Collected Poems (37 page)

Who, then, was she now, who was the person she had been, if all she was, all he still so adored,

was muddled, addled, mangled: what of her could be repository now, the place where she existed?

When everything was shorn from her, what within this flux of fragments still stayed her?

He knew then what he had to do: he was so much of her now and she of him that she was his,

her consciousness and memory both his, he would will her into him, keep her from her dissolution.

All the wreckage of her fading life, its shattered hours taken in this fearful flood,

its moments unrecoverable leaves twirling in a gust across a waste of loss, he drew into himself,

and held her, kept her, all the person she had been was there within his sorrow and his longing:

it didn’t matter what delirium had captured her, what of her was being lacerated, rent,

his pain had taken on a power, his need for her became a force that he could focus on her;

there was something in him like triumph as he shielded her within the absolute of his affection.

Then he couldn’t hold it, couldn’t keep it, it was all illusion, a confection of his sorrow:

there wasn’t room within the lenses of his mortal being to contain what she had been,

to do justice to a single actual instant of her life and soul, a single moment of her mind,

and he released her then, let go of this diminished apparition he’d created from his fear.

But still, he gave himself to her, without moving moved to her: she was still his place of peace.

He listened for her breath: was she still here with him, did he have her that way, too?

He heard only the flow of the silent darkness, but he knew now that in it they’d become it,

their shells of flesh and form, the old delusion of their separateness and incompletion, gone.

When one last time he tried to bring her image back, she was as vivid as he’d ever seen her.

What they were together, everything they’d lived, all that seemed so fragile, bound in time,

had come together in him, in both of them: she had entered death, he was with her in it.

Death was theirs, she’d become herself again; her final, searing loveliness had been revealed.

THE VIGIL

[1997]

I

The Neighbor

Her five horrid, deformed little dogs, who incessantly yap on the roof under my window;

her cats, god knows how many, who must piss on her rugs — her landing’s a sickening reek;

her shadow, once, fumbling the chain on her door, then the door slamming fearfully shut:

only the barking, and the music, jazz, filtering as it does day and night into the hall.

The time it was Chris Conner singing “Lush Life,” how it brought back my college sweetheart,

my first real love, who, till I left her, played the same record, and, head on my shoulder,

hand on my thigh, sang sweetly along, of regrets and depletions she was too young for,

as I was too young, later, to believe in her pain: it startled, then bored, then repelled me.

My starting to fancy she’d ended up in this firetrap in the Village, that my neighbor was her;

my thinking we’d meet, recognize one another, become friends, that I’d accomplish a penance;

my seeing her — it wasn’t her — at the mailbox, grey-yellow hair, army pants under a nightgown:

her turning away, hiding her ravaged face in her hands, muttering an inappropriate “Hi.”

Sometimes, there are frightening goings-on in the stairwell, a man shouting
Shut up!

the dogs frantically snarling, claws scrabbling, then her, her voice, hoarse, harsh, hollow,

almost only a tone, incoherent, a note, a squawk, bone on metal, metal gone molten,

calling them back, Come back, darlings; come back, dear ones, my sweet angels, come back.

Medea she was, next time I saw her, sorceress, tranced, ecstatic, stock-still on the sidewalk,

ragged coat hanging agape, passersby flowing around her, her mouth torn suddenly open,

as though in a scream, silently though, as though only in her brain or breast had it erupted:

a cry so pure, practiced, detached, it had no need of a voice or could no longer bear one.

These invisible links that allure, these transfigurations even of anguish that hold us:

the girl, my old love, the last, lost time I saw her, when she came to find me at a party:

her drunkenly stumbling, falling, sprawling, skirt hiked, eyes veined red, swollen with tears;

her shame, her dishonor; my ignorant, arrogant coarseness; my secret pride, my turning away.

Still life on a roof top: dead trees in barrels, a bench, broken; dogs, excrement, sky.

What pathways through pain, what junctures of vulnerability, what crossings and counterings?

Too many lives in our lives already, too many chances for sorrow, too many unaccounted-for pasts.

Behold me, the god of frenzied, inexhaustible love says, rising in bloody splendor:
Behold me!

Her making her way down the littered vestibule stairs, one agonized step at a time;

my holding the door, her crossing the fragmented tiles, faltering at the step to the street,

droning, not looking at me, “Can you help me?” taking my arm, leaning lightly against me;

her wavering step into the world, her whispering, “Thanks, love,” lightly, lightly against me.

Dominion: Depression

I don’t know what day or year of their secret cycle this blazing golden afternoon might be,

but out in the field in a shrub hundreds of pairs of locusts are locked in a slow sexual seizure.

Hardly more animate than the few leaves they haven’t devoured, they seethe like a single being,

limbs, antennas, and wings all tangled together as intricately as a layer of neurons.

Always the neat, tight, gazeless helmet, the exoskeleton burnished like half-hardened glue;

always the abdomen twitched deftly under or aside, the skilled rider, the skillfully ridden.

One male, though, has somehow severed a leg, it sways on the spike of a twig like a harp:

he lunges after his female, tilts, falls; the mass horribly shudders, shifts, realigns.

So dense, so hard, so immersed in their terrible need to endure, so unlike me but like me,

why do they seem such a denial, why do I feel if I plunged my hand in among them I’d die?

This must be what god thinks, beholding his ignorant, obstinate, libidinally maniacal offspring:

wanting to stop them, to keep them from being so much an image of his impotence or his will.

How divided he is from his creation: even here near the end he sees moving towards him

a smaller, sharper, still more gleaming something, extracting moist matter from a skull.

No more now: he waits, fists full of that mute, oily, crackling, crystalline broil,

then he feels at last the cool wingbeat of the innocent void moving in again over the world.

