Plundered Hearts (8 page)

He takes another head by the ear and dips

    It
—eight, nine, ten—
into the kettle,

               Then quickly starts to shave it

    With a bone-handled wartime Gillette.

               The black matted shag falls in

Patches to the floor and floats toward the clogged drain.

One after another, the heads are stacked up

    Behind, like odd-lot, disassembled

               Plastic replicas of goats.

    Though their lips are hardened now, the teeth

               Of some can be seen—perfect!

But Muhammad hacks the jaws off anyway,

And the skulls with their nubbly horns and ears.

    What’s left is meant for his faithful poor,

               For their daily meager stew.

    He lines up six on a shelf out front.

               (As if all turned inside out,

The heads, no longer heads exactly, strangely

Bring to mind relief maps of the “occupied

    Territories.” Born on the wrong side

               Of a new border, he’s made

    To carry his alien’s ID,

               Its sullen headshot labeled

In the two warring tongues.) Goat heads feel them all,

The refugee, the single man, and his dog—

    Their delicacy. Cartilage knobs.

               Fat sacs. The small cache of flesh.

    The eyeballs staring out at nothing

               In all directions. The tongue

Lolling up, as if with something more to say.

Friendship is love without wings.

—
FRENCH PROVERB

Cloud swells. Ocean chop. Exhaustion’s

Black-and-white. The drone at last picked up

By floodlights a mile above Le Bourget.

Bravado touches down. And surging past

Police toward their hero’s spitfire engine,

His cockpit now become the moment’s mirror,

The crowd from inside dissolves to flashbulbs.

Goggles, then gloves, impatiently pulled off,

He climbs down out of his boy’s-own myth.

His sudden shyness protests the plane deserves

The credit. But his eyes are searching for a reason.

Then, to anyone who’d listen: “She’s not here?

But … but I flew the Atlantic because of her.”

At which broadcast remark, she walks across

Her dressing room to turn the radio off.

Remember how it always begins? The film,

That is.
The Rules of the Game,
Renoir’s tragi-

Comedy of manners even then

Outdated, one suspects, that night before

The world woke up at war and all-for-love

Heroes posed a sudden risk, no longer

A curiosity like the silly marquis’s

Mechanical toys, time’s fools, his stuffed

Warbler or the wind-up blackamoor.

Besides, she prefers Octave who shared those years,

From twelve until last week, before and after

The men who let her make the mistakes she would

The morning after endlessly analyze—

This puzzle of a heart in flight from limits—

With her pudgy, devoted, witty, earthbound friend.

—A friend who, after all, was her director,

Who’d written her lines and figured out the angles,

Soulful
auteur
and comic relief in one,

His roles confused as he stepped center-stage

(Albeit costumed as a performing bear)

From behind the camera—or rather, out

Of character. Renoir later told her

The question “how to belong, how to meet”

Was the film’s only moral preoccupation,

A problem the hero, the Jew, and the woman share

With the rest of us whose impulsive sympathies

For the admirable success or loveable failure

Keep from realizing the one terrible thing

Is that everyone has his own good reasons.

The husband wants the logic of the harem—

I.e., no one is thrown out, no one hurt—,

His electric organ with its gaudy trim and come-on,

Stenciled nudes. His wife, who’s had too much

To drink, stumbles into the château’s library

And searches for a lover on the shelf just out

Of reach, the one she learned by heart at school.

The lover, meanwhile (our aviator in tails)

Because love is the rule that breaks the rules,

Dutifully submits to the enchantment of type.

If each person has just one story to tell,

The self a Scheherazade postponing The End,

It’s the friend alone who, night after night, listens,

His back to the camera, his expression now quizzical,

Now encouraging even though, because he has

A story himself, he’s heard it all before.

Is there such a thing as unrequited

Friendship? I doubt it. Even what’s about

The house, as ordinary, as humble as habit—

The mutt, the TV, the rusted window tray

Of African violets in their tinfoil ruffs—

Returns our affection with a loyalty

Two parts pluck and the third a bright instinct

To please. (Our habits too are friends, of course.

The sloppy and aggressive ones as well

Seem pleas for attention from puberty’s

Imaginary comrade or the Job’s comforters

Of middle age.) Office mates or children

Don’t form bonds but are merely busy together,

And acquaintances—that pen pal from Porlock is one—

Slip between the hours. But those we eagerly

Pursue bedevil the clock’s idle hands,

And years later, by then the best of friends,

You’ll settle into a sort of comfy marriage,

The two of you familiar as an old pair of socks,

Each darning the other with faint praise.

More easily mapped than kept to, friendships

Can stray, and who has not taken a wrong turn?

(Nor later put that misstep to good use.)

Ex-friends, dead friends, friends never made but missed,

How they resemble those shrouded chandeliers

Still hanging, embarrassed, noble, in the old palace

Now a state-run district conference center.

One peevish delegate is sitting there

Tapping his earphones because he’s picking up

Static that sounds almost like trembling crystal.

Most friendships in New York are telephonic,

The actual meetings—the brunch or gallery hop

Or, best, a double-feature of French classics—

Less important than the daily schmooze.

