the men who were once fullbacks or tackles or guards
in their three-point stances knuckling into the mud,
hungry for high school glory and the pride of their fathers,
eager to gallop terribly against each other’s bodies,
each man in his body looking out now at the nakedness
of a body like his, men who each autumn had followed
their fathers into the pheasant-rich fields of Kansas
and as boys had climbed down from the Allis-Chalmers
after plowing their first straight furrow, licking the dirt
from their lips, the hand of the father resting lightly
upon their shoulder, men who in the oven-warm winter
kitchens of Baptist households saw after a bath the body
of the father and felt diminished by it, who that same
winter in the abandoned schoolyard felt the odd intimacy
of their fist against the larger boy’s cheekbone
but kept hitting, ferociously, and walked away
feeling for the first time the strength, the abundance,
of their own bodies. And I imagine the men
that evening after the strangest day of their lives,
after they have left the shop without speaking
and made the long drive home alone in their pickups,
I see them in their little white frame houses on the edge
of town adrift in the long silence of the evening turning
finally to their wives, touching without speaking the hair
which she has learned to let fall about her shoulders
at this hour of night, lifting the white nightgown
from her body as she in turn unbuttons his work shirt
heavy with the sweat and grease of the day’s labor until
they stand naked before each other and begin to touch
in a slow choreography of familiar gestures their bodies,
she touching his chest, his hand brushing her breasts,
and he does not say the word beautiful because
he cannot and never has, and she does not say it
because it would embarrass him or any other man
she has ever known, though it is precisely the word
I am thinking now as I stand before Donatello’s David
with my wife touching my sleeve, what are you thinking?
and I think of the letter from my father years ago
describing the death of Bobby Sudduth, a single shot
from a twelve-gauge which he held against his chest,
the death of the heart, I suppose, a kind of terrible beauty,
as someone said of the death of Hart Crane, though that is
surely a perverse use of the word, and I was stunned then,
thinking of the damage men will visit upon their bodies,
what are you thinking? she asks again, and so I begin
to tell her about a strange afternoon in Kansas,
about something I have never spoken of, and we walk
to a window where the shifting light spreads a sheen
along the casement, and looking out, we see the city
blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings
taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way
the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her,
would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty.
The Invisible Man
We are kids with orange Jujubes stuck to our chins
and licorice sticks snaking out of our jeans pockets,
and we see him, or rather don’t see him, when the bandages
uncoil from his face and lo, there’s nothing between
the hat and suit. It is wonderful, this pure nothing,
but we begin to be troubled by the paradoxes of nonexistence.
(Can he pee? If he itches, can he scratch? If he eats
Milk Duds, do they disappear?) Sure, standing around
in the girls’ locker room unobserved or floating erasers
in math class, who could resist, but the enigma
of sheer absence, the loss of the body, of who we are,
continues to grind against us even into the Roy Rogers
western that follows. The pungent VistaVision embodiments
of good and evil—this clear-eyed young man with watermelon
voice and high principles, the fat, unshaven dipshits
with no respect for old ladies or hard-working Baptist
farmers—none of this feels quite solid anymore. Granted,
it’s the world as the world appears, but provisional somehow,
a shadow, a ghost, dragging behind every rustled cow
or runaway stagecoach, and though afterward the cloud
of insubstantiality lifts and fades as we stroll out
grimacing into the hard sunlight, there is that
slight tremble of déjàvu years later in Philosophy 412
as Professor Caws mumbles on about essence and existence,
being and nothingness, and Happy Trails to You echoes
from the far end of the hall.
In The Invisible Man
sometimes we could see the thread or thin wire that lifted
the gun from the thief’s hand, and at the Hearst mansion
only days ago a sign explained that the orchestra
of Leonard Slye entertained the zillionaire and his Hollywood
friends on spring evenings caressed by ocean breezes
and the scent of gardenias. You can almost see them swaying
to “Mood Indigo” or “Cherokee,” champagne glasses in hand:
Chaplin, Gable, Marion Davies, Herman Mankiewicz,
and cruising large as the Titanic, William Randolph Hearst,
Citizen Kane himself. Leonard Slye sees this too, along with
the Roman statuary and rare medieval tapestries, and thinks,
someday, someday, and becomes invisible so that he
can appear later as Roy Rogers and make movies in
Victorville, California, where Mankiewicz and Orson Welles
will write the story of an enormous man who misplaced
his childhood and tried to call it back on his deathbed.
