Plundered Hearts

by J. D. McClatchy

  The other tugged at her pearls and stayed

  Near the smiles, her dress insinuated

  Among the lead crystal teardrops

  On the fixture above her, each one

  The size, and now the color, of a blossom

  On an apple bough outside, and herself

  Inside, tiny and helplessly upsidedown.

  •

  The first month of the first marriage.

  The second year of the second marriage.

  The third betrayal of the third marriage.

  And love. Love. Always love.

  •

  a deep winter yawn

  the wind caught napping

  static on the news

  charred ozone glaze

  dead-petal weather

  the air’s loose skin

  the albino’s birthmark

  the vinegar mother

  a bubble in the artery

  the pebble in Demosthenes’ mouth

  love asleep at the wheel

  childhood stunned and dumped

  the philosopher’s divorce

  the psychopomp’s coin

  self-pity’s last tissue

  the blister on the burn

  the emptiness added daily

  the abstract’s arsenal

  quarry of doubts

  earthrise from the dark side

  the holy sleeve

  the beatific blindness

  white root of heaven

  the hedge around happiness

  •

  The sound of it? A silence

  Understood as all the noise

  Ignored or stifled, nods

  Exchanged on the trading floor,

  Or sex in the next room,

  His hand over her mouth,

  Her belt, the overcast leather,

  Clenched between his teeth.

  Where the needle stuck,

  Its hiss and hard swallow

  Halfway into the heart

  Of the nocturne, two notes

  Fell further apart, the space

  Between them a darkness

  Clotting, the moon

  Having passed behind

  A black key, then risen

  Higher across the record’s

  Rutted, familiar road.

  •

  Suddenly, lengths of storm gauze

  Drawn across the clearing.

  We must not want too much

  To know. Uncertainty

  Condenses on the windshield,

  Then runs down the cheek,

  A single waxen tear.

  When last night’s grief

  Is pulled back from,

  Who will be the brighter?

  Hush. Be careful. Turn

  Those headlights down, low

  As a curtained candle flame

  Shivering in the dark dispelled.

  •

  First, the diagnosis: those night sweats

  And thrush, the breathing that misplaces air,

  The clouds gathering on a horizon of lung …

  Translated as pneumocystis, the word from a dead

  Language meant to sound like a swab

  On a wound open but everywhere unseen.

  Then, the options. There were options,

  Left like food trays outside your door.

  Protocols, support groups, diets,

  A promising treatment.

  But three months later

  You began to forget the doctor’s appointments,

  And the next week no longer cared that you forgot.

  The friends who failed to visit, even their letters

  Grew hard to parse. It was not as if their “real”

  Feelings lay between the lines, but that the lines

  Themselves would break apart: the fight so long

  All your work the circumstances remember when.

  But remember was precisely what you couldn’t do,

  And to pay attention more than you could afford.

  The books you’d read now looked back at you

  With blank pages memories might fill in

  With makeshift, events haphazardly recalled—

  Snow swarming on the canal that Christmas

  In Venice with Claudio who cried to see it,

  Or globes of watery sunlight in your Chelsea flat,

  White lilacs at their lips last May, no one there

  For a change but just you two.

  And here you are

  Still, propped up in the half-light, my shadow,

  My likeness, your hand wandering to the arm

  Of the chair, as if your fingers might trace

  The chalkdust of whole years erased.

  Is this, then, what it means to lose your life?

  But the question is forgotten before it can be

  Answered. I take your hand, and give it back

  To you, and watch you then look up, giving in,

  Unknowing all, whose pain has just begun.

  HEADS

  As if layered in a wedge of honey cake,

  The aromas of split persimmon,

  Mint, cat spray, and cardamom

  All mingle with the bitter coffee

  On this morning’s scuffed brass tray

  Brought into the shop by a cripple with wings.

  The match for two Marlboros also now strikes

  The end to one loud bit of holy

  (“Faith” in Arabic is “din”)

  Bargaining at the end of the street.

  Peels of old light lie scattered

  Outside. Dogs barking. Market day in the souk.

  Muhammad deals in goat heads. His rival’s shop

  Is beef, swags of lung and counters heaped

  With livers like paving stones,

  A child-high pile of squat, outsize shins

  And marbleized, harelipped hearts—

  Food the rich man eats to settle his conscience.

  And there are flies next door, and a hose to wash

  Dung out of the cow guts … which reminds

  Muhammad of his brother

  Who left to become headwaiter at

  Rasputin’s Piano-Bar.

