Plundered Hearts (13 page)

She is sitting three pews ahead of me

At the Methodist church on Wilshire Boulevard.

I can make out one maple leaf earring

Through the upswept fog bank of her hair

—Suddenly snapped back, to stay awake.

A minister is lamenting the forgetfulness

Of the laws, and warms to his fable

About the wild oryx, “which the Egyptians

Say stands full against the Dog Star

When it rises, looks wistfully upon it,

And testifies after a sort by sneezing,

A kind of worship but a miserable knowledge.”

He is wearing, now I look, the other earring,

Which catches a bluish light from the window

Behind him, palm trees bent in stained glass

Over a manger scene. The Joseph sports

A three-piece suit, fedora in hand.

Mary, in a leather jacket, is kneeling.

The gnarled lead joinder soldered behind

Gives her a bun, protruding from which

Two shafts of a halo look like chopsticks.

Intent on her task, her mouth full of pins,

She seems to be taking them out, one by one,

To fasten or fit with stars the night sky

Over the child’s crib, which itself resembles

A Studebaker my parents owned after the war,

The model called an Oryx, which once took

The three of us on the flight into California.

I remember, leaving town one Sunday morning,

We passed a dwarfish, gray-haired woman

Sitting cross-legged on an iron porch chair

In red slacks and a white sleeveless blouse,

A cigarette in her hand but in a silver holder,

Watching us leave, angel or executioner,

Not caring which, pursuing her own thoughts.

Dawn through a slider to the redwood deck.

Two mugs on the rail with a trace

Still of last night’s vodka and bitters.

The windchimes’ echo of whatever

Can’t be seen. The bottlebrush

Has given up its hundred ghosts,

Each blossom a pinhead firmament,

Galaxies held in place by bristles

That sweep up the pollinated light

In their path along the season.

A scrub jay’s Big Bang, the swarming

Dharma of gnats, nothing disturbs

The fixed orders but a reluctant question:

Is the world half empty or half full?

Through the leaves, traffic patterns

Bring the interstate to a light

Whose gears a semi seems to shift

With three knife-blade thrusts, angry

To overtake what moves on ahead.

This tree’s broken under the day.

The red drips from stem to stem.

That wasn’t the question. It was,

Why did we forget to talk about love?

We had all the time in the world.

What we forgot, I heard a voice

Behind me say, was everything else.

Love will leave us alone if we let it.

Besides, the world has no time for us,

The tree no questions of the flower,

One more day no help for all this night.

It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,

    Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,

The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,

    The sour taste of each day’s first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling

    A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,

Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark

    Along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,

    Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad?

You get from life what you can shake from it?

    For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level

    At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,

Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,

    And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer

    Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.

His answering machine always has room for one more

    Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears

    Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why
now
?

I long ago gave up pretending to believe

    Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream

    Almost every night of holding you again,

Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,

    Through the bruised unbalanced waves?

Horace iv.i

Suppose my heart had broken

Out of its cage of bone,

Its heaving grille of rumors—

    My metronome,

My honeycomb and crypt

Of jealousies long since

Preyed on, played out,

    My spoiled prince.

Suppose then I could hold it

Out toward you, could feel

Its growling hound of blood

    Brought to heel,

Its scarred skin grown taut

With anticipating your touch,

The tentative caress

    Or sudden clutch.

Suppose you could watch it burn,

A jagged crown of flames

Above the empty rooms

    Where counterclaims

Of air and anger feed

The fire’s quickening flush

And into whose remorse

    Excuses rush.

Would you then stretch your hand

To take my scalding gift?

And would you kiss the blackened

    Hypocrite?

It’s yours, it’s yours
—this gift,

This grievance embedded in each,

Where time will never matter

    And words can’t reach.

at the ruins of a provincial Roman town

So this is the city of love.

I lean on a rail above

Its ruined streets and square

Still wondering how to care

For a studiously unbuilt site

Now walled and roofed with light.

A glider’s wing overhead

Eclipses the Nike treads

On a path once freshly swept

Where trader and merchant kept

A guarded company.

As far as the eye can see

The pampered gods had blessed

The temples, the gates, the harvest,

The baths and sacred spring,

Sistrum, beacon, bowstring.

Each man remembered his visit

To the capital’s exquisite

Libraries or whores.

The women gossiped more

About the one-legged crow

Found in a portico

Of the forum, an omen

That sluggish priests again

Insisted required prayer.

A son’s corpse elsewhere

Was wrapped in a linen shroud.

A distant thundercloud

Mimicked a slumping pine

That tendrils of grape entwined.

Someone kicked a dog.

The orator’s catalogue

Prompted worried nods

Over issues soon forgot.

A cock turned on a spit.

A slave felt homesick.

The underclass of scribes

Was saved from envy by pride.

The always invisible legion

Fought what it would become.

