Search Party
Page 18
say it, as if it were the name of God.
Umbrian Nightfall
The stench-rich stones dogs parse all day will reek
all night of data, but one
by one the dogs get summoned home. Streetlights
sizzle on and bats unfurl.
The Tiber valley, trough of a thousand
shades of green, has brimmed with dusk.
It's late. High time. High ground. Even the hill-
top towns stand tiptoe. The lake
of the black night laps everywhere. Two dogs
(three?), like raddled islands, bark.
The Cloister
The last light of a July evening drained
into the streets below. My love and I had hard
things to say and hear, and we sat over
wine, faltering, picking our words carefully.
The afternoon before I had lain across
my bed and my cat leapt up to lie
alongside me, purring and slowly
growing dozy. By this ritual I could
clear some clutter from my baroque brain.
And into that brief vacancy the image
of a horse cantered, coming straight to me,
and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt
and fear. How did we do? A medium job,
which is well above average. But because
she had opened her heart to me as far
as she did, I saw her fierce privacy,
like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung
with disappointments, and I knew
that to love her I must love the tree
and the nothing it cares for me.
A Poetry Reading at West Point
I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?
Question-and-answer time.
"Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
"Sir" again. "Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try
to understand them?" he asked. "Do
you want that?" I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
"I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human,"
I started, picking my way care-
fully, for he and I were, after
all, pained by the same dumb longings.
"I try to say what I don't know
how to say, but of course I can't
get much of it down at all."
By now I was sweating bullets.
"I don't want my poems to be hard,
unless the truth is, if there is
a truth." Silence hung in the hall
like a heavy fabric. Now my
head ached. "Sir," he yelled. "Thank you. Sir."
People Like Us
When the ox was the gray enemy
of the forest and engine of the plow,
the poor drifted across the fields,
through the sweet grasses and the vile,
and tendered bare bowls at our doors.
We hoarded and they begged. We piled
ricks high with hay and they slept there
like barn cats or cuckoos.
When we sluiced the maculate streets
with fermenting slops, and strode to our jobs
furred by coal dust, didn't the poor
punctuate our routines with cries
for alms? Our sclerotic rivers
turned the color of old leather
and the poor fished them anyway
and slept under their bridges.
Now they come surging up the stairs
and up the fire escapes. Open our door
to them and then they're us,
and if we don't we're trapped inside
with only us for company
while in the hall they pray and sing
their lilting anthems of reproach
while we bite our poor tongues.
Frazzle
"All for one and one for all" was our motto after all
our tribulations. And then we'd each go home, after all.
By the people. For the people. Of the people. Grammar—
but politics is an incomplete sentence, after all.
"Better to have loved and lost...," the poet wrote.
Than to have won? Poetry dotes on loss, after all.
They don't take the flag down at dusk, the patriot grumbled.
A country's too big to love, but not a rule, after all.
How would you translate "self-service" or "lube job"
if you had a dirty mind and scant English, after all?
Veil (beekeeper's? bridal?), Vale (tears), Vail (Colorado).
Phonics? No avail. Better learn to spell, after all.
The love of repetition is the root of all form?
Well, liturgy and nonsense are cousins, after all.
"I cannot tell a lie," he said, which was a lie,
but not the kind for which the bill comes after all.
The Bar at the Andover Inn
May 28, 1995
The bride, groom (my son), and their friends gathered
somewhere else to siphon the wedding's last
drops from their tired elders. Over a glass
of chardonnay I ignored my tattered,
companionable glooms (this took some will:
I've ended three marriages by divorce
as a man shoots his broken-legged horse)
and wished my two sons and their families
something I couldn't have, or keep, myself.
The rueful pluck we take with us to bars
or church, the morbid fellowship of woe—
I've had my fill of it. I wouldn't mope
through my son's happiness or further fear
my own. Well, what instead? Well, something else.
Big Tongue
The spit-sheathed shut-in, sometimes
civil, lolls on its leash in its cave
between meals, blunt little feinschmecker.
He seems both sullen and proud, not
an unusual combination. Well, that little
blind boy knows his way around the mouth.
An aspirate here, a glottal stop there—
he's a blur. He works to make sensible
noise at least as hard as an organist,
and so giddily pleased by his own
skill that for the sheer bravura
of it he flicks a shard of chicken
salad free from a molar en route
to the startling but exact finish
of a serpentine and pleasing sentence.
God knows the brain deserves most
of the credit for the sentence, but then
wasn't it God who insisted from the first
that whatever "it" means, it isn't fair?
Theology can be stored in a couplet:
The reason God won't answer you
is God has better things to do.
I mention only briefly, mia diletta,
lest I embarrass you by lingering,
how avidly this tongue nuzzled your nub,
how slowly (glib is his day job) he urged
your pleased clamor. Think then how he might feel—
the spokesman, the truffle pig, Mr. Muscle—
to sense along the length of his savor
a hard node, like a knot in a tree, and thus
to know another attack's begun. First one
side of the bilateral tongue will stiffen
and swell to two or three times normal size
(it's like having a small shoe in your mouth),
and then, as it subsides, after three or four
hours, the other side grows grandiose.
(Your salivary glands are like grapes
on steroids. Your speech is feral—only vowels,
and those from no language you recognize.)
Pride goeth before a bloat. Start to puff yourself up
and next thing you know you'll be on TV,
in the Macy's parade. Vae, puto deus fio
("Damn, I think I'm becoming a god," said
the emperor Vespasian on his deathbed).
