Collected Poems (23 page)

My friend was fat and mean and lonely.

He made lots of money and never got anything

he really wanted. Most unhappy man I ever met.

There was resentment and even dislike in his

love for me. But we managed, knowing that.

We would spend long evenings reviewing again

his first marriage. Then he’d make his speech

about therapy teaching him how to express anger.

Afterwards, we would sit sleepy and silent

in the lavishness, embarrassed by our tenderness.

When I dream of him now, years later, he’s driving

me to the airport, or we are on Fifth Avenue

near Rockefeller Center with him explaining again

how to reach Columbus Circle. We stand on,

talking of nothing. Comfortable, as the snow

falls the way it did in the old Pittsburgh.

People complain about too many moons in my poetry.

Even my friends ask why I keep putting in the moon.

And I wish I had an answer like when Archie Moore

was asked by a reporter in the dressing room

after the fight, “Why did you keep looking in

his eyes, Archie? The whole fight you were

looking in his eyes.” And old Archie Moore said,

“Because the eyes are the windows of the soul, man.”

He tries to tell the doctor:

“My heart springs open and I see

there is a woods inside.

The trees are full of birds

but they are unable to sing.”

It’s a good sign, the doctor says.

“My body begins to shine

brighter and brighter.

In the center of the light

there is a transparent woman

yelling,
Go back! Go back!
”

The doctor says that’s promising.

“No,” he says, “all of you lie to me.

Like the night they came to get me

out of bed at four in the morning.

Because Marmarosa wouldn’t play

anymore. Unless I was there, they said.

“It was one of those blind pig places

I remember. And he made something perfect.

Made an architecture with the piano.

Like one of those buildings by Palladio.

But when he came to my table he was

as crazy as before. Like after Los Angeles.

“We left and walked through the empty streets

of East Liberty afterwards. Just before

it got light, Dodo in pain and mumbling.

It’s what you’re good at they use

to destroy you he said.”

The doctor says Dodo was feeling

a little down because they took

away his children. “No, no!” he insists.

“I remember what Dodo was like before

he went with the Dorsey band.

When we were in high school, he was

like everybody else. When I went

to have his father cut my hair

I could always hear Dodo in the other

room practicing Chopin.”

Yes, of course, the doctor says.

“You don’t understand. He was famous.

He was important. Parker and Gillespie

would still go over to the house

when they passed through town.

He invented that music with them.

Things mattered.”

(The doctor does not say anything.

Calm yourself,
something whispers

inside him.
We can go home now.
)

There is a film on water

which permits a glass to hold

more than it can hold.

If probed, the water breaks.

Before and after,

both are truly water. But

only one will support swans.

There is someone. Always the same

half block behind. Not a doppelgänger

or anything like that. Not dangerous

or angelic. Just a middle-aged man

with a thick face wearing an old coat.

But always furtively just out of sight.

He is often on ridges very high up

when I walk along the empty beach.

When I am in the bedrooms, he is

discreet. He waits in a doorway

to see her face in the streetlight

as we go by. There is neither sex

nor love between us, but he will

follow the girl home. He stays far back

and never speaks to them. Once

he even helped me when I got trampled.

Very efficient, but ambiguous.

Except for that, we have never met.

One day, when he had lost me, I saw him

following an old damaged woman.

But he returns to me. Without kindness

or threat. My life is beginning to list.

He occupies more and more importance.

Meaninglessly. Nothing to do with God

or fate. Actually a man. Rather stout.

And I can’t make out his intentions.

I am terrified by his not wanting anything.

They have Mary’s wedding ring in the Cathedral.

I was eager to see it, but learned it is

kept fastened in a box which requires keys

carried by the district’s three main officials.

The box is locked seven times in a chest

and the keys held by their chief guilds.

The chest is sealed in the wall of the nave,

thirty feet in the air. Stairs are built to it

just once a year. It is a very holy relic,

and I assumed they feared thieves. Today,

when I asked of it, I learned it is magic.

The color changes according to the soul before it.

Then I understood about the locks. The ring

is not being protected. It is locked in.

I have drifted into the habit

of going to Matins. Today

I found they are repairing

the church. The side windows

have been taken out. I was shocked

by the sound of swallows. By sun

and the smell of morning.

I realized there has been a mistake.

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve.

To insist we are damned because a country girl

talked to the snake one afternoon long ago.

Children must starve in Somalia for that,

and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities.

It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes

of molten lead. Because she was confused

by happiness that first time anyone said

she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be

the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks

and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also

created in His image.

                                        The forest must

not show the other face: slugs and grubs,

nematodes, and greenhead flies laying eggs

so their white larvae squirm in the filth.

Tent caterpillars, high in the trees, swarm out

from their offensive shrouds to eat the green

luxury bare. Spiders cast their nets in the dark.

Aphids gorge on lice. The braconid wasps lay eggs

under the skin of sphinx caterpillars so the larvae

will bore their way out through the host.

The other faces of God are not mediated by our

heart’s need. We are not stone, nor even jungle.

We are animals haunted by love. Not spirits

buried in flesh, but the flesh itself.

And the spirit we are is not separated from it.

There is a god who prepares the locust in the blind

earth for seventeen years, to have it born without

a mouth. I believe in the spirit that would have

Agamemnon sail home with Iphigenia alive in his arms,

leaving Helen with her young man.

If human love and God’s love meet

There is where we’ll find defeat.

When spirit and the flesh are twin

There is where we can begin.

Where the heart is not at rest

There will I build my only nest.

I spend the days deciding

on a commemorative poem.

Not, luckily, an epitaph.

A quiet poem

to establish the fact of me.

As one of the incidental faces

in those stone processions.

Carefully done.

Not claiming that I was

at any of the great victories.

But that I volunteered.