in the arboretum. Like the gods,
no matter what cultures, it's everywhere
and thus it can never be found.
I've read the classics, curious
about the gods, who seem to have problems
not different from ours, nor do they behave well.
And where are they now? The lush world
surrounds us. Could it be that they, too,
felt like exiles in the midst
of almost unforgettable beauty,
and took up the long work of forgetting?
Slow Work
You need something to tend that exacts a stately pace.
You could set type, dice vegetables for soup,
or knit a tiny sweater no faster than the baby
gestates for whom it's meant. Or translate Martial,
scrubbing the rust from your Latin. Then you could
spend a month in a writers' retreat, honing the barbed
tips of the stingers in Martial's undiligent
and antisocial bees, not Romans aswarm
but pains to be named later. You'd work on Martial
most of the day, time out for a thoughtful walk,
and sleep in a bed no wider than a stretcher
and dream of cognates and black smoke. The girl
on your left on the plane had explained
that her father was a shipping impresario
and had named a ship for her; she was on her way
back from whapping it on the butt with a magnum
of champagne. The woman on your right had asked
what you do when you finish a book. Write another?
Right she was. There's what we call the body of work
and it grows, by taken pains, suppler and more vivid.
The work of the body is to chafe and stiffen.
E lucevan le stelle
And the stars shone, and the earth unstoppered
its perfumes, the garden gate scrinched
open, footsteps lisped along the path
and they were hers, and she was mine.
And my hand shook the more slowly
I unwrapped and dawdlier I kissed her,
and her aromas rose, and the hour fled,
which is the way with hours.
And I've unveiled myself of any hope,
and death's steps rasp along the path,
and, like any star, I have nothing
to burn but the life I love.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clarinetist
I was a dull musician as a boy—
I sucked a reed as if it were my thumb—
but did that make me mute? A strangled joy
burbled in me like an inept glory
that music might release if I weren't dumb.
I was a bad musician as a boy,
but a boy has grandeurs: le jazz, c'est moi.
No matter that this kingdom didn't come
because I couldn't toot my strangled joy.
Mine's not a sad but a well-known story:
the clarinet requires only two thumbs.
I was a drab musician as a boy.
"The clarinet, young man, is not a toy,"
my patient teacher barked, his calm undone
by some simple piece I'd mangled. Joy
grew from work, patience and melancholy,
I now think. Good thing I was so stubborn,
a poor musician even as a boy,
and destitute before my strangled joy.
Debt
Money's job is to change hands fast, no flies
on it. As one in a bucket brigade—
and in each bucket a small rage of fire—
I pass it on. Industry on Parade,
they used to show us on gray grade-school days,
or The Timken Ball Bearing Story: garish
flames, fibrillating shadows, workers' faces
etched by sweat ... Kettle drumbeats, flourishes
of brass, music for the war on matter...
The workers were in place and the products
on parade, just as we sat and the film
spooled by. They made cars and we made trouble,
faces, spitballs. If we ever grew up,
we'd pay for this, Mrs. Updike sputtered.
Condoms Then
Trojan, Sheik—the names confirmed what we feared:
sex happened elsewhere to blatant raptors.
Condoms? Boyhood years, we called them rubbers.
Sometimes they broke, or slithered off, we heard,
if you "lost" your erection. (You don't
lose it, it melts. But then you may have seen
how pronouns slither, too: what do I mean
by "you"?) We carried them in our wallets
like rusting badges, or "shields," as the cops
say. "For protection from disease," the fine
print said. Walkers of dogs, mowers of grass,
rainy, blustering boys. "A piece of ass,"
we said, a slice of life. And who'd complain
about us? Wouldn't we soon grow up?
Condoms Now
are like a good hex: wearing a surgeon's
mask into the subway, drinking only
bottled water (though it be packaged by
descendants of the corporate huns
who mucked our rivers and scumbled our air),
fending off the world that set our parents'
tables and compounded their retirement
funds. There's something poisonous out there
we can't let in—or if it's here, let loose.
The world is too much with us? Not if we
sift through it like anorectic ghosts.
