Plundered Hearts

by J. D. McClatchy

  •

  For the dog wedding,

  I brought matching jeweled leashes,

  Modelled on my own.

  •

  From the scarab bracelet of boutiques on Worth

  Dangle offices, discrete but palatial,

  For jowls that look like an afterbirth

  Before the peel and stem-cell facial.

  KISS KISS

  The opera prompter makes a kissing sound—

  Backstage bunkum now signaling dismay—

  To force the off-key tenor to turn around

  And follow her hand toward the requisite A.

  •

  At the singer’s subsequent biopsy,

  The stolid doctor’s puckered lips

  Mimic the site the slickened tube

  Enters and leaves with a faint smack,

  While overhead the Blue Danube

  Stutters on a damaged track.

  MY ROBOTIC PROSTATECTOMY

  The surgeon sat at his desk in a niche

  On the far side of the OR,

  Ready to power up the robot

  I lay facing, its arms still shrouded

  In plastic as if just delivered

  From the dry cleaners. My mask

  Was snapped on, the drip unclamped.

  That was the last I saw of this iron man

  Whom a computer’s knobs directed

  To motivate the forceps breaching

  The tissue walls so elfin scissors

  Could do what it once took three hags

  To manage—hold, measure, and cut

  The thread that would tie off the lemon-

  Large defect planning in time

  To bring the whole contraption down.

  So what did they cut out of me?

  My past? The source of the little death

  Clenched at the climax of one

  Of the few unambiguous pleasures

  And now, slowly or suddenly, riddled

  With a cancer only mildly threatening

  But still urgently reminding me of how,

  The older one gets, the past matters

  Less and less. What’s wanted now,

  I realize, is not my old life

  Back again, but anyone’s life—

  Yours, say, so long as it lasts.

  If only a course of radiation

  Next could scorch the still remaining

  Traces of what is killing me—

  Metastasizing nostalgia.

  Oh, what did they cut out of me?

  A future? I had imagined it as a shaded

  Chaise near the pool, but will find myself

  Shuffling in diapers, chapped and snappish,

  Down its corridor, meanly overconfident,

  Bored at having joined the ranks

  Of beribboned Survivors who never stop

  Nattering on about their close calls.

  When I check out, the receptionist

  Reviews the charges and happens on

  The overlooked pathologist’s

  Report, and running her finger down

  The rows of obscure acronyms

  And variable percentages

  To the bottom line, she looks up

  Past my credit card, clucking

  With good news: the borders are clear.

  It is as if a mist has lifted

  And he stands there on the other side,

  The other iron man, not impatient

  But, yes, more obvious than before,

  Knowing that sooner or later I must,

  Though the terms and timing are unknown,

  Step forward at last to meet him, alone.

  TWO ARIAS FROM THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO

  1. Non più andrai

  No more now will you flutter by

  To bother the ladies night and day,

  You preening, lovesick butterfly!

  Let those beauties enjoy their rest.

  No more now the ruffles and frills,

  That feathered hat, all flash and flare,

  That wavy hair, that dashing air,

  Those cheeks so pink and caressed.

  Off to the wars, my young friend!

  Long mustaches and socks to mend,

  Musket to shoulder, saber in place,

  Back like a ramrod, sneer on your face,

  A helmet to wear, my fine legionnaire,

  Honor to squander, not a cent to spare.

  No fancy balls and minuets,

  Now it’s all marching and bayonets.

  Mountains, marshes, one by one,

  Chilled by snow, scorched by sun.

  How shrill the bugle call,

  How loud the cannonball,

  Blunderbuss and caterwaul,

  All muddy, bitter, and gory.

  On to victory, Cherubino!

  Here’s to military glory!

  2. Dove sono

  Where are they now, the vanished days,

  The moments of pleasure’s afterglow?

  Where are the vows, the murmured praise

  Spoken by that liar so long ago?

  Why, if sweetness turns to regret,

  If every hope becomes a grief,

  Why is it still I cannot forget

  The love that vies with disbelief?

  If only my waiting, my long endurance,

  The patience that true love imparts,

  Could bring the slightest reassurance

  Of changing his ungrateful heart!

  HIS OWN LIFE

  Who scorns his own life is lord of yours.

  —SENECA

  The morning sunlight on the window ledge

  Was the signal he should start to kill himself.

  Weeks before, it had been carefully planned.

  The pills were lined up on the tray beside his bed

  In tiny piles so he could swallow ten at a time,

  White oblongs ridged across the middle

  Like a trench between Help and Helplessness.

  It had been so long now and, a doctor himself,

  He knew what more he would have to endure

  Before the body had worn itself out.

