Search Party

by William Matthews

  Then they open it

  to see what may have killed it,

  and the body had arteriosclerosis

  in its heart, for this was an inside job.

  Now someone must identify the body

  so that the state may have a name

  for what it will give away,

  and the funeral people come in a stark car

  shaped like a coffin with a hood

  and take the body away,

  for now it belongs to the funeral people

  and the body's family buys it back,

  though it lies in a box at the crematorium

  while the mourners travel and convene.

  Then they bring the body to the chapel, as they call it,

  of the crematorium, and the body lies in its box

  while the mourners enter and sit

  and stare at the box, for the box

  lies on a pedestal where the altar would be

  if this were a chapel.

  A rectangular frame with curtains at the sides

  rises from the pedestal,

  so that the box seems to fill a small stage,

  and the stage gives off the familiar

  illusion of being a box with one wall torn away

  so that we may see into it,

  but it's filled with a box we can't see into.

  There's music on tape and a man in a robe

  speaks for a while and I speak

  for a while and then there's a prayer

  and then we mourners can hear the whir

  of a small motor and curtains slide

  across the stage. At least for today,

  I think, this is the stage that all the world is,

  and another motor hums on

  and we mourners realize that behind

  the curtains the body is being lowered,

  not like Don Giovanni to the flames

  but without flourish or song

  or the comforts of elaborate plot,

  to the basement of the crematorium,

  to the mercies of the gas jets

  and the balm of the conveyor belt.

  The ashes will be scattered,

  says a hushed man in a mute suit,

  in the Garden of Remembrance,

  which is out back.

  And what's left of a mild, democratic man

  will sift in a heap with the residue of others,

  for now they all belong to time.

  Time

  I did but taste a little honey with the end of the rod

  that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die.

  —1 Samuel 14:43

  Not sated first, then sad (the two words branch,

  not far apart, from the same Indo-

  European root), but kindled by longing,

  you amble to the window and look out.

  You feel like fire's held breath just before

  fire flares out from matter, but no flare comes.

  And look, a blurred oval, a ghostly kiss

  has formed on the window from the breath you

  didn't hold. You've got time on your hands; you've

  been caught red-handed with the blues and by

  the worst detective in the world, yourself.

  "It was blind luck, really. I knew his next

  failure to move, each mope, each sullen shrug.

  I knew his thoughts as if they were my own."

  Cameras flash; shutters fall like tiny

  guillotines. "I don't know how. Goethe said,

  If I knew myself, I'd run." Of course I

  didn't, and that's what broke the case open.

  Only one paper used the Goethe quote:

  MYSTERY WOMAN HAUNTS SELF-KNOWLEDGE CASE,

  the headline blared. The article gave her

  name as Gerta. "About this Swiss beauty,

  nothing else is known." The time had come

  (but from where? hadn't it been here always?)

  for me to forgo my lush indolence.

  There are places things go to be forgot:

  the tip of the tongue, the back of the mind,

  retirement colonies like the Linger

  Longer Mobile Home Park, and memory.

  Perhaps I should plan how to spend my

  time, but wouldn't that, like a home movie,

  prove but a way to waste the same time twice?

  Maybe time's just one more inexact way

  to gauge loss? But we keep more than we think.

  Suppose a TV signal adventures

  for years in space, then hits something solid

  and adventures back. You've dozed off in front

  of your TV—you've been wasting some time—

  and see on the screen not flickering blue

  snow but the test pattern of an El

  Paso station twenty-nine years defunct,

  stark as a childhood taunt or remembered

  genitals. What steady company you have:

  you got losses like these, you'll need two trucks

  next time you move. You couldn't bear to throw

  them out, you said (remember?). And now what have

  you got? A gorged attic like a head cold,

  a basement clogged by waste. You can't "save time"

  this way or any. Nor, since it can't be

  owned, can it be stolen, though afternoon

  adulterers add to the tryst's fevers—

  the codes and lies, the sunlight sieved by blinds,

  the blank sheets and the ink at brim—the pleased

  guilt of having stolen time. What might they

  do for time, those from whom it got stolen?

  They bowl, they shop, they masturbate before

  a nap (a spot of body work at O'

  Nan's Auto Service), they finish their day's

  work. To begin thinking about time, we might

  take all the verbs we like to think we do

  to time, and turn those verbs on us, and say

  that time wastes us, and time saves and buys us,

  that time spends us, and time marks and kills us.

