Poems 1959-2009 (40 page)

Sympathized with, it comes off on your hands.

Or is it a mind too generous, too deep for her,

Always in the clouds, straining to rain?

Outside, he is passing by,

His eyes on the ground, on his way home.

Greeting the opening door,

Drafts dash around the room,

Like a terrier sprinting in circles

Around its home-from-work owner.

The lampshades bow like tutus.

Fresh air—but freshened where?

The lace curtains billow like the Graces' nightgowns,

Then split and kick the cancan—

Higher! Nearer—

No, farther away, farther:

The click of heels.

The air has stopped, stands still.

Across the way, a light goes on and off,

But a girl with a chiffon scarf

Was standing by the window.

Not a cloud, not a thought of rain.

The great night is pacing the slot above the street,

And down into the street, back and forth …

Like Hamlet sweltering in velvet Elizabethan mourning.

His head is in the sheer, temperatureless stratosphere;

His heart is smothering.

The dark is clear.

Still, some of his thoughts connect,

And are stars.

 

Below the window wine-washed Rome

Is drying and the concrete lane

Weaves in the rose direction home

Southwestward. I'll take her off to Ischia and Spain

And marry her, and make her love

Her rashness. Then we pause—we stay where they smile clove

And garlic in the earthy air. We'll stay,

We'll mend the bedsheets when they fray

Ourselves, and seize the hours and work

Them into full-lipped ovened clay

Vessels of content. Her shy, bare fingers jerk

The satin ribbons and unbox

My saved-up present to her, a snakeskin purse which locks

Inside it the love poem I want to read.

“Only I don't intend to plead

With you to listen. Don't I know

The Fathers say I'll never lead

You to the altar? Let them go—and even so,

You love them, don't you? And you dare

Not love me just for wanting you alone? Then swear

You couldn't love the others and be true

To me—swear something or we're through.”

But that's not all. You were so shy

A girl, a child. Where is she? You

Have lost her here. How can I convalesce what I

Corrupted when infection struts

Around this city whose street lights are sidewalk sluts?

She sits there glowering at the shadow-moths

Her thumbs twiddle around the oilcloths

Soiling the walls. The curtain's sleeves

Of mellow vespertine blue sloths

Of air are all my twenty-two years of life receives

From life, besides a wobbly bed

And tabletop and chairs. The poor are richer dead …

Yet my starved spider dangling from the wall,

My seeing-eye, wants nothing at all

Except what gives itself away

By moving, and only wants what's small

Enough to count as riches. Where's the charm to lay

Between our pillows? It's not grace,

Not the unspoken tenderness—or in the place

Of tenderness a tepidarium.

You venture so much and you come

To loathe life's honey on your hands—

And once love worked like a green thumb

In the hot weather. And she longed for Rome. Rome stands

For hope—pocked, wired, original,

Electric as a honeycomb or a staked skull.

And all those blue-eyed souls blinded by thorns,

All the poor souls loving suborns

And scales down to the irony

Of middle age, can kiss the corns

Of gold from Peter's toe, can give to piety

Their ego, for amnesia.

That jet plane's vapor trail is time's aphasia

Coiled over St. Peter's—but that tail will crack

The silence. Then it all comes back:

The glaring doorway and the door

Open, her husband—and the black

Missal the priest held: “
Paid?
She's
paid?
And you're some whore?”

There is no God. They taught her wrong,

The smooth-faced Sisters. Depilation kept them strong,

But lessons can't fit Spellman's corpulence

Through the bright groove the penitents'

Blue knees carved to an altar rail

In stone Trastevere, where rents

Split with indulgences, where love hangs on its nail.

I turn the light out … I am sure

Of nothing—just the moon, brassiered and soap-sleek, pure

Perfumed Spellman, stinking with allure.

 

As he approaches each tree goes on,

And the girls one by one

Glance down at their blouses. A nun,

Then six or seven, hop in

A cream station wagon,

White-beaked blackbirds baked in a pie.

In his mind is

The lid of an eye

The dark dilated closing behind him.

Levy. Arched eyebrows and shadowed

Moist eyes. An El Greco. Swart, slim.

He's late to her. He thinks of her, waiting,

Limb by limb.

Her defenselessness and childlike trust!

Smiling to be combed out

And parted—and her lust

Touching the comb like a lyre.

To have been told by her not to trust her!

And he distrusts her.

And everywhere he sees

Hunchbacks and addicts and sadists

In braces in the cities,

Roosting in their filth,

Or plucking the trees,

In New York for true love,

In Boston for constancy.

You can be needed by someone,

Or needy, thinks Levy.

They clutch their loves like addicts

Embracing when they see

Hot May put out her flowers.

Or clutch themselves. They can't shake free.

He thinks of the time

He lived by her calendar

When she missed her time.

She gave the child a name.

When she bled, she laughed and gasped

Tears warm as pablum

On his wrists. But that is past.

Levy feels his body

Moving in front of his last

Step. He sweats, and thinks

Of the rubble massed

On Creusa behind Aeneas's

White-hot shoulders and neck.

Addresses

And clothesline laundry swelled

Like pseudocyesis—

That's what he has to pass through.

His tie is her blue,

And a new lotion gives him an air

Of coolness. He combs his hair,

And tries to smooth his hair.

He'll
be there,

The husband. She'll have left him asleep—

A nap, beyond the top stair,

In darkness.

