Plundered Hearts (10 page)

Disrupting the way things go, we come to learn,

Informs the art. Weavers incorporate

A flaw, the stitch dropped or badly turned,

To remind who kneel that only God is great,

Perfection His, His the privilege to create.

And on the block we guard or square we thread,

If thought is our element—a fiery hate,

A patient air, the earth we defend and dread—

Its flaw is the very idea that, above or ahead,

Perfection exists, the god hidden in habit.

She wakes in pain, the night cut down, her bed

A dirt floor—but there’s the sun, and the stab it

Makes behind her eyes. The day’s at hand.

A light signals from the mountains now, as planned.

Some light is on the mountains now. A plan

Of the city taped to her wall, the day’s targets

Marked, a red inaudible word on each …

A band of sun edges up on that paper too.

The grid of streets, the harbor’s selvage, the mosques

And prismatic parks, the quadrants colored by faction,

When brought to such a light take on a kilim’s

Dispositions.

               No art can stop the killings,

Nor any point of view make an abstraction

Of the child murdered because a boundary was crossed.

The living and the dead are woven through

Us, back and forth, in and out of my speech—

The bullets’ stammer, the longest threads in the carpet—

As if everything she knows I understand.

As if everything we’ve known we understand,

A deal is struck. The familiar guarantee—

That for his trouble the buyer may demand

The weaver have gone blind to finish the work—

Applies. A hookah is brought. A glass of tea.

And what we’ve bargained for is something framed,

As night by day, an anarchy on which, alert

To lives now lost in thought, the eye is trained.

Correspondences in camouflage.

Reflected in the windowpane, we pay attention

To each in turn, the pieces of a world dislodged—

Beirut, Vermont, the surfaces that start

To yield, and depths that hold their breath, a tension

The force of habit takes as order to the heart.

The force of habit’s taken order to its heart,

As if bodies were the soul’s ornaments,

Reproduction’s glistening egg-and-dart.

History’s figures of speech for randomness—

Meaning subversive because superimposed—

Are so strangely silent this still desert night

That a wind to frame and fill the scene arose,

And love’s changing aspect in starlight

We can see and hear as a single page of text,

A palm-read pool whose vacillating pattern

The touchstone I toss first creates but next

Disrupts. The way things go we come to learn.

    A light is on the mountains now, as planned,

    As if everything we’ve known we understand.

Love is injustice, said Camus.

We want to be loved. What’s still more true?

Each wants most to be preferred,

And listens for those redeeming words

Better than X, more than Y—

Enough to quiet the child’s cry,

The bridegroom’s nerves, the patient’s

Reluctant belief in providence.

Break what you can, hurt whom you will,

Humiliate the others until

Someone takes a long, hard look.

Oh Love, put down your balance book.

Summers during the Eisenhower years, a carnival

Came to town. From my father’s pair of bleacher seats,

The safety net under the Big Top’s star attractions,

The drugged tiger, the stilted clowns, the farting scooters

All seemed as little death-defying as those routines

The high-wire trio staged with their jerky parasols.

With that singular lack of shame only a kid commands,

I’d sneak over instead to the sawdusted sideshow tent.

Every year
they
were back: the fire-breathing women,

The men who swallowed scimitars or hammered nails

Up their noses and fishhooks through their tongues,

The dwarf in his rayon jockstrap and sequined sweatband.

A buck got you into the blow-off where a taped grind

Spieled the World of Wonders while a blanket rose

On seven clear ten-gallon jars that held

Pickled fetuses—real or rubber?—their limbs

Like ampersands, each with something deliriously wrong,

Too little of this in front or too much of that behind.

Four-legged chickens, a two-headed raccoon,

The Mule-Faced Girl, the Man with Four Pupils

In His Eyes, coffined devil babies, the Penguin Boy,

The Living Skeleton, an avuncular thousand-pound

Sort who swilled cans of soda and belched at us.…

What I think of the Word Made Flesh developed in this darkroom.

Back then I couldn’t wait for hair to appear on my face

And down below, where my flashlight scrutinized at bedtime.

I’d rise and fall by chance, at the table, on buses, in class.

My voice cracked. I was shooting up and all thumbs.

Oh, the restless embarrassments of late childhood!

My first pimple—huge and lurid—had found its place.

I kept staring at one jar. The thing inside seemed to float

Up from a fishtail that was either leg or penis—or both.

(I could hear my father now, outside the tent, calling me.)

From its mouth, a pair of delicate legs emerged,

As if it had swallowed a perfect twin. I gulped. Something

Unspoken, then and since, rose like acid in my throat.

The over-crayoned valentine
FOR MOTHER

    The furtive gym-class crush.

In my missal the polychrome Sacred Heart

    Our Savior exposes,

The emblems of his Passion still festering,

    The knotted scourge, the sponge,

The nailhead studs all sweating blood from inside

    A little crown of thorns

Tightening around my groin as I pulled back

    The crushed-velvet curtain

And entered the confessional’s dark chamber.

    Whatever lump in the throat

Aztec horror tales had once contrived to raise

    Melted in the aftermath

Of eating—myself both high priest and victim

    On his knees, head yanked back—

The live, quivering heart of thwarted romance,

    A taste one swallowed hard

First to acquire, and much later to mock.

    Hearts bid on, hearts broken.

