Plundered Hearts (3 page)

Time. What had once been flashed on a screen

As a sequence of familiar shots from a past

No one else would understand—the father’s slap,

The sister’s moonlit breasts, the teacher’s pen,

The lover’s mole, the inch of vintage mescal—

The carousel of slides we call a lifetime

I suppose went through his head, but how could I know?

It is as likely nothing was there, the mind stunned

And drifting from blurred maples in a square

To a painful wrinkle in the sheet beneath his thigh.

It was time. It was the plan. But it was hard to move.

He reached for the pills, pushing his hand deeper

Into the sun’s warmth, which quickly overtook

His arm, his neck, his face, until he surrendered.

When, embracing her, he seemed to hesitate,

His wife pleaded not to witness his courage

But to share it. He relented. They both opened their wrists

With his sword. Because of his frailty, his blood ran

Too slowly, so he cut the veins in his ankles and knees,

Then looked up, fearful he would lose his purpose

If his wife were forced to stare at his torment.

He sent her away and summoned several scribes,

Sitting on the cold marble steps and dictating

Maxims still quoted today by those who think

They know how they would want to live a last day.

But death would not come. He asked a friend

To prepare the same poison used to execute

Those Athenian trials had condemned, and drank it down.

It was dark. It was the agreed-upon hour.

I had the key and quietly let myself in.

A lamp had been left on in the corridor.

I walked through its precaution toward the bedroom.

This is what we had decided, the dead man,

His lover, and I. I would “discover” the body.

The lover would pointedly—bantering with the doorman—

Arrive a half-hour later. Then, together,

We would call the police and, in one frantic

And one somber voice, report an apparent suicide.

The bedroom was dark, but I could see the body,

On the bed, under a sheet, its profile gaunt.

I turned the overhead light on and knew at once

Something was wrong. The face should be paler.

I went to it and screamed his name. Twice.

I heard the faintest groan. An eyelid moved.

There were too many pills still on the tray. Again

I called his name. I put my fingers on his neck,

But could feel nothing, hear nothing. I knew,

Though, that he was alive. I sat on the bed

Beside him and stared. Enough time passed

For shock not to have noticed. The doorbell rang.

What would I tell my friend now? What would we do?

I followed my crumbs of dread back to the door,

And opened it with the latch on, though expecting

The very person who was anxiously standing there.

I let him in, and could think of nothing but the truth.

“He’s still alive.” Eyes rolling back, he collapsed.

In a city where tyrants kill their mothers and children,

Why would they not soon turn against their teachers?

We may decide how but never precisely when

We leave. His barely clothed body was so cold

It stalled the poison’s effect. Silently,

They waited. Organizing a death as drama

Had proved too difficult, the tableau disarranged

By the mind’s eye in conflict with the body’s

Stubborn clutch at life, its blind refusal.

So what he thought would be was behind him now.

What good was sentiment or ideas? You shape,

When you can, the middle of things—where in fact

The story begins—not the beginning or the end.

He asked his slaves to carry him to the steam room.

Meanwhile, we sat in the living room, debating what

To think, to feel, to do. We decided the sun

Was to blame, its warmth sapping the will,

Lulling the dying man’s resolve, ruining the plan

He had weeks ago listened to abstractly,

Wanting and not wanting what he nodded to.

We spoke as if he were not in the next room.

We had three options. We could—this would be the one

He wanted—hold a pillow over his face

And do what he was finally unable to for himself.

Or we could leave and return the next day, hopeful

By then his weakness had solved the situation.

But there were witnesses that we were here now

And an autopsy would finger us as accomplices.

The third choice was inhuman but morally right.

Since I could not kill a man, even one I wanted dead,

And because I did not want to end up a criminal,

We called 911 and asked for an ambulance—

What our friend had begged to avoid, the Emergency

Room’s brutal vanities. Within minutes they had arrived

In battle gear, quickly guessed the truth,

Strapped the victim to the gurney and, with genuine

Deference, told us everything would be done

To see that it was a quick and painless death.

A silent ride to the hospital in the crowded back.

We sat at the foot of his bed as he was examined.

A nurse told everyone to wait in the hallway.

She drew a curtain and stayed inside with him.

First, he is lowered into a pool of hot water.

How long does it take to die? a young man asks.

A lifetime, the philosopher replies with a smile.

He hopes the water will speed both the blood

And the hemlock. When he sees the water darken,

He weakly takes a handful and sprinkles the slaves,

A libation to Jupiter the Liberator.

Let us continue our journey, he bids them next,

And they carry him at last to the steam room,

Where, choking, he is soon suffocated.

His will, written while he was still powerful,

Specified his ashes be buried with no ceremony.

He would allow no one to praise or flatter him

For merely having anticipated his own death.

The doctor stood before us with a look

Whose pursed lips and downcast eyes

Spelled trouble. There had been a complication.

