Selected Poems
Page 4
of mysteries could go on and on
without ever any verification…), a few ruined
snapshots (a chicken in every BBQ, social justice), one
shattered vision, a few mild
auditory hallucinations, faint harp
music, celestial crowing
or choiring, or the low love cooing
of an amorous duo,
Ignorance and Certainty, that each lost one of us,
I pray, would agree, should agree, should be
sterilised!
Grim Town in a Steep Valley
This valley: as if a huge, dull, primordial ax
once slammed into the earth
and then withdrew, innumerable millennia ago.
A few flat acres
ribbon either side of the river sliding sluggishly
past the clock tower, the convenience store.
If a river could look over its shoulder,
glad to be going, this one would.
In town center: a factory of clangor and stink,
of grinding and oil,
hard howls from drill bits
biting sheets of steel. All my brothers
live here, every cousin, many dozens
of sisters, my worn aunts
and numb uncles, the many many of me,
a hundred sad wives,
all of us countrymen and -women
born next to each other behind the plow
in this valley, each of us
pressing to our chests a loaf of bread
and a jug of milk.… The river is low
this time of year and the bedstones’ blackness
marks its lack
of depth. A shopping cart
lies on its side in center stream
gathering branches, detritus, silt,
forcing the already weak current to part for it,
dividing it, but even so diminished
it’s glad to be going,
glad to be gone.
River Blindness (Onchocerciasis)
First, a female buffalo gnat of the genus Simulium bites you
and in the process
deposits her infective larvae.
In ten to twenty months (no big hurry) they grow
to threadlike adult worms
which live up to fifteen years under the skin,
intermuscularly, in fascial planes, against capsules
of joints or the shafts of long bones – the neighborhoods
they love inside you. The adult females,
now residing in your body, produce live embryos
which live a year or two,
migrating, restless,
during which time they will likely invade your eyes,
lymph glands, or other (you don’t want to know
which) organs. Results
are unpleasant: blindness, which might be merciful
for then you don’t see: rash, wheals, gross
lichenification, atrophy (known as “lizard skin”),
enlarged lymph glands
leading to pockets of loose flesh,
“hanging groins”, which predispose
to hernia, and so on.
Treatment: Serious drugs, some so toxic the treatment worse
than the illness.
Prognosis: If you are not reinfected, the parasites die out
within fifteen years. Symptoms of disease, however, may
get worse during this time.
Prevention: Avoid Third World communities,
particularly those located within twenty kilometers
of fast-flowing rivers
in which Simulium prefers to breed.
Some twenty to forty million (hard to be exact!) people
infected,
baby flies dying, dying
in their eyes,
blinding them.
History Books
That is, their authors, leave out
one thing: the smell. How sour, no, rancid – bad cheese
and sweat – the narrow corridors of Hitler’s bunker
during the last days powdered
by plaster shaken down
under bomb after bomb. Or (forward or backward
through time, history books take you) downstream
a mile or two from a river-crossing ambush
a corpse washes ashore
or catches in branches
and bloats in the sun. The carrion eaters
who do not fly
come by their noses: the thick,
ubiquitous, sick, sweet smell.
Most of history, however,
is banal, not bloody: the graphite and wood smell
of a pencil factory, the glue- fertiliser- paper-
(oh redolent!) shoe- hat- (ditto malodor
and poisonous) chemical- salt cod-
munitions-canning- shirtwaist- plastics- box-
tractor- etc. factories – and each one
peopled by people: groins, armpits, feet.
A bakery, during famine; guards, smoking, by the door.
Belowdecks, two years out, dead calm, tropics.
And wind a thousand miles all night combing
the tundra: chilled grasses, polar bear droppings,
glacial exhalations.… Open
the huge book of the past: whoosh!: a staggering cloud
of stinks, musks
and perfumes, swollen pheromones, almond
and anise, offal dumps, mass graves exhumed, flower
heaps, sandalwood bonfires, milk vapors
from a baby’s mouth, all of us
wading hip-deep through the endless
waftings, one bottomless soup
of smells: primal, atavistic – sniff, sniff, sniff.
Shaving the Graveyard
The graveyard being what he called his face;
even as a young man
he called his face the graveyard – he talked
like that, funny, odd
things that scared me sometimes
in our early years. I thought maybe he was a little touched
(his Uncle Bob was certifiable)
but it was just his way of talking. U-feeisms,
he told me once, he liked to use u-feeisms,
which was no language
I ever heard of. He never touched a drop, though,
nor ever lifted a hand against me
or the kids, and when it came to loving,
well, he was sweet, but talking strange then
too: Bug Sauce, he’d call me, or Lavender Limbs,
or sometimes Birdbath – never Honey
or Sugar like other husbands when they talked, talked.
He was funny like that. Anyway,
after breakfast (he always shaved after breakfast,
said his face was ‘looser’ then)
he’d stroke his chin and say:
Time to shave the graveyard,
and he would and then he’d go to work,
the handle of his lunchpail hooked through
with a belt and slung
over his shoulder. Some days I’d watch him
until he reached the corner
of Maple and Cottage
where he turned and walked the two block
to the mill.
Pecked to Death by Swans
(for Stephen Dobyns)
Your tear-wracked family bedside: elderly grandchildren,
great-grandchildren arriving
straight from med school; not a peep of pain, calm,
lucid, last words impeccably drafted?
No. Pecked to death by swans.
Having saved the lives of twelve crippled children
(pulled from a burning circus tent), the president
calling your hospital room, and you say: Tell him
to call back; all the opiate drugs you want?
No. Pecked to death by swans.
Great honors accrued, Don’t go telegram from th
e pope
on the side table, serious lobby
already in place re a commemorative stamp; a long
long life capped by falling, peacefully, asleep?