  Both his grandfathers, his father too, had worked

  In this tiled hollow lit by one bare bulb.

  Stuck in the mirror are their postcards

  Of the Kaaba, the silk-veiled,

  Quartz-veined sky-stone, Islam’s one closed eye.

  Muhammad hasn’t made his

  Required pilgrimage. He went west instead,

  The hajj to California, but came up six

  Credits shy at Fresno State. (Shy too

  Of the girlfriend who’d wanted

  To marry “for good,” not a green card.)

  So he’s back in the shop now,

  Next to a copper tub of boiling water.

  He takes another head by the ear and dips

  It—eight, nine, ten—into the kettle,

  Then quickly starts to shave it

  With a bone-handled wartime Gillette.

  The black matted shag falls in

  Patches to the floor and floats toward the clogged drain.

  One after another, the heads are stacked up

  Behind, like odd-lot, disassembled

  Plastic replicas of goats.

  Though their lips are hardened now, the teeth

  Of some can be seen—perfect!

  But Muhammad hacks the jaws off anyway,

  And the skulls with their nubbly horns and ears.

  What’s left is meant for his faithful poor,

  For their daily meager stew.

  He lines up six on a shelf out front.

  (As if all turned inside out,

  The heads, no longer heads exactly, strangely

  Bring to mind relief maps of the “occupied

  Territories.” Born on the wrong side

  Of a new border, he’s made

  To carry his alien’s ID,

  Its sulle
n headshot labeled

  In the two warring tongues.) Goat heads feel them all,

  The refugee, the single man, and his dog—

  Their delicacy. Cartilage knobs.

  Fat sacs. The small cache of flesh.

  The eyeballs staring out at nothing

  In all directions. The tongue

  Lolling up, as if with something more to say.

  Jerusalem, November 1987

  AN ESSAY ON FRIENDSHIP

  Friendship is love without wings.

  —FRENCH PROVERB

  I.

  Cloud swells. Ocean chop. Exhaustion’s

  Black-and-white. The drone at last picked up

  By floodlights a mile above Le Bourget.

  Bravado touches down. And surging past

  Police toward their hero’s spitfire engine,

  His cockpit now become the moment’s mirror,

  The crowd from inside dissolves to flashbulbs.

  Goggles, then gloves, impatiently pulled off,

  He climbs down out of his boy’s-own myth.

  His sudden shyness protests the plane deserves

  The credit. But his eyes are searching for a reason.

  Then, to anyone who’d listen: “She’s not here?

  But … but I flew the Atlantic because of her.”

  At which broadcast remark, she walks across

  Her dressing room to turn the radio off.

  Remember how it always begins? The film,

  That is. The Rules of the Game, Renoir’s tragi-

  Comedy of manners even then

  Outdated, one suspects, that night before

  The world woke up at war and all-for-love

  Heroes posed a sudden risk, no longer

  A curiosity like the silly marquis’s

  Mechanical toys, time’s fools, his stuffed

  Warbler or the wind-up blackamoor.

  Besides, she prefers Octave who shared those years,

  From twelve until last week, before and after

  The men who let her make the mistakes she would

  The morning after endlessly analyze—

  This puzzle of a heart in flight from limits—

  With her pudgy, devoted, witty, earthbound friend.

  II.

  —A friend who, after all, was her director,

  Who’d written her lines and figured out the angles,

  Soulful auteur and comic relief in one,

  His roles confused as he stepped center-stage

  (Albeit costumed as a performing bear)

  From behind the camera—or rather, out

  Of character. Renoir later told her

  The question “how to belong, how to meet”

  Was the film’s only moral preoccupation,

  A problem the hero, the Jew, and the woman share

  With the rest of us whose impulsive sympathies

  For the admirable success or loveable failure

  Keep from realizing the one terrible thing

  Is that everyone has his own good reasons.

  The husband wants the logic of the harem—

  I.e., no one is thrown out, no one hurt—,

  His electric organ with its gaudy trim and come-on,

  Stenciled nudes. His wife, who’s had too much

  To drink, stumbles into the château’s library

  And searches for a lover on the shelf just out

  Of reach, the one she learned by heart at school.

  The lover, meanwhile (our aviator in tails)

  Because love is the rule that breaks the rules,

  Dutifully submits to the enchantment of type.

  If each person has just one story to tell,

  The self a Scheherazade postponing The End,

  It’s the friend alone who, night after night, listens,

  His back to the camera, his expression now quizzical,

  Now encouraging even though, because he has

  A story himself, he’s heard it all before.

