The baggy tweeds. Exposed in the Racquet Club
Dressing room, they were invisible,
Present purely in outline like the head
And torso targets at the police firing
Range, hairless bodies and full heads of hair,
Painted neatly combed, of the last WASPs.
They walked like boys, talked like their grandfathers—
Public servants in secret, and the last
Generation of men to prefer baths.
These were the CIA boys with EYES
ONLY clearance and profiles like arrowheads.
A fireside frost bloomed on the silver martini
Shaker the magic evenings they could be home.
They were never home, even when they were there.
Public servants in secret are not servants,
Either. They were our gods working all night
To make Achilles’ beard fall out and prop up
The House of Priam, who by just pointing sent
A shark fin gliding down a corridor,
Almost transparent, like a watermark.
EMPIRE
The endangered bald eagle is soaring
Away from extinction, according to the evening news—
Good news after the news, after
The stocking masks and the blindfolds,
Contorted and disfigured nature in the dying days of oil.
What a surprise happy ending for the half hour.
Eagles airlift above the timberline—cut to
Their chicks nesting in the rocks.
The TV anchorman who predigests it all,
Himself has a great American carnivore prow,
But he is more an oak than an eagle.
According to polls, our father image comforts like the breast,
Is more trusted than the president by far.
Oh so honestly Carter’s eyes widen and glitter
For emphasis—the expression of a very sober child
Who is showing you he can wiggle his ears.
Flags fly at half-mast all over the nation
For the fallen, each flagpole a pinprick,
So many pinpricks it becomes pain—
Three thousand continental miles from sea to sea
Reforested with half-flying flags. How unsuitable
For being on its knees Old Glory is,
Bomb burst and cheer on its knees under
Incomparable American skies, the famous North American light.
The famous humidity. Condensation frosts the bottom inch
Of the windshield, the first air conditioner day.
A rainbow of stainless steel, the Gateway Arch,
Takes off and lands, takes off and lands, takes off
And rises sixty stories, and swoops back and lands
A little way down the levee. A railroad bridge
Filigrees across the brown sumptuous river.
Humid flags sog at half-mast.
Bitter bitter bitter bitter
Cries a bird somewhere out over the river
At dusk, as darkness filters down through the soft evening
On Ste. Genevieve, near St. Louis. Remember,
The creek out there somewhere in the dark
Burbles, remember. You cannot see:
But close your eyes anyway, and smell.
The houses when you open your eyes are watching the news.
Unshaved men in suits walk ahead of others in masks.
It might be the men one sees strolling
Together outside Claridge’s in London followed
At a submissive distance by their veiled wives,
But in Central America—hostages and their slaves
By relay satellite. Rank as the odor in urine
Of asparagus from the night before,
This is empire waking drunk, and remembering in the dark.
THE NEW COSMOLOGY
Above the Third World, looking down on a fourth:
Life’s aerial photograph of a new radio telescope
Discoloring an inch of mountainside in Chile,
A Martian invasion of dish receivers.
The tribes of Israel in their tents
Must have looked like this to God—
A naive stain of wildflowers on a hill,
A field of ear trumpets listening for Him,
Stuck listening to space like someone blind …
If there was a God.
There never is.
Almond-eyed shepherd warriors
Softly pluck their harps and stare off into space,
And close their eyes and dream.
In one tent, the Ark;
The chip of kryptonite.
They dream a recurring dream
About themselves as superpowers, and their origin.
Man is the only animal that dreams of outer space,
Epitome of life on earth,
The divine mammal which can dream
It is the chosen people of the universe
No more. But once you have got up high enough to look down,
Once you have got out far enough to look back,
The earth seems to magnify itself
In intensely sharp focus against the black,
Beautiful blind eye milky blue.
That we are alone, that we are not, are unimaginable.
We turn a page of Life,
Lying open in the grass,
To a pink earthworm slowly crossing the Milky Way
At nearly the speed of light—red-shifted protein!
The rest is unimaginable,
Like the silence before the universe.
The last nanosecond of silence twenty billion years ago
Before the big bang is endless.
A ROW OF FEDERAL HOUSES
A row of Federal houses with one missing,
The radicals’ bomb factory, now blue sky,
An elegantly preserved “landmark block”
Address the last quake of the sixties’ underground leveled;
Leaving a prize street with an empty lot
Worth its weight in caviar, stripped naked
Between the wound-pale windowless raw side walls
Of the neighbors, left homeless in a flash
Whose value grows and grows. The years roll by,
Gray as big grains of butter-sweet beluga,
Real estate booms. The lot is still empty.
