Collected Poems (11 page)

and is used up now, and his eyes move, roll, spin up to the top of his head

the way the eyes of those fish who try to see god or the lid of the water roll, like dice,

so me, within me again: I cover myself with my own scrawl and wait in the shallow,

I face the shallow and wait like a fin and I ripple the membrane of scrawl like water;

so me, we, dear life I love you where are you, so we, dear our lord of anguish where are you,

so zero, so void; we don’t even know how to end it, how to get out of the way of the serif or slash.

And the next, and the next, the way the next, the way all, any, any he, any she,

any human or less or more, if not bone that leaps with its own word then still more,

if not skin that washes its own wound then more and more, the way more than a wound,

more than a thing which has to be spoken or born, born now, later, again,

the way desire is born and born, the desire within me and not, within and without and neither;

the way the next holds on to itself and the one after holds on to me, on to my person, my human,

and I give back, the way ten times a day I offer it back with love or resentment or horror,

so I bear my likeness and greet my like, and the way will, my will or not,

the way all it can say is I am or am not, or I don’t, won’t, cannot or will not,

and the way that it burns anyway, and the way it smiles, smiles anyway, fills, ripens,

so that the hour or the scrawl burns and ripens; so within me, as though I had risen,

as though I had gone to the gate and opened the lock and stepped through;

so within me, it lifts and goes through, lifts itself through, and burns, anyway, smiles, anyway.

Bob

If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to hear every imaginable kind of bullshit.

Every long-time loser has a history to convince you he isn’t living at the end of his own leash

and every kid has some pimple on his psyche he’s trying to compensate for with an epic,

but the person with the most unlikely line I’d ever heard — he told me he’d killed, more than a few times,

during the war and then afterwards working for the mob in Philadelphia — I could never make up my mind about.

He was big, bigger than big. He’d also been drinking hard and wanted to be everyone’s friend

and until the bartender called the cops because he wouldn’t stop stuffing money in girls’ blouses,

he gave me his life: the farm childhood, the army, re-upping, the war — that killing —

coming back and the new job — that killing — then almost being killed himself by another hood and a kind of pension,

a distributorship, incredibly enough, for hairdresser supplies in the ward around Passyunk and Mifflin.

He left before the cops came, and before he left he shook my hand and looked into my eyes.

It’s impossible to tell how much that glance weighed: it was like having to lift something,

something so ponderous and unwieldy that you wanted to call for someone to help you

and when he finally turned away, it wouldn’t have bothered me at all if I’d never seen him again.

This is going to get a little nutty now, maybe because everything was a little nutty for me back then.

Not a little. I’d been doing some nice refining. No work, no woman, hardly any friends left.

The details don’t matter. I was helpless, self-pitying, angry, inert, and right now

I was flying to Detroit to interview for a job I knew I wouldn’t get. Outside,

the clouds were packed against our windows and just as I let my book drop to look out,

we broke through into a sky so brilliant that I had to close my eyes against the glare.

I stayed like that, waiting for the stinging after-light to fade, but it seemed to pulse instead,

then suddenly it washed strangely through me, swelling, powdering,

and when my sight came back, I was facing inwards, into the very center of myself,

a dark, craggy place, and there was a sound that when I blocked the jets,

the hiss of the pressurization valves and the rattling silverware and glasses, I realized was laughter.

The way I was then, I think nothing could have shocked me. I was a well, I’d fallen in,

someone was there with me, but all I did was drift until I came to him: a figure, arms lifted,

he was moving in a great, cumbersome dance, full of patience, full of time, and that laughter,

a deep, flowing tumult of what seemed to be songs from someone else’s life.

Now the strange part. My ears were ringing, my body felt like water, but I moved again,

farther in, until I saw the face of who it was with me and it was Bob, the drunk,

or if it wasn’t him, his image filled the space, the blank, the template, better than anyone else,

and so, however doubtful it seems now, I let it be him: he was there, I let him stay.

Understand, this happened quickly. By that night, home again, I was broken again,

torn, crushed on the empty halves of my bed, but for that time, from Pittsburgh, say,

until we braked down to the terminal in Detroit, I smiled at that self in myself,

his heavy dance, his laughter winding through the wrack and detritus of what I thought I was.

Bob, I don’t know what happened to. He probably still makes the circuits of the clubs and corner bars,

and there must be times when strangers listen and he can tell it, the truth or his nightmare of it.

“I killed people,” the secret heart opening again, “and Jesus God, I didn’t even know them.”

Bread

A whole section of the city I live in has been urban renewed, some of it torn down,

some restored to what it was supposed to have been a few hundred years ago.

Once you could’ve walked blocks without hearing English, now the ghettos have been cleared,

there are parks and walkways and the houses are all owned by people who’ve moved back from the suburbs.

When I lived there, at the very edge of it where the expressway is going in now

and the buildings are still boarded with plywood or flattened altogether,

the old market was already shuttered, the shipping depots had been relocated upriver

and the only person I ever saw was a grocer who lived across from me over his empty store.

I couldn’t understand what he was doing there — it must have been years

since a customer had come in past the dead register and the icebox propped open with a carton,

but it was comforting to have him: he’d make his bed, sweep, cook for himself like a little wife

and when the constables came every week or so to tell us we were condemned,

he never paid attention so I didn’t either. I didn’t want to leave. I’d been in love,

I thought I was healing, for all I know I might have stayed forever in the grim room I was camped in

but one day some boys who must have climbed up through one of the abandoned tenements

suddenly appeared skidding and wrestling over the steep pitch of the old man’s roof

and when I shouted at them to get the hell off, he must have thought I’d meant him:

he lurched in his bed and stopped rubbing himself with the white cream he used to use on his breasts.

