Plundered Hearts
Page 8
Disrupting the way things go, we come to learn,
Informs the art. Weavers incorporate
A flaw, the stitch dropped or badly turned,
To remind who kneel that only God is great,
Perfection His, His the privilege to create.
And on the block we guard or square we thread,
If thought is our element—a fiery hate,
A patient air, the earth we defend and dread—
Its flaw is the very idea that, above or ahead,
Perfection exists, the god hidden in habit.
She wakes in pain, the night cut down, her bed
A dirt floor—but there’s the sun, and the stab it
Makes behind her eyes. The day’s at hand.
A light signals from the mountains now, as planned.
XIII.
Some light is on the mountains now. A plan
Of the city taped to her wall, the day’s targets
Marked, a red inaudible word on each …
A band of sun edges up on that paper too.
The grid of streets, the harbor’s selvage, the mosques
And prismatic parks, the quadrants colored by faction,
When brought to such a light take on a kilim’s
Dispositions.
No art can stop the killings,
Nor any point of view make an abstraction
Of the child murdered because a boundary was crossed.
The living and the dead are woven through
Us, back and forth, in and out of my speech—
The bullets’ stammer, the longest threads in the carpet—
As if everything she knows I understand.
XIV.
As if everything we’ve known we understand,
A deal is struck. The familiar guarantee—
That for his trouble the buyer may demand
The weaver have gone blind to finish the work—
Applies. A hookah is brought. A glass of tea.
And what we’ve bargained for is something framed,
As night by day, an anarchy on which, alert
To lives now lost in thought, the eye is trained.
Correspondences in camouflage.
Reflected in the windowpane, we pay attention
To each in turn, the pieces of a world dislodged—
Beirut, Vermont, the surfaces that start
To yield, and depths that hold their breath, a tension
The force of habit takes as order to the heart.
XV.
The force of habit’s taken order to its heart,
As if bodies were the soul’s ornaments,
Reproduction’s glistening egg-and-dart.
History’s figures of speech for randomness—
Meaning subversive because superimposed—
Are so strangely silent this still desert night
That a wind to frame and fill the scene arose,
And love’s changing aspect in starlight
We can see and hear as a single page of text,
A palm-read pool whose vacillating pattern
The touchstone I toss first creates but next
Disrupts. The way things go we come to learn.
A light is on the mountains now, as planned,
As if everything we’ve known we understand.
from TEN COMMANDMENTS
1998
THE LEDGER
Love is injustice, said Camus.
We want to be loved. What’s still more true?
Each wants most to be preferred,
And listens for those redeeming words
Better than X, more than Y—
Enough to quiet the child’s cry,
The bridegroom’s nerves, the patient’s
Reluctant belief in providence.
Break what you can, hurt whom you will,
Humiliate the others until
Someone takes a long, hard look.
Oh Love, put down your balance book.
MY SIDESHOW
Summers during the Eisenhower years, a carnival
Came to town. From my father’s pair of bleacher seats,
The safety net under the Big Top’s star attractions,
The drugged tiger, the stilted clowns, the farting scooters
All seemed as little death-defying as those routines
The high-wire trio staged with their jerky parasols.
With that singular lack of shame only a kid commands,
I’d sneak over instead to the sawdusted sideshow tent.
Every year they were back: the fire-breathing women,
The men who swallowed scimitars or hammered nails
Up their noses and fishhooks through their tongues,
The dwarf in his rayon jockstrap and sequined sweatband.
A buck got you into the blow-off where a taped grind
Spieled the World of Wonders while a blanket rose
On seven clear ten-gallon jars that held
Pickled fetuses—real or rubber?—their limbs
Like ampersands, each with something deliriously wrong,
Too little of this in front or too much of that behind.
Four-legged chickens, a two-headed raccoon,
The Mule-Faced Girl, the Man with Four Pupils
In His Eyes, coffined devil babies, the Penguin Boy,
The Living Skeleton, an avuncular thousand-pound
Sort who swilled cans of soda and belched at us.…
What I think of the Word Made Flesh developed in this darkroom.
Back then I couldn’t wait for hair to appear on my face
And down below, where my flashlight scrutinized at bedtime.
I’d rise and fall by chance, at the table, on buses, in class.
My voice cracked. I was shooting up and all thumbs.
Oh, the restless embarrassments of late childhood!
