The Best American Poetry 2012 (18 page)

I've got you in my pocket, Ich hob mir fer pacht.

It sees me and I cannot spell it.

Ich hob dich in bud, which means I see you as if

You were in the bathtub naked: I know you completely.

Kischkas: guts. Tongue of the guts, tongue

Of the heart naked, the guts of the tongue.

Bubbeh loschen. Tongue of my grandmother

That I can't spell in these characters I know.

I know “Hob dich in bud” which means I see you

And through you, tongue of irony. Intimate.

Tongue of the dear and the dead, tongue of death.

Tongue of laughing in the guts, naked and completely.

Bubbeh loschen, lost tongue of the lost, “Get away

From me” which means,
come closer
: Gei

Avek fun mir, Ich hob dich in bud. I see you

Completely. Naked. I've got you in my pocket.

from
The Threepenny Review

DEAN RADER

Self-Portrait as Dido to Aeneas

We wake: the night star-scorched & stained, morning fetal and uncoiling:

everything lifting: treehush and moondive: you at the window, the window

at day's limn. The day (heart's fulcrum) lists. Hear me: even if the bed

is an iron net, and the mattress a cage of twine and sawgrass: even if my legs

are bars and my arms are bars, the body's chain of sweat and skin

is no prison: it's the floating cell of the ship that will lock you down.

from
The Cincinnati Review

SPENCER REECE

The Road to Emmaus

for Nathan Gebert

I.

The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew.

I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan.

In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House,

right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida,

I began my story—

it was an interview, much of life is an interview.

She said I did not need to pay her, but donations,

yes, donations were appreciated:

they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope

that she could take back to the cloister.

She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper.

She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife.

My meetings with her went on for a few years.

I had come to speak about Durell.

I did not know how to end sentences about Durell.

He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror?

What? There were so many ways to end my sentence.

He was an unlikely candidate for so many things.

Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer.

I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact,

but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own,

which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly.

Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things.

Sister Ann's face was open, fragile—

parts were chipped as on a recovered fresco.

Above her gray head,

a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene,

the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading—

the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity.

There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame.

It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples,

one named Cleopas, the other anonymous,

forever mumbling Christ's name, and with them,

the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger.

They were on their way to that town, Emmaus,

seven miles out from Jerusalem,

gossiping about the impress of Christ's vanishing—

they argued about whether to believe what they had seen;

they were restless, back and forth the debate went—

when there is estrangement there is little peace.

II.

Every time we met, Sister Ann prayed first.

At times, my recollections blurred or a presumption would reverse.

Sister Ann told me Durell was with me
still,

in a more intimate way than when he lived.

She frequently lost her equilibrium, as older people sometimes do,

before settling into her worn-out chair

where she listened to me, week after week.

The day I met Durell, I said, the morning light was clear,

startling the town with ornament.

The steeple of Christ Church held the horizon in place,

or so I imagined, as if it had been painted first

with confident amounts of titanium white

before the rest was added. Trees clattered.

The reiterating brick puzzle of Cambridge brightened—

Mass Avenue, Mount Auburn, Dunster, Holyoke—

proclaimed a new September, and new students trudged the streets.

Every blood-warm structure was defined in relief.

Hours before, while the moon's neck wobbled on the Charles

like a giraffe's, or the ghost of a giraffe's neck,

I imagined Durell labored, having slept only a few hours,

caged in his worries of doctor bills, no money,

and running out of people to ask for it:

mulling over mistakes, broken love affairs—

a hospital orderly, a man upstairs,

he probably mumbled unkind epithets about blacks and Jews,

even though the men he loved
were
blacks and Jews.

Some of his blasphemies, if you want to call them that,

embarrassed me in front of Sister Ann,

but she seemed unflappably tolerant.

At sixty, he was unemployable.

He had taught school and guarded buildings,

each job ending worse than the last.

His refrain was always: “It is not easy being an impoverished aristocrat.”

He spoke with the old Harvard accent,

I can
still
hear it, I will probably
always
hear it,

with New York City, the North Shore and the army mixed in,

the
a
's broadened, the
r
's were flat, the
t
's snapped—

so a sentence would calibrate to a confident close,

like “My dee-ah boy,
that
is
that.
”

He lived on 19 Garden Street in a rent-controlled studio

on the second floor, number 25; he said the “25” reminded him of Christmas.

At eleven o'clock,

he probably pulled on his support hose,

increasing the circulation in his legs, blotched green and black.

Next, he would have locked the door with his gold key

and moved deliberately, his smile beleaguered.

Bowing to Miss Littlefield in the landlord's office

at the building's dark cubbyhole of an entrance:

they probably spoke of Queen Elizabeth II,

her disappointments, for Miss Littlefield and he were Royalists both.

Then Durell began to move towards me, entering the Square.

Breathing heavily, he might have passed the Brattle

advertising
Judgment at Nuremberg
—

inside the shut black theatrical box where the world repeated the past,

Maximilian Schell interrogated Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift;

Marlene Dietrich let the phone ring and ring.

Maybe he passed the Store 24 sign, bright orange,

passed Nini's Corner where sex magazines were stacked like a cliff.

Maybe, maybe. But, maybe not.

Maybe he went another way.

Then I recalled how the
T
shook that place,

the subway grates pushing up the scent of rat-life and all things fallen,

mixing with Leavitt & Peirce exuding its masculine snuff.

Down Plympton Street he might have gone, past the Grolier,

which I always remembered, for some reason, as closed,

gilded with spines of poetry books for its reredos.

Yes, he probably, most likely, certainly, did that.

Sister Ann wondered if I thought he paused.

I thought not—

poetry offered him no solutions.

At twelve o'clock,

the chairperson called our AA meeting to order.

We called ourselves “The Loony Nooners,”

and met in a Lutheran church basement.

We ate salads out of Tupperware,

shaking the contents like dice to mix the dressing.

Some knitted. Schizophrenics lit multiple cigarettes.

Acne-pocked Kate wanted to be a model,

Electroshock Mike read paperbacks,

and an Irish professor named Tom

welcomed Tellus, who could not get over Nam.

Darkened figures in the poor light, we looked like the burghers of Calais,

and smelled of brewed coffee, smoke, perfume, urine, human brine.

We were aristocrats of time:

“I have twenty-one years,” “I have one week,” “I have one day.”

I have often thought we were like first-century Christians—

a strident, hidden throng, electrified by a message.

Or, another way of thinking of us

is that we were inconvenient obstacles

momentarily removed, much to the city's relief.

From each window well, high heels and business shoes hurried.

Durell H., as he was known to us, took his place,

his thick hair fixed as the waves of an 1800s nautical painting

(perhaps he kept it set with hair spray?),

his Tiffany ring polished to a brilliance,

he set himself apart in his metal folding chair.

He had the clotted girth of Hermann Göring.

What was he thinking about?

Was he thinking about blood clots and possible aneurysms?

Imperious, behind prism-like trifocals,

quietly he said to me, “I've grown as fat as Elizabeth Taylor.”

III.

The meeting ended and Durell folded his metal chair.

He hated his Christian name—

“Durell,” he said, “Who names their child Durell?”

Moving among the crowd, listening to success and failure,

he passed out meeting lists, literature, leaflets.