Plundered Hearts (16 page)

After colliding with a cloudberg, the chopper

sinks through more, like feelings gone soft

around the edges, forming shapeless moist

masses and as easily dissolving, until underhead

we approach the ashen, lopsided cones,

the brimstone stench of steam, the mess of gods.

Headphones dip into the sliding plates

dragged over soft forces divided by stress,

some fracturing crust of indifference

through which the buried magma seeps.

Or have I got it all wrong again?

Does he mean instead that, once home,

after we’re back, set down, driven off,

the sunset’s backwash sloshing

in the rearview’s little sac of sorrows,

the tremors will start again, the leakage?

But now that I am used to pain,

Its knuckles in my mouth the same

Today as yesterday, the cause

As clear-obscure as who’s to blame,

A fascination with the flaws

Sets in—the plundered heart, the pause

Between those earnest, oversold

Liberties that took like laws.

What should have been I never told,

Afraid of outbursts you’d withhold.

Why are desires something to share?

I’m shivering, though it isn’t cold.

Beneath your window, I stand and stare.

The planets turn. The trees are bare.

I’ll toss a pebble at the pane,

But softly, knowing you are not there.

Years ago—long enough at least for bitter

Leaves to have cooled at the bottom of a cup

Then brimful and steaming with insecurities—

Four spellbound friends were huddled around

What might as well have been a campfire,

Their shadows thrown back on the world

By candlelight, the flames of anticipation

Fed by skittish questions of whatever voice

Any one of them had felt clearing its throat

Inside the jelly lid with its toothpick pointer

Patrolling a border of hand-drawn letters—

Not theirs, of course, the timidly curious

Weekend houseguests in rainy Stonington,

But JM’s, the loom from which bolts of blues

Lay stacked on his desk,
Ephraim
’s final galleys.

The master had been unexpectedly

Summoned by redundancy—a family crisis—

But insisted … look, the steak’s been marinating,

There’s plenty to drink, the weather forecast’s glum.

They’d stay? And why not take an idle turn

At the board? His Honda was barely in reverse

When Mickey’s mop and pail were blithely tossed

Aside and motley, ill-fitting robes assumed—

In their case, a cheap imitation mantle

That, like any religion, risked mocking

What it worshipped. But then, how else learn

What can’t be taught than play the earnest fool?

Left alone with a luster and delirium

About to be cut with callow, flavorless slush,

They pulled their chairs up to the round table,

Guarded by votive griffins, a saltcellar,

And a spineless cactus that waited patiently

Under a bite-size crystal hanging from the dome.

Roach clip. Jug wine. The conventional aids

To inspiration were reluctantly foresworn

In favor of seltzer and cold credulity.

They sat there edgily, hour after hour,

Watching the voices muster into words—

As when, between the scenes of a play, the stage

Is briefly darkened but still slightly visible,

Enough for us to see the stagehands moving

Furniture around, the props of what’s to come—

So that what had clumsily been transcribed

Into a notebook later came clear in ways

Each might have made light of there in the dark.

A
——
, for instance, at thirty buffed and tan

But oddly pious and almost too eager for word

Of how immanent the Beyond would turn out to be,

A lens in the black box of lives led here below.

He begins by chance with Agul, a priest of Aton,

Standoffish and abstract.
Egyptians not concerned

With sin, only singularity. We wait for sunrise.

Friends exchange light. Love, light, are one.

I breathe your light. Aton knows your aspect.

And for those who don’t care, whose beliefs start

When their eyes are shut?
Night is sun for others.

Doggedly the acolyte buttonholes the board.

At last one Mary Wentworth gently picks up

The extension, a London mother and mystic

Two centuries dead.
Your soul, sweet A
——
,

The shape of a healthy body, shelters under my wing.

Wing?
Down is warmer than up.
Up?

The Pharisees are cold on their mountain tops.

They will not sin & so they freeze. Your body

Sins to warm your heart.
How easily tenderness

Rinses the dirty hands temptation lathers.

Then B
——
, saddled with a Fifties adolescence

Spent peeping at encyclopedia cross-sections

And nudist colony glossies—all shrivel and sag—

Until transfixed by martyred Oscar’s wit,

Its gay science devoted to curing the heart,

Shyly asks, after combing his hair, for Himself.

The Other Life, within us or abroad,

Acts—and why not?—as if it had all the time

In either world, exaggerating its courtesies.

Wilde extends an invisible gloved hand

To B
——
, who stutters about his nervousness.

Confession is good for one’s soul & one’s royalties.

I sold my lower depths & made a good thing of them.

But his own feelings … for the young man, say?

Bosie was ornamental. That was enough.

No real love then? Your wife?
Constance

Was as her name suggests. That was not enough.

Though Paris is, of course, better on the whole,

I think most of Oxford, where, donning robes,

Pater drew on airy nothing to burn with a flame

Of the first water, in whose heat our damp clay

Was fired into well-wrought urnings.
(“The ease,”

B
——
marvels, “with which a practiced stagecraft

Flicks its iridescent fan!”)
No window

Can without some dressing up long hold

A discerning eye. For birds of our feather

The pen that is a plume adds panache.

But—oh, this is as it must be written—

A thousand admiring eyes in the world

Of letters finally matter less than the one

Understanding heart in a country retreat.

Blushing, B
——
withdraws, interested only

In how prudently to spend his overdraft.

Then C
——
, whose reedy, wire-rimmed pretense,

Goosed by Southern manners and a French degree,

The saccharine-coated pill B
——
had been swallowing

For a decade, insinuates his clubman’s smarm

And succeeds in raising static on the line.

