PART THREE
To an Editor Who Said I Repeat Myself and Tell Too Much
The mouth works all its life to spit a vowel—
some long sound with feeling fenced in
by the sharp stops of a few consonants, a howl
and a pen to keep it tame, a calm din
that won’t drown out the life it tries
to say, but won’t deny, either, that hell
is the sound we’re born making, the cry
in the womb, which we tell
and tell—too much, of course—
in the hope of exhausting it. Stated plain,
there is no other subject—rejoice, remorse,
repress—all words stand for pain.
Over and over I say—what else can I do?
All words stand for pain. Fuck you.
Get Out
Can you feel your confidence
match the billowing crowd?
You even feel cocky, believing
you’ve earned the admiration of a few.
It is, in fact, what it appears to be:
a voice fastened to paper very carefully,
a cry cut from its mouth.
But then, you think, who is that
you’re talking to? There’s no one here,
just paper and ink and you.
What is this pathetic game
of pretend? Get out. Go find a friend.
“Sometimes We Sleep Well in the Midst of Terrible Grief”
The January night my mother died
the bed was wet and heavy with snow.
Things felt mostly odd, and no one cried.
We stared blank as graves dug from inside
as my dad and I drove home straight and slow
the January night my mother died.
Her death was like waking up to fried
food cooking on another family’s stove
in another life where no one cried,
because no one had known her, or they denied
having known her their whole
lives the morning after my mother died
in a hospital where a social worker tried
to prepare us to let the bleeping machines go
silent, nothing to measure. No one cried
and I slept by my dad on my mother’s side
of their bed. I wanted to know,
on the January night my mother died,
how she had slept. A few years later, I cried.
My Mom, d. 1994
My wife is not my mom. My mom is not
my mom. My father is not my mom. My boss
is not my mom. She is a tooth with rot,
a flower pressed between the pages of a lost
book. My son is not my mom. She is a mare
crushing my skull beneath her hoof. She is forever
starved. I ride to the edge of the earth clutching her hair.
Get it over with. It’s never OK, not ever.
Fuck it, whatever. If Robert Frost is my mom,
then so is Robert Lowell. She taught me to talk.
She is where I’m headed, a bomb
crater. She forgives me like a hunting hawk.
Maybe she’s my boss’s boss, my wife’s other other lover,
my son’s midnight cough. She loves me like a brother.
Quatrains Until Dawn
Well here we are. Does night
race or erase the time
between now and morning?
This voice makes my brain sick.
It’s heard it all before
and that’s it. Well death is
just like anything else.
Check the clock. Whole years can
fit between tick and tock.
Race or erase the time
tonight, its long private
fever, its terrible blank,
real as any audible voice.
Well here we are halfway.
Hold this in your hand and
feel this. Who would take
care of my wife and son?
Well there it is.
Worries not razor blades.
They are just plain dull.
Well soon the sun will be up.
If only my headphones
can sing me to sleep. Well
soon the sun will be up.
PART FOUR
I
Goodbye Girls
It’s time to stop clutching
you last few petals, dreams
I’ve been sleeping without. So
goodbye dear missed Marisa
and Cath and Debra
and Tanya and dearest Renee—
I leave you for the life
you left me to, but, still, I pine
for you and all the men
I might have become
between your various kisses
(if only I had kissed you enough
or at all, lips soft and warm as
possibilities). Now look at you
on Facebook, your children hoisted
upon your hips, their faces only half-
familiar. I read your debut articles
in The Nation, browse pics of Brazil
and your living rooms. You’re so
much better than we would have
been. I hope there is nothing
like me (did you even like me?)
in the men you chose,
who got you for their wives,
leaving no reason for their thoughts
to circle back to bygone girls
with whom they didn’t get to live
other, better lives.
Late Poem
I was alone inside a book as I’d wished. It was
fifty years from now. I didn’t live that long.
The book was lost, in an attic, a locked trunk,
a storage space, under rubble. It was the last
copy, the only. Immortality seemed a memory.
