Nothing by Design (3 page)

with our friends the Enemy.

And the football game?

It was a sort of courtship

before the first, last, passionate fusion.

Or it felt like the smiling sorrow

after you and your girl have split up.

But nothing forgiven, furious, tomorrow.

The Germans won, 3 to 2.

On Boxing Day

the mercury rose, and the mud.

It was agreed—

let the dead bury their dead—

and side by side, they dug.

They laid them in who hadn’t played

but had already lost:

each a tidy Christmas package

tied with a cross.

II

THE AFTERLIFE

NORA

Even in death your radiance follows me.

Or leads me. You’re ahead of me on the sidewalk,

pushing your baby’s pram as I push mine,

and you swing your head to greet someone driving by,

your sheet of black hair the shiniest anyone

has ever seen; you don’t even understand

that nobody in her thirties shines that much,

nobody laughs so musically at jokes

that are not that funny. Whatever it was I said

twenty years ago, whatever anyone said

no longer is heard, or can be, the way you took it

because you’re not here to beam it back, to turn it

funny or beautiful—even the saddest things

you somehow made useful to us who were sad

with those infinite eyes of yours, looking right at us,

that
Oh
that was all acceptance. Even in death

that swept down upon you, death that locked you shut

and the
No
that is locked inside your name now, Nora,

I see the
Ra
for sun god, too, which is silly,

but you’d understand; I take it for your radiance

that even now in the darkness follows me.

THE AFTERLIFE

Oh shabti allotted to me, if I be summoned or if I be detailed to do any work which has to be done in the realm of the dead … you shall detail yourself for me on every occasion of making arable the fields, of flooding the banks or conveying sand from east to west; “Here am I,” you shall say.

                                        —
BOOK OF THE DEAD

    1.

They’re looking a little parched

after millennia standing side

by side in the crypt, but the limestone

Egyptian couple, inseparable

on their slab, emerge from it as noble

and grand as you could ask of people

thirteen inches tall.

The pleasant, droopy-breasted wife

smiles hospitably in her gown

(the V-necked sheath “a style popular

for the entire 3,000-year

Pharaonic period”).

Her skin is painted paler than his:

a lady kept out of the sun.

Bare-chested in his A-line kilt,

her husband puts his spatulate

best foot forward, so as to stride

into a new life.

Not mummies; more like dummies.

Not idols, yet not merely dolls.

Stocky synecdoches

of the ruling class, they survey

an entourage of figurines

at work providing necessaries

for long days under the reigns

of dynasties still unborn.

To serenade them, here’s a harpist.

A dwarf even in life—

a mascot to amuse the court

whose music must not be cut short.

A potter modeling vessels that seem,

like him, already fired in a kiln.

Six silos of wheat,

imaginary granaries.

A woman of stone grinding grain,

as she would have, on a quern of stone.

A woman winnowing grain in a pan.

Another on her knees, kneading.

A brewer mashing a vat of beer,

a butcher slitting the throat

of a heifer for the hereafter.

    2.

What had it felt like, that credence

in the afterlife of art?

To die, as the departed did,

comforted by the guaranteed

incarnation of a statuette;

to feed then on that slaughtered meat?

To take a leap from the stock-still

tyranny of the literal?

To see the miniature, the fiction

as a grow-in-the-dark depiction

of the soon-to-be actual?

    3.

Aboveground, thought was evolving.

So many lords and ladies died;

not everyone could be supplied

with a finely sculpted retinue

of laborers to keep them living.

And how were the high ones to keep

so many minions at their task?

The overseer with his whip

became a smiling, bland convention:

one foreman for every ten or so

farmers with a hoe.

It wasn’t only math.

Something unforeseen

was undermining transfiguration—

a canny, efficient faith

that less detail might well stand in

for the stand-in;

a simplicity of encryption.

Hundreds and hundreds of years passed.

Alabaster, faience, wood,

the scale of the factotum totems

dwindled as numbers multiplied;

jostled in the mass graves

of toy-box coffins, they were transported

by a procession of living slaves

a little distance, and slipped

into their niches in the crypt

for the shelf life of eternity.

Thumb-sized effigies wrapped

in bandages of holy script,

the hieroglyphed
Book of the Dead.

Words. The nominal vow to work,

not the enactment of work.

The
shabti
held one stylized tool,

barely identifiable—

and were serene as Christian saints

with their hatchets and wheels, the instruments

of a recurring martyrdom.

In time they grew more mummiform,

cross-armed at the chest

or armless. Finally, curiously, at rest—

like zeros who were something

in being nothing,

place markers of their own

as much as of the master’s soul.

    4.

And on the wall of a vault,

an artist has drawn himself—

or a cunning substitute—

at work, shaping a life-sized
shabti

designed to be his twin:

a goateed dandy that our mute,

vainglorious ventriloquist

settles on one knee.

Profile to profile, they stare

into the mannered mirror

of one another.

In whatever kingdom this was

(by now, the blink

of one kohl-lined, almond eye),

what did people think was the life span

of the stunt man who betokens man?

The
shabti
sent to make
shabti
?

But the question too has shrunk,

eroded to vocabulary—

one fine old potsherd of a word

to be carried from the museum

like any other item

in the museum shop:

a replica necklace, a postcard.

