Plundered Hearts (18 page)

Just sitting there, at the table for
BLOOD TYPE B
,

She seemed to Frank at first too young, all wrong,

The sweater and saddle shoes, the hair too long.

But the longer he spoke to her, the more he could see

That time and chance had converged on this one girl.

His duty now was clear. What might it mean—

All the years between them merely a screen

He could slide to reveal the cherry trees aswirl—

To love her who long ago had this same face?

He waited until he was sure she’d seen through

His social calls more than she’d admit.

He hesitated, then in an awkward embrace

Vowed to be constant and compassionate.

(Oh, how not tell the truth and still be true?)

She and her parents sent away for good …

The world at war … the papers filled with hate …

She was twenty, he was forty-eight …

Everything conspired as it could

To keep them apart. Even the words they spoke

Fell short of what they felt. Sometimes silence

Seemed more to them than mere convenience.

Tanny would fidget or hum. Frank would smoke.

Her father asked him to smuggle letters or take

A message to the general, but he refused,

Not from fear but apathy, or heartbreak.

He wanted only what she might suddenly choose,

Though for herself she asked nothing, like love

Or like stars, those wounds in the tender flesh above.

Each night—on those nights he visited the camp—

He’d turn the corner by Block Thirteen and stop,

Expecting to find a badly painted backdrop,

A pale body on a bloodsoaked, floodlit ramp,

And the tearful applause that echoed in his dreams.

Instead, she was sitting there on the mess hall steps

And shyly smiled. Again, his promise was kept.

Again, she helped him past the years between.

She let him hold her hand while she described

A basketball game. He looked down at the ground

And smiled to hear just how the girls would shriek,

How they ran across the muddy court and found

An opening in the air. She’d nearly died!

By then he wasn’t listening, but he let her speak.

When all the wells in the holy city had failed

And only Matsumura’s, as if fed by a spring,

Remained, he allowed the afflicted people to bring

Their buckets, until one day—or so the tale

Unfolds—a servant drowned and the old priest

Went to the well, where he saw in the water there

The image of a woman combing her hair,

A ghost from his past or a spirit unreleased.

A week later, during a violent storm,

The woman visited his room and revealed

She was a dragon’s mirror in a woman’s form.

No harm would come so long as he kept her concealed.

               The well, drained and raked,

               Yielded a blazoned hairpin

               And a mirror rim.

               When he searched its emptiness

               He saw what had haunted him.

The honeybees dance and are understood,

But their point is always and only nectar.

Achilles spoke with the gods, and all

They wanted was his spear through Hector.

By the Senate’s decree, in the heart of Rome

No ominous soldiers were allowed

Except in hollow triumphs where,

More than the general, plated and proud,

The whispering slave amused the crowd.

From pre-hab to re-tox in under a year,

The cynic had run his terror to ground.

The man in the mirror was merely glass.

The world was just “Another round.”

The woman giving birth

Was standing near a bed,

The child apparently worth

The risk that lay ahead.

“Don’t be stubborn. Here,

Lie down,” he crossly said.

She winced and shook her head.

“Spoken just like a man.

Lie down? A bed? That’s where

The trouble first began.”

The day he left, he said I knew the reason.

Look at the trees. Love only lasts a season.

For years since then, I’ve stared at them and seen

Only their blackened branches beneath the green.

How many did I live in before I had my own?

During the war, my father in the Pacific,

There was my widowed grandmother’s

With its collection of French clocks

And closet doors, mostly the must

Of a turn-of-the-century wardrobe.

Next, the newly demobbed’s semidetached

And its neighborhood’s first television set,

A cherrywood box on legs with its ten-inch

World Series that played to a crowd

White-knuckling old-fashioneds.

Finally, the tile-roofed white stucco

Suburban, memory’s first homestead

Because living there—my own room at last!—

Coincided with a fogbound sexual dawning

That rose, flushed, in a corner of its attic

But had less to do with my body than the books

Stolen from Wanamaker’s that touched

On Reproduction, accompanied by

Photographs of one toad atop another.

