Search Party
Page 15
predicts across the rug gaunt shadows
of the generic paper birds
my landlord's pasted to the eastern wall,
all glass, to fend specific birds
from bonking themselves dull or worse
against the bright blare of false sky.
From the bay the house must look
like a grade-school homeroom gussied up
for parents' night. I like to build
a small fire first thing in the morning,
drink some coffee, drive to town,
buy the Times, drive back to embers
the color of canned tomato soup
(made not with water but with milk).
In this house I fell—no, hurled myself—
in love, and elsewhere, day by day,
it didn't last. Tethered to lobster traps,
buoys wobble on the bay. On the slithering
surface of the water, the rain seems
to explode—chill shrapnel, and I look
away. Embers and cool coffee. Matter,
energy, the speed of light: the universe
can be explained by an equation. Everything
that goes from one side of the equal sign
is exactly replaced from the other; i.e.,
nothing much happens at a speed so fast
we scarcely notice it, but so steadily
the math always checks out. This is thought
as I know and love it. Why did that marriage
fail? I know the reasons and count the ways.
The clouds with squalls in their cheeks,
like chaws or tongues, have broken up.
The fire is down, the coffee cold, the sun is up.
Mingus in Diaspora
You could say, I suppose, that he ate his way out,
like the prisoner who starts a tunnel with a spoon,
or you could say he was one in whom nothing was lost,
who took it all in, or that he was big as a bus.
He would say, and he did, in one of those blurred
melismatic slaloms his sentences ran—for all
the music was in his speech: swift switches of tempo,
stop-time, double time (he could talk in 6/8),
"I just ruined my body." And there, Exhibit A,
it stood, that Parthenon of fat, the tenant voice
lifted, as we say, since words are a weight, and music.
Silence is lighter than air, for the air we know
rises but to the edge of the atmosphere.
You have to pick up The Bass, as Mingus called
his, with audible capitals, and think of the slow years
the wood spent as a tree, which might well have been
enough for wood, and think of the skill the bassmaker
carried without great thought of it from home
to the shop and back for decades, and know
what bassists before you have played, and know
how much of this is stored in The Bass like energy
in a spring and know how much you must coax out.
How easy it would be, instead, to pull a sword
from a stone. But what's inside the bass wants out,
the way one day you will. Religious stories are rich
in symmetry. You must release as much of this hoard
as you can, little by little, in perfect time,
as the work of the body becomes a body of work.
Tomorrow
When the tubes in the radio had refurled
for the night their flickering orange
filamental tongues; and when the fountain
of bedtalk he could hear through the wall
to his parents' room stopped gurgling,
so that he heard the wind, like a comb
with a few teeth broken, rake the papery corn-
stubble before it rose to roll a tattoo
against the skin of his window; then the boy
knew he was on his own, except for his
dopey kitten, Asterisk, and he grew
sore afraid. While the kitten teetered across
the headboard of his bed like a high-wire
walker, placing each paw where it had fit
easily when she'd been smaller, holding
her breath (Tuna Dinner), scrabbling across
with two near-falls, he lay face down, fingers
knit across the back of his head against
her flailing claws if she should topple, but
she had not. She sat in her Egyptian
doorstop pose at the end of the headboard.
And that meant he could see her, dimly, but
he could. The dark that had gathered itself
so casually—a swatch from under
the eaves, a tatter from the dry creekbed,
a burgeoning stain in the east near dusk
like a gaggle of gossips—suddenly
was black dye, and all the world a smother
of settling cloth from which a kitten
wriggled free, and thus a sleepless boy.
Money
We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely: the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.
—Numbers 11:4
"Honey, I don't want to shock you,
but white people aren't white,
they're pink," a rich man's cook
told me when I was six. She was beating
egg whites for lemon meringue pie,
which the boss loved. Well then,
I thought, I'll sing for my supper,
and it worked then, though later
I got Jell-O often, and for so
little grew rancid with charm.
