absurd to use a ballpoint pen
for a task like this, a challenge,
for which he’d also bought a new,
but antique, rolltop desk recently
restored, with matching chair,
also not cheap, and for which
he’d renovated the attic room with
pine-paneled walls, bookshelves,
and a good light for his new office
or weekend office, a place planned
for many years, even before college,
back in high school in fact, a resolve
rare in his life, but about which
he’d dreamed in free moments
at work, and which kept him
sane during those tedious years
of doing the taxes for strangers,
but now at last begun, excitingly
begun, as he leaned forward with
pen raised to put down on paper
the first word of his first novel.
Jump
Then he trips and falls splat on the walk,
tangling his feet, jumping too quickly
from crack to crack, leaps that felt like
flying as he pushed off with red Keds,
sneakers got that morning with money
from collecting empties, selling seeds,
candy door to door, shoveling sidewalks
in winter, raking leaves and of course
help from those above, being how he
regards his mom and dad, those above,
sounding at once cordial, but distant,
which was how he liked it, a decent
separation from the ones who held
the other end of the leash, those above;
galloping down the block, knowing
the names of dogs in every house,
a few nice, a few not; feeling his body’s
Superboy power when he had earlier
slammed open the front door, sprinted
across the porch and leapt with arms
outstretched; a fighter jet, nearly flying,
but only jumping, a boy leaping, having
not yet grasped the line that separates
what might happen from what might not.
What Happened?
Taking first a morsel of squash,
then a bit of bread—an elegant
gray rat with glossy pelt, steps
lightly across the compost heap,
his best loved spot, unaware
of the source of such largesse,
not having linked these gifts
to the mother who wears a path
from house to dump, or from
the disgusted to the grateful
as inside the house her toddler
flicks another splop of beets
onto the floor with carrots soon
to follow; what fills the child
with indignation is for the rat
attained ambition, a trickle down
bounty, or so the rich might
have us think as they dole out
peanuts to the poor, making
the mom a middle-class flunky
who believes she’s doing goodly
work. Is this the case? Not quite.
Instead she asks what happened,
as she recalls photos from the past:
her son’s birth, her wedding, college,
winding her way back to fourth grade,
to one of those frigid winter days
when half the kids are dreaming
and she maps out a future of slashing
through a tangle of Amazon jungle,
a deadly snake in one hand, eager
to capture a jaguar with the other.
Philosophy
Nihilism, but not in a negative
sense—such was his thought,
what else to call it? Like snow
inside a novelty snow globe,
vague possibility descended
from probability, descended
from likelihood and certainty.
Now not even air. Those great
words discussed in college—
truth, beauty, justice, which
had come to embarrass him,
like teasing bare-breasted
girls in postcards sent from
Polynesian islands that each
year he had found less likely;
absolutes faded like old shirts,
as still he tried to create from
stray thoughts as if out of wood-
chips and mud, the old certainties
he once loved, the believable lie.
Melodrama
A gunshot: the trigger so light
he’d hardly known he pulled it;
another man’s pistol grabbed from
an antique table with clawed feet
that he had bought last week—
before the fight and her departure—
bought driving to Memphis, the late
honeymoon they had been planning,
not realizing the antique salesman
was such a rascal, the same rascal
who’d shown up at their wedding
in Knoxville, oh, two months back,
a wedding in an art gallery with
watercolors by his cousin, delicate,
gray landscapes of the Smokies,
the cousin who’d brought the friend
nobody knew, an antique dealer
who flirted with his wife, his bride,
a girl he had loved since high school,
since tenth-grade history, the teacher—
whose name he couldn’t remember—
who he’d once helped change a tire
on her van when she broke down
high up on the parkway and where
the boy had stared across the valley,
as if at a string of tomorrows, their
abundant on-goingness to the haze-
shaded horizon, an April morning,
the valley with its meandering river,
white barns, cows like black pinpricks.
Exercise
Luckily, he hadn’t broken his neck,
had fallen instead into tall grass
when he’d slipped from the saddle
after letting go the reins, an accident,
but even so his first time on a horse,
a ten-year-old gelding, chestnut
with one white stocking, guaranteed
to be slow and responsible along
the trails through the pine woods;
a stable they saw each day, driving
into the city where he still worked,
having sworn the previous evening
to change his life, but nothing too
drastic, only some mild exercise
to please his wife, who never quite
bullied him, who surely loved him,
and who, he knew, deserved better;
a small gesture taking less than half
an hour, because what was the word
she had shouted at him? Sedentary.
Failure
I’m sorry, I’m expecting someone else,
speaking as he stood in front of her table,
but not raising her head, as he stuttered,
May I, May I . . . sweat beading his brow,
having just nearly tripped over the curb,
as he stepped forward, intent on asking,
May I buy you lunch? . . . gasping for breath
from sprinting across four lanes packed
with cabs, which he had side-stepped
and leapt across, to frustrate their wish
to squash him flat, as he again repeated,
Would you join me tonight for dinner?—
and this after he’d been compelled to wait
for the turtle-advance of an uptown bus,
the exhaust stranding him in an aggravated,
black cloud of e
xpectation, as he practiced
the phrase, I’d like to get to know you better,
deciding this was best after he had first seen
her figure, a green blouse off one shoulder,
the very raison d’état of his departure from
the further curb with his eyes focused upon
her outside table, convinced his wisest course
was to break loose of all timidity and shout,
I want to screw you till the cows come home,
sweet cakes; since hadn’t he been helpless
once he had seen her lovely and expectant—
robins twittering, tulips blooming—and his
ardent self all set to break out? He knew it.