Fragment

This time the holdup man didn’t know a video-sound camera hidden up in a corner

was recording what was before it or more likely he didn’t care, opening up with his pistol,

not saying a word, on the clerk you see blurredly falling and you hear — I keep hearing —

crying, “God! God!” in that voice I was always afraid existed within us, the voice that knows

beyond illusion the irrevocability of death, beyond any dream of being not mortally injured —

“You’re just going to sleep, someone will save you, you’ll wake again, loved ones beside you…”

Nothing of that: even torn by the flaws in the tape it was a voice that knew it was dying,

knew it was being — horrible — slaughtered, all that it knew and aspired to instantly voided;

such hopeless, astonished pleading, such overwhelmed, untempered pity for the self dying;

no indignation, no passion for justice, only woe, woe, woe, as he felt himself falling,

even falling knowing already he was dead, and how much I pray to myself I want not, ever,

to know this, how much I want to ask why I must, with such perfect, detailed precision,

know this, this anguish, this agony for a self departing wishing only to stay, to endure,

knowing all the while that, having known, I always will know this torn, singular voice

of a soul calling “God!” as it sinks back through the darkness it came from, cancelled, annulled.

The Hovel

Slate scraps, split stone, third hand splintering timber; rusted nails and sheet-tin;

dirt floor, chinks the wind seeps through, the stink of an open sewer streaming behind;

rags, flies, stench, and never, it seems, clear air, light, a breeze of benevolent clemency.

My hut, my home, the destiny only deferred of which all I live now is deflection, illusion:

war, plunder, pogrom; crops charred, wife ravished, children starved, stolen, enslaved;

muck, toil, hunger, never a moment for awareness, of birdsong, of dawn’s immaculate stillness.

Back bent, knees shattered, teeth rotting; fever and lesion, the physical knowledge of evil;

illiterate, numb, insensible, superstitious, lurching from lust to hunger to unnameable dread:

the true history I inhabit, its sea of suffering, its wave to which I am froth, scum.

My Fly

for Erving Goffman, 1922–1982

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated from fresh excrement

and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft intentionality that makes them seem to think,

materializes just above my desk, then vanishes, his dense, abrasive buzz sucked in after him.

I wait, imagine him, hidden somewhere, waiting, too, then think, who knows why, of you —

don’t laugh — that he’s a messenger from you, or that you yourself (you’d howl at this),

ten years afterwards have let yourself be incarnated as this pestering anti-angel.

Now he, or you, abruptly reappears, with a weightless pounce alighting near my hand.

I lean down close, and though he has to sense my looming presence, he patiently attends,

as though my study of him had become an element of his own observations — maybe it is you!

Joy! To be together, even for a time! Yes, tilt your fuselage, turn it towards the light,

aim the thousand lenses of your eyes back up at me: how I’ve missed the layers of your attention,

how often been bereft without your gift for sniffing out pretentiousness and moral sham.

Why would you come back, though? Was that other radiance not intricate enough to parse?

Did you find yourself in some monotonous century hovering down the tidy queue of creatures

waiting to experience again the eternally unlikely bliss of being matter and extension?

You lift, you land — you’re rushed, I know; the interval in all our terminals is much too short.

Now you hurl against the window, skid and jitter on the pane: I open it and step aside

and follow for one final moment of felicity your brilliant ardent atom swerving through.

Hercules, Deianira, Nessus

from Ovid,
Metamorphoses,
Book IX

There was absolutely no reason after the centaur had pawed her and tried to mount her,

after Hercules waiting across the raging river for the creature to carry her to him

heard her cry out and launched an arrow soaked in the hydra’s incurable venom into the monster,

that Deianira should have believed him, Nessus, horrible thing, as he died but she did.

We see the end of the story: Deianira anguished, aghast, suicide-sword in her hand;

Hercules’ blood hissing and seething like water in which molten rods are plunged to anneal,

but how could a just-married girl hardly out of her father’s house have envisioned all that,

and even conjecturing that Nessus was lying, plotting revenge, how could she have been sure?

We see the centaur as cunning, malignant, a hybrid from the savage time before ours

when emotion always was passion and passion was always unchecked by commandment or conscience;

she sees only a man-horse, mortally hurt, suddenly harmless, eyes suddenly soft as a foal’s,

telling her, “Don’t be afraid, come closer, listen”: offering homage, friendship, a favor.

In our age of scrutiny and dissection we know Deianira’s mind better than she does herself:

we know the fortune of women as chattel and quarry, objects to be won then shunted aside;

we understand the cost of repression, the repercussions of unsatisfied rage and resentment,

but consciousness then was still new, Deianira inhabited hers like the light from a fire.

Or might she have glimpsed with that mantic prescience the gods hadn’t yet taken away

her hero a lifetime later on the way home with another king’s daughter, callow, but lovely,

lovely enough to erase from Hercules’ scruples not only his vows but the simple convention

that tells you you don’t bring a rival into your aging wife’s weary, sorrowful bed?

… No, more likely the centaur’s promise intrigued in itself: an infallible potion of love.

“Just gather the clots of blood from my wound: here, use my shirt, then hide it away.

Though so exalted, so regal a woman as you never would need it, it might still be of use:

whoever’s shoulders it touches, no matter when, will helplessly, hopelessly love you forever.”

See Hercules now in the shirt Deianira has sent him approaching the fire of an altar,

the garment suddenly clinging, the hydra, his long-vanquished foe, alive in its threads,

each thread a tentacle clutching at him, each chemical tentacle acid, adhering, consuming,

charring before his horrified eyes skin from muscle, muscle from tendon, tendon from bone.

Now Deianira, back then, the viscous gouts of Nessus’ blood dyeing her diffident hands:

if she could imagine us watching her there in her myth, how would she want us to see her?