Plundered Hearts

by J. D. McClatchy

  ordinarily accompanies it.

  So I’ve locked myself into the first because,

  though farther from the lightbulb overhead,

  it remains the more conventional

  and thereby illuminating choice.

  The wit on its walls is more desperate.

  As if I had written them

  there myself, but only because by now

  I have seen them day after day,

  I know each boast, each plea,

  the runty widower’s resentments,

  the phone number for good head.

  Today’s fresh drawing:

  a woman’s torso, neck to outflung knees,

  with breasts like targets and at her crotch

  red felt-tip “hair” to guard

  a treasure half wound, half wisecrack.

  The first critic of the flesh is always

  the self-possessed sensualist.

  With all that wall as his margin,

  he had sniffed in smug ballpoint

  OBVIOUSLY DONE BY SOMEONE

  WHO HAS NEVER SEEN THE REAL THING.

  Under that, in a later hand,

  the local pinstripe aesthete

  had dismissed the daydreamer’s crudity

  and its critic’s edgy literalism.

  His block letters had squared,

  not sloping shoulders: NO,

  BY SOMEONE WHO JUST CAN’T DRAW.

  Were the two opinions

  converging on the same moral point?

  That a good drawing is the real thing?

  Or that the real thing

  can be truly seen only through another’s

  eyes? But now that I trace it through

  other jokes and members,

  the bottom line leads to a higher inch

  of free space on the partition—

  a perch above the loose

  remarks, like the pimp’s doorway

  or the Zen master’s cliff-face ledge.

  THERE ARE NO REAL THINGS

  writes the philosopher. But he too

  has been misled by everything

  the mind makes of a body.

  When the torso is fleshed out

  and turns over in the artist’s bed,

  when the sensualist sobs over her,

  when the critic buttons his pants,

  when the philosopher’s scorn sinks back

  from a gratified ecstasy,

  then it will be clear to each

  in his own way. There is nothing

  we cannot possibly not know.

  TEA WITH THE LOCAL SAINT

  I’d bought a cone of solid sugar and a box

  Of tea for the saint himself, a flashlight

  For his son, the saint-elect, and bubblegum

  For a confusion of small fry—the five-year-old

  Aunt, say, and her seven-year-old nephew.

  Nothing for the women, of course, the tattooed,

  One-eyed, moon-faced matron, or her daughter

  Whose husband had long ago run away

  After killing their newborn by pouring

  A bottle of cheap cologne down its throat.

  This was, after all, our first meeting.

  I was to be introduced by a Peace Corps pal

  Whose easy, open California ways

  Had brought a water system to the village

  And an up-to-date word to its vocabulary.

  Every other guttural spillway of Arabic

  Included a carefully enunciated “awesome,”

  The speaker bright-eyed with his own banter.

  We sat on a pair of Kurt Cobain beach towels

  And under a High-Quality Quartz Clock,

  The plastic butterflies attached to whose hands

  Seemed to keep time with those in my stomach.

  At last, he entered the room, the saint himself,

  Moulay Madani, in a white head scarf and caftan

  The fading blue of a map’s Moroccan coastline,

  Its hem embroidered with geometric ports of call.

  A rugged sixty, with a longshoreman’s jaw,

  A courtier’s guile, and a statesman’s earnest pauses,

  He first explained the crescent dagger he fingered

  Had been made two centuries ago by a clever Jew.

  Then he squinted for my reaction. I’ve no taste

  For bad blood, and gingerly cleared my throat to say

  I was inclined to trust any saint who carried a knife.

  From a copper urn, glasses of mint tea were poured,

  Of a tongue-stiffening sweetness. I was allowed to wave

  Away the tray of nougat—or rather, the flies on it.

  Sipping, I waited for a word, a sign from the saint.

  I’d wanted to lie, as if underground, and watch

  Him dig up the sky, or stand at a riverbank

  And have the water sweep off my presumptions,

  Have him blow light into my changeling bones.

  I wanted to feel the stalk rise and the blade fall.

  I wanted my life’s arithmetic glazed and fired.

  I wanted the hush, the wingstroke, the shudder.

  But sainthood, I learned soon enough, is a fate

  Worse than life, nights on call for the demons

  In a vomiting lamb, a dry breast, a broken radio,

  And days spent parroting the timeless adages,

  Spent arbitrating water rights, property lines,

  Or feuds between rival herdsmen over scrub brush,

  Spent blessing every bride and anyone’s big-bellied

  Fourth or fifth wife, praying that they deliver sons.

  I thought back to the time, not ten feet from him,

  I heard a homily delivered by old John XXIII,

  Sounding wholly seraphic in his murmured Italian.

  Ten interpreters stepped from behind the throne.