  The suppurating pustules were multiplying

  In his anus that drooled or spewed out gouts

  Of acid-hot blood, the trail of which

  He saw from the john he could never reach in time.

  Time. What had once been flashed on a screen

  As a sequence of familiar shots from a past

  No one else would understand—the father’s slap,

  The sister’s moonlit breasts, the teacher’s pen,

  The lover’s mole, the inch of vintage mescal—

  The carousel of slides we call a lifetime

  I suppose went through his head, but how could I know?

  It is as likely nothing was there, the mind stunned

  And drifting from blurred maples in a square

  To a painful wrinkle in the sheet beneath his thigh.

  It was time. It was the plan. But it was hard to move.

  He reached for the pills, pushing his hand deeper

  Into the sun’s warmth, which quickly overtook

  His arm, his neck, his face, until he surrendered.

  When, embracing her, he seemed to hesitate,

  His wife pleaded not to witness his courage

  But to share it. He relented. They both opened their wrists

  With his sword. Because of his frailty, his blood ran

  Too slowly, so he cut the veins in his ankles and knees,

  Then looked up, fearful he would lose his purpose

  If his wife were forced to stare at his torment.

  He sent her away and summoned several scribes,

  Sitting on the cold marble steps and dictating

  Maxims still quoted today by those who think

  They know how they would want to live a last day.

  But death would not come. He asked a friend

  To prepare the same poison used to ex
ecute

  Those Athenian trials had condemned, and drank it down.

  It was dark. It was the agreed-upon hour.

  I had the key and quietly let myself in.

  A lamp had been left on in the corridor.

  I walked through its precaution toward the bedroom.

  This is what we had decided, the dead man,

  His lover, and I. I would “discover” the body.

  The lover would pointedly—bantering with the doorman—

  Arrive a half-hour later. Then, together,

  We would call the police and, in one frantic

  And one somber voice, report an apparent suicide.

  The bedroom was dark, but I could see the body,

  On the bed, under a sheet, its profile gaunt.

  I turned the overhead light on and knew at once

  Something was wrong. The face should be paler.

  I went to it and screamed his name. Twice.

  I heard the faintest groan. An eyelid moved.

  There were too many pills still on the tray. Again

  I called his name. I put my fingers on his neck,

  But could feel nothing, hear nothing. I knew,

  Though, that he was alive. I sat on the bed

  Beside him and stared. Enough time passed

  For shock not to have noticed. The doorbell rang.

  What would I tell my friend now? What would we do?

  I followed my crumbs of dread back to the door,

  And opened it with the latch on, though expecting

  The very person who was anxiously standing there.

  I let him in, and could think of nothing but the truth.

  “He’s still alive.” Eyes rolling back, he collapsed.

  In a city where tyrants kill their mothers and children,

  Why would they not soon turn against their teachers?

  We may decide how but never precisely when

  We leave. His barely clothed body was so cold

  It stalled the poison’s effect. Silently,

  They waited. Organizing a death as drama

  Had proved too difficult, the tableau disarranged

  By the mind’s eye in conflict with the body’s

  Stubborn clutch at life, its blind refusal.

  So what he thought would be was behind him now.

  What good was sentiment or ideas? You shape,

  When you can, the middle of things—where in fact

  The story begins—not the beginning or the end.

  He asked his slaves to carry him to the steam room.

  Meanwhile, we sat in the living room, debating what

  To think, to feel, to do. We decided the sun

  Was to blame, its warmth sapping the will,

  Lulling the dying man’s resolve, ruining the plan

  He had weeks ago listened to abstractly,

  Wanting and not wanting what he nodded to.

  We spoke as if he were not in the next room.

  We had three options. We could—this would be the one

  He wanted—hold a pillow over his face

  And do what he was finally unable to for himself.

  Or we could leave and return the next day, hopeful

  By then his weakness had solved the situation.

  But there were witnesses that we were here now

  And an autopsy would finger us as accomplices.

  The third choice was inhuman but morally right.

  Since I could not kill a man, even one I wanted dead,

  And because I did not want to end up a criminal,

  We called 911 and asked for an ambulance—

  What our friend had begged to avoid, the Emergency

  Room’s brutal vanities. Within minutes they had arrived

  In battle gear, quickly guessed the truth,

  Strapped the victim to the gurney and, with genuine

  Deference, told us everything would be done

  To see that it was a quick and painless death.

  A silent ride to the hospital in the crowded back.

  We sat at the foot of his bed as he was examined.

  A nurse told everyone to wait in the hallway.