O Leonard Slye, lifting Roy’s six-gun from its holster,
O Hearst, dreaming of Rosebud and raping the castles of Europe,
O America, with your dreams of money and power,
small boys sit before your movie screens invisible
to themselves, waiting for the next episode, in which they
stumble blind into daylight and the body of the world.
All the People in Hopper’s Paintings
All the people in Hopper’s paintings walk by me
here in the twilight the way our neighbors
would stroll by of an evening in my hometown
smiling and waving as I leaned against
the front-porch railing and hated them all
and the place I had grown up in. I smoked
my Pall Mall with a beautifully controlled rage
in the manner of James Dean and imagined
life beyond the plains in the towns of Hopper
where people were touched by the light of the real.
The people in Hopper’s paintings were lonely
as I was and lived in brown rooms whose
long, sad windows looked out on the roofs
of brown buildings in the towns that made
them lonely. Or they lived in coffee shops
and cafés at 3 a.m under decadent flowers
of cigarette smoke as I thought I would have
if there had been such late-night conspiracy
in the town that held me but offered nothing.
And now they gather around with their bland,
mysterious faces in half-shadow, many still
bearing the hard plane of light that found them
&n
bsp; from the left side of the room, as in Vermeer,
others wearing the dark splotches of early
evening across their foreheads and chins that said
they were, like me, tragic, dark, undiscovered:
the manicurist from the barber shop buried
beneath a pyramid of light and a clock frozen
at eleven, the woman sitting on the bed
too exhausted with the hopelessness of brick walls
and barber poles and Rhinegold ads to dress
herself in street clothes. The wordless, stale
affair with the filling station attendant
was the anteroom to heartbreak. The gloom
of his stupid uniform and black tie beneath
the three white bulbs blinking MOBILGAS into
the woods that loomed bleak as tombstones
on the edge of town; the drab backroom
with its Prestone cans and sighing Vargas girls
and grease rags; his panting, pathetic loneliness.
But along the white island of the station,
the luminous squares from its windows
lying quietly like carpets on the pavement
had been my hope, my sense then of the real world
beyond the familiar one, like the blazing cafe
of the nighthawks casting the town into shadow,
or the beach house of the sea watchers
who sat suspended on a verandah of light,
stunned by the flat, hard sea of the real.
Everywhere was that phosphorescence, that pale
wash of promise lifting roofs and chimneys
out of dullness, out of the ordinary that I
could smell in my work clothes coming home
from a machine shop lined with men who stood
at lathes and looked out of windows and wore
the same late-afternoon layers of sunlight
that Hopper’s people carried to hotel rooms
and cafeterias. Why was their monotony
blessed, their melancholy apocalyptic, while
my days hung like red rags from my pockets
as I stood, welding torch in hand, and searched
the horizon with the eyes and straight mouth
of Hopper’s women? If they had come walking
toward me, those angels of boredom, if they
had arrived clothed in their robes of light,
would I have recognized them? If all those women
staring out of windows had risen from their desks
and unmade beds, and the men from their offices
and sun-draped brownstones, would I have known?
Would I have felt their light hands touching
my face the way infants do when people
seem no more real than dreams or picture books?
The girl in the blue gown leaning from her door
at high noon, the gray-haired gentleman
in the hotel by the railroad, holding his cigarette
so delicately, they have found me, and we
walk slowly through the small Kansas town
that held me and offered nothing, where the light
fell through the windows of brown rooms, and people
looked out, strangely, as if they had been painted there.
The Book of Hours
Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons
hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled
and limp after waking late in her boyfriend’s apartment.
And here, she notes, the Procession of St. Gregory,
where atop Hadrian’s mausoleum the angel of death
returns his bloody sword to its scabbard, and staring
down at the marble floor, liquid in the slanted
silver light of midmorning, she ponders briefly
the polished faces of her audience: seraphim gazing
heavenward at the golden throne, or, as she raises
her tired eyes to meet their eyes, the evolving souls
of purgatory, bored as the inhabitants of some
fashionable European spa sunbathing on boulders.
And here, notice the lovely treatment of St. John
on Patmos, robed in blue and gold, and she tells the story
of gallnuts, goats’ skins dried and stretched into vellum—
the word vellum delicious in its saying, caressed
in her mouth like a fat breakfast plum—lapis lazuli
crushed into pools of ultramarine blue, and gold foil
hammered thin enough to float upon the least breath,
the scribes hastily scraping gold flakes into ceramic cups,
curling their toes against the cold like her lover stepping
out of bed in that odd, delicate way of his, wisps of gold
drifting like miniature angels onto the scriptorium’s
stone floor, and dog’s teeth to polish the gold leaf
as transcendent in its beauty, she says, as the medieval
mind conceived the soul to be.
