Sitting here in the Knox Street Tavern, I see what
he means: the inevitable crowd scene, brick street
lifted into light, flat faces rounding into possibility.
Behind the bar Eric von Stroheim smokes a Gauloise,
merciless and cool, contemplating so many frames
per second, the small darknesses we never see.
The Limits of My Language: English 85B
Nouns normally serve to identify things in space, verbs to release them in time.
—JOHN FELSTINER
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
The black shawl falls from your shoulders
as you rise against your daughter’s tugs
and whispers, and your withered mouth
opens in a dry quaver like voices
heard across a windblown field, Rock of Ages,
cleft for me, and my students wake to listen.
On that first day she whispered, warning me:
She thinks she’s in church. She’s my mother
and I’ll have to bring her every day.
Your eyes wandered like fish behind a glass
and your crooked hand jerked back from mine.
So I’ve become a minister to you,
some fundamental backwoods screamer,
redeemer of Oklahoma souls, surrounded
by a choir of distant kinfolk robed
in flecks of stained-glass light and shade.
“The Old Rugged Cross” or “Bringing in the Sheaves”
lifts you right out of your seat at times,
and we wait while your daughter puts you
back in place: Be quiet now, Momma.
There’s no time for that. In her voice
I hear your own among hymns hovering
on an Oklahoma Sunday years ago
inside a white frame church let me hide
myself in thee and in your shaken glance
and palsied hands I see you kneeling there
beneath dim memories of burnt-out fields
and black locust clouds looming down
wailing with God’s own sorrow let the water
and the blood creek floods crawling
across gray moonlit ground, black hours
in storm cellars between dank earth walls
from thy riven side which flowed your mother
crying, the same hymns hanging in the air
like dust as you knelt there that Sunday,
clump of cinquefoil in your fist, big ribboned
Easter hat pulled back, as the preacher man
laid hands on you and promised everything:
hope, happiness, the heaven of eternal Being.
And so, through a dustbowl girlhood, a husband
headed for hell, and one daughter who turned out
right, you saved your best for last. Now
you come into my room and take your place
and stare into some space beyond these walls.
Every time I take a stick of chalk,
you see the wafer in my hand.
Every time I write a word across the board,
you see me beckon to the choir.
Every time I ask is this a verb or noun,
you turn the pages of your book.
And when I spread my arms for answers,
you rise slowly to sing, Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound, out of time and place.
Late Game
for Paul
If this is soccer,
the moon’s up for grabs.
It floats low over the goalee,
whose father waits downfield
measuring the distance,
several white lines
that flame then fade
like breaking waves.
The players pull night
behind them.
Luminous uniforms
move the white ball
quietly here, there.
Then out of these blurred
frail bodies
the ball looms.
His son’s arms flash
against the moon,
catching it,
and one pale cry leaps
toward the stars.
FROM
Local Knowledge
(1991)
In Czechoslovakia
It is 1968, and you are watching a movie
called The Shop on Main Street, about a man—
an ordinary man, a carpenter—in Czechoslovakia,
who is appointed Aryan Controller of a poor button shop
belonging to the widow Lautmannová, who is old
and deaf and has the eyes of a feverish child.
She smiles in luminous gratitude for almost anything—
the empty button boxes, a photo of her lost daughters,
the man, Tóno, who she believes has come to help her.
At the point where the two meet—she, kind but confused,
he, awkward and somewhat ashamed—you notice a woman
in the front row who keeps bending toward the seat
beside her and whispering and letting her hand drift
lovingly toward whomever—a child, you suppose—is there.
The woman’s frizzy hair catches the reflected light
from the screen, a nimbus of fire around her head
as she turns to share her popcorn with the child whose
fine blonde hair and green eyes you have begun to imagine.
In the movie Tóno has failed to explain his position
to the widow and is acting as her helper in exchange
for monthly payments from the Jewish community.
He is contented, his ambitious wife is enjoying
dreams of prosperity and a heightened sexuality,
it is that terrible time when everyone is happier
than they should be, and then of course the trucks
move in, the dependable gray trucks that have made
life somewhat impossible in the twentieth century.
