Authors: J.D. McClatchy
Just sitting there, at the table for
BLOOD TYPE B
,
She seemed to Frank at first too young, all wrong,
The sweater and saddle shoes, the hair too long.
But the longer he spoke to her, the more he could see
That time and chance had converged on this one girl.
His duty now was clear. What might it mean—
All the years between them merely a screen
He could slide to reveal the cherry trees aswirl—
To love her who long ago had this same face?
He waited until he was sure she’d seen through
His social calls more than she’d admit.
He hesitated, then in an awkward embrace
Vowed to be constant and compassionate.
(Oh, how not tell the truth and still be true?)
She and her parents sent away for good …
The world at war … the papers filled with hate …
She was twenty, he was forty-eight …
Everything conspired as it could
To keep them apart. Even the words they spoke
Fell short of what they felt. Sometimes silence
Seemed more to them than mere convenience.
Tanny would fidget or hum. Frank would smoke.
Her father asked him to smuggle letters or take
A message to the general, but he refused,
Not from fear but apathy, or heartbreak.
He wanted only what she might suddenly choose,
Though for herself she asked nothing, like love
Or like stars, those wounds in the tender flesh above.
Each night—on those nights he visited the camp—
He’d turn the corner by Block Thirteen and stop,
Expecting to find a badly painted backdrop,
A pale body on a bloodsoaked, floodlit ramp,
And the tearful applause that echoed in his dreams.
Instead, she was sitting there on the mess hall steps
And shyly smiled. Again, his promise was kept.
Again, she helped him past the years between.
She let him hold her hand while she described
A basketball game. He looked down at the ground
And smiled to hear just how the girls would shriek,
How they ran across the muddy court and found
An opening in the air. She’d nearly died!
By then he wasn’t listening, but he let her speak.
When all the wells in the holy city had failed
And only Matsumura’s, as if fed by a spring,
Remained, he allowed the afflicted people to bring
Their buckets, until one day—or so the tale
Unfolds—a servant drowned and the old priest
Went to the well, where he saw in the water there
The image of a woman combing her hair,
A ghost from his past or a spirit unreleased.
A week later, during a violent storm,
The woman visited his room and revealed
She was a dragon’s mirror in a woman’s form.
No harm would come so long as he kept her concealed.
The well, drained and raked,
Yielded a blazoned hairpin
And a mirror rim.
When he searched its emptiness
He saw what had haunted him.
The honeybees dance and are understood,
But their point is always and only nectar.
Achilles spoke with the gods, and all
They wanted was his spear through Hector.
By the Senate’s decree, in the heart of Rome
No ominous soldiers were allowed
Except in hollow triumphs where,
More than the general, plated and proud,
The whispering slave amused the crowd.
From pre-hab to re-tox in under a year,
The cynic had run his terror to ground.
The man in the mirror was merely glass.
The world was just “Another round.”
The woman giving birth
Was standing near a bed,
The child apparently worth
The risk that lay ahead.
“Don’t be stubborn. Here,
Lie down,” he crossly said.
She winced and shook her head.
“Spoken just like a man.
Lie down? A bed? That’s where
The trouble first began.”
The day he left, he said I knew the reason.
Look at the trees. Love only lasts a season.
For years since then, I’ve stared at them and seen
Only their blackened branches beneath the green.
How many did I live in before I had my own?
During the war, my father in the Pacific,
There was my widowed grandmother’s
With its collection of French clocks
And closet doors, mostly the must
Of a turn-of-the-century wardrobe.
Next, the newly demobbed’s semidetached
And its neighborhood’s first television set,
A cherrywood box on legs with its ten-inch
World Series that played to a crowd
White-knuckling old-fashioneds.
Finally, the tile-roofed white stucco
Suburban, memory’s first homestead
Because living there—my own room at last!—
Coincided with a fogbound sexual dawning
That rose, flushed, in a corner of its attic
But had less to do with my body than the books
Stolen from Wanamaker’s that touched
On Reproduction, accompanied by
Photographs of one toad atop another.
