She knows what I know,
or used to know, for in me sonnets fade.
Homer erodes
like sandstone worn by age.
Each year I grow emptier, more obsolete,
can barely grope
to words that once hung iridescent in my skull.
When, thirty years back, I asked my beloved tutor
how I’d ever pay him back, he said, It’s not
that linear. Only carry on this talk
with someone else.
All his thoughts on Western Civ
would melt like ice without this kid—
hair dyed torch red, painted flames on her lug-sole boots.
She safety-pinned a plastic charm
of Our Lady’s sacred heart to her sleeve.
Last night, to plot her destiny
she hurled at the world map a lopsided dart
and hit a South Seas flyspeck. Call collect,
I say, if you get stuck. Read
thus-and-such translation of Rilke only.
And though I sound like Polonius to myself,
she scribbles down my platitudes.
Without her like,
I’d live in the dull smear
of my own profession, each kid
a repeat, indistinct from the vanishing instants
that mark us made.
The hand that holds this pen’s assembled by some force
newly manifest
in her face. She brought amazement for a spell,
then tore loose into the labyrinth I’ve meandered in
addled as a child, feeling along the string
my teacher tied. My eyes stare out from ever deeper sockets, edged in mesh.
I watch her cross the snow-swirled quad
backpacked in hunter plaid, bent like an old scholar,
moving with care across the slippery earth.
Snow is falling
over the quad, like rare pages
shredded and dispersed by wind,
that wild white filling every place we’ve stepped.
(for Betsy Hogan)
ENTERING THE KINGDOM
As the boy’s bones lengthened,
and his head and heart enlarged,
his mother one day failed
to see herself in him.
He was a man then, radiating
the innate loneliness of men.
His expression was ever after
beyond her. When near sleep
his features eased towards childhood,
it was brief.
She could only squeeze
his broad shoulder. What could
she teach him
of loss, who now inflicted it
by entering the kingdom
of his own will?
DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE GARDEN
We know he was a man because, once doomed,
he begged for reprieve. See him
grieving on his rock under olive trees,
his companions asleep
on the hard ground around him
wrapped in old hides.
Not one stayed awake as he’d asked.
That went through him like a sword.
He wished with all his being to stay
but gave up
bargaining at the sky. He knew
it was all mercy anyhow,
unearned as breath. The Father couldn’t intervene,
though that gaze was never
not rapt, a mantle around him. This
was our doing, our death.
The dark prince had poured the vial of poison
into the betrayer’s ear,
and it was done. Around the oasis where Jesus wept,
the cracked earth radiated out for miles.
In the green center, Jesus prayed for the pardon
of Judas, who was approaching
with soldiers, glancing up—as Christ was—into
the punctured sky till his neck bones
ached. Here is his tear-riven face come
to press a kiss on his brother.
HURT HOSPITAL’S BEST SUICIDE JOKES
In unfolded aluminum chairs the color of shit
and set in a circle as if to corral some emptiness
in this church basement deep in the dirt,
strangers sit and tell stories.
Case sipped wine in a hot tub. Janice
threw back shots in a dive.
Bob drew blinds to smoke blunts and ate nothing
but cake frosting bought by the case.
The first lady of someplace swiped her son’s meds
to stay slim. Craig burst through bank doors,
machine gun in hand. John geezed heroin:
with a turkey baster, he says, into a neck vein.
A cop shoved Mark’s face in the mud,
put a shoe on his neck to cuff him and ask
where his friends were. I had friends,
he said, think I’d be here?
Zola once wrote that the road from the shrine
at Lourdes was impressively littered
with crutches and canes but he noted
not one wooden leg.
In the garage, with your face through a noose,
you kick out the ladder, but the green rope won’t give,
and when your wife clicks the garage switch and the door
tilts up, there you dangle on tiptoe.
Alive, all of us, on this island where we sip only
black liquids or clear water and face down the void
we’ve shaped, and should our eyes meet
what howls erupt—like jackals we bawl
to find ourselves upright.
(for Patti Macmillan)
SINNERS WELCOME
I opened up my shirt to show this man
the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up
like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.
I who should have been kneeling
was knelt to by one whose face
should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:
no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses
with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.
