All of Us (22 page)

He keeps on staring at the boat.

The empty rigging, the deserted deck.

The boat rises. Moves closer.

He peers through the glasses.

The human figure, the music

it makes, that’s what’s missing

from the tiny deck.

A deck no broader than a leaf.

So how could it support a life?

Suddenly, the boat shudders.

Stops dead in the water.

He sweeps the glasses over the deck.

But after a while his arms grow

unbearably heavy. So he drops them,

just as he would anything unbearable.

He lays the glasses on the shelf.

Begins dressing. But the image

of the boat stays. Drifting.

Stays awhile longer. Then bobs away.

Forgotten about as he takes up

his coat. Opens the door. Goes out.

This morning I woke up to rain

on the glass. And understood

that for a long time now

I’ve chosen the corrupt when

I had a choice. Or else,

simply, the merely easy.

Over the virtuous. Or the difficult.

This way of thinking happens

when I’ve been alone for days.

Like now. Hours spent

in my own dumb company.

Hours and hours

much like a little room.

With just a strip of carpet to walk on.

Yesterday I dressed in a dead man’s

woolen underwear. Then drove to the end

of an icy road where I passed

some time with Indian fishermen.

I stepped into water over my boots.

Saw four pintails spring from the creek.

Never mind that my thoughts were elsewhere

and I missed the perfect shot.

Or that my socks froze. I lost track

of everything and didn’t make it back

for lunch. You could say

it wasn’t my day. But it was!

And to prove it I have this little bite

she gave me last night. A bruise

coloring my lip today, to remind me.

The fishing in Lough Arrow is piss-poor.

Too much rain, too much high water.

They say the mayfly hatch has come

and gone. All day I stay put

by the window of the borrowed cottage

in Ballindoon, waiting for a break

in the weather. A turf fire smokes

in the grate, though no romance

in this or anything else

here. Just outside the window an old iron

and wood schooldesk keeps me company.

Something is carved into the desk under

the inkwell. It doesn’t matter

what; I’m not curious. It’s enough

to imagine the instrument

that gouged those letters.

               My dad is dead,

and Mother slips in and out of her mind.

I can’t begin to say how bad it is

for my grown-up son and daughter.

They took one long look at me

and tried to make all my mistakes.

More’s the pity. Bad luck for them,

my sweet children. And haven’t I mentioned

my first wife yet? What’s wrong with me

that I haven’t? Well, I can’t anymore.

Shouldn’t, anyway. She claims

I say too much as it is.

Says she’s happy now, and grinds her teeth.

Says the Lord Jesus loves her,

and she’ll get by. That love

of my life over and done with. But what

does that say about my life?

My loved ones are thousands of miles away.

But they’re in this cottage too,

in Ballindoon. And in every

hotel room I wake up in these days.

The rain has let up.

And the sun has appeared and small

clouds of unexpected mayflies,

proving someone wrong. We move

to the door in a group, my family and I.

And go outside. Where I bend over the desk

and run my fingers across its rough surface.

Someone laughs, someone grinds her teeth.

And someone, someone is pleading with me.

Saying, “For Christ’s sake, don’t

turn your back on me.”

An ass and cart pass down the lane.

The driver takes the pipe from his mouth

and raises his hand.

There’s the smell of lilacs in the damp air.

Mayflies hover over the lilacs,

and over the heads of my loved ones.

Hundreds of mayflies.

I sit on the bench. Lean

over the desk. I can remember

myself with a pen. In the beginning,

looking at pictures of words.

Learning to write them, slowly,

one letter at a time. Pressing down.

A word. Then the next.

The feeling of mastering something.

The excitement of it.

Pressing hard. At first

the damage confined to the surface.

But then deeper.

These blossoms. Lilacs.

How they fill the air with sweetness!

Mayflies in the air as the cart

goes by—as the fish rise.

Trolling the coho fly twenty feet behind the boat,

under moonlight, when the huge salmon hit it!

And lunged clear of the water. Stood, it seemed,

on its tail. Then fell back and was gone.

Shaken, I steered on into the harbor as if

nothing had happened. But it had.

And it happened in just the way I’ve said.

I took the memory with me to New York,

and beyond. Took it wherever I went.

All the way down here onto the terrace

of the Jockey Club in Rosario, Argentina.

Where I look out onto the broad river

that throws back light from the open windows

of the dining room. I stand smoking a cigar,

listening to the murmuring of the officers

and their wives inside; the little clashing

sound of cutlery against plates. I’m alive

and well, neither happy nor unhappy,

here in the Southern Hemisphere. So I’m all the more

astonished when I recall that lost fish rising,

leaving the water, and then returning.

The feeling of loss that gripped me then

grips me still. How can I communicate what I feel

about any of this? Inside, they go on

conversing in their own language.

                         I decide to walk

alongside the river. It’s the kind of night

that brings men and rivers close.

I go for a ways, then stop. Realizing

that I haven’t been close. Not

in the longest time. There’s been

this waiting that’s gone along with me

wherever I go. But the hope widening now

that something will rise up and splash.

I want to hear it, and move on.

