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Elegy for a Broken Machine

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by Patrick Phillips




  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Phillips

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com/poetry

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Due to limitations of space, acknowledgments can be found at the end of the volume.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Phillips, Patrick, [date]

  [Poems. Selections]

  Elegy for a broken machine : poems / Patrick Phillips.—First edition.

  pages cm

  “This is a Borzoi Book”—Title page verso.

  ISBN 978-0-385-35375-5 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-35376-2 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3616.H465A6 2015 811’.6—dc23 2014026436

  Jacket image: E+/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Oliver Munday

  v3.1

  For Ellen

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Elegy for a Broken Machine

  Four Haiku

  Elegy Outside the ICU

  Once

  The Night Nurse Comes

  Elegy with Oil in the Bilge

  The Man

  The Body

  Work-Clothes Quilt

  The Shoebox Hades

  II

  Mercy

  Elegy with a Bronze Station Wagon

  The Singing

  Elegy After Midnight

  Mattress

  Barbershop

  Elegy After a Suicide

  Vesper Sparrow

  Old Love

  My Father’s Friends

  My Grandmother

  III

  Elegy for Smoking

  Alan the Plumber

  The Guitar

  Elegy at the Trinity Pub

  Sunset Park

  Elegy with Gasoline

  Aubade

  Spell Against Gods

  Variations on a Text by Donald Justice

  Will

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  I

  Elegy for a Broken Machine

  My father was trying

  to fix something

  and I sat there just watching,

  like I used to,

  whenever something

  went wrong.

  I kept asking where he’d been,

  until he put down a wrench

  and said Listen:

  dying’s just something

  that happens sometimes.

  Who knows

  where that kind of dream comes from?

  Why some things

  vanish, and some

  just keep going forever?

  Like that look on his face

  when he’d stare off at something

  I could never make out

  in the murky garage,

  his ear pressed

  to whatever it was

  that had died—

  his eyes listening for something

  so deep inside it, I thought

  even the silence,

  if you listened,

  meant something.

  Four Haiku

  In the dark he grunts

  The fuck you want? fists ripping

  tubes out in his sleep.

  *

  I dream in my chair

  he’s young: walking towards me,

  squinting at the sun.

  *

  A P.A. hunches

  in the half-light. I wake and

  hear the Foley drain.

  *

  Out the window, rain.

  Behind a paper curtain

  someone worse off moans.

  Elegy Outside the ICU

  They came into

  this cold white room

  and shaved his chest

  then made a little

  purple line of dashes

  down his sternum,

  which the surgeon,

  when she came in,

  cut along, as students

  took turns cranking

  a shiny metal jig

  that split his ribs

  just enough for them

  to fish the heart out—

  lungs inflating

  and the dark blood

  circulating through

  these hulking beige machines

  as for the second time

  since dawn they skirted

  the ruined arteries

  with a long blue length

  of vein that someone

  had unlaced from his leg,

  so that by almost every definition,

  my father died

  there on the table

  and came back in the body

  of his own father,

  or his mother at the end,

  or whoever it was

  the morphine summoned

  up out of the grave, into his dreams—

  like that figure

  in the floor-length mirror

  he kept talking to

  as we inched a fluid-hung

  telemetry pole

  past the endless open doors,

  until he was finally close enough

  to recognize a flicker

  in those bloodshot eyes

  and a quiver in the mumbling lips—

  so slack and thin

  he leaned a little closer

  to catch their ghostly whisper

  before he even

  realized it was him.

  Once

  the father

  of my son’s friend

  watched his father die.

  Then for some reason

  came, still grieving,

  to a soccer field where I,

  a guy he knew,

  or kind of knew,

  stood with the others

  trying not to stare

  at the there-

  but-for-the-grace-of-God-

  go-I of him:

  his eyes raw-rimmed

  behind dark glasses

  as herds of little bodies

  shrieked and galloped

  all around us—

  whoever he was before

  a trace, a remnant now,

  shaking in the gray October wind:

  the truth about love, about all of us,

  so plain in him

  there was nothing left

  but to pretend

  I was not watching

  out the corner of my eye

  when the muddy dog,

  and the bouncing ball,

  and the children

  chasing after it

  all seemed to veer

  and disappear inside him.

  The Night Nurse Comes

  to take his pulse and shut off the alarm,

  her pink nails leaving little jaundiced dents in his forearm.

  Today he cannot eat or walk or read or speak.

  His glazed eyes follow me around the room, and blink.

  When I shake the cup of ice, he flicks his gray bird-tongue—

  as she commands, under her breath, You must be the son.

  Elegy with Oil in the Bilge

  By the time we got out on the water

  the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water

  but a field of gray snow that we plowed

  in one endless whi
te furrow of water,

  skirting the rocks and wrecked trawlers

  and abandoned old jetties just under the water—

  my father in the bow, slick with fever,

  whispering back to whatever the water

  chattered and hissed through the hull—

  until at last I saw lights on the water

  and let the old Mercury rattle and sputter

  its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water

  as we drifted, at idle, the last time in his life,

  through that beloved, indifferent harbor.