•

We call it ordinary

Life—banal, wary,

Able to withdraw

From chaos or the law,

Intent on the body’s tides

And the mysteries disguised

At the bedside or the hearth,

Where all things come apart.

There must have been a point—

While stone to stone was joined,

All expectation and sweat,

The cautious haste of the outset—

When the city being built,

In its chalky thrust and tilt,

Resembled just for a day

What’s now a labeled display,

These relics of the past,

A history recast

As remarkable rubble,

Broken column, muddled

Inscription back when

Only half up, half done.

Now only the ruins are left,

A wall some bricks suggest,

A doorway into nothing,

Last year’s scaffolding.

By design the eye is drawn

To something undergone.

A single carving remains

The plunder never claimed,

And no memories of guilt

Can wear upon or thrill

This scarred relief of a man

And woman whom love will strand,

Their faces worn away,

Their heartache underplayed,

Just turning as if to find

Something to put behind

Them, an emptiness

Of uncarved rock, an excess

Of sharp corrosive doubt.

•

Now everything’s left out

To rain and wind and star,

Nature’s repertoire

Of indifference or gloom.

This French blue afternoon,

For instance, how easily

The light falls on debris,

How calmly the valley awaits

Whatever tonight frustrates,

How quickly the small creatures

Scurry from the sunlight’s slur,

How closely it all comes to seem

Like details on the table between

Us at dinner yesterday,

Our slab of sandstone laid

With emblems for a meal.

Knife and fork. A deal.

Thistle-prick. Hollow bone.

The olive’s flesh and stone.

A contrail’s white scimitar unsheathes

Above the tufts of anti-aircraft fire.

Before the mullah’s drill on righteousness,

Practice rocks are hurled at chicken-wire

Dummies of tanks with silhouetted infidels

Defending the nothing both sides fight over

In God’s name, a last idolatry

Of boundaries. The sirens sound: take cover.

He has forced the night and day, the sun and moon,

Into your service. By His leave, the stars

Will shine to light the path that He has set

You to walk upon. His mercy will let

You slay who would blaspheme or from afar

Defile His lands. Glory is yours, oh soon.

•

Of the heart. Of the tongue. Of the sword. The holy war

Is waged against the self at first, to raze

The ziggurat of sin we climb upon

To view ourselves, and next against that glaze

The enemies of faith will use to disguise

Their words. Only then, and at the caliph’s nod,

Are believers called to drown in blood the people

Of an earlier book. There is no god but God.

He knows the day of death and sees how men

Will hide. Who breaks His covenant is cursed.

Who slights His revelations will live in fire.

He has cast aside the schemer and the liar

Who mistake their emptiness of heart for a thirst

That, to slake, the streams of justice descend.

•

Ski-masked on videotape, the skinny martyr

Reads his manifesto. He’s stilted, nervous.

An hour later, he’s dropped at the market town,

Pays his fare, and climbs aboard the bus.

Strapped to his chest is the death of thirty-four

—Plus his own—“civilians” on their way

To buy or sell what goods they claim are theirs,

Unlike our fates, which are not ours to say.

Under the shade of swords lies paradise.

Whom you love are saved with you, their souls

In His hand. And who would want to return to life

Except to be killed again? Who can thrive

On the poverty of this world, its husks and holes?

His wisdom watches for each sacrifice.

Now that you are gone, you are everywhere.

    Take this orchid, for instance,

its swollen lip, the scrawny stalk’s one

    descended testicle

as wrinkled as rhetoric on the bar-scene stump,

    the golden years since

jingling in its purse. How else signal the bee?

In my swan-clip now languish urgent appeals

    from the usual charities

lined up to be ignored. But your flags are up:

    I see the flapping petals,

the whorl of sepals, their grinning come-on.

    Always game, again

I’d head straight for the column’s sweet trap.

Ducking under the puckered anther cap

    to glide toward the stiff,

waxy sense of things, where male and female

    hardly matter to one’s heady

urge to pull back the glistening lobes

    and penetrate the heart,

I fell for it every time, the sticky bead

laid down on my back as I huddled there

    with whatever—mimicking

enemy or friend, the molecular musk

    of each a triggering lure—

wanted the most of me. Can I leave now too?

    I have death’s dust-seed

on me. I have it from touching you.

And then a long senescent cell—though why,

Who knows?—will suddenly refuse to stay

In line, the bucket brigade of proteins meant

To slow or stimulate the tissue’s growth

Will stumble, so the cells proliferate

And tumors form while, deep within,

Suppressor genes, mutated, overlook

The widening fault, the manic drive to choke

On itself that fairy tales allot the gnome

Who vainly hammers the broken sword in his cave,

Where malignant cells are shed into the blood

Or lymph, cascading through the body’s streams,

Attaching themselves to places where we breathe

And love and think of what cannot be true.