— ANTON CHEKHOV
“An Unpleasantness”
The Attic
Her brain is an attic where things
were stored over the years.
From time to time her face appears
in the little windows near the top of the house.
The sad face of someone who has been locked up
and forgotten about.
Margo
His name was Tug. Hers, Margo.
Until people, seeing what was happening,
began calling her Cargo.
Tug and Cargo. He had drive,
they said. Lots of hair on his face
and arms. A big guy. Commanding
voice. She was more laid-back. A blond.
Dreamy. (Sweet and dreamy.) She broke
loose, finally. Sailed away
under her own power. Went to places
pictured in books, and some
not in any book, or even on the map.
Places she, being a girl, and cargo,
never dreamed of getting to.
Not on her own, anyway.
On an Old Photograph of My Son
It’s 1974 again, and he’s back once more. Smirking,
a pair of coveralls over a white tee-shirt,
no shoes. His hair, long and blond, falls
to his shoulders like his mother’s did
back then, and like one of those young Greek
heroes I was just reading about. But
there the resemblance ends. On his face
the contemptuous expression of the wise guy,
the petty tyrant. I’d know that look anywhere.
It burns in my memory like acid. It’s
the look I never hoped I’d live to see
again. I want to forget that boy
in the picture—that jerk, that bully!
What’s for supper, mother dear? Snap to!
Hey, old lady, jump, why don’t you? Speak
when spoken to. I think I’ll put you in
a headlock to see how you like it. I like
it. I want to keep you on
your toes. Dance for me now. Go ahead,
bag, dance. I’ll show you a step or two.
Let me twist your arm. Beg me to stop, beg me
to be nice. Want a black eye? You got it!
Oh, son, in those days I wanted you dead
a hundred—no, a thousand—different times.
I thought all that was behind us. Who in hell
took this picture, and
why’d it turn up now,
just as I was beginning to forget?
I look at your picture and my stomach cramps.
I find myself clamping my jaws, teeth on edge, and
once more I’m filled with despair and anger.
Honestly, I feel like reaching for a drink.
That’s a measure of your strength and power, the fear
and confusion you still inspire. That’s
how mighty you once were. Hey, I hate this
photograph. I hate what became of us all.
I don’t want this artifact in my house another hour!
Maybe I’ll send it to your mother, assuming
she’s still alive somewhere and the post can reach
her this side of the grave. If so, she’ll have
a different reaction to it, I know. Your youth and
beauty, that’s all she’ll see and exclaim over.
My handsome son, she’ll say. My boy wonder.
She’ll study the picture, searching for her likeness
in the features, and mine. (She’ll find them, too.)
Maybe she’ll weep, if there are any tears left.
Maybe—who knows?—she’ll even wish for those days
back again! Who knows anything anymore?
But wishes don’t come true, and it’s a good thing.
Still, she’s bound to keep your picture out
on the table for a while and make over you
for a time. Then, soon, you’ll go
into the big family album along with the other crazies —
herself, her daughter and me, her former husband. You’ll be
safe in there, cheek to jowl with all your victims. But don’t
worry, my boy—the pages turn, my son. We all
do better in the future.
Five O’Clock in the Morning
As he passed his father’s room, he glanced in at the door.
Yevgraf Ivanovitch, who had not taken off his clothes or gone
to bed, was standing by the window, drumming on the panes.
“Goodbye, I am going,” said his son.
“Goodbye … the money is on the round table,” his father
answered without turning around.
A cold, hateful rain was falling as the laborer drove him
to the station.… The grass seemed darker than ever.
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“Difficult People”
Summer Fog
To sleep and forget everything for a few hours…
To wake to the sound of the foghorn in July.
To look out the window with a heavy heart and see fog
hanging in the pear trees, fog clogging the intersection,
shrouding the neighborhood like a disease invading a healthy
body. To go on living when she has stopped living…
A car eases by with its lights on, and the clock is
turned back to five days ago, the ringing and ringing that brought me
back to this world and news of her death, she who’d simply been
away, whose return had been anticipated with baskets
of raspberries from the market. (Starting from this day
forward, I intend to live my life differently. For one thing,
I won’t ever answer the phone again at five in the morning. I knew
better, too, but still I picked up the receiver and said that fateful
word, “Hello.” The next time I’ll simply let it ring.)
First, though, I have her funeral to get through. It’s today, in a
matter of hours. But the idea of a cortege creeping through this fog
to the cemetery is unnerving, and ridiculous, everyone in the town
with their lights on anyway, even the tourists.…
May this fog lift and burn off before three this afternoon! Let us
be able, at least, to bury her under sunny skies, she who worshiped
the sun. Everyone knows she is taking part
in this dark masque today only because she has no choice.
She has lost the power of choice! How she’d
hate this! She who loved in April deciding
to plant the sweetpeas and who staked them before
they could climb.
I light my first cigarette of the day and turn away from
the window with a shudder. The foghorn sounds again, filling me
with apprehension, and then, then stupendous
grief.
Hummingbird
FOR TESS
Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
Out
Out of the black mouth of the big king
salmon comes pouring the severed heads of herring,
cut on the bias, slant-wise —
near perfect handiwork of the true
salmon fisherman, him and his slick, sharp bait knife.
Body of the cut herring affixed then eighteen inches behind
a flashing silver spoon, heads tossed over
the side, to sink and turn
in the mottled water. How they managed it, those heads,
to reappear so in ou
r boat—most amazingly!—pouring forth
from the torn mouth, this skewed version, misshapen chunks
of a bad fairy tale, but one where no wishes will be
granted, no bargains struck nor promises kept.
We counted nine of those heads, as if to count was already
to tell it later. “Jesus,” you said, “Jesus,” before
tossing them back overboard where they belonged.
I started the motor and again we dropped our plugged herring-baited
hooks into the water. You’d been telling stories
about logging for Mormons on Prince of Wales Island (no booze,
no swearing, no women. Just no, except for work
and a paycheck). Then you fell quiet, wiped the knife
on your pants and stared toward Canada, and beyond.
All morning you’d wanted to tell me something and now you
began to tell me; how
your wife wants you out of her life, wants
you gone, wants you to just disappear.
Why don’t you disappear and just don’t ever
come back? she’d said. “Can you beat it? I think she hopes
a spar will take me out.” Just then there’s one hell of a strike.
The water boils as line goes out. It keeps
going out.
Downstream
At noon we have rain, which washes away the snow,
and at dusk, when I stand on the river bank and watch
the approaching boat contend with the current,
a mixture of rain and snow comes down.… We go downstream,
keeping close to a thicket of purple willow shrubs. The men
at the oars tell us that only ten minutes ago a boy in a cart
saved himself from drowning by catching hold of
a willow shrub; his team went under.…
The bare willow shrubs bend toward the water with
a rustling sound, the river suddenly grows dark.… If
there is a storm we shall have to spend the night among
the willows and in the end get drowned, so why not go on?
We put the matter to a vote and decide to row on.
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“Across Siberia”
The Net
Toward evening the wind changes. Boats
still out on the bay
head for shore. A man with one arm
sits on the keel of a rotting-away
vessel, working on a glimmering net.
He raises his eyes. Pulls at something
with his teeth, and bites hard.
I go past without a word.
Reduced to confusion
by the variableness of this weather,
the importunities of my heart. I keep
going. When I turn back to look
I’m far enough away
to see that man caught in a net.
Nearly
The two brothers, Sleep and Death, they unblinkingly called
themselves, arrived at our house around nine in the evening,
just as
the light was fading. They unloaded all their paraphernalia
in the driveway, what they’d need for killing bees, hornets —
yellow-
jackets as well. A “dusky” job, one had said on the phone. Those
invaders, we told ourselves, had become such a nuisance.
