Collected Poems (42 page)

watching the wave of not-here take the shore-edge of here acknowledging rather its portion

of being the blare of light in the corner the grain in the wood the old odors and the space

a great cup underneath a great gaping under the breadth of your being so that you want

no matter what this last moment of holding even if shoulders and brain can hardly abide it

even if brain swoons nearly trying to hold its last thought last fusion of will and cognition

and there is no end in this ending no contingent condition of being this glare of perception

hurl of sensation all one sense and intention act and love my psyche my spider love and hope

take us dear spider of self into your otherness into having once been and the knowledge of having

in all this been once in wonder so every instant was thanks and all else was beneath and adrift

my spider psyche all awe now all we ever wanted to be now in this great gratitude gone

Grace

Almost as good as her passion, I’ll think, almost as good as her presence, her physical grace,

almost as good as making love with her, I’ll think in my last aching breath before last,

my glimpse before last of the light, were her good will and good wit, the steadiness of her affections.

Almost, I’ll think, sliding away on my sleigh of departure, the rind of my consciousness thinning,

the fear of losing myself, of — worse — losing her, subsiding as I think, hope it must,

almost as good as her beauty, her glow, was the music of her thought, her voice and laughter.

Almost as good as kissing her, being kissed back, I hope I’ll have strength still to think,

was watching her as she worked or read, was beholding her selfless sympathy for son, friend, sister,

even was feeling her anger, sometimes, rarely, lift against me, then be forgotten, put aside.

Almost, I’ll think, as good as our unlikely coming together, was our constant, mostly unspoken debate

as to whether good in the world was good in itself, or (my side) only the absence of evil:

no need to say how much how we lived was shaped by her bright spirit, her humor and hope.

Almost as good as living at all — improbable gift — was watching her once cross our room,

the reflections of night rain she’d risen to close the window against flaring across her,

doubling her light, then feeling her come back to bed, reaching to find and embrace me,

as I’ll hope she’ll be there to embrace me as I sail away on that last voyage out of myself,

that last passage out of her presence, though her presence, I’ll think, will endure,

as firmly as ever, as good even now, I’ll think in that lull before last, almost as ever.

Time: 1972

As a child, in the half-dark, as you wait on the edge of her bed for her to sleep,

will lift her hand to your face and move it over your brow, cheeks, the orbits of your eyes,

as though she’d never quite seen you before, or really remarked you, or never like this,

and you’re taken for a time out of your own world into hers, her world of new wonder,

and are touched by her wonder, her frank, forthright apprehending, gentle and knowing,

somehow already knowing, creating itself — you can feel it — in this outflow of bestowal,

so, sometimes, in the sometimes somber halls of memory, your life as you’ve known it,

in the only way you can know it, in these disparate, unpredictable upsurges of mind,

gathers itself, gathers what seem like the minds behind mind that shimmer within mind,

and turns back on itself, suspending itself, caught in the marvel of memory and time,

and, as the child’s mind, so long ago now, engendered itself in attachment’s touch and bestowal,

life itself now seems engendered from so much enduring attachment, so much bestowal.

Villanelle of the Suicide’s Mother

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying,

Then I feel if I don’t, I’ll go insane.

It can seem her whole life was her dying.

She tried so hard, then she was tired of trying;

Now I’m tired, too, of trying to explain.

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

The anxiety, the rage, the denying;

Though I never blamed her for my pain,

It can seem her whole life was her dying,

And mine was struggling to save her: prying,

Conniving: it was the chemistry in her brain.

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

If I said she was easy, I’d be lying;

The lens between her and the world was stained:

It can seem her whole life was her dying

But the fact, the
fact,
is stupefying:

Her absence tears at me like a chain.

Sometimes I almost go hours without crying.

It can seem her whole life was her dying.

Thirst

Here was my relation with the woman who lived all last autumn and winter day and night

on a bench in the Hundred and Third Street subway station until finally one day she vanished:

we regarded each other, scrutinized one another: me shyly, obliquely, trying not to be furtive;

she boldly, unblinkingly, even pugnaciously; wrathfully even, when her bottle was empty.

I was frightened of her, I felt like a child, I was afraid some repressed part of myself

would go out of control and I’d be forever entrapped in the shocking seethe of her stench.

Not excrement, merely, not merely surface and orifice going unwashed, rediffusion of rum:

there was will in it, and intention, power and purpose; a social, ethical rage and rebellion.

… Despair, too, though, grief, loss: sometimes I’d think I should take her home with me,

bathe her, comfort her, dress her: she wouldn’t have wanted me to, I would think.

Instead I’d step into my train: how rich, I would think, is the lexicon of our self-absolving;

how enduring our bland, fatal assurance that reflection is righteousness being accomplished.

The dance of our glances, the clash; pulling each other through our perceptual punctures;

then holocaust, holocaust: host on host of ill, injured presences squandered, consumed.

Her vigil, somewhere, I know, continues: her occupancy, her absolute, faithful attendance;

the dance of our glances: challenge, abdication, effacement; the perfume of our consternation.

