Futile Efforts (55 page)

and find myself behind him, staring

at the sweet spot of his skull, hell itself

must be daring me,

as the adoring roaring crowd gives him more

and more,

and I fight the urge to keep my fists steady

and not let all of our various

paltry and petty hatreds

suddenly spill out

gushing and screaming onto the floor.

I've pressed my face down in graves and breathed in

the right kind of dust, fists clenching dirt so that everybody

who looked at my black nails

used to think I worked as hard as the grease monkey

edging his flaring nostrils into the fan belt,

digging further,

hoping to find out exactly when the interred world

would open wider

yet finding only cut drying flowers.

I used to have a real problem with that sort of thing,

but I'm working it out.

I've learned to stand at the sides of sepulchers

and not leap on in, to stare for hours at the mysteries

of the mud and headstone and exhumed bone

and contain my urges to get under the easy earth.

We all have to heed and feed our inhibiting

demanding perfection-driven needs—

cemeteries have always called to me as they've

called to my entire family. Whichever graveyard

I wander in I'm never alone, there's a familiar name,

someone sitting around just waiting for a visit. I'm shocked

that at 37 I have friends who've still never met the dead,

who know no dead, who've never had to play this particular

shined-shoe, kneel at the coffin game. Me, most of my relatives

lie underground.

I've paid debts to graves,

been laid in graves, I've traveled deep up wombs

into the freezing winter tombs and avoided the painfully

clear trail

of my own insistent doom—I've painted those shadow-tossed

trees at dawn, taken charcoal impressions

of the sleeping stone children at noon, sat in on

rain-swept funerals of those I didn't know, holding

an umbrella for the weeping daughters of strangers.

I have presence among caskets and I'm at home

in any hole. The dark buried intersections are crowded

but the planted traffic is moving.

I was soft and had never been face to face

with a roach before, but this one had climbed out

from beneath the sweetly-perfumed sheet,

humped up my chest, and stood nose

to nose with me, eager

to make contact, to understand, little insect paws patting

and telling me, "Good boy, nice boy," antennae weaving

all across hell, the way a man

might fling up his arms after losing another woman

in the heat—

which reminded me…

I scanned the one-room apartment, like she

might be behind the couch, someplace

under the sink, wedged upon the edge

of her bookshelves, behind the prints and photos

of her other smiling selves.

I'd blacked out after the first ten minutes

in bed as the night folded around and consumed

my cracking gin-soaked head,

and so now was now and now what?

Even Ralph the roach turned his chin

searching for his old lady—

and the caterwauls of the centuries came up

from below,

laughter of a thousand defeated

dreams, never-ending tear-streaked dance

of slaughterhouse despair,

three a.m. shrieking of hideous

bleeding and jagged glass

cut throat.

She was down in the street, naked, running

back and forth from sidewalk to sidewalk,

a couple of cabs trying to ease on past,

her red hair rising

in rivulets of flaming lullabies,

shoulder blades so sharp

and jutting she could spike you between the ribs,

flashing cop cars

around the corner as she tilted and bent wildly

in inhumanly crooked,

broken-necked witch fashion

to look up at her own window, glaring

and wishing the heartache of eons upon those invited

into her own dead end charnel nest.

Ralph bolted one way

and I cut the other,

and we both scurried to our own hidey-holes hoping

the raging ageless exterminator would get

somebody else instead.

When You Look Down to Find Yourself Going

but Not Yet Gone

They tried to teach you back then, when you were a kid,

the right way

to become a man, and a lot of it had to do with having

strong hands,

knowledgeable forearms, the strength of legs, tattooed biceps,

you were only six but that was old enough to start down

the right road

to your father's world of engines and baseball, of sweat socks

and power saws, to begin carrying your own load and

welcome in

the acute understanding found inside those locked tool boxes.

But the old man was swept away by a strong wind one fall,

an ashen monsoon of murder that started deep in his throat

and carried him over the side, buried him while you played

up in your room and stayed inside

while all of them constantly lied about what was happening,

and Mom would wince and shiver until finally you were told

and you used your small fists of frenzy a week after he'd died,

a week too late

to ever come face to face and make fragile peace with your

Dad's fate,

and something in your chest grew too cold and dragged itself

around in dwindling circles, and has never stopped moving

or warmed up since—

and his tools were never taken up although his books were read,

his voice soon forgotten but not his smile or his

undaunted stance,

the way he'd give a straight grinning glance—you went crying

into cartoons and crape paper cut-outs, Mama's boy

surrounded by toys

that held more significance than manhood or the fact that

your daddy

was dead.

You've stood nearly forty years out in the rain, hoping to find

your own gray outline, to prove you have substance and mass,

that you're more than drifting fog, more than the useless pink

roundness of wit and profound rants against God and the grave

and your own lazy fat ass.

Would he forgive you for your slack and your weak back

and everything in you

that to this very day you still lack—would he

be able to stare at you for more than a minute without having

to turn his face and hide his eyes—would he look with a

hint of pride?

Do thirty years of carrying his torch mean anything to him now

behind the veil of night and mist—does he know how

many rocks

of regret you carry on your shoulders as you try to work off

this everlasting debt?

You never learned to use a torque wrench but you still suffer

laid out across the work bench

the way you should, sweating

as much as your father ever did,

full of weakness but perhaps

becoming just a bit stronger now, as you approach his age,

not so squarely settled on all your wrongs, but still occasionally

lost in the storms of fruitless rage

and both of you set about hammering the nails in

just where they belong.

Up over the division bridge of archaic balance

between logic and faith, your taste and your teeth,

losing some of both but coming out ahead

of your last enemies whose names escape you

they'll be back

The returned dead, gnats in your ears

violent muscles on the rise, attack

dreams boiling under the tongue

the way you champ down and turn blue

and turn green, crimson, and whisper women's names

who no longer have faces, these scarred fingers

that once roamed freely against her throat

and her throat, and hers, and her creamy perfumed wrist,

gone now without a trace

Odd how you feel like you're falling when you sit up

and how mired in your own tired fires you've become,

how your sister stares in disbelief,

your wife holding a broken wine glass, your brother

still ready to kick your ass, your son pointing, neighbors

peering through the back window fainting, the cops

breaking in your front door, mother wailing,

your dead fish gaping, the dog needs to be fed

and you have absolutely no idea

just what the hell you might have done or said

At least the old man is laughing, Christ knows

how he does it, lying in bed like that

with Mom vacuuming out the grit of his tracheotomy

handling it so well, the hose in his lungs, dinner on the stove

Even the cat is half out of his head, crawling in the drapes,

seeing ghosts, he's begging for a lobotomy.
 
You, yes,