Collected Poems (25 page)

the unaccountable life quirks forecast in neither the soured milk nor the parents’ roaring bed.

Relationship’s theodicy: as the ever-generous deity leaves the difficult door of faith ajar

in a gesture of just-fathomable irony, so our beloved other, in the pain of partial mutuality,

moves us with its querulous “Look what you made me do!” toward the first clear glimpses of terrible self.

Medusa

Once, in Rotterdam, a whore once, in a bar, a sailors’ bar, a hooker bar, opened up her legs —

her legs, my god, were logs — lifted up her skirt, and rubbed herself, with both hands rubbed herself,

there, right there, as though what was there was something else, as though the something else

was something she just happened to have under there, something that she wanted me to see.

All I was was twenty, I was looking for a girl, the girl, the way we always, all of us,

looked for the girl, and the woman leaned back there and with both hands mauled it,

talked to it, asked it if it wanted me, laughed and asked me if I wanted it, while my virginity,

that dread I’d fought so hard to lose, stone by stone was rising back inside me like a wall.

Rush Hour

Someone has folded a coat under the boy’s head, someone else, an Arab businessman in not very good French,

is explaining to the girl, who seems to have discovered, like this, in the crowded Métro,

her lover is epileptic, that something must be done to keep the boy from swallowing his tongue:

he works a billfold between the rigidly clenched teeth as the kneeling girl silently looks on,

her expression of just-contained terror transfiguring her, generalizing her almost to the mythic,

the very image of our wonder at what can befall the most ordinary afternoon of early love.

The spasms quiet, the boy, his left ear scarlet from rubbing the wool, comes to, looks up at the girl,

and she, as the rest of us begin to move away, hesitates, then lays her cheek lightly on his brow.

Philadelphia: 1978

I’m on my way to the doctor to get the result of chest X-rays because I coughed blood

a few weeks ago while we were still in California; I am more or less a wreck of anxiety

and just as I turn the corner from Spruce Street onto Sixteenth where my doctor’s is,

a raggedy-looking guy coming toward me on the sidewalk yells to me from fifty feet away:

“I know that walk! I sure know
that
walk!” smiling broadly, with genuine good feeling.

Although I don’t recognize him — he looks druggy, wasted — I smile back, then, as we come closer,

he suddenly seems dubious, asking, “Don’t I know you?” “Maybe not.” “Weren’t you in ’Nam?”

and before I can answer, “Shit!” he spits out, “shit!” furious with me: “You fucking
shit!
”

Midas

It wasn’t any mewling squeamishness about how “hard” he’d become: if his responsibilities as chief

sometimes spilled over in impatience, with subordinates, even at home, well, that came with the territory.

And it wasn’t either any unaccounted-for sentimentality, no degrading longings for the lost good days

when never enough had somehow been just enough, before more than he’d ever need became insufficient.

No, his preoccupation had to do with his desire: not with anything he wanted and didn’t have —

what after all was left to have? — but with something askew in the very quality of desire itself.

It was as though he had to will himself to want, had to drag himself awake even to pay attention,

and then, when he’d ungaraged his lust, he’d half forget it, the ache would fade before it flowered.

The Park

In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction peculiar to the lost,

a grimy derelict is flat out on a green bench by the sandbox, gazing blankly at the children.

“Do you want to play with me?” a small boy asks another, his fine head tilted deferentially,

but the other has a lovely fire truck so he doesn’t have to answer and emphatically he doesn’t,

he just grinds his toy, its wheels immobilized with grit, along the low stone wall.

The first child sinks forlornly down and lays his palms against the earth like Buddha.

The ankles of the derelict are scabbed and swollen, torn with aching varicose and cankers.

Who will come to us now? Who will solace us? Who will take us in their healing hands?

Travelers

He drives, she mostly sleeps; when she’s awake, they quarrel, and now, in a violet dusk,

a rangy, raw-boned, efficient-looking mongrel loping toward them down the other shoulder

for no apparent reason swerves out on the roadbed just as a battered taxi is going by.

Horrible how it goes under, how it’s jammed into the asphalt, compressed, abraded, crumpled,

then is ejected out behind, still, a miracle, alive, but spinning wildly on itself, tearing,

frenzied, at its broken spine, the mindless taxi never slowing, never noticing or caring,

they slowing, only for a moment, though, as, “Go on,” she says, “go on, go on,” face averted,

she can’t look, while he, guilty as usual, fearful, fascinated and uncouth, can’t not.

Second Persons: Café de L’Abbaye

Without quite knowing it, you sit looking for your past or future in the couples strolling by,

the solitaries stalking by, saddened that you never seem to find what you’ve been looking for

although you’ve no idea or at least you tell yourself you don’t what you might be looking for,

you only have the vaguest, vagrant sense that it would be someone you knew once, lover, friend,

and lost, let drift away, not out of your life, for they were meant to drift away that way,

but from some portion of your meaning to yourself, or from the place such meaning should reside:

the other would recuperate essences, would be the link from where you were to where you would be,

if consciousness were able, finally, to hold all of this together, even not quite ever knowing why.

The Lens

Snapshots of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are scattered on the old woman’s lap.

How are you, Ma? her son asks, then, before she answers, to the nurse: How’s she doing?

The old woman, smiling, tilts her head back, centering her son in the thick, unfamiliar lenses.

Her head moves left, then right, farther back now, forward, then finally she has and holds him.

She is beaming now, an impression of almost too-rapt attentiveness, admiration, even adoration.

Do you want to eat, Ma? the son asks; the woman starts to nod and in doing so loses him again

and has to track him again, that same, slow, methodically circular, back-and-forth targeting in.