He looked up, our eyes met, and I think for the first time he really believed I was there.

I don’t know how long we stared at each other — I could hear the kids shrieking at me

and the road-building equipment that had just started tearing the skin from the avenue —

then his zincy fingers slowly subsided against his heart and he smiled,

a brilliant, total, incongruous smile, and even though I had no desire to,

the way afterwards I had no desire to cry when my children were born, but did,

sobbed, broke down with joy or some inadmissible apprehension, I smiled back.

It was as though we were lovers, as though, like lovers, we’d made speech again

and were listening as it gutted and fixed the space between us and then a violent,

almost physical loathing took me, for all I’d done to have ended in this place,

to myself, to everyone, to the whole business we’re given the name life for.

I could go on with this. I could call it a victory, an exemplary triumph, but I’d lie.

Sometimes the universe inside us can assume the aspect of places we’ve been

so that instead of emotions we see trees we knew or touched or a path,

and instead of the face of a thought, there’ll be an unmade bed, a car nosing from an alley.

All I know about that time is that it stayed, that something, pain or the fear of it,

makes me stop the wheel and reach to the silence beyond my eyes and it’s still there:

the empty wind, the white crosses of the renewers slashed on the doorposts,

the last, dim layers of paint loosening from the rotted sills, drifting down.

Near the Haunted Castle

Teen Gangs Fight: Girl Paralyzed By Police Bullet

— Headline

This is a story. You don’t have to think about it, it’s make-believe.

It’s like a lie, maybe not quite a lie but I don’t want you to worry about it.

The reason it’s got to be a lie is because you already know the truth and I already know it

and what difference does it make? We still can’t do anything: why kill yourself?

So here’s the story. It’s like the princess and the pea, remember?

Where they test her with mattresses and a pea and she’s supposed not to sleep

and get upset and then they’ll know she’s the princess and marry her?

Except in this version, she comes in and nobody believes it’s her and they lay her down

but instead of forty mattresses do you know what they lay her on? Money!

Of course, money! A million dollars! It’s like a hundred mattresses, it’s so soft, a thousand!

It’s how much you cut from the budget for teachers to give the policemen.

It’s how much you take from relief to trade for bullets. Soft!

And instead of the pea, what? A bullet! Brilliant! A tiny bullet stuck in at the bottom!

So then comes the prince. My prince, my beauty. Except he has holsters.

He has leather and badges. And what he does, he starts tearing the mattresses out.

Out? Don’t forget, it’s a story. Don’t forget to not worry, it’s pretend.

He’s tearing the mattresses out and then he’s stuffing them in his mouth!

This wonderful prince-mouth, this story-mouth, it holds millions, billions,

and she’s falling, slowly, or no, the pea, the bullet, is rising,

surging like some ridiculous funny snout out of the dark down there.

Does it touch you? Oh, yes, but don’t worry, this is just a fib, right?

It slides next to your skin and it’s cold and it goes in, in! as though you were a door,

as though you were the whole bedroom; in, through the backbone, through the cartilage,

the cords, then it freezes. It freezes and the prince is all gone,

this is the sleeping, the wrong-sleeping, you shouldn’t be sleeping,

the so-heaviness in the arms, the so-heaviness in the legs, don’t sleep, they’ll leave you,

they’ll throw you away … the dollars spinning, the prince leaving,

and you, at the bottom, on the no-turning, on the pea, like a story,

on the bullet, the single bullet that costs next to nothing, like one dollar.

People torture each other so they’ll tell the whole truth, right?

And study the nervous systems of the lower orders to find the truth, right?

And tell the most obviously absurd tales for the one grain of truth?

The mother puts down her book and falls asleep watching television.

On the television they go on talking.

The father’s in bed, the little gears still rip through his muscles.

The two brothers have the same dream, like Blinken and Nod, like the mayor and the president.

The sister … The sister … The heart furnace, the brain furnace, hot … hot …

Let’s go back to find where the truth is. Let’s find the beginning.

In the beginning was love, right? No, in the beginning … the bullet …

The Cave

I think most people are relieved the first time they actually know someone who goes crazy.

It doesn’t happen the way you hear about it where the person gibbers and sticks to you like an insect:

mostly there’s crying, a lot of silence, sometimes someone will whisper back to their voices.

All my friend did was sit, at home until they found him, then for hours at a time on his bed in the ward,

pointing at his eyes, chanting the same phrase over and over. “Too much fire!” he’d say. “Too much fire!”

I remember I was amazed at how raggedy he looked, then annoyed because he wouldn’t answer me

and then, when he was getting better, I used to pester him to tell me about that fire-thing.

He’d seemed to be saying he’d seen too much and I wanted to know too much what

because my obsession then was that I was somehow missing everything beyond the ordinary.

What was only real was wrong. There were secrets that could turn you into stone,

they were out of range or being kept from me, but my friend, if he knew what I meant, wouldn’t say,

so we’d talk politics or books or moon over a beautiful girl who was usually in the visiting room when we were

who mutilated herself. Every time I was there, new slashes would’ve opened out over her forearms and wrists

and once there were two brilliant medallions on her cheeks that I thought were rouge spots

but that my friend told me were scratches she’d put there with a broken light bulb when she’d run away the day before.

The way you say running away in hospitals is “eloping.” Someone who hurts themselves is a “cutter.”

How could she do it to herself? My friend didn’t think that was the question.

She’d eloped, cut, they’d brought her back and now she was waiting there again,