Plundered Hearts (14 page)

It is as if, the stench intensified

And strong or weak alike now swept away,

The plague in Athens hurried its descent

By fear, a symptom leaving the stricken loath

To fight for life who had defied the great

Spartan ranks themselves, the sight of skin

Inflamed, the thirst, the dripping anus took

Hold of them until, in tears, they broke.

The dead in piles around them, a hecatomb

To gods who, like those mongrel dogs who crave

A corpse they drag to safety through the mud

To feast upon, had disappeared, their dreams,

According to Thucydides, seethed

With images of forsaken, drowning crews.

She had lost the bet, and in her sunken eyes

The birthday she had over and over prayed

To die before was offered like a present.

(Dressed in a party hat, I sat with both

My parents by the bed.) A toast was made.

Through the pleated, angled straw she took in

A burning mouthful of champagne, and rebuked

Her son-in-law for his expensive joke,

Drawing, hairless, an imaginary comb

Through memories of what pleasure anger gave,

Then smiled, “I’d stop all this if only I could.”

Even at ten I sensed that she had seen,

Staring at me, what would be bequeathed.

My mother slowly closed her eyes. We knew.

Years of sneaking sidelong glances toward the one

    At the next urinal’s gaping mouth—

Between classes, between buses, between acts,

    In dorm or disco, rest stop or Ritz—

Assemble them now in a sort of line-up:

    Bald, one-eyed, red-faced, shifty suspects,

Each generic, all so individual—

    Hooded, lumpish, ropy, upcurving,

Anchovy or shark, the three-inch alley cat

    Or blood-choked panther whose last droplet,

Back-lit by porcelain, is wagged free to fly

    In a bright sterile arc, its reversed

Meniscus shattered by the soon swirling flush.

    But that slice-of-life in the Men’s Room

In retrospect seems an idle pantomime,

    Old desires or anxieties

Projected onto a stranger’s handful

    Of gristle, the shadowy dumb show

Our schoolroom puppets once swooped and wiggled through

    Back when any sense of difference

Posed as curiosity’s artless cut-outs.

    Only years later was I haunted

By a premonition of something I thought

    I didn’t have, or have enough of

—Poor Punch, fingered, limp, flung back into his case.

•

Who knows what early memories are redeemed,

    What primitive rites re-enacted,

By our masculine version of mother-love?

    What daily unconscious tenderness

Is lavished here, such fastidious grooming

    Rituals for the wrinkled baby

Capuchin. Each man’s member every morning

    May be gingerly held and jiggled

Inside his Jockey shorts or lazily scratched

    Through silk pajamas—in any case,

Fondled,
its crimpled, sweat-sticky, fetid skin

    Lifted off the scrotal water-bed

And hand-dried as if in a tumbler of air.

    Later, tucked behind the clerk’s apron

Or the financier’s pinstripes or the rapper’s

    Baggy jeans, our meek little Clark Kent

Daydreams at his desk of last night’s heroics,

    Hounded by a double life blackmailed

By grainy color shots of summer-cabin

    Or backseat exploits that had won praise

From their pliant, cooing co-conspirators.

    But now, absently readjusted,

As if fresh from cold surf, his ideal is just

    The bud of classic statuary.

The marble is hard, the soulful cub withdrawn.

•

So, the old questions linger on unanswered.

    Why in the fables on Greek kraters

Do those of the ephebes always stick straight out?

    Why is it the last part of a man’s

Body to age? Though function may no longer

    Follow form, its chthonic shaft and crown

Retain maturity’s rugged majesty.

    What Ovid might once have figured out

As a shepherd who’d struck a king in disguise,

    Or Plato have thought in an aside

The haphazard tail of white in the pot where

    His abstract egg was hard-boiling into halves

Soon in search of some way to resume the shell

    Of an identical privacy,

Scientists today measure as Anyman’s

    Lowest common denominator,

A demonic’s tutorial in the means

    Of his being manipulated

By unpredictable powers far beyond

    His knowing but not his sad sensing.