But let's bring this descant back down to earth:
names ground us, and this humiliation's called
angioedema, short (?!) for angioneurotic
edema, often "an expression of allergy,"
as Webster's Third has it. What's the humbled
tongue, sore from strenuous burgeon and wane,
allergic to? Whatever it is, it may well be
systemic, and the "attack" a kind of defense,
a purge, a violent recapture of balance,
like a migraine or an epileptic seizure.
"Who needs this?" I might cry out. The answer
might be: I do. So why am I exchanging vows
with my allergies? Although I hate it when my
competence is sick, I hereby refuse
to make mine allegorical, though not before,
you'll note, I've had my fun with that possibility—
for where's "the bribe of pleasure" (as Dr. Freud,
that gloomy mensch, called it) in being sick
if I can't loll in limelight for a while?
Where next? My dressing room, to wipe off the drama
and stare at the mirror,
met by ordinary fear.
Bucket's Got a Hole in It
Keep it under your hat, the saying went
when we wore hats. And secrets dissipate
(in this poem the verb means "to leave the pate")
like body heat. And some secrets can't quit
memory fast enough for human good;
viz., what my friend's wife's kisses tasted like
and why I didn't sleep with her for all
her vernal allure. Did we need to read
in transcript each taped word of Nixon's
contempt for us, like preserved globs of spit?
Don't double-click on the Save icon
a piggy bank? a jumbled attic?)
until you've thought how much a fossil fuel
has to forget fossil to become fuel,
or how much childhood we plow under.
"Tears, idle tears," the poet wrote, but they've
got their work cut out for them, the way
a river might imagine a canyon.
Misgivings
"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,
but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab,
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may augur we're on our own
for good reasons. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door, " you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-
in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.
Care
The lump of coal my parents teased
I'd find in my Christmas stocking
turned out each year to be an orange,
for I was their sunshine.
Now I have one C. gave me,
a dense node of sleeping fire.
I keep it where I read and write.
"You're on chummy terms with dread,"
it reminds me. "You kiss ambivalence
on both cheeks. But if you close your
heart to me ever, I'll wreathe you in flames
and convert you to energy."
I don't know what C. meant me to mind
by her gift, but the sun returns
unbidden. Books get read and written.
My mother comes to visit. My father's
dead. Love needs to be set alight
again and again, and in thanks
for tending it, will do its very
best not to consume us.
Index of Titles
A | B | C | D | N | E | F | G | Y | M | H | I | J | L | O | P | R | S | T | U | V | W
Accompanist, The, 178
Another Beer, 26
Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu, 259
April in the Berkshires, 176
Bad, 143
Bar at the Andover Inn, The, 301
Bear at the Dump, The, 224
Beer after Tennis, 22
August 1972, 47
Big Tongue, 302
Black Box, 186
Blues, The, 201
Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41, 6
Bmp Bmp, 107
Bring the War Home, 48
Bucket's Got a Hole in It, 305
Buddy Bolden Cylinder, The, 269
Bud Powell, Paris, 1959, 71
Bystanders, 92
Caddies' Day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio, 181
Cancer Talk, 253
Care, 307
Cat, The, 31
Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959, 240
Civilization and Its Discontents, 156
Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950, 130
Cloister, The, 296
Cloud, The, 115
Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP 7
Condoms Now, 266
Condoms Then, 265
Cows Grazing at Sunrise, 90
Dancing to Reggae Music, 124
Debt, 264
Descriptive Passages, 98
Directions, 23
Dire Cure, 291
Dog Life, 183
Driving All Night, 15
Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April
Night, 25
Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow, 268
Drunken Baker, The, 122
Egg in the Corner of One Eye, An, 30
Elegy for Bob Marley, An, 167
E lucevan le stelle, 262
Eternally Undismayed Are the Poolshooters, 120
Faith of Our Fathers, 12
Familial, 158
Fellow Oddballs, 175
Frazzle, 300
Generations, The, 251
Good, 135
Good Company, 100
Gossip, 126
Grandmother, Dead at 99
Years and 10
Months, 272
Grandmother Talking, 271
Grief, 221
Happy Childhood, A, 150
Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri on Ice, 180
Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog, 199
Housecooling, 198
Housework, 91
Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario, The, 73
I Let a Song Go out of My Heart, 276
In Memory of the Utah Stars, 69
In Memory of W H. Auden, 81
Iowa City to Boulder, 127
Jealousy, 8
Jilted, 132
La Tâche 1962, 35
Leaving the Cleveland Airport, 123
Left Hand Canyon, 67
Letter to Russell Banks, 40
&
nbsp; Lions in the Cincinnati Zoo, 128
Listening to Lester Young, 72
Little Blue Nude, 208
Living Among the Dead, 65
Long, 85
Loyal, 149
Lust, 11
Mail, The, 75
Manners, 283
Masterful, 166
Memo, The, 270
Men at My Father's Funeral, 235
Mingus in Diaspora, 243
Mingus in Shadow, 279
Mingus at The Half Note, 233
Mingus at The Showplace, 223
Misgivings, 306
Money, 247
Mood Indigo, 196
Moonlight in Vermont, 203
Moving, 10
Moving Again, 60
Mud Chokes No Eels, 46
My Father's Body, 226
Nabokov's Blues, 191
Nabokov's Death, 109
Names, 274
Needle's Eye, the Lens, The, 29
New, 89
News, The, 63
Night Driving, 28
Night at the Opera, A, 254
Note Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would
Next, at a Summer Writers' Conference, 23 8
Nurse Sharks, 83
Oh Yes, 16
Old Girlfriends, 17
On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen, 14
Onions, 212
On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, NH, 111
Our Strange and Lovable Weather, 96
Oxymorons, 290
Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives, The, 106
People Like Us, 299
Phone Log, 267
Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig, 177
Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal, 104