Collected Poems (18 page)

The gas station? Texaco, Esso — I don’t know. They were just words anyway then, just what their signs said.

I wouldn’t have understood the first thing about monopoly or imperialist or oppression.

It’s dawn. It’s so late. Even then, when I was never tired, I’m just holding on.

Slumped on my friend’s shoulder, I watch the relentless, wordless misery of the route twenty-two sky

that seems to be filming my face with a grainy oil I keep trying to rub off or in.

Why are we here? Because one of my friends, in the men’s room over there, has blue balls.

He has to jerk off. I don’t know what that means, “blue balls,” or why he has to do that —

it must be important to have to stop here after this long night, but I don’t ask.

I’m just trying, I think, to keep my head as empty as I can for as long as I can.

One of my other friends is asleep. He’s so ugly, his mouth hanging, slack and wet.

Another — I’ll never see this one again — stares from the window as though he were frightened.

Here’s what we’ve done. We were in Times Square, a pimp found us, corralled us, led us somewhere,

down a dark street, another dark street, up dark stairs, dark hall, dark apartment,

where his whore, his girl or his wife or his mother for all I know, dragged herself from her sleep,

propped herself on an elbow, gazed into the dark hall, and agreed, for two dollars each, to take care of us.

Take care of us.
Some of the words that come through me now seem to stay, to hook in.

My friend in the bathroom is taking so long. The filthy sky must be starting to lighten.

It took me a long time, too, with the woman, I mean. Did I mention that she, the woman, the whore or mother,

was having her time and all she would deign do was to blow us? Did I say that? Deign? Blow?

What a joy, though, the idea was in those days. Blown! What a thing to tell the next day.

She only deigned, though, no more. She was like a machine. When I lift her back to me now,

there’s nothing there but that dark, curly head, working, a machine, up and down, and now,

Freud, Marx, Fathers, tell me, what am I, doing this, telling this, on her, on myself,

hammering it down, cementing it, sealing it in, but a machine, too?
Why am I doing this?

I still haven’t read Augustine. I don’t understand Chomsky that well. Should I?

My friend at last comes back. Maybe the right words were there all along.
Complicity. Wonder.

How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake.
Grace. Love. Take care of us. Please.

Tar

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.

All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,

and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them

as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.

After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind

if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven

when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,

we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,

the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.

Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,

setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.

The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.

When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.

Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,

a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,

before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.

In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,

it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,

the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.

When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,

work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,

the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.

Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.

However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:

we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.

Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,

would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.

I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,

the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.

I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.

I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.

But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.

Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.

By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

One of the Muses

Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is …

— Plato,
Symposium

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there we should like to say, is a
spirit.

— Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations

1.

I will not grace you with a name … Even “you,” however modest the convention: not here.

No need here for that much presence. Let “you” be “she,” and let the choice, incidentally,

be dictated not by bitterness or fear — a discretion, simply, the most inoffensive decorum.

This was, after all, if it needs another reason, long ago, and not just in monthly, yearly time,

not only in that house of memory events, the shadowed, off-sized rooms of which

it amuses us to flip the doors of like a deck of cards, but also in the much more malleable,

mazy, convoluted matter of the psyche itself, especially the wounded psyche,

especially the psyche stricken once with furrows of potential which are afterwards untenanted:

voids, underminings, to be buttressed with the webbiest filaments of day-to-dayness.

2.

Long ago, in another place, it seems sometimes in another realm of being altogether,

one of those dimensions we’re told intersects our own, rests there side by side with ours,

liable to be punched across into by charity or prayer, other skullings at the muscle.

How much of her essential being can or should be carried over into now isn’t clear to me.

That past which holds her, yellowed with allusiveness, is also charged with unreality:

a tiny theater in whose dim light one senses fearfully the contaminating powers of illusion.

Here, in a relatively stable present, no cries across the gorge, no veils atremble,

it sometimes seems as though she may have been a fiction utterly, a symbol or a system of them.

In any case, what good conceivably could come at this late date of recapitulating my afflictions?

3.

Apparently, it would have to do with what that ancient desperation means to me today.

We recollect, call back, surely not to suffer; is there something then for me, today,

something lurking, potent with another loss, this might be meant to alter or avert?