You want to go downstairs for lunch? the son asks, a bit impatient: Ma, you want to get a bite?

The Body

Jed says: How come I’m afraid to climb on the jungle game when even the littler kids aren’t?

I say: But you did go up on it, I saw you before, you were going across the vine bridge.

Jed says: Yeah, I went up there, but I was afraid of the hard part, where you swing down.

I say: Well, people do things at different rates, there are things you can do that they can’t.

Jed says: Am I a coward? Why couldn’t I just swing right down there; I’m like the cowardly lion.

I say: When I was a kid I was just like you, I was always timid, I thought I was weak.

I say: I started doing sports late, like you, but look, now you’re swimming and everything.

Jed says: I’m tired of swimming. What time is it? Can I get a crêpe? I don’t think I’m weak.

Racists

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa!
the butcher we used to patronize in the Rue Cadet market,

beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the import of which I missed

but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop of definitely lower quality

until I convinced myself that probably I’d misunderstood that other thing and could come back.

Today another black man stopped, asking something that again I didn’t catch, and the butcher,

who at the moment was unloading his rotisserie, slipping the chickens off their heavy spit,

as he answered — how get this right? — casually but accurately
brandished
the still-hot metal,

so the other, whatever he was there for, had subtly to lean away a little, so as not to flinch.

The Dream

How well I have repressed the dream of death I had after the war when I was nine in Newark.

It would be nineteen-forty-six; my older best friend tells me what the atom bomb will do,

consume me from within, with fire, and that night, as I sat, bolt awake, in agony, it did:

I felt my stomach flare and flame, the edges of my heart curl up and char like burning paper.

All there was was waiting for the end, all there was was sadness, for in that awful dark,

that roar that never ebbed, that frenzied inward fire, I knew that everyone I loved was dead,

I knew that consciousness itself was dead, the universe shucked clean of mind as I was of my innards.

All the earth around me heaved and pulsed and sobbed; the orient and immortal air was ash.

Dawn

The first morning of mist after days of draining, unwavering heat along the shore: a
breath:

a plume of sea fog actually visible, coherent, intact, with all of the quieter mysteries

of the sea implicit in its inconspicuous, unremarkable gathering in the weary branches

of the drought-battered spruce on its lonely knoll; it thins now, sidles through the browning needles,

is penetrated sharply by a sparrow swaying precipitously on a drop-glittering twiglet,

then another bird, unseen, is there, a singer, chattering, and another, long purls of warble,

which also from out of sight insinuate themselves into that dim, fragile, miniature cloud,

already now, almost with reluctance, beginning its dissipation in the overpowering sunlight.

II

Reading: Winter

He’s not sure how to get the jack on — he must have recently bought the car, although it’s an ancient,

impossibly decrepit, barely holding-together Chevy: he has to figure out how each part works,

the base plate, the pillar, the thing that hooks to the bumper, even the four-armed wrench,

before he can get it all together, knock the hubcap off and wrestle free the partly rusted nuts.

This all happens on a bed of sheet ice: it’s five below, the coldest January in a century.

Cars slip and skid a yard away from him, the flimsy jack is desperately, precariously balanced,

and meanwhile, when he goes into the trunk to get the spare, a page of old newspaper catches his attention

and he pauses, rubbing his hands together, shoulders hunched, for a full half minute, reading.

Reading: The Subway

First he finishes
The Chief,
“New York’s Civil Employee’s Weekly,” then folds it carefully

and slips it into his much-wrinkled
Duane Reade
shopping bag (“The Chain of Experience”),

from which he retrieves a thick, green, double-cellophane-bound volume,
Successful Investing,

balancing it on the waistband of his slick designer jeans:
Lewis,
they say, instead of
Levi’s.

The train is going very fast, the car sways frighteningly, almost lifting us from our seats,

but he stands firmly planted, with an imperturbably athletic dexterity, not even holding on,

only glancing up from time to time to gaze with an apparently real interest at an advertisement —

Un buen baño con jabón Ivory
— as though to decathect a moment, letting go, the better to absorb.

Reading: The Bus

As she reads, she rolls something around in her mouth, hard candy it must be, from how long it lasts.

She’s short, roundish, gray-haired, pleasantly pugnacious-looking, like Grace Paley, and her book,

Paint Good and Fast,
must be fascinating: she hasn’t lifted her eyes since Thirty-fourth Street,

even when the corner of a page sticks so that she has to pause a bit to lick her index finger …

No, now she does, she must have felt me thinking about her: she blinks, squints out the window,

violently arches her eyebrows as though what she’d just read had really to be nailed down,

and, stretching, she unzips a pocket of her blue backpack, rummages through it, and comes out with,

yes, hard candy, red and white, a little sackful, one of which she offers with a smile to me.

Reading: The Gym

The bench he’s lying on isn’t nearly wide enough for the hefty bulk of his torso and shoulders.

Shielding his eyes with his sheaf of scrawled-on yellow paper from the bare bulb over his head,

legs lifted in a dainty V, he looks about to tip, but catches himself with unconscious shrugs.

Suddenly he rises — he’s still streaming from his session on the Nautilus and heavy bag —

goes into the shower, comes back, dries off with a gray, too-small towel and sits to read again,

applying as he does an oily, evil-looking lotion from a dark brown bottle onto his legs and belly.

Next to his open locker, a ragged equipment bag, on top a paperback:
The Ethical System of Hume.

The smell of wintergreen and steam-room steam; from the swimming pool echoes of children screaming.

Reading: The Cop

Usually a large-caliber, dull-black, stockless machine gun hangs from a sling at his hip

where a heavily laden cartridge belt in the same blue as his special-forces uniform cinches his waist,