Our smirched, AIDS-riven, only world accosts
us with its mottled, usual beauty
daily. Can't we both take care and rejoice?
Phone Log
Sunday, 1:46 A.M., I'm up
tending the weedy garden of my desk
and the phone rings. No news at this hour's
good, so I try an insincere "Hello?"
There's a practiced pause and then a husked male
voice asks, the same flat stress on each word,
"How big is your cock?"
"You must have a wrong number," I quip,
and hang up, then sit half an hour thinking
what I might have said. "You mean right now?" Or,
"If you have to ask you can't afford it."
Or, ever the teacher, I might have plied
the Socratic method and asked him,
"How fleet is your pig?"
But next I think of dire phone calls I'd made
too late at night, drunk, curdled by regret
for my unloveliness, and how I'd known
as I picked up the phone, although I told
myself the opposite, that I had found
but a new way to reach out and touch my
old bone-loneliness.
Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow
I pass the big rigs on the upgrades;
they measle me with roadslush on the downslopes.
Skeins of snowflakes waver in my headlights
like curtains in a draft. Of course I can't see
the swatches of black ice I speed across,
but I can feel a slur—a tiny, stifled
shimmy, faster than a thought—in my rear
tires. File cabinets and mattresses hurtle
downhill. Stroudsburg: 32 miles.
Enough butter to slather a county surges
past me. We bottom out. Carting a few
books and an extra pair of shoes, I pass
the butter. Semis doze in the rest areas,
the orange cab lights stippled by snow,
while we who are close enough to sleep
to keep on driving toward it, keep on
driving toward it, although we're neither
here (Stroudsburg: 11
miles) nor there.
The Buddy Bolden Cylinder
It doesn't exist, I know, but I love
to think of it, wrapped in a shawl
or bridal veil, or, less dramatically,
in an old copy of the Daily Picayune,
and like an unstaled, unhatched egg
from which, at the right touch, like mine,
the legendary tone, sealed these long years
in the amber of neglect, would peal and re-
peal across the waters. What waters do
I have in mind? Nothing symbolic, mind you.
I meant the sinuous and filth-rich
Mississippi across which you could hear
him play from Gretna, his tone was so loud
and sweet, with a moan in it like you were
in church, and on those old, slow, low-down
blues Buddy could make the women jump
the way they liked. But it doesn't exist,
it never did, except as a relic
for a jazz hagiography, and all
we think we know about Bolden's music
is, really, a melancholy gossip
and none of it sown by Bolden, who
spent his last twenty-four years in Jackson
(Insane Asylum of Louisiana)
hearing the voices of people who spooked
him before he got there. There's more than one
kind of ghostly music in the air, all
of them like the wind: you can't see it
but you can see the leaves shiver in place
as if they'd like to turn their insides out.
The Memo
I want this up and running, the office
bully wrote, next Monday, and I insist
blah blah blah blah. Each blah stands for three
or four moronic insistences, because
a poem honors the non-reading hours
in its readers' lives by brevity, just
as grace uses far less time than dinner.
And this poem, presto, replaces the memo.
Gentle reader, you didn't need that shit.
You work hard, right? You wanna be the screen
on which some bozo you don't know projects
his lurid drama, Bozo: The Lean Years?
Or do you want to control your leisure?
If so you'll want to take this simple test.
Grandmother Talking
"Do the pelicans seem scarce to you?
The world is gorged with people and these poor
baggy, rumpled birds are fewer year
by year. They used to lurk—maybe to dry
their wings?—one to a dockpost all along
the bay. See how many posts are vacant?
I met a woman who's been twice married
to admirals but they both died. 'Well, you're
a killer,' I told her, 'aren't you?' And she
said, 'Yes, I am.' Well, what else could she say?
Cigarettes, I know now, stilled my husband's
heart and left me all this time. They're afraid
I'll fall on my back and squirm like a turtle
while no one comes, so I'm sentenced to this
walker. I hated to clump, but once I got
wheels for it I was off and dawdling,
going nowhere fast, since I'm going
somewhere so slow I often forget where
en route. I wish you'd stay longer, and your
pretty wife. You won't divorce her too, I hope?
