All of Us (28 page)

Make use of the things around you.

This light rain

Outside the window, for one.

This cigarette between my fingers,

These feet on the couch.

The faint sound of rock-and-roll,

The red Ferrari in my head.

The woman bumping

Drunkenly around in the
kitchen…

Put it all in,

Make use.

All day he’d been working like a locomotive.

I mean he was
painting
, the brush strokes

coming like clockwork. Then he called

home. And that was that. That was all she

wrote. He shook like a leaf. He started

smoking again. He lay down and got back

up. Who could sleep if your woman sneered

and said time was running out? He drove

into town. But he didn’t go drinking.

No, he went walking. He walked past a mill

called “the mill.” Smell of fresh-cut

lumber, lights everywhere, men driving

jitneys and forklifts, driving themselves.

Lumber piled to the top of the warehouse,

the whine and groan of machinery. Easy

enough to recollect, he thought. He went

on, rain falling now, a soft rain that wants

to do its level best not to interfere

with anything and in return asks only

that it not be forgotten. The painter

turned up his collar and said to himself

he wouldn’t forget. He came to a lighted

building where, inside a room, men played

cards at a big table. A man wearing

a cap stood at the window and looked

out through the rain as he smoked

a pipe. That was an image he didn’t

want to forget either, but then

with his next thought he

shrugged. What was the point?

He walked on until he reached the jetty

with its rotten pilings. Rain fell

harder now. It hissed as it struck

the water. Lightning came and went.

Lightning broke across the sky

like memory, like revelation. Just

when he was at the point of despair,

a fish came up out of the dark

water under the jetty and then fell back

and then rose again in a flash

to stand on its tail and shake itself!

The painter could hardly credit

his eyes, or his ears! He’d just

had a sign—faith didn’t enter

into it. The painter’s mouth flew

open. By the time he’d reached home

he’d quit smoking and vowed never

to talk on the telephone again.

He put on his smock and picked up

his brush. He was ready to begin

again, but he didn’t know if one

canvas could hold it all. Never

mind. He’d carry it over

onto another canvas if he had to.

It was all or nothing. Lightning, water,

fish, cigarettes, cards, machinery,

the human heart, that old port.

Even the woman’s lips against

the receiver, even that.

The curl of her lip.

You are served “duck soup” and nothing more. But you

can hardly swallow this broth; it is a turbid liquid

in which bits of wild duck and guts

imperfectly cleaned are swimming.…

It is far from tasty.

Among the hieroglyphs, the masks, the unfinished poems,

the spectacle unfolds:
Antonin et son double.

They are at work now, calling up the old demons.

The enchantments, etc. The tall, scarred-looking

one at the desk, the one with the cigarette and

no teeth to speak of, is prone to

boldness, to a certain excess

in speech, in gesture. The other is cautious,

watches carefully his opportunity, is effacing even. But

at certain moments still hints broadly, impatiently

of his necessarily arrogant existence.

Antonin, sure enough, there are no more masterpieces.

But your hands trembled as you said it,

and behind every curtain there is always, as you

knew, a rustling.

Trying to write a poem while it was still dark out,

he had the unmistakable feeling he was being watched.

Laid down the pen and looked around. In a minute,

he got up and moved through the rooms of his house.

He checked the closets. Nothing, of course.

Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

He turned off the lamps and sat in the dark.

Smoking his pipe until the feeling had passed

and it grew light out. He looked down

at the white paper before him. Then got up

and made the rounds of his house once more.

The sound of his breathing accompanying him.

Otherwise nothing. Obviously.

Nothing.

He arose early, the morning tinged with excitement,

eager to be at his desk. He had toast and eggs, cigarettes

and coffee, musing all the while on the work ahead, the hard

path through the forest. The wind blew clouds across

the sky, rattling the leaves that remained on the branches

outside his window. Another few days for them and they’d

be gone, those leaves. There was a poem there, maybe;

he’d have to give it some thought. He went to

his desk, hesitated for a long moment, and then made

what proved to be the most important decision

he’d make all day, something his entire flawed life

had prepared him for. He pushed aside the folder of poems —

one poem in particular still held him in its grip after

a restless night’s sleep. (But, really, what’s one more, or

less? So what? The work would keep for a while yet,

wouldn’t it?) He had the whole wide day opening before him.

Better to clear his decks first. He’d deal with a few items

of business, even some family matters he’d let go far

too long. So he got cracking. He worked hard all day—love

and hate getting into it, a little compassion (very little), some

fellow-feeling, even despair and joy.

There were occasional flashes of anger rising, then

subsiding, as he wrote letters, saying “yes” or “no” or “it

depends”—explaining why, or why not, to people out there

at the margin of his life or people he’d never seen and never

would see. Did they matter? Did they give a damn?