No. I said: Pecked to death by swans.
By a bullet meant for a lover or a best friend,
by a car set to kill someone else whom you pushed,
because you could, out of the way; the ululations
of a million mourners rising to your window?
No. Pecked to death by swans.
Autobiographical
The minute my brother gets out of jail I want
some answers: when our mother
murdered our father
did she find out first, did he tell her – the pistol’s tip
parting his temple’s fine hairs – did he
tell her where our sister (the youngest, Alice)
hid the money Grandma (mother’s side)
stole from her Golden Age Group?
It was a lot of money but enough to die for?
was what Mom said she asked him,
giving him a choice. I’ll see you in hell,
she said Dad said
and then she said (this is in the trial transcript): Not
any time soon, needle dick!
We know Alice hid the money – she was arrested
a week later in Tacoma for armed robbery,
which she would not have done
if she had it. Alice was (she died
of a heroin overdose six hours after making bail)
syphilitic, stupid, and rude
but not greedy. So she hid the money,
or Grandma did,
but since her stroke can’t say a word,
doesn’t seem to know anybody.
Doing a dime at Dannemora
for an unrelated sex crime, my brother
might know something but won’t answer
my letters, refuses to see me,
though he was the one who called me
at divinity school
after Mom was arrested. He could hardly
get the story out from laughing
so much: Dad had missed
his third in a row the day before with his parole officer,
the cops were sent
to pick him up (Bad timing, said Mom) and found him
before he was cold.
He was going back to jail anyway, Mom said,
said the cops,
which they could and did use against her
to the tune of double digits, which means,
what with the lupus, she’s guaranteed
to die inside. Ask her?
She won’t talk to me.
She won’t give me the time of day.
Emily’s Mom
(Emily Norcross Dickinson, 1804–1882,
mother of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, 1830-1886)
Today we’d say she was depressed, clinically. Then,
they called it ‘nameless disabling apathy’, ‘persistent nameless
infirmity’, ‘often she fell sick
with nameless illnesses and wept
with quiet resignation’. The Nameless, they should
have called it! She was depressed,
unhappy, and who can blame her
given her husband, Edward, who was, without exception,
absent – literally and otherwise – and in comparison
to a glacial range, cooler by a few degrees.
Febrile, passionate: not Edward.
‘From the first she was desolately lonely.’
A son gets born, a daughter (the poet), another daughter,
and that’s all, then nearly fifty years
of ‘tearful withdrawal and obscure maladies’.
She was depressed, for christsake! The Black Dog
got her, the Cemetery Sledge, the Airless Vault,
it ate her up
and her options few: no Prozac then, no Elavil,
couldn’t eat all the rum cake,
divorce the sluggard?
Her children? Certainly they
brought her some joy?: ‘I always ran home to Awe
when a child, if anything befell me. He was an Awful Mother,
but I liked him better than none.’
This is what her daughter, the poet, said.
No, it had her,
for a good part of a century
it had her by the neck: the Gray Python,
the Vortex Vacuum.
During the last long (seven) years,
crippled further by a stroke,
it did not let go but, but: ‘We were never intimate
Mother and children while she was our Mother
but mines in the ground meet by tunneling
and when she became our Child, the Affection came.’
This is what Emily, her daughter, wrote
in that manner wholly hers,
the final word
on Emily, her mother – melancholic,
fearful, starved-of-love.
‘Mr John Keats Five Feet Tall’ Sails Away
on the Maria Crowther,
a cargo brig
of 127 tons bound for Italy,
Naples, the sun
which was thought would cure his cough, his lungs.
The day: Sunday, 17 September 1820.
With him: Severn,
a painter, his nurse-companion;
Mrs Pidgeon, a pain in the ass
and cold; Miss Cotterell,
like Keats consumptive
and ‘very lady-like but a sad martyr
to her illness,’ wrote Severn;
the captain and crew.
This was not a pleasure cruise.
Second day out: the sick
and nonsick get seasick
and ‘bequeath to the mighty sea their breakfasts’.
Storms, water by the pailful
in the sleeping cabin; calms, nary a puff.
A squall (Bay of Biscay),
a calm again (Cape Saint Vincent),
then, one dawn, Gibraltar, the African coast!
Then, Bay of Naples,
Saturday, 21 October – ten days
quarantined
during which not one porthole opened
it rained so hard and long.
Welcome, Mr Keats, to sunny southern Italy.
Then, by wagon, on roads ripe
with malaria, to Rome
from where in the two months plus
he still has lungs
he does not write again to Fanny Brawne,
whom he loves,
though he does write about
her to a friend
the famous sentence: ‘Oh God! God! God!’ (in whom
he had no faith) ‘Every thing
I have in my trunk
reminds me of her
and goes through me like a spear.’
And the better but less quoted
next sentence: ‘The silk
lining she put in my travelling cap scalds
my head.’ The verb choice ‘scalds’
perfect here (literally he had the fever,
figuratively…), the tactility
fresher, the melodrama cut
by an almost comic hyperbole. It is
more Keats than Keats,
who died 172 years, 8 months, 2 weeks, and 4 days
ago – this tiny man
John Keats,
who wrote some poems
without which,
inch by inch – in broken
barn light,
in classrooms (even there!),
under the lamp where what you read
teaches you what you love – without which
we would each,
inch by hammered inch,
we would each
be diminished.
‘I Love You Sweatheart’
A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside do
wn (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work…?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognise his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of ‘something special, darling, tomorrow’?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the words.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed – always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.
NEW POEMS FROM
New and Selected Poems
(1997)
Refrigerator, 1957
More like a vault – you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire