Speak for yourself, I thought redundantly, for I'm
the one with the typewriter and gall to speak
for others. Tony's his only clientele. "I didn't rob
your place," he yelled, "and stay away from Shirley."
The wonder is how much we manage to hang on to.
Even if a robbery's been designed to hurt,
no thief would know to take the postcard
of Renoir's Little Blue Nude I'd taped above my desk.
She sits, all wist and inner weather on her creamy
skin, her face bemused beneath the ginger helmet
of her hair, wholly alert to what the poets once
called reverie, perhaps, though from the relaxed
attention of her body I'd say she was listening
to beloved music. If I could choose for her,
I'd make it Ellington's 1940 recording
of "Cottontail," with Ben Webster on tenor.
If you'd been robbed, let's say, and rage ran through
you like a wind, and you balled your fists and sat
and stared at them, as though you'd forget their name,
you who are so good with words, rehearsing irate
speeches for Tony, wrapped in fury like a flower
in a bud; and also feeling impotent, a chump
with a mouthful of rant, a chump who knows
even now he'll eat the rage, the loss, the sour
tang of moral superiority to Tony,
the times he'll tell the story and list what Tony
stole ... If you could see all those words coming
and know even now you'd eat them, every one,
you could turn to music you love, not as a mood-
altering drug nor as a consolation, but because
your emotions had overwhelmed and tired you
and made you mute and stupid, and you rued
them every one. But when Webster kicks into
his first chorus, they're back, all your emotions,
every one, and in another language, perhaps
closer to their own. "There you are," you say
to them silently, and you're vivid again, the way
we're most ourselves when we know surely
what we love, and whom. The little blue nude
has a look on her face like that. Once
when I was fussing with my tapes, Tony came by
to sell me mineral water and envelopes.
"You writing a book on jazz or what?" "No,"
I said, "I just love these." I didn't say why,
because I didn't talk that way to Tony,
and because, come to think of it, I didn't know
that day, I didn't ask myself until later,
afterthought being the writer's specialty
and curse. But that conversation explains why
he took the tapes and left the typewriter.
Writing's my scam, he thought, and music my love.
The dogs come snuffling and scrabbling back.
This time of night the building quiets down,
the hour of soliloquists. Even with walls this thin
the neighbors don't complain when I type late.
"Still working on that book?" they ask.
"What's it about?" one asked. I didn't know
that day, I didn't ask myself until later.
It's a reverie on what I love, and whom,
and how I manage to hold on to them.
Onions
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them.
It's true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there's nothing to an onion
but skin, and it's true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It's there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
Straight Life
There's grit in the road, and pumice,
and grease in which too many stale fish
have been fried. There are twists of breadcrust
with flourishing settlements of gray-blue
and iridescent green, and there's a wedding
band a hurt woman flung from a taxi window.
There's loneliness richer than topsoil
in Iowa, and there are swales and hollows
of boredom that go by as if trundled
by stagehands, unloved and worse,
unnoticed. Scenery, we call it, and land-
scape, when boredom is on us like a caul.
The bells of cats dead so long their names
have been forgot are bulldozed into the road,
and tendrils of rusting chrome and flecks
of car paint with ambitious names—
British Racing Green and Claret.
Cinders and tar and sweat and tax hikes
and long-term bonds. Like a village
at the base of an active volcano,
the road is built of its history.
It's we who forget, who erred and swerved
and wandered and drove back and forth
and seemed aimless as teenagers,
though one of us steered the whole time.
…
The way it happened, see, we played in Dallas,
the state fair, for some black dance. Cat with a beautiful
white suit, Palm Beach maybe, dancing his ass
off. You look up from the charts, you see that white suit
like a banner in the center of the floor. Next thing
you know there's a big circle of people moving
back, the way you throw a rock in water and it broadcasts
rings and rings, moving back. You travel
and you travel, some things you don't forget.
Two cats in the center, one of them the cat in the white
suit and suddenly the suit was soaked-through red.
…
Coleman Hawkins used to say he'd been born
on a ship, in no country at all, though I think
he said it to remind himself how torn he felt
between being American at heart and the way
Europeans treated black musicians. This life,
it's easy to feel you've been born on the road.
You know the fine coat of dust furniture grows
just standing there? We grow it traveling.
We're on the road and the road's on us.
I used to ask myself each morning where I was
but slowly learned to know—and this is how
you tell a man who's traveled some and paid
attention—by looking at the sky. A sky's
a fingerprint. All along the road the food's
the same and no two beds you hang your toes
over the end of are. That's when you've got
a bed. Some nights we just pulled the bus
off the road like a docked boat. After some towns
there'd be a scatter of spent condoms
where we'd parked, the way in a different life
you throw coins in a fountain, to come back
or not, whichever seemed the better luck.
…
I loved her earlobes and her niblet toes
and how the crook of her elbow smelled.
I loved one of her fingers most but a new
one every day. I loved how at the onset
of desire her eyes would go a little milky
the way water does just before the surface
of it shimmers when it starts to boil.
Telling how much I loved her made me talk
as well as I can play. One time she told me
what Dame Nellie Melba said: There's only
two things I like stiff, and one of them is Jell-o.
