Plundered Hearts

by J. D. McClatchy

  Broken column, muddled

  Inscription back when

  Only half up, half done.

  Now only the ruins are left,

  A wall some bricks suggest,

  A doorway into nothing,

  Last year’s scaffolding.

  By design the eye is drawn

  To something undergone.

  A single carving remains

  The plunder never claimed,

  And no memories of guilt

  Can wear upon or thrill

  This scarred relief of a man

  And woman whom love will strand,

  Their faces worn away,

  Their heartache underplayed,

  Just turning as if to find

  Something to put behind

  Them, an emptiness

  Of uncarved rock, an excess

  Of sharp corrosive doubt.

  •

  Now everything’s left out

  To rain and wind and star,

  Nature’s repertoire

  Of indifference or gloom.

  This French blue afternoon,

  For instance, how easily

  The light falls on debris,

  How calmly the valley awaits

  Whatever tonight frustrates,

  How quickly the small creatures

  Scurry from the sunlight’s slur,

  How closely it all comes to seem

  Like details on the table between

  Us at dinner yesterday,

  Our slab of sandstone laid

  With emblems for a meal.

  Knife and fork. A deal.

  Thistle-prick. Hollow bone.

  The olive’s flesh and stone.

  JIHAD

  A contrail’s white scimitar unsheathes

  Above the tufts of anti-aircraft fire.

  Before the mullah’s drill on righteousness,

  Practice rocks are hurled at chicken-wire

  Dummies of tanks with silhouetted infidels

  Defending the nothing both sides fight over

  In God’s name, a last idolatry

  Of boundaries. The sirens sound: take cover.

  He has forced the night and day, the sun and moon,

  Into your service. By His leave, the stars

  Will shine to light the path that He has set

  You to walk upon. His mercy will let

  You slay who would blaspheme or from afar

  Defile His lands. Glory is yours, oh soon.

  •

  Of the heart. Of the tongue. Of the sword. The holy war

  Is waged against the self at first, to raze

  The ziggurat of sin we climb upon

  To view ourselves, and next against that glaze

  The enemies of faith will use to disguise

  Their words. Only then, and at the caliph’s nod,

  Are believers called to drown in blood the people

  Of an earlier book. There is no god but God.

  He knows the day of death and sees how men

  Will hide. Who breaks His covenant is cursed.

  Who slights His revelations will live in fire.

  He has cast aside the schemer and the liar

  Who mistake their emptiness of heart for a thirst

  That, to slake, the streams of justice descend.

  •

  Ski-masked on videotape, the skinny martyr

  Reads his manifesto. He’s stilted, nervous.

  An hour later, he’s dropped at the market town,

  Pays his fare, and climbs aboard the bus.

  Strapped to his chest is the death of thirty-four

  —Plus his own—“civilians” on their way

  To buy or sell what goods they claim are theirs,

  Unlike our fates, which are not ours to say.

  Under the shade of swords lies paradise.

  Whom you love are saved with you, their souls

  In His hand. And who would want to return to life

  Except to be killed again? Who can thrive

  On the poverty of this world, its husks and holes?

  His wisdom watches for each sacrifice.

  ORCHID

  Now that you are gone, you are everywhere.

  Take this orchid, for instance,

  its swollen lip, the scrawny stalk’s one

  descended testicle

  as wrinkled as rhetoric on the bar-scene stump,

  the golden years since

  jingling in its purse. How else signal the bee?

  In my swan-clip now languish urgent appeals

  from the usual charities

  lined up to be ignored. But your flags are up:

  I see the flapping petals,

  the whorl of sepals, their grinning come-on.

  Always game, again

  I’d head straight for the column’s sweet trap.

  Ducking under the puckered anther cap

  to glide toward the stiff,

  waxy sense of things, where male and female

  hardly matter to one’s heady

  urge to pull back the glistening lobes

  and penetrate the heart,

  I fell for it every time, the sticky bead

  laid down on my back as I huddled there

  with whatever—mimicking

  enemy or friend, the molecular musk

  of each a triggering lure—

  wanted the most of me. Can I leave now too?

  I have death’s dust-seed

  on me. I have it from touching you.

  CANCER

  1.

  And then a long senescent cell—though why,

  Who knows?—will suddenly refuse to stay

  In line, the bucket brigade of proteins meant

  To slow or stimulate the tissue’s growth

  Will stumble, so the cells proliferate

  And tumors form while, deep within,

  Suppressor genes, mutated, overlook

  The widening fault, the manic drive to choke

  On itself that fairy tales allot the gnome

  Who vainly hammers the broken sword in his cave,

  Where malignant cells are shed into the blood

  Or lymph, cascading through the body’s streams,

  Attaching themselves to places where we breathe

  And love and think of what cannot be true.

