Spring Two
1.
The days are gentler, frosts are paper thin.
In these parts
winter is hard. You spend it bracing, then succumbing
to floating fevers
prone with your own ghost in bed, wrapped around
your viruses
like a wet mat, hating your flesh, all flesh.
Outside, the winners
go eating up the track while you drift off
with a temperature
of one hundred and three, thrown by empty self-
effacing dreams.
2.
In one I see a man sitting way beyond me
at the other end
of the room, smoking or pretending to smoke, in a wing-
backed easy chair,
with the back facing me, and not seeming to care
if he's seen.
The room is dim and I'm straining to see what he's at.
He's very busy,
but the harder I look, the darker the room becomes.
His pace increases:
he's grim, working quickly, ferociously stuffing an oversized
man-shaped coat
with blankets, filling it out, all black, and making it
into a figure
that if casually looked at would seem like a person sitting
there backwards, smoking,
in a wingbacked chair. It dawns on me then that
what he's straining to do
is make an escape without being noticed, even
while being observed:
getting away while giving the appearance (the dummy
he's stuffed) of being
still there. And now he comes moving on all fours,
but too swiftly; just passing
under a nearby table, smoking, the cigarette
stuck to his lips,
the red coal of it burning, and he coming on
shaggy and fast,
an inflated roach, ever nearer (my God!) to me, and aiming
to go -- where? Through me!
3.
Pell-mell the world explodes whenever you
get sick -- as sick
as the exploded world itself appears when you
get well. And so
you scream it out: "Neither I nor it exists!"
The blasphemy
is sobering. An egg is coddled, you drink
a little soup.
If it isn't me, you say, wanly smoking,
doing these things
at this time and in this place, then it has
to be my ghost.
Ghost food tastes good. You recover. The bad world
turns good-and-bad.
Then you understand that it has never changed.
4.
Her long slow smile
moves gently in my head again -- a smile
odd on an old woman's
face, therefore special, therefore something to adopt
or be adopted by
(I note quickly in photos of me then). Illiterate,
speaking three languages,
she turned into a literary figure: I called her
(in Auden's phrase)
"my true ancestor," and later, dedicating
a book to "My
Spanish Grandmother," I wrote this guardedly
fond poem to her:
For an Immigrant Grandmother
She sat for an age at the window with glances that threw
Pennies of pity at collarless beggars, and cripples
Who crawled like crabs from gutter to curb rippled
The geese in the bag of her hunched-over flesh. But you
Always could tell by her murmur for heaven to witness
When neighborhood children like sparrows hopped in distress
To catch from the hand of the baker his three-day-old bread.
Yet she danced with a hint of the hips and a lilt of the head,
And the savor of turbans and princes and spices welled
From her smile like a promise of Turkish delights withheld;
For her heart was a mediterranean cradling the earth
With wishes that tumbled like fish and golden sea fairs
Where pirates were drowned and angels were spared by her prayers
Till she slipped unaware on the edge of a sigh to her death.
5.
I need her moving in this time again, and in
her aura, love.
She takes the cups up with her freckled hands,
brown eyes following
like lambs, to the sink, pausing in the swish of faucets.
Without a word
she turns and wonders, surprised she understands.
The bulb-eyed night light
dims. I sleep, and it is warm and safe,
and I am loved.
Memory is (again) a stage where the dead
walk soft, actors
seeming to belong, but briefly, to another's
words and bidding,
supporting the light that seeks them out, until
we who bear them
shining, frightened, hungry, out of love,
go down the hole.
Who sends us up again? Wraiths, like us?
Enacting one
all-memory (ghosts to grandchildren,
grandchildren to ghosts)
there in another's mind, at another's bidding?
6.
The kitchen light
is glittering on just-washed, gold-rimmed dishes.
