Collected Poems (53 page)

has been banging his head on the window for hours;

you’d think by now he’d be brain-dead, but no,

he flings himself at the pane: hammer, hammer again.

I ease around him to open the sash, hoping

he doesn’t sting me because then I’d be sorry

I didn’t kill him, but he pays me no mind:

it’s still fling, hammer, fling, hammer again.

I’m sure his brain’s safe, his bones are outside,

but up there mine are too, so why does it hurt

so much to keep thinking — hammer, hammer —

the same things again and, hammer, again?

That invisible barrier between you and the world,

between you and your truth … Stinger blunted,

wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain,

only the hammer, hammer, hammer again.

On the Métro

On the métro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;

she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.

I sit, take out my own book — Cioran,
The Temptation to Exist
— and notice her glancing up from hers

to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,

she’s
present
in a way she hadn’t been before; though she hasn’t moved an inch, she’s allowed herself

to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark

her strong figure and very tan skin — (how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer).

She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;

she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,

achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged,
known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,

but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:

a memory — a lovely girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school,

our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,

my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.

The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,

and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,

(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,

(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again

as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

Peggy

The name of the horse of my friend’s friend,

a farmer’s son whose place we’d pass

when we rode out that way I remember,

not his name, just his mare’s, Peggy,

a gleaming, well-built gray; surprising,

considering her one-stall plank shed.

I even recall where they lived,

Half-Acre Road — it sounds like Frost,

and looked it: unpaved, silos and barns.

I went back not long ago;

it’s built up, with rows on both sides

of bloated tract mansions.

One lot was still empty,

so I stopped and went through and found

that behind the wall of garages and hydrants

the woods had stayed somehow intact,

and wild, wilder; the paths overgrown,

the derelict pond a sink of weeds.

We’d gallop by there, up a hill,

our horses’ flanks foaming with sweat,

then we’d skirt Peggy’s fields

and cross to more woods, then a meadow,

the scent of which once, mown hay,

was so sweet I taste it still.

But now, the false-mullioned windows,

the developer’s scrawny maples, the lawns —

I didn’t know what to do with it all,

it just ached, like forgetting someone

you love is dead, and wanting to call them,

and then you remember, and they’re dead again.

Fish

On the sidewalk in front

of a hairdresser’s supply store

lay the head of a fish,

largish, pointy, perhaps a pike’s.

It must recently have been left there;

its scales shone and its visible eye

had enough light left in it still

so it looked as they will for awhile

astonished and disconsolate

to have been brought to such a pass:

its incision was clean, brutal, precise;

it had to have come in one blow.

In the showcase window behind,

other heads, women’s and men’s,

bewigged, painstakingly coiffed,

stared out, as though at the fish,

as though stunned, aghast, too —

though they were hardly surprised:

hadn’t they known all along

that life, that frenzy, that folly,

that flesh-thing, would come

sooner or later to this? It hurts,

life, just as much as it might,

and it ends, always, like this.

Better stay here, with eyes of glass,

like people in advertisements,

and without bodies or blood,

like people in poems.

The Blade

November 3, 2004

1.

Usually I don’t mind that being out of the city now

means still having to endure the drone of planes,

traffic on the ubiquitous highways, mowers and pumps;

they’ve become almost a part of the music of nature,

but this morning, the builder’s men clearing the woods

facing our house, the roar of their truck hauling away

the old oaks and the screech of the blade of their dozer

scraping the stony soil, seem beyond bearing.

2.

Though I know all too well it’s the lost election,

the sense of not only disappointment but betrayal,

of realizing a campaign could succeed by relying

entirely on fearmongering, slander and lies.

And beyond that a foreboding: always before,

whatever party of regression has been in ascendance,

the under-voices of conciliation and reason

were audible somehow: can anyone claim that now?

3.

In Spain, during the reign of Franco, I blundered

into a rally the tyrant had arranged for himself. A butcher,

who’d jailed them for decades in a dark ages of army

and church, the people couldn’t cheer him enough.

For a moment, when the swarming mob surged,

I was lifted from my feet and swept towards a line of tanks:

frightening, that mass of bodies heaving against me,

pulling me down, that having to fight not to fall.

4.

So far off on a hill I can’t hear him,

a farmer is plowing his fields for the spring wheat.

Just across, though, the excavators hammer

and grunt and whine, unfurling a fog of diesel

that fumes out over the stumps and slashed earth,

and hangs there, as though the ground itself was afire.

It thins when the wind shifts, but still my eyes sting,

and my mouth still tastes of oil and lead.