  2.

  It is as if, the stench intensified

  And strong or weak alike now swept away,

  The plague in Athens hurried its descent

  By fear, a symptom leaving the stricken loath

  To fight for life who had defied the great

  Spartan ranks themselves, the sight of skin

  Inflamed, the thirst, the dripping anus took

  Hold of them until, in tears, they broke.

  The dead in piles around them, a hecatomb

  To gods who, like those mongrel dogs who crave

  A corpse they drag to safety through the mud

  To feast upon, had disappeared, their dreams,

  According to Thucydides, seethed

  With images of forsaken, drowning crews.

  3.

  She had lost the bet, and in her sunken eyes

  The birthday she had over and over prayed

  To die before was offered like a present.

  (Dressed in a party hat, I sat with both

  My parents by the bed.) A toast was made.

  Through the pleated, angled straw she took in

  A burning mouthful of champagne, and rebuked

  Her son-in-law for his expensive joke,

  Drawing, hairless, an imaginary comb

  Through memories of what pleasure anger gave,

  Then smiled, “I’d stop all this if only I could.”

  Even at ten I sensed that she had seen,

  Staring at me, what would be bequeathed.

  My mother slowly closed her eyes. We knew.

  PENIS

  Years of sneaking sidelong glances toward the o
ne

  At the next urinal’s gaping mouth—

  Between classes, between buses, between acts,

  In dorm or disco, rest stop or Ritz—

  Assemble them now in a sort of line-up:

  Bald, one-eyed, red-faced, shifty suspects,

  Each generic, all so individual—

  Hooded, lumpish, ropy, upcurving,

  Anchovy or shark, the three-inch alley cat

  Or blood-choked panther whose last droplet,

  Back-lit by porcelain, is wagged free to fly

  In a bright sterile arc, its reversed

  Meniscus shattered by the soon swirling flush.

  But that slice-of-life in the Men’s Room

  In retrospect seems an idle pantomime,

  Old desires or anxieties

  Projected onto a stranger’s handful

  Of gristle, the shadowy dumb show

  Our schoolroom puppets once swooped and wiggled through

  Back when any sense of difference

  Posed as curiosity’s artless cut-outs.

  Only years later was I haunted

  By a premonition of something I thought

  I didn’t have, or have enough of

  —Poor Punch, fingered, limp, flung back into his case.

  •

  Who knows what early memories are redeemed,

  What primitive rites re-enacted,

  By our masculine version of mother-love?

  What daily unconscious tenderness

  Is lavished here, such fastidious grooming

  Rituals for the wrinkled baby

  Capuchin. Each man’s member every morning

  May be gingerly held and jiggled

  Inside his Jockey shorts or lazily scratched

  Through silk pajamas—in any case,

  Fondled, its crimpled, sweat-sticky, fetid skin

  Lifted off the scrotal water-bed

  And hand-dried as if in a tumbler of air.

  Later, tucked behind the clerk’s apron

  Or the financier’s pinstripes or the rapper’s

  Baggy jeans, our meek little Clark Kent

  Daydreams at his desk of last night’s heroics,

  Hounded by a double life blackmailed

  By grainy color shots of summer-cabin

  Or backseat exploits that had won praise

  From their pliant, cooing co-conspirators.

  But now, absently readjusted,

  As if fresh from cold surf, his ideal is just

  The bud of classic statuary.

  The marble is hard, the soulful cub withdrawn.

  •

  So, the old questions linger on unanswered.

  Why in the fables on Greek kraters

  Do those of the ephebes always stick straight out?

  Why is it the last part of a man’s

  Body to age? Though function may no longer

  Follow form, its chthonic shaft and crown

  Retain maturity’s rugged majesty.

  What Ovid might once have figured out

  As a shepherd who’d struck a king in disguise,

  Or Plato have thought in an aside

  The haphazard tail of white in the pot where

  His abstract egg was hard-boiling into halves

  Soon in search of some way to resume the shell

  Of an identical privacy,

  Scientists today measure as Anyman’s

  Lowest common denominator,

  A demonic’s tutorial in the means

  Of his being manipulated

  By unpredictable powers far beyond

  His knowing but not his sad sensing.

  Do I wish my own rose at will, and stayed put,

  And was just, say, two inches longer?

  Sure. So who doesn’t think he’s inherited

  An apartment too small for his plans?

  Do I cancel the party, or gamely shrug?

  •

  “But why,” Jane asks, “is something silly at best

  And objectively ugly at worst

  The focus of so much infatuation?”

  Cults thrive on cloying contradictions.

  Shrewd and aloof, women are thought to enjoy

  What it does, the petulant master

  They devour, or the wheedling spongy slave

  They finally love to rub the wrong way.