I rode the bike and flung the daily
paper from it. I got the grades
and brought them home. I caught
the ball and threw it back and fed
the dog while the ball was in flight,
and didn't ask, "Have I got this right?"
There were those who were good
for nothing and I set myself apart
from them. I'd make myself at home
here, like a weevil in the flour,
or like the mouse behind the stove.
The cat that killed that mouse was so
lazy and fat that it lay before
its bowl to eat and lived to be sixteen.
I remember my first raise. I smoldered
with a stupid, durable pleasure for weeks:
this stuff is powerful, like alcohol,
I thought, but it wasn't stuff, it was numbers,
nothing more than squiggles of dried ink,
though they were like new muscles
(from the Latin musculus, "little
mouse," for the ripple under the skin).
There were people said to be smart about
money because they had a good supply,
like those who were known to have good taste
since they shared the taste of those who said so.
I didn't want smart, though knowledge sticks
to me like dust to a dog—I'm a kind
of intellectual Velcro. Still, I do
sniff around, because that's what I wanted,
my snout to the confounded, uric ground.
"Led by the nose," even your friends will say
if you can't, or won't, describe what you want.
Or "driven," it doesn't seem to matter
which, so long as the engine isn't you.
"A simple farmboy with a smattering
of Latin, my ass," Friend B tells Friend A.
"Did you notice the shoes on that peacock?"
Friendship, too, is a species of money.
You get what you need by never knowing
what you want; you ramble like a sentence
growing ever longer and carefully
avoiding verbs, so if you imagine
the exact verb you've got a space for it,
and the fit's so tight you'd not know
there'd ever been a gap but for the ache,
which is yours always, like a phantom limb.
If you're rich enough you can be haunted
by all the dross you ever wanted,
and if you're poor enough you itch
for money all the time and scratch yourself
with anger, or, worse, hope. These thoughts
aren't dark; they're garishly well lit. Let's see
what's on TV The news—murder and floods
and something heartwarming about a dog—
and then a commercial, but for what?
A woman in a blue silk dress eases
into a gray sedan and swirls it through turn
after turn alongside the Pacific.
She drives it right onto the beach
while the sun subsides and the ocean laces
and unlaces at her feet. She walks and pouts,
hooking her slate-colored pumps on her
left index finger. She'll ruin her new
hose and doesn't care. She purses her bruised-fruit
lips, and the sea, like a dull dog,
brings back what we throw out. What do
we want, and how much will we pay
to find out, and how much never to know?
What's wrong with money is what's wrong with love:
it spurns those who need it most for someone
already rolling in it. But only
the idea of justice is about
being just, and it's only an idea.
Money's not an abstraction; it's math
with consequences, and if it's a kind
of poetry, it's another inexact way,
like time, to measure some sorrow we can't
name. The longer you think about
either, the stupider you get,
while dinner grows tepid and stale.
The dogs have come in like a draft
to beg for scraps and nobody's
at the table. The father works on tax forms.
The mother folds laundry and hums
something old and sweetly melancholy.
The children drift glumly towards fracas.
None of these usual doldrums will lift
for long if they sit down to dinner, but
there's hunger to mollify, and the dogs.
The Generations
I've been poor, but since I'm an American
I hated it. Bills drifted through the mail
slot of the door like snow, and desperate
people who'd hired themselves out to dun
their fellow debtors phoned during dinner
to extract shame and promises from me.
"Who called, my sweet?" my wife would wanly ask.
Her hopes were dwindling for a second dress.
I'd not carried a hod, nor laid a brick,
nor tamped tar to a roof in August,
nor squeezed my body into a freshly
gouged trench in the street to thaw a city
pipe while my co-workers clomped their feet
against the cold and yelled moral support
at me. I had a typewriter and was
that dreadful thing, a serious young
literary man. The void and I stared
at each other, and I showed my throat.
In that same throat one day I'd find my voice.
I needed time, I thought, and money, too,
but I was wrong. The voice had been there all
along. I needed work that milled me
to flour and to rage. I needed to know
not only that the boss would never pay
enough, but also that if I were boss
I wouldn't pay enough unless I grew
to be a better man than I was then.