The patrons are beginning
to wander now as she points to the crucifixion scene,
done to perfection by the Limbourg brothers, the skull and bones
of Adam lying scattered beneath the Roman soldier’s horse,
and the old custodian wipes palm prints from the glass, the monks
breathe upon their fingertips and pray against the hard winter,
and the art historian recalls the narrow shafts of light tapping
the breakfast table, the long curve of his back in half-shadow,
the bed’s rumpled sheets lifted by an ocean breeze
as if they were the weightless gold leaf of the spirit.
Cigarettes
Gross, loathsome. Trays and plates loaded
like rain gutters, butts crumpled and damp with gin,
ashes still shedding the rank breath of exhaustion—
nevertheless, an integral part of human evolution,
like reading. Cigarettes possess the nostalgic potency
of old songs: hand on the steering wheel, fat pack
of Pall Malls snug under my sleeve, skinny bicep
pressed against the car door so my muscle bulges,
and my girl, wanting a smoke, touches my arm.
Or 3 a.m. struggling with the Chekhov paper, I break
the blue stamp with my thumb, nudge open petals of foil,
and the bloom of nicotine puts me right back in the feedstore
where my grandfather used to trade—leather, oats, burlap,
and red sawdust. Or at the beach, minute flares floating
in the deep dark, rising, falling in the hands of aunts
and uncles telling the old stories, drowsy with beer,
waves lapping the sand and dragging their voices down.
Consider the poverty of lungs drawing ordinary air,
the unreality of it, the lie it tells about quotidian existence.
Bad news craves cigarettes, whole heaps of them, sucking
in the bad air the way the drowning gulp river water,
though in hospital rooms I’ve seen grief let smoke
gather slowly into pools that rise, and rise again
to nothing. I’ve studied the insincere purity
of a mouth without the cigarette that gives the air form,
the hand focus, the lips a sense of identity.
The way Shirley Levin chattered after concerts:
her fingers mimicking piano keys and the cigarette
they held galloping in heart-like fibrillations until
the thrill of it had unravelled in frayed strands of smoke.
1979: “Sweet Lorraine,” seventh, eighth chorus, and
I’m looking at the small black scallops above the keyboard,
a little history of smoke and jazz, improvisation as
a kind of forgetting. The music of cigarettes:
dawn stirs and
lifts the smoke in dove-gray striations
that hang, then break, scatter, and regroup along
the sill where paperbacks warp in sunlight and the cat
claws house spiders. Cigarettes are the only way
to make bleakness nutritional, or at least useful,
something to do while feeling terrified. They cling
to the despair of certain domestic scenes—my father,
for instance, smoking L&M’s all night in the kitchen,
a sea of smoke risen to neck level as I wander in
like some small craft drifting and lost in fog
while a distant lighthouse flares awhile and swings away.
Yes, they kill you, but so do television and bureaucrats
and the drugged tedium of certain rooms piped
with tasteful music where we have all sat waiting
for someone to enter with a silver plate laden
with Camels and Lucky Strikes, someone who leans
into our ears and tells us that the day’s work is done,
and done well, offers us black coffee in white cups,
and whispers the way trees whisper, yes, yes, oh yes.
The Himalayas
The stewardess’ dream of the Himalayas
followed her everywhere: from Omaha
to Baltimore and back, and then to Seattle
and up and down the California coast until
she imagined herself strapped to the wing
just across from seat 7A muttering
little homemade mantras and shivering
in the cold, stiff wind of the inexpressible.
It could hardly go on like this, she thought,
the unending prayer to nothing in particular
whirling around in her head while she held
the yellow mask over her face and demonstrated
correct breathing techniques: the point was
to breathe calmly like angels observing
the final separation of light from a dead star,
or the monk described in the travel book
trying to untangle his legs and stand once more
at the mouth of his cave. The stewardess
delighted in her symmetrical gestures, the dance
of her hands describing the emergency exits
and the overhead lights that made exquisite
small cones in the night for readers and children
afraid of the dark. As the passengers fell asleep
around her, the stewardess reached up to adjust
the overhead whose cone of light rose over her
The Blue Buick Page 5