Collected Poems (22 page)

The Modern

Its skin tough and unpliable as scar, the pulp out of focus, weak, granular, powdery, blank,

this tomato I’m eating — wolfing, stuffing down: I’m so hungry — is horrible and delicious.

Don’t tell me, I know all about it, this travesty-sham; I know it was plucked green and unripe,

then locked in a chamber and gassed so it wouldn’t rot till I bought it but I don’t care:

I was so famished before, I was sucking sweat from my arm and now my tomato is glowing inside me.

I muscle the juice through my teeth and the seeds to the roof of my mouth and the hard,

scaly scab of where fruit met innocent stem and was torn free I hold on my tongue and savor,

a coin, a dot, the end of a sentence, the end of the long improbable utterance of the holy and human.

The Mistress

After the drink, after dinner, after the half-hour idiot kids’ cartoon special on the TV,

after undressing his daughter, mauling at the miniature buttons on the back of her dress,

the games on the bed — “Look at my pee-pee,” she says, pulling her thighs wide, “isn’t it pretty?” —

after the bath, pajamas, the song and the kiss and the telling his wife it’s her turn now,

out now, at last, out of the house to make the call (out to take a stroll, this evening’s lie),

he finds the only public phone booth in the neighborhood’s been savaged, receiver torn away,

wires thrust back up the coin slot to its innards, and he stands there, what else? what now?

and notices he’s panting, he’s panting like an animal, he’s breathing like a bloody beast.

The Lover

When she stopped by, just passing, on her way back from picking up the kids at school,

taking them to dance, just happened by the business her husband owned and her lover worked in,

their glances, hers and the lover’s, that is, not the husband’s, seemed so decorous, so distant,

barely, just barely touching their fiery wings, their clanging she thought so well muffled,

that later, in the filthy women’s bathroom, in the stall, she was horrified to hear two typists

coming from the office laughing, about them, all of them, their boss, her husband, “the blind pig,”

one said, and laughed, “and her, the horny bitch,” the other said, and they both laughed again,

“and
him,
did you see
him,
that sanctimonious, lying bastard — I thought he was going to
blush.”

Religious Thought

for (…)

Beyond anything else, he dwells on what might inhabit his mind at the moment of his death,

that which he’ll take across with him, which will sum his being up as he’s projected into spirit.

Thus he dwells upon the substance of his consciousness, what its contents are at any moment:

good thoughts, hopefully, of friends, recent lovers, various genres of attempted bliss.

Primitive notions of divinity and holy presence interest him not at all; blessèd, cursèd: less.

For life: a public, fame, companionship, arousal; for death, an endless calm floating on abyss.

His secret is the terror that mind will do to him again what it did that unforgivable once.

Sometimes, lest he forget, he lets it almost take him again: the vile thoughts, the chill, the dread.

Carpe Diem

A young tourist with a two-thousand-dollar Leica and a nice-looking girl waiting outside the gate

has slipped into the park next to St.-Germain-des-Prés to take a picture with his super-fisheye

of a little girl in smock and sandals trying to balance herself on the low wrought-iron fence

in front of Picasso’s statue for Apollinaire, the row of disattached Gothic arches as background.

He needs an awfully long time to focus; before you know it, she’s circled all the way around

to the sunny bench where her mother sits intently probing at her big toe with a safety pin

and where a grungy Danish hippie is sound asleep, his head propped sideways on his old guitar.

Wait, now we’re changing lenses; uh oh, girlfriend’s impatient: Okay, she says, let’s move it, maestro!

Twins

“There were two of them but nobody knew at first because only one happened on the table,

the other was just suddenly there during the night: I felt a spasm I thought or dreamed

had something to do with whatever they’d done to me that afternoon and then there it was.

I woke up — I suppose I should have called the nurse but all I did was turn the light on.

He wasn’t breathing, it didn’t occur to me to wonder dead or not dead: I was very tired.

I covered us again and dozed on and off till morning; when the nurse did come, she was angry.

Funny: I used to think one of them was yours, the other … you know … That solved something for me.

That and dope, dear, darling dope: I stayed stoned an entire month, then I bought my diaphragm.”

The Telephone

He must be her grandson: they’re both very dark, she with high, broad cheekbones, white wiry hair,

he slightly fairer, finer featured, hair thick, rich, black, badly cropped, shining with oil.

I’m only watching from my car so I can’t tell what language they’re in, but it’s not English.

They’re standing by the phone booth arguing, the boy apparently doesn’t want to make the call,

but the woman takes his arm — she’s farm-wife muscular, he’s very lean — and easily shoves him in.

Very rapidly, with an offhanded dexterity, he punches out a number, listens for hardly a moment

and with an I-told-you-so exasperation holds out the receiver so that she can lean to it,

not quite touching, and listen, eyes focused to the middle distance, for at least a dozen rings.

Failure

Maybe it’s not as bad as we like to think: no melodramatic rendings, sackcloths, nothing so acute

as the fantasies of conscience chart in their uncontrollably self-punishing rigors and admonitions.

Less love, yes, but what was love: a febrile, restless, bothersome trembling to continue to possess

what one was only partly certain was worth wanting anyway, and if the reservoir of hope is depleted,

neither do distracting expectations interfere with these absorbing meditations on the frailties of chance.

A certain
resonance
might be all that lacks; the voice spinning out in darkness in an empty room.

The recompense is knowing that at last you’ve disconnected from the narratives that conditioned you

to want to be what you were never going to be, while here you are still this far from “the end.”

Crime

John the tailor had gone racing up the stairs in back of his store and because he was so frightened

had jumped right out the window into the street where he broke his arm, though not badly.