  We live as the direct object of verbs

  we hoped we could command. Grammar school, they called

  it, and we couldn't wait to graduate.

  We puffed ourselves up like a cat striving

  sideways to look vast, or people who like

  to be right (may God thicken their tongues, or if

  they write, explode their pens). Now critics write

  of my "mature work" (When, the petulant boy

  in me wants to know, will they publish theirs?),

  and my male friends my age and I

  scan the obits every day. The word

  "time" now seems, often enough, the nickname

  for the phrase "time left." Suppose I didn't

  go from the paper to my desk. Instead

  I chaperoned my tumor every

  day to radiology by subway

  and rancored home with it by bus. Suppose

  my job was to be nauseated and bald

  from chemotherapy and still to make

  the plucky joke when Procter & Gamble

  sent me, "Resident," a beauty about whom

  nothing else was known, hair-care products.

  "Luster," the prose whispered, and "sheen." My head

  looked like an egg and the prose said "coupon."

  I'd have ceased calling my anxious frets about

  the future "thought." On Tuesday I'd wake up

  and I'd say "Tuesday," my whole essay on time.

  I think that's what I'd do. I'd soldier through

  the fear and fell depressions. I'd call on

  what those critics like nicely to call "wit,"

  i.e., the whole compressed force of my rage

  and love. I'd invent whatever it took

  to get me through or dead, whichever came

  first. And yet we must remember this:

  dire time hectors us
along with it, and so

  we might consider thanks. Wednesday. Thursday.

  Thus water licks its steady way through stone.

  President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984

  Pomp churned through midtown like a combine,

  razing a path to the Waldorf-Astoria.

  At 34th and 10th a black man

  drizzled a wan froth of soap and dirt

  on my windshield and paused for me to pay

  to get it squeegeed off. He just wanted,

  he said, to make an honest living.

  I gave a dollar and he gave thanks; we

  knew the going rate, and so we went,

  but only a few feet. The light shone red.

  The Waldorf bellboys (ages 23—

  59) waited, too, and men in shades

  and shiny suits with walkie-talkies

  along the route the limousine would take.

  Our creamiest streets were cordoned off so

  pomp could clot them, and the walkie-talkies

  sputtered each to each. What had the black man

  or I to do with this peacockery?

  The light turned green. Under a soot-slurred sky

  we gave each other a parting glance.

  What nation you can build on that, was ours.

  Mingus at The Half Note

  Two dozen bars or so into "Better Get It

  in Your Soul," the band mossy with sweat,

  May 1960 at The Half Note, the rain

  on the black streets outside

  dusted here and there by the pale pollen

  of the streetlights. Blue wreaths

  of smoke, the excited calm

  of the hip in congregation, the long

  night before us like a view and Danny

  Richmond so strung out the drums

  fizz and seethe. "Ho, hole, hode it,"

  Mingus shouts, and the band clatters

  to fraught silence. There's a twinge

  in the pianist's shoulder, but this time

  Mingus focuses like a nozzle

  his surge of imprecations on a sleek

  black man bent chattering across

  a table to his lavish date:

  " This is your heritage and if you

  don' wanna listen, then you got

  someplace else you'd better be."

  The poor jerk takes a few beats

  to realize he'll have to leave

  while we all watch before another

  note gets played. He glowers dimly

  at Mingus, like throwing a rock

  at a cliff, then offers his date

  a disdained arm, and they leave in single

  file (she's first) and don't

  look back, nor at each other.

  "Don't let me constrain you revelers,"

  Mingus says, and then, tamed by his own rage

  for now, he kick-starts the band:

  "One, two, one two three four."

  Men at My Father's Funeral

  The ones his age who shook my hand

  on their way out sent fear along

  my arm like heroin. These weren't

  men mute about their feelings,

  or what's a body language for?

  And I, the glib one, who'd stood

  with my back to my father's body

  and praised the heart that attacked him?

  I'd made my stab at elegy,

  the flesh made word: the very spit

  in my mouth was sour with ruth

  and eloquence. What could be worse?

  Silence, the anthem of my father's

  new country. And thus this babble,

  like a dial tone, from our bodies.

  The Rookery at Hawthornden

  Along this path Ben Jonson rode to visit

  William Drummond. What fun those two dour

  poets must have made for one another.

  Under a sycamore Drummond waited.

