Authors: J.D. McClatchy
The hard part is not so much telling the truth
as knowing which truth to tell—or worse,
what it is you want to tell the truth, and how
at last one learns to unlove others,
to uncast the spells, to rewind the romance
back to its original desire
for something else altogether, its grievance,
say, against that year’s dazzling head boy
or the crippled wide-eyed horse you couldn’t shoot.
And, as innocent as the future
porno star’s first milk tooth, the dictionary
has no morality other than
definition itself. The large, functional
Indo-European family
will do for a murky myth of origin,
and the iron laws of shift and change
go unquestioned by the puzzled rummager.
Our names for things tend to hold them fast
in place, give an X its features or its pitch,
a fourth dimension of distinctness.
And what may seem vague awaits the Supplement
just now pulling into the depot,
late as usual but looming through the steam.
Words have their unflappable habits
of being, constellations of fixed ideas
that still move. Sentimentality,
Snobbery, Sympathy, Sorrow—each queues up
at the same window. No raised eyebrow
for the faked orgasm or press conference
to issue official denials.
No sigh for the botanist’s crabbed notebook.
No praise for the florilegium.
No regret for the sinking tanker’s oil slick
glittering now off Cape Flattery.
No truck with bandbox grooming, fashion runways,
the foot binder’s stale apology,
or the dream’s down payment and layaway plan.
Everything adds up to or sinks back
into the word we know it by in this book.
A believer in words—common prayers
or textbook theories—this wrinkled metaphor
of the mind itself abided by
what grave and lucid laws, what keen exemptions
these columns of small print have upheld.
He could be sitting beside one, chin in hand,
listening to a late quartet, a gaze
on his face only the final chord will break.
Here is that faraway something else,
here between the crowded lines of scholarship.
Here is the first rapture and final
dread of being found out by words, terms, phrases
for what is unknown, unfelt, unloved.
Here in the end is the language of a life.
Half my life ago, before retiring
to new digs under Oxford’s old spires,
as a part of his farewell tour of the States,
one last look at the rooms of the house
he’d made of our poised, mechanical largesse,
he visited my alma mater.
The crowd—tweedy townies and student groundlings—
packed the hall and spilled over the lawn
outside, where the lucky ones pressed their faces
to windows suspense was steaming up.
How did I find a place at the master’s feet?
My view was of the great man’s ankles,
and close enough to see his socks didn’t match.
I sat there uncomfortably but spellbound
to his oracular mumble. And later,
after the applause and the sherry,
while he wambled tipsily toward his guest suite,
I sprang as if by coincidence
from its darkened doorway where I’d been waiting.
But, well, waiting for
what
exactly?
Suddenly speechless, I counted on a lie
and told him I knew his work by heart
and would he autograph my unread copy.
He reached in his jacket for a pen
and at last looked distractedly up at me.
A pause. “Turn around and bend over,”
he ordered in a voice vexed with impatience
I at once mistook for genuine
interest—almost a proposition, in fact.
The coy young man I was then is not
my type, but I can recognize the appeal.
Even as I wheeled slowly around
and put my hands on my knees, I realized
what he wanted, what he’d asked of me.
To write in the book, he required a desk.
My back would do as well as any
Tree trunk or cafeteria tabletop.
Only years later did it make sense.
By then I’d figured out that he’d been writing
on me ever since that encounter,
or that I’d unconsciously made of myself
a desk so that he could continue—
the common imagination’s dogsbody
and ringmaster—still to speak up,
however halting or indirect the voice.
Today, sitting down at six to darn the day
with a drink, I glanced across the room
to my desk, where Wystan, my month-old tabby,
lay asleep on an open volume
of the wizard’s unfailing dictionary,
faultless creaturely Instinct atwitch
on a monument. How to sneak out past him
for the sweating martini shaker?
My clumsy tiptoe prompts a faint annoyance—
a single eye unlidded, a yawn,
his right paw, claws outstretched, pointing to
soodle
.
Weren’t these—the cat and book, or instinct
and idea—the two angels on his shoulder?
Together, they’d made him suspicious
of the holy crusade, the top of the charts,
compulsive hygiene, debt, middlemen,
seaside cottages, crooners, Gallic charm,
public charities, the forgeries
of statecraft, the fantasies of the bedroom,
easy assumptions, and sweeping views.
The kitten’s claws have somehow caught in the page
and puckered it so that, skewed sideways,
it resembles—or rather, for the moment
I can make out in the lines of type—
the too often folded map his face looked like.
Protect me, St. Wiz, protect us all
from this century by your true example.
With what our language has come to know
about us, protect us still from both how much
and how little we can understand
ourselves, from the unutterable blank page
of soul, from the echoing silence
moments after the heavy book is slammed shut.
The room with double beds, side by side.
One was the bed of roses, still made up,
The other the bed of nails, all undone.
In the nightstand clamshell, two Marlboro butts.
On the shag, a condom with a tear in its tip
Neither of them noticed—or would even suspect
For two years more. A ballpoint embossed
By a client’s firm: Malpractice Suits.