Miniature Poodle

Her shipboard lover had sent her ahead

to the already full hotel where I was staying

and decamped I heard her sobbing in the lobby

so offered to find her and her poodle a place

to stay and did and she asked me to dinner.

Were we lovers too? Absurd I was nineteen

she fifty at least and alone so alone I’d see her

wherever I went that summer Rome Florence

standing misplacedly on a corner ridiculous dog

in her arms no reason to go one way or another.

She looked more faded each time I saw her

though now the years crumpled behind me

she seems not old at all not gray as I am

not ill as I am my death sniffing at me yes

like a dog jamming its snout in my crotch.

I watched hers that night spoiled thing

as she cut up its meat she wholly absorbed

I scornful as usual never imagining

I’d ever attend with equivalent inappropriateness

to my own obsessions my own mortal disquiet.

Plums

1.

All the beautiful poems

about plum trees in flower,

gold in the moonlight,

silver in the silvery starlight,

and not one of them mentions

that the damned things

if you don’t pay attention

will pull themselves apart.

2.

A perfect wall of the hard

green globules of pubescent

plums too late we found

deep in the foliage of ours,

both largest limbs

already fatally fractured

had to be amputated,

the incisions sealed with tar.

3.

None of the poems mentions

either that when the hiding

fruit falls, the same flies

that invade to inhabit

fresh dog shit are all at once

there in the muck of the plums

already rotting their flesh

off as fast as they can.

4.

Abuzz, ablaze, the flies

crouch in the ooze,

like bronze lions it looks like,

drooling it looks like

at the chance to sink up

to their eyes in the rankness,

to suck gorgeously

at the swill.

5.

While our once-lovely tree

waits naked in the naked

day-glare for branches

to bring leaves forth again,

and fruit forth, not for us,

or the flies, but just to be

gold again in the moonlight,

silver in the silvery starlight.

Rats

August 2005

1.

From beneath the bank

of the brook, in the first

searing days

of the drought, water

rats appeared,

two of them,

we’d never known

even were there.

Unlike city

rats skulking

in cellars or sliding

up from a sewer-

mouth — I saw this,

it wasn’t dusk —

these, as blithe

as toy tanks,

sallied into the garden

to snitch the crusts

we’d set

out for the birds.

But still, who

knows what filth

and fetor and rot

down in their dark

world they were

before? I shouted

and sent them

hurtling back.

2.

Now the brute

crucible of heat

has been upon us

for weeks,

just breathing is work,

and we’re frightened.

The planet all

but afire, glaciers

dissolving, deserts

on the march,

hurricanes without end,

and the president

and his energy-company

cronies still insist

global warming

isn’t real. The rats

rove where they will

now, shining and fat,

they’ve appropriated

the whole lawn.

From this close,

they look just

like their cousins

anywhere else,

devious, ruthless,

rapacious, and every

day I loathe

them more.

Again

1.

On a PBS program, one of my favorites,

a philosopher, or historian of philosophy,

I never quite know the difference,

but whichever she is, in her conviction,

in the passionate cogency with which

she discusses the theme of her new book — evil —

her erudition and dedication are manifest:

evil exists, she says her book says.

2.

Now her interlocutor, earnest as always,

solicitous, gently inquisitive, asks

what is obviously meant to be his last,

most crucial question, the answer to which

will resolve various other critical issues

for which there’s no time (her time is up):

“And do you believe,” he asks her,

“there is a moral order in the world?”

3.

She hesitates; her lips part to speak,

but she doesn’t; they part again,

she’s thinking fast, you can tell,

her machine’s on high, but still nothing,

until, with his smile of compassionate tact,

the host offers: “If you don’t know, who does?”

and she, with relief, “It depends on the day —

sometimes I think so, sometimes I don’t.”

4.

Well, no great solace there,

one might even be put out a bit.

Isn’t this supposedly very wise person saying

that her vision of the human adventure,

her conclusions after years of reflection

and analysis, depend on her
mood,

on the perceptions and thoughts and emotions

which most recently passed through her?

5.

Isn’t she implying that the cosmos

might have some coherence coaxed from it,

but that tomorrow the same evidence

might entail its contrary, or its tragic qualification?

Have all her intellectual efforts come to this?

Has she, and by extension we, not advanced

beyond the most primitive cogitation,

the most conditional, quotidian blurt?

6.

But really, why all the fuss?

What was I expecting? A “moral order” —

does it make any difference if there is

one or not? Does anything change?

Would anyone suffer less, or love more?

Would evil not exist? Whose evil?

Philosophy, ethics, the mind: fuck it all.

And while you’re about it, fuck TV.