Now the woman in the front row has returned
to her seat and is handing a Coke to the child
hidden by the chair back, then reaching over
with a handkerchief to wipe the child’s mouth
and smile and whisper out of that explosion of hair
she wears. The widow Lautmannová cannot understand
the trucks or Tóno’s dilemma that either she must go
or he will be arrested as a collaborator, and as he
stands there pleading, going crazy in her husband’s suit
which she has given to him, her eyes widen
like opened fists and she knows now and begins
to shout, pogrom, pogrom, with her hands trembling
like moths around her face, and when he panics
and hurls her into the closet to hide her, she falls
and oh Jesus he has killed her and he cries out,
I am a zero, but you think, no, no, it’s worse,
you’re a man, and now the woman in the front row
is shouting at the child, it’s misbehaved in some way,
and when you look up my God Tóno has hung himself
in the suit that belonged to the widow’s husband,
the suit he was married in, and then, miraculously,
Tóno and the widow are floating arm in arm,
smiling, dancing out into the sun-drenched boulevard,
dancing away from you and history, resurrected
into the world as it might be but somehow cannot be,
a grove of light where the cobbled streets and trees
with their wire skirts are glossy after a soft rain
and the world deepens without darkening and the faces
of everyone are a kind of ovation, and then it’s over,
you think, the house lights go up, and you’re sitting there
stunned and
the woman from the front row walks out
into the aisle with her hand out behind her as if gripping
another, smaller hand. And you see it, though
you don’t want to, because you are a man or a woman,
you see that there is nothing there, no child,
nothing, and the woman stops and bends down to speak
to the child that isn’t there and she has this smile
of adoration, this lacemaker’s gaze of contentment,
she is perfectly happy, and she walks on out
into the street where people are walking up and down
and where you will have to walk up and down
as if you were on a boulevard in Czechoslovakia
watching that endless cortege of gray trucks
rumble by in splendid alignment as you go on thinking
and breathing as usual, wreathed in your own human skin.
In a Café near Tuba City, Arizona, Beating My Head against a Cigarette Machine
. . . the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body.
—BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
The ruptured Pontiac, comatose and tilted on three wheels,
seems to sink slowly like a drunken ship into the asphalt.
My wife wanders aimlessly further into despair and an absence
of traffic, waving invisible semaphores along the embankment.
The infant we have misnamed after a suicidal poet writhes
in harness across my back, her warm urine funneling between
my buttocks, and her yowls rip like sharks through the gray heat.
But still beyond the screams I hear somehow the flutter
of chicken wings, buckets rattling, the howl of spaniels,
and my grandfather’s curse grinding against the dull, unjust sky
of God and Oklahoma. I have given the waitress all my money,
and she has taken it, stuffed it into the heart-shaped pocket stamped
with her ridiculous name, and removed herself to the storeroom
with the cook who wants only to doze through the afternoon lull
undisturbed by a man who has yanked the PALL MALL knob
from the cigarette machine and now beats his head against
the coin return button while mumbling the prayer for the Burial
of the Dead at Sea which his grandmother taught him as a charm
against drowning in the long silences before tornadoes
and floods when Black Bear Creek rose on the Otoe
and the windmill began to shriek like a gang of vampires.
In the shards of the machine’s mirror I see the black line
of blood dividing my forehead and a dozen versions of my wife
sobbing now at the screen door while behind her our laundry
has flown free of the Pontiac’s wired trunk lid and drifts
like gulls across the vast sea, the difficult sea surrounding
Tuba City, Arizona, and my grandparents walk slowly
toward us over the water in the serene and noble attitude of gods.
Language, Nonsense, Desire
Professor Ramirez dozes behind the projector,
Conversación Español lapping over the bored
shoulders of sophomores who dissolve in the film’s
languor of talk and coffee at a sidewalk café
in Madrid or Barcelona or some other luminous
Mediterranean dream. The tanned faces rounding
into the Spanish air like bowls of still-life fruit
offer little dialogues about streetcars or feathers
over a clutter of plates and delicate white cups
of mocha blend. The hands of the speakers
are bright birds that lift and tremble among
the anomalies of ordinary life: piñatas, cousins
who live in Peru, the last train to Zaragoza.