Light, light is in the trees

Pizzicato, and mica

Sizzles up to his knees.

A dozen traffic lights

Swallow and freeze

And one by one relay red red

Like runners with a blank message.

I hate her, I hate her, he said

A minute ago. Curls cluster

Levy's dark head.

 

Now the green leaves of Irish Boston fly or wither

Into bloodred Hebrew, Cotton Mather's fall.

When this morning the end-of-it-all

Siren, out of its head,

Turned inside out, hell-red,

Anne, you touched my wrist, you touched your cross,

The Fine Arts' reproduction. It must have broken—

On and on and on sang the siren,

Like a hebephrenic

Bleeding noise from each second's pinprick.

Our hearts stopped. The cars zombied on

Through the synchronized lights;

Monosyllabic shapes,

Devoid of intonation as ghosts, deaf to melody,

Like melodic dysprody.

One more terrible redeemed day is risen!

A siren wails that it is noon.

You who are ill, Anne, soon

Will withdraw to your therapy,

Vainly again to seek succor:

Passing the trees, the fall smells in their war paint

And feathers—the statue of Mather,

The marble head bent seeming to ponder

The leaves on Moses' tablets like a shroud;

He wears his curls

Like a lion in a sampler,

And hungers to be president of Harvard—

But his hand is gently raised to heaven

Where his late wife is

Whose soul was pleasant as a rose:

Passing a nailless printed finger

(It asks, Do you know about Christian Science?),

Anne, passing a mother on a billboard

(She asks, Have you called Mother

This week long distance?).

Your breath stops … glued to the black leather,

Staring off into no hope, into space:

The way a fiancée

Stares past the left hand she holds up

At a distance from her face,

And the plastic groom figure

On the cake, the way he stares

When the bride begins to cut!

Between the unreal and the next world, stretched taut,

Anne, you are trying to talk, wide-eyed and hollow-eyed,

Bright starving eyes! Like sections

Of a tapeworm, the anacoluthons

Break off—fed

On your daily bread

Dread.

Yet you wear the cross,

The red saltire x,

And a Ban the Bomb button

On your blouse.

Said Endicott at the trial of your namesake:

“She saith she now suffers and let us do what we will

She shall be delivered by a miracle.

I hope the court takes notice

Of the vanity of it

And heat of her spirit.”

You hear the helicopter:

The moth wings–against-a-window purr

Of a cat squinting with pleasure.

It hovers nearby,

A winking red eye.

Green helicopters patrol the mushroom-colored sky.

The sunstruck State House dome is ringing

The thin air with gold quoits. The end is winging

Nearer. Your lips part;

As if I, your one friend, might be late.

You are drunk

With being loved, the demands!

Drunk that night, while your husband slept in a stupor,

Your red-hot cigarette marked and marked and marked

His palms and the backs of his hands!

Over your bed is tacked the little print of Mather.

His wig is white as a lamb,

But evilly parted in the middle,

His flesh shines like marble or cold tallow.

He has anosognosia, he is incapable

Of knowing he is ill.

Aspiring to be less
Magnalia
and more direct,

He sees the witches' moist red and black parts

Joined mutually to infect;

Championing inoculation, he dreams of wet warm hearts,

Their extinction! Their annihilation!

You say he dreams of Mistress Hutchinson,

When the Bomb had descended and was in her heart,

That “peculiar indwelling of the Holy Ghost,”

When the Voice was in her ear,

When, all soul, without soul-space

Left for sanctification,

“At last she was so full she could not contain

And vented her revelations …

That she should come into New England

And should here be persecuted,

And that God would ruin us

And our posterity and the whole state

For the same.” Banished as one seditious,

Indians stretched her apart piece by piece.

Even her shade has disappeared.

She is revered

Only by you alone,

Anne, no one even knows that she was here.

Her sweet heart and sweet mind and sweet flesh and soul are one,

Like the air with the wind, as if she had never been born!

You walk through the burning Common,

Past the low terror of the Ether Dome,

You walk over the rooftops of Charlestown,

You walk over the Mystic River, and think of the One!

The Voice! It speaks of a wordless converse

Between airy, sweetly singing

Silent invisibles intermingling—

In bliss! within a sunbeam!

Within a single atom!

The mind stops … mind and body

Longing for order and mystery,

To be as a cloud, pure as a Taj Mahal

Of grief for a cherished soul,

Floating over beautiful wine-colored October.

 

A window sighs.

The row of houses stipples and sways

As if seen through a windshield after a downpour.

A brownstone tries to say something:

But the chimney is too small,

Is intimidated by the dark,

Its fireplaces never used.

Under the street light,

I take out the booklet

Of shadowless photographs

Drained soft beiges by reproduction:

Slave-bangles, kohl eyes—the partner,

With cracked patent-leather hair, in his socks and garters,

All aloofness, good posture, chin in the air,

Forty years ago. My glasses bite

The bridge of my nose

As I stare into the dustless room.

Is he her lover? But cheats on her …

And she's had others.

Her veil-gray fingertips brush my eyelids, my lips.

And will have more.

The cathedral clock has just struck three, or four;

A car parks in the piles of leaves.

I think of the flower-fresh wide-eyed gaze of Greece—

Garlanding what it sees.

Convinced life is meaningless,

I lack the courage of my conviction.

 

The way a child's hands stare through glass

Under the frost, pining so much

They lag behind the child, they pass

Their two hours, patients and their visitors, and touch