I would hold my own tiny reptile
And imagine a milky pudding of incipient
Tadpoles until a translucent drop
Of something surfaced with less pleasure
Than, in the basement, a sheet on a clothesline
Came up on Act I in which, having collected
Tickets and delivered the Prologue, who starred
As the Frog Prince, accompanied by his sisters
As cellophaned water beetles, insisted
He eat from the plate and sleep in the bed
Of a person the stage director had cleverly
Represented as an invisible royal presence,
Haughty, deceitful, probably an early role
Model not perfected until a decade later
At the college grill’s monthly Gay Night …
But that was two intermissions further along.
Back in the preteen’s cellar theater—so like
The attic’s erotics in which, as in dreams,
One is always the protagonist—I couldn’t have
Guessed the greasepaint had also smeared on
A coarseness and meanness I perpetuated
Out of timidity, a fear of reproducing myself
Except as someone else, someone noble
If warted, unafraid because unaware
I had already started out on the wrong foot
By supposing I was safe with a secret life,
Something so ordinary as wanting to please,
Wanting to hide in the sources of pleasure.
At an age when the extra baggage is the paraphernalia
Of parents, both of whom—if only I’d had to—
Would already have been packed and labeled
NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE
, I was almost on my own,
Fifteen, aboard the
Queen Mary,
feeling
The mattress in my stateroom’s upper berth
For lumps and staring out the porthole
Opposite at the alluring distant shores
Of New Jersey. Tugs were backing us out
Of everything familiar. It was time to shave.
While my bunkmates—this was a chaperoned
Grand Tour for what the brochure had termed
“Precocious” adolescents—were crowding
The promenade deck to watch Lady Liberty wave
Goodbye, I was at the tiny sink’s mirror,
Staring at my own precociousness,
The delicate but distinct shadow of fuzz
Above my lip and the half-dozen stray
Hairs, a few here, a few there, but enough
To convince me the first bold step
To adulthood was to lather it all up
For the safety razor I had purchased
From a druggist who’d squinted and shrugged.
I was alone. I was ready. I had seen the ads
And the actors, had often sat on the tub’s edge
To study my father’s assured technique.
I knew the stuttering downward stroke,
The rising slow-motion flick of the wrist.
I had laid out a version of my newly sophisticated
Self on someone else’s bed: my dark suit,
My wash-and-wear shirt and regimental tie.
There were still two hours before the Captain’s
Bon Voyage Dinner. I had long since scanned
The passenger list and devised a flexible
Introduction with just enough flattery and French
In it to impress anyone standing nearby
Who overheard half of it. Time to shave.
From the hissing aerosol can shot a gob
Of foam I petted my face with, the double-sided
Blade was clamped into place, and I cocked
My head for a better look at a ragged
Sideburn where, clearing my throat, I tentatively began.
What little there was yielded without a struggle,
When suddenly there was a screw loose,
Or the bow thruster backfired or the rudder reeled—
Something
jammed and the ship seized up
With intermittent convulsions I decided
Unwisely to ignore until several red alerts
On cheek and chin demanded that I stop.
My debut as an adult later that evening
Included the ignominy of five scraps of tissue
Plastered by the blood they staunched
Onto the curiosity of tablemates who looked
Beyond me in order to see right into my vapidity.
Perhaps I
had
grown up, then. Even a single hair
Casts a shadow. Sitting there in public,
A failure at the simple tasks, my vanity on display,
I might have already realized we use the first part
Of our lives to render the rest of it miserable.
The charge of the light cascade
From the disco globe’s orbiting
Spray of incandescent pricks
Had electrified me long enough.
I’d invested a decade in the hunt-
And-peck system of trying
Not to find myself—though
that
Was a maze of abrupt right angles
And false leads even my shrink
Failed to decipher—but someone else,
Someone just to stay home with.