The speakers are three friends forever entangled
in the syntax of Spanish 101, fated to shape
loose chatter into harmonies of discourse, arias
of locus, ¿Dónde está la casa? and possession,
Yo tengo un perro: Raoul, his dark, hungry
profile immaculately defined against the pallor
of a white beach; the housewife Esmeralda erotic
in her onyx curls, recalling a Catholic childhood,
that same black extravagance pressed against
her pillow as she listened to the nun read stories
and imagined herself as a gaucho, drunk and love-
crazed in the hills of Argentina; and wan Julio,
articulate, epicene, fluttering his pianist’s fingers
as he croons melodiously about the rush of time:
¿Qué hora es? ¿Son las dos? ¡Ay! And always
in the background along the periphery of syllable
and gesture, the silent pilgrimage of traffic
and commerce and light-dazzled crowds with some
destination, some far blue promise to carry them
through the day, some end to speech and love.
There Is Constant Movement in My Head
The choreographer from Nebraska
is listening to her mother’s cane
hammering the dance floor, down, down,
like some gaunt, rapacious bird
digging at a rotted limb. The mother
still beats time in her daughter’s head.
There is constant movement in my head,
the choreographer begins. In Nebraska
I learned dance and guilt from my mother,
held my hands out straight until the cane
beat my palms blue. I was a wild bird
crashing into walls, calming down
only to dance. When Tallchief came down
from New York, a dream flew into my head:
to be six feet tall, to dance The Firebird
all in black and red, to shock Nebraska
with my naked, crazy leaps until the cane
shook in the furious hand of my mother.
Well, that day never came. My mother
thought I could be whittled down,
an oak stump to carve into some cane
she could lean on. But in my head
were the sandhill cranes that crossed Nebraska
each fall: sluggish, great-winged birds
lumbering from our pond, the air bird-
heavy with cries and thrumming. My mother
knew. She said I would leave Nebraska,
that small-town life could only pull me down.
Then her hands flew up around her head
and she hacked at the air with her cane.
There are movements I can’t forget: the cane
banging the floor, dancers like huge birds
struggling into flight, and overhead,
the choreography of silver cranes my mother
always watched when the wind blew down
from the sandhills and leaves fell on Nebraska.
This dance is the cane of my mother.
The dancers are birds that will never come down.
They were all in my head when I left Nebraska.
Maize
After Roland Stills fell from the top of the GANO
grain elevator, we felt obliged in some confused,
floundering way as if his hand had just pulled
the red flag from our pockets and we had turned
to find not him but rows of Kansas maize
reeling into the sun, we felt driven to recall
more than perhaps, drunk, we saw: trees squatting
below like pond frogs, mare’s tails sweeping the hills,
and the moon in its floppy dress riding low behind
the shock of his yellow hair as, falling, he seemed
to drop to his knees, drunk, passing out, oh shit,
with the same stupi
d grin as when he might recite
Baudelaire in the company of a girl and a small glass
of Cointreau, Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux.
And beyond his eyes blooming suddenly into white
flowers were the lights of houses where our parents
spoke of harvest like a huge wall they would climb
to come again to a new life. Driving along dirt roads
in our trucks, we would look through the scrim of dust
at the throbbing land and rows of red maize whipping past
before the hard heat of summer when the combines
came pushing their shadows and shouldering each other
dark as clouds erasing the horizon, coming down
on the fields to cut the maize, to cut it down
in a country without rain or the grace of kings.
In Another Life I Encounter My Father
There we are in the same outfield,
a minor league team named after some small
but ferocious animal—the Badgers, say,
or Bulldogs. The town is heavily industrial,
Peoria maybe, and the slap of the fungo bat
keeps us moving over the worn grass—in,
then back, where a blonde drinking a beer
is painted crudely on a white fence.
Big drops of condensation drape the bottle,
which is angled toward her open mouth.
We want to joke about this, but don’t.
He is new on the team, and we are uneasy
with each other. When a high one drifts
far to his right, he takes it on a dead run.
He is more graceful than I am, and faster.
In the dugout he offers me a chew,
and we begin to talk—hometown, college ball,
stuff like that. A copy of Rimbaud
sticks out of my pocket, and I give him
the line about begging the day for mercy.
He frowns, spitting, working his glove.
We begin to talk politics, baseball
as ideology, more embracing than Marxism.
He seems interested, but something is wrong.
The sky is getting a yellow tinge.
The heavy air droops over my shoulders,
and the locusts begin their harangue.
When I go to the plate, the ball
floats by fat as a cantaloupe, and I
The Blue Buick Page 2