The shape of a flame reversed in the Zippo

    Cupped close to light one last

Cigarette before walking out on a future.

    The shape two fat, rain-soaked

Paperbacks assumed on the back-porch table

    After I’d left for home,

That whole summer spent reading Tolstoy, sleeping

    With my window open

Onto an imaginary grove of birch—

    One of which I had carved

Two names on and sat under with my diary

    To watch the harvesting.

There is a black heart somewhere—the clarinet

    In K. 581,

Still aching for the pond edge, the rippling pain,

    The god’s quick grasp of things.

A white one, too—that teardrop pearl on Vermeer’s

    Girl at the Frick, hanging

Above her interrupted letter, mirror

    To what she’s left unsaid.

At ten, on a grade-school excursion downtown

    To the science museum,

I learned my lesson once and for all—how to

    Lose myself in a heart.

In that case, a cavernous, walk-through model

    With narrow, underlit

Arterial corridors and piped-in thumps.

    As so often later,

The blindfold loosely fastened by loneliness

    Seemed to help me stumble

Past the smeary diagrams and push-button

    Explanations, helped me

Ignore the back-of-the-closet, sour-milk

    Smells and the silly jokes

Of classmates in the two-storey lung next door.

    For those others, the point

Was to end up only where they had begun,

    Back at the start of something,

Eager for the next do-it-yourself gadget.

    I stayed behind, inside,

Under the mixed blessing of not being missed.

    I could hear the old nun

Scolding some horseplay, more faintly leading them

    On to a further room,

“Where a giant pendulum will simulate

    The crisscrossed Sands of Time.…”

What had time to do with anything
I
wanted!

    At last I had the heart

All to myself, my name echoing through it

    As I called to myself

In a stage whisper from room to blood-red room.

    And what of the smaller,

Racing heart—my own, that is—inside the heart

    Whose very emptiness

Had by now come to seem a sort of shelter?

    Was it—
me,
I mean,
my
heart—

Even back then ready to stake everything,

    To endure the trials

By fire and water, to pledge long silence,

    Accept the surprises

And sad discoveries one loses his way

    Among, walking around

And around his own heart, looking for a way

    That leads both in and out?

It happens first in one’s own heart, doesn’t it?

    And then in another’s.

Something happens when you hear it happening.

    One day, out of the blue,

An old friend shows up and needs, so you’d thought, just

    A shoulder to cry on.

Or a new friend is stirring in the next room.

    Or the stranger in bed

Beside you gets up in the middle of the night.

    You listen for the steps.

Unfamiliar steps are coming closer, close

    Enough to reach out for.

Come over here, love. Bend down and put your head

    To my chest. Now listen.

Listen.
Do you hear them? After all this time

    There are your own footsteps.

Can you hear yourself walking toward me now?

1955. A scratchy waltz

Buzzed over the ice rink’s P.A.

My classmate Tony, the barber’s son: “Alls

He wantsa do is, you know, like, play.”

Bored with perfecting my languid figure eights,

I trailed him to a basement door marked
GENTS

With its metal silhouette of high-laced skates

(Symbols, I guess, of methods desire invents).

Tony’s older brother was waiting inside.

I’d been “requested,” it seemed. He was sixteen,

Tall, rawboned, blue-eyed,

Thumbs hooked into faded, tightening jeans.

I fumbled with small talk, pretending to be shy.

Looking past me, he slowly unzipped his fly.

Her voice: steeped in a rancid clotting syrup:

Whatever’s not believed remains a grace

While again she invokes the power that yields:

Splintered timber and quick consuming flame:

The simplest way to take hold of the heart’s

Complications, its pool of spilt religion:

A long black hair sweat-stuck to the skin:

The bitter sleep of the dying: the Jew in Berlin:

Who sent you here? the sharp blade pleads:

Stormcloud: thornhedge: starchill:

Blood bubble floating to the top of the glass:

The light, from fleshrise to soulset:

The world dragging the slow weight of its shame

Like the train of pomp: guttering candle: her voice.

Parasangs, satraps, the daily drill …

Beginner’s Greek its own touchstone.

The sophomore teacher was Father Moan,

Whom I longed to have praise my skill.

The illustrated reader’s best

Accounts of murder and sacrifice

Only suggested the heavy price

I longed to pay at his behest.

He’d slap the pointer against his thigh.

I quivered. What coldness may construe

Of devotion was an experience

As hard to learn as catch his eye.

I kept my hand up.
Here!
I knew

The right answer. The case. The tense.

In the shower, at the shaving mirror or beach,

For years I’d led … the unexamined life?

When all along and so easily within reach

(Closer even than the nonexistent wife)

Lay the trouble—naturally enough

Lurking in a useless, overlooked

Mass of fat and old newspaper stuff

About matters I regularly mistook

As a horror story for the opposite sex,

Nothing to do with what at my downtown gym

Are furtively ogled as The Guy’s Pecs.

But one side is swollen, the too tender skin

Discolored. So the doctor orders an X-

Ray, and nervously frowns at my nervous grin.

Mammography’s on the basement floor.

The nurse has an executioner’s gentle eyes.

I start to unbutton my shirt. She shuts the door.

Fifty, male, already embarrassed by the size

Of my “breasts,” I’m told to put the left one

Up on a smudged, cold, Plexiglas shelf,

Part of a robot half menacing, half glum,

Like a three-dimensional model of the Freudian self.