Collected Poems (41 page)

then she realizes that though she hasn’t said a word, he’s sensed her sadness and is irked,

feels that she’s inflicting, as she always does, he seems to think, her misery on him,

so she tells herself not to be so needy anymore, for now, though, she just wants to leave,

except she can’t, she knows that if he suspects he’s let her down he’ll be more irritated still,

and so she stays, feeling dumb and out of place, and heavy, heavier, like a load of stone.

8.

She experiences a pleasurable wave of nostalgia, not for her own past, but for his:

she can sense and taste the volume and the textures of the room he slept in as a child,

until she reminds herself she’s never been there, never even seen the place, so, reluctantly,

she thinks reluctantly, she wonders if she might not be too close, too devoted to him,

whether she might actually be trying to become him, then she feels herself resolve, to her surprise,

to disengage from him, and such a sense of tiredness takes her that she almost cries.

9.

As usual these days he’s angry with her, and because she wants him not to be she kisses him,

but perhaps because he’s so surprised, she feels him feel her kiss came from some counter-anger,

then she starts to doubt herself, wondering if she might have meant it as he thinks she did,

as a traitor kiss, a Judas kiss, and if that’s true, his anger, both his angers, would be justified:

look, though, how he looks at her, with bemusement, hardly hidden, he knows her so well,

he senses her perplexity, her swell of guilt and doubt: how he cherishes his wrath!

10.

Such matters end, there are healings, breakings-free; she tells herself they end, but still,

years later, when the call she’d dreaded comes, when he calls, asking why she hasn’t called,

as though all those years it wasn’t her who’d called, then stopped calling and began to wait,

then stopped waiting, healed, broke free, so when he innocently suggests they get together,

she says absolutely not, but feels uncertain — is she being spiteful? small? — and then she knows:

after this he’ll cause her no more pain, though no matter how she wished it weren’t, this is pain.

In Darkness

That old documentary about the miners’ strike in Harlan County, the company hireling, the goon,

who’s brought in as a guard for the scabs and ends up blowing a miner’s brains out:

how he, the thug, the enforcer, confronting the strikers, facing them down, pistol in hand,

ready to kill, maim, slaughter, destroy, evidences no compunction, no trepidation, no fear,

and you know it’s because he has no reverence for creaturely existence, even his own,

to deflect him from what for him are the only true issues, obedience, wealth, property, power;

how he posed, strutted, snarled in contempt at those he conceived were beneath him,

the way, now, so many in power, assuming that same stance of righteous rectitude and rage,

snarl their contempt at those who’d dare hold differing notions of governance and justice.

And when, after, the strikers met in the bare, scrufty yard of their dead friend’s house,

and found there in the dust a shining shard, an arch of perfectly white human skull-bone;

though it was midnight, with just enough faint moonlight to make out the circle of faces,

you could see that despite their resolve they were frightened, despite their desperate need

they were awed at having to know once again how brief our mortal moment of time is,

while behind them, the thug, the enforcer, prowled and raved, teeth clenched, jaw grinding,

his ravenous craving for order unslaked, his fear and his longing for love extracted forever,

as now, they, the political thugs, crazed with power, prowl, waiting to wreak social mayhem,

not for charity’s sake but submission’s, not for compassion but for appeasement of limitless greed.

The Demagogue

As on the rim of a cup crusted with rancid honey a host of hornets suddenly settles,

congealing in a mindless, ravenous mass, bristling with stingers of menace and rage, thus they,

so muddled with the rich intoxicant bliss of his resentment they forget who they are,

congregate, mass, swarm on his lips, to suck at his sanctimonious syrups of indignation,

that which once was love in them so corrupted that when he urges them — warriors, hornets —

to lift the cup of spiritual violence to their lips and drink, they do lift, they do drink.

The Bed

Beds squalling, squealing, muffled in hush; beds pitching, leaping, immobile as mountains;

beds wide as a prairie, strait as a gate, as narrow as the plank of a ship to be walked.

I squalled, I squealed, I swooped and pitched; I covered my eyes and fell from the plank.

Beds proud, beds preening, beds timid and tense; vanquished beds wishing only to vanquish;

neat little beds barely scented and dented, beds so disused you cranked them to start them.

I admired, sang praises, flattered, adored: I sighed and submitted, solaced, comforted, cranked.

Procrustean beds with consciences sharpened like razors slicing the darkness above you;

beds like the labors of Hercules, stables and serpents; Samson blinded, Noah in horror.

Blind with desire, I wakened in horror, in toil, in bondage, my conscience in tatters.

Beds sobbing, beds sorry, beds pleading, beds mournful with histories that amplified yours,

so you knelled through their dolorous echoes as through the depths of your own dementias.

I echoed, I knelled, I sobbed and repented, I bandaged the wrists, sighed for embryos lost.

A nation of beds, a cosmos, then, how could it still happen, the bed at the end of the world,

as welcoming as the world, ark, fortress, light and delight, the other beds all forgiven, forgiving.

A bed that sang through the darkness and woke in song as though world itself had just wakened;

two beds fitted together as one; bed of peace, patience, arrival, bed of unwaning ardor.

The Heart

When I saw my son’s heart blown up in bland black and white on the sonogram screen,

an amoebic, jellylike mass barely contained by invisible layers of membrane, I felt faint.

Eight years old, Jed lay, apparently unafraid, wires strung from him into the clicking machine,

as the doctor showed us a pliable, silvery lid he explained was the valve, benignly prolapsed,

which to me looked like some lost lunar creature biting too avidly, urgently at an alien air,

the tiniest part of that essence I’d always allowed myself to believe could stand for the soul.