A giggling Indian scout—
ice filled my seeing,

Great ice-haired mounts, English
—trails off

To a corpuscle who or which insists eternity

Is
the plucked tension between limit and nothing.

A yawn gets passed around. A Chinese sage

Wanders across the screen, dropping fragments

Of a fortune cookie.
We do not gain the moon

By telling her to be still.
Fingers in silhouette

Mug redwood trees, or German armaments

Tycoon, or chef, or silent movie vamp,

The manic Cuisinart finally shredding

Soul into a slaw of nonsense syllables.

The others glower at C
——
and call a break,

When suddenly, as from another room,

A stricken whisper:
Was I that humpback

At whom you laughed when you believed me

Out of hearing? Oh sweet betrayal, my bridegroom!

And D
——
. (But why “D―”? His name was Drew.

I knew him, loved him.) A tenant of his body,

He was hurt by everything he took for remedy—

Waiting tables, acupuncture, coke—

And longed to leap against the painted drop,

Some grand pirouette center stage, sweat whipped

Into the spotlight, sequined corsair or satyr.

He asks for Isadora.
Hail, friend!

Why do they never book me anymore?

Drew then nudges into the dressing room

With a question. Will I ever dance like you?

You know in your bones. I died broken on the wheel

Of circumstance. Now it’s just tableau vivant.

The happiness of the body is all on earth.

The beauty of the body in motion and repose

I wanted to give, long after it was probable.

Drew’s charged resolve saw him through the drill

(Temp job to tryout) of making a name for himself,

Until he met the dancer who infected him.

The virus flic-flacked through his system, aswirl

In cells that faltered and too soon abandoned

The soloist whose stumble a falling curtain concealed.

For that matter, you too, JM, have gone

And done it, become a voice, letters on a page—

Not like love’s sweet thoughtless routine

But a new romance, hazard and implication,

Promises as yet unmade, possibilities

Slipping, say, from N to O … —Oh,

Why will words cohere and dissolve on this blank

And not their darker meanings, an unspoken grief

I’ve reached for and felt sliding as if over

Poster board smoothed by years of being used

To giving back the bright presence drawn

Up from within yourself, your starry heart

So empty, so large, too filled with others

Not to fear an unworthiness indwelling.

You took everything on faith but death,

An old friend’s or the breathless lining

Of any new encounter, so that fresh acolytes,

Once back home, would remark with wonder

On your otherworldliness. What they failed

To see was something that has just now begun

To sink in on me: how little your detachment

Had to do with the demands of a formal art

Or a mind at once too sovereign and too spent

By being trolled for schools of thought or feeling.

Stage fright can apply or smear what make-up

Seems necessary for any evening’s encores,

And lines rehearsed before the smoked mirror’s

Critical gaze can turn to ashes in the mouth

When spoken to some poor stick mugging there

Who you hope will stay the night and fear

May last until the end. How seldom, I sense,

You gave yourself up, how often instead

Had to borrow back what had already been lent.

Even the board is under wraps in a closet upstairs.

Funny, I’ve not tried to do it since you died,

Even for a simple jabbing toward the consoling
Yes

In answer to the obvious questions posed

By missing you. Or have I instead been fearing

The
No
—the not-happy
No,
the not-there
No
?

Or had you perhaps been receding all along—

Like those friends of a quarter century ago,

Faded to vanishing points like death or California,

Where everything to be lost is finally regained,

The figures of speech for once beyond compare?

No. I
can
hear your voice from the other side,

That kingdom-come memory makes of the past,

The old recordings, the stiffening onionskin

Letters your Olivetti punched out from Athens

Or Isfahan, notebook cities shaped

By anecdotes of love—no, antidotes,

Spelled out to be kept suspended at a distance,

As now I imagine your nights with pencil and cup.

From my seat, somehow above or below the table,

Your hand moving steadily back and forth

Across the board seems like a wave goodbye.

in memory of James Merrill

To steal a glance and, anxious, see

Him slipping into transparency—

The feathered helmet already in place,

Its shadow fallen across his face

(His hooded sex its counterpart)—

Unsteadies the routines of the heart.

If I reach out and touch his wing,

What harm, what help might he then bring?

But suddenly he disappears,

As so much else has down the years …

Until I feel him deep inside

The emptiness, preoccupied.

His nerve electrifies the air.

His message is his being there.

I hesitate to mention now the time

I hesitated—was it weeks or months?—

Before telling him I was leaving, leaving for good,

So that, in the end, it was he who left me,

And my fear of his decision, or no … well,

His tonelessly announcing it one night,

Only that, always that, has clouded the scene,

Not unlike the way the years of happiness

Until that day, all of them a delusion,

Had prevented my recalling just how long

I’d waited to discover my feelings at the start.

Two weeks—no, less—on my own, secret cell

Phone calls, a rented post office box,

The desperate joking, the passionate or-elses,

Seemed only to discover the nowhere

I lingered in, the time I wanted to postpone

Hurting myself or him, the time I wanted

To wait until I could turn into something

He would never leave. Years later, forcing me

To divide the shoebox full of snapshots

Or the letters from our long-dead companions,

He waited while I chose, through tears, the things

I didn’t want to see, and did not look back

Through the closing door, though it only seemed

As if he were standing there and I was falling

Back, back to a time when I couldn’t delay

Any longer, the time I leaned down to select

My lot, lying there on the ground, in the field,

Where I recognized so many others waiting their turn.