Collected Poems (12 page)

those clowny stigmata of lord knows what on her, as tranquil and seductive as ever.

I used to storm when I’d leave her there with him. She looked so vulnerable.

All the hours they’d have. I tormented myself imagining how they’d come together,

how they’d tell each other the truths I thought I had to understand to live,

then how they’d kiss, their lips, chaste and reverent, rushing over the forgiven surfaces.

Tonight, how long afterwards, watching my wife undress, letting my gaze go so everything blurs

but the smudges of her nipples and hair and the wonderful lumpy graces of her pregnancy,

I still can bring it back: those dismal corridors, the furtive nods, the moans I thought were sexual

and the awful lapses that seemed vestiges of exaltations I would never have,

but now I know whatever in the mystery I was looking for, whatever brute or cloud I thought eluded me,

isn’t lost in the frenzy of one soul or another, but next to us, in the touch, between.

Lying down, fumbling for the light, moving into the shadow with my son or daughter, I find it again:

the prism of hidden sorrow, the namelessness of nothing and nothing shuddering across me,

and then the warmth, clinging and brightening, the hide, the caul, the first mind.

Hog Heaven

for James Havard

It stinks. It stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.

It stinks in the mansions and it stinks in the shacks and the carpeted offices,

in the beds and the classrooms and out in the fields where there’s no one.

It just stinks. Sniff and feel it come up: it’s like death coming up.

Take one foot, ignore it long enough, leave it on the ground long enough

because you’re afraid to stop, even to love, even to be loved,

it’ll stink worse than you can imagine, as though the whole air was meat pressing your eyelids,

as though you’d been caught, hung up from the earth

and all the stinks of the fear drain down and your toes are the valves dripping

the giant stinks of the pain and the death and the radiance.

Old people stink, with their teeth and their hot rooms, and the kiss,

the age-kiss, the death-kiss, it comes like a wave and you want to fall down and be over.

And money stinks: the little threads that go through it like veins through an eye,

each stinks — if you hold it onto your lip it goes bad, it stinks like a vein going bad.

And Christ stank: he knew how the slaves would be stacked into the holds and he took it —

the stink of the vomit and shit and of somebody just rolling over and plunging in with his miserable seed.

And the seed stinks. And the fish carrying it upstream and the bird eating the fish

and you the bird’s egg, the dribbles of yolk, the cycle: the whole thing stinks.

The intellect stinks and the moral faculty, like things burning, like the cave under justice,

and the good quiet men, like oceans of tears squeezed into one handful, they stink,

and the whole consciousness, like something plugged up, stinks, like something cut off.

Life stinks and death stinks and god and your hand touching your face

and every breath, daring to turn, daring to come back from the stop: the turn stinks

and the last breath, the real one, the one where everyone troops into your bed

and piles on — oh, that one stinks best! It stays on your mouth

and who you kiss now knows life and knows death, knows how it would be to fume in a nostril

and the thousand desires that stink like the stars and the voice heard through the stars

and each time — milk sour, egg sour, sperm sour — each time — dirt, friend, father —

each time — mother, tree, breath — each time — breath and breath and breath —

each time the same stink, the amazement, the wonder to do this and it flares,

this, and it stinks, this: it stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks.

Blades

When I was about eight, I once stabbed somebody, another kid, a little girl.

I’d been hanging around in front of the supermarket near our house

and when she walked by, I let her have it, right in the gap between her shirt and her shorts

with a piece of broken-off car antenna I used to carry around in my pocket.

It happened so fast I still don’t know how I did it: I was as shocked as she was

except she squealed and started yelling as though I’d plunged a knife in her

and everybody in the neighborhood gathered around us, then they called the cops,

then the girl’s mother came running out of the store saying, “What happened? What happened?”

and the girl screamed, “He stabbed me!” and I screamed back, “I did not!” and she you did too

and me I didn’t and we were both crying hysterically by that time.

Somebody pulled her shirt up and it was just a scratch but we went on and on

and the mother, standing between us, seemed to be absolutely terrified.

I still remember how she watched first one of us and then the other with a look of complete horror —

You did too! I did not! — as though we were both strangers, as though it was some natural disaster

she was beholding that was beyond any mode of comprehension so all she could do

was stare speechlessly at us, and then another expression came over her face,

one that I’d never seen before, that made me think she was going to cry herself

and sweep both of us, the girl and me, into her arms to hold us against her.

The police came just then, though, quieted everyone down, put the girl and the mother

into a squad-car to take to the hospital and me in another to take to jail

except they really only took me around the corner and let me go because the mother and daughter were black

and in those days you had to do something pretty terrible to get into trouble that way.

I don’t understand how we twist these things or how we get them straight again

but I relived that day I don’t know how many times before I realized I had it all wrong.

The boy wasn’t me at all, he was another kid: I was just there.

And it wasn’t the girl who was black, but him. The mother was real, though.

I really had thought she was going to embrace them both

and I had dreams about her for years afterwards: that I’d be being born again

and she’d be lifting me with that same wounded sorrow or she would suddenly appear out of nowhere,

blotting out everything but a single, blazing wing of holiness.

Who knows the rest? I can still remember how it felt the old way.

How I make my little thrust, how she crushes us against her, how I turn and snarl

at the cold circle of faces around us because something’s torn in me,

some ancient cloak of terror we keep on ourselves because we’ll do anything,

anything, not to know how silently we knell in the mouth of death

and not to obliterate the forgiveness and the lies we offer one another and call innocence.

This is innocence. I touch her, we kiss.

