by Tom Sleigh
That the leisure class I served I aspired to, so I could join
the high G of the cello floating off, slowly vanishing
in a pianissimo fermata? Then nothing more,
silence and night? But this was California,
and soon the heat pump and water filter
would strain the water to such a blueness and temperature
that acid-washed LA would go swimming night and day,
the blue havens built by alambristas, union bricklayers, unskilled juvies
teaching me the Faustian accounting
of my employer, Bob “Just Call Me a Genius” Harrington:
Screw ’em out of this, screw ’em out of that,
but sweep up your mess and you’ll get
away with murder. Sucking up the slurry of cement
and sand, the hose pulsed in the pit
of the parvenu, the ingenue, the Hollywood producers
and Van Nuys GM bosses whose assembly-line crews
riveted my beat-up Firebird’s body, Wolfman Jack’s XERB
taking another little piece of my heart now, baby,
as I sprayed gunite on rebar ribs and the air compressor
pounded like the other Firebird: Stravinsky taking his temperature
in West Hollywood, Schoenberg watering his lawn in Brentwood,
Mann perched above the waves in Pacific Palisades
had also perused catalogs weighing concrete vs. vinyl
as blast caps detonated in holes the demmies drilled
and ash sifted down over my face and shoulders
to post-war twelve tone assaulting my ears.
But while I and my transistor radio worked ten hour days,
my father dreamt our own little South Seas grotto:
every weekend we rose to the promise of chlorination
as he and “us boys” dug trenches for our water lines,
hacked away the hillside to make our ice plant grow,
and rented the monster backhoe
digging out the pool pit to rim it with lava stone
against the mud. My father waved the baton
of his shovel to light the fuse to the chord
of dynamited stone: the cloud of our need
went up all over California
and rang in overtones all through me.
Detectives
The two detectives prowling at the edges of my dream are late—as usual. Already I’m being pushed toward the cliff edge, driven not by a gunman or a maniac, but by wanting to escape my betrayal of a friend—a serious betrayal, worth thirty pieces of silver. On all the talk shows, they talk about how I lie, about my need for attention and how no stunt is too low to get it. But when they tell how I sold out my friend, my dismissal of kindness and decency, like leaving your wife when she has cancer, the shame is too much. Off the cliff I fall, until the ground looms up, and the detectives come running—the man wearing the years-long death mask of detachment, the woman, who’s only been dead a few days, the mask of death as disillusion. And in their eyes, there’s something so heartbroken, so lonely! As if their work as detectives, almost sacred in their minds, had been made into a sideshow by bad actors on TV, and I was their last chance—muffed again!—to prove to the world what was good and true in being a real detective. And so to make them feel less defeated, I start to lie, denying I betrayed her.… And the veiled triumph in the man’s eyes at having caught me in my lies look like my father’s eyes, so that I know just what he’s feeling when he reaches to take his partner’s hand—a hand so like my mother’s that when she reaches to take mine, I recognize her passionate avowal undercut by wariness, sounding the same as in life: We’ll stand by you, she says, her cool grasp assuring me that they know I know that all I’m pretending they don’t know we all know, but look, that’s OK, we’re family, aren’t we? a family of detectives?
“Let Thanks Be Given to the Raven as Is Its Due”
I read a story, I’d like to think it’s true,
about a raven in Rome who lived
above a shoemaker’s shop and every day the bird flew
to the Capitol where it greeted the Senators by name:
magnificent sounding names, Germanicus, Drusus,
Decimus Brutus, even Emperor Tiberius just come
from Capri where, for a wrong prediction, he’d thrown
his astrologer off a cliff. The raven
was no snob, though, he greeted the people of Rome
as they passed by, with names like Paulus,
Paulina—the same name as my long-dead great aunt
who lived in Newark in an apartment complex so notorious
for heroin that one day when I visited her
she talked that way … that way that makes you wonder
how a woman who was a social worker,
a Eugene Debs Socialist, could become so vicious in
her mind. But the courteous raven spoke
with such virtue that it seemed more than human—
and when the raven greeted Tiberius, who kept everyone
in a creeping state of terror, he called back a greeting,
blessing the bird as a good omen for Rome.
