Authors: J.D. McClatchy
She is sitting three pews ahead of me
At the Methodist church on Wilshire Boulevard.
I can make out one maple leaf earring
Through the upswept fog bank of her hair
—Suddenly snapped back, to stay awake.
A minister is lamenting the forgetfulness
Of the laws, and warms to his fable
About the wild oryx, “which the Egyptians
Say stands full against the Dog Star
When it rises, looks wistfully upon it,
And testifies after a sort by sneezing,
A kind of worship but a miserable knowledge.”
He is wearing, now I look, the other earring,
Which catches a bluish light from the window
Behind him, palm trees bent in stained glass
Over a manger scene. The Joseph sports
A three-piece suit, fedora in hand.
Mary, in a leather jacket, is kneeling.
The gnarled lead joinder soldered behind
Gives her a bun, protruding from which
Two shafts of a halo look like chopsticks.
Intent on her task, her mouth full of pins,
She seems to be taking them out, one by one,
To fasten or fit with stars the night sky
Over the child’s crib, which itself resembles
A Studebaker my parents owned after the war,
The model called an Oryx, which once took
The three of us on the flight into California.
I remember, leaving town one Sunday morning,
We passed a dwarfish, gray-haired woman
Sitting cross-legged on an iron porch chair
In red slacks and a white sleeveless blouse,
A cigarette in her hand but in a silver holder,
Watching us leave, angel or executioner,
Not caring which, pursuing her own thoughts.
Dawn through a slider to the redwood deck.
Two mugs on the rail with a trace
Still of last night’s vodka and bitters.
The windchimes’ echo of whatever
Can’t be seen. The bottlebrush
Has given up its hundred ghosts,
Each blossom a pinhead firmament,
Galaxies held in place by bristles
That sweep up the pollinated light
In their path along the season.
A scrub jay’s Big Bang, the swarming
Dharma of gnats, nothing disturbs
The fixed orders but a reluctant question:
Is the world half empty or half full?
Through the leaves, traffic patterns
Bring the interstate to a light
Whose gears a semi seems to shift
With three knife-blade thrusts, angry
To overtake what moves on ahead.
This tree’s broken under the day.
The red drips from stem to stem.
That wasn’t the question. It was,
Why did we forget to talk about love?
We had all the time in the world.
What we forgot, I heard a voice
Behind me say, was everything else.
Love will leave us alone if we let it.
Besides, the world has no time for us,
The tree no questions of the flower,
One more day no help for all this night.
It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,
Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,
The sour taste of each day’s first lie,
And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling
A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,
Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark
Along a body like my own, but blameless.
What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,
Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad?
You get from life what you can shake from it?
For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN.
Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.
There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.
Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears
Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why
now
?
I long ago gave up pretending to believe
Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets.
So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream
Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
Through the bruised unbalanced waves?
Horace iv.i
Suppose my heart had broken
Out of its cage of bone,
Its heaving grille of rumors—
My metronome,
My honeycomb and crypt
Of jealousies long since
Preyed on, played out,
My spoiled prince.
Suppose then I could hold it
Out toward you, could feel
Its growling hound of blood
Brought to heel,
Its scarred skin grown taut
With anticipating your touch,
The tentative caress
Or sudden clutch.
Suppose you could watch it burn,
A jagged crown of flames
Above the empty rooms
Where counterclaims
Of air and anger feed
The fire’s quickening flush
And into whose remorse
Excuses rush.
Would you then stretch your hand
To take my scalding gift?
And would you kiss the blackened
Hypocrite?
It’s yours, it’s yours
—this gift,
This grievance embedded in each,
Where time will never matter
And words can’t reach.
at the ruins of a provincial Roman town
So this is the city of love.
I lean on a rail above
Its ruined streets and square
Still wondering how to care
For a studiously unbuilt site
Now walled and roofed with light.
A glider’s wing overhead
Eclipses the Nike treads
On a path once freshly swept
Where trader and merchant kept
A guarded company.
As far as the eye can see
The pampered gods had blessed
The temples, the gates, the harvest,
The baths and sacred spring,
Sistrum, beacon, bowstring.
Each man remembered his visit
To the capital’s exquisite
Libraries or whores.
The women gossiped more
About the one-legged crow
Found in a portico
Of the forum, an omen
That sluggish priests again
Insisted required prayer.
A son’s corpse elsewhere
Was wrapped in a linen shroud.
A distant thundercloud
Mimicked a slumping pine
That tendrils of grape entwined.
Someone kicked a dog.
The orator’s catalogue
Prompted worried nods
Over issues soon forgot.
A cock turned on a spit.
A slave felt homesick.
The underclass of scribes
Was saved from envy by pride.
The always invisible legion
Fought what it would become.