Do I wish my own rose at will, and stayed put,

    And was just, say, two inches longer?

Sure. So who doesn’t think he’s inherited

    An apartment too small for his plans?

Do I cancel the party, or gamely shrug?

•

“But why,” Jane asks, “is something silly at best

    And objectively ugly at worst

The focus of so much infatuation?”

    Cults thrive on cloying contradictions.

Shrewd and aloof, women are thought to enjoy

    What it does, the petulant master

They devour, or the wheedling spongy slave

    They finally love to rub the wrong way.

And men? Men! Men are known to appreciate

    What it stands for. History books have this

In common with off-the-rack pulp romances.

    Small men with big ones, big men with small,

Lead lives of quiet compensation, power

    Surging up from or meekly mizzling

Down to the trouser snake in their paradise.

    If love’s the religion with the god

That fails, is it because blood goes to his head?

    No, it’s that after the night’s tom-toms

And fire-dances are over and he’s sulking

    In his shrine, sadness beats him hollow.

Asked by nagging reporters once too often

    Why, despite the count of body bags,

We were in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped

    His fly and slapped it on the table.

“Gentlemen, this is why,” he barked. “This is why.”

Three boots from Great Lakes stumble arm-in-arm

                         Past the hookers

               And winos on South State

To a tat shack. Pissed on mai tais, what harm

               Could come from the bright slate

Of flashes on the scratcher’s corridor

Wall, or the swagger of esprit de corps?

Tom, the freckled Hoosier farmboy, speaks up

                         And shyly points

               To a four-inch eagle

High over the Stars and Stripes at sunup.

               A stormy upheaval

Inside—a seething felt first in the groin—

Then shoves its stubby subconscious gunpoint

Into the back of his mind. The eagle’s beak

                         Grips a banner

               Waiting for someone’s name.

Tom mumbles that he’d like the space to read

               
FELIX
, for his small-framed

Latino bunkmate with the quick temper.

Felix hears his name and starts to stammer—

He’s standing there beside Tom—then all three

                         Nervously laugh

               Out loud, and the stencil

Is taped to Tom’s chest. The needle’s low-key

               Buzzing fusses until,

Oozing rills of blood like a polygraph’s

Lines, there’s a scene that for years won’t come off.

Across the room, facedown on his own cot,

                         Stripped to the waist,

               Felix wants Jesus Christ

Crucified on his shoulder blade, but not

               The heartbroken, thorn-spliced

Redeemer of punk East Harlem jailbait.

He wants light streaming from the wounds, a face

Staring right back at those who’ve betrayed him,

                         Confident, strong,

               With a dark blue crewcut.

Twelve shading needles work around the rim

               Of a halo, bloodshot

But lustrous, whose pain is meant to prolong

His sudden resolve to fix what’s been wrong.

(Six months later, a swab in Vietnam,

                         He won’t have time

               To notice what’s been inked

At night onto the sky’s open hand—palms

               Crawling with Cong. He blinks.

Bullets slam into him. He tries to climb

A wooden cross that roses now entwine.)

And last, the bookish, acned college grad

                         From Tucson, Steve,

               Who’s downed an extra pint

Of cut-price rye and, misquoting Conrad

               On the fate of the mind,

Asks loudly for the whole nine yards, a “sleeve,”

An arm’s-length pattern of motives that weave

And eddy around shoals of muscle or bone.

                         Back home he’d signed

               On for a Navy hitch

Because he’d never seen what he’s since grown

               To need, an
ocean
which …

But by now he’s passed out, and left its design

To the old man, whose eyes narrow, then shine.

By dawn, he’s done. By dawn, the others too

                         Have paid and gone.

               Propped on a tabletop,

Steve’s grappling with a hangover’s thumbscrew.

               The bandages feel hot.

The old man’s asleep in a chair. Steve yawns

And makes his way back, shielded by clip-ons.