  She drew a curtain and stayed inside with him.

  First, he is lowered into a pool of hot water.

  How long does it take to die? a young man asks.

  A lifetime, the philosopher replies with a smile.

  He hopes the water will speed both the blood

  And the hemlock. When he sees the water darken,

  He weakly takes a handful and sprinkles the slaves,

  A libation to Jupiter the Liberator.

  Let us continue our journey, he bids them next,

  And they carry him at last to the steam room,

  Where, choking, he is soon suffocated.

  His will, written while he was still powerful,

  Specified his ashes be buried with no ceremony.

  He would allow no one to praise or flatter him

  For merely having anticipated his own death.

  The doctor stood before us with a look

  Whose pursed lips and downcast eyes

  Spelled trouble. There had been a complication.

  The nurse who had taken charge is a Catholic.

  She says she sat with your friend for about an hour,

  Then whispered to him, Do you want to live?

  There was no response at first, but then she says

  He said, Yes. Again she asked. Yes.

  She reported it, leaving me no choice

  But to do everything we can to keep him alive.

  I know this is clearly not what anyone wants

  But you must realize our legal jeopardy.

  So a ventilator, mask, and tubes were brought.

  Our comatose friend was wired back up to life.

  It took him five more days to die of a racking

  Pneumonia, never conscious but evidently

  In horrid torment. The nurse had disappeared.

  Did I hate her? Did I hate the friends

  Who had involved me? Or hate myself

  Who, like a slave lowering him into a pool

  Of self-pity to make the poison work,

  Had been forced to ask myself what to do?

  And how in turn will I deal with the pain

  Not of separation from but of attachment

  To a body which has become a petulant

  Tyrant? Whom will I ask to open the door

  And discover me, to call out one last time

  To the body lying there in a windowless room?

  CAĞALOĞLU

  From a cistern in the dome the daylight drips

  While the calls to prayer

  From the quarter’s seven minarets—

  Overlapping tape loops of Submission—slip

  Down through the arching crescent lunettes

  Cut into the air

  As if the vault itself had loosened its grip.

  I am on my back, listening to the tattoo

  Of clogs crisscrossing

  The sopping white marble floor inlaid

  With veins of still darker matters to pursue.

  A skittish gleam accents, like eyeshade,

  A fountain’s boss in

  The corner alcove, where hot and cold make do

  In a basin Tony Curtis and Franz Liszt

  Both stared into once.

  (Stardom is a predictable fate:

  The point is forgotten but somehow still missed.)

  Gods, whenever they annunciate,

  Long for the romance

  That ironclad heroes peering through the mist

  Or mousy adolescent girls both provide.

  The same unlikely

  Places—a battlefield or grotto—

  Are returned to, while again the hollow-eyed

  Ogle in flagrante devoto

  And obey, shyly,

  The scrambled revelations so true-and-tried.

  Congestive, crotch-sc
ented vapor has congealed

  Into beads that skid

  Along suction-knots and shadow-ends

  Abutting my slab. Eager for an ordeal

  The illustrated brochure commends

  As a bath to rid

  The body of its filth both real and unreal,

  I have bought their boast, “We make you feel reborn,”

  For fifty euros.

  Pinched and idly gestured toward a plinth

  Two centuries of customers have careworn

  To a shallow trough not quite my length,

  I’m forced to burrow

  Into a pose much more flagellant than faun.

  The sodden towel is too heavy now to hold

  Itself across me—

  And there is the pasha’s bay window,

  The shriveled bulblet, the whole ill-shaped scaffold

  Of surplus fact and innuendo,

  From arthritic scree

  To the congenital heart flutter’s toehold.

  The attendant walks up and down on my back,

  Pacing the problem,

  Then plucks, then mauls, then applies a foam

  He scrubs in until it causes an attack

  Of radiance, the world’s palindrome

  Suddenly solemn,

  Suddenly seeming to surrender its knack

  For never allowing us simply to want

  What we already

  Have, or are, or perhaps could have been.

  His hand-signal to get up seems like a taunt.

  I lie there, my fist under my chin,

  Senses unsteady,

  Something gradually, like a tiny font,

  Coming into focus. I sit up and start

  To notice small bits

  Of grit when I run my hand over

  My chest. But wasn’t this debris the chief part

  Of the package deal? The makeover

  And its benefits?

  In the fog I can’t really see what trademark

  Schmutz the Oriental Luxury Service

  Has failed to wash off.

  So I put it in my mouth and taste

  Two dank gobbets—salty, glairy, and grayish—

  I should have recognized as the waste

  That was my old self,

  A loofah having scraped it from each crevice