  The English one at last explained the Holy Father

  Had urged us all to wear seatbelts while driving.

  My heart sank at its plain good sense, as hymns

  Echoed and golden canopies enfolded the pope.

  How like home it seemed, with my own father

  A preoccupied patriarch of practicality

  When what was wanted veered wildly between

  The gruff headmaster and the drunken playwright.

  Instead, I got the distant advertising salesman,

  The suburban dad of what turned out to be my dreams.…

  Dreams that, decades later, back at my hotel in Fez,

  A bucket of cold water was suddenly poured on.

  I’d gone to the hamam, stripped, and lay on a pattern

  Of sopping tiles that might have spelled God’s will.

  Steam shrouded the attendant methodically soaping

  The knots of disappointment he’d knuckled in my back.

  He paused. I drifted. [Yowza!] I looked up

  At a bald, toothless gnome in swaddling clothes

  On his way back to the fountain for more bad news.

  Something in his bowlegged walk—perhaps the weary

  Routine of it—made me think of the saint again,

  Of how, when tea was done, and everyone had stood,

  He reached for my head, put his hands over it,

  And gently pulled me to his chest, which smelled

  Of dung-smoke and cinnamon and mutton grease.

  I could hear his wheezy breathing now, like the prophet’s

  Last whispered word repeated by the faithful.

  Then he prayed for what no one had time to translate—

  His son interrupted the old man to tell him a group

  Of snake charmers sought his blessing, and a blind thief.

  The saint pushed me away, took one long look,

  Then straightened my collar and nodded me toward the door.

  for Jane Garmey

  UNDER HYDRA

  To disbelieve in God—or worse, in His servants—

>   Of old incited mobs

  With stones or stakes grimly to atone for what,

  Like a bomb not lobbed

  But planted in the garage of a mirror-skin

  High-rise, has from deep within

  Too suddenly exposed

  The common desire to learn

  Less than had been supposed.

  Bedsores, point shaving, a taste for sarongs. There are signs

  Everywhere—like the thumbprints,

  Say, of thin-lipped men or sluggish women

  On an heirloom violin.

  So mine is the culture of laugh track and chat room.

  Authority’s foredoomed.

  Where is distance, and what

  Can frighten or inspire, condemn or redeem?

  All transcendence is cut

  With a canned, buttoned-down, fork-tongued coziness.

  The stars are hooded now.

  The heart’s cloud chamber weeps its nuclear tears.

  My nails are bitten, and how

  All-consuming my vanities, the fancied slights

  To my air-kissing appetites.

  Millennial echoes

  Fill the abandoned stadium. Homeless

  Frauds crowd the two back rows.

  Compel them to come in, the evangelist

  Insists. There are empty

  Seats at the table for minims and ranters.

  Join the ancient family

  Squabbles—whose is bigger? who deserves more?

  Prophecy’s the trapdoor

  Whose fatal saving grace

  Leads to listening for a voice within

  That doubles as self-praise.

  His lips cut off, and flames at work on his bubbling guts,

  The wandering monk is tied

  To his own refusal—a book or belief.

  The scholar, for his pride,

  Is whipped, branded, and in midwinter sent out

  On the road of his doubt

  To perish of the cold.

  Judge and martyr each invokes God’s mercy

  On his innocent soul.

  There goes the pitiful procession of mumblers,

  Slave masters and skinheads,

  Witches, dealers, backwoods ayatollahs.

  And here am I, tucked in bed,

  Wondering if I believe in anything more

  Than my devotions and four

  Squares. And if forced to say,

  Wouldn’t I deny even you, love, for a future?

  Who spoke the truth today?

  AUDEN’S OED

  in the old oxblood edition, the color

  of the mother tongue, all foxed and forked,

  its threadbare edges dented, once a fixture

  in the second-storey Kirchstetten

  room where day by day he fashioned the silence

  into objects, often sitting on

  Poy–Ry, say, or Sole–Sz, and after his death

  sent packing from cozy Austria

  to Athens, where fortune dropped it from Chester’s

  trembling hands into a legacy

  that exiled it next to page-curling Key West

  and finally to Connecticut,

  is shelved here now, a long arm’s-length from my desk.

  What he made of himself he had found

  in this book, the exact weight of each soft spot

  and sore point, how each casts a shadow

  understudying our hungers and our whims.

  If history is just plain dull facts,

  the facts are these, these ruling nouns and upstart

  verbs, these slick adjectival toadies

  and adverbial agents with their collars

  pulled up, privileged phrasal moments,

  and full-scale clausal changes that qualify

  or contradict the course of a life.

  This book is all we can remember and dream.

  It’s how spur gears mesh and rocks are parsed

  into geodes, how the blood engorges

  a glance, how the fig ripens to fall,

  or what quarter-tones and quarks may signal deep

  inside a precise idea of space.

