the widow if she’d like it if the bailiff dug up
her husband and repossessed the suit he was buried in.
“Your bitter grief is proof enough.”
Mozart, Act II, Scene 2
La Clemenza di Tito
The woman in El Paso who wants to give us her furniture.
But it’s clear she is having a nervous breakdown.
We’re afraid to touch it. Then we take the bed, and a chair.
Duke Ellington riding in the back of his limo, somewhere
in Indiana. He is reading by lamplight. Billy Strayhorn
is with him, but asleep. The tires hiss on the pavement.
The Duke goes on reading and turning the pages.
I’ve got—how much longer?
Enough horsing around!
The March into Russia
Just when he had given up thinking
he’d ever write another line of poetry,
she began brushing her hair.
And singing that Irish folk song
he liked so much.
That one about Napoleon and
his “bonnie bunch of roses, oh!”
Some Prose on Poetry
Years ago—it would have been 1956 or 1957—when I was a teenager, married, earning my living as a delivery boy for a pharmacist in Yakima, a small town in eastern Washington, I drove with a prescription to a house in the upscale part of town. I was invited inside by an alert but very elderly man wearing a cardigan sweater. He asked me to please wait in his living room while he found his checkbook.
There were a lot of books in that living room. Books were everywhere, in fact, on the coffee table and end tables, on the floor next to the sofa—every available surface had become the resting place for books. There was even a little library over against one wall of the room. (I’d never seen a personal library before; rows and rows of books arranged on built-in shelves in someone’s private residence.) While I waited, eyes moving around, I noticed on his coffee table a magazine with a singular and, for me, startling name on its cover: Poetry. I was astounded, and I picked it up. It was my first glimpse of a “little magazine,” not to say a poetry magazine, and I was dumbstruck. Maybe I was greedy: I picked up a book, too, something called The Little Review Anthology, edited by Margaret Anderson. (I should add that it was a mystery to me then just what “edited by” meant.) I fanned the pages of the magazine and, taking still more liberty, began to leaf through the pages of the book. There were lots of poems in the book, but also prose pieces and what looked like remarks or even pages of commentary on each of the selections. What on earth was all this? I wondered. I’d never before seen a book like it—nor, of course, a magazine like Poetry. I looked from one to the other of these publications, and secretly coveted each of them.
When the old gentleman had finished writing out his check, he said, as if reading my heart, “Take that book with you, sonny. You might find something in there you’ll like. Are you interested in poetry? Why don’t you take the magazine too? Maybe you’ll write something yourself someday. If you do, you’ll need to know where to send it.”
Where to send it. Something—I didn’t know just what, but I felt something momentous happening. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, obsessed with the need to “write something,” and by then I’d made a few clumsy attempts at poems. But it had never really occurred to me that there might be a place where one actually sent these efforts in hopes they would be read and even, just possibly—incredibly, or so it seemed—considered for publication. But right there in my hand was visible proof that there were responsible people somewhere out in the great world who produced, sweet Jesus, a monthly magazine of poetry. I was staggered. I felt, as I’ve said, in the presence of revelation. I thanked the old gentleman several times over, and left his house. I took his check to my boss, the pharmacist, and I took Poetry and The Little Review book home with me. And so began an education.
Of course, I can’t recall the names of any of the contributors to that issue of the magazine. Most likely there were a few distinguished older poets alongside new, “unknown” poets, much the same situation that exists within the magazine today. Naturally, I hadn’t heard of anyone in those days—or read anything either, for that matter, modern, contemporary or otherwise. I do remember I noted the magazine had been founded in 1912 by a woman named Harriet Monroe. I remember the date because that was the year my father had been born. Later that night, bleary from reading, I had the distinct feeling my life was in the process of being altered in some significant and even, forgive me, magnificent way.
In the anthology, as I recall, there was serious talk about “modernism” in literature, and the role played in advancing modernism by a man bearing the strange name of Ezra Pound. Some of his poems, letters and lists of rules—the do’s and don’t’s for writing—had been included in the anthology. I was told that, early in the life of Poetry, this Ezra Pound had served as foreign editor for the magazine—the same magazine which had on that day passed into my hands. Further, Pound had been instrumental in introducing the work of a large number of new poets to Monroe’s magazine, as well as to The Little Review, of course; he was, as everyone knows, a tireless editor and promoter—poets with names like H. D., T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Richard Aldington, to cite only a handful. There was discussion and analysis of poetry movements; imagism, I remember, was one of these movements. I learned that, in addition to The Little Review, Poetry was one of the magazines hospitable to imagist writing. By then I was reeling. I don’t see how I could have slept much that night.