Night after night at the Nibelheim,
Through a scrim of exhaled Kools,
I’d made out the same old tricks
Lined up at the bar, as if having taken
Their positions at curtain time—
The repairman nursing his Bud,
The receptionist hugging his stool,
The goggle-eyed poli-sci postgrad,
The dishy interns in scrubs,
Bankers, biologists, bricklayers
(Even, oops, Stephen Spender once),
Each with his bit part to play,
His wary banter or boogie.
I rarely scored for lack
Of trying, wearied by the whole
Lump-in-the-throat approach
And pain-in-the-ass retreat.
So, resolute, hunched over a map
Of my future, I made a decision.
I would lie low for a month,
Hoping the tide would wash up
Flopping new prospects worth more
Than the loneliness of forced companionship.
Time was up. The time was ripe.
I chose a Saturday night to storm
The bar and steal away with a man
For good—the someone, an anybody,
A man I could admit wanting
To “love,” if that’s the word for giving
Your “heart” away, for doubting
What until that day you’d most believed.
My strategy was to sit next
To the first customer I saw wearing a tie,
A necktie, all knot and design,
Standing in, it seemed, for a set
Of assumptions and hesitations
I shared, or wanted to share.
I entered and scouted and spotted
The only one who matched my profile,
Then simply, rudely, slid into the booth
Where he was sitting with three or four
Now startled and resentful friends,
Introduced myself and started talking
Without noticing more than his four-in-hand.
(The next morning, the rest came clear:
Short, curly-haired, sharp-featured,
With fingers propped on his chin
Both delicate and slowly drumming.)
He was, it turned out, a pianist
And willing to accompany my off-key
Renditions of the usual storm and stress.
As we left the bar together that night,
And lived happily ever after for a year,
I knew the second step in the right direction
Would be the hardest, but didn’t care.
I had the life I wanted, didn’t I? Didn’t I?
And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out
of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and
put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw aught.
And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.
After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him
look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.
—MARK
8:23–25
If the sun were a hot bright blue, the daylight
Would shine on a planet cold-blooded
To the spectrum of what now we can make out
Of shapes in the distance—the sun itself, say,
Or the blighted ash over there near the, the …
Whatever it might be. To be told
About the colors and textures we could not
Actually see, or to listen
For how the petal tip begins to turn brown
And the paint on the kitchen cabinets
Is sallower than it was when the baby
Was in diapers, would be to loosen
The string of molecular ties that binds us
To one another. As if in parallel
Lines down the center of a ballroom waiting
For the gavotte to begin, we gaze
Across at our partners and take our bearings
By what will momentarily spin
Out of our vision, the settee and lampstand,
The string quartet poised for the downbeat,
The women in black standing with lemonade
Along the wall. We need a second
To know and be known by what we see around
Us, and what we see through the window,
The men smoking cigars on the balcony,
And billowing up far behind them
The stand of horse chestnuts on the horizon.
We know where we are, what we are meant
To do next by what we can keep an eye on,
The world’s child now its worried parent.
I can still spot my father, two decades dead,
In my doctor’s thick medical file
And in his warning when he looks up from it,
My inheritance a condition
I could live without. The past blurs my future.
The blood sugar choking my system
So that I can see my right foot but not feel
The internist’s pinprick on its toes
Has also clouded my sight and anything
Three feet away takes on the thickset
Haziness that some second-generation
Impressionist would spoil a nude with.
TV’s talking heads on mute all look the same,
Bobbing owlets on the barn’s rafter.
Taking in the news hour with a martini,
I watch each day’s car bomb explosion
Through the bleared perspective history provides,
The sense that people will keep fighting
Over the same wooden idol or acre
Of nowhere because once as children
They had been grabbed and told to look their fathers
Right in the eye. Now the machine guns
Are bigger than the boys who aim them at each
Other, whole brigades of them, marching
Toward the sun that, while we weren’t looking, turned red.