Frightening, too. An end to it! And them, we decided: we’ll write
finish to their short-lived career as pollen-gatherers, honey-
makers. Not a decision taken lightly, or easily. Annihilation
on such
an undreamt-of scale, a foreign thing to us. We moved
to the window to look down to the drive where the men,
one older,
one younger, stood smoking, watching a few late stragglers find
their way to the hole under the eave. Those bees trying to
beat the sun as it tipped over the horizon, the air turning
colder now,
the light gradually fainter. We raised our eyes and, through the
glass, could see a dozen, two dozen, a tiny fist
of them, waiting in a swirl their turn to enter their newfound
city. We could hear rustling, like scales, like wings chaffing
behind the wall, up near the ceiling. Then the sun disappeared
entirely, it was dark. All bees inside. One of the brothers, Sleep, it
must have been, he was the younger, positioned the ladder
in the drive, under the southwest corner. A few words we couldn’t
catch were exchanged, then Death pulled on his oversized
gloves and
began his climb up the ladder, slowly, balancing on his back
a heavy cannister held papoose-like by a kind of harness. In
one hand
was a hose, for killing. He passed our lighted window on his
way up,
glancing briefly, incuriously, into the living room. Then he stopped,
about even with our heads, only his boots showing where he
stood on
a rung of the ladder. We tried to act as if nothing out of
the ordinary were happening. You picked up a book, sat in your
favorite chair, pretended to concentrate. I put on a record. It was
dark out, darker, as I’ve said, but there remained a saffron flush in
the western sky, like blood just under the skin. Saffron, that
hoarded
spice you said drove the harvesters in Kashmir nearly mad, the
fields ripe with the smell of it. An ecstasy, you said. You turned a
page, as if you’d read a page. The record played and
played. Then came the hiss-hiss of spray as Death pressed
the trigger of his device again and again and again. From the drive
below, Sleep called up, “Give it to them some more, those
bastards.” And then, “That’s good. That ought to do it, by God.
Come
down now.” Pretty soon they left, those slicker-coated men, and we
never had to see them or talk to them again. You took a glass of
wine. I smoked a cigarette. That domestic sign mingling with
the covetous reek that hung like a vapor near the cast-iron stove.
What an evening! you said, or I said. We never spoke of it after that.
It was as if something shameful had occurred.
Deep in the night, still awake as the house sailed west, tracking
the moon, we came together in the dark like knives, like wild
animals, fiercely, drawing blood even—something we referred to
next morning as “love-making.” We didn’t tell each other of our
dreams. How could we? But once in the night, awake, I heard the
house creak, almost a sigh, then creak again. Settling, I think
it’s called.
VI
Foreboding
“I have a foreboding.… I’m oppressed
by a strange, dark foreboding. As though
the loss of a loved one awaited me.”
“Are you married, Doctor? You have a family!”
“Not a soul. I’m alone, I haven’t even any
friends. Tell me, madam, do you believe in forebodings?”
“Oh, yes, I do.”
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“Perpetuum Mobile”
Quiet Nights
I go to sleep on one beach,
wake up on another.
Boat all fitted out,
tugging against its rope.
Sparrow Nights
There are terrible nights with thunder, lightning, rain, and
wind, such as are called among the people “sparrow nights.”
There has been one such night in my personal life.…
I woke up after midnight and leaped
suddenly out of bed.
It seemed to me for some reason that I was just immediately
going to die. Why did it seem so? I had no sensation
in my body that suggested my immediate death, but my soul
was oppressed with terror, as though I had suddenly seen
a vast menacing glow of fire.
I rapidly struck a light, drank some water straight out of
the decanter, then hurried to the open window.
The weather outside was magnificent.
There was a smell of hay and some other
very sweet scent. I could see the spikes of the fence,
the gaunt, drowsy trees by the window, the road,
the dark streak of woodland,
there was a serene, very bright moon in the sky and not a single
cloud, perfect stillness, not one
leaf stirring. I felt that everything was looking at me and
waiting for me to die.… My spine was
cold; it seemed to be drawn
inwards, and I felt as though death
were coming upon me stealthily from behind.…
— ANTON CHEKHOV
“A Dreary Story”
Lemonade
When he came to my house months ago to measure
my walls for bookcases, Jim Sears didn’t look like a man
who’d lose his only child to the high waters
of the Elwha River. He was bushy-haired, confident,
cracking his knuckles, alive with energy, as we
discussed tiers, and brackets, and this oak stain
compared to that. But it’s a small town, this town,
a small world here. Six months later, after the bookcases
have been built, delivered and installed, Jim’s
father, a Mr Howard Sears, who is “covering for his son”
comes to paint our house. He tells me—when I ask, more
out of small-town courtesy than anything, “How’s Jim?” —
that his son lost Jim Jr in the river last spring.
Jim blames himself. “He can’t get over it,
neither,” Mr Sears adds. “Maybe he’s gone on to lose
All of Us: The Collected Poems Page 25