Flopped on the sofa in my drip-dry kimono,

I kick off the morning’s dance of hours with you,

Natalie, doyenne of the daily calls,

Master-mistress of crisis and charm.

Contentedly we chew the cud of yesterday’s

Running feud with what part of the self

Had been mistaken—yes?—for someone else.

And grunt. Or laugh. Or leave to stir the stew.

Then talk behind the world’s back—how, say,

Those friends of friends simply Will Not Do,

While gingerly stepping back (as we never would

With lover or stranger) from any disappointment

In each other. Grooming like baboons? Perhaps.

Or taking on a ballast of gossip to steady

Nerves already bobbing in the wake of that grand

Liner, the SS
Domesticity,

With its ghost crew and endless fire drills.

But isn’t the point to get a few things

Clear at last, some uncommon sense to rely

Upon in all this slow-motion vertigo

That lumbers from dream to real-life drama?

You alone, dear heart, remember what it’s like

To be me; remember too the dollop of truth,

Cheating on that regime of artificially

Sweetened, salt-free fictions the dangerous

Years concoct for tonight’s floating island.

Different friends sound different registers.

The morning impromptu, when replayed this afternoon

For you, Jimmy, will have been transcribed

For downtown argot, oltrano, and Irish harp,

And the novelist in you draw out as anecdote

What news from nowhere had earlier surfaced as whim.

On your end of the line (I picture a fire laid

And high-tech teapot under a gingham cozy),

Patience humors my warmed-over grievance or gush.

Each adds the lover’s past to his own, experience

Greedily annexed, heartland by buffer state,

While the friend lends his field glasses to survey

The ransacked loot and spot the weak defenses.

Though it believes all things, it’s not love

That bears and hopes and endures, but the comrade-in-arms.

How often you’ve found me abandoned on your doormat,

Pleading to be taken in and plied

With seltzer and Chinese take-out, while you bandaged

My psyche’s melodramatically slashed wrists

(In any case two superficial wounds),

The razor’s edge of romance having fallen

Onto the bathroom tiles next to a lurid

Pool of self-regard. “
Basta!
Love

Would bake its bread of you, then butter it.

The braver remedy for sorrow is to stand up

Under fire, or lie low on a therapist’s couch,

Whistling an old barcarole into the dark.

Get a grip. Buckle on your parachute.

Now, out the door with you, and just remember:

A friend in need is fortune’s darling indeed.”

Subtle Plato, patron saint of friendship,

Scolded those nurslings of the myrtle-bed

Whose tender souls, first seized by love’s madness,

Then stirred to rapturous frenzies, overnight

Turn sour, their eyes narrowed with suspicions,

Sleepless, feverishly refusing company.

The soul, in constant motion because immortal,

Again and again is “deeply moved” and flies

To a new favorite, patrolling the upper air

To settle briefly on this or that heart-

Stopping beauty, or flutters vainly around

The flame of its own image, light of its life.

Better the friend to whom we’re drawn by choice

And not instinct or the glass threads of passion.

Better the friend with whom we fall in step

Behind our proper god, or sit beside

At the riverbend, idly running a finger

Along his forearm when the conversation turns

To whether everything craves its opposite,

As cold its warmth and bitter its honeydrop,

Or whether like desires like—agreed?—

Its object akin to the good, recognizing

In another what is necessary for the self,

As one may be a friend without knowing how

To define friendship, which itself so often slips

Through our hands because … but he’s asleep

On your shoulder by now and probably dreaming

Of a face he’d glimpsed on the street yesterday,

The stranger he has no idea will grow irreplaceable

And with whom he hasn’t yet exchanged a word.

Late one night, alone in bed, the book

Having slipped from my hands while I stared at the phrase

The lover’s plaintive “Can’t we just be friends?”

I must have dreamt you’d come back, and sat down

Beside my pillow. (I could also see myself

Asleep but in a different room by now—

A motel room to judge by the landscape I’d become,

Framed on the cinder-block wall behind.)

To start over, you were saying, requires too much,

And friendship in the aftermath is a dull

Affair, a rendezvous with second guesses,

Dining out on memories you can’t send back

Because they’ve spoiled. And from where I sat,

Slumped like a cloud over the moon’s tabletop,

Its wrinkled linen trailing across a lake,

I was worried. Another storm was brewing.

I ran a willowy hand over the lake to calm

The moonlight—or your feelings. Then woke

On the bed’s empty side, the sheets as cool

As silence to my touch. The speechlessness

Of sex, or the fumble afterwards for something

To say about love, amount to the same. Words

Are what friends, not lovers, have between them,

Old saws and eloquent squawkings. We deceive

Our lovers by falling for someone we cannot love,

Then murmur sweet nothings we do not mean,

Half-fearing they’ll turn out true. But to go back—

Come dawn, exhausted by the quiet dark,

I longed for the paper boy’s shuffle on the stair,

The traffic report, the voices out there, out there.

Friends are fables of our loneliness.

If love would live for hope, friendship thrives

On memory, the friends we “make” made up

Of old desires for surprise without danger,

For support without a parent’s smarting ruler,

For a brother’s sweaty hand and a trail of crumbs.