take them up like male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Once1
I saw my father naked, once, I
opened the blue bathroom’s door
which he always locked—if it opened, it was empty—
and there, surrounded by glistening turquoise
tile, sitting on the toilet, was my father,
all of him, and all of him
was skin. In an instant, my gaze ran
in a single, swerving, unimpeded
swoop, up: toe, ankle,
knee, hip, rib, nape,
shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle,
my father. He looked so unprotected,
so seamless, and shy, like a girl on a toilet,
and even though I knew he was sitting
to shit, there was no shame in that
but even a human peace. He looked up,
I said Sorry, backed out, shut the door
but I’d seen him, my father a shorn lamb,
my father a cloud in the blue sky
of the blue bathroom, my eye driven
up the hairpin mountain road of the
naked male, I had turned a corner
and found his flank unguarded—gentle
bulge of the hip joint, border of the pelvic cradle.
Quake Theory2
When two plates of earth scrape along each other
like a mother and daughter
it is called a fault.
There are faults that slip smoothly past each other
an inch a year, just a faint rasp
like a man running his hand over his chin,
that man between us,
and there are faults
that get stuck at a bend for twenty years.
The ridge bulges up like a father’s sarcastic forehead
and the whole thing freezes in place,
the man between us.
When this happens, there will be heavy damage
to industrial areas and leisure residence
when the deep plates
finally jerk past
the terrible pressure of their contact.
The earth cracks
and innocent people slip gently in like swimmers.
Satan Says1
I am locked in a little cedar box
with a picture of shepherds pasted onto
the central panel between carvings.
The box stands on curved legs.
It has a gold, heart-shaped lock
and no key. I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me in the locked box
and says, I’ll get you out. Say
My father is a shit. I say
my father is a shit and Satan
laughs and says, It’s opening.
Say your mother is a pimp.
My mother is a pimp. Something
opens and breaks when I say that.
My spine uncurls in the cedar box
like the pink back of the ballerina pin
with a ruby eye, resting besides me on
satin in the cedar box.
Say shit, say death, say fuck the father,
Satan says, down my ear.
The pain of the locked past buzzes
in the child’s box on her bureau, under
the terrible round pond eye
etched around with roses, where
self-loathing gazed at sorrow.
Shit. Death. Fuck the father.
Something opens. Satan says
Don’t you feel a lot better?
Light seems to break on the delicate
edelweiss pin, carved in two
colors of wood. I love him too,
you know, I say to Satan dark
in the locked box. I love them but
I’m trying to say what happened to us
in the lost past. Of course, he says
and smiles, of course. Now say: torture.
I see, through blackness soaked in cedar,
the edge of a large hinge open.
Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s
cunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out.
The angle of the hinge widens
until I see the outlines of
the time before I was, when they were
locked in the bed. When I say
the magic words, Cock, Cunt,
Satan softly says, Come out.
But the air around the opening
is heavy and thick as hot smoke.
Come in, he says, and I feel his voice
breathing from the opening.
The exit is through Satan’s mouth.
Come in my mouth, he says, you’re there
already, and the huge hinge
begins to close. Oh no, I loved
them, too, I brace
my body tight
in the cedar house.
Satan sucks himself out the keyhole.
I’m left locked in the box, he seals
the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.
It’s your coffin now, Satan says,
I hardly hear;
I am warming my cold
hands at the dancer’s
ruby eye—
the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of
love.
The Pope’s Penis1
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
The Promise2
With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking fume,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.
The Space Heater1
On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients’ chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst’s couch, at the end,
like the infant’s headstone that was added near the foot
of my f
ather’s grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire’s heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises—
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn’t seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, “If you’re cold—are you cold? But if it’s on
for me … “ He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, “Of course,” as if I had asked,
and he stood up and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down, behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message.
If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me in my old
shame and horror, then I would rest
on his art—and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of heat,
the pleasure of power.
Dave Smith (b. 1942)
Pulling a Pig’s Tail1
The feel of it was hairy and coarse
like new rope in A. W. Johnson’s
hardware store but I never touched it
or any part of a pig
until that day my father took me
where the farm was, woods
a kind of green stillness, the hanging
leaves from so much rain
I guess—it felt as if I was upside
down underwater trying to swim
for my life. The farmer, Uncle Bern,
said I could have one
if I could catch it. A little one
looked easy, about my size,
not so wary because he wasn’t unsure
of anything yet—I must have
thought, but quick and hungry
as small lives always are
so I chased him until the foul mud
hardened on me like a skin,
the big men crying with laughter.