This was back in 1956 or 1957, as I’ve said. So what excuse is there for the fact that it took me twenty-eight years or more to finally send off some work to Poetry? None. The amazing thing, the crucial factor, is that when I did send something, in 1984, the magazine was still around, still alive and well, and edited, as always, by responsible people whose goal it was to keep this unique enterprise running and in sound order. And one of those people wrote to me in his capacity as editor, praising my poems, and telling me the magazine would publish six of them in due course.
Did I feel proud and good about this? Of course I did. And I believe thanks are due in part to that anonymous and lovely old gentleman who gave me his copy of the magazine. Who was he? He would have to be long dead now and the contents of his little library dispersed to wherever small, eccentric, but probably not in the end very valuable collections go—the second-hand bookstores. I’d told him that day I would read his magazine and read the book, too, and I’d get back to him about what I thought. I didn’t do that, of course. Too many other things intervened; it was a promise easily given and broken the moment the door closed behind me. I never saw him again, and I don’t know his name. I can only say this encounter really happened, and in much the way I’ve described. I was just a pup then, but nothing can explain, or explain away, such a moment: the moment when the very thing I needed most in my life—call it a polestar—was casually, generously given to me. Nothing remotely approaching that moment has happened since.
Poems
They’ve come every day this month.
Once I said I wrote them because
I didn’t have time for anything
else. Meaning, of course, better
things—things other than mere
poems and verses. Now I’m writing
them because I want to.
More than anything because
this is February
when normally not much of anything
happens. But this month
the larches have blossomed,
and the sun has come out
every day. It’s true my lungs
have heated up like ovens.
And so what if some people
are waiting for the other shoe
to drop, where I’m concerned.
Well, here it is then. Go ahead.
Put it on. I hope it fits
like a shoe.
Close enough, y
es, but supple
so the foot has room to breathe
a little. Stand up. Walk
around. Feel it? It will go
where you’re going, and be there
with you at the end of your trip.
But for now, stay barefoot. Go
outside for a while, and play.
Letter
Sweetheart, please send me the notebook I left
on the bedside table. If it isn’t on the table,
look under the table. Or even under the bed! It’s
somewhere. If it isn’t a notebook, it’s just
a few lines scribbled on some scraps
of paper. But I know it’s there. It has to do
with what we heard that time from our doctor friend, Ruth,
about the old woman, eighty-some years old,
“dirty and caked with grime”—the doctor’s words—so lacking
in concern for herself that her clothes had stuck
to her body and had to be peeled
from her in the Emergency Room. “I’m so
ashamed. I’m sorry,” she kept saying. The smell
of the clothing burned Ruth’s eyes! The old woman’s fingernails
had grown out and begun to curl in
toward her fingers. She was fighting for breath, her eyes
rolled back in her fright. But she was able, even so, to give
some of her story to Ruth. She’d been a Madison Avenue
debutante, but her father disowned her after
she went to Paris to dance in the Folies Bergère.
Ruth and some of the other Emergency Room staff thought
she was
hallucinating. But she gave them the name of her estranged
son who
was gay and who ran a gay bar in that same city. He confirmed
everything. Everything the old woman said was true.
Then she suffered a heart attack and died in Ruth’s arms.
But I want to see what else I noted from all I heard.
I want to see if it’s possible to recreate what it was like
sixty years ago when this young woman stepped off the boat
in Le Havre, beautiful, poised, determined to make it
on the stage at the Folies Bergère, able
to kick over her head and hop at the same time, to wear feathers
and net stockings, to dance and dance, her arms linked with
the arms of other young women at the Folies Bergère, to
high-step it
at the Folies Bergère. Maybe it’s
in that notebook with the blue cloth cover, the one
you gave me when we came home from Brazil. I can see
my handwriting next to the name of my winning horse at the track
near the hotel: Lord Byron. But the woman, not the dirt, that
doesn’t matter, nor even that she weighed nearly 300 pounds.
Memory doesn’t care where it lives and mocks
the body. “I understood something about identity once,” Ruth
said, recalling her training days, “all of us young medical students
gaping at the hands of a corpse. That’s
where the humanness
stays longest—the hands.” And the woman’s hands. I made a note
at the time, as if I could see them anchored on her
slim hips, the same hands
Ruth let go of, then couldn’t forget.
The Young Girls
Forget all experiences involving wincing.
And anything to do with chamber music.
Museums on rainy Sunday afternoons, etcetera.
