Poems 1959-2009 (30 page)

If only he could be von Schrader or

Deloges, a beautiful athlete or a complete

Shit. God, von Schrader lazily shagging flies,

The beautiful flat trajectory of his throw.

Instead of seeking power, being it!

Tomorrow Deloges will lead the school in prayer,

Not that the autist would want to take his place.

Naked boys are yelling and snapping wet towels

At each other in the locker room,

Like a big swordfighting scene from
The Three Musketeers
,

Parry and thrust, roars of laughter and rage,

Lush Turkish steam billowing from the showers.

The showers hiss, the air is silver fox.

Hot breath, flashes of swords, the ravishing fur!—

Swashbuckling boys brandishing their towels!

Depression, aggression, elation—and acne cream—

The ecosystem of a boy his age.

He combs his wet hair straight, he hates his curls,

He checks his pimples. Only the biggest ones show,

Or rather the ointment on them caked like mud,

Supposedly skin-color, invisible; dabs

Of peanut butter that have dried to fossils,

That even a shower won't wash away, like flaws

Of character expressed by their concealment—

Secrets holding up signs—O adolescence!

O silence not really hidden by the words,

Which are not true, the words, the words, the words—

Unless you scrub, will not wash away.

But how sweetly they strive to outreach these shortcomings,

These boys who call each other by their last names,

Copying older boys and masters—it's why

He isn't wearing his glasses, though he can't see.

That fiend Deloges notices but says nothing.

Butting rams, each looks at the other sincerely,

And doesn't look away, blue eyes that lie.

He follows his astigmatism toward

The schoolbuses lined up to take everyone home,

But which are empty still, which have that smiling,

Sweet-natured blur of the retarded, oafs

In clothes too small, too wrong, too red and white,

And
painfully
eager to please a sadist so cruel

He wouldn't even hurt a masochist.

The sadistic eye of the autist shapes the world

Into a sort of, call it innocence,

Ready to be wronged, ready to

Be tortured into power and beauty, into

Words his phonographic memory

Will store on silence like particles of oil

On water—the rainbow of polarity

Which made this poem. I put my glasses on,

And shut my eyes. O adolescence, sing!

All the bus windows are open because it's warm.

I blindly face a breeze almost too sweet

To bear. I hear a hazy drone and float—

A dimpled cloud—above the poor white and poorer

Black neighborhoods which surround the small airfield.

 

I look at Broadway in the bitter cold,

The center strip benches empty like today,

And see St. Louis. I am often old

Enough to leave my childhood, but I stay.

A winter sky as total as repression

Above a street the color of the sky;

A sky the same gray as a deep depression;

A boulevard the color of a sigh:

Where Waterman and Union met was the

Apartment building I'm regressing to.

My key is in the door; I am the key;

I'm opening the door. I think it's true

Childhood is your mother even if

Your mother is in hospitals for years

And then lobotomized, like mine. A whiff

Of her perfume; behind her veil, her tears.

She wasn't crying anymore. Oh try.

No afterward she wasn't anymore.

But yes she will, she is. Oh try to cry.

I'm here—right now I'm walking through the door.

The pond was quite wide, but the happy dog

Swam back and forth called by the boy, then by

His sister on the other side, a log

Of love putt-putting back and forth from fry

To freeze, from freeze to fry, a normal pair

Of the extremes of normal, on and on.

The dog was getting tired; the children stare—

Their childhood's over. Everyone is gone,

Forest Park's deserted; still they call.

It's very cold. Soprano puffs of breath,

Small voices calling in the dusk is all

We ever are, pale speech balloons. One death,

Two ghosts … white children playing in a park

At dusk forever—but we must get home.

The mica sidewalk sparkles in the dark

And starts to freeze—or fry—and turns to foam.

At once the streetlights in the park go on.

Gas hisses from the trees—but it's the wind.

The real world vanishes behind the fawn

That leaps to safety while the doe is skinned.

The statue of Saint Louis on Art Hill,

In front of the museum, turns into

A blue-eyed doe. Next it will breathe. Soon will

Be sighing, dripping tears as thick as glue.

Stags do that when the hunt has cornered them.

The horn is blown. Bah-ooo. Her mind a doe

Which will be crying soon at bay. The stem

Between the autumn leaf and branch lets go.

My mother suddenly began to sob.

If only she could do that now. Oh try.

I feel the lock unlock. Now try the knob.

Sobbed uncontrollably. Oh try to cry.

How easily I can erase an error,

The typos my recalling this will cause,

But no correcting key erases terror.

One ambulance attendant flashed his claws,

The other plunged the needle in. They squeeze

The plunger down, the brainwash out. Bah-ooo.

Calm deepened in her slowly. There, they ease

Her to her feet. White Goddess, blond, eyes blue—

Even from two rooms away I see

The blue, if that is possible! Bright white

Of the attendants; and the mystery

And calm of the madonna; and my fright.

I flee, but to a mirror. In it, they

Are rooms behind me in our entrance hall

About to leave—the image that will stay

With me. My future was behind me. All

The future is a mirror in which they

Are still behind me in the entrance hall,

About to leave—and if I look away

She'll vanish. Once upon a time, a fall

So long ago that they were burning leaves,

Which wasn't yet against the law, I looked

Away. I watched the slowly flowing sleeves

Of smoke, the blood-raw leaf piles being cooked,

Sweet-smelling scenes of mellow preparation

Around a bloodstained altar, but instead

Of human sacrifice, a separation.

My blue-eyed doe! The severed blue-eyed head!