Constantine XI
—May 29, 1453
And he was never seen on this earth again,
having rushed forward with sword raised
toward the crowd of Turks boiling through
the breach in the wall, after first casting off
his crown and purple robes, so to be taken
for a common soldier and thrown down
in a common grave, buried with the others
to keep the enemy from parading his head
proudly through the cities of their empire,
this being his only choice—The city has
fallen and I remain alive.—last of the last,
God’s representative on earth, ruling
a fragment of a city, still the seat of Rome
after eleven centuries, his army just a sliver
the size of the enemy’s hundred thousand,
some of his soldiers being priests, slaves,
shopkeepers, even women, still protecting
a scrapheap, once the richest, largest, and
most beautiful, to be sacked for three days,
universities destroyed, libraries destroyed,
palaces and churches, schools and gardens,
citizens hunted down and slaughtered.
What alternative but to rush forward?
Remember him when your time comes.
Literature
Just midnight. Footsteps stop
by the outside door. Inside
he keeps alert, feels the rapid
beating of his heart, listening
to feet scraping up the walk,
having heard a car door slam.
Who had he been expecting?
Nobody. He’d been reading
a novel by the fireplace, one
with scenes so violent they’d
stick in his head all week—
disembowelment, decapitation—
a book lent him by a neighbor
he’d never liked, who revved
his Harley Sunday mornings,
tossed around the trash cans;
a man with whom he’d fought only
this morning when his dog tore up
the black-eyed Susans, swearing
to murder the dog, which, for sure,
he’d never do, he only wanted
to scare the man, make him sweat,
but who that afternoon lent him
the book he couldn’t put down
that seized him like a rope squeezing
his throat. To make up, the man said,
to clean the slate; a man unknown
to tell the truth, who’d formed a plan
as fearful as murder, a stranger
at his door late at night, a sudden
shriek, and a book to soften him up.
You’ll love it, the neighbor said.
Jism
And shot his wad all over the wall,
but wasn’t that bound to happen
in the pitch black room when he’d
missed the correct orifice and fell
back, and she whooshing beneath him
like an engine building steam; this being
the trouble with arousal, the paradox
of rushing ahead of himself, the hasty
projection and hapless failure, because
it wasn’t the first time; and it took place
despite the pricey ointments, vitamins,
New Age meditation, stabs at distraction,
like imagining pushing a red Cadillac up
an icy parking ramp while the inevitable
debacle hung in the air like the dirigible
Hindenburg over Lakehurst, New Jersey,
before its own tumescence discharged
in flames; and so he quickly polished up
the old excuses: e.g., a superabundance
of passion, for didn’t she bring to mind
Anita Ekberg frolicking in Trevi Fountain,
a splashing that did the reverse of putting
a damper on his ardor, or he might boast
he’d blasted a warning shot across her bows,
or he frets about making a racket, getting
decrepit, feeling carsick, smelly armpits,
a list falling from likely to silly, as his fearless
Don Juan is morphed into a figure of fun?
Valencia
For Stuart Phillips
Droplets of water hang from the rusted ceiling
inside the butcher’s truck as clouds of steam
rise from six slick bodies, like prayers ascending
to an empty heaven; six bulls suspended upside
down from hooks, and stripped of their hides,
pink and wet, their black hooves jutting straight
out, like a lost argument’s second thoughts,
heads sawn off, severed necks nearly touching
the mix of water and blood, the floor’s lake:
accept this afterlife, the dead flesh still alight
from living exertion, vapor surrounded and
slashed open from where the pretty killers
had thrust their sharp points during a fifteen-
minute rush between certain accomplishment
and certain defeat; the work begun by a blare
of trumpets as the double doors banged open
and each creature took its turn—shiny, dark,
and self-assured—to charge a few steps into
the ring, then pause to acknowledge the crowd’s
shout, their great heads erect, the needle-tips
of their horns pivoting left and right—how strange
we must have looked to them—their front legs
all but dancing over freshly swept sand, and eager,
surely eager, like someone at the start of life.
Thanks
For Rick Mann
Your friend grabbing your wrist, as he hung
from the rusty metal ladder, calling out, Do
you need help?—the ladder fixed by bolts
to the concrete abutment sticking into
the river above the falls, your fingernails
dragging bit by bit over the rough stone
with your legs at the lip of plunging water,
and you being powerless to pull them back,
the current being too strong, grasping that
you’d soon be swept into the white cauldron
below—the result of not seeing the current
was pulling you into the center of the river,
as you’d half-swum, half-floated, supposing
a few strokes would take you to shore. So
what did you think might happen out of all
the decreasing possibilities? Why, nothing
at all, as you stared up at blue sky and trees
coming into full leaf, because why think
in such glorious weather? So you didn’t notice
you were gathering speed as you floated under
the small bridge; so you hadn’t considered
anything but pleasure when you first waded
into the water, leaving your sandals on the bank,
the current no more than a gentle tug, a dip
befo
re dinner, as you thought of the evening
ahead—your wife, a movie, a book—but not
of the river where many swam, but not past
the bridge; stepping into the river, secure
in your belief in ongoing tomorrows, which
was stupid, stupid, because soon you’d be
an instant from being swept over the falls.
Then would you still think you could determine
the end of an action at the start of an action
as you had done when drifting downstream,
because, really, what is the meaning of safety?
A dream, an ambition? Why, nothing at all.
PART FIVE
Persephone, Etc.
The man with silver hooks instead of hands
picks apart a pomegranate on a park bench
as the sun malingers about the sky. It is hot
in the plaza and royal palms bring no relief.
Wicked monkeys wank among the fronds.
See him as an ex-sailor whose risky ventures
gobbled up his tender digits. It’s market day
and treasure seekers haggle over odds and ends.
The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech Page 5