  "Welcome, royal Ben."

  "Greetings, Hawthornden."

  The good fellowship of poets always

  has, like death jokes on the eve of battle,

  gravel in its craw.

  Back from Bonnyrigg

  I've come with a liter of the Famous

  Grouse for my room. The six weeks I have here

  to read, to write, to amble and to fester

  with solitude, a slut for company

  and bearing like a saucer of water

  my intimates, my bawds, my pretty ones,

  the words I wrote that didn't mutiny—

  six such weeks are hard to find, and hard

  to fill. Who scrawled between pastoral poems

  a few rude lines to warn us? The blotched, mottled

  sky above the glen, the rain, the rusty fox,

  the melodious gargle of Scots talk,

  the pale scumbled blue forget-me-nots—

  all these can be but a reminder that

  the world's a poem we'll not learn how to write.

  Not portly Horace on his Sabine Farm,

  that Yaddo-for-one, nor all the English

  poets who admired but never sheared a sheep

  nor steered a plow through soil's dun bilge and shoals

  of stone.

  Yet from the rookery the shrill

  inventions rise. From the entire black bell

  of each bird the rasped song clappers forth.

  Verse is easy and poetry is hard.

  The brash choir, like a polyphonic heart,

  beats loudly in the trees and does not ask

  what poetry can do, infamous for making

  nothing happen. The rooks and I rejoice

  not to be mute. The day burgeons with raucous

  song about the joy of a song-stuffed throat.

  Note Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers' Conference

  Welcome, good heart. I hope you like—I did—

  the bust of Schiller, the reproduction

  of Caspar David Friedrich's painting

  of Coleridge, with his walking stick, gazing

  over the peaks of German thought (the Grand

  Teutons?), and the many Goethe pinups.

  The life of the mind is celebrated here,

  so why's the place so sad? I hate the way

  academic life can function as a sort

  of methadone program for the depressed,

  keeping the inmates steadily fatigued

  and just morose enough that a day's full

  measure of glum work gets done. Cowbirds

  like us will have to put in our two weeks' worth

  before the studied gloom begins to leak

  forth from the files, the books, the post cards sent

  back by colleagues from their Fulbright venues,

  Tübingen, Dubrovnik, Rome, and Oslo.

  Of course our own offices wait for us

  and fall is coming on. To teach, Freud warned,

  is one of three impossible jobs

  (the others are to govern and to cure).

  To teach what you know—laughter, ignorance,

  curiosity, and the erotic thrall

  of work as a restraint against despair—

  comes as close to freedom as anyone pays

  wages for. Outside the classroom such brave words

  ring dully, for failures of tolerance

  coat the halls as plaque clogs an artery.

  Cruelty doesn't surprise a human

  much, but the drenched-in-sanctimony prose

  by which the cruel christen cruelty

  with a better name should rot in the mouths

  of the literate. The louder they quote

  Dr. Johnson, the faster I count the spoons.

  Well, the grunts always kvetch about the food

  and the rank morals of their officers.

  Who'd want to skip that part? In the office,

  though, alone with the books, post cards, busts
,

  and sentimental clutter, we feel rage

  subside and joy recede. These dusty keepsakes

  block from view the very love they're meant to be

  an emblem of, the love whose name is books.

  Suppose we'd been kidnapped by the space

  people and whisked around the galaxies,

  whirred past wonders that would render Shakespeare

  mute and make poor stolid Goethe whimper

  like a beagle. The stellar dust, debris

  agleam in the black light, the fell silence,

  the arrogantly vast scale of the creation,

  the speed of attack and decay each blurred,

  incised impression made, the sure greed

  we'd feel to describe our tour, and how we'd fail

  that greed ... And then we're back, alone

  not with the past but with how fast the past

  eludes us, though surely, friend, we were there.

  Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959

  The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils

  of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue,

  particulate, the opposite of dew.

  We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls

  had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt

  like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped

  and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose.

  But "like us" is wrong: we had no result

  three nights out of three: so we had heroes.

  And " we" is wrong, for I knew none by name

  among that hazy company unless

  I brought her with me. This was loneliness

  with noise, unlike the kind I had at home

  with no clock running down, and mirrors.

  The Rented House in Maine

  At dawn, the liquid clatter of rain

  pocks the bay and stutters on the roof.

  Even when it's this gray, the first slant light