The visitor is illiterate.

What did that stone scroll say,

meant to convert someday

to the thing it represents, papyrus?

Even the scribes couldn’t read.

Something about the god Osiris

who came back from the dead.

She must be going.

Feels for the gloves in her pockets,

empty hands for her hands.

Opens a door to Chicago,

where a fine dust is ticking

coldly onto everything;

where she is still alive, and it’s snowing.

IT’S HARD TO SAY

That’s what you say a hundred times a day.

               Yet we keep asking.

(“How was your morning? Did you like the nurse?”)

The worse you get, the louder we keep asking—

as though, if you heard better, you could say.

Two adjectives bob up sometimes, depending.

               Good things you call “amazing.”

(“How was the garden? Did you like the birds?”)

Things are either “terrible” or “amazing.”

Nothing is in the middle. It’s the ending,

the drawn-out ending, of your verbal life.

               “It’s hard to say,”

you say, as though by thinking you’d remember

your sentence: word by word, still less to say.

This man here is your son. I am his wife,

and it is, indeed, terrible and amazing

               you must be told again.

I know
you
, though—that undimmed politesse

of eighty-plus years when, awestruck again

by a too-brilliant question, you sit there gazing

thoughtfully into space, and only then

do you say the terrible thing. “It’s hard to say.”

CITIES IN THE SKY

The buildings you drew were stooped

a little like you, lanky and tall and shambling

in your cloud-colored sweater, smiling vaguely

but curiously through your chic, black-rimmed,

perfectly round glasses.

Good morning. Yes thanks, coffee.

Show me your latest cities.

Or in any case, cities I can’t keep straight.

They hunch and huddle in my head—

the toy building-block houses,

blank-faced and pink and red,

that fall willingly from some cliff you invented

but do not fall; they stall.

They stay there, falling; even you don’t know why.

We drink more coffee in Claverack,

New York, on a day of arctic cold

and I inspect another high

cloud packed like an attic

with a city, clover-leafed with ramps

of cheerful, commuting cars, wherever

cars commute to up there,

a cloud that hovers like the dream

of the cows below,

unaware they’re dreaming:

they’re realists in their watercolor,

browsing, heads down, on a meadow

of saturated green.

Another cloud, jammed with people, is shaped

exactly like a map

of the continental United States.

“That’s interesting,” you say. “I didn’t see that.”

Thought clouds, that’s what these are, as in

cartoons of characters thinking.

No words for what you’re thinking, though,

just blueprints, unfeasibility studies, for cities

no one has time to build—

pulleys and sluices, ladders and cranes and pipelines

to nowhere. Bridges to caves. Nowhere

somewhere changing to something.

Knife-edged but bulging vehicles, cut

as from a tray of strudel.

A city sliced across the cranium,

its brains exposed like a motherboard.

Blockhead figures, only their bodies sinuous,

twisting like wind-whipped banners.

A robot stepping right through the plaster

walls of a town house,

leaving his empty shape behind

like a crumbling shadow.

Oh, here’s your wife of fifty-some years,

the adorable Colette.

She has brought us farm eggs, juice, and toast.

Stay for a bit; your houseguest

has more to ask.

Is this what you think the afterworld is,

cities of real and unreal things

cohabiting in the sky?

That was only a question. I meant it idly.

Wake up, Jim, don’t die.

It’s only eight in the morning.

OVER AND OUT

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.

Those of you on the left side of the aisle

surely have spotted, on this fine Fourth of July,

fireworks erupting all around the city.

Pockets of color. Ooh baby, look at that.

From thirty thousand feet, you never hear

the
pop pop
when they open. No, they seem

to blossom in the dark, in suspended silence—

to dilate and fill like delicate parachutes

descending with curious tautness, until at last

they safely resolve to a shimmer of memory

that lingers like stars, then truly disappears.

Or that’s what I’m seeing. Excuse the poetry.

Sometimes I get carried away up here.

I’ve left the seat-belt sign illuminated,

and though we expect no turbulence, weather-wise,

I’ll ask you not to move about the cabin

unless you have to. The truth is we’re in trouble.

Those of you on the right side may have noted

a funny rumble. That’s not the fireworks, folks.

I’m going to get this plane down the best I can.

I bet you’d trade in every one of your frequent-

flier points for the real-life parachutes

we lack on this particular budget aircraft.

Wouldn’t it be divine if we all drifted

to terra firma guided as if by winged

angels in parti-colored, ballooning silks?

Instead I’m duty-bound to propose that you

gather up—not your personal belongings

but any final reflections you may feel

will comfort you. Naturally you hate

being reminded your fate is in the hands

of faceless authority—that would be me;

but my advice is, try to rise above that.

You should have had a third little flask of scotch,

some of you are thinking. Some of you gals

are wishing our steward Keith, in business class,

so handsome, were available for a few

minutes, anyway. Triumphant sex

with strangers as the fireworks fade forever—

the dizzy thrill of The End? That dream would only

come true in the pathetic paperbacks

you brought on board. Real terror, let me tell you,

is no aphrodisiac. How stupidly

you lined up for this trip! How much you cared

who was preboarded first, or whether Misty,