And this. I’m here or not here. I can’t tell. I stab her. I stab her again. I still can’t.

Friends

My friend Dave knew a famous writer who used to have screwdrivers for breakfast.

He’d start with half gin and half juice and the rest of the day he’d sit with the same glass

in the same chair and add gin. The drink would get paler and paler, finally he’d pass out.

Every day was the same. Sometimes, when I’m making milk for the baby, cutting the thick,

sweet formula from the can with sterilized water, the baby, hungry again, still hungry,

rattling his rickety, long-legged chair with impatience, I think of that story.

Dave says the writer could talk like a god. He’d go on for hours in the same thought.

In his books, though, you never find out why he drove so hard toward his death.

I have a death in my memory that lately the word itself always brings back. I’m not quite sure why.

A butterfly, during a downpour one afternoon, hooked onto my screen. I thought it was waiting.

The light was just so. Its eyes caught the flare so it seemed to be watching me in my bed.

When I got up to come closer and it should have been frightened, it hung on.

After the rain, it was still there. Its eyes were still shining. I touched the screen

and it fell to the ledge. There were blue streaks on its wings. A while later, the wind took it.

The writer drowned in his puke or his liver exploded — it depends on the story.

He was a strong man, for all that. He must have thought it was taking forever.

Dave says when he’d wake with amnesia, he wouldn’t want you to fill in the gaps.

He just wanted his gin and his juice. From all that you hear, he was probably right.

When we were young and we’d drink our minds to extinction, that was the best part: you did this, you said that.

It was like hearing yourself in a story. Sometimes real life is almost the same,

as though you were being recited; you can almost tell what a thought is before it arrives.

When I follow my mind now, another butterfly happens. It’s not hard to see why.

It’s the country this time. The butterfly walked over the white table and onto my hand.

I lifted it and it held. My friends were amazed. Catherine tried, too, but the butterfly fluttered away.

I put my hand back in the air and it found me again. It came down on a finger and clung.

Its sails listed. I could see it untwirling the barb of its tongue on my nail. I shook it away.

Those were the days and the nights when Catherine and I were first falling in love.

Sometimes, in the dark, I’d still be afraid but she’d touch my arm and I’d sleep.

The visions I had then were all death: they were hideous and absurd and had nothing to do with my life.

All I feel now about death is a sadness, not to be here with everyone I love,

but in those days, I’d dream, I’d be wracked, Catherine would have to reach over to hold me.

In the morning, it would be better. Even at dawn, when I’d wake first, trembling, gasping for air,

I’d burrow back down, Catherine would open her eyes, smiling, with me at her breast, and it would be better.

The Shade

A summer cold. No rash. No fever. Nothing. But a dozen times during the night I wake

to listen to my son whimpering in his sleep, trying to snort the sticky phlegm out of his nostrils.

The passage clears, silence, nothing. I cross the room, groping for the warm,

elusive creature of his breath and my heart lunges, stutters, tries to race away;

I don’t know from what, from my imagination, from life itself, maybe from understanding too well

and being unable to do anything about how much of my anxiety is always for myself.

Whatever it was, I left it when the dawn came. There’s a park near here

where everyone who’s out of work in our neighborhood comes to line up in the morning.

The converted school buses shuttling hands to the cannery fields in Jersey were just rattling away when I got there

and the small-time contractors, hiring out cheap walls, cheap ditches, cheap everything,

were loading laborers onto the sacks of plaster and concrete in the backs of their pickups.

A few housewives drove by looking for someone to babysit or clean cellars for them,

then the gates of the local bar unlaced and whoever was left drifted in out of the wall of heat

already rolling in with the first fists of smoke from the city incinerators.

It’s so quiet now, I can hear the sparrows foraging scraps of garbage on the paths.

The stove husk chained as a sign to the store across the street creaks in the last breeze of darkness.

By noon, you’d have to be out of your mind to want to be here: the park will reek of urine,

bodies will be sprawled on the benches, men will wrestle through the surf of broken bottles,

but even now, watching the leaves of the elms softly lifting toward the day, softly falling back,

all I see is fear forgiving fear on every page I turn; all I know is every time I try to change it,

I say it again: my wife, my child … my home, my work, my sorrow.

If this were the last morning of the world, if time had finally moved inside us and erupted

and we were Agamemnon again, Helen again, back on that faint, beginning planet

where even the daily survivals were giants, filled with light, I think I’d still be here,

afraid or not enough afraid, silently howling the names of death over the grass and asphalt.

The morning goes on, the sun burning, the earth burning, and between them, part of me lifts and starts back,

past the wash of dead music from the bar, the drinker reeling on the curb, the cars coughing alive,

and part, buried in itself, stays, forever, blinking into the glare, freezing.

With Ignorance

With ignorance begins a knowledge the first characteristic of which is ignorance.

— Kierkegaard

1.

Again and again. Again lips, again breast, again hand, thigh, loin and bed and bed

after bed, the hunger, hunger again, need again, the rising, the spasm and needing again.

Flesh, lie, confusion and loathing, the scabs of clear gore, the spent seed and the spurt

of desire that seemed to generate from itself, from its own rising and spasm.

Everything waste, everything would be or was, the touching, the touch and the touch back.

Everything rind, scar, without sap, without meaning or seed, and everyone, everyone else,

every slip or leap into rage, every war, flame, sob, it was there, too, the stifling, the hushed,

malevolent frenzy and croak of desire, again and again, the same hunger, same need.

Touch me, hold me, sorrow and sorrow, the emptied, emptied again, touched again.