Collected Poems (48 page)

eludes me.

My face inches from his

face neither frowning

nor smiling nor susceptible

any longer to any expression

but this watch, this regard;

whatever it is

I might keep of any of that

eludes me.

My face inches from his,

his inches from mine,

whatever it is beyond

dying and fear of dying,

whatever it is beyond solace

which remains solace

eludes me,

yet no longer eludes me.

Gravel

Children love gravel, kneeling to play in gravel,

even gravel covering dry, irrelevant dust.

It’s not “Look what I found!” but the gravel itself,

which is what puzzles adults, that nothing’s there,

even beneath, but it’s just what Catherine most likes,

that there’s no purpose to it, no meaning.

So, that day in the metro when the pickpocket

she’d warned a tourist against knelt, a hand at his ankle,

glowering at her, I wonder if one layer of her mind

had drift through it,
“Like a child, with gravel.”

That the thief may have been reaching into his boot

for a knife or a razor didn’t come to her until later,

when she told me about it; only then was she frightened,

even more than when the crook, the creep, the slime,

got up instead and shoved her, and spit at her face,

and everyone else stood there as blank as their eyes,

only then did she lean against me, and shudder, as I,

now, not in a park or playground, not watching a child

sift through her shining fingers those bits of shattered

granite which might be our lives, shudder again.

Lessons

1.

When I offered to help her and took the arm

of the young blind woman standing

seemingly bewildered on my corner,

she thanked me, disengaged my hand

and tucked one of hers under my elbow

with a forthright, somehow heartening firmness;

we walked a few blocks to the subway

and rode awhile in the same direction;

she studied history, she told me, then here

was my stop, that’s all there was time for.

2.

Something about feeling the world

come towards her in irrational jags,

a hundred voices a minute, honks,

squeals, the clicking blur of a bike,

and how she let herself flow across it

with the most valiant, unflinching unsurprise

made the way I dwell in my own cognition,

the junctures of perception and thought,

seem suddenly hectic, blunt;

the sense of abundances squandered, misused.

3.

My first piano teacher was partially blind;

her sister, whom she lived with,

was entirely so; she had a guidedog,

a shepherd, who’d snarl at me from their yard —

I feared him nearly as much as the teacher.

She, of the old school, cool and severe,

because of her sight would seem to scowl at my fingers,

and she kept a baton on the keyboard to rap them

for their inexhaustible store of wrong notes

and for lags of my always inadequate attention.

4.

Still, to bring her back just to berate her

is unfair, I mustn’t have been easy either;

I keep being drawn to that place, though:

there was some scent there, some perfume, some powder;

my ears would ring and my eyes widen and tear.

Rank, wild, it may have been perspiration —

they were poor — or old music, or books;

two women, a dog: despite myself,

stumbling out into the dusk — dear dusk —

I’d find myself trying to breathe it again.

5.

… And the way one can find oneself strewn

so inattentively across life, across time.

Those who touch us, those whom we touch,

we hold them or we let them go

as though it were such a small matter.

How even know in truth how much

of mind should be memory, no less

what portion of self should be others

rather than self? Across life, across time,

as though it were such a small matter.

Oh

Oh my, Harold Brodkey, of all people, after all this time appearing to me,

so long after his death, so even longer since our friendship, our last friendship,

the third or fourth, the one anyway when the ties between us definitively frayed,

(Oh, Harold’s a handful, another of his ex-friends sympathized, to my relief);

Harold Brodkey, at a Christmas Eve dinner, of all times and places,

because of my nephew’s broken nose, of all reasons, which he suffered in an assault,

the bone shattered, reassembled, but healing a bit out of plumb,

and when I saw him something Harold wrote came to mind, about Marlon Brando,

how until Brando’s nose was broken he’d been pretty, but after he was beautiful,

and that’s the case here, a sensitive boy now a complicatedly handsome young man

with a sinewy edge he hadn’t had, which I surely remark because of Harold,

and if I spoke to the dead, which I don’t, or not often, I might thank him:

It’s pleasant to think of you, Harold, of our good letters and talks;

I’m sorry we didn’t make it up that last time, I wanted to but I was worn out

by your snits and rages, your mania to be unlike and greater than anyone else,

your preemptive attacks for inadequate acknowledgment of your genius …

But no, leave it alone, Harold’s gone, truly gone, and isn’t it unforgivable, vile,

to stop loving someone, or to stop being loved; we don’t mean to lose friends,

but someone drifts off, and we let them, or they renounce us, or we them, or we’re hurt,

like flowers, for god’s sake, when really we’re prideful brutes, as blunt as icebergs.

Until something like this, some Harold Brodkey wandering into your mind,

as exasperating as ever, and, oh my, as brilliant, as charming, unwound from his web

to confront you with how ridden you are with unthought regret, how diminished,

how well you know you’ll clunk on to the next rationalization, the next loss, the next lie.

Narcissism

… The word alone sizzles like boiling acid, moans like molten lead,

but ah my dear, it leaves the lips in such a sweetly murmuring hum.