The old masters. All that.
Forget the young girls. Try and forget them.
The young girls. And all that.
V
Yet why not say what happened?
— ROBERT LOWELL
from Epilogue
The Offending Eel
His former wife called while he was in the south
of France. It was his chance of a lifetime,
she suggested, addressing herself
to his answering machine. A celebration
was under way, friends arriving, even as he listened once again
to her voice, confidential yet fortified, too, with
some heady public zeal:
I’m going under fast. But that’s not
the point, that’s not why
I’m calling. I’m telling you, it’s a heaven-sent
opportunity to make a lot of money!
Call me when you get home for details.
She hung up, in that distant three weeks ago, then called
right back, unable to contain herself.
Honey, listen. This is not another
crazy scheme. This, I repeat, is
the real thing. It’s a game
called Airplane. You start off
in the economy section then work
your way forward to the co-pilot’s seat,
or maybe even the pilot’s seat!
You’ll get there if
you’re lucky, and you are
lucky, you always have
been. You’ll make a lot of
money. I’m not kidding. I’ll
fill you in on details, but you have to
call me.
It was sunset, late evening. It was the season
when the grain had begun to head and the fields
were fair with flowers—flowers beginning to nod
as night came on and on, night which really did wear its
“cloak of darkness.” Tables were being laid outside; candles
lit and placed in the blossoming pear trees
where, shortly, they would assist the moon
to light the homecoming festivities.
He continued listening to her high, manic voice
on the tape. Call me, it said, again and again.
But he wouldn’t be calling. He couldn’t.
He knew better. They’d been through all that.
His heart which, a few minutes before this message,
had been full and passionate and, for a few minutes anyway,
forgetful and unguarded, shrank in its little place
until it was only a fist-sized muscle joylessly
discharging its duties. What could he do?
She was going to die one of these days and
he was going to die too. This much they knew
and still agreed on. But though many things
had happened in his life, and none more or less
strange than this last-ditch offer of great profit
on her airplane, he’d known for a long time
they would die in separate lives and far from each other,
despite oaths exchanged when they were young.
One or the other of them—she, he felt with dread
certainty—might even die raving, completely
gone off. This seemed a real possibility now.
Anything could happen. What could be done?
Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
He couldn’t even talk to her any longer.
Not only that—he was afraid to. He
deemed her insane. Call me, she said.
No, he wouldn’t be calling. He stood there
thinking. Then swerved wildly and remembered
back a couple of days. Finding that passage
in the book as he blasted across the Atlantic
at 1,100 m.p.h., 55,000 feet above it all.
Some young knight riding over the drawbridge
to claim his prize, his bride, a woman he’d never
laid eyes on, one who waited anxiously
inside the keep, combing and combing her long tresses.
The knight rode slowly, splendidly, falcon on his wrist,
gold spurs a-jingle, a sprig of plantagenesta
in his scarlet bonnet. Behind him
m
any riders, a long row of polished helmets, sun
striking the breastplates of those cavaliers.
Everywhere banners unfurling in the warm breeze,
banners spilling down the high stone walls.
He’d skipped ahead a little and suddenly found
this same man, a prince now, grown disillusioned
and unhappy, possessed of a violent disposition —
drunk, strangling, in the middle of a page,
on a dish of eels. Not a pretty picture.
His cavaliers, who’d also grown coarse
and murderous, they could do nothing except
pound on his back, vainly push greasy fingers
down his throat, vainly hoist him off the floor
by his ankles until he quit struggling.
His face and neck suffused with the colors of sunset.
They let him down then, one of his fingers
still cocked and frozen, aimed at his breast
as if to say there. Just there it lodges.
Just over the heart’s where this offending eel
can be found. The woman in the story dressed herself
in widow’s weeds then dropped from sight, disappeared
into the tapestry. It’s true these people
were once real people. But who now remembers?
Tell me, horse, what rider? What banners? What
strange hands unstrapped your bucklers?
Horse, what rider?
Sorrel
Through the open window he could see a flock of ducks
with their young. Waddling and stumbling, they were hurrying
down the road, apparently on their way to the pond. One
duckling picked up a piece of gut that was lying on
the ground, tried to swallow it, choked
on it and raised an alarmed squeaking. Another
duckling ran up, pulled the gut out of its beak and choked on
the thing too.… At some distance from the fence,
in the lacy shadow cast on the grass by the young lindens,
the cook Darya was wandering about, picking sorrel
for a vegetable soup.
All of Us: The Collected Poems Page 24