Well, who'd have thought it, ninety-six? I packed
my heart like a sachet and married a man
from Cincinnati and look what it's all
come to. This, all of it, everything."
Grandmother, Dead at 99 Years and 10 Months
Everyone cheered her on
like a race horse
to make a hundred,
but when I asked
how she felt, she said,
without pause, "Old."
Two by two the young
with their ambitious
jitters bought the houses
her friends died out of.
The village ate and ate
and cleared its plate.
"Dearie, what are you doing
here?" her husband, dead now
thirty years, asked me one
Thanksgiving in the garage,
each of us bearing a flute
of champagne, Veuve Clicquot.
I loved him and so told
the truth. "Hiding." "Me too,"
he said; "I want to bring
us all together here,
but the garage is part of here."
We clinked glasses and drank.
Like the widow Clicquot
she amazed the menfolk
and, more gallingly, outlived them,
including two of her three sons.
Tough as a turtle, everyone
said, but if she fell on her back...
She'd lost control of her
bowels, checkbook and legs,
and everyone cheered her on.
I raise a glass
to her truant kidney
and to oblivion.
Names
Ten kinds of wolf are gone and twelve of rat
and not a single insect species.
Three sorts of skink are history and two
of minnow, two of pupfish, ten of owl.
Seventeen kinds of rail are out of here
and five of finch. It comforts us to think
the dinosaurs bought their farms all at once,
but they died at a rate of one species
per thousand years. Life in a faster lane
erased the speckled dace, the thicktail chub,
two kinds of thrush and six of wren, the heath
hen and Ash Meadows killfish. There are four
kinds of sucker not born any minute
anymore. The Christmas Island musk shrew
is defunct. Some places molt and peel so fast
it's a wonder they have any name:
the Chatham Island bellbird flew the coop
as did the Chatham Island fernbird, the
Lord Howe Island fantail and the Lord Howe
Island blackbird. The Utah Lake sculpin,
Arizona jaguar and Puerto
Rican caviomorph, the Vegas Valley
leopard frog and New Caledonian lorikeet?
They've hit the road for which there is no name
a mouth surrounds so well as it did theirs.
The sea mink's crossed the bar and the great auk's
ground time here was brief. Four forms the macaw
took are canceled checks. Sad Adam fills his lungs
with haunted air, and so does angry Eve:
they meant no name they made up for farewell.
They were just a couple starting out,
a place they could afford, a few laughs,
no champagne but a bottle of rosé.
In fact Adam and Eve are not their names.
I Let a Song Go out of My Heart
I bruised my beloved's heart
by inattention and saw the smolder
in her eyes, too late, of course, for
hadn't I taught myself not to watch
myself not pay attention to her?
And for what? The sump of silence,
the tatty ruths of loneliness.
When love drew near I threw salt
over my shoulder. Accidente.
For dross, for cigarette ash, for the scent
of my own farts. For dust to which we must
all return, but to which we need not speed.
Once the siege is done, the fort becomes a prison.
So I've made this dirge by which I can
begin to teach myself to sing again.
After All (1998)
Mingus in Shadow
What you see in his face in the last
phot
ograph, when ALS had whittled
his body to fit a wheelchair, is how much
stark work it took to fend death off, and fail.
The famous rage got eaten cell by cell.
His eyes are drawn to slits against the glare
of the blanched landscape. The day he died,
the story goes, a swash of dead whales
washed up on the Baja beach. Great nature grieved
for him, the story means, but it was great
nature that skewed his cells and siphoned
his force and melted his fat like tallow
and beached him in a wheelchair under
a sombrero. It was human nature,
tiny nature, to take the photograph,
to fuss with the aperture and speed, to let
in the right blare of light just long enough
to etch pale Mingus to the negative.
In the small, memorial world of that
negative, he's all the light there is.
Rescue
To absolve me of my loneliness, and rather
than board her for the stint, I brought
my cat with me for two weeks in Vermont. Across
bare, borrowed floors she harried ping-
pong balls, her claws like castanets, her blunt face rapt—
she kept a ball ahead of her
and between her paws as she chased it full tilt.
Then she'd amble over to where I sat reading
Search Party Page 16