My father said it was just
that funny like some kind of soul’s
testing to see I wanted
badly enough to catch myself, black
eyes not seeming to watch,
fixed on the horizon past the weird
way I talked to it. Finally
it listened to something and I took
a grip, held, grunting, dug
my sneakers into the shit. Why he ran
and didn’t try to bite me
I don’t know. By then I almost had
everything straight but felt
at last what wasn’t right, the uncoiled
helplessness of anything
dragged small and screaming while
the big ones watch and grin.
I let go. I didn’t say I was thinking
about school that was over
that summer, the teacher that yanked
my hair, who said she’d see
I got myself straightened out. I hid
my hands in shame. How could I
tell my father a pig’s tail burns
your hands like lost beauty?
I only knew I loved school
until that raw day when she let me loose.
Wreck in the Woods1
Under that embrace of wild saplings held fast,
surrounded by troops of white mushrooms, by wrens
visiting like news-burdened ministers known
only to some dim life inside, this Model
A Ford like my grandfather’s entered the earth.
What were fenders, hood, doors,
no one washed, polished,
gazed with a tip of finger, or boyhood dream.
I stood where silky blue above went wind-rent,
pines, oaks, dogwood tickling, pushing as if grief
called families to see what none understood. What
plot of words, what heart-shudder of men, women
here ended so hard the green world must hide it?
Headlights, large, round. Two pieces of shattered glass.
Sharon Bryan (b. 1943)
Beyond Recall1
Nothing matters
to the dead,
that’s what’s so hard
for the rest of us
to take in—
their complete indifference
to our enticements,
our attempts to get in touch—
they aren’t observing us
from a discreet distance,
they aren’t listening
to a word we say—
you know that,
but you don’t believe it,
even deep in a cave
you don’t believe
in total darkness,
you keep waiting
for your eyes to adjust
and reveal your hand
in front of your face—
so how long a silence
will it take to convince us
that we’re the ones
who no longer exist,
as far as X is concerned,
and Y, and they’ve forgotten
every little thing
they knew about us,
what we told them
and what we didn’t
have to, even our names
mean nothing to them
now—our throats ache
with all we might have said
the next time we saw them.
Philip Schultz ((b. 1945)
The Answering Machine1
My friends & I speak mostly to one another’s machine.
We badger, cajole, & manipulate without compunction
& often don’t even remember who it is we’re calling.
These machines don’t counterfeit enthusiasm by raising
their volume or use a disdainful static
to imply indignation.
They don’t hold grudges & aren’t judgmental.
They’re never
too busy or bored or self-absorbed.
They have no conscience
& possess a tolerance for sadness which,
admittedly, we lack.
Even cowardice is permitted,
if enunciated clearly. I broke off
with Betsey by telling her machine I couldn’t go rafting
with her in Colorado.
I meant anywhere & it understood perfectly.
They appreciate, I think,
how much intimacy we can bear
on a daily basis.
When one becomes overburdened it buries
all pertinent information by overlapping;
whatever happened,
say, to Jane’s sweet birthday song,
hidden now under so many
solicitations about my appendix operation, or Bill’s news
of his father’s death
which was so rudely preempted by Helen’s
wedding invitation? Yes, the conflict which evolves through
direct contact is softened & our privacy protected, but
perhaps the price we pay is greater isolation. Under all
these supplanted voices is a constant reminder of everything
we once promised
& then forgot, or betrayed. The guilt
can be overwhelming, especially late at night when I replay
my messages to hear
the plaintive vowels & combative consonants
rub like verbal sticks into a piercing vibrato
of prayerlike
insistence. What is essential, after all,
cannot be understood
too quickly & unessential facts get equal time. I mean
Even in our silence there is evidence of what we feared
to say or mean—
that ongoing testimony of remorse & affection
which, however crippling,
we replay nightly & then, sadly, erase.
Ronald Wallace (b. 1945)
Thirteen1
Gent, Nugget, Swank, and Dude:
the names themselves were lusty, crude,
as I took my small detour from school,
my breath erect, my manner cool.
In Kranson’s Drugstore, furtive, alert,
stiff in my khakis I’d sneak to the back,
unrip the new issue from its thick stack,
and stick it in my quick shirt.
Oh, I was a thief for love,
accompliced by guilt and thrill,
mystery and wonder my only motive.
Oh, that old Kranson could be there still!
I’d slip in and out, liquid, unseen,
out of my mind again, thirteen.
Tom Wayman (b. 1945)
Did I Miss Anything?1
Question frequently asked by
students after missing a class.
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours;
Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent;
Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose;
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 46