I follow him around
as he tries to thread the shine of a stone
through the eye of a watchful bird.
After a year of banging
his head, crying, the awful falling down, now he’s trying
to explain the vast brightening in his brain
by saying “M’mba”
to me again and again.
And though I follow with the sadness
above which a stone cannot lift itself, I wink and say
“M’mba” back to him. But I don’t mean it.
Nancy Vieira Couto (b. 1942)
Living in the La Brea Tar Pits1
Each morning she is wheeled into the picture
window of her son-in-law’s house,
jammed into her selected viewing space
by the table with the lamp and bowling trophy.
The drapes sweep apart like fronds.
She stretches her neck like a brontosaurus
and watches the neighbors, whose names she doesn’t
remember. Across the street
two Volkswagens line up like M&M’s,
one yellow, one orange.
At lunchtime
her daughter broils a small steak, very tender,
saying, “Ma, you must have meat.” But her taste runs
these days to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and baby cereals.
She leans over her plate,
stretching her neck like a brontosaurus,
and mangles a small piece between her tough
gums. The dog waits his turn.
Each evening she is wheeled up close
to the TV in her son-in-law’s house.
She watches “Superman” reruns.
In the kitchen, her son-in-law
eats meat and potatoes and talks in a loud voice.
His bowling night—she will have
her daughter to herself. But the TV
picture has gone bad, and the room is dark.
Just last week she could hardly tell if there
were four lovely Lennon sisters, or three.
He returns late—almost eleven—
low scorer on his team. He wants his wife
but there’s a dinosaur in his living room, stretching
her neck. It’s past her bedtime. He waits his turn.
∼
Each morning he looks out of the picture
window of his house. Across the street
the neighbors have parked their shiny new Toyotas.
He blinks, as if at something unexpected
and obscene. He moves away,
walking upright, heavy on his bare
heels. He wears pajamas.
In the kitchen
he pours orange juice into a paper cup
and takes his medication—two shiny capsules.
His mother-in-law is extinct, and his wife, too.
There is the dog to feed, and he will think of
people to visit. He moves slow, deliberate,
but keeps on moving. The sky is full of birds,
and the Rocky Mountains all have names.
In the evening he turns on the TV
and wedges his fifty-foot frame into his favorite
chair, curling his tail over the armrest.
He watches the third rerun of the Italian
version of Zorro. When the horizontal
hold goes haywire, he watches diagonal stripes.
It’s not easy to be a tyrannosaurus.
He stands eighteen feet tall, he thuds through life,
what’s left. And when he roars, he shows his sharp
stalactites and stalagmites. His grown children
get nervous. He resents them. They wait their turn.
Stuart Dybek (b. 1942)
Brass Knuckles1
Kruger sets his feet
before Ventura Furniture’s plate glass window.
We’re
outlined in streetlights,
reflected across the jumbled living rooms,
bedrooms, dining rooms,
smelling fresh bread
from the flapping ventilator down the alley
behind Cross’s Bakery.
His fist keeps clenching
(Our jaws grinding on bennies)
through the four thick rings
of the knuckles he made me in shop
the day after I got stomped
outside St. Sabina’s.
“ The idea is to strike like a cobra. Don’t follow through. Focus total power at the moment of impact. “
His fist uncoils
the brass
whipped back a centimeter from
smashing out my teeth,
the force waves
snapping my head back.
“See?” he says,
sucking breath like a diver, toe to toe
with the leopard-skin sofa;
I step back
thinking how a diamond ring cuts glass;
his fist explodes.
The window cracks for half a block,
knees drop out of our reflections.
An alarm
is bouncing out of doorways,
we cut
down a gangway of warm bread,
boots echoing
through the dim-lit viaduct on Rockwell
where I see his hand
flinging orange swashes off the concrete walls,
blood behind us
like footprints.
spoor for cops;
in a red haze of switches
boxcars couple,
we jump the electric rail
knowing we’re already caught.