My journals were lost or incinerated, those fervent
transcriptions and wonderings and hopeful
evenings, scripts for wild lives unlived, unloved
long since disintegrated. Whatever power
I encoded had escaped and moved on. I was
neither I nor eye nor lie. No one cared or could.
Even what was left of me wasn’t. My bones
were as brittle as a text, religious, with no teacher.
Looking back, there was no future, no future.
Narcissus and Me
A reflection is irresistible because it is a paradox: an opposite that is the same, an other that is also clearly yourself.
—Daniel Mendelsohn
If they weren’t mine, I’d say
my eyes are beautiful,
like a riddle
to which I am the answer.
I’d say my eyes are green,
flecked with orange—women
have always admired my eyes.
My beard is a blazing
red, I’d say.
Some women admire it.
Even, perhaps, some men.
A vision overwhelmed him—
an empty hope,
a shadow mistaken for it’s body.
He gazed at himself, wonderstruck
and paralyzed.
He saw his own two eyes
like two green stars,
his beard divinely curling.
It was desire for himself
that seized him,
longing
to know the one closest to hand, farthest from reach.
I would say my eyes
are a woman’s eyes.
Even my beard, I’d say,
should grow on the face
of a woman.
Green is the color of springtime
and birth—
mine are the eyes
of a woman’s feelings.
And red is also a woman’s color,
like flowers and sex.
; But my shoulders are broad
as a wall,
my gut as tough as a rock.
Only a thin, thin line keeps us apart,
more forbidding than mountains
or impassable gates.
I would ask,
what kind of man
has eyes so green?
I would look into my eyes
and ask to love.
But they are my eyes
and there are things I do not know
how to ask.
I am the cause
of the fire,
the fuel and the flame
it feeds.
Smoking
I smoke a pipe—it’s ridiculous, I know, I know.
One of those silly habits taken up in high school
—to seem older? Different? Certainly not cool—
and accidentally kept up as the years go.
What do I think this is, the nineteenth century
when all young men smoked pipes? I’m thirty,
a father, overweight, and smoke two hours a day!
My son, who’ll need care, can’t afford my dying young
of throat-rot or cancer of the tongue.
The trouble is I like it. I read Sherlock Holmes—
a pipe’s the right accessory for thinking, writing poems.
And maybe I still feel older than I am, still feel
different, mistreated, odd, and want to repay
my past’s pain with future pain, a smoker’s deal.
Friendship
In just the couple years since two by two
we all began to partner off,
already we’ve practically retired, passing through
apartment doors shut tighter than a cough.
There used to be long, wasted hours of talk,
nothing secret between us, not even skin;
at the conclusion of a wandering walk,
the flirtatious dark would set in.
Is marriage lonely by design,
in hopes that obeying an age-old law
of I am only hers, she is only mine
forms a brittle scab over the always-raw
wound of too much intimacy between friends
in favor of a duller aching that never ends?
Other Women
There are other women everywhere,
long legs pouring into sandals, feet almost bare,
shampoo-floral-odor tail trailing
like the tail of a comet that comes hailing
every fifteen seconds, spanning one generation
at most of skittery male temptation.
I touch them all in quick succession, their thighs
and each plump buttock fondled by my eyes.
If they knew, if they knew—oh but they must:
men and women are bound by public lust.
Every turn of my head is a secret tryst
I rehash while fucking my wife, and I’m not missed
at home in bed. How lovely, all this sex in the air—
wherever I look, a blameless affair!
Masturbation
Painstakingly, thoroughly, you do in your head what you’d never do in life,
every lick and thrust and slap, every delicious source of shame,
all these desires—real desires—you would never tell your wife
or anyone, though she, who wishes you’d talk dirtier, wouldn’t blame
you for being turned on by anything. But you believe—you always have—
there’s something sick about the thoughts that get you off, your personality
damaged, a hurt somewhere that might hurt someone you love.
Ironic—or not?—that what shames you most is most organically
yourself. It will erupt, you fear, and possess you, this demon from your core,
where you are always terrified alone and your traumas are fossilized.
For years you did it once a day, at least, if not two or three times more,
out of boredom, or to mellow after a glance at a classmates’s inner thighs.