My first pimple—huge and lurid—had found its place.
I kept staring at one jar. The thing inside seemed to float
Up from a fishtail that was either leg or penis—or both.
(I could hear my father now, outside the tent, calling me.)
From its mouth, a pair of delicate legs emerged,
As if it had swallowed a perfect twin. I gulped. Something
Unspoken, then and since, rose like acid in my throat.
MY EARLY HEARTS
The over-crayoned valentine FOR MOTHER
The furtive gym-class crush.
In my missal the polychrome Sacred Heart
Our Savior exposes,
The emblems of his Passion still festering,
The knotted scourge, the sponge,
The nailhead studs all sweating blood from inside
A little crown of thorns
Tightening around my groin as I pulled back
The crushed-velvet curtain
And entered the confessional’s dark chamber.
Whatever lump in the throat
Aztec horror tales had once contrived to raise
Melted in the aftermath
Of eating—myself both high priest and victim
On his knees, head yanked back—
The live, quivering heart of thwarted romance,
A taste one swallowed hard
First to acquire, and much later to mock.
Hearts bid on, hearts broken.
The shape of a flame reversed in the Zippo
Cupped close to light one last
Cigarette before walking out on a future.
The shape two fat, rain-soaked
Paperbacks assumed on the back-porch table
After I’d left for home,
That whole summer spent reading Tolstoy, sleeping
With my window open
Onto an imaginary grove of birch—
One of which I had carved
Two names on and sat under with my diary
To watch the harvesting.
There is a black heart somewhere—the cla
rinet
In K. 581,
Still aching for the pond edge, the rippling pain,
The god’s quick grasp of things.
A white one, too—that teardrop pearl on Vermeer’s
Girl at the Frick, hanging
Above her interrupted letter, mirror
To what she’s left unsaid.
At ten, on a grade-school excursion downtown
To the science museum,
I learned my lesson once and for all—how to
Lose myself in a heart.
In that case, a cavernous, walk-through model
With narrow, underlit
Arterial corridors and piped-in thumps.
As so often later,
The blindfold loosely fastened by loneliness
Seemed to help me stumble
Past the smeary diagrams and push-button
Explanations, helped me
Ignore the back-of-the-closet, sour-milk
Smells and the silly jokes
Of classmates in the two-storey lung next door.
For those others, the point
Was to end up only where they had begun,
Back at the start of something,
Eager for the next do-it-yourself gadget.
I stayed behind, inside,
Under the mixed blessing of not being missed.
I could hear the old nun
Scolding some horseplay, more faintly leading them
On to a further room,
“Where a giant pendulum will simulate
The crisscrossed Sands of Time.…”
What had time to do with anything I wanted!
At last I had the heart
All to myself, my name echoing through it
As I called to myself
In a stage whisper from room to blood-red room.
And what of the smaller,
Racing heart—my own, that is—inside the heart
Whose very emptiness
Had by now come to seem a sort of shelter?
Was it—me, I mean, my heart—
Even back then ready to stake everything,
To endure the trials
By fire and water, to pledge long silence,
Accept the surprises
And sad discoveries one loses his way
Among, walking around
And around his own heart, looking for a way
That leads both in and out?
It happens first in one’s own heart, doesn’t it?
And then in another’s.
Something happens when you hear it happening.
One day, out of the blue,
An old friend shows up and needs, so you’d thought, just
A shoulder to cry on.
Or a new friend is stirring in the next room.
Or the stranger in bed
Beside you gets up in the middle of the night.
You listen for the steps.
Unfamiliar steps are coming closer, close
Enough to reach out for.
Come over here, love. Bend down and put your head
To my chest. Now listen.
Listen. Do you hear them? After all this time
There are your own footsteps.
Can you hear yourself walking toward me now?
MY OLD IDOLS
I. At Ten
1955. A scratchy waltz
Buzzed over the ice rink’s P.A.
My classmate Tony, the barber’s son: “Alls
He wantsa do is, you know, like, play.”
Bored with perfecting my languid figure eights,
I trailed him to a basement door marked GENTS
With its metal silhouette of high-laced skates
(Symbols, I guess, of methods desire invents).
Tony’s older brother was waiting inside.
I’d been “requested,” it seemed. He was sixteen,
Tall, rawboned, blue-eyed,
Thumbs hooked into faded, tightening jeans.
I fumbled with small talk, pretending to be shy.