Old Man

Special: Big Tits,
says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our neighborhood newsstand,

but forget her breasts — a lush, fresh-lipped blonde, skin glowing gold, sprawls there, resplendent.

Sixty nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better than harlots can still stir me.

Maybe coming of age in the American sensual darkness, never seeing an unsmudged nipple,

an uncensored vagina, has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the eye:

always that erotic murmur — I’m hardly myself if I’m not in a state of incipient desire.

God knows, though, there are worse twists your obsessions can take: last year, in Israel,

a young ultra-Orthodox rabbi, guiding some teenaged girls through the shrine of the
Shoah,

forbade them to look in one room because there were images in it he said were licentious.

The display was a photo: men and women, stripped naked, some trying to cover their genitals,

others too frightened to bother, lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown in a ditch.

The girls to my horror averted their gaze: what carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them?

Even that, though … Another confession: once, in a book on pre-war Poland, a studio-portrait,

an absolute angel, with tormented, tormenting eyes; I kept finding myself at her page;

that she died in the camps made her, I didn’t dare wonder why, more present, more precious.

“Died in the camps”: that, too, people, or Jews anyway, kept from their children back then,

but it was like sex, you didn’t have to be told. Sex and death: how close they can seem.

So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me, sometimes I think I confound them.

My wife’s loveliness almost consumes me, my passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds;

when we make love, her holding me, everywhere all around me, I’m there and not there,

my mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions: I live my life over as though I were drowning.

… Then I am drowning, in despair, at having to leave her, this, everything, all: unbearable, awful …

Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not having been slaughtered or enslaved,

and not having to know history’s next mad rage or regression — it might be a relief.

No, again no, I don’t mean that for a moment, what I mean is the world holds me so tightly,

the good and the bad, my own follies and weakness, that even this counterfeit Venus,

with her sham heat and her bosom probably plumped with gel, so moves me my breath catches.

Vamp, siren, seductress, how much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows;

how she incarnates our desperate human need for regard, our passion to live in beauty,

to be beauty, to be cherished, by glances if by no more, of something like love, or love.

REPAIR

[1999]

Ice

That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a block of ice:

the way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, fractures, facets;

dazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly complicate the cosmos of its innards.

Radiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a treasure hoard of light,

when you stab it again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both faces grainy, gnawed at, dull.

An icehouse was a dark, low place of raw, unpainted wood,

always dank and black with melting ice.

There was sawdust and sawdust’s tantalizing, half-sweet odor, which, so cold, seemed to pierce directly to the brain.

You’d step onto a low-roofed porch, someone would materialize,

take up great tongs and with precise, placating movements like a liontamer’s slide an ice-block from its row.

Take the awl yourself now, thrust, and when the block splits do it again, yet again;

watch it disassemble into smaller fragments, crystal after fissured crystal.

Or if not the puncturing pick, try to make a metaphor, like Kafka’s frozen sea within:

take into your arms the cake of actual ice, make a figure of its ponderous inertness,

of how its quickly wetting chill against your breast would frighten you and make you let it drop.

Imagine how even if it shattered and began to liquefy

the hope would still remain that if you quickly gathered up the slithery, perversely skittish chips,

they might be refrozen and the mass reconstituted, with precious little of its brilliance lost,

just this lucent shimmer on the rough, raised grain of water-rotten floor,

just this single drop, as sweet and warm as blood, evaporating on your tongue.

The Train

Stalled an hour beside a row of abandoned, graffiti-stricken factories,

the person behind me talking the whole while on his portable phone,

every word irritatingly distinct, impossible to think of anything else,

I feel trapped, look out and see a young hare moving through the sooty scrub;

just as I catch sight of him, he turns with a start to face us, and freezes.

Gleaming, clean, his flesh firm in his fine-grained fur, he’s very endearing;

he reminds me of the smallest children on their way to school in our street,

their slouchy, unself-conscious grace, the urge you feel to share their beauty,

then my mind plays that trick of trying to go back into its wilder part,

to let the creature know my admiration, and have him acknowledge me.

All the while we’re there, I long almost painfully out to him,

as though some mystery inhabited him, some semblance of the sacred,

but if he senses me he disregards me, and when we begin to move

he still waits on the black ballast gravel, ears and whiskers working,

to be sure we’re good and gone before he continues his errand.

The train hurtles along, towns blur by, the voice behind me hammers on;

it’s stifling here but in the fields the grasses are stiff and white with rime.

Imagine being out there alone, shivers of dread thrilling through you,

those burnished rails before you, around you a silence, immense, stupendous,

only now beginning to wane, in a lift of wind, the deafening creaking of a bough.

Archetypes

Often before have our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced,

often I’ve been comforted through a dream by that gently sensitive pressure,

but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across mine in an awkward,

unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely external to me, removed;

an object whose precise weight, volume and form I’d never remarked:

its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle-pads, the subtle, complex structure,

with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like columns in a temple.

Your fingers began to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings;

it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature,

then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and knees,

and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face,

until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall

and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away,

forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch.