Collected Poems (15 page)

Why, after all the fuss, a park, I don’t know, but at any rate, it’s not a pleasant place,

reinforced, bleak concrete mostly; a fountain, ringed with granite, out of order, dry.

Two busloads of retarded kids were playing with their teachers on the asphalt ball field,

twittering with glee and shrieking as they lumbered from home plate to center field and back.

A whole platoon of them, the smallest ones — adorable — had imitation football helmets.

Some food chain’s plastic giveaways, the things had eagles stenciled on them, and the letters GIANTS.

The other benches were populated with old women, the Greystone ladies, back to claim their turf, I thought.

It was mild and sunny. I let my eyes close, and dozed and dreamed, listening to the children.

The Gift

I have found what pleases my friend’s chubby, rosy, gloriously shining-eyed year-old daughter.

She chirps, flirts with me, pulls herself up by my pants leg, and her pleasure is that I lift her,

high, by her thighs, over my head, and then that I let her suddenly fall, plunge, plummet,

down through my hands, to be, at the last instant, under the arms, in mid-gasp, caught.

She laughs when I do it, she giggles, roars; she is flushed with it, glowing, elated, ecstatic.

When I put her down, she whines, whimpers, claws at my lap:
Again,
she is saying …
Again: More.

I pick up my glass, though, my friend and I chat, the child keeps at me but I pay no mind.

Once I would never have done that, released her like that, not until, satisfied, sated,

no need left, no “more,” nothing would have been left for her but to fold sighing in my arms.

Once it was crucial that I be able to think of myself as unusually gifted with children,

and, even discounting the effort I put in it all, the premeditation, the scheming, I was.

I’d studied what they would want — at this age to rise, to fall, be tickled, caressed.

Older, to be heeded, attended: I had stories, dreams, ways to confide, take confidence back.

But beyond that, children did love me, I think, and beyond that, there seemed more.

I could calm crying babies, even when they were furious, shrieking, the mothers at wits’ end.

I had rituals I’d devised, whisperings, clicks; soft, blowy whistles, a song-voice.

A certain firmness of hand, I remember I thought: concentration, a deepening of the gaze.

Maybe they’d be surprised to find me with them at all instead of the mother or father,

but, always, they’d stop, sometimes so abruptly, with such drama, that even I would be taken aback.

Tears, sometimes, would come to my eyes: I would be flooded with thanks that I’d been endowed with this,

or had resurrected it from some primitive source of grace I imagined we’d bartered away.

What else did I have? Not very much: being alone most of the time, retrospectively noble,

but bitter back then, brutal, abrasive, corrosive — I was wearing away with it like a tooth.

And my sexual hunger, how a breast could destroy me, or a haunch: not having the beautiful haunch.

… And love, too, I suppose, yes, now and then, for a girl, never for other men’s wives yet …

Where did the children fit in, though, that odd want to entrance and enchant, to give bliss?

Did no one think I was mad? Didn’t I ever wonder myself if I was using the children,

whether needs or compulsions, at least sublimations, were unaccounted for in my passion?

No, never, more sense to ask if those vulnerable creatures of the heart used me.

The children were light — I thought they pertained to my wish to be pure, a saint.

I never conjoined them with anything else, not with the loneliness or the vile desire,

not with my rages or the weary, nearly irrepressible urges I’d feel to let go, to die.

The children were light, or let intimations of light through — they were the way to the soul:

I wanted to think myself, too, a matrix of innocent warmth instead of the sorrowing brute I was,

stumbling out by myself into the moaning darkness again, thrust again into that murderous prowl.

On Learning of a Friend’s Illness

for James Wright

The morning is so gray that the grass is gray and the side of the white horse grazing

is as gray and hard as the harsh, insistent wind gnawing the iron surface of the river,

while far off on the other shore, the eruptions from the city seem for once more docile and benign

than the cover of nearly indistinguishable clouds they unfurl to insinuate themselves among.

It’s a long while since the issues of mortality have taken me this way. Shivering,

I tramp the thin, bitten track to the first rise, the first descent, and, toiling up again,

I startle out of their brushy hollow the whole herd of wild-eyed, shaggy, unkempt mares,

their necks, rumps, withers, even faces begrimed with patches of the gluey, alluvial mud.

All of them at once, their nostrils flared, their tails flung up over their backs like flags,

are suddenly in flight, plunging and shoving along the narrow furrow of the flood ditch,

bursting from its mouth, charging headlong towards the wires at the pasture’s end,

banking finally like one great, graceful wing to scatter down the hillside out of sight.

Only the oldest of them all stays with me, and she, sway-backed, over at the knees,

blind, most likely deaf, still, when I approach her, swings her meager backside to me,

her ears flattening, the imperturbable opals of her eyes gazing resolutely over the bare,

scruffy fields, the scattered pines and stands of third-growth oak I called a forest once.

I slip up on her, hook her narrow neck, haul her to me, hold her for a moment, let her go.

I hardly can remember anymore what there ever was out here that keeps me coming back

to watch the land be amputated by freeways and developments, and the mares, in their sanctuary,

thinning out, reverting, becoming less and less approachable, more and more the symbols of themselves.

How cold it is. The hoofprints in the hardened muck are frozen lakes, their rims atilt,

their glazed opacities skewered with straw, muddled with the ancient, ubiquitous manure.

I pick a morsel of it up: scentless, harmless, cool, as desiccated as an empty hive,

it crumbles in my hand, its weightless, wingless filaments taken from me by the wind and strewn

in a long, surprising arc that wavers once then seems to burst into a rain of dust.

No comfort here, nothing to say, to try to say, nothing for anyone. I start the long trek back,

the horses nowhere to be seen, the old one plodding wearily away to join them,

the river, bitter to look at, and the passionless earth, and the grasses rushing ceaselessly in place.

Combat

Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland … Es war ein Traum.

—
Heinrich Heine

I’ve been trying for hours to figure out who I was reminded of by the welterweight fighter

I saw on television this afternoon all but ruin his opponent with counter-punches and now I have it.

It was a girl I knew once, a woman: when he was being interviewed after the knockout, he was her exactly,

the same rigorous carriage, same facial structure — sharp cheekbones, very vivid eyebrows —

even the sheen of perspiration — that’s how I’d remember her, of course … Moira was her name —

and the same quality in the expression of unabashed self-involvement, softened at once with a grave,

almost oversensitive attentiveness to saying with absolute precision what was to be said.

Lovely Moira! Could I ever have forgotten you? No, not forgotten, only not had with me for a time

that dark, slow voice, those vulnerable eyes, those ankles finely tendoned as a thoroughbred’s.

We met I don’t remember where — everything that mattered happened in her apartment, in the living room,

with her mother, whom she lived with, watching us, and in Moira’s bedroom down the book-lined corridor.

The mother, I remember, was so white, not all that old but white: everything, hair, skin, lips, was ash,

except her feet, which Moira would often hold on her lap to massage and which were a deep,

frightening yellow, the skin thickened and dense, horned with calluses and chains of coarse, dry bunions,

the nails deformed and brown, so deeply buried that they looked like chips of tortoiseshell.

Moira would rub the poor, sad things, twisting and kneading at them with her strong hands;

the mother’s eyes would be closed, occasionally she’d mutter something under her breath in German.

That was their language — they were, Moira said, refugees, but the word didn’t do them justice.

They were well-off, very much so, their apartment was, in fact, the most splendid thing I’d ever seen.

There were lithographs and etchings — some Klees, I think; a Munch — a lot of very flat oriental rugs,

voluptuous leather furniture and china so frail the molds were surely cast from butterflies.

I never found out how they’d brought it all with them: what Moira told me was of displaced-person camps,

a pilgrimage on foot from Prussia and the Russians, then Frankfurt, Rotterdam, and here, “freedom.”

The trip across the war was a complicated memory for her; she’d been very young, just in school,

what was most important to her at that age was her father, who she’d hardly known and who’d just died.

He was a general, she told me, the chief of staff or something of “the war against the Russians.”

He’d been one of the conspirators against Hitler and when the plot failed he’d committed suicide,

all of which meant not very much to me, however good the story was (and I heard it often),

because people then were still trying to forget the war, it had been almost ignored, even in school,

and I had no context much beyond what my childhood comic books had given me to hang any of it on.

Moira was fascinated by it, though, and by their journey, and whenever she wanted to offer me something —

when I’d despair, for instance, of ever having from her what I had to have — it would be, again, that tale.

In some ways it was, I think, her most precious possession, and every time she’d unfold it

she’d seem to have forgotten having told me before: each time the images would be the same —

a body by the roadside, a child’s — awful — her mother’d tried to hide her eyes but she’d jerked free;

a white ceramic cup of sweet, cold milk in the dingy railroad station of some forgotten city,

then the boat, the water, black, the webs of rushing foam she’d made up creatures for, who ran beneath the waves

and whose occupation was to snare the boat, to snarl it, then … she didn’t know what then,

and I’d be hardly listening anyway by then, one hand on a thigh, the other stroking,

with such compassion, such generous concern, such cunning twenty-one-year-old commiseration,

her hair, her perfect hair, then the corner of her mouth, then, so far away, the rich rim of a breast.

We’d touch that way — petting was the word then — like lovers, with the mother right there with us,

probably, I remember thinking, because we weren’t lovers, not really, not
that
way (not yet, I’d think),

but beyond that there seemed something else, some complicity between them, some very adult undertaking

that I sensed but couldn’t understand and that astonished me as did almost everything about them.

I never really liked the mother — I was never given anything to like — but I was awed by her.

If I was left alone with her — Moira on the phone, say — I stuttered, or was stricken mute.

It felt like I was sitting there with time itself: everything seemed somehow finished for her,

but there seemed, still, to be such depths, or such ascensions, to her unblinking brooding.

She was like a footnote to a text, she seemed to know it, suffer it, and, if I was wildly uneasy with her,

my eyes battering shyly in their chutes, it was my own lack, my own unworthiness that made it so.

Moira would come back, we’d talk again, I can’t imagine what about except, again, obsessively, the father,

his dying, his estates, the stables, servants, all they’d given up for the madness of that creature Hitler.

I’d listen to it all again, and drift, looking in her eyes, and pine, pondering her lips.

I knew that I was dying of desire — down of cheek; subtle, alien scent — that I’d never felt desire like this.

I was so distracted that I couldn’t even get their name right: they’d kept the real pronunciation,

I’d try to ape what I remembered of my grandmother’s Polish Yiddish but it still eluded me

and Moira’s little joke before she’d let me take her clothes off was that we’d have lessons, “Von C —” “No, Von
C
—”

Later, when I was studying the Holocaust, I found it again, the name, Von C —, in Shirer’s
Reich:

it had, indeed, existed, and it had, yes, somewhere on the Eastern front, blown its noble head off.

I wasn’t very moved. I wasn’t in that city anymore, I’d ceased long before ever to see them,

and besides, I’d changed by then — I was more aware of history and was beginning to realize,

however tardily, that one’s moral structures tended to be air unless you grounded them in real events.

Everything I did learn seemed to negate something else, everything was more or less up for grabs,

but the war, the Germans, all I knew about that now — no, never: what a complex triumph to have a nation,

all of it, beneath you, what a splendid culmination for the adolescence of one’s ethics!

As for Moira, as for her mother, what recompense for those awful hours, those ecstatic unaccomplishments.