by Marie Howe
Further praise for Marie Howe and
What the Living Do
“The tentative transformation of agonizing, slow-motion loss into redemption is Howe’s signal achievement in this wrenching second collection, which uncovers new potential for the personal poem.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review, and chosen as one of the five best books of poetry published in 1997)
“Her verse is almost unornamented though she manages through some great gift of will and expression to convey the sharpest feelings in long, graceful lines that seem to breathe on the page…. Despite the fathomless pain inherent in these poems, Howe never succumbs to sentimentality or self-pity; her tone is passionate yet detached, her vocabulary and imagery evocative, appropriate, and devastating.”
—Memphis Commercial Appeal
“These are important poems by an established practitioner, defining contemporary poetry as accessible to all…. Howe is a truth-teller of the first order. Fearless in presenting unfiltered experiences, she interweaves her simple, economical language into long, subordinated sentences, loose, enjambed couplets that spill compellingly down the page with near-invisible artistry.”
—Providence Sunday Journal
“The love in this book is tangible and redemptive.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
WHAT THE LIVING DO
ALSO BY MARIE HOWE
The Good Thief
In the Company of My Solitude:
American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic
(edited with Michael Klein)
WHAT THE LIVING DO
poems
Marie Howe
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK • LONDON
Copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.
The text of this book is composed in Electra with the display set in Electra Bold
Desktop composition by Chelsea Dippel
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Howe, Marie, 1950–
What the living do: poems / Marie Howe.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07590-8
I. Title.
PS3558.O8925W48 1997
811'.54—DC21 97-10798
CIP
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU
Some of these poems first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly; Agni; Columbia Magazine; the Harvard Review; the New England Review; the Plum Review; Tikkun; Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction & Deliverance (edited by Sarah Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner); and Lights, Camera, Poetry!: American Movie Poems (edited by Jason Shinder).
“Practicing” and “The Fort” first appeared in The New Yorker.
I am grateful to the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Engelhard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts for support: the time and space to work on these poems.
So many friends have helped me, too many to mention here, but I’m especially grateful to Marcus Alonso, who first walked me to the road, and to Charlene Engelhard for her many gifts and for walking with me.
I am grateful to Donna Masini for her generosity, and to my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her steady heart.
Finally, this book would not have come into being without the specific help I received from Jane Cooper, Tony Hoagland, Georgia Heard, James Shannon, and Jason Shinder.
Contents
The Boy
Sixth Grade
The Fort
From My Father’s Side of the Bed
Buying the Baby
Practicing
The Mother
In the Movies
The Attic
Beth
The Fruit Cellar
The Copper Beech
The Game
The Girl
The Dream
For Three Days
Just Now
A Certain Light
How Some of It Happened
Rochester, New York, July 1989
The Last Time
Without Music
Pain
Faulkner
The Promise
The Cold Outside
The Grave
The Gate
One of the Last Days
Late Morning
Wanting a Child
Tulips
Watching Television
The Dream
More
Separation
The Bird
Prayer
Two or Three Times
Reunion
The Kiss
Yesterday
Memorial
My Dead Friends
The Visit
The New Life
What the Living Do
Buddy
With gratitude for my brother John Howe
in memory of Jane Kenyon and Billy Forlenza
and for the living, James Shannon.
WHAT THE LIVING DO
The Boy
My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer night:
white T-shirt, blue jeans—to the field at the end of the street.
Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,
and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.
And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him—you know
where he is—and talk to him: No reprisals. He promised. A small parade of kids
in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father
will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
Sixth Grade
The afternoon the neighborhood boys tied me and Mary Lou Mahar
to Donny Ralph’s father’s garage doors, spread-eagled,
it was the summer they chased us almost every day.
Careening across the lawns they’d mowed for money,
on bikes they threw down, they’d catch us, lie on top of us,
then get up and walk away.
That afternoon Donny’s mother wasn’t home.
His nine sisters and brothers gone—even Gramps, who lived with them,
gone somewhere—the backyard empty, the big house quiet.
A gang of boys. They pulled the heavy garage doors down,
and tied us to them with clothesline,
and Donny got the deer’s leg severed from the buck his dad had killed
the year before, dried up and still fur-covered, and sort of
poked it at us, dancing around the blacktop in his sneakers, laughing.
Then somebody took it from Donny and did it.
And then somebody else, and somebody after him.
And then Donny pulled up Mary Lou’s dress and held it up,
and she began to cry, and I became a boy again, and shouted Stop,
and they wouldn’t.
And then a girl-boy, calling out to Charlie, my best friend’s brother,
who wouldn’t look
Charlie! to my brother’s friend who knew me
Stop them. And he wouldn’t.