I needed not to turn my back to my
then wife and mollify, sotto voce
as if I were planning a tryst,
the wretch whose dire job it was to nag me.
I needed to stand short—a tiny man,
a stick figure, as my young sons, little
Shakespeares, drew me: "the poor, bare, forked
animal." Of course they draw everyone
that way, I thought, mincing garlic
one torpid afternoon, and then I saw
that they were right. Mottled by cat dander,
perfumed by peanut butter and wet sheets,
they were powerless enough to know
the radical equality of human
souls, but too coddled to know they knew it.
They could only draw it, and they blamed
their limited techniques for the great truth
that they showed, that we're made in the image
of each other and don't know it. How hard
we'll fight to keep that ignorance they had
yet to learn, and they had me as teacher.
Cancer Talk
Of course it's not on the X-rays: tumors
have no bones. But thanks to the MRI
we see its vile flag luffing from your spine.
To own a fact you buy many rumors:
is the blob benign, or metastatic
to the bone and fatal, or curable?
There will be tests. How good were you in school?
Cells are at work on your arithmetic.
You don't have to be a good soldier.
Lymphoma is exquisitely sensitive
to radiation, but it's not what you have.
How easy it once seemed to grow older.
Don't you hate the phrase "growth experience"?
Big as a grapefruit? Big as a golf ball?
You'll learn new idioms (how good in school
were you?) like "protocol" and "exit burns."
"You'll be a cure," a jaunty resident
predicts. What if you could be you, but rid
of the malignant garrison? How would
it feel to hear in your own dialect—
not Cancer Babble but clear Broken Heart?
Bald, queasy, chemotherapeutic beau-
ty, welcome home from Port-a-Cat and eu-
phemism. Let the healing candor start.
A Night at the Opera
"The tenor's too fat," the beautiful young
woman complains, "and the soprano
dowdy and old." But what if Otello's
not black, if Rigoletto's hump lists,
if airy Gilda and her entourage
of flesh outweigh the cello section?
In fairy tales, the prince has a good heart,
and so as an outward and visible
sign of an inward, invisible grace,
his face is not creased, nor are his limbs gnarled.
Our tenor holds in his liver-spotted
hands the soprano's broad, burgeoning face.
Their combined age is ninety-seven; there's
spittle in both pinches of her mouth;
a vein in his temple twitches like a worm.
Their faces are a foot apart. His eyes
widen with fear as he climbs to the high
B-flat he'll have to hit and hold for five
dire seconds. And then they'll stay in their stalled
hug for as long as we applaud. Franco
Corelli once bit Birgit Nilsson's ear
in just such a command embrace because
he felt she'd upstaged him. Their costumes weigh
fifteen pounds apiece; they're poached in sweat
and smell like fermenting pigs; their voices rise
and twine not from beauty, nor from the lack
of it, but from the hope for accuracy
and passion, both. They have to hit the note
and the emotion, both, with the one poor
arrow of the voice. Beauty's for amateurs.
Uncollected Poems (1982�
��1997)
Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu
He was Chinese or Japanese or haole;
he knew someone powerful, the neighbors
hated the idea but what could they do?
By the time they knew they'd been screwed
it was too late to protest or profit.
Everyone nods. The story's got all the right
parts: real estate, corruption and race
niftily braided, and the knowing tone
in which the losers joke about lotteries.
And the prices? Fat! Fat! Fat!
to quote Wallace Stevens,
who knew that money, too,
is a kind of poetry, and surely
it is, for even the battered dollar,
decried and squandered everywhere,
is tethered to the gravity
of matter and endurance
and thins at its gas-lacy tip
towards abstraction and pure vision,
just like the trees on which money
famously refuses to grow.
It refuses to grow on the banyan,
that vegetal city complete with suburban sprawl;
it refuses to grow on the sago palm,
the ti, the eucalyptus, the koa;
it's not to be found in the simmer
and rust and clatter of the rain forest,
nor high in the beachfront palmtufts,
nor in the anthology of trees