Looking past me, he slowly unzipped his fly.
II. Callas
Her voice: steeped in a rancid clotting syrup:
Whatever’s not believed remains a grace
While again she invokes the power that yields:
Splintered timber and quick consuming flame:
The simplest way to take hold of the heart’s
Complications, its pool of spilt religion:
A long black hair sweat-stuck to the skin:
The bitter sleep of the dying: the Jew in Berlin:
Who sent you here? the sharp blade pleads:
Stormcloud: thornhedge: starchill:
Blood bubble floating to the top of the glass:
The light, from fleshrise to soulset:
The world dragging the slow weight of its shame
Like the train of pomp: guttering candle: her voice.
III. In Class
Parasangs, satraps, the daily drill …
Beginner’s Greek its own touchstone.
The sophomore teacher was Father Moan,
Whom I longed to have praise my skill.
The illustrated reader’s best
Accounts of murder and sacrifice
Only suggested the heavy price
I longed to pay at his behest.
He’d slap the pointer against his thigh.
I quivered. What coldness may construe
Of devotion was an experience
As hard to learn as catch his eye.
I kept my hand up. Here! I knew
The right answer. The case. The tense.
MY MAMMOGRAM
I.
In the shower, at the shaving mirror or beach,
For years I’d led … the unexamined life?
When all along and so easily within reach
(Closer even than the nonexistent wife)
Lay the trouble—naturally enough
Lurking in a useless, overlooked
Mass of fat and old newspaper stuff
About matters I regularly mistook
As a horror story for the opposite sex,
Nothing to do with what at my downtown gym
Are furtively ogled as The Guy’s Pecs.
But one side is swollen, the too tender skin
Discolored. So the doctor orders an X-
Ray, and nervously frowns at my nervous grin.
II.
Mammography’s on the basement floor.
The nurse has an executioner’s gentle eyes.
I start to unbutton my shirt. She shuts the door.
Fifty, male, already embarrassed by the size
Of my “breasts,” I’m told to put the left one
Up on a smudged, cold, Plexiglas shelf,
Part of a robot half menacing, half glum,
Like a three-dimensional model of the Freudian self.
Angles are calculated. The computer beeps.
Saucers close on a flatness further compressed.
There’s an ache near the heart neither dull nor sharp.
The room gets lethal. Casually the nurse retreats
Behind her shield. Anxiety as blithely suggests
I joke about a snapshot for my Christmas card.
III.
“No sign of cancer,” the radiologist swans
In to say—with just a hint in his tone
That he’s done me a personal favor—whereupon
His look darkens. “But what these pictures show …
Here, look, you’ll notice the gland on the left’s
Enlarged. See?” I see an aerial shot
Of Iraq, and nod. “We’ll need further tests,
Of course, but I’d bet that what you’ve got
Is a liver problem. Trouble with your estrogen
Levels. It’s time, my friend, to take stock.
It happens more often than you’d think to men.”
Reeling from its millionth scotch on the
rocks,
In other words, my liver’s sensed the end.
Why does it come as something less than a shock?
IV.
The end of life as I’ve known it, that is to say—
Testosterone sported like a power tie,
The matching set of drives and dreads that may
Now soon be plumped to whatever new designs
My apparently resentful, androgynous
Inner life has on me. Blind seer?
The Bearded Lady in some provincial circus?
Something that others both desire and fear.
Still, doesn’t everyone long to be changed,
Transformed to, no matter, a higher or lower state,
To know the leathery D-Day hero’s strange
Detachment, the queen bee’s dreamy loll?
Yes, but the future each of us blankly awaits
Was long ago written on the genetic wall.
V.
So suppose the breasts fill out until I look
Like my own mother … ready to nurse a son,
A version of myself, the infant understood
In the end as the way my own death had come.
Or will I in a decade be back here again,
The diagnosis this time not freakish but fatal?
The changes in one’s later years all tend,
Until the last one, toward the farcical,
Each of us slowly turned into something that hurts,
Someone we no longer recognize.
If soul is the final shape I shall assume,
The shadow brightening against the fluorescent gloom,
An absence as clumsily slipped into as this shirt,
Then which of my bodies will have been the best disguise?
FOUND PARABLE
In the men’s room at the office today
some wag has labelled the two stalls
the Erotic and the Political.
The second seems suitable for the results
of my business, not for what thinking