A mounted policeman who’d been with his married girlfriend around the corner heard the shouts

and came cantering up just as the holdup man with a pistol in his hand was coming out:

the policeman pulled his gun, shot once, hit the robber in the chest, and it was over.

By the time I got there, everybody was waiting for the ambulance, John was still sobbing,

the crook was lying next to that amazing clot of blood, congealed to the consistency of cow plop,

and kids were darting from the crowd, scrambling for the change he’d let spill when he fell.

Fat

The young girl jogging in mittens and skimpy gym shorts through a freezing rainstorm up our block

would have a perfect centerfold body except for the bulbs of grandmotherly fat on her thighs.

Who was it again I loved once … no, not loved truly, liked, somewhat, and slept with, a lot,

who when she’d brood on the I thought quite adorable blubber she had there would beat it on the wall?

Really: she’d post herself naked half a stride back, crouch like a skier, and swing her hips, bang!

onto the plaster, bang! ten times, a hundred: bang! the wall shook, bang! her poor body quivered.

I’d lie there aghast, I knew that mad pounding had to mean more than itself, of course I thought me.

For once I was right; soon after, she left me, and guess what, for all that, I missed her.

Fame

I recognize the once-notorious radical theater director, now suffering general public neglect

but still teaching and writing and still certain enough of his fame so that when I introduce myself

he regards me with a polite, if somewhat elevated composure, acknowledging some friends in common,

my having heard him lecture once, even the fact that I actually once dashed off a play

inspired by some of his more literary speculations, but never does he ask who I might be,

what do, where live, et cetera, manifesting instead that maddeningly bland and incurious cosmopolitan

or at least New Yorkian self-centeredness, grounded in the most unshakable and provincial syllogism:

I am known to you, you not to me, therefore you clearly must remain beneath serious consideration.

USOCA

At the United States Out of Central America rally at a run-down community center in the Village

the audience is so sparse that the Andean musicians who’ve come to play for us are embarrassed

and except for the bass guitarist who has to give the introductions explaining their songs

they all focus resolutely on their instruments, their gazes never rising, even to one another.

Their music is vital, vigorous, sometimes almost abandoned, but informed always with nostalgia,

with exile’s dark alarms and melancholy, exacerbated surely by how few and weak we are

but which we disregard, applauding when they’re done so heartfeltly that they relent a bit,

releasing shy, exotic smiles for us to pass along between us like the precious doves of hope.

Eight Months

Jed is having his bath; he lies in a few inches of water in his plastic bathtub on the kitchen sink.

Catherine holds a bar of white soap in one hand, her other hand rubs it, then goes to Jed,

slipping over his gleaming skin, the bulges and crevasses, back to the soap, back to Jed.

She’s humming, Jed is gazing raptly at her and every time her hand leaves for its journey,

he squirms with impatience, his own hands follow along as though to hurry her return to him.

When he realizes I’m in the room, he smiles brilliantly up at me, welcoming me into the ritual.

Catherine stops crooning, looks up too, smiles too, but her hand goes on, moving over Jed,

the soap, Jed, gently roiling the foamy surface: before I’m out the door, she’s singing again.

Junior High School Concert: Salle Rossini

Each movement of the Mozart has a soloist and as each appears the conductor tunes her instrument,

while they, pubescent girls all, look fiercely unconcerned with being possibly made fools of.

Their teacher is oblivious to that, though with his graying dentures he seems kind enough,

he just loves music more — you can tell he might love music more than Toscanini or than Bach.

It might be the saddest thing about the arts that they so seldom recompense passion and commitment

with genius or with anything at all beyond a ground-floor competence, but
tant pis!
for that,

the old man seems to say,
Tant pis!
too if the cellos thump, if the
lento
is a trifle tired,

if the girl slogging through as soon would let the whole thing drop:
Tant pis!
everything:
Bravo!

The Prodigy

for Elizabeth Bishop

Though no shyer than the others — while her pitch is being checked she beams out at the audience,

one ear sticking through her fine, straight, dark hair, Nabokov would surely say “deliciously” —

she’s younger, slimmer, flatter, still almost a child: her bow looks half a foot too big for her.

Not when she begins to play, though: when she begins to play, when she goes swooping, leaping,

lifting from the lumbering
tutti
like a fighter plane, that bow is fire, that bow is song,

that bow lifts all of us, father and old uncle, yawning younger brother and bored best friend,

and brings us all to song, to more than song, to breaths breathed for us, sharp, indrawn,

and then, as she bows it higher and higher, to old sorrows redeemed, a sweet sensation of joy.

Souls

Bound with baling wire to the tubular jerry-built bumper of a beat-up old dump truck

are two of those gigantic teddy bears people win (usually shills) in cheap amusement parks.

It’s pouring: dressed in real children’s clothes, they are, our mothers would have said, drenched,

and they’re also unrelentingly filthy, matted with the sticky, sickly, ghastly, dark gray sheen

you see on bums ambulating between drinking streets and on mongrels guarding junkyards.

Their stuffing hasn’t been so crushed in them as to affect their jaunty, open-armed availability,

but, regarded more closely, they seem to manifest a fanatical expression-lessness, like soldiers,

who, wounded, captured, waiting to be shipped away or shot, must submit now to their photograph.

Regret

Rather die than live through dying with it: rather perish absolutely now than perish partially

in its cold coils which would mean savaging the self from far within where only love, self-love,

should be allowed to measure what one was and is and to roll the bales of loss aside.

Or if it should survive to insinuate itself into that ceremony: not to have to own to it,

not to any other, anyway, at least to keep the noble cloak of reticence around one’s self,

keep the self-contained and self-sustaining version of what was not endured but was accomplished.