I would hold my own tiny reptile

And imagine a milky pudding of incipient

Tadpoles until a translucent drop

Of something surfaced with less pleasure

Than, in the basement, a sheet on a clothesline

Came up on Act I in which, having collected

Tickets and delivered the Prologue, who starred

As the Frog Prince, accompanied by his sisters

As cellophaned water beetles, insisted

He eat from the plate and sleep in the bed

Of a person the stage director had cleverly

Represented as an invisible royal presence,

Haughty, deceitful, probably an early role

Model not perfected until a decade later

At the college grill’s monthly Gay Night …

But that was two intermissions further along.

Back in the preteen’s cellar theater—so like

The attic’s erotics in which, as in dreams,

One is always the protagonist—I couldn’t have

Guessed the greasepaint had also smeared on

A coarseness and meanness I perpetuated

Out of timidity, a fear of reproducing myself

Except as someone else, someone noble

If warted, unafraid because unaware

I had already started out on the wrong foot

By supposing I was safe with a secret life,

Something so ordinary as wanting to please,

Wanting to hide in the sources of pleasure.

At an age when the extra baggage is the paraphernalia

Of parents, both of whom—if only I’d had to—

Would already have been packed and labeled

NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE
, I was almost on my own,

Fifteen, aboard the
Queen Mary,
feeling

The mattress in my stateroom’s upper berth

For lumps and staring out the porthole

Opposite at the alluring distant shores

Of New Jersey. Tugs were backing us out

Of everything familiar. It was time to shave.

While my bunkmates—this was a chaperoned

Grand Tour for what the brochure had termed

“Precocious” adolescents—were crowding

The promenade deck to watch Lady Liberty wave

Goodbye, I was at the tiny sink’s mirror,

Staring at my own precociousness,

The delicate but distinct shadow of fuzz

Above my lip and the half-dozen stray

Hairs, a few here, a few there, but enough

To convince me the first bold step

To adulthood was to lather it all up

For the safety razor I had purchased

From a druggist who’d squinted and shrugged.

I was alone. I was ready. I had seen the ads

And the actors, had often sat on the tub’s edge

To study my father’s assured technique.

I knew the stuttering downward stroke,

The rising slow-motion flick of the wrist.

I had laid out a version of my newly sophisticated

Self on someone else’s bed: my dark suit,

My wash-and-wear shirt and regimental tie.

There were still two hours before the Captain’s

Bon Voyage Dinner. I had long since scanned

The passenger list and devised a flexible

Introduction with just enough flattery and French

In it to impress anyone standing nearby

Who overheard half of it. Time to shave.

From the hissing aerosol can shot a gob

Of foam I petted my face with, the double-sided

Blade was clamped into place, and I cocked

My head for a better look at a ragged

Sideburn where, clearing my throat, I tentatively began.

What little there was yielded without a struggle,

When suddenly there was a screw loose,

Or the bow thruster backfired or the rudder reeled—

Something
jammed and the ship seized up

With intermittent convulsions I decided

Unwisely to ignore until several red alerts

On cheek and chin demanded that I stop.

My debut as an adult later that evening

Included the ignominy of five scraps of tissue

Plastered by the blood they staunched

Onto the curiosity of tablemates who looked

Beyond me in order to see right into my vapidity.

Perhaps I
had
grown up, then. Even a single hair

Casts a shadow. Sitting there in public,

A failure at the simple tasks, my vanity on display,

I might have already realized we use the first part

Of our lives to render the rest of it miserable.

The charge of the light cascade

From the disco globe’s orbiting

Spray of incandescent pricks

Had electrified me long enough.

I’d invested a decade in the hunt-

And-peck system of trying

Not to find myself—though
that

Was a maze of abrupt right angles

And false leads even my shrink

Failed to decipher—but someone else,

Someone just to stay home with.

