Collected Poems (31 page)

When we made the baby, after my first visit to the ashram, I was so quiet inside, so serene,

as though I’d never been alive before; I felt Baba with me, just like when I met him.

I knew right away the pregnancy had taken, I knew I’d finally get my child; I was so happy.

I’m not lying to him, just not telling him; I can’t, I
won’t.
Don’t you, either
— promise!

Politics

They’re discussing the political situation they’ve been watching evolve in a faraway country.

He’s debating intensely, almost lecturing, about fanaticism and religion, the betrayal of ideals.

He believes he’s right, but even as he speaks he knows within himself that it’s all incidental;

he doesn’t really care that much, he just can’t help himself, what he’s really talking about

is the attraction that he feels she feels towards those dark and passionate young men

just now glowing on the screen with all the unimpeachable righteousness of the once-oppressed.

He says that just because they’ve been afflicted isn’t proof against their lying and conniving.

What he means is that they’re not, because she might find them virile, therefore virtuous.

He says that there are always forces we don’t see that use these things for evil ends.

What he means is that he’s afraid that she might turn from him towards someone suffering,

or, as possible, towards someone who’d share with similar conviction her abhorrence of suffering.

He means he’s troubled by how
sure
she is, how her compassions are so woven into her identity.

Isn’t the degree to which she’s certain of her politics, hence of her rightness in the world,

the same degree to which she’d be potentially willing to risk herself, and him, and everything?

Also, should she wish to justify an action in her so firmly grounded socio-ethical system,

any action, concupiscence, promiscuity, orgy, wouldn’t it not only let her but abet her?

Sometimes he feels her dialectics and her assurance are assertions of some ultimate availability.

Does he really want someone so self-sufficient, who knows herself so well, knows so much?

In some ways, he thinks — has he really come to this? — he might want her knowing
nothing.

No, not nothing, just … a little less … and with less fervor, greater pragmatism, realism.

More and more in love with her, touched by her, he still goes on, to his amazement, arguing.

Pillow Talk

Please try to understand, it was only one small moment, it didn’t mean a thing, not really.

He was nice enough, but I didn’t like him that much, I just felt, you’ve felt it, too, I’m sure,

a burden in my chest, as though I couldn’t catch my breath, or get my heartbeat straight.

You know, I know you know: there’s an ache in you, you want to make it stop, that awful flurrying;

you can’t get back to where you used to like to be, everything is out of balance in you,

and you realize, even if you’d rather not, that the only way is with this other person,

you can’t tell how you come to that conclusion, you feel silly, you hardly even know him,

he’s almost not important anyway, he just represents release from all of it, a correction,

but you know that nothing else will get this settled in you, that you’ll always be like this,

with this sense of incompletion, unless you act, even though you might not really want to,

so you go ahead and while it’s happening you don’t think of things like evil or betrayal,

you just want your inner world back in order so you can start to live your life again,

and then it’s over, ended, you won’t ever need him anymore, you realize it’s finished, done.

I thought that you should know, that if you knew you’d understand: tell me, do you? Understand?

Ethics

The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in love with someone else’s wife,

I managed to maintain the clearest sense of innocence, even after the woman returned my love,

even after she’d left her husband and come down on the plane from Montreal to be with me,

I still felt I’d done nothing immoral, that whole disturbing category had somehow been effaced;

even after she’d arrived and we’d gone home and gone to bed, and even after, the next morning,

when she crossed my room undressed — I almost looked away; we were both as shy as adolescents —

and all that next day when we walked, made love again, then slept, clinging to each other,

even then, her sleeping hand softly on my chest, her gentle breath gently moving on my cheek,

even then, or not until then, not until the new day touched upon us, and I knew, knew absolutely,

that though we might love each other, something in her had to have the husband, too,

and though she’d tried, and would keep trying to overcome herself, I couldn’t wait for her,

did that perfect guiltlessness, that sure conviction of my inviolable virtue, flee me,

to leave me with a blade of loathing for myself, a disgust with who I guessed by now I was,

but even then, when I took her to the airport and she started up that corridor the other way,

and we waved, just waved — anybody watching would have thought that we were separating friends —

even then, one part of my identity kept claiming its integrity, its non-involvement, even chastity,

which is what I castigate myself again for now, not the husband or his pain, which he survived,

nor the wife’s temptation, but the thrill of evil that I’d felt, then kept myself from feeling.

The Mirror

The way these days she dresses with more attention to go out to pass the afternoon alone,

shopping or just taking walks, she says, than when they go together to a restaurant or party:

it’s such a subtle thing, how even speak of it, how imagine he’d be able to explain it to her?

The way she looks for such long moments in the mirror as she gets ready, putting on her makeup;

the way she looks so deeply at herself, gazes at her eyes, her mouth, down along her breasts:

what is he to say, that she’s looking at herself in ways he’s never seen before, more
carnally?

She would tell him he was mad, or say something else he doesn’t want no matter what to hear.

The way she puts her jacket on with a flourish, the way she gaily smiles going out the door,

the door, the way the door slams shut, the way its latch clicks shut behind her so emphatically.

What is he to think? What is he to say, to whom? The mirror, jacket, latch, the awful door?

He can’t touch the door, he’s afraid he’ll break the frightening covenant he’s made with it.

He can’t look into the mirror, either, that dark, malicious void: who knows what he might see?