  III.

  Is there such a thing as unrequited

  Friendship? I doubt it. Even what’s about

  The house, as ordinary, as humble as habit—

  The mutt, the TV, the rusted window tray

  Of African violets in their tinfoil ruffs—

  Returns our affection with a loyalty

  Two parts pluck and the third a bright instinct

  To please. (Our habits too are friends, of course.

  The sloppy and aggressive ones as well

  Seem pleas for attention from puberty’s

  Imaginary comrade or the Job’s comforters

  Of middle age.) Office mates or children

  Don’t form bonds but are merely busy together,

  And acquaintances—that pen pal from Porlock is one—

  Slip between the hours. But those we eagerly

  Pursue bedevil the clock’s idle hands,

  And years later, by then the best of friends,

  You’ll settle into a sort of comfy marriage,

  The two of you familiar as an old pair of socks,

  Each darning the other with faint praise.

  More easily mapped than kept to, friendships

  Can stray, and who has not taken a wrong turn?

  (Nor later put that misstep to good use.)

  Ex-friends, dead friends, friends never made but missed,

  How they resemble those shrouded chandeliers

  Still hanging, embarrassed, noble, in the old palace

  Now a state-run district conference center.

  One peevish delegate is sitting there

  Tapping his earphones because he’s picking up

  Static that sounds almost like trembling crystal.

  IV.

  Most friendships in New York are telephonic,

  The actual meetings—the brunch or gallery hop

  Or, best, a double-feature of French classics—

  Less important than the daily schmooze.

  Flopped on the sofa in my drip-dry kimono,

  I kick off the morning’s dance of hours with you,

  Natalie, doyenne of the daily calls,

  Master-mistress of crisis and charm.

  Contentedly we chew the cud of yesterday’s

  Running feud with what part of the self

  Had been mistaken—yes?—for someone else.

  And grunt. Or laugh. Or leave to stir the stew.

  Then talk behind the world’s back—how, say,

  Those friends of friends simply Will Not Do,

  While gingerly stepping back (as we never would

  With lover or stranger) from any disappointment

  In each other. Grooming like baboons? Perhaps.

  Or taking on a ballast of gossip to steady

  Nerves already bobbing in the wake of that grand

  Liner, the SS Domesticity,

  With its ghost crew and endless fire drills.

  But isn’t the point to get a few things

  Clear at last, some uncommon sense to rely

  Upon in all this slow-motion vertigo

  That lumbers from dream to real-life drama?

  You alone, dear heart, remember what it’s like

  To be me; remember too the dollop of truth,

  Cheating on that regime of artificially

  Sweetened, salt-free fictions the dangerous

  Years concoct for tonight’s floating island.

  V.

  Different friends sound different registers.

  The morning impromptu, when replayed this afternoon

  For you, Jimmy, will have been transcribed

  For downtown argot, oltrano, and Irish harp,

  And the novelist in you draw out as anecdote

  What news from nowhere had earlier surfaced as whim.

  On your end of the line (I picture a fire laid

  And high-tech teapot under a gingham cozy),

  Patience humors my warmed-over grievance or gush.

  Eac
h adds the lover’s past to his own, experience

  Greedily annexed, heartland by buffer state,

  While the friend lends his field glasses to survey

  The ransacked loot and spot the weak defenses.

  Though it believes all things, it’s not love

  That bears and hopes and endures, but the comrade-in-arms.

  How often you’ve found me abandoned on your doormat,

  Pleading to be taken in and plied

  With seltzer and Chinese take-out, while you bandaged

  My psyche’s melodramatically slashed wrists

  (In any case two superficial wounds),

  The razor’s edge of romance having fallen

  Onto the bathroom tiles next to a lurid

  Pool of self-regard. “Basta! Love

  Would bake its bread of you, then butter it.

  The braver remedy for sorrow is to stand up

  Under fire, or lie low on a therapist’s couch,

  Whistling an old barcarole into the dark.

  Get a grip. Buckle on your parachute.

  Now, out the door with you, and just remember:

  A friend in need is fortune’s darling indeed.”

  VI.

  Subtle Plato, patron saint of friendship,

  Scolded those nurslings of the myrtle-bed

  Whose tender souls, first seized by love’s madness,

  Then stirred to rapturous frenzies, overnight

  Turn sour, their eyes narrowed with suspicions,

  Sleepless, feverishly refusing company.

  The soul, in constant motion because immortal,

  Again and again is “deeply moved” and flies

  To a new favorite, patrolling the upper air