Night after night at the Nibelheim,

Through a scrim of exhaled Kools,

I’d made out the same old tricks

Lined up at the bar, as if having taken

Their positions at curtain time—

The repairman nursing his Bud,

The receptionist hugging his stool,

The goggle-eyed poli-sci postgrad,

The dishy interns in scrubs,

Bankers, biologists, bricklayers

(Even, oops, Stephen Spender once),

Each with his bit part to play,

His wary banter or boogie.

I rarely scored for lack

Of trying, wearied by the whole

Lump-in-the-throat approach

And pain-in-the-ass retreat.

So, resolute, hunched over a map

Of my future, I made a decision.

I would lie low for a month,

Hoping the tide would wash up

Flopping new prospects worth more

Than the loneliness of forced companionship.

Time was up. The time was ripe.

I chose a Saturday night to storm

The bar and steal away with a man

For good—the someone, an anybody,

A man I could admit wanting

To “love,” if that’s the word for giving

Your “heart” away, for doubting

What until that day you’d most believed.

My strategy was to sit next

To the first customer I saw wearing a tie,

A necktie, all knot and design,

Standing in, it seemed, for a set

Of assumptions and hesitations

I shared, or wanted to share.

I entered and scouted and spotted

The only one who matched my profile,

Then simply, rudely, slid into the booth

Where he was sitting with three or four

Now startled and resentful friends,

Introduced myself and started talking

Without noticing more than his four-in-hand.

(The next morning, the rest came clear:

Short, curly-haired, sharp-featured,

With fingers propped on his chin

Both delicate and slowly drumming.)

He was, it turned out, a pianist

And willing to accompany my off-key

Renditions of the usual storm and stress.

As we left the bar together that night,

And lived happily ever after for a year,

I knew the second step in the right direction

Would be the hardest, but didn’t care.

I had the life I wanted, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out
of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and
put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw aught.

And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.

After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him
look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.

—MARK
8:23–25

If the sun were a hot bright blue, the daylight

    Would shine on a planet cold-blooded

To the spectrum of what now we can make out

    Of shapes in the distance—the sun itself, say,

Or the blighted ash over there near the, the …

    Whatever it might be. To be told

About the colors and textures we could not

    Actually see, or to listen

For how the petal tip begins to turn brown

    And the paint on the kitchen cabinets

Is sallower than it was when the baby

    Was in diapers, would be to loosen

The string of molecular ties that binds us

    To one another. As if in parallel

Lines down the center of a ballroom waiting

    For the gavotte to begin, we gaze

Across at our partners and take our bearings

    By what will momentarily spin

Out of our vision, the settee and lampstand,

    The string quartet poised for the downbeat,

The women in black standing with lemonade

    Along the wall. We need a second

To know and be known by what we see around

    Us, and what we see through the window,

The men smoking cigars on the balcony,

    And billowing up far behind them

The stand of horse chestnuts on the horizon.

    We know where we are, what we are meant

To do next by what we can keep an eye on,

    The world’s child now its worried parent.

I can still spot my father, two decades dead,

    In my doctor’s thick medical file

And in his warning when he looks up from it,

    My inheritance a condition

I could live without. The past blurs my future.

    The blood sugar choking my system

So that I can see my right foot but not feel

    The internist’s pinprick on its toes

Has also clouded my sight and anything

    Three feet away takes on the thickset

Haziness that some second-generation

    Impressionist would spoil a nude with.

TV’s talking heads on mute all look the same,

    Bobbing owlets on the barn’s rafter.

Taking in the news hour with a martini,

    I watch each day’s car bomb explosion

Through the bleared perspective history provides,

    The sense that people will keep fighting

Over the same wooden idol or acre

    Of nowhere because once as children

They had been grabbed and told to look their fathers

    Right in the eye. Now the machine guns

Are bigger than the boys who aim them at each

    Other, whole brigades of them, marching

Toward the sun that, while we weren’t looking, turned red.