Collected Poems (29 page)

that I’d allowed myself, or that God had allowed me, to surrender to this need in myself?

What makes me think, though, that the region of my soul in which all this activity’s occurring

is a site which God might consider an engaging or even an acceptable spiritual location?

I thought I’d kept the lack of a sacred place in myself from myself, therefore from God.

Is
this
prayer, recognizing that my isolation from myself is a secret I no longer can keep?

Might prayer be an awareness that even our most belittling secrets are absurd before God?

Might God’s mercy be letting us think we haven’t betrayed those secrets to Him until now?

If I believe that there exists a thing I can call God’s mercy, might I be praying at last?

If I were, what would it mean: that my sad loneliness for God might be nearing its end?

I imagine that were I in a real relation with God instead of just being lonely for Him,

the way I’d apprehend Him would have nothing to do with secrets I’d kept, from Him or myself.

I’d empty like a cup: that would be prayer, to empty, then fill with a substance other than myself.

Empty myself of what, though? And what would God deign fill me with except my own prayer?

Is this prayer now, believing that my offering to God would be what He’d offered me?

I’m trying to pray, but I know that whatever I’m doing I’m not: why aren’t I, when will I?

Allies: According to Herodotus

“Just how much are you worth?” Xerxes asks Pythius, reputedly the richest man in Lydia,

at the entertainment Pythius was holding in his palace for Xerxes and his chiefs of staff.

“Exactly three million nine hundred and ninety-three thousand golden darics,” Pythius answers,

“and all of it is yours, my humble contribution towards your glorious war against the Greeks.”

Xerxes is pleased: since he’s left Persia with his troops, only Pythius along their route

has offered hospitality without being compelled to; all this might indicate a welcome drift.

“Consider yourself my personal friend,” he says to Pythius: “Keep your fortune, you’ve earned it,

and furthermore I’m awarding you another seven thousand darics of my own to round it off.”

Later, as Xerxes is preparing to go on, an eclipse is sighted, which irrationally alarms Pythius,

but also encourages him to ask Xerxes for a favor. “Anything you want, just ask,” says Xerxes.

“I have five sons,” Pythius replies, “and all of them are leaving to take part in your campaign.

I’m getting on: let me keep my eldest here, to help take care of me and see to my estates.”

Xerxes is incensed. “You ungrateful scum,” he snarls, “you have the gall to talk about your son,

when I myself, Xerxes himself, is going off to fight with all my sons and friends and relatives?

It would have pleased my ears if you’d offered me your
wife,
and thrown in your old carcass.

You saved yourself by your generosity the other night, but now you’ll know a real king’s rage.”

Some ancients doubt Herodotus, but not in this; Xerxes, after all, angry at the Hellespont,

had it lashed and branded; we can trust therefore that near the moment when history begins,

Xerxes commanded that the beloved eldest son of Pythius be brought to him and cut in half,

and that the halves be placed along the roadside for his army to march out towards Greece between.

Harm

With his shopping cart, his bags of booty and his wine, I’d always found him inoffensive.

Every neighborhood has one or two these days; ours never rants at you at least or begs.

He just forages the trash all day, drinks and sings and shadowboxes, then at nightfall

finds a doorway to make camp, set out his battered little radio and slab of rotting foam.

The other day, though, as I was going by, he stepped abruptly out between parked cars,

undid his pants, and, not even bothering to squat, sputtered out a noxious, almost liquid stream.

There was that, and that his bony shanks and buttocks were already stained beyond redemption,

that his scarlet testicles were blown up bigger than a bull’s with some sorrowful disease,

and that a slender adolescent girl from down the block happened by right then, and looked,

and looked away, and looked at me, and looked away again, and made me want to say to her,

because I imagined what she must have felt, It’s not like this, really, it’s not this,

but she was gone, so I could think, But isn’t it like this, isn’t this just what it is?

The Insult

Even here, in a forest in the foothills of a range of mountains, lucent air, the purest dawn,

a continent and years away from where it happened, it comes back to me, simmering and stinging,

driving me farther down along the pathway to a hidden brook I hadn’t realized was there.

The thrust came first, accurate, deft, to the quick, its impetus and reasonings never grasped.

Then my pain, my sullen, shocked retort, harsh, but with nothing like an equivalent rancor.

Then the subsiding: nothing resolved, only let slide; nothing forgiven, only put by.

The stream bends here under a bridge, its voice lifts more loudly from the rocks of its bed.

The quickly hardening light slants in over the tough, sparse wild grasses on the far hill.

Wind rattling the aspens; a hawk so tiny it seems almost a toy hovering in a socket of updraft.

Even now, I have no real wish to tell it, I know it so well why have to recite it again?

What keeps bringing us back to those fissures so tenaciously holding our furious suffering?

Are there deeper wounds in us than we know; might grief itself be communion and solace?

So many footprints crossing and recrossing the trail through the boulders edging the bank;

the swarms of apparently purposeless insects ticking their angular circuits over the water.

The song of the water, the mindless air, the hawk beyond sight, the inaudible cry of its prey.

Child Psychology

for Loren Crabtree and Barbara Cram

In that stage of psychosexual development called latency, when not that much, at least supposedly,

is going on — libido sleeps, the engrossing Oedipal adventure is forgotten for a time —

we were going somewhere and without telling him I took my father’s keys and went outside to wait.

House, car, office keys: how proud I was to be the keeper of that weighty, consequential mass.

I stood there, tossing it from hand to hand, then, like my father, high into the air.

And then I missed, and saw it fall, onto the narrow grating of a storm sewer, and then in.

I gazed, aghast, down into those viscous, unforgiving depths, intestinal, malignant, menacing.

What happened? Had I dropped the keys on purpose? God no: I well knew my father’s hand.