Revealed now in a nakedness nearly not to be looked upon as the muscular ghost of itself,

it majestically swelled and contracted, while I stood trembling before it, in love, in dread.

Exterior: Day

Two actors are awkwardly muscling a coffin out of a doorway draped in black funeral hangings;

a third sobs, unconvincingly though: the director cries “Cut!” and they set up again.

Just then an old woman, blind, turns the corner; guiding herself down the side of the building,

she touches the velvet awning and visibly startles: has someone died and she not been told?

You can almost see her in her mind move through the entrance, and feel her way up the stairs,

knocking, trying doors — who might be missing? — but out here everything holds.

For a long moment no one knows what to do: the actors fidget, the cameraman looks away;

the woman must be aware that the street is unnaturally quiet, but she still doesn’t move.

It begins to seem like a contest, an agon; illusion and truth: crew, onlookers, and woman;

her hand still raised, caught in the cloth, her vast, uninhabited gaze sweeping across us.

Time: 1978

1.

What could be more endearing, on a long, too quiet, lonely evening in an unfamiliar house,

than, on the table before us, Jed’s sneakers, which, finally, at eleven o’clock, I notice,

tipped on their sides, still tied, the soles barely scuffed since we just bought them today,

or rather submitted to Jed’s picking them out, to his absolutely having to have them,

the least practical pair, but the first thing besides toys he’s ever cared so much about,

and which, despite their impossible laces and horrible color, he passionately wanted,
desired,

and coerced us into buying, by, when we made him try on the sensible pair we’d chosen,

limping in them, face twisted in torment: his first anguished ordeal of a violated aesthetic.

2.

What more endearing except Jed himself, who, now, perhaps because of the new night noises,

wakes, and, not saying a word, pads in to sit on Catherine’s lap, head on her breast, silent,

only his breathing, sleep-quickened, as I write this, trying to get it all in, hold the moments

between the sad desolation I thought if not to avert then to diminish in writing it down,

and this, now, my pen scratching, eyes rushing to follow the line and not lose Jed’s gaze,

which dims with sleep now, wanders to the window — hills, brush, field cleft with trenches —

and begins to flutter so that I can’t keep up with it: quick, quick, before you’re asleep,

listen, how and whenever if not now, now, will I speak to you, both of you, of all this?

Hawk

Whatever poison it had ingested or injury incurred had flung it in agony onto its back,

and it drove itself with shuddering, impotent flails of its wings into the dirt.

When it stopped, I came closer, thinking its sufferings over, but it savagely started again,

talons retracted, spine cramped grotesquely, pinions beginning to shatter and fray.

I knew what to do, but, child of the city, I couldn’t: there was no one to help me;

I could only — forgive me — retreat from that frantic, irrational thrashing, thinking as I went,

Die, please,
the way, it came to me with a startling remorse, I did when my father was dying,

when he woke from the probe in his brain to the worse than death waiting for him.

There’d be long moments he’d seem not to breathe: absolute stillness, four long beats, more,

between huge inhalations, and,
Go,
I’d think,
die, be released from the toil of your dying.

I’d think it again and again, with the fierce anguished impatience of the child I was now again,

then I’d wonder: might this be only my unpardonably wanting my own anxiety to be over?

When at last he’d open his eyes, I’d think,
No, stay, be with us as long as you can,

relieved I at least could think that; but that other shock of misgiving still holds me.

I was frightened, then, too; then, too, something was asked and I wasn’t who I wanted to be.

How seldom I am, how much more often this self-sundering doubt, this bewildering contending.

The Lover

for Michel Rétiveau

Maybe she missed the wife, or the wife’s better dinner parties, but she never forgave him,

the lover, not for having caused the husband to switch gender preference, but for being,

she must have said, or sighed, a thousand times, so difficult to be with, so crude, so
tiresome.

But it was she who began to bore, the way she kept obsessively questioning his legitimacy —

so
arch
he was, she’d say, so
bitchy
— and all after the rest of us had come to appreciate

his mildly sardonic, often brilliant bantering, his casual erudition in so many arcane areas.

It’s true that at first he may have seemed at least a little of what she said he was —

obstreperously, argumentatively, if wittily, abrasive — but we assigned that to what,

considering the pack of friends’ old friends with which he was faced, was a reasonable apprehension

about being received into a society so elaborate in the intricacies of its never articulated

but still forbiddingly solidified rituals of acceptance: he really handled it quite graciously.

What after all did she expect of him? Shyness? Diffidence? The diffidence of what? A bride?

The Game

“Water” was her answer and I fell instantly and I knew self-destructively in love with her,

had to have her, would, I knew, someday, I didn’t care how, and soon, too, have her,

though I guessed already it would have to end badly though not so disastrously as it did.

My answer, “lion” or “eagle,” wasn’t important: the truth would have been anything but myself.

The game of that first fateful evening was what you’d want to come back as after you died;

it wasn’t the last life-or-death contest we’d have, only the least erotically driven and dangerous.

What difference if she was married, and perhaps mad (both only a little, I thought wrongly)?

There was only my jealous glimpse of her genius, then my vision of vengeance: midnight, morning —

beneath me a planet possessed: cycles of transfiguration and soaring, storms crossing.

Spider Psyche

The mummified spider hung in its own web in the rafters striped legs coiled tightly

into its body head hunched a bit into what would be shoulders if it had been human

indicating a knowledge perhaps of the death coming to take it indicating not fear of death

I surmise but an emotion like wanting to be ready or ready on time trying to prepare psyche

for death so psyche won’t fall back into the now useless brain the core imprinted with all

it knew in the world until now but only a nub now no longer receptor receptacle rather

and perhaps psyche did it didn’t flinch rather just gazed out of the web of perception