•
We call it ordinary
Life—banal, wary,
Able to withdraw
From chaos or the law,
Intent on the body’s tides
And the mysteries disguised
At the bedside or the hearth,
Where all things come apart.
There must have been a point—
While stone to stone was joined,
All expectation and sweat,
The cautious haste of the outset—
When the city being built,
In its chalky thrust and tilt,
Resembled just for a day
What’s now a labeled display,
These relics of the past,
A history recast
As remarkable rubble,
Broken column, muddled
Inscription back when
Only half up, half done.
Now only the ruins are left,
A wall some bricks suggest,
A doorway into nothing,
Last year’s scaffolding.
By design the eye is drawn
To something undergone.
A single carving remains
The plunder never claimed,
And no memories of guilt
Can wear upon or thrill
This scarred relief of a man
And woman whom love will strand,
Their faces worn away,
Their heartache underplayed,
Just turning as if to find
Something to put behind
Them, an emptiness
Of uncarved rock, an excess
Of sharp corrosive doubt.
•
Now everything’s left out
To rain and wind and star,
Nature’s repertoire
Of indifference or gloom.
This French blue afternoon,
For instance, how easily
The light falls on debris,
How calmly the valley awaits
Whatever tonight frustrates,
How quickly the small creatures
Scurry from the sunlight’s slur,
How closely it all comes to seem
Like details on the table between
Us at dinner yesterday,
Our slab of sandstone laid
With emblems for a meal.
Knife and fork. A deal.
Thistle-prick. Hollow bone.
The olive’s flesh and stone.
A contrail’s white scimitar unsheathes
Above the tufts of anti-aircraft fire.
Before the mullah’s drill on righteousness,
Practice rocks are hurled at chicken-wire
Dummies of tanks with silhouetted infidels
Defending the nothing both sides fight over
In God’s name, a last idolatry
Of boundaries. The sirens sound: take cover.
He has forced the night and day, the sun and moon,
Into your service. By His leave, the stars
Will shine to light the path that He has set
You to walk upon. His mercy will let
You slay who would blaspheme or from afar
Defile His lands. Glory is yours, oh soon.
•
Of the heart. Of the tongue. Of the sword. The holy war
Is waged against the self at first, to raze
The ziggurat of sin we climb upon
To view ourselves, and next against that glaze
The enemies of faith will use to disguise
Their words. Only then, and at the caliph’s nod,
Are believers called to drown in blood the people
Of an earlier book. There is no god but God.
He knows the day of death and sees how men
Will hide. Who breaks His covenant is cursed.
Who slights His revelations will live in fire.
He has cast aside the schemer and the liar
Who mistake their emptiness of heart for a thirst
That, to slake, the streams of justice descend.
•
Ski-masked on videotape, the skinny martyr
Reads his manifesto. He’s stilted, nervous.
An hour later, he’s dropped at the market town,
Pays his fare, and climbs aboard the bus.
Strapped to his chest is the death of thirty-four
—Plus his own—“civilians” on their way
To buy or sell what goods they claim are theirs,
Unlike our fates, which are not ours to say.
Under the shade of swords lies paradise.
Whom you love are saved with you, their souls
In His hand. And who would want to return to life
Except to be killed again? Who can thrive
On the poverty of this world, its husks and holes?
His wisdom watches for each sacrifice.
Now that you are gone, you are everywhere.
Take this orchid, for instance,
its swollen lip, the scrawny stalk’s one
descended testicle
as wrinkled as rhetoric on the bar-scene stump,
the golden years since
jingling in its purse. How else signal the bee?
In my swan-clip now languish urgent appeals
from the usual charities
lined up to be ignored. But your flags are up:
I see the flapping petals,
the whorl of sepals, their grinning come-on.
Always game, again
I’d head straight for the column’s sweet trap.
Ducking under the puckered anther cap
to glide toward the stiff,
waxy sense of things, where male and female
hardly matter to one’s heady
urge to pull back the glistening lobes
and penetrate the heart,
I fell for it every time, the sticky bead
laid down on my back as I huddled there
with whatever—mimicking
enemy or friend, the molecular musk
of each a triggering lure—
wanted the most of me. Can I leave now too?
I have death’s dust-seed
on me. I have it from touching you.
And then a long senescent cell—though why,
Who knows?—will suddenly refuse to stay
In line, the bucket brigade of proteins meant
To slow or stimulate the tissue’s growth
Will stumble, so the cells proliferate
And tumors form while, deep within,
Suppressor genes, mutated, overlook
The widening fault, the manic drive to choke
On itself that fairy tales allot the gnome
Who vainly hammers the broken sword in his cave,
Where malignant cells are shed into the blood
Or lymph, cascading through the body’s streams,
Attaching themselves to places where we breathe
And love and think of what cannot be true.