And then more softly, and looking directly at him, I said, Charlie.
And he said Stop. And they said What? And he said Stop it.
And they did, quickly untying the ropes, weirdly quiet,
Mary Lou still weeping. And Charlie? Already gone.
The Fort
It was a kind of igloo
made from branches and weeds, a dome
with an aboveground tunnel entrance
the boys crawled through on their knees,
and a campfire in the center
because smoke came out of a hole in the roof,
and we couldn’t go there. I
don’t even remember trying, not
inside. Although I remember
a deal we didn’t keep—so many
Dr Peppers which nobody drank,
and my brother standing outside it
like a chief: bare-chested, weary
from labor, proud, dignified,
and talking to us as if we could never
understand a thing he said because
he had made this thing and we had not,
and could not have done it, not
in a thousand years—true knowledge
and disdain when he looked at us.
For those weeks the boys didn’t chase us.
They busied themselves with patching
the fort and sweeping the dirt outside
the entrance, a village of boys
who had a house to clean, women
in magazines, cigarettes and soda and
the strange self-contained voices they used
to speak to each other with.
And we approached the clearing where
their fort was like deer in winter
hungry for any small thing—what
they had made without us.
We wanted to watch them live there.
From My Father’s Side of the Bed
When he had fallen deep asleep and was snoring
and I had moved out slowly from under his heavy arm,
I would sometimes nudge him a little,
not to wake him—
but so that he would sleep more lightly
and wake more easily should the soldiers,
maybe already assembling in the downstairs hall,
who were going to kill my father and rape my mother,
begin to mount the stairs.
Buying the Baby
In those days you could buy a pagan baby for five dollars,
the whole class saved up. And when you bought it
you could name it Joseph, Mary, or Theresa, the class took a vote.
But on the day I brought in the five dollars
my grandmother had given me for my birthday something happened
—a fire drill? an assassination? And if it was announced
Marie Howe has, all by herself, bought a baby in India and gets to name it,
it was overshadowed and forgotten.
And if I tried to picture my baby, the CARE package
carried to her hut and placed before her, as her sisters and brothers watched,
that image dissolved into the long shining hall to the girls’ lavatory.
Even in my own room, waiting for Roy Orbison to sing “Only the Lonely”
so I could sleep, I couldn’t conjure that baby up.
The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that:
because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it.
Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention,
sister to the Sin of Omission, which was
the price for what you hadn’t done but thought.
Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed
it would start to happen;
then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.
Practicing
I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement
of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths
how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out
the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:
concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes
instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.
We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was
practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair…and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song
for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.
The Mother
In her early old age the mother’s toenails curl over her toes
so that when she walks across the kitchen floor some click.
The doctor has warned her, for the third time, that her legs will
ulcerate if she doesn’t rub moisturizer into them so
unwilling is she to touch her own body or care for it
—the same woman who stood many nights at the foot of that attic stairs
as her husband weaved and stammered up into the room where her daughter slept
—on the landing, in her bathrobe,
by the laundry chute, unmoving,
like a statue in the children’s game her children play—
and now the soft drone of her daughter’s waking voice, reasoning and
rising, and the first slap
and the scrape of her son’s chair pushed back from his desk,
the air thick now with their separate listening,
and again the girl’s voice, now quietly weeping, and the creak of her bed…
In the game, someone has to touch you to free you
then you’re human again.
In the Movies
When a man rapes a woman because he’s a soldier and his army’s won,
there’s always somebody else holding her down, another man,
so the men do it together, or one after the other,
in the way my brothers shot hoops on the driveway with their friends
while we girls watched. Their favorite game was PIG.
A boy had to make the exact shot as the boy before him, or he was a P
I G consecutively until he lost. I’ve been thinking
about the sorrow of men, and how it’s different from the sorrow
of women, although I don’t know how—
In the movies, one soldier holds the woman down, his hand over her mouth,
and another soldier or two holds down the husband
who’s enraged and screaming because he can’t help the woman he loves.
When the soldiers go, he crawls across the dirt and grass
to reach his wife who’s speaking gibberish now.
He kisses her cheek over and over again…
—The woman lives on. We see her years later,
answering a man’s questions in the drawin
g room, a crescent scar
just above her lace collar. She’s dignified and serene. Maybe
her son has been recently killed, maybe she’s successfully
married her daughter.
How can a woman love a man? In the movies, a man
rapes a woman because he’s a soldier and his army’s won, and he
wants to celebrate—all those nights in the dark and the mud—
and there’s always someone else holding her down, another soldier, or