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Night of the Republic

Page 4

by Alan Shapiro


  spilling the goods out

  in profuse disorder at her feet.

  Like what if not like here

  at night where the improbable

  is law, and logic

  a penumbral state in which "tar heels"

  from Ohio could be "first in flight"

  above a beach named after a bird

  named after a cat.

  The Public

  The no one of it

  is everywhere.

  It is a high-rise that

  is itself a wall

  of windows all

  but one of which

  halfway up is dark,

  rising above the locked

  gate against which

  a stray page of the day's

  disasters has been

  blown flat, trembling

  against the iron

  bars as if trying

  to pass through or

  over them, like a

  fugitive the dogs

  are closing in on,

  wanting in, wanting

  for God's sake someone

  to take him in, as if

  that sole blue light

  above were safety,

  except it isn't

  safety, is it,

  it's the news

  on television, the same

  news of the same

  day—it is news

  calling out to news

  as pixel to print

  to pixel over circuits

  and atonal airways

  that someone earlier

  left on before leaving

  to make it seem

  as if someone were home.

  IV. AT THE CORNER OF COOLIDGE AND CLARENCE

  For Tom Sleigh

  Beloved

  The block is empty. I'm the boy there in the street,

  Looking downhill for you to turn the corner,

  Out of the avenue where horn blare, veils

  Of exhaust, and strangers in a hurrying sleepwalk

  Through each other tell me you'll be here soon.

  And soon is home, and home is when at last

  Your any moment now sensation brings

  Out of the day's dull glint and inching flow

  The look and bearing of a just for me

  Unearned, unjustified, imagined face

  That's all I need, so long as it's arriving,

  That's mine till your real face eff aces it.

  But not today, not now, not ever again.

  No one but me is left here outside the house

  Where you by being dead are more alive

  To me than ever, you who have no other

  Purpose now, no other way of being,

  Than to appear by never quite appearing,

  Whenever I need you, any time I want

  Clearer and still clearer in the aftermath

  Of your not yet but soon about to happen.

  Flowerpot

  I lay back on the carpeted bott om step

  Of the stairwell that like a well extended

  Darkly up to the window near the ceiling,

  Up where the china man under the wide-brimmed hat

  That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held

  No flower across the sill no one could reach.

  There was a television on somewhere

  Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,

  Someone was saying. Someone was saying something

  About a blockade and a quarantine,

  Who would blink first, lose face, or push the butt on.

  A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.

  The china man however didn't care.

  Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers,

  He was content to be a clot of darkness

  Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—

  The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,

  The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled.

  And everywhere within the light's slow fall

  Infinities of particles were falling

  Into the flowerpot they'd never fill.

  The Family

  Three million years ago, three barefoot people—

  A father and mother and a litt le child—

  Were walking close together in moist ash.

  I saw their footprints in a photograph—

  The child walked beside his mother, the father

  A step or two ahead, and it was raining,

  Fat raindrops pocked the ash around their feet,

  The ash that later hardened under ash

  Preserved in ash the way the mother paused,

  Turned left a moment, not sure where she should go,

  Looking behind her at the home she fled?

  At the volcano exploding in the distance?

  Anonymous as Lot's wife, turning around—

  In sorrow or relief? As if a blank

  Impenetrable cloud, extending back

  In time forever opened only there

  Just then, and briefly, for only ninety feet,

  Before it closed again for good behind them,

  Whoever they were, wherever they were going,

  On a rainy day three million years ago,

  Walking together barefoot in the ash.

  Light Switch

  The bad news was the sun was mortal too.

  One day it would just burn out. The good news was

  We'd all be long gone by the time it happened.

  The good news was there wasn't any place

  Inside the house I couldn't find extinctions

  To study and by studying prepare

  Myself for what I wouldn't live to see:

  The way the angry litt le ball of fire

  From a struck match would vanish when I shook it

  Into a loosening skeleton of smoke;

  Or how the world that watched me from the TV screen

  Swallowed itself the moment I turned it off.

  The good news was the light switch in my room,

  The way I'd flick it on and off so quickly

  That when the room went black an after-room

  Lit by a spectral light would drift on the blackness,

  The bed, the desk, the streetlamp in the window,

  Drifting before me till the black seeped through.

  I watched it till it wasn't anymore

  To feel as if I understood. That was

  The good news. The bad news was it did no good.

  Sickbed

  There were two voices in the fever dream:

  Hers speaking from another room, and theirs,

  The teenyboppers', singing from the screen.

  Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks,

  And thankful worries, who did what to whom,

  And why, and thank God it wasn't worse, poor bastard,

  Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears short

  Shorts, we wear short shorts, over and over

  Till I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last,

  Was out of it, and someone else, thank God,

  Had only lost a breast, and Shirley what

  A good kid, what a beauty, what a doll,

  She let herself go when the bum walked out.

  Thank God they never had a child. Thank God

  They smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog.

  Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sang

  To me on litt le stages on the stage

  Where boys and girls were dancing all around them,

  Singing and dancing where it wasn't worse,

  Thank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonder

  Who to thank for just how bad it was.

  Coffee Cup

  Consider the cup of coff ee, black as night,

  At night, all night, beside her on the table,

  Under the kitchen light where she would sit

  Staring at nothing, still as a photograph.

  Consider th
e way at first the steam would rise,

  Like phantoms twisting up against each other

  Struggling to pull away from the black lake

  That burned them every which way into nothing.

  Consider the cup of coff ee as it cooled,

  The glassy black of it on which the light

  Above floated a tiny version of itself.

  How like an eye it might have looked to her,

  The bright pupil there, the negative of hers,

  If she had seen it, although she never did,

  Never so much as lifted up the cup,

  Never so much as touched it, staring off

  At nothing as it went from hot to cold,

  To colder while you watched her from the hallway,

  Back in the dark beyond the doorway's frame,

  Unseen, unseeable, and completely safe

  As the cold eye in the mirror of the cup.

  Cigarette Smoke

  The cigarett e leaning in the ashtray's groove,

  On the side table beside the easy chair,

  Before the never-turned-off television,

  Released a single strand of smoke straight up

  In a slender column that looked like it would go

  On stretching in a straight line to the ceiling,

  Though always at the same point—maybe a foot

  Or so above the ashtray—it would waver,

  And bend and branch, the branches branching too,

  Thinning to veins, the veins to capillaries

  Entangling and knott ing up each other

  Into a bluish opalescent cloud.

  There had to be a reason why it split

  And whorled and tangled in that slow turbulence,

  And why the cloud it turned into would rise

  Just so high and then hang there like a halo

  Under the lamplight just above her head,

  While on the screen a movie star who'd died

  Was somehow standing on a subway vent

  And laughing as she tried to hold her white

  Dress down against the wind that lifted it.

  Piano Bench

  Back in an alcove off the upstairs room,

  Against the wall, the tall piano slept

  Beside the record player that had no needle,

  Beside a crate of albums. The tall piano slept,

  And nobody would wake it. Under the lid

  Too heavy for me to lift, the keys would dream

  All day of songs in the piano bench,

  Locked up on sheets of paper, behind bars,

  The way the records locked up their songs as well

  Inside the tight cell of concentric grooves

  I'd hold a fingernail to just to see

  If I could spring them while the record spun.

  The piano slept, and nobody could wake it.

  Nobody could stop the keys under the lid

  From dreaming all the melodies they dreamed

  When no one else was home, in the empty house,

  When the radio and the TV downstairs

  Were sleeping too, the silence through the day

  Now like a round of voiceless voices all

  Around me singing songs I couldn't hear

  While the turntable turned under my finger.

  Dryer

  I sat before the porthole to watch the clothes

  Billowing and collapsing round and round

  For hours inside the perforated drum.

  As if I watched the world from outer space,

  In an accelerated sky, white clouds

  Of underwear and T-shirts massed and parted,

  Slid away to mass again, in never quite

  The same white vortices within vortices

  You couldn't see down to the bott om of.

  I watched geologies of color, deep time

  Of mountain ranges rising from a sea

  They just as quickly sank into again;

  Pangaea breaking into continents,

  Continents into islands, and the islands

  Into that reef of blue cuff , green peninsula

  Of pant leg, flashing up and driven down,

  Churning itself upon itself, in cycles

  Neither diff erent nor the same, over

  And over for five billion years until

  The bell rang as the drum stopped, and it all

  Fell past the porthole into what it was.

  Bathtub

  Aside from sleep, there were two ways to practice:

  One was to lie back in the bath and stay there

  Still as the stillest water my stillness made

  Until I couldn't feel it anymore,

  The heat of it, despite how hot it was.

  As if my body had become no body,

  Suspended in a nothing that could turn

  Back into burning only when I moved.

  The other way was picturing the pink

  Gum hard as marble someone I didn't know

  Had left on the bott om of my desk at school,

  The desk carved with initials no one knew,

  Forgotten, in that row of desks inside

  That classroom in a vast hall of classrooms

  On the third floor of the elementary school

  At three o'clock on Sunday in the thick

  Of summer when the bell rings for no reason,

  And the silence in the moment after

  Is suddenly everywhere an avalanche

  Of silence that in the moment after that

  Becomes again the silence that it is.

  Family Pictures

  At first it was the old dead on the wall

  Above the fireplace nobody lit,

  Who kept watch on the empty living room;

  Solemn or smiling, who never looked away

  From the fluff ed cushions of the reading chair,

  The glass-topped coff ee table where a stack

  Of Mona Lisa coasters lay beside

  A giant picture book nobody opened.

  All day and night, they watched the plastic-covered

  Couches that I was not to sit on ever,

  The crystal goblets I was not to touch

  Behind a locked door in the cabinet

  Where silver hid inside a felt-lined box.

  And then each year, it seemed, more dead would join them,

  Some old, some younger, some my parents' age,

  And even one or two my own, in clothes

  I could imagine wearing, seeing myself

  Up there among them keeping a close eye too

  On everybody coming after me

  Who needed to be reminded constantly

  That nothing in the living room was theirs.

  Color

  How did God move? And anyway why would he?

  Where would he go, where could he ever need

  To go if he was everywhere already?

  How could I think of it, or picture it—

  God moving "over the blank face of the void"—

  Except as color, instantaneous as color?

  And what was color really but a vital

  Absence living where it was and wasn't,

  Insolid soul of visibility,

  The unseen of seeing all at once and too

  Continuously for the eye to see

  The trackless path it traces to the eye:

  The finch's yellow now-there-not-there flashing

  Among the leaves, and the leaves too, their green

  Degrees, gradations, shifting moods, a green

  Or yellow fire unfixed and alive

  And flaring out indiff erent to the sight

  It woos and enters, indiff erent to the bird,

  The leaf, the very air it all at once

  Continuously dwells in and deserts,

  Awake and wakeless, light-borne, born of light?

  Faucet

  The faucet dripped one slow drip from its lip,

  A slight convexity at first of metal


  Distilled from metal to a silvery blur,

  Opaque as mercury, that thickened to

  A see-through curvature, a mound that swelled

  As streams I couldn't see poured in and filled it,

  Stretched by its own weight to a rounder shape

 

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