And year in year out, the raven flew
to the Capitol and greeted every morning the soon-
to-be poisoned, the soon-to-be suicides, the thinker who
would open his veins in the bath, the arbiter
of pleasure who knew his days were few
and so to read Sappho meant, in his last hours,
to forget a little of his fear. And the raven
greeted the prostitute who had the contest with Messalina,
great wife of Caesar, and Messalina won:
twenty-five men in twenty-four hours, which might not sound
like all that many, barely more than one an hour,
but it isn’t the number, is it? The bird perhaps knew that men
and women are the sole animals whose first experience
of mating makes them regret which is why the bird, caught
between two natures, must have felt the aura of Tiberius,
the need of Messalina, but hailed them anyway—
the way it would have hailed Rome’s thieves and slaves
and commoners like my aunt running the gauntlet of junkies
she passed through each day in her apartment complex’s hallways,
just teenage kids, some of them, who liked the taste of junk—
though two or three did try to rob her, and the super told me,
when my mother and I finally found a place to move her,
how the kids liked to torment her, shouting out,
“You old white bitch!” which she returned with her slurs—
or think of Tiberius’s apparent modesty in refusing
the groveling Senate’s honors, the way his outward show
of virtue—he forbade all public kissing—
gave morality a high tone: did his power
at last unmask him? So that he found relief
in training little boys to swim under
and between his legs, little licking, nibbling fishes, while
nursing babies were given his cock to suck and highborn
Roman women he raped he put on trial
if they fought against him so that one stabbed herself
to be free of his lust; or during a religious sacrifice
he was so taken by the acolyte that he rushed him off
and his flute-playing brother too, not even
waiting for the priest to finish, and afterward,
when they complained, he had their legs broken.
And in affairs of state, his cruelty watched
over twenty executions in a day, the bodies dragged
with hooks into the Tiber, and any man whose estate he coveted
could only find relief from his threats by cutting his own throat.
That’s one version of Rome the histories tell—
>
the same as my version of my aunt is certainly not
how she’d tell it. Which makes the raven’s shadow
perched above the Capitol an inkblot shape that can turn
into a nightmare, even as its feathers split into rainbows
the spectra of the sun. Flying home one day, the raven shit
from the air and soiled the shoes of the shoemaker
next door, and the man killed the bird, the records don’t
say how, whether with a stone or poison
or a net or strangled or crushed by the man’s hands.
The people of Rome flocked to the man’s home,
they drove him from the neighborhood,
they lynched him—while the bird’s funeral was celebrated
with pomp: a black-draped bier was carried
on sturdy shoulders of two Ethiopians as a flute-player led
them past masses of funeral flowers heaped up
on the way to the pyre built on the right-hand side
of the great Appian Road at the second milestone, on what has
the unlikely name the Rediculus Plain spelled not
with an “i” but an “e”—after the Roman god Rediculus,
deity of returning travelers and of opening and closing
doors, who shut the door on the raven’s tomb. And just as the door
was sealed, the risen ghost of Christ came passing by and, meeting
at the bird’s pyre his disciple Peter
who would soon be asking to be nailed to his own cross
upside down so as not to compete with his master,
told Peter that He, the Son of Man,
King of the Jews, was a dark bird of omen
returning to Rome to be crucified a second time.
The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Looking at the lion behind the plate glass,
I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,
but he seemed to come apart, not literally
I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole:
Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping
as he panted and began to roar. His balls
sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft
jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle
rusted in mid-air. Somebody or something
I read once said that when Jesus had his vision
of what his father, God, would do to him,
that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross,
pieces of a body appearing through flashes
of sun, as if the body in his vision
was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso,
everything come unmagnetized from the soul:
the lion caught me in his stare not at
or through me but fixated on the great chain
of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that
a zebra might gallop in—black and white stripes
marking longitudes of this world turning
to meat, bloody meat—this vision of an inmate
that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by
making a cageless cage with glass instead
of bars—though the lion didn’t seem to care,
he was roaring for his keepers to bring
him food, so everything’s what it should be
if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion
seem concerned about having gone a little
crazy, barking incessantly so I could see
the plush, hot pink insides of its throat,
though like the lion through the glass
there’s this distortion, my reflection
I’m looking through that makes me float above
the zoo: and now this silence at closing time
pours like a waterfall in different zones
of silences that, pouring through my head,
surround roaring, barking, human muttering—
is any of that what being sounds like?