  It is to this book he sat for the lessons

  the past had set him—how our Greeks died,

  whom your Romans killed, how her Germans

  overreached, what his English understood,

  how my Americans denied history

  was anything but an innocence

  the others had simply skimmed or mispronounced.

  He knew history is a grammar,

  and grammar a metaphor, and poetry

  nothing more or less than death itself—

  it never lies because it never affirms.

  From the start, squinting at the propped score

  with Mother in their duets at the upright

  or biting his nails while arguing

  the quidditas of thuggish jacks-in-office,

  he knew what he called truth always lies

  in the words and so in this dictionary,

  which like him has become a conscience

  with all its roots, all its ramifications,

  meanings and examples down the years.

  It was on this book he sat for the lessons

  learned five inches above a desk chair,

  five inches to lean down closer to the page,

  one volume at a time, day by day,

  slightly above the sense of things, but closer

  to what tomorrow so many others

  will consider to have somehow been the truth.

  The hard part is not so much telling the truth

  as knowing which truth to tell—or worse,

  what it is you want to tell the truth, and how

  at last one learns to unlove others,

  to uncast the spells, to rewind the romance

  back to its original desire

  for something else altogether, its grievance,

  say, against that year’s dazzling head boy

  or the crippled wide-eyed horse you couldn’t shoot.

  And, as innocent as the future

  porno star’s first milk tooth, the dictionary

  has no morality other than

  definition itself. The large, functional

  Indo-European family

  will do for a murky myth of origin,

  and the iron laws of shift and change

  go unquestioned by the puzzled rummager.

  Our names for things tend to hold them fast

  in place, give an X its features or its pitch,

  a fourth dimension of distinctness.

  And what may seem vague awaits the Supplement

  just now pulling into the depot,

  late as usual but looming through the steam.

  Words have their unflappable habits

  of being, constellations of fixed ideas

  that still move. Sentimentality,

  Snobbery, Sympathy, Sorrow—each queues up

  at the same window. No raised eyebrow

  for the faked orgasm or press conference

  to issue official denials.

  No sigh for the botanist’s crabbed notebook.

  No praise for the florilegium.

  No regret for the sinking tanker’s oil slick

  glittering now off Cape Flattery.

  No truck with bandbox grooming, fashion runways,

  the foot binder’s stale apology,

  or the dream’s down payment and layaway plan.

  Everything adds up to or sinks back

  into the word we know it by in this book.

  A believer in words—common prayers

  or textbook theories—this wrinkled metaphor

  of the mind itself abided by

  what grave and lucid laws, what keen exemptions

  these columns of small print have upheld.

  He could be sitting beside one, chin in hand,

  listening to a late quartet, a gaze

  on his face
only the final chord will break.

  Here is that faraway something else,

  here between the crowded lines of scholarship.

  Here is the first rapture and final

  dread of being found out by words, terms, phrases

  for what is unknown, unfelt, unloved.

  Here in the end is the language of a life.

  Half my life ago, before retiring

  to new digs under Oxford’s old spires,

  as a part of his farewell tour of the States,

  one last look at the rooms of the house

  he’d made of our poised, mechanical largesse,

  he visited my alma mater.

  The crowd—tweedy townies and student groundlings—

  packed the hall and spilled over the lawn

  outside, where the lucky ones pressed their faces

  to windows suspense was steaming up.

  How did I find a place at the master’s feet?

  My view was of the great man’s ankles,

  and close enough to see his socks didn’t match.

  I sat there uncomfortably but spellbound

  to his oracular mumble. And later,

  after the applause and the sherry,

  while he wambled tipsily toward his guest suite,

  I sprang as if by coincidence

  from its darkened doorway where I’d been waiting.

  But, well, waiting for what exactly?

  Suddenly speechless, I counted on a lie

  and told him I knew his work by heart

  and would he autograph my unread copy.

  He reached in his jacket for a pen

  and at last looked distractedly up at me.

  A pause. “Turn around and bend over,”

  he ordered in a voice vexed with impatience

  I at once mistook for genuine

  interest—almost a proposition, in fact.

  The coy young man I was then is not

  my type, but I can recognize the appeal.

  Even as I wheeled slowly around

  and put my hands on my knees, I realized

  what he wanted, what he’d asked of me.

  To write in the book, he required a desk.

  My back would do as well as any

  Tree trunk or cafeteria tabletop.

  Only years later did it make sense.

  By then I’d figured out that he’d been writing

  on me ever since that encounter,

  or that I’d unconsciously made of myself

  a desk so that he could continue—

  the common imagination’s dogsbody

  and ringmaster—still to speak up,

  however halting or indirect the voice.