In a week he’ll unwrap himself. His wrist,

                         A scalloped reef,

               Could flick an undertow

Up through the tangled swash of glaucous cyst

               And tendon kelp below

A vaccination scallop’s anchored seaweed,

The swelling billow his bicep could heave

For twin dolphins to ride toward his shoulder’s

                         Coppery cliffs

               Until the waves, all flecked

With a glistening spume, climb the collar-

               Bone and break on his neck.

When he raises his arm, the tide’s adrift

With his dreams, all his watery what-ifs,

And ebbs back down under the sheet, the past,

                         The uniform.

               His skin now seems colder.

The surface of the world, he thinks, is glass,

               And the body’s older,

Beckoning life shines up at us transformed

At times, moonlit, colorfast, waterborne.

Figuring out the body starts with the skin,

    Its boundary, its edgy go-between,

The scarred, outspoken witness at its trials,

    The monitor of its memories,

Pleasure’s flushed archivist and death’s pale herald.

    But skin is general-issue, a blank

Identity card until it’s been filled in

    Or covered up, in some way disguised

To set us apart from the beasts, whose aspects

    Are given, not chosen, and the gods

Whose repertoire of change—from shower of gold

    To carpenter’s son—is limited.

We need above all to distinguish ourselves

    From one another, and ornament

Is particularity, elevating

    By the latest bit of finery,

Pain, wardrobe, extravagance, or privation

    Each above the common human herd.

The panniered skirt, dicky, ruff, and powdered wig,

    Beauty mole, Mohawk, or nipple ring,

The pencilled eyebrow above Fortuny pleats,

    The homeless addict’s stolen parka,

Facelift, mukluk, ponytail, fez, dirndl, ascot,

    The starlet’s lucite stiletto heels,

The billboard model with his briefs at half-mast,

    The geisha’s obi, the gigolo’s

Espadrilles, the war widow’s décolletage …

    Any arrangement elaborates

A desire to mask that part of the world

    One’s body is. Nostalgia no more

Than anarchy laces up the secondhand

    Myths we dress our well-fingered goods in.

Better still perhaps to change the body’s shape

    With rings to elongate the neck, shoes

To bind the feet, lead plates wrapped to budding breasts,

    The sadhu’s penis-weights and plasters,

The oiled, pumped-up torsos at Muscle Beach,

    Or corsets cinched so tightly the ribs

Protrude like a smug, rutting pouter pigeon’s.

    They serve to remind us we are not

Our own bodies but anagrams of their flesh,

    And pain not a feeling but a thought.

But best of all, so say fellow travellers

    In the fetish clan, is the tattoo,

Because not merely molded or worn awhile

    But exuded from the body’s sense

Of itself, the story of its conjuring

    A means defiantly to round on

Death’s insufferably endless emptiness.

    If cavemen smeared their bones with ochre,

The color of blood and first symbol of life,

    Then peoples ever since—Egyptian

Priestesses, Mayan chieftains, woady Druids,

    Scythian nomads and Hebrew slaves,

Praetorian guards and kabuki actors,

    Hells Angels, pilgrims, monks, and convicts—

Have marked themselves or been forcibly branded

    To signify that they are members

Of a group apart, usually above

    But often below the rest of us.

The instruments come effortlessly to hand:

    Fish bone, razor blade, bamboo sliver,

Thorn, glass, shell shard, nail, or electric needle.

    The canvas is pierced, the lines are drawn,

The colors suffuse a pattern of desire.

    The Eskimos pull a charcoaled string

Beneath the skin, and seadogs used to cover

    The art with gunpowder and set fire

To it. The explosion drove the colors in.

    Teddy boys might use matchtip sulphur

Or caked shoe polish mashed with spit. In Thailand

    The indigo was once a gecko.

In mall parlors here, India ink and tabs

    Of pigment cut with grain alcohol

Patch together tribal grids, vows, fantasies,

    Frescoes, planetary signs, pinups,

Rock idols, bar codes, all the insignia

    Of the brave face and the lonely heart.