The purchaser still waits for permission to build.
No yellow ribbons yet for the hostages, tied
To the door knockers, sashed around the trees,
Which will become the symbol of support
For them, the Americans held in Iran. Surreal,
The Shah’s dying of cancer in Cairo; his body
Escaped the revolution only to find
His insides turning into caviar,
The peacock and his court of torturers.
Marvelous, how time takes care of things;
Shad are running in the river with their
Delicious roe after years of none,
And seemingly hopeless pollution. There is hope.
The Landmarks Commission tells the community
The latest compromise design succeeds,
Protects the past, the unity of the block,
Your wishes went into it, etc.,
The way the mind negotiates a dream.
Gradually, Versailles bricks up the hole;
A million-dollar Bastille seals it off;
Till fountains rise from the swimming pool that fills
The garden space and the vast moment when
The daughter whose parents were gone for the summer heard
A thud while shopping, knew her friends were dead,
Smiled at the cashier, blankly turned
And walked away in the silence before the sirens.
THAT FALL
The body on the bed is made of china,
Shiny china vagina and pubic hair.
The glassy
smoothness of a woman’s body!
I stand outside the open door and stare.
I watch the shark glide by … it comes and goes—
Must constantly keep moving or it will drown.
The mouth slit in the formless fetal nose
Gives it that empty look—it looks unborn;
It comes into the room up to the bed
Just like a dog. The smell of burning leaves,
Rose bittersweetness rising from the red,
Is what I see. I must be twelve. That fall.
A DIMPLED CLOUD
Cold drool on his chin, warm drool in his lap, a sigh,
The bitterness of too many cigarettes
On his breath: portrait of the autist
Asleep in the arms of his armchair, age thirteen,
Dizzily starting to wake just as the sun
Is setting. The room is already dark while outside
Rosewater streams from a broken yolk of blood.
All he has to do to sleep is open
A book; but the wet dream is new, as if
The pressure of De bello Gallico
And Willa Cather face down on his fly,
Spread wide, one clasping the other from behind,
Had added confusion to confusion, like looking
For your glasses with your glasses on.
A mystically clear, unknowing trance of being …
And then you feel them—like that, his first wet dream
Seated in a chair, though not his first.
Mr. Hobbs, the Latin master with
A Roman nose he’s always blowing, who keeps
His gooey handkerchief tucked in his jacket sleeve,
Pulls his hanky out, and fades away.
French, English, math, history: masters one
By one arrive, start to do what they do
In life, some oddity, some thing they do,
Then vanish. The darkness of the room grows brighter
The darker it gets outside, because of the moonlight.
O adolescence! darkness of a hole
The silver moonlight fills to overflowing!
If only he could be von Schrader or
Deloges, a beautiful athlete or a complete
Shit. God, von Schrader lazily shagging flies,
The beautiful flat trajectory of his throw.
Instead of seeking power, being it!
Tomorrow Deloges will lead the school in prayer,
Not that the autist would want to take his place.
Naked boys are yelling and snapping wet towels
At each other in the locker room,
Like a big swordfighting scene from The Three Musketeers,
Parry and thrust, roars of laughter and rage,
Lush Turkish steam billowing from the showers.
The showers hiss, the air is silver fox.
Hot breath, flashes of swords, the ravishing fur!—
Swashbuckling boys brandishing their towels!
Depression, aggression, elation—and acne cream—
The ecosystem of a boy his age.
He combs his wet hair straight, he hates his curls,
He checks his pimples. Only the biggest ones show,
Or rather the ointment on them caked like mud,
Supposedly skin-color, invisible; dabs
Of peanut butter that have dried to fossils,
That even a shower won’t wash away, like flaws
Of character expressed by their concealment—
Secrets holding up signs—O adolescence!
O silence not really hidden by the words,
Which are not true, the words, the words, the words—
Unless you scrub, will not wash away.
But how sweetly they strive to outreach these shortcomings,
These boys who call each other by their last names,
Copying older boys and masters—it’s why
He isn’t wearing his glasses, though he can’t see.
That fiend Deloges notices but says nothing.
Butting rams, each looks at the other sincerely,
And doesn’t look away, blue eyes that lie.
He follows his astigmatism toward
The schoolbuses lined up to take everyone home,
But which are empty still, which have that smiling,
Sweet-natured blur of the retarded, oafs
In clothes too small, too wrong, too red and white,
And painfully eager to please a sadist so cruel
He wouldn’t even hurt a masochist.