A wad of gum balled in a page of proverbs
Torn from the complimentary Bible.
His lipstick. Her aftershave.
A dream they found the next day they’d shared:
All the dogs on the island were dying
And the birds had flown up into the lonely air.
Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
There was the carpet, the second-best
Chairs, the old chipped washstand, all his dead parents’
Things
donated months ago
“To make an unfortunate
Crowd happy” at the Hôtel
Marigny, Albert’s brothel,
Warehouse of desires
And useless fictions—
For one of which he turned to Albert
And nodded, he’d have that one at cards, the soon-
To-be footman or fancy butcher.
He’d rehearsed his questions in the corridor.
Did you kill an animal
Today? An ox? Did it bleed?
Did you touch the blood? Show me
Your hands, let me see how you …
(Judgment Day angel
Here to separate
The Good from the Bad, to weigh the soul …
Soon enough you’ll fall from grace and be nicknamed
Pamela the Enchantress or Tool
Of the Trade. Silliness is the soul’s sweetmeat.)
One after another now,
Doors closed on men in bed with
The past, it was three flights to
His room, the bedroom at last,
The goal obtained and
So a starting point
For the next forbidden fruit—the taste
Of apricots and ripe gruyère is on the hand
He licks—the next wide-open mouth
To slip his tongue into like a communion
Wafer. The consolation
Of martyrs is that the God
For whom they suffer will see
Their wounds, their wildernesses.
He’s pulled a fresh sheet
Up over himself,
As if waiting for his goodnight kiss
While the naked boy performs what he once did
For himself. It’s only suffering
Can make us all more than brutes, the way that boy
Suffers the silvery thread
To be spun inside himself,
The snail track left on lilac,
Its lustrous mirror-writing,
The mysterious
Laws drawn through our lives
Like a mother’s hand through her son’s hair …
But again nothing comes of it. The signal
Must be given, the small bedside bell.
He needs his parents to engender himself,
To worship his own body
As he watches them adore
Each other’s. The two cages
Are brought in like the holy
Sacrament. Slowly
The boy unveils them.
The votive gaslights seem to flicker.
Her dying words were “What have you done to me?”
In each cage a rat, and each rat starved
For three days, each rat furiously circling
The pain of its own hunger.
Side by side the two cages
Are placed on the bed, the foot
Of the bed, right on the sheet
Where he can see them
Down the length of his
Body, helpless now as it waits there.
The rats’ angry squealing sounds so far away.
He looks up at his mother—touches
Himself—at her photograph on the dresser,
His mother in her choker
And her heavy silver frame.
The tiny wire-mesh trapdoors
Slide open. At once the rats
Leap at each other,
Claws, teeth, the little
Shrieks, the flesh torn, torn desperately,
Blood spurting out everywhere, hair matted, eyes
Blinded with the blood. Whichever stops
To eat is further torn. The half-eaten rat
Left alive in the silver
Cage the boy—he keeps touching
Himself—will stick over and
Over with a long hatpin.
Between his fingers
He holds the pearl drop.
She leans down over the bed, her veil
Half-lifted, the scent of lilac on her glove.
His father hates her coming to him
Like this, hates her kissing him at night like this.
It turned out the funeral had been delayed a year.
The casket now stood in the state capitol rotunda,
An open casket. You lay there like Lenin
Under glass, powdered, in powder blue
But crestfallen, if that’s the word
For those sagging muscles that make the dead
Look grumpy. The room smelled of gardenias.
Or no, I
was
a gardenia, part of a wreath
Sent by the Radcliffe Institute and right behind
You, with a view down the line of mourners.
When Lloyd and Frank arrived, both of them
Weeping and reciting—was it “Thanatopsis”?—
A line from Frank about being the brother
To a sluggish clod was enough to wake you up.
One eye, then the other, slowly opened.
You didn’t say anything, didn’t have to.
You just blinked, or I did, and in another room
A group of us sat around your coffin chatting.
Once in a while you would add a comment—
That, no, hay was stacked with beaverslides,
And, yes, it was a blue, a mimeograph blue
Powder the Indians used, and stuck cedar pegs
Through their breasts in the ghost dance—
All this very slowly. Such an effort for you
To speak, as if underwater and each bubble-
Syllable had to be exhaled, leisurely
Floated up to the surface of our patience.
Still alive, days later, still laid out
In a party dress prinked with sun sparks,
Hands folded demurely across your stomach,
You lay on the back lawn, uncoffined,
Surrounded by beds of freckled foxglove
And fool-the-eye lilies that only last a day.
By then Lowell had arrived, young again
But shaggy even in his seersucker and tie.
He lay down alongside you to talk.
The pleasure of it showed in your eyes,
Widening, then fluttering with the gossip,
Though, of course, you still didn’t move at all,
Just your lips, and Lowell would lean in
To listen, his ear right next to your mouth,
Then look up smiling and roll over to tell me
What you said, that since you’d passed over
You’d heard why women live longer than men—
Because they wear big diamond rings.