be footman or fancy butcher.

He’d rehearsed his questions in the corridor.

                         
Did you kill an animal

                         
Today? An ox? Did it bleed?

               
Did you touch the blood? Show me

               
Your hands, let me see how you …

(Judgment Day angel

Here to separate

    The Good from the Bad, to weigh the soul …

Soon enough you’ll fall from grace and be nicknamed

    Pamela the Enchantress or Tool

Of the Trade. Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.)

                         One after another now,

                         Doors closed on men in bed with

               The past, it was three flights to

               His room, the bedroom at last,

The goal obtained and

So a starting point

    For the next forbidden fruit—the taste

Of apricots and ripe gruyère is on the hand

    He licks—the next wide-open mouth

To slip his tongue into like a communion

                         Wafer. The consolation

                         Of martyrs is that the God

               For whom they suffer will see

               Their wounds, their wildernesses.

He’s pulled a fresh sheet

Up over himself,

    As if waiting for his goodnight kiss

While the naked boy performs what he once did

    For himself. It’s only suffering

Can make us all more than brutes, the way that boy

                         Suffers the silvery thread

                         To be spun inside himself,

               The snail track left on lilac,

               Its lustrous mirror-writing,

The mysterious

Laws drawn through our lives

    Like a mother’s hand through her son’s hair …

But again nothing comes of it. The signal

    Must be given, the small bedside bell.

He needs his parents to engender himself,

                         To worship his own body

                         As he watches them adore

               Each other’s. The two cages

               Are brought in like the holy

Sacrament. Slowly

The boy unveils them.

    The votive gaslights seem to flicker.

Her dying words were “What have you done to me?”

    In each cage a rat, and each rat starved

For three days, each rat furiously circling

                         The pain of its own hunger.

                         Side by side the two cages

               Are placed on the bed, the foot

               Of the bed, right on the sheet

Where he can see them

Down the length of his

    Body, helpless now as it waits there.

The rats’ angry squealing sounds so far away.

    He looks up at his mother—touches

Himself—at her photograph on the dresser,

                         His mother in her choker

                         And her heavy silver frame.

               The tiny wire-mesh trapdoors

               Slide open. At once the rats

Leap at each other,

Claws, teeth, the little

    Shrieks, the flesh torn, torn desperately,

Blood spurting out everywhere, hair matted, eyes

    Blinded with the blood. Whichever stops

To eat is further torn. The half-eaten rat

                         Left alive in the silver

                         Cage the boy—he keeps touching

               Himself—will stick over and

               Over with a long hatpin.

Between his fingers

He holds the pearl drop.

    She leans down over the bed, her veil

Half-lifted, the scent of lilac on her glove.

    His father hates her coming to him

Like this, hates her kissing him at night like this.

It turned out the funeral had been delayed a year.

The casket now stood in the state capitol rotunda,

An open casket. You lay there like Lenin

Under glass, powdered, in powder blue

But crestfallen, if that’s the word

For those sagging muscles that make the dead

Look grumpy. The room smelled of gardenias.

Or no, I
was
a gardenia, part of a wreath

Sent by the Radcliffe Institute and right behind

You, with a view down the line of mourners.

When Lloyd and Frank arrived, both of them

Weeping and reciting—was it “Thanatopsis”?—

A line from Frank about being the brother

To a sluggish clod was enough to wake you up.

One eye, then the other, slowly opened.

You didn’t say anything, didn’t have to.

You just blinked, or I did, and in another room

A group of us sat around your coffin chatting.

Once in a while you would add a comment—

That, no, hay was stacked with beaverslides,

And, yes, it was a blue, a mimeograph blue

Powder the Indians used, and stuck cedar pegs

Through their breasts in the ghost dance—

All this very slowly. Such an effort for you

To speak, as if underwater and each bubble-

Syllable had to be exhaled, leisurely

Floated up to the surface of our patience.

Still alive, days later, still laid out

In a party dress prinked with sun sparks,

Hands folded demurely across your stomach,

You lay on the back lawn, uncoffined,

Surrounded by beds of freckled foxglove

And fool-the-eye lilies that only last a day.

By then Lowell had arrived, young again

But shaggy even in his seersucker and tie.

He lay down alongside you to talk.

The pleasure of it showed in your eyes,

Widening, then fluttering with the gossip,

Though, of course, you still didn’t move at all,

Just your lips, and Lowell would lean in

To listen, his ear right next to your mouth,

Then look up smiling and roll over to tell me

What you said, that since you’d passed over

You’d heard why women live longer than men—

Because they wear big diamond rings.