  And men? Men! Men are known to appreciate

  What it stands for. History books have this

  In common with off-the-rack pulp romances.

  Small men with big ones, big men with small,

  Lead lives of quiet compensation, power

  Surging up from or meekly mizzling

  Down to the trouser snake in their paradise.

  If love’s the religion with the god

  That fails, is it because blood goes to his head?

  No, it’s that after the night’s tom-toms

  And fire-dances are over and he’s sulking

  In his shrine, sadness beats him hollow.

  Asked by nagging reporters once too often

  Why, despite the count of body bags,

  We were in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped

  His fly and slapped it on the table.

  “Gentlemen, this is why,” he barked. “This is why.”

  TATTOOS

  1.

  Chicago, 1969

  Three boots from Great Lakes stumble arm-in-arm

  Past the hookers

  And winos on South State

  To a tat shack. Pissed on mai tais, what harm

  Could come from the bright slate

  Of flashes on the scratcher’s corridor

  Wall, or the swagger of esprit de corps?

  Tom, the freckled Hoosier farmboy, speaks up

  And shyly points

  To a four-inch eagle

  High over the Stars and Stripes at sunup.

  A stormy upheaval

  Inside—a seething felt first in the groin—

  Then shoves its stubby subconscious gunpoint

  Into the back of his mind. The eagle’s beak

  Grips a banner

  Waiting for someone’s name.

  Tom mumbles that he’d like the space to read

  FELIX, for his small-framed

  Latino bunkmate with the quick temper.

  Felix hears his name and starts to stammer—

  He’s standing there beside Tom—then all three

  Nervously laugh

  Out loud, and the stencil

  Is taped to Tom’s chest. The needle’s low-key

  Buzzing fusses until,

  Oozing rills of blood like a polygraph’s

  Lines, there’s a scene that for years won’t come off.

  Across the room, facedown on his own cot,

  Stripped to the waist,

  Felix wants Jesus Christ

  Crucified on his shoulder blade, but not

  The heartbroken, thorn-spliced

  Redeemer of punk East Harlem jailbait.

  He wants light streaming from the wounds, a face

  Staring right back at those who’ve betrayed him,

  Confident, strong,

  With a dark blue crewcut.

  Twelve shading needles work around the rim

  Of a halo, bloodshot

  But lustrous, whose pain is meant to prolong

  His sudden resolve to fix what’s been wrong.

  (Six months later, a swab in Vietnam,

  He won’t have time

  To notice what’s been inked

  At night onto the sky’s open hand—palms

  Crawling with Cong. He blinks.

  Bullets slam into him. He tries to climb

  A wooden cross that roses now entwine.)

  And last, the bookish, acned college grad

  From Tucson, Steve,

  Who’s downed an extra pint

  Of cut-price rye and, misquoting Conrad

  On the fate of the mind,

  Asks loudly for the whole
nine yards, a “sleeve,”

  An arm’s-length pattern of motives that weave

  And eddy around shoals of muscle or bone.

  Back home he’d signed

  On for a Navy hitch

  Because he’d never seen what he’s since grown

  To need, an ocean which …

  But by now he’s passed out, and left its design

  To the old man, whose eyes narrow, then shine.

  By dawn, he’s done. By dawn, the others too

  Have paid and gone.

  Propped on a tabletop,

  Steve’s grappling with a hangover’s thumbscrew.

  The bandages feel hot.

  The old man’s asleep in a chair. Steve yawns

  And makes his way back, shielded by clip-ons.

  In a week he’ll unwrap himself. His wrist,

  A scalloped reef,

  Could flick an undertow

  Up through the tangled swash of glaucous cyst

  And tendon kelp below

  A vaccination scallop’s anchored seaweed,

  The swelling billow his bicep could heave

  For twin dolphins to ride toward his shoulder’s

  Coppery cliffs

  Until the waves, all flecked

  With a glistening spume, climb the collar-

  Bone and break on his neck.

  When he raises his arm, the tide’s adrift

  With his dreams, all his watery what-ifs,

  And ebbs back down under the sheet, the past,

  The uniform.

  His skin now seems colder.

  The surface of the world, he thinks, is glass,

  And the body’s older,

  Beckoning life shines up at us transformed

  At times, moonlit, colorfast, waterborne.

  2.

  Figuring out the body starts with the skin,

  Its boundary, its edgy go-between,

  The scarred, outspoken witness at its trials,

  The monitor of its memories,

  Pleasure’s flushed archivist and death’s pale herald.

  But skin is general-issue, a blank

  Identity card until it’s been filled in

  Or covered up, in some way disguised

  To set us apart from the beasts, whose aspects