No, emphatically: let it be that simple. And not any sort of longing backwards, either:

no desire to redeem defeats, no humiliations to atone for, no expiations or maledictions.

Why bother then? Why inflict it on myself again, that awful time, those vacillations and frustrations?

It’s to be accounted for, that’s all. Something happened, the time has come to find its place.

Let it just be that: not come to terms with, not salvage something from, not save.

There was this, it’s to be accounted for: “she,” for that, will certainly suffice.

4.

She had come to me …
She
to
me …
I know that, I knew it then, however much, at the end,

trying so to hang on to it, to keep something of what by then was nothing, I came to doubt,

to call the memory into question, that futile irreducible of what had happened and stopped happening.

She, to me, and with intensity, directness, aggression even, an aggression that may have been,

I think, the greater part of my involvement to begin with: in the sweep of her insistence,

it was as though she’d simply shouldered past some debilitating shyness on my part,

some misgiving, some lack of faith I’d never dared acknowledge in myself but which, now,

I suddenly understood had been a part of my most basic being: a tearing shoal of self,

which, brought to light now, harrowingly recognized, had flowed away beneath me.

5.

Later, when everything had turned, fallen, but when we still found ways, despite it all,

through our impediments — my grief, her ever-stricter panels of reserve — that first consummation,

her power, the surprising counter-power I answered with, came to seem a myth, a primal ceremony.

Later, and not much later because the start and end were, although I couldn’t bear to think it,

nearly one, it became almost a ritual, not even ritual, a repetition, and I had to recognize,

at last, how few times that first real, unqualified soaring had actually been enacted.

Maybe several times, maybe only once: once and once — that would have been enough,

enough to keep me there, to keep me trying to recuperate it, so long after I’d begun to feel,

and to acknowledge to myself, her searing hesitations, falterings, awkwardnesses.

6.

Her withholdings were so indefinite at first, it wasn’t hard to fend them off, deny them.

The gasp that seemed — but did it really? — to extend a beat into a sigh, and then the sigh,

did it go on an extra instant to become a heave of tedium, impatience, resignation?

… Then the silences: I could have, if I’d wanted to, dared to, been certain of the silences.

They were in time, had duration, could be measured: how I must have wanted not to know.

I didn’t even name them that at first, “silence,” no: lapses, inattentions, respites.

It feels as though I’d begun to try to cope with them before I’d actually remarked them.

They weren’t silences until they’d flared and fused, until her silences became her silence,

until we seemed, to my chagrin, my anguish, horror, to be wholly in and of them.

7.

Her silence: how begin to speak of it? I think sometimes I must have simply gaped.

There were harmonies in it, progressions, colors, resolutions: it was a symphony, a tone poem.

I seemed to live in it, it was always with me, a matrix, background sound: surf, wind.

Sometimes, when I’d try to speak myself, I’d find it had insinuated into my voice:

it would haul at me; I’d go hoarse, metallic, hollow, nothing that I said entailed.

More and more her presence seemed preceded by it: a quiet on the stair, hushed hall.

I’d know before I heard her step that she was with me, and when she’d go, that other,

simpler silence, after all the rest, was like a coda, magnificent, absorbing,

one last note reverberating on and on, subdividing through its physics toward eternity.

8.

At the same time, though, it was never, never quite, defined as being final.

She always, I have no idea how, left her clef of reticence ajar: a lace, a latticework.

I thought — I think that I was meant to think — it was provisional, a stopping place.

And, to exacerbate things, it became her: with it, and within it, she seemed to promise more.

The sheer
focus
it demanded; such shadings were implied in how she turned in it;

the subtleties I hadn’t been allowed, the complexities not fathomed: she was being re-enhanced by it.

What was inaccessible in her, what not, what — even as I’d hold her, even as we’d touch —

was being drawn away, marked off, forbidden: such resonance between potential and achieved.

The vibrations, though, as subtle as they were, crystalline, were tearing me apart.

9.

Sometimes, it would seem as though, still with me, she had already left me.

Sometimes, later, when she really had left, left again, I would seem to ache,

not with the shocks or after-shocks of passion, but with simply holding her, holding on.

Sometimes, so flayed, I would think that I was ready to accept defeat, ready to concede.

I may have even wished for hints of concrete evidence from her that she wanted us to stop.

She could, I thought, with the gentlest move, have disengaged: I was ready for it …