The pen that told the truth

went into the washing machine

for its trouble. Came out

an hour later, and was tossed

in the dryer with jeans

and a western shirt. Days passed

while it lay quietly on the desk

under the window. Lay there

thinking it was finished.

Without a single conviction

to its name. It didn’t have

the will to go on, even if it’d wanted.

But one morning, an hour or so

before sunrise, it came to life

and wrote:

“The damp fields asleep in moonlight.”

Then it was still again.

Its usefulness in this life

clearly at an end.

He shook it and whacked it

on the desk. Then gave up

on it, or nearly.

Once more though, with the greatest

effort, it summoned its last

reserves. This is what it wrote:

“A light wind, and beyond the window

trees swimming in the golden morning air.”

He tried to write some more

but that was all. The pen

quit working forever.

By and by it was put

into the stove along with

other junk. And much later

it was another pen,

an undistinguished pen

that hadn’t proved itself

yet, that facilely wrote:

“Darkness gathers in the branches.

Stay inside. Keep still.”

He was never the same, they said, after that.

And they were right. He left home, glad for his life.

Fell under the spell of Italian opera.

A gout stool was built into the front of his sedan chair.

His family went on living in a hut without a chimney.

One season very much like another for them.

What did they know?

A river wound through their valley.

At night the candles flickered, blinking like eyelashes.

As though tobacco smoke burned their eyes.

But nobody smoked in that stinking place.

Nobody sang or wrote cantatas.

When he died it was they who had to identify the body.

It was terrible!

His friends couldn’t remember him.

Not even what he’d looked like the day before.

His father spat and rode off to kill squirrels.

His sister cradled his head in her arms.

His mother wept and went through his pockets.

Nothing had changed.

He was back where he belonged.

As though he’d never left.

Easy enough to say he should have declined it.

But would you?

He began the poem at the kitchen table,

one leg crossed over the other.

He wrote for a time, as if

only half interested in the result. It wasn’t

as if the world didn’t have enough poems.

The world had plenty of poems. Besides,

he’d been away for months.

He hadn’t even
read
a poem in months.

What kind of life was this? A life

where a man was too busy even to read poems?

No life at all. Then he looked out the window,

down the hill to Frank’s house.

A nice house situated near the water.

He remembered Frank opening his door

every morning at nine o’clock.

Going out for his walks.

He drew nearer the table, and uncrossed his legs.

Last night he’d heard an account

of Frank’s death from Ed, another neighbor.

A man the same age as Frank,

and Frank’s good friend. Frank

and his wife watching TV.
Hill Street Blues.

Frank’s favorite show. When he gasps

twice, is thrown back in his chair —

“as if he’d been electrocuted.” That fast,

he was dead. His color draining away.

He was grey, turning black. Betty runs

out of the house in her robe. Runs

to a neighbor’s house where a girl knows

something about CPR.
She’s
watching

the same show! They run back

to Frank’s house. Frank totally black now,

in his chair in front of the TV.

The cops and other desperate characters

moving across the screen, raising their voices,

yelling at each other, while this neighbor girl

hauls Frank out of his chair onto the floor.

Tears open his shirt. Goes to work.

Frank being the first real-life victim

she’s ever had.

                         She places her lips

on Frank’s icy lips. A dead man’s lips. Black lips.

And black his face and hands and arms.

Black too his chest where the shirt’s been torn,

exposing the sparse hairs that grew there.

Long after she must’ve known better, she goes on

with it. Pressing her lips against his

unresponsive lips. Then stopping to beat on him

with clenched fists. Pressing her lips to his again,

and then again. Even after it’s too late and it

was clear he wasn’t coming back, she went on with it.

This girl, beating on him with her fists, calling

him every name she could think of. Weeping

when they took him away

from her. And someone thought to turn off

the images pulsing across the screen.

In the meadow this afternoon, I fetch

any number of crazy memories. That

undertaker asking my mother did she

want to buy the entire suit to bury my dad in,

or just the coat? I don’t

have to provide the answer to this,

or anything else. But, hey, he went

into the furnace wearing his britches.

This morning I looked at his picture.

Big, heavyset guy in the last year

of his life. Holding a monster salmon

in front of the shack where he lived

in Fortuna, California. My dad.

He’s nothing now. Reduced to a cup of ashes,

and some tiny bones. No way

is this any way

to end your life as a man.

Though as Hemingway correctly pointed out,

all stories, if continued far enough,

end in death. Truly.

Lord, it’s almost fall.

A flock of Canada geese passes

high overhead. The little mare lifts

her head, shivers once, goes back

to grazing. I think I will lie down

in this sweet grass. I’ll shut my eyes

and listen to wind, and the sound of wings.

Just dream for an hour, glad to be here

and not there. There’s that. But also

the terrible understanding

that men I loved have left

for some other, lesser place.

I looked into the room a moment ago,

and this is what I saw —

my chair in its place by the window,

the book turned facedown on the table.

And on the sill, the cigarette

left burning in its ashtray.

Malingerer!
my uncle yelled at me

so long ago. He was right.

I’ve set aside time today,

same as every day,

for doing nothing at all.