Maroon1
for Anthony Dadaro, 1946-1958
A boy is bouncing a ball off a brick wall after school. The bricks have been painted maroon a long time ago. Steady as a heartbeat the ball rebounds oblong, hums, sponges back round. A maroon Chevy goes by.
Nothing else. This street’s deserted: a block-long abandoned factory, glass from the busted windows on the sidewalk mixed with brown glass from beer bottles, whiskey pints. Sometimes the alkies drink here. Not today.
Only the ball flying between sunlit hands and shadowed bricks and sparrows brawling in the dusty gutters. The entire street turning maroon in the shadow of the wall, even the birds, even the hands.
He stands waiting under a streetlight that’s trying to flicker on. Three guys he’s never seen in the neighborhood before, coming down the street, carrying crowbars.
B. H. Fairchild (b. 1942)
The Dumka2
His parents would sit alone together
on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvorak’s piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense
and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
by smearing the sky green with doom
but afterwards drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and table tops. But it was
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise
or bow their heads as they spoke about
the farm in twilight with piano music
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main street like mannequins,
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, the homecoming,
the h
omecoming, and afterwards, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,
the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.
Tom Hennen (b. 1942)
Soaking Up Sun1
Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love, the kind of day when my grandfather would sit on the south side of the wooden corncrib where the sunlight warmed slowly all through the day like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves fell. No painful memories came. Everything was lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright as pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood grove came the damp smell of mushrooms, of things going back to earth. I sat with my grandfather then. Sheep came up to us as we sat there, their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange and magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet smelling apple sticks just to get at the scent. His thumb had a permanent groove in it where the back of the knife blade rested. He let me listen to the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep, while his own silence taught me every secret thing he knew.
The Life of a Day2
Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
David Huddle (b. 1942)
Holes Commence Falling1
The lead and zinc company
owned the mineral rights
to the whole town anyway,
and after drilling holes
for 3 or 4 years,
they finally found the right
place and sunk a mine shaft.
We were proud
of all that digging,
even though nobody from
town got hired. They
were going to dig right
under New River and hook up
with the mine at Austinville.
Then people’s wells
started drying up just like
somebody’d shut off a faucet,
and holes commenced falling,
big chunks of people’s yards
would drop 5 or 6 feet,
houses would shift and crack.
Now and then the company’d
pay out a little money
in damages; they got a truck
to haul water and sell it
to the people whose wells
had dried up, but most
everybody agreed the
situation wasn’t
serious.
Louis Jenkins (b. 1942)
A Place for Everything1
It’s so easy to lose track of things. A screwdriver, for instance. “Where did I put that? I had it in my hand just a minute ago.” You wander vaguely from room to room, having forgotten, by now, what you were looking for, staring into the refrigerator, the bathroom mirror … “I really could use a shave. … “
Some objects seem to disappear immediately while others never want to leave. Here is a small black plastic gizmo with a serious demeanor that turns up regularly, like a politician at public functions. It seems to be an “integral part,” a kind of switch with screw holes so that it can be attached to something larger. Nobody knows what. This thing’s use has been forgotten but it looks so important that no one is willing to throw it in the trash. It survives by bluff, like certain insects that escape being eaten because of their formidable appearance.
My father owned a large, three-bladed, brass propeller that he saved for years. Its worth was obvious, it was just that it lacked an immediate application since we didn’t own a boat and lived hundreds of miles from any large body of water. The propeller survived all purges and cleanings, living, like royalty, a life of lonely privilege, mounted high on the garage wall.
William Matthews (1942 – 1997)
A Poetry Reading at West Point2
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. My own
head ached. “Sir,” he yelled. “Thank you. Sir.”
Onions1
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 stick
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, the bud-like,
ac
rid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky
and incomplete, 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.
Sharon Olds (b. 1942)
I Go Back to May 19371
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips back in the May air,
they are about to graduate,
they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to die. I want to go
up to them there in the May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 45