The windows were wide-open through which I

Could flee to nowhere—nowhere meaning how

The past is portable, and therefore why

The future of the past was always now

A treeless Art Hill gleaming in the snow,

The statue of Saint Louis at the top

On horseback, blessing everything below,

Tobogganing the bald pate into slop.

Warm sun, blue sky; blond hair, blue eyes; of course

They'll shave her head for the lobotomy,

They'll cut her brain, they'll kill her at the source.

When she's wheeled out, blue eyes are all I see.

The bandages—down to her eyes—give her

A turbaned twenties look, but I'm confused.

There were no bandages. I saw a blur.

They didn't touch a hair—but I'm confused.

I breathe mist on the mirror … I am here—

Blond hair I pray will darken till it does,

Blue eyes that will need glasses in a year—

I'm here and disappear, the boy I was …

The son who lifts his sword above Art Hill;

Who holds it almost like a dagger but

In blessing, handle up, and not to kill;

Who holds it by the blade that cannot cut.

 

I could only dream, I could never draw,

In Art with the terrifying Mrs. Jaspar

Whom I would have done anything to please.

Aquiline and aloof in the land of the button nose, her smile

Made her seem a witch, my goddess,

Too cool, too cold. She was my muse

Because she hardly spoke a word.

We used to pronounce her name to rhyme with Casbah,

Mimicking her fahncy Locust Valley lockjaw.

Say Christ through your nose!

Part of her allure and majesty and

Wonderful strange music for St. Louis certainly,

Though not as musical as her silence was. Casbah,

White flannels on a summer evening, Jasbah,

Endless lawn down to the sea. The accent

Was preposterous, the voice beautiful

Green running down to the sea nine hundred miles inland,

Preposterous. The accent

Was preposterous, her beautiful voice a

Bassoon, slow velvet cadence of the sound,

Shy but deep. Shy but deep. Clangs / The bell. Eliot.

The lips are drawn back slightly;

As if it had been hinged that way, the jaw doesn't quite close—

Actually, the opposite of lockjaw since it

Moves, and it doesn't close.

The very back of the throat without the use of the lips

Produces the bloated drawl of the upper class.

You hear it in a certain set, you see it in a certain scene,

Which has equivalents abroad who sound incredibly the same,

And bong the same aristocrat gong in their own languages.

The stag hunting gang in France who hunt on horseback.

Most aquiline being the honorary hunt servants

In livery and wearing tricorns, always

Dukes and such and others who

The very back of the throat without using the lips much.

It is an accent you can
see
—

That you could hear through soundproof glass from what you saw.

It is a sound you see in the Sologne when

The huntsman blows his haunting horn.

The hounds open their mouths. Silence. The servants in their

White breeches and long blue coats dismount. The

Stag stands in the water dropping tears of terror and exhaustion.

They do that when the hunt has them at bay.

The king is in his counting-house counting out his money.

His head will be hacked off and saved;

The carcass goes to the dogs—after the servants drink the blood

And defecate. There is another accent, that goes to Harvard,

That anyone who does can have. My babysitter

Harold Brodkey will. One day I, too, I will.

The servants dip their fingers in

The blood and paint themselves, and smear each other's blouses,

With all the time in the world apparently until it's time. It's time

To pass the chalice and drink. They defecate

In their breeches, but their coats are quite long,

The flecks on their boots are only mud,

Everything I've written here is lies.

The flecks could be flecks of blood,

But the coattails completely hide the other. There's a smell.

Though there's the smell rising in silence

From the page, but that's a lie. Brodkey knows. Lies that rise.

Now my unseen neighbor in New York four blocks away.

He is finishing the novel, he knows

Il miglior fabbro means a bigger liar. Lies that rise.

Ab lo dolchor qu'al cor mi vai

Pound catches the thermals in every language, and soars.

Eliot rises in the pew to kneel.

When he opens his mouth it is a choir.

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse

Dont meurt le bruit parmi les vents.

The cockpit voice recorder in its crashproof case remembers and sings.

Flesh and juice of the refreshing and delicious.

Inside a crashproof housing. But I don't recognize the voice.

This is your captain. In the unisex soprano of children his age.

We are trying to restart the engines

On wings of song. The pilot giggles posthumously—

“You may kiss my hond,” he drawls, for the last time

Holding a hond out to be kissed from this page. (Sound of crash.)

 

What hasn't happened isn't everything

Until in middle age it starts to be.

Night-blooming jasmine, dreams—and when they bring

You out on stage there's silence. Now I see,

You tell the darkness which is watching you.

Applause. Then instantly a hush, a cough.

It was another darkness once you knew

You had a blindfold on. You took it off,

But this is darker—down an unlit street,

An unmarked street, the three blocks to the shore.

They call it Banyan Street, night air so sweet.

Too much increasingly turns into more—

This is the martyr's grove on Banyan Street.

You breathe a perfumed darkness, numberless

Perfumes. The glistening as wet as meat

Deliciousness of sinking in. The S

OS of it. But it's too late. You reach

The can't stop trembling yes oh yes of it—

Already when you're two blocks from the beach

You start to drown. Love ruled your White House. Sit,

You named your dog. Come, Sit;
sit
, Sit; was love.

Your head explodes although you hear a shot.

Then archaeology … below above—

Beneath amnesia, Troy. But you forgot.

 

It sang without a sound: music that

The naive elm trees loved. They were alive.

Oh silky music no elm tree could survive.

The head low slither of a stalking cat,

Black panther darkness pouring to the kill,

Entered every elm—they drank it in.