Then she let loose a laugh like a dropped
drawer of silverware. Here's what I said:
I love every juice and tuft and muscle
of you, honey, each nub and bog and fen,
each prospect and each view. That's what
I like to say I said, though where'd I learn
to talk like that? Same place I learned to play.
You know how people always ask each other
How you feel? You learn to look straight
at the answer without flinching, then spend
ten years to learn your instrument.
Good luck helps, too. Of course somewhere along
that line I let my sweetie slip away. Truth is,
that was by choice. But I was with her
when I learned how some things can't be fully
felt until they're said. Including this salute.
…
You shuffle into some dingebox and there's
an audience of six, three of them sober.
The chill fire of its name in neon bathes
the windows. In the mist outside, the stoplights
are hazy and big, like lazy memories of pleasure,
and as they change in their languorous sequence,
going green and going downtown, an explanation
beckons, but of what? Too late, it's gone. No use
in staring moodily out the window.
Whatever it is, it will be back. Tires slur
on the rainy pavement outside. You've never
looked into a mirror to watch the next thing
you do, but it would identify you to yourself
faster than anything you know. You can remember it,
and in advance, with a sure and casual
rapacity. You duck your left shoulder a little
and sweep your tongue in a slight crescent
first under your top lip, then over the bottom.
You lay a thin slather on the reed and take
n a few bars of breath. Emily Dickinson
wrote of Judge Otis Phillips Lord that Abstinence
from Melody was what made him die.
Music's only secret is silence. It's time
to play, time to tell whatever you know.
Time & Money (1995)
Grief
E detto l'ho perché doler ti debbia!
—Inferno, xxiv, 151
Snow coming in parallel to the street,
a cab spinning its tires (a rising whine
like a domestic argument, and then
the words get said that never get forgot),
slush and backed-up runoff waters at each
corner, clogged buses smelling of wet wool...
The acrid anger of the homeless swells
like wet rice. This slop is where I live, bitch,
a sogged panhandler shrieks to whom it may
concern. But none of us slows down for scorn;
there's someone's misery in all we earn.
But like a bur in a dog's coat his rage
has borrowed legs. We bring it home. It lives
like kin among the angers of the house,
and leaves the same sharp zinc taste in the mouth:
And I have told you this to make you grieve.
The Wolf of Gubbio
Not the walls of the furled city,
through which he drifted like malign sleet,
nor every vigilance, could stop him.
He came and rent some poor soul
to morsels and ate him. There was no help
nearby, so Saint Francis slogged
from Assisi to tame the wolf.
Sassetta painted this meeting.
The wolf, pert and teachable as Lassie,
has laid his licentious, vow-making right paw
in the saint's hand and meets with his
ochre eye the saint's chastening gaze.
The townspeople stand like a grove
and watch. Probably one of their faces
belonged to a patron who commissioned
Sassetta, but which face? Art remembers
a few things by forgetting many.
The wolf lived on in the nearby hills
but never ate, the story goes, another
citizen. Was Sassetta the last one,
then, to see on the piazza, like dropped
firewood, most of a leg and what may be
a forearm gnawed from both ends, lurid
with scarlet blood? None in the painting
looks at this carnage and bright waste,
nor thinks of the gnarled woods
in which the pewter-colored wolf
makes his huge home, nor measures with what work
each stone was prized from the furious ground
to build each house in Gubbio
and to lay a piazza atop the town
and to raise above it a tower.
Mingus at The Showplace
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
other things, but as it happened they were wrong.
So I made him look at the poem.
"There's a lot of that going around," he said,
and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He glowered
at me but he didn't look as if he thought
bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they'd plot
to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later
that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.
"We've suffered a diminuendo in personnel,"
he explained, and the band played on.
The Bear at the Dump
Amidst the too much that we buy and throw
away and the far too much we wrap it in,
the bear found a few items of special
interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon,
the bone from a leg of lamb. He'd rock back
lightly onto his rear paws and slash
open a plastic bag, an
d then his nose—
jammed almost with a surfeit of rank
and likely information, for he would pause—
and then his whole dowsing snout would
insinuate itself a little way
inside. By now he'd have hunched his weight
forward slightly, and then he'd snatch it back,
trailed by some tidbit in his teeth. He'd look
around. What a good boy am he.
The guardian of the dump was used
to this and not amused. "He'll drag that shit
every which damn way," he grumbled
who'd dozed and scraped a pit to keep that shit
where the town paid to contain it.
The others of us looked and looked. "City
folks like you don't get to see this often,"
one year-round resident accused me.
Some winter I'll bring him down to learn
to love a rat working a length of subway
track. "Nope," I replied. Just then the bear
decamped for the woods with a marl of grease
and slather in his mouth and on his snout,
picking up speed, not cute (nor had he been
cute before, slavering with greed, his weight
all sunk to his seated rump and his nose stuck
up to sift the rich and fetid air, shaped
like a huge, furry pear), but richly
fed on the slow-simmering dump, and gone
into the bug-thick woods and anecdote.
My Father's Body
First they take it away,
for now the body belongs to the state.
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