Dissections

Not only have the skin and flesh and parts of the skeleton

of one of the anatomical effigies in the
Musée de l’Homme

been excised, stripped away, so that you don’t look just at,

but through the thing — pink lungs, red kidney and heart,

tangles of yellowish nerves he seems snarled in, like a net;

not only are his eyes without eyelids, and so shallowly

embedded beneath the blade of the brow, that they seem,

with no shadow to modulate them, flung open in pain or fear;

and not only is his gaze so frenziedly focused that he seems to be

receiving everything, even our regard scraping across him as
blare;

not only that, but looking more closely, I saw he was real,

that he’d been constructed, reconstructed, on an actual skeleton:

the nerves and organs were wire and plaster, but the armature,

the staring skull, the spine and ribs, were varnished, oxidizing bone;

someone was there, his personhood discernible, a self, a soul.

I felt embarrassed, as though I’d intruded on someone’s loneliness,

or grief, and then, I don’t know why, it came to me to pray,

though I don’t pray, I’ve unlearned how, to whom, or what,

what fiction, what illusion, or, it wouldn’t matter, what true thing,

as mostly I’ve forgotten how to weep … Only mostly, though,

sometimes I can sense the tears in there, and sometimes, yes,

they flow, though rarely for a reason I’d have thought —

a cello’s voice will catch in mine, a swerve in a poem, and once,

a death, someone I hardly knew, but I found myself sobbing, sobbing,

for everyone I had known who’d died, and some who almost had.

In the next display hall, evolution: half, then quarter creatures,

Australopithecus, Pithecanthropus, Cro-Magnon,

sidle diffidently along their rocky winding path towards us.

Flint and fire, science and song, and all of it coming to this,

this unhealable self in myself who knows what I should know.

Scale: I

Catherine shrieks

a little then comes

over to show me

where something bit her.

Parking herself

flank to my face

she jerks her shirt

out of her jeans —

the smallest segment

of skin, so smooth,

though, so densely

resilient, so
present,

that the whole inside

of my body goes

achingly hollow,

and floods with lust.

•

No sign of a sting;

Catherine tucks

herself in and goes

back to her work-

bench to hammer

again at the links

she’s forging

for a necklace,

leaving me to act

as though nothing

had changed,

as though this moment

I’m caught in

could go on expanding

like this forever,

with nothing changed.

Scale: II

Once, hearing you behind me, I turned,

you were naked, I hadn’t known you would be,

and something in my sense of dimension went awry,

so your body, the volumes of your shoulders and hips,

the broad expanse of your chest over your breasts

and the long, sleek slide down between

seemed all at once larger, more than that —

you were lavish, daunting, a deluge of presence.

I wanted to touch you, but I looked away;

it wasn’t desire I felt, or not only desire,

I just didn’t want ordinary existence to resume,

as though with you there could be such a thing.

Doves

So much crap in my head,

so many rubbishy facts,

so many half-baked

theories and opinions,

so many public figures

I care nothing about

but who stick like pitch;

so much political swill.

So much crap, yet

so much I don’t know

and would dearly like to:

I recognize nearly none

of the birdsongs of dawn —

all I’m sure of is

the maddeningly vapid
who,

who-who
of the doves.

And I don’t have half

the names of the flowers

and trees, and still less

of humankind’s myths,

the benevolent ones,

from the days before ours;

water-plashed wastes,

radiant intercessions.

So few poems entire,

such a meager handful

of precise recollections of paintings:

detritus instead, junk,

numbers I should long ago

have erased, inane

“information,” I’ll doubtless

take with me to the grave.

So much crap, and yet,

now, morning, that first

sapphire dome of glow,

the glow!
The first sounds

of being awake,
the sounds!
—

a wind whispering, but even

trucks clanking past,

even the idiot doves.

And within me, along

with the garbage, faces, faces

and voices, so many

lives woven into mine,

such improbable quantities

of memory; so much already

forgotten, lost, pruned away —

the doves though, the doves!

Flamenco

I once met a guitarist,

in Spain, in Granada,

an American, of all things,

and on top of that Jewish,

who played flamenco like a fiend.

He called himself “Juan,”

then something with an “S,”

not the “S” it was once,

but Sastres, or something;

whatever: he played like a fiend.

He lived in a seedy hotel,

which was really a whorehouse,

he told me, though mostly

what he told me were lies;

still, he did play like a fiend.

That he was a drug addict

he didn’t say, but he’d often

have to go for a shot, he said

because he was sick, but who cared,

when he played like a fiend?

Or perhaps I should say

he played like a fiend

when he played, because often,

as they say, he was “nodding,”

and no one like that plays like a fiend.

He lived in a whorehouse, did drugs,

and lied. How had it happened?

It came to him, it could have

to you or me, and I for one

never played anything like a fiend.

Inculcations

Only heartbreaking was it much later to first hear someone you loved speak of strangers with disdain.

They, them, those:
this accent, that hue, these with their filth and squalor, those in their shacks, their slums.

We were intelligent, ambitious, appropriately acquisitive; they untrustworthy, ignorant, feckless;

worse, they were presumed to
need
less than we, and therefore merited yet more scorn and contempt.

Only saddening a lifetime after to recall those cosmologies of otherness settling comfortably within you;

you knew from the tone of their formulation they were despicable, base, but, already tamed, you stayed still.

Whence dullness, whence numbness, for so much had to be repudiated or twisted that the senses became stone;

whence distrust, and anxiety, for isn’t their origin just there, in the impotence and contradiction it all implied?