They’d just fallen, by themselves, that’s what I’d say; no, say nothing, that was even better,

keep still, lips sealed, stoicism, silence — what other mechanism did I have beside denial?

Which is what I implemented when my father came to question me, and question me again.

Wholly taken in the burning ardor of my virtue, I was as innocent as Isaac, and as dumb.

Months pass, the doorbell rings, as always I’m the one to run to answer; a man is there,

he holds the long-forgotten ring of keys, my father’s name, address, and number legible, intact.

I don’t remember what men wore back then to muck about in filth for us, but it didn’t matter;

the second I saw him I knew him —
the return of the repressed
 … so soon, though, so very soon.

The shudderings I drove within were deafening; I couldn’t bring myself to speak, but knew he would,

as I knew what he would say: “Is your father home?” He was, he was: how could he not be?

Chapter Eleven

As in a thousand novels but I’ll never as long as I live get used to this kind of thing,

the guy who works as director of something or other in the business my friend owns and who,

I’m not sure why, we’re out, my friend and I, for an after-work drink with, keeps kidding around,

making nice, stroking us, both of us, but of course mostly my friend, saying “Yes, boss, yes, boss,”

which is supposed to be funny but isn’t because joke or no joke he’s really all over my friend,

nodding, fawning, harking hard, and so intense it all is, with such edges of rage or despair —

is my friend letting him go? is his job as they say in that world, that hard world, on the line? —

that finally even my friend, who must have suspected something like this was going to happen

(why bring me then?), gets edgy, there are lapses, we all shift, then my friend says something,

“I don’t feel great,” something, “I have a headache,” and, without thinking, I’m sure without thinking,

it happens so quickly, the guy reaches, and, with the back of his hand, like a nurse or a mother,

feels my friend’s forehead, as though to see if he has a fever, and my friend, what else? jerks back,

leaving the hand hung there in mid-air for a moment, almost saluting, almost farewelling,

until finally the poor man hauls the hand in, reels it back in, and does what with it?

Puts it for a moment lightly on the back of his head, lightly on his collar, the table, his drink?

All right, yes, the back of his head, lightly; lightly, his collar, the table, his drink.

But what does it matter anyway what the poor man does with his poor marooned hand?

Besides, he’s fine now, we’re all fine, it was all just a blink, the man’s folded his hands,

you’d think he was just saying grace or something, and probably nothing happened at all,

you probably just blinked and drifted and imagined it all; if you asked the man how he was,

what would he say, except “What do you mean?” and what would you do but shut up and smile,

this isn’t
Death of a Salesman,
nobody here is going to turn into a Gregor Samsa;

if you were him, wouldn’t the last thing you’d want be for someone like me to me-too you?

My friend beckons, the check comes on its little salver and my friend stares down at it hard.

“I’m dead,” he says finally. “I’m on such a short leash with the bank, I can’t make a dime.”

The Loneliness

Not even when my gaze had gone unmet so long, starved so long, it went out of my control;

the most casual passing scrutiny would make my eyes, though I’d implore them not to,

scurry, slither, dart away to execute again their cowardly, abject ceremony of submission.

It was as though my pupils had extruded agonizing wires anyone who wanted to could tug.

What I looked at, what let approach me, had virtue only in so much as it would let me be,

let me hide further back within myself, let that horrid, helpless, sideways cringing stop.

Not even when my voice became so riddled with disuse my only recourse seemed to be to cry.

Some pointless pride, though, wouldn’t let me: I’d ransack the layers of numb, resisting tissue,

but when I’d touch my cheeks they’d still be dry, even that benign release had been proscribed.

I’d think there might be something I could tell myself that would be equivalent to crying,

an idea or locution that would excavate a route through those impacted wells of desolation.

Thought hurt now, though; I couldn’t concentrate: the most elementary logic lay beyond me.

Not even when, near sleep, it seemed somewhere in my mental boil my name was being called.

I’d reach out to hold the voice, then I’d realize that “name” and “call” were only symbols,

that some more painful aural stuff was solidifying in the echoing amphitheater of my skull.

No wonder my fascination turned to those as lost as me, the drugged, the drunk, the mad.

Like ancient wounds they were, punctured with their solitude and sorrow, suppurating, stinking;

I’d recoil from what the soul could come to, but I knew within my soul that they were me.

My life, too, eluded me; I, too, learned to shun what of myself I saw in those around me.

No face now without its screen of categorical resistance, no glance untainted by denial.

I was being spoored by my imaginations; I felt guilt, and then remorse, as though I’d sinned.

I thought I’d come to know it then, when it began to turn on me, become its own exacerbation,

when the most unpremeditated look or smile or gesture, coming from it didn’t matter who,

roused only rage in me, rejection, fire … I was close then, closer, but no, not even then.

By then, though, I was near the end; I’d never thought I would, but I was looking back,

almost apprehensive for the innocent I’d been, wondering if it all had been a romance,

if I might have really sanctioned all that hard annealing, and even then I hadn’t understood.

When I knew, it was long after I imagined that I’d let it go; when I saw it come upon my children;

when I knew that they believed as I’d believed they’d never be sufficient to themselves again;

when I realized there was nothing I could do or say to help them: then, and only then.

Scar

As though the skin had been stripped and pulled back onto the skull like a stocking and soldered

too tightly so that it mottled to yellow and ocher, the pores and follicles thumbed out of the clay

by the furious slash of flame that must have leapt on her and by the healing that hurt her —

if it is healing that leaves her, age three, in a lassitude lax on her mother’s broad lap,

bleak, weary, becalmed, what’s left of her chin leaned heavily onto what’s left of her fingers,

those knobs without nails, diminished, blunted, as though someone had hammered them thicker;

nares gone, ears gone, most of the dear lips gone so that your gaze is taken too deeply, terribly,