Or is it just animal gasping like what
Jesus must have heard from the thieves
hanging beside him, one damned, one saved?
What was in his heart when his vision
clarified and he saw it was a hand he
recognized that the nail was driving through?
The Twins
You know those twins hanging on the corner,
they look like me and my twin brother
when we were younger, in our twenties,
the paler one like me, sickly, more uptight,
but weirdly aristocratic, more distant
than the one like you, Tim, who, if
you were him would put his arm around me
with that casualness and gentleness
I’ve always craved between us, which we
nearly lost in our twenties but got back
in our fifties now that death’s in my face
when I look at it at just the right angle:
then your smile’s so open, Tim, that we go
back even further, to when we were
boys listening on the stairs to our older
brother telling us about girls, what
you could do with them, what they’d do
with you … not much like our board games
when all we’d think about was rolling
the dice and moving the metal dog or battleship
round and round the squares, counting out loud,
intent on winning … but these past few days
your eyes keep confronting me in the mirror,
your glance full of a goofball happiness!
And the wreath of poppies around your head
grazes my forehead too, and like the dope
I used to shoot, the clear dose in the syringe
lets me down into my body like I’m deep
inside your body, the two of us together
fed by the same blood, waking, sleeping,
nestled next to each other, thumbs in our mouths—
but it only lasts a little while, this feeling
of me inside you inside that liquid warmth
up the back of my neck and down toward
my cock, the high moving at its own sweet will—
Tim, I’ll only belong to you forever
when the other brother, the pale and stern
and faceless one who holds the needle still
when I slide it into the vein and smiles back
my smile, I’ll only belong to him too when he,
in some parody of an old rocker in a crowd
of old rockers holding up lit cigarette lighters,
snaps shut that flickering: oh sure,
to sleep is good, to die is even better,
but the best is never to have been born.
2
Homage to Zidane
In all the cafés
on the seafront
whatever could be seen
kept exploding in riots
of blue, red, green—
horns everywhere hooting
for the ball soaring
toward the net.
Slicks of trash
and plastic glinting
from the waves, the world
was in a fever
to see the perfect goal,
the giant screens
on every corner
loud with the locust thrum
of satellite hookups.
Between two limestone cliffs
I plunged into the filth,
sucked a mouthful
of oil
and set out
swimming hard
to where I heard
rising voices
shouting in Arabic
Score Score.
A big wave swept
me under,
another
and another,
until I shot out
of the water that gleamed
like a forehead butting mine,
expert but without malice
threatening to drag me down
until I slid out on the rocks.
I shivered, and wanted to live
in the clear light
of the announcers’ voices
echoing in different languages
weaving a net so fine
the sun could pass through it—
yet you could see
in instant replay
the ball caught and caught
and caught, and not one stitch
of that fabric
going taut.
Refugee Camp
When one of the soldiers asked me about my fever,
despite the fact that I was almost seeing double,
and I couldn’t get my head clear of the zebra
I’d seen killed by lions the day before—
the zebra
on its side, striped legs jerking, twitching, as their heads
disappeared, necks shoved up to the shoulders
into its belly—
I said, No, the fever’s better,
let’s go for a ride.
So he put me on the back
of his motorbike, an ancient Honda 160
with blown-out baffles so it made a rackety,
popping roar that split my head in two.
The old Somali poet, as we took off, was still reciting
his poem about wanting to go home:
beard stiff
with henna, his old pants immaculately clean
despite the dust and living in a hut with a floor
made of flattened out CARE cardboard
from unpacked medical supplies.
The United States must help us, he sang,
and, What do you have for me, now that I have taken time
from my busy schedule to sing for you?
I had nothing to give him and so I smiled
a sort of hangdog smile—which was when the soldier said:
How is your fever? Would you like to go for a ride?
Dust and wind and engine-throb blacked out
any sound so we were completely cocooned
in our own cloud, muffling grayness spreading
ear to ear—
my arms wrapped around the soldier’s waist,
his sweating shirtback drying into my sweating shirtfront,
we passed the compound where an hour ago
I heard a woman tell the registration officer,
nervously giggling through the translator’s English,