All of Us (8 page)

So I told it. Tried to anyway,

Haines and I pretty drunk now. Wilson listening, listening,

then saying, You sure it wasn’t a bobcat?

Which I secretly took as a put-down, he from the Southwest,

poet who had read that night,

and any fool able to tell a bobcat from a cougar,

even a drunk writer like me,

years later, at the smorgasbord, in California.

Hell. And then the cougar smooth-loped out of the brush

right in front of me—God, how big and beautiful he was —

jumped onto a rock and turned his head

to look at me. To look at
me
! I looked back, forgetting to shoot.

Then he jumped again, ran clear out of my life.

These fish have no eyes

these silver fish that come to me in dreams,

scattering their roe and milt

in the pockets of my brain.

But there’s one that comes —

heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,

that simply holds against the current,

closing its dark mouth against

the current, closing and opening

as it holds to the current.

Half asleep on top of this bleak landscape,

surrounded by chukkers,

I crouch behind a pile of rocks and dream

I embrace my babysitter.

A few inches from my face

her cool and youthful eyes stare at me from two remaining

wildflowers. There’s a question in those eyes

I can’t answer. Who is to judge these things?

But deep under my winter underwear,

my blood stirs.

Suddenly, her hand rises in alarm —

the geese are streaming off their river island,

rising, rising up this gorge.

I move the safety. The body gathers, leans to its work.

Believe in the fingers.

Believe in the nerves.

Believe in THIS.

In the living room Walter Cronkite

prepares us for the moon shot.

We are approaching

the third and final phase, this

is the last exercise.

I settle down,

far down into the covers.

My son is wearing his space helmet.

I see him move down the long airless corridor,

his iron boots dragging.

My own feet grow cold.

I dream of yellow jackets and near

frostbite, two hazards

facing the whitefish fishermen

on Satus Creek.

But there is something moving

there in the frozen reeds,

something on its side that is

slowly filling with water.

I turn onto my back.

All of me is lifting at once,

as if it were impossible to drown.

In the trailer next to this one

a woman picks at a child named Louise.

Didn’t I tell you, Dummy, to keep this door closed?

Jesus, it’s winter!

You want to pay the electric bill?

Wipe your feet, for Christ’s sake!

Louise, what am I going to do with you?

Oh, what am I going to do with you, Louise?

the woman sings from morning to night.

Today the woman and child are out

hanging up wash.

Say hello to this man, the woman says

to Louise. Louise!

This is Louise, the woman says

and gives Louise a jerk.

Cat’s got her tongue, the woman says.

But Louise has pins in her mouth,

wet clothes in her arms. She pulls

the line down, holds the line

with her neck

as she slings the shirt

over the line and lets go —

the shirt filling out, flapping

over her head. She ducks

and jumps back—jumps back

from this near human shape.

When you were little, wind tailed you

all over Magdeburg. In Vienna wind looked for you

in first one courtyard then another.

It overturned fountains, it made your hair stand on end.

In Prague wind accompanied serious young couples

just starting families. But you made their breaths catch,

those ladies in long white dresses,

the men with their moustaches and high collars.

It waited in the cuffs of your sleeves

when you bowed to the Emperor Haile Selassie.

It was there when you shook hands

with the democratic King of the Belgians.

Wind rolled mangoes and garbage sacks down the streets of Nairobi.

You saw wind pursuing zebras across the Serengeti Plain.

Wind joined you as you stepped off the eaves of suburban houses

in Sarasota, Florida. It made little noises

in trees at every crossroads town, every circus stop.

You remarked on it all your life,

how it could come from nowhere,

how it stirred the puffy faces of the hydrangeas

below hotel room balconies while you

drew on your big Havana and watched

the smoke stream south, always south,

toward Puerto Rico and the Torrid Zone.

That morning, 74 years old and 10 stories up,

midway between hotel and hotel, a promotional stunt

on the first day of spring, that wind

which has been everywhere with you

comes in from the Caribbean to throw itself

once and for all into your arms, like a young lover!

Your hair stands on end.

You try to crouch, to reach for wire.

Later, men come along to clean up

and to take down the wire. They take down the wire

where you spent your life. Imagine that: wire.

This sky, for instance:

closed, gray,

but it has stopped snowing

so that is something. I am

so cold I cannot bend

my fingers.

Walking down to the river this morning

we surprised a badger

tearing a rabbit.

Badger had a bloody nose,

blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:

    prowess is not to be confused

    with grace.

Later, eight mallard ducks fly over

without looking down. On the river

Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls

for steelhead. He has fished

this river for years

but February is the best month

he says.

Snarled, mittenless,

I handle a maze of nylon.

Far away —

another man is raising my children,

bedding my wife bedding my wife.

Drifting outside in a pall of smoke,

I follow a snail’s streaked path down

the garden to the garden’s stone wall.

Alone at last I squat on my heels, see

what needs to be done, and suddenly

affix myself to the damp stone.