He’d sailed past then clay gods
and the singing girls who might have made of him
a swine. That the world could arrive at me
with him in it, after so much longing—
impossible. He enters me and joy
sprouts from us as from a split seed.
THE FIRST STEP
From your first step toward me
I sprang to life, though stood
stock still. Our gazes locked.
You ambled up, I couldn’t move.
My swagger stopped.
My breezy bravura
went windswept plain. I stood
and let you come. For months we talked,
but the chair you occupied sat
so far, you were an island oasis
I couldn’t reach. I barely heard the words
your lush mouth shaped, just thirsted
for your breath to come
easing down my lungs. Each time
that mouth politely said goodnight
and turned so I could throw the bolt—
upon that door, I’d softly bang my head.
Until you asked (at
last at last) if you could browse my face,
as if it were page or sacred tome.
From then, the crosswalks told us go,
the maitre d’s right now. From that first step,
I had to stop the turning world
to breathe you in,
and now some nights
tend toward you whom
I never was intended for.
(for Peter Straus)
A TAPESTRY FIGURE ESCAPES FOR OCCUPANCY IN THE REAL WORLD, WHICH INCLUDES THE DEATH OF HER MOTHER
You’d like the unseeable shuttle to stop
tocking off the ticked seconds
<
br /> drawing tight strands of wind around you,
blue smoke, ether, wants. You’d like
the tapestry pattern to stop growing
around your minor figure.
Such a large green pasture already
and so much of which
you’re not kept abreast, must only guess
from the trees’ chord changes.
When you escape the tapestry and plop out,
you’re on a street corner pondering left or right
when a loud whoosh from behind
whirls you around to find glowing
speed lines of some sudden absence.
Seraphim or incubus? Guardian or assassin?
Later, you slumber in the night boat
and wake feeling a neck-tug
like a noose or a shepherd’s hook,
but it’s only your own veined hands
trying to cut off that shriek
that got choked back
in childhood, but which now
boils up at certain instants like bile.
Say the lover you’re about to leave intones
a soliloquy on your hair. Say your mother’s ashes
come in a Ziploc bag, on which you find writ
in some felt-tip, “Mom
one-half.” You dip your right hand
in that gray flour, and its gravity
in your palm’s scale is nothing. Love
is so rare, any such handful of ash
holds the whole world’s weight.
unless, unless…
In your plunge through the gibbet door
the thread that darned you here
gets tied in a love knot and bitten free.
MISTER COGITO POSTHUMOUS
You were born inside barbed wire,
black lines whose intervals of spiked stars
were all you could steer by within
the vectors of that slaughterhouse. Poland otherwise starless.
The stomp of jackboots down your block
implanted the two-step iamb.
Then the sickle swung, a fine-honed moon
at neck level, and the invaders’ helmets toppled
along with the listless or uncharged.
Many names in the gulag logbooks
were printed in vanishing ink.
You posed as scarecrow and birds
alit your arms. You posed as clerk, and no one
was fooled. You went alone over a white steppe
of snowy paper. Nightly your pen nib
traced the old gods’ impotence.
Here in the alleged first world,
things cost a lot.
We suffer the luxury of disbelief,
endure grim comfort. Our men are fat,
our women spider thin.
Our scholars seek to cancel any history
they find unsavory, or to untether words
from referents till they sink
like sad balloons. Please send help.
You may have crossed the checkpoint
to the impalpable, but we hear across
those barricades what radar
can’t detect, nor censors blacken:
your words, which pin our shoulders back,
drumbeats for the war that never passes.
(for Zbigniew Herbert)
FOR A DYING TOMCAT WHO’S RELINQUISHED HIS FORMER HISSING AND PREDATORY NATURE
I remember the long orange carp you once scooped
from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond
her swung broom, across summer lawns
to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks
for that. I’m not one to whom offerings
often get made. You let me feel
how Christ might when I kneel,
weeping in the dark
over the usual maladies: love and its lack.
Only in tears do I speak
directly to him and with such
conviction. And only once you grew frail
did you finally slacken into me,
dozing against my ribs like a child.
You gave up the predatory flinch
that snapped the necks of so many
birds and slow-moving rodents.
Now your once powerful jaw
is malformed by black malignancies.
It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way