Collected Poems (10 page)

A History of Revolutions
— rattled through the pages and triumphantly handed it to her husband.

A photograph: someone who’s been garroted and the executioner, standing behind him in a business hat,

has his thumbs just like that over the person’s eyes, straightening the head,

so that you thought the thumbs were going to move away because they were only pointing

the person at something they wanted him to see and the one with the hands was going to say, “Look! Right there!”

“I told you,” the wife said. “I swear to god she’s trying to drive me crazy.”

I didn’t know what it all meant but my friend went wild, started breaking things, I went home

and when I saw him the next morning at breakfast he acted as though nothing had happened.

We used to eat at the Westfield truck stop, but I remember Fritz’s, The Victory, The Eagle,

and I think I’ve never had as much contentment as I did then, before work, the light just up,

everyone sipping their coffee out of the heavy white cups and teasing the middle-aged waitresses

who always acted vaguely in love with whoever was on jobs around there right then

besides the regular farmers on their way back from the markets and the long-haul truckers.

Listen: sometimes when you go to speak about life it’s as though your mouth’s full of nails

but other times it’s so easy that it’s ridiculous to even bother.

The eggs and the toast could fly out of the plates and it wouldn’t matter

and the bubbles in the level could blow sky-high and it still wouldn’t.

Listen to the back-hoes gearing up and the shouts and somebody cracking his sledge into the mortar pan.

Listen again. He’ll do it all day if you want him to. Listen again.

Spit

… then the son of the “superior race” began to spit into the Rabbi’s mouth so that the Rabbi could continue to spit on the Torah …

— The Black Book

After this much time, it’s still impossible. The SS man with his stiff hair and his uniform;

the Rabbi, probably in a torn overcoat, probably with a stained beard the other would be clutching;

the Torah, God’s word, on the altar, the letters blurring under the blended phlegm;

the Rabbi’s parched mouth, the SS man perfectly absorbed, obsessed with perfect humiliation.

So many years and what is there to say still about the soldiers waiting impatiently in the snow,

about the one stamping his feet, thinking, Kill him! Get it over with!

while back there the lips of the Rabbi and the other would have brushed

and if time had stopped you would have thought they were lovers,

so lightly kissing, the sharp, luger hand under the dear chin,

the eyes furled slightly and then when it started again the eyelashes of both of them

shyly fluttering as wonderfully as the pulse of a baby.

Maybe we don’t have to speak of it at all, it’s still the same.

War, that happens and stops happening but is always somehow right there, twisting and hardening us;

then what we make of God — words, spit, degradation, murder, shame; every conceivable torment.

All these ways to live that have something to do with how we live

and that we’re almost ashamed to use as metaphors for what goes on in us

but that we do anyway, so that love is battle and we watch ourselves in love

become maddened with pride and incompletion, and God is what it is when we’re alone

wrestling with solitude and everything speaking in our souls turns against us like His fury

and just facing another person, there is so much terror and hatred that yes,

spitting in someone’s mouth, trying to make him defile his own meaning,

would signify the struggle to survive each other and what we’ll enact to accomplish it.

There’s another legend.

It’s about Moses, that when they first brought him as a child before Pharaoh,

the king tested him by putting a diamond and a live coal in front of him

and Moses picked up the red ember and popped it into his mouth

so for the rest of his life he was tongue-tied and Aaron had to speak for him.

What must his scarred tongue have felt like in his mouth?

It must have been like always carrying something there that weighed too much,

something leathery and dead whose greatest gravity was to loll out like an ox’s,

and when it moved, it must have been like a thick embryo slowly coming alive,

butting itself against the inner sides of his teeth and cheeks.

And when God burned in the bush, how could he not cleave to him?

How could he not know that all of us were on fire and that every word we said would burn forever,

in pain, unquenchably, and that God knew it, too, and would say nothing Himself ever again beyond this,

ever, but would only live in the flesh that we use like firewood,

in all the caves of the body, the gut cave, the speech cave:

He would slobber and howl like something just barely a man that beats itself again and again onto the dark,

moist walls away from the light, away from whatever would be light for this last eternity.

“Now therefore go,” He said, “and I will be with thy mouth.”

Toil

After the argument — argument? battle, war, harrowing; you need shrieks, moans from the pit —

after that woman and I anyway stop raking each other with the meat-hooks we’ve become with each other,

I fit my forehead into the smudge I’ve already sweated onto the window with a thousand other exhaustions

and watch an old man having breakfast out of a pile of bags on my front step.

Peas from a can, bread with the day-old price scrawled over the label in big letters

and then a bottle that looks so delectable, the way he carefully unsheathes it

so the neck just lips out of the wrinkled foreskin of the paper and closes his eyes and tilts,

long and hard, that if there were one lie left in me to forgive a last rapture of cowardice

I’d go down there too and sprawl and let the whole miserable rest go to pieces.

Does anyone still want to hear how love can turn rotten?

How you can be so desperate that even going adrift wouldn’t be enough —

you want to scour yourself out, get rid of all the needs you’ve still got in yourself

that keep you endlessly tearing against yourself in rages of guilt and frustration?

I don’t. I’d rather think about other things. Beauty. How do you learn to believe there’s beauty?

The kids going by on their way to school with their fat little lunch bags: beauty!

My old drunk with his bags — bottle bags, rag bags, shoe bags: beauty! beauty!

He lies there like the goddess of wombs and first-fruit, asleep in the riches,

one hand still hooked in mid-flight over the intricacies of the iron railing.