The sadistic eye of the autist shapes the world
Into a sort of, call it innocence,
Ready to be wronged, ready to
Be tortured into power and beauty, into
Words his phonographic memory
Will store on silence like particles of oil
On water—the rainbow of polarity
Which made this poem. I put my glasses on,
And shut my eyes. O adolescence, sing!
All the bus windows are open because it’s warm.
I blindly face a breeze almost too sweet
To bear. I hear a hazy drone and float—
A dimpled cloud—above the poor white and poorer
Black neighborhoods which surround the small airfield.
THE BLUE-EYED DOE
I look at Broadway in the bitter cold,
The center strip benches empty like today,
And see St. Louis. I am often old
Enough to leave my childhood, but I stay.
A winter sky as total as repression
Above a street the color of the sky;
A sky the same gray as a deep depression;
A boulevard the color of a sigh:
Where Waterman and Union met was the
Apartment building I’m regressing to.
My key is in the door; I am the key;
I’m opening the door. I think it’s true
Childhood is your mother even if
Your mother is in hospitals for years
And then lobotomized, like mine. A whiff
Of her perfume; behind her veil, her tears.
She wasn’t crying anymore. Oh try.
No afterward she wasn’t anymore.
But yes she will, she is. Oh try to cry.
I’m here—right now I’m walking through the door.
The pond was quite wide, but the happy dog
Swam back and forth called by the boy, then by
His sister on the other side, a log
Of love putt-putting back and forth from fry
To freeze, from freeze to fry, a normal pair
Of the extremes of normal, on and on.
The dog was getting tired; the children stare—
Their childhood’s over. Everyone is gone,
Forest Park’s deserted; still they call.
It’s very cold. Soprano puffs of breath,
Small voices calling in the dusk is all
We ever are, pale speech balloons. One death,
Two ghosts … white children playing in a park
At dusk forever—but we must get home.
The mica sidewalk sparkles in the dark
And starts to freeze—or fry—and turns to foam.
At once the streetlights in the park go on.
Gas hisses from the trees—but it’s the wind.
The real world vanishes behind the fawn
That leaps to safety while the doe is skinned.
The statue of Saint Louis on Art Hill,
In front of the museum, turns into
A blue-eyed doe. Next it will breathe. Soon will
Be sighing, dripping tears as thick as glue.
Stags do that when the hunt has cornered them.
The horn is blown. Bah-ooo. Her mind a doe
Which will be crying soon at bay. The stem
Between the autumn leaf and branch lets go.
My mother suddenly began to sob.
If on
ly she could do that now. Oh try.
I feel the lock unlock. Now try the knob.
Sobbed uncontrollably. Oh try to cry.
How easily I can erase an error,
The typos my recalling this will cause,
But no correcting key erases terror.
One ambulance attendant flashed his claws,
The other plunged the needle in. They squeeze
The plunger down, the brainwash out. Bah-ooo.
Calm deepened in her slowly. There, they ease
Her to her feet. White Goddess, blond, eyes blue—
Even from two rooms away I see
The blue, if that is possible! Bright white
Of the attendants; and the mystery
And calm of the madonna; and my fright.
I flee, but to a mirror. In it, they
Are rooms behind me in our entrance hall
About to leave—the image that will stay
With me. My future was behind me. All
The future is a mirror in which they
Are still behind me in the entrance hall,
About to leave—and if I look away
She’ll vanish. Once upon a time, a fall
So long ago that they were burning leaves,
Which wasn’t yet against the law, I looked
Away. I watched the slowly flowing sleeves
Of smoke, the blood-raw leaf piles being cooked,
Sweet-smelling scenes of mellow preparation
Around a bloodstained altar, but instead
Of human sacrifice, a separation.
My blue-eyed doe! The severed blue-eyed head!
The windows were wide-open through which I
Could flee to nowhere—nowhere meaning how
The past is portable, and therefore why
The future of the past was always now
A treeless Art Hill gleaming in the snow,
The statue of Saint Louis at the top
On horseback, blessing everything below,
Tobogganing the bald pate into slop.
Warm sun, blue sky; blond hair, blue eyes; of course
They’ll shave her head for the lobotomy,
They’ll cut her brain, they’ll kill her at the source.
When she’s wheeled out, blue eyes are all I see.
The bandages—down to her eyes—give her
A turbaned twenties look, but I’m confused.
There were no bandages. I saw a blur.
They didn’t touch a hair—but I’m confused.
I breathe mist on the mirror … I am here—
Blond hair I pray will darken till it does,
Blue eyes that will need glasses in a year—
I’m here and disappear, the boy I was …
The son who lifts his sword above Art Hill;
Poems 1959-2009 Page 24