I begin to look around me slowly

and listen, employing

my entire body as the snail

employs its body, relaxed, but alert.

Amazing! Tonight is a milestone

in my life. After tonight

how can I ever go back to that

other life? I keep my eyes

on the stars, wave to them

with my feelers. I hold on

for hours, just resting.

Still later, grief begins to settle

around my heart in tiny drops.

I remember my father is dead,

and I am going away from this

town soon. Forever.

Goodbye, son, my father says.

Toward morning, I climb down

and wander back into the house.

They are still waiting,

fright splashed on their faces,

as they meet my new eyes for the first time.

Where this floated up from, or why,

I don’t know. But thinking about this

since just after Robert called

telling me he’d be here in a few

minutes to go clamming.

How on my first job I worked

under a man named Sol.

Fifty-some years old, but

a stockboy like I was.

Had worked his way

up to nothing. But grateful

for his job, same as me.

He knew everything there was

to know about that dime-store

merchandise and was willing

to show me. I was sixteen, working

for six bits an hour. Loving it

that I was. Sol taught me

what he knew. He was patient,

though it helped I learned fast.

Most important memory

of that whole time: opening

the cartons of women’s lingerie.

Underpants, and soft, clingy things

like that. Taking it out

of cartons by the handful. Something

sweet and mysterious about those

things even then. Sol called it

“linger-ey.” “Linger-ey?”

What did I know? I called it

that for a while, too. “Linger-ey.”

Then I got older. Quit being

a stockboy. Started pronouncing

that frog word right.

I knew what I was talking about!

Went to taking girls out

in hopes of touching that softness,

slipping down those underpants.

And sometimes it happened. God,

they let me. And they
were

linger-ey, those underpants.

They tended to linger a little

sometimes, as they slipped down

off the belly, clinging lightly

to the hot white skin.

Passing over the hips and buttocks

and beautiful thighs, traveling

faster now as they crossed the knees,

the calves! Reaching the ankles,

brought together for this

occasion. And kicked free

onto the floor of the car and

forgotten about. Until you had

to look for them.

“Linger-ey.”

Those sweet girls!

“Linger a little, for thou art fair.”

I know who said that. It fits,

and I’ll use it. Robert and his

kids and I out there on the flats

with our buckets and shovels.

His kids, who won’t eat clams, cutting

up the whole time, saying “Yuck”

or “Ugh” as clams turned

up in the shovels full of sand

and were tossed into the bucket.

Me thinking all the while

of those early days in Yakima.

And smooth-as-silk underpants.

The lingering kind that Jeanne wore,

and Rita, Muriel, Sue, and her sister,

Cora Mae. All those girls.

Grownup now. Or worse.

I’ll say it: dead.

  This rain has stopped, and the moon has come out.

I don’t understand the first thing about radio

waves. But I think they travel better just after

a rain, when the air is damp. Anyway, I can reach out

now and pick up Ottawa, if I want to, or Toronto.

Lately, at night, I’ve found myself

becoming slightly interested in Canadian politics

and domestic affairs. It’s true. But mostly it was their

music stations I was after. I could sit here in the chair

and listen, without having to do anything, or think.

I don’t have a TV, and I’d quit reading

the papers. At night I turned on the radio.

    When I came out here I was trying to get away

from everything. Especially literature.

What that entails, and what comes after.

There is in the soul a desire for not thinking.

For being still. Coupled with this

a desire to be strict, yes, and rigorous.

But the soul is also a smooth son of a bitch,

not always trustworthy. And I forgot that.

I listened when it said, Better to sing that which is gone

and will not return than that which is still

with us and will be with us tomorrow. Or not.

And if not, that’s all right too.

It didn’t much matter, it said, if a man sang at all.

That’s the voice I listened to.

Can you imagine somebody thinking like this?

That it’s really all one and the same?

What nonsense!

But I’d think these stupid thoughts at night

as I sat in the chair and listened to my radio.

    Then, Machado, your poetry!

It was a little like a middle-aged man falling

in love again. A remarkable thing to witness,

and embarrassing, too.

Silly things like putting your picture up.

And I took your book to bed with me

and slept with it near at hand. A train went by

in my dreams one night and woke me up.

And the first thing I thought, heart racing

there in the dark bedroom, was this —

It’s all right, Machado is here.

Then I could fall back to sleep again.

    Today I took your book with me when I went

for my walk. “Pay attention!” you said,

when anyone asked what to do with their lives.

So I looked around and made note of everything.

Then sat down with it in the sun, in my place

beside the river where I could see the mountains.

And I closed my eyes and listened to the sound

of the water. Then I opened them and began to read

“Abel Martin’s Last Lamentations.”

This morning I thought about you hard, Machado.

And I hope, even in the face of what I know about death,

that you got the message I intended.

But it’s okay even if you didn’t. Sleep well. Rest.

Sooner or later I hope we’ll meet.

And then I can tell you these things myself.