Some did. He took some calls too, and made some others, which

in turn created the need to make a few more. So-and-so, being

unable to talk now, promised to call back next day.

Toward evening, worn out and clearly (but mistakenly, of course)

feeling he’d done something resembling an honest day’s work,

he stopped to take inventory and note the couple of

phone calls he’d have to make next morning if

he wanted to stay abreast of things, if he didn’t want to

write still more letters, which he didn’t. By now,

it occurred to him, he was sick of all business, but he went on

in this fashion, finishing one last letter that should have been

answered weeks ago. Then he looked up. It was nearly dark outside.

The wind had laid. And the trees—they were still now, nearly

stripped of their leaves. But, finally, his desk was clear,

if he didn’t count that folder of poems he was

uneasy just to look at. He put the folder in a drawer, out

of sight. That was a good place for it, it was safe there and

he’d know just where to go to lay his hands on it when he

felt like it. Tomorrow! He’d done everything he could do

today. There were still those few calls he’d have to make,

and he forgot who was supposed to call him, and there were a

few notes he was required to send due to a few of the calls,

but he had it made now, didn’t he? He was out of the woods.

He could call today a day. He’d done what he had to do.

What his duty told him he should do. He’d fulfilled his sense of

obligation and hadn’t disappointed anybody.

But at that moment, sitting there in front of his tidy desk,

he was vaguely nagged by the memory of a poem he’d wanted

to write that morning, and there was that other poem

he hadn’t gotten back to either.

So there it is. Nothing much else needs be said, really. What

can
be said for a man who chooses to blab on the phone

all day, or else write stupid letters

while he lets his poems go unattended and uncared for,

               abandoned —

or worse, unattempted. This man doesn’t deserve poems

and they shouldn’t be given to him in any form.

               His poems, should he ever produce any more,

ought to be eaten by mice.

There is no deceiving the bird-fancier. He sees and

understands his bird from a distance. “There is no relying on

that bird,” a fancier will say,

looking into a siskin’s beak, and counting the feathers

on its tail. “He sings now, it’s true, but what

of that? I sing in company too. No, my boy, shout, sing

to me without company; sing in solitude, if

you can.… Give me

the quiet one!”

Talking about her brother, Morris, Tess said:

“The night always catches him. He never

believes it’s coming.”

That time I broke a tooth on barbecued ribs.

I was drunk. We were all drunk.

The early sixteenth-century Belgian painter called,

for want of his real name,

“The Master of the Embroidered Leaf.”

Begin the novel with the young married couple

getting lost in the woods, just after the picnic.

Those dead birds on the porch when I opened up

the house after being away for three months.

The policeman whose nails were bitten to the quick.

Aunt Lola, the shoplifter, rolled her own dad

and other drunks as well.

Dinner at Doug and Amy’s. Steve ranting, as usual,

about Bob Dylan, the Vietnam War, granulated sugar,

silver mines in Colorado. And, as usual, just

as we sit down the phone rings and is passed around

the table so everyone can say something. (It’s Jerry.)

The food grows cold. No one is hungry anyway.

“We’ve sustained damage, but we’re still able

to maneuver.” Spock to Captain Kirk.

Remember Haydn’s 104 symphonies. Not all of them

were great. But there were 104 of them.

The rabbi I met on the plane that time who gave me comfort

just after my marriage had broken up for good.

Chris’s story about going to an AA meeting where

a well-to-do family comes in—“freaked out,”

her words—because they’ve just been robbed at gunpoint.

Three men and a woman in wet suits. The door to their

motel room is open and they are watching TV.

“I am disbanding the fleet and sending it back

to Macedonian shores.”

                                        Richard Burton

                                        
Alexander the Great

Don’t forget when the phone was off the hook

all day, every day.

The bill collector (in Victoria, B.C.) who asks

the widow if she’d like it if the bailiff dug up

her husband and repossessed the suit he was buried in.

“Your bitter grief is proof enough.”

                                        Mozart, Act II, Scene 2

                                        
La Clemenza di Tito

The woman in El Paso who wants to give us her furniture.

But it’s clear she is having a nervous breakdown.

We’re afraid to touch it. Then we take the bed, and a chair.

Duke Ellington riding in the back of his limo, somewhere

in Indiana. He is reading by lamplight. Billy Strayhorn

is with him, but asleep. The tires hiss on the pavement.

The Duke goes on reading and turning the pages.

I’ve got—how much longer?

Enough horsing around!

Just when he had given up thinking

he’d ever write another line of poetry,

she began brushing her hair.

And singing that Irish folk song

he liked so much.

That one about Napoleon and

his “bonnie bunch of roses, oh!”