Old father, wouldn’t it be a good ending if you and I could just walk away together?

Or that you were the king who reveals himself, who folds back the barbed, secret wings

and we’re all so in love now, one spirit, one flesh, one generation, that the truces don’t matter?

Or maybe a better ending would be that there is no ending.

Maybe the Master of Endings is wandering down through his herds to find it

and the cave cow who tells truth and the death cow who holds sea in her eyes are still there

but all he hears are the same old irresistible slaughter-pen bawlings.

So maybe there is no end to the story and maybe there’s no story.

Maybe the last calf just ambles up to the trough through the clearing

and nudges aside the things that swarm on the water and her mouth dips in among them and drinks.

Then she lifts, and it pours, everything, gushes, and we’re lost in both waters.

The Last Deaths

1.

A few nights ago I was half-watching the news on television and half-reading to my daughter.

The book was about a boy who makes a zoo out of junk he finds in a lot —

I forget exactly; a horse-bottle, a bedspring that’s a snake, things like that —

and on the news they were showing a film about the most recent bombings.

There was a woman crying, tearing at her hair and breasts, shrieking incomprehensibly

because her husband and all her children had been killed the night before

and just when she’d flung herself against the legs of one of the soldiers watching her,

Jessie looked up and said, “What’s the matter with her? Why’s she crying?”

2.

I haven’t lived with my daughter for a year now and sometimes it still hurts not to be with her more,

not to have her laughter when I want it or to be able to comfort her when she cries out in her sleep.

I don’t see her often enough to be able to know what I can say to her,

what I can solve for her without introducing more confusions than there were in the first place.

That’s what happened with death. She was going to step on a bug and when I told her she’d kill it,

it turned out that no one had ever told her about death and now she had to know.

“It’s when you don’t do anything anymore,” I told her. “It’s like being asleep.”

I didn’t say for how long but she’s still been obsessed with it since then,

wanting to know if she’s going to die and when and if I am and her mother and grandma and do robbers do it?

Maybe I should have just given her the truth, but I didn’t: now what was I going to say about that woman?

“Her house fell down,” I said. “Who knocked down her house?” “It just fell.”

Then I found something for us to do, but last night, again, first thing,

“Tell me about that girl.” “What girl?” “You know.” Of course I know.

What could have gone on in my child’s dreams last night so that woman was a girl now?

How many times must they have traded places back and forth in that innocent crib?

“You mean the lady whose house fell down?” “Yeah, who knocked her house down?”

3.

These times. The endless wars. The hatreds. The vengefulness.

Everyone I know getting out of their marriage. Old friends distrustful.

The politicians using us until you can’t think about it anymore because you can’t tell anymore

which reality affects which and how do you escape from it without everything battering you back again?

How many times will I lie to Jessie about things that have no meaning for either of us?

How many forgivenesses will I need from her when all I wanted was to keep her from suffering the same ridiculous illusions I have?

There’ll be peace soon.

They’ll fling it down like sick meat we’re supposed to lick up and be thankful for and what then?

4.

Jessie, it’s as though the whole race is sunk in an atmosphere of blood

and it’s been clotting for so many centuries we can hardly move now.

Someday, you and I will face each other and turn away and the absence,

the dread, will flame between us like an enormous, palpable word that wasn’t spoken.

Do we only love because we’re weak and murderous?

Are we commended to each other to alleviate our terror of solitude and annihilation and that’s all?

5.

I wish I could change dreams with you, baby. I’ve had the bad ones, what comes now is calm and abstract.

Last night, while you and that poor woman were trading deaths like horrible toys,

I was dreaming about the universe. The whole universe was happening in one day, like a blossom,

and during that day people’s voices kept going out to it, crying, “Stop! Stop!”

The universe didn’t mind, though. It knew we were only cursing love again

because we didn’t know how to love, not even for a day,

but our little love days were just seeds it blew out on parachutes into the summer wind.

Then you and I were there. We shouted “Stop!” too. We kept wanting the universe to explode,

we kept wishing it would go back into its root, but the universe understood.

We were its children. It let us cry into its petals, it let its stems bend against us,

then it fed and covered us and we looked up sleepily — it was time to sleep —

and whatever our lives were, our love, this once, was enough.

The Race of the Flood

The way someone stays home, that’s all, stays in the house, in the room, just stays,

the way she, let it be she this time, the way she stays, through the class, the backseat and the job;

the way she stays there for so many chapters, so many reels, not moving, the way the earth doesn’t move;

the way one morning, one day, any day, she wakes and knows now that it’s gone now,

that never is now, and she thinks she can feel it, the never, even her cells have spread over the sheets;

the way she thinks that oh, even these open-pored pores, even these glances butting the wall like thrown-away combs;

the way she, or these, these pores, glances, presences, so me, so within me,

as though I were she, exactly, as though I were the absence, too, the loss, too,

as though just beneath me was the worn, soft tallow, the unmoved and unmoving;

so there is this within me which has never touched life, never, never gone to the ball or the war,

never and never, so within and next and around me, fear and fear and the self-deceived,

the turned-to-the-wall, the stricken, untouched, begun ill or never begun,

the way it happens without happening, begins or doesn’t, moves, gives way, or never does.

Or this. Messages, codes; the way he, the next one, the way he pins them all over himself,

on his clothes, on his skin, and then walks through the street like a signpost, a billboard;

the way there are words to his wife and words to his kids, words even to god so our lord

is over his eyes and our father over his belly and the history of madness and history of cliffs;

the way there’s no room now, the way every word in the world has stuck to the skin