Collected Poems (26 page)

and usually he stands directly in the doorway, so that people have to edge their way around him —

there was some sort of bombing in the building, and presumably this is part of his function.

He often seems ill at ease and seems to want to have but doesn’t quite because he’s so young

that menacingly vacant expression policemen assume when they’re unsure of themselves or lonely,

but still, today, when I noticed him back in the hallway reading what looked like a political pamphlet,

I was curious and thought I’d just stop, go back, peek in, but then I thought, no, not.

Reading: Early Sorrow

The father has given his year-old son
Le Monde
to play with in his stroller and the baby does

just what you’d expect: grabs it, holds it out in front of him, stares importantly at it,

makes emphatic and dramatic sounds of declamation, great pronouncements of analytic probity,

then tears it, pulls a page in half, pulls the half in quarters, shoves a hearty shred in his mouth —

a delicious editorial on unemployment and recession, a tasty
jeu de mots
on government ineptitude.

He startles in amazement when the father takes the paper back from him:
What in heaven’s name?

Indignation, impotence, frustration, outrage, petulance, rebellion, realism, resignation.

Slumping back, disgusted …
Hypocrite lecteur, semblable …
Just wait, he’s muttering, just wait …

Suicide: Elena

She was fourteen and a half; she’d hanged herself: how had she ever found the resource for it,

the sheer
strength,
as frail as she was, skinny even for her age, breastless and hipless,

with a voice so subdued and without resonance she seemed to play it to herself, like a clavichord?

My co-therapist had made a “megaphone” for her by tearing out the bottom of a paper coffee cup.

She agreed to try it, then seemed relieved to have it, becoming more voluble and animated.

She only visited our group once, though, with a boy I didn’t see again until the day it happened.

“Do you know about Elena?” I asked him; I said the name the Spanish way, “El-
lay
-nah” —

I knew a Mexican Elena then, from Monterey — “El-
leh
-nah,” the boy said, “not El-
lay
-nah. Yeah.”

Suicide: Ludie

The whole time I’ve been walking down the block the public phone at the corner’s been ringing

so when I get there just to try to help somebody out I stop and pick it up and say “Hello.”

A woman’s voice: “Is Ludie there?” “You have a wrong number,” I answer, “I’m in a phone booth.”

“I know you are,” the voice says, “but isn’t Ludie anywhere around there?” “No, no one is.”

“You
sure?
Look again. She just called me, Ludie, and she says she’s going to commit
su
-icide.”

“She really isn’t here, I’d have seen her down the street: there isn’t anybody around here.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? What are you supposed to do when somebody’s gonna kill herself?”

“The police. Where does Ludie live?” “That’s the whole thing, she don’t
live
where she lives.”

Suicide: Anne

for Anne Sexton

Perhaps it isn’t as we like to think, the last resort, the end of something, thwarted choice or attempt,

but rather the ever-recurring beginning, the faithful first to mind, the very image of endeavor,

so that even the most patently meaningless difficulties, a badly started nail, a lost check,

not to speak of the great and irresolvable emotional issues, would bring instantly to mind

that unfailingly reliable image of a gesture to be carried out for once with confidence and grace.

It would feel less like desperation, being driven down, ground down, and much more a reflex, almost whim,

as though the pestering forces of inertia that for so long had held you back had ebbed at last,

and you could slip through now, not to peace particularly, not even to escape, but to completion.

Love: Youth

Except for the undeniable flash of envy I feel, the reflexive competitiveness, he’s inconsequential:

all I even see of him is the nape of his neck with his girlfriend’s fingers locked in his hair.

She, though, looks disturbingly like a girl I wanted and pestered and who I thought broke my heart

when I was at that age of being all absorbed in just the unattainabilities she represented.

With what unashamed ardor this one is kissing, head working, that hand tugging him ever tighter,

and when at last they come apart, with what
gratitude
she peers at him, staring into his eyes

with what looks like nothing but relief, as though she’d waited her whole life for this, died for this,

time has taken so long for this, I thought you’d never get here, I thought I’d wither first and fade.

Love: Beginnings

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much frank need and want,

so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity and unity they make —

her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back
so
far in her laughter at his laughter,

he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of being craved so,

she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,

every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in flame into the sexual —

that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that filling of the heart,

the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again, stamping in its stall.

Love: Habit

He has his lips pressed solidly against her cheek, his eyes are wide open, though, and she, too,

gazes into the distance, or at least is nowhere in the fragile composition they otherwise create.

He breaks off now, sulkily slouches back; his hand, still lifted to her face, idly cups her chin,

his fingers casually drumming rhythms on her lips, a gesture she finds not at all remarkable —

she still gazes away, looking for whatever she’s been looking for, her inattention like a wall.

Now he kisses her
again,
and they both, like athletes, hold that way again, perversely persevering …

O, Paolo, O, Francesca: is this all it comes to, the perturbations and the clamor, the broken breath,

the careenings on the wheel: just this: the sorrowing flame of consciousness so miserably dimmed?

Love: Loss

He’s the half-respectable wino who keeps to himself, camping with his bags on the steps of the
Bourse.

She’s the neighborhood schizo, our nomad, our pretty post-teen princess gone to the grim gutter:

her appalling matted hair, vile hanging rags, the engrossing shadow plays she acts out to herself.

Tonight, though, something takes her, she stops, waits, and smiling cunningly asks him for a smoke.

They both seem astonished, both their solitudes emerge, stiff-legged, blinking, from their lairs.

The air is charged with timid probings, promises, wants and lost wants, but suddenly she turns,

she can’t do it, she goes, and he, with a stagy, blasé world-weariness leans back and watches,

like Orpheus watches as she raptly picks her way back to the silver path, back to the boiling whispers.

Love: Sight

When she’s not looking in his eyes, she looks down at his lips, his chin, collar, tie, back again.

When he’s not looking in her eyes — her cheek, parted mouth, neck, breasts, thighs, back again.

Sometimes their four hands will lock and in a smooth contortion end up at her waist, then his waist,

then up between them, weaving, writhing, with so much animation that their glances catch there.

The first time he looks away, she still smiles at him, smugly, with a lusciousness almost obscene,

then her gaze goes trailing after, as if afraid to be abandoned, as if desiring even what he sees.

The second time, it might be with some small suspicion that her eyes go quickly chasing his;

the third, they’re hardening, triangulating, calculating, like a combat sergeant’s on the line.

Love: Petulance

She keeps taking poses as they eat so that her cool glance goes off at perpendiculars to him.

She seems to think she’s hiding what she feels, that she looks merely interested, sophisticated.

Sometimes she leans her head on her hand, sometimes with a single finger covers her lower lip.

He, too, will prop his temple on his fist, as though to make her believe he’s lost in thought.

Otherwise he simply chews, although the muscles of his jaws rise violently in iron ridges.

Their gazes, when they have to go that way, pass blankly over one another like offshore lights.

So young they are for this, to have arrived at this, both are suffering so and neither understands,

although to understand wouldn’t mean to find relief or overcome, that this, too, is part of it.

Love: Intimacy

They were so exceptionally well got-up for an ordinary Sunday afternoon stop-in at Deux Magots,

she in very chic deep black, he in a business suit, and they were so evidently just out of bed

but with very little to say to one another, much gazing off, elaborate lightings of her cigarettes,

she more proper than was to be believed, sipping with a flourished pinky at her Pimm’s Cup,

that it occurred to me I was finally seeing one of those intriguing
Herald Tribune
classifieds —

a woman’s name, a number — for “escorts” or “companions,” but then I had to change my mind:

she’d leaned toward him, deftly lifted a line of his thinning hair, and idly, with a mild pat,

had laid it back — not commiserating, really, just keeping record of the progress of the loss.

Love: Shyness

By tucking her chin in toward her chest, she can look up darkly through her lashes at him,

that look of almost anguished vulnerability and sensitivity, a soft, near-cry of help,

the implication of a deeply privileged and sole accessibility … yours alone, yours, yours alone,

but he’s so flagrantly uncertain of himself, so clearly frightened, that he edges into comedy:

though everybody at the party is aware she’s seducing him, he doesn’t seem to understand;

he diddles with his silly mustache, grins and gawks, gabbles away around her about this and that.

Now she’s losing interest, you can see it; she starts to glance away, can’t he see it? Fool!

Touch her! Reach across, just caress her with a finger on her cheek: fool, fool — only touch her!

Love: Wrath

He was very much the less attractive of the two: heavyset, part punk, part L. L. Bean,

both done ineptly; his look as brutal as the bully’s who tormented you in second grade.

She was delicate and pretty; what she was suffering may have drawn her features finer.

As I went by, he’d just crossed his arms and said, “
You’re
the one who’s fucking us all up!”

He snarled it with a cruelty which made him look all the more a thug, and which astonished me,

that he would dare to speak to her like that, be so unafraid of losing her unlikely beauty …

But still, I knew, love, what he was feeling: the hungering for reason, for fair play,

the lust for justice; all the higher systems “Go”: the need, the fear, the awe, burned away.

Love: The Dance

They’re not quite overdressed, just a bit attentively, flashily for seventy-five or eighty.

Both wear frosted, frozen, expensive but still delicately balanced and just-adhering wigs,

and both have heavy makeup: his could pass for a Miami winter tan, but hers goes off the edge —

ice-pink lipstick, badly drawn, thick mascara arching like a ballerina’s toward the brow.

All things considered, she’s not built that badly; he has his gut sucked nearly neatly in;

their dancing is flamboyant, well rehearsed, old-time ballroom swirls, deft romantic dips and bows.

If only they wouldn’t contrive to catch our eyes so often, to acknowledge with ingratiating grins:

the waltz of life, the waltz of death, and still the heart-work left undone, the heavy heart, left undone.

Good Mother: The Métro

Why is he wearing a white confirmation suit — he’s only about three — on a Thursday morning,

in the Métro station Richelieu-Drouot, and what possibly has he done wrong, so wrong,

that his mother should be shrieking at him in a language I don’t understand or even recognize

but whose syllables of raging accusation still pierce and fluster me with an intimate anguish?

He
has
done something, too, the way he sits curled up, you know it, the way he cries heartfeltly:

it’s clearly not the mother’s ordinary worries or preoccupations that could bring such awful anger …

What then? Is it something of the body? Has he disgraced himself? Or is it something of the soul?

Has he hurt her very soul? That’s how she acts. Did I do that? Ever? Please, forgive me if I did.

Good Mother: The Plane

Bulging overnight bags on both shoulders, in one hand a sack with extra diapers, cookies, toys,

in the other a translucent plastic bag, a giant Snoopy grinning with malevolent cuteness through,

“Move, move, move,” she keeps saying, nudging the child with her knee, “Can’t you just move?”

but he, as he’s been doing all flight long, obstinately fusses, whines, whimpers, dawdles,

and when she pushes him again lets out a real, really loud, though not a really heartfelt howl.