The nurse who had taken charge is a Catholic.

She says she sat with your friend for about an hour,

Then whispered to him, Do you want to live?

There was no response at first, but then she says

He said, Yes. Again she asked. Yes.

She reported it, leaving me no choice

But to do everything we can to keep him alive.

I know this is clearly not what anyone wants

But you must realize our legal jeopardy.

So a ventilator, mask, and tubes were brought.

Our comatose friend was wired back up to life.

It took him five more days to die of a racking

Pneumonia, never conscious but evidently

In horrid torment. The nurse had disappeared.

Did I hate her? Did I hate the friends

Who had involved me? Or hate myself

Who, like a slave lowering him into a pool

Of self-pity to make the poison work,

Had been forced to ask myself what to do?

And how in turn will I deal with the pain

Not of separation from but of attachment

To a body which has become a petulant

Tyrant? Whom will I ask to open the door

And discover me, to call out one last time

To the body lying there in a windowless room?

From a cistern in the dome the daylight drips

                         While the calls to prayer

               From the quarter’s seven minarets—

Overlapping tape loops of Submission—slip

               Down through the arching crescent lunettes

                         Cut into the air

As if the vault itself had loosened its grip.

I am on my back, listening to the tattoo

                         Of clogs crisscrossing

               The sopping white marble floor inlaid

With veins of still darker matters to pursue.

               A skittish gleam accents, like eyeshade,

                         A fountain’s boss in

The corner alcove, where hot and cold make do

In a basin Tony Curtis and Franz Liszt

                         Both stared into once.

               (Stardom is a predictable fate:

The point is forgotten but somehow still missed.)

               Gods, whenever they annunciate,

                         Long for the romance

That ironclad heroes peering through the mist

Or mousy adolescent girls both provide.

                         The same unlikely

               Places—a battlefield or grotto—

Are returned to, while again the hollow-eyed

               Ogle in flagrante devoto

                         And obey, shyly,

The scrambled revelations so true-and-tried.

Congestive, crotch-scented vapor has congealed

                         Into beads that skid

               Along suction-knots and shadow-ends

Abutting my slab. Eager for an ordeal

               The illustrated brochure commends

                         As a bath to rid

The body of its filth both real and unreal,

I have bought their boast, “We make you feel reborn,”

                         For fifty euros.

               Pinched and idly gestured toward a plinth

Two centuries of customers have careworn

               To a shallow trough not quite my length,

                         I’m forced to burrow

Into a pose much more flagellant than faun.

The sodden towel is too heavy now to hold

                         Itself across me—

               And there is the pasha’s bay window,

The shriveled bulblet, the whole ill-shaped scaffold

               Of surplus fact and innuendo,

                         From arthritic scree

To the congenital heart flutter’s toehold.

The attendant walks up and down on my back,

                         Pacing the problem,

               Then plucks, then mauls, then applies a foam

He scrubs in until it causes an attack

               Of radiance, the world’s palindrome

                         Suddenly solemn,

Suddenly seeming to surrender its knack

For never allowing us simply to want

                         What we already

               Have, or are, or perhaps could have been.

His hand-signal to get up seems like a taunt.

               I lie there, my fist under my chin,

                         Senses unsteady,

Something gradually, like a tiny font,

Coming into focus. I sit up and start

                         To notice small bits

               Of grit when I run my hand over

My chest. But wasn’t this debris the chief part

               Of the package deal? The makeover

                         And its benefits?

In the fog I can’t really see what trademark

Schmutz the Oriental Luxury Service

                         Has failed to wash off.

               So I put it in my mouth and taste

Two dank gobbets—salty, glairy, and grayish—

               I should have recognized as the waste

                         That was my old self,

A loofah having scraped it from each crevice

And bulge, from every salacious thought and deed.

                         Every good one too.

               It is the past, not just what is wrong,

It is the embarrassments we still breast-feed,

               That we absentmindedly so long

                         To shed. A new
you,

Oneself an innate second person succeeds.

How do the saints feel when they fall to their knees,

                         God coming to light?

               Less ecstatic than ashamed, I fear,

Of bodies never worthy of being seized.

               Encumbered by the weight of a tear,

                         In hopeless hindsight

They see all that the flesh can never appease,

All that the flesh is obliged to mortify.

                         Here I am, laid out,

               Looking up to where nothing appears,

Hardly wondering why nothing satisfies

               And yet saddened that it’s all so clear.

                         Tulip waterspouts

Trickle. Reservoirs deep underground reply.

Snowbanks, so heaped by happenstance

A melting glance would misconstrue

Them as eiderdown, blanket the trails

Blazed, day in, night out, at dawn,

In dreams, whose patchwork accidents

Become the frosted dormer through

Brightening panes of which details

That make a world of sense are drawn.

Even the sky here in Connecticut has it,

That wry look of accomplished conspiracy,

The look of those who’ve gotten away