  The Man

  After his friends

  rigged a pulley

  and lowered the pack

  of Kool menthols;

  after he’d laughed

  and then winced

  and squinted up

  at the trickle of dirt

  dusting his lashes;

  after his wife

  had come sobbing

  through the glare of the kliegs

  and called down

  to where the men pointed

  how much she loved him;

  after their son

  sat cross-legged

  at the edge of the hole

  saying yessir,

  yessir to whatever

  came through the receiver;

  after a gloved hand

  had burst

  through the clods and pale roots

  and fastened the harness,

  and tugged

  for the lift to begin;

  when he’d flashed

  his thumbs-up

  and heard the men roar;

  when he’d answered

  all the EMT’s questions,

  and laid his head back

  and sobbed, and thanked God,

  and then felt his heart

  finally, violently seize—

  only then,

  in the dark, sleeping house

  before dawn,

  looking up from the paper

  as the last stars

  faintly shined

  in the skeletal arms

  of the trees,

  did I get a fleeting,

  unspoken, yet

  suddenly clear

  sense of our real situation.

  The Body

  The house is dark

  but the body glows.

  It’s not the way it seems:

  how what he was

  is him again

  each time the red clock blinks.

  Soon the undertaker’s sons

  will come and lift this

  strangest of all strange things:

  a palimpsest

  of what we loved,

  a nest in the brittle leaves.

  It’s late, I know,

  and the whole world waits

  there, where you stopped to read,

  and found us here,

  and stared respectfully

  out the window at the trees.

  Work-Clothes Quilt

  With nothing but time

  and the light of the Singer,

  and no one to come now forever

  and rattle the bell

  at the backdoor and scatter

  black mud on the stoop,

  and make that small moan

  as he heaves off his boots—

  with no one to fill

  the big kettle and set it,

  and fall asleep talking

  to the back of her neck

  as the treadle belt hums—

  with nobody, nowhere

  in need of such things,

  she unbuckles his belt

  for the last time

  and cuts up his pant legs

  and rips out the double-stitched seams,

  making patches of plackets

  and oil-stained pockets,

  of kerchiefs, and collars, and sleeves,

  her thin fingers setting the bobbin

  and clamping the foot

  until she’s joined every

  scrap she can salvage,

  no matter how brown

  with his sweat, or stiff with his blisters,

  or blooming his roses

  of pine sap, and gear grease, and blood—

  until,

  as the wedding clock chimes

  and his buried bones freeze,

  as frost gleams

  at sunrise in the window,

  she stands by the bed

  and breathes his last scent,

  then wraps herself

  in it and sleeps.

  The Shoebox Hades

  His little Lego

  arms outstretched,

  Aeneas stares

  across the Styx,

  watching his

  clay father fade

  into the glued-on

  cotton mist.

  What is there

  to say? I love it.

  I touch my son’s

  soft neck,

  and peer with him

  into the depths

  until his teacher

  bellows Parents!—

  which means it’s time

  It’s time kiddo

  for her to take

  by his small wrist

  the boy who clings

  to me like death,

  as if he knows:

  it is no myth.

  II

  Mercy

  Like two wrestlers etched

  around some ancient urn

  we’d lace our hands,

  then wrench

  each other’s wrists back

  until the muscles ached

  and the tendons burned,

  and one brother

  or the other grunted Mercy—

  a game we played

  so many times

  I finally taught my sons,

  not knowing what it was,

  until too late, I’d done:

  when the oldest rose

  like my brother’s ghost,

  grappling the little

  ghost I was at ten—

  who cried out Mercy!

  in my own voice Mercy!

  as I watched from deep

  inside my father’s skin.

  Elegy with a Bronze Station Wagon

  Back when Miss Heidrich still

  called up my mother

  and asked for a turn in the carpool,

  *

  even when it meant stopping

  by the school after chemo,

  even when, some days, I’d heave open the door

  *

  and find my friend Jim,

  with his veiny blue skull,

  half-asleep on the sticky brown vinyl

  *

  that always reeked of his vomit

  or the bleach that had cleaned it—

  back when no one I knew ever died,

  *

  I used to just sit there

  and laugh with my sister

  and watch the powerlines race past the farms,

  *

  because nobody’d told us,

  and I hadn’t yet even imagined

  how soon, as we sat in a pew looking on,

  *

  she’d lean down and kiss him

  just like in the driveway, I remember:

  when he used to wake and climb into her arms.

  The Singing

  I can hear her through

  the thin wall, singing,

  up before the sun:

  two notes, a kind

  of hushed half-breathing,

  each time the baby

  makes that little moan—

  can hear her trying

  not to sing, then singing

  anyway, a thing so old

  it might as well

  be Hittite or Minoan,

  and so soft no one

  would ever guess

  that I myself once

  sang that very song:

  back when my son

>   and then his brother

  used to cry all night

  or half the morning,

  though nothing in all

  the world was wrong.

  And now how strange:

  to be the man from next door,

  listening, as the baby cries

  then quiets, cries and quiets

  each time she sings

  their secret song,

  that would sound the same ten

  thousand years ago,

  and has no

  meaning but to calm.

  Elegy After Midnight

  Let the leftovers rot.

  Let the last candle burn.

  Let the clocks think

  whatever they want.

  This is the night,

  says the night, you were given.

  The hour, each hour,

  you’ve lost.

  So lean into me, love.

  Kiss the blue children.

  Come cast our brief

  shadows together.

  Let the wet branches lash

  the black windows like death.

 

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