But not lately. Now it’s once or twice a month, far less than you have sex for real.
You’re a good person, you don’t do anything wrong, no matter what you feel.
Jazz
It’s not the idea of collective improvisation I like,
not the show of instrumental virtuosity,
not the hipster life. And jazz isn’t my history.
No, when the tune is really going, when horns spike,
dip into and slice the melody, when the drums
kick the rhythm deep and the bass is walking
and you hear the wooden click before the E-string thrums,
I love that, without any words, these people are talking
like they can say exactly what they mean
because they never have to say it.
Rather than labor to construct a sentence, they play it.
How fun! O, to play the piano, to let my thoughts careen
instead of getting stalled in speech. Talking takes so long
and never helps. I wish Brenda and I could fight in song.
The Middle Generation
They rewrote their lives, ahead of and obsessed with themselves.
Their books seem to tremble a little, unsettling my shelves.
They did nothing good, except for their art, if art meant
pillorying their loved ones in poems, setting the precedent
for so much sentimental verse in the ensuing decades,
pathetic, melodramatic poems as dull as used razor blades.
They were jealous and fake, and drank with inspired, suicidal thirst,
but if I could write poems like their best, I’d forgive me at my worst.
Of course, now dead and all but mythic, they can be anything
I need them to, and I can be like them, so in my reimagining,
they wrote blindly past the point of retreat, and they are, like me,
choked swans sinking slow and graceful into the black of posterity.
Money Time
Supposedly, time is money:
money will buy you time
assuming you have money
to spend, as well as time
to wait while your money
grows. However, time
spent waiting can be like money
misspent—it’s often time
wasted, even if money
is made, a kind of time
not worth spending, so money
isn’t necessarily time.
Maybe time is money
if you make with your time
something else that makes money,
though most of the time
it’s not your money
you’ve made with your time.
And money isn’t even money,
necessarily, in a time
like this, when money
loses value and time
is misspent losing money.
And time isn’t even time,
necessarily, if it’s lost money
on which you’re wasting time,
nor is money really money
if it’s wasted on wasted time.
Still, sometimes, time is money,
but only if you have money and time.
Layoff
In my twenty-ninth year, and in the two
thousand and ninth since the birth of Christ,
I was laid off from my job. I worked
as a book reviews editor and news
reporter for the major industry
magazine of the publishing business.
Hardly anyone advertises now,
certainly not to other businesses,
so I was let go. I can’t take it
too personally—who isn’t being laid off
these days? I get more time with my young son,
can freelance, teach poetry, write about books,
plus there’s unemployment for
now and work
as a secretary for an old artist friend.
And my wife is still working; we’re OK.
But, still, I have more time, the very thing
I took a nine-to-five job to get rid of, and time
brings things to mind: how’s and why’s and what’s
that make the day like a sleepless night.
What did I do wrong? And how will I get
healthcare for my son once my severance is done?
My brain spilleth over and gets on everyone.
Cal has just gone to sleep. It’s eight o’clock,
Sunday night, and tomorrow might as well
be Saturday. Lately Cal’s been resisting
bed, crying for hours till he just can’t anymore
and begins to quietly snore, as if sleep
were one more submission forced upon him.
Or is that an adult’s idea? An adult sprung
suddenly free—he just wants this not that,
like me, and sleep is that for now.
What’s to be gleaned from what a child
does and why? He’s simply not given to
interpretation, mine or his own. That’s
the lesson: some things aren’t anything
else. Then, later, all things are other things,
their meanings trumping how they be.
A day job affords distraction
from this kind of ruminating. What Auden said
about poetry, that it makes nothing happen,
is also true of thinking, though what good
does that thought do? Tomorrow,
how will the impossible problems
of each succeeding moment make any more sense
than they do today? What will my son become
and what can I do for or about it now?
I’m being vague, I know, but that’s part
of the problem, isn’t it—not saying
what I won’t know I think till it’s said. How
do I learn to love Brenda right, and learn
to get her to love me how I want to be loved?
What’s love look like in the midst of a fight?
To Keep Love Blurry Page 3