The Call

When one of my oldest and dearest friends died and another friend called to console me,

I found myself crying — I hadn’t thought I would — and said, “I didn’t know I’d feel this bad.”

Now, a year later, the second friend calls again, this time because his mistress has left him.

He’s anguished, his voice torn; “I didn’t know,” he tells me, “that I’d feel this bad.”

I’m shocked to hear him use precisely the words I had in my grief, but of course I understand.

There are more calls, and more, but in the end they all add up to much the same thing.

The mistress had warned him time and again, if not in so many words, that this might happen;

she’d asked him to leave his wife, he hadn’t yet, but thought his honest oath to was in effect.

How was he to know that what he’d taken as playful after-intercourse endearments were threats?

Now that this terrible thing has happened, he’s promised he’ll really do it, but too late:

his beloved has found someone else, she’s in love, no question now of beginning over.

At first my friend’s desperation is sad to behold, his self-esteem is in harrowing decline;

decisiveness, or a lack of it, his lack of it, has become the key factor in his value system.

Gradually, though, he begins to focus on the new lover, on his insipidness, his pitiful accomplishments.

There are flaws to this attack, though, because with each new proof of the other’s shortcomings,

with each attempt to neutralize his effectiveness, my friend’s self-blame becomes more acute.

Still, he can’t say to himself, “Behold this giant competitor, this (Freudian) father of a man,”

so he keeps diminishing the other, which only augments his sense of the capriciousness of fate.

Then, to his relief (though he won’t quite admit it), he finds sometimes he’s furious at the woman.

How could she have done this? She’d known the risks he’d taken in doubling his affections,

shouldn’t she simply have accepted his ambivalence and hesitation as a part of their relation?

And what about his wife; yes, some innocence, some purity has been transgressed there, too.

Her suspicions had been hot; she’d accepted his denials; wasn’t that an offering to the mistress?

Aren’t there violations, then, not just of his own good intentions but of his wife’s generosity?

He’s often torn with rage now, he doesn’t even know at whom, but then he has to stop himself.

He doesn’t want to blame the mistress
too
much, in case she should, despite all, come back,

and he doesn’t want to hate his wife, who still doesn’t know, or is even kinder than he thought.

So he keeps dutifully forgiving everyone, which throws the whole fault back on him again

and makes him wonder what kind of realignment could possibly redeem so much despair.

No, it’s all ruined in advance, everything is stuck, the only thing he can do now is forget.

They’re so degrading, these issues which can be resolved by neither consolation nor forgiveness.

No wonder my friend would cast his misery as mourning; no wonder, biting my tongue, I’d let him.

The Image

She began to think that jealousy was only an excuse, a front, for something even more rapacious,

more maniacally pathological in its readiness to sacrifice its own well-being for its satisfaction.

Jealousy was supposed to be a fact of love, she thought, but this was a compulsion, madness,

it didn’t have a thing to do with love, it was perfectly autonomous, love was just its vehicle.

She thought: wasn’t there a crazy hunger, even a delight, in how he’d pounced on her betrayal?

There hadn’t even
been
betrayal until he’d made it so; for her, before that, it had been a whim,

a frivolity she’d gone to for diversion, it hadn’t had anything to do with him, or them.

Her apologies meant nothing, though, nor her fervent promise of repentance, he
held
his hurt,

he cultivated, stroked it, as though that was all that kept him in relationship with her.

He wanted her to think she’d maimed him: what was driving him to such barbarous vindictiveness?

She brought to mind a parasite, waiting half a lifetime for its victim to pass beneath its branch,

then coming to fully sentient, throbbing, famished life and without hesitation letting go.

It must have almost starved in him, she thinks, all those years spent scenting out false stimuli,

all that passive vigilance, secreting bitter enzymes of suspicion, ingesting its own flesh;

he must have eaten at himself, devouring his own soul until his chance had finally come.

But now it had and he had driven fangs in her and nothing could contain his terrible tenacity.

She let the vision take her further; they had perished, both of them, there they lay, decomposing,

one of them drained white, the other bloated, gorged, stale blood oozing through its carapace.

Only as a stupid little joke, she thought, would anybody watching dare wonder which was which.

The Idyll

I just don’t want to feel put down; if she decides she wants to sleep with someone, listen,

great, go ahead, but I want to know about it and I want the other guy to know I know;

I don’t want some mother sliming in her sack, using her and thinking he’s one up on me.

She’s always touching men, she sort of
leans
at them, she has to have them
notice
her,

want to
grab
her; it’s like she’s always telling me she’s on the lookout for some stud,

some gigantic sex-machine who’s going to get it on with her a hundred times an hour.

Once it really happened: she looked me in the eye and said, “I balled someone else last night.”

Christ, I felt these
ridges
going up and down my jaw, I thought my teeth were going to break.

What’d I do? I took her home, we made out like maniacs. What else was I supposed to do?

Sometimes I wonder if I
need
it. I mean, she’ll be coming on to somebody, as usual,

I’ll want to crack her head for her, but if I think about it, I might get a buzz from it,

it must be what going into battle’s like: sometimes I think going nuts from her is my religion.

I don’t know if she fools around much now; I guess I’m not a whole lot into other women either.

The last time I was with another chick — she was a little knockout, too — I wasn’t hardly there.

I realized who I wanted to be with was
her.
I turned off. Hell, is that how you get
faithful?

The Silence