Among the smells
of meat and bread and soup a next-door neighbor,
through the paper walls,
sends something gurgling, drowning, in the quickly
sloshing toilet
as the family, just having eaten, push back
their chairs to rise,
frayed napkins daubing mouths, all quickly, so as
not to wake
the fevered child, nearer death than life,
to whom each noise
sounds out its special poignant mystery.
He lies there sleepless
in his narrow room, counting up his heartbeats
against the heavy
thing abiding in the corner, stirring
too lively in
the half-light of the kitchen door ajar.
It must be
a snow gust blown up blindly to the iron-heavy
burning between
his slackened shoulders as he dizzies and his
imagined face
gets blacker with dead air caught stoppered in his throat,
like blue gas
swirling in a bottle, till it suddenly pops out --
proving he's alive!
Unclenching bursting lips he grabs new air
with his drowning mouth.
7.
How was it in childhood almost to have died?
It was to live,
beyond the sickness and the being small,
having touched
the mushy border splashing, plowing through
the hot black aching
sickroom ten days of night unending, then surfacing
(like the picture book seal
coughing itself up on a beach) in blinding daylight
to eat and drink
among the bumbling shapes of life: on the still
sad side table
the torn tan lampshade, leftover breadcrumbs, bedpan,
cloth and soap,
watching the nurse's curd-white fingers pause,
the one with a gold
wedding band ( saying I belong to someone ),
bracing the fever
chart, and sunlight jerking down the wall.
8.
Through mind's deep loopings,
small immensities of the world retrieved float back,
as though moving
in the blood's intricate canals and locks,
returning toward
the radiating brain-lit sunlight of a day like this,
no different from himself,
being self-absorbed inside the seeing eye.
The dark reflection
of his lips and lolling tongue goes swiftly by,
as testing fingernails
etch stars and sun, a whole new sky, across
the rimed March window
his own smoke-huffing breathfuls have designed.
It was to live,
though still a child and parented, beliefless
as a man
and parentless: divorced parents, what have I
to do with thee?
It was to live pretending what one's parents gave
or wished to give
was still the true umbilicus and only
necessary lifeline,
but absolutely immaterial. Fawned on,
to smile back.
Having wandered by the swamp all day, to come home
late, contrite,
to shouts of castigation, whispering I'm sorry,
but not to mean it.
It was being still a child but no longer someone's,
belonging to no one
inside one's own great empty endless self.
The day reels back,
the focus sharpens: he is hunched up on his heels,
alone and watching
the burnt-rubber-smelling marsh gas rise and hover
miles across
the reeking, rich, all-swallowing dumps among
exploded cars
and cans, the smashed toy skeletons and busted
hulks of households,
applauded by a giant billboard swaying broken-backed
on tattooed feet,
the ripped advertisement flapping out its message
to every wing
of passing gulls fixed on scavenging, eating
up the world.
9.
It was lifelong to be his only brother's death,
as in the poem which read:
sometimes I hear the taste and smell of me
crack like a bag of spontaneous rags
under warm snow
sound like smell strong enough
I can taste it --
it has to be me
that still might be
any child you know must die
who will survive in you --
who knows? -- died
survived
a small brother died
mack trucked in the May warm
macadam Brooklyn street
just as the sun winked me past him
just as my shadow slipped me on
to the iron front house door
a schoolboy hung on a handle
hearing one pierced cry
the driver's glowering curse
afraid if I turned I would see
still in the trickle
spread wet and red
the soon caking blood
caught in the blond hair
stuck to the tread
picked up
head swooped back
over the driver's elbow
whisked white necked
into a sudden cab
siren fading in smoke
left
forever to whisper
let it be me
so I could hear whispering back not yet
not me
left
all day watching all night
till early
that morning
the nurse floating down
a clean white pigeon
wiping her mouth saying he
the boy is dead
it can't be
he
maybe it's me
and I can't tell
sunk in a bag
and can't breathe
10.
The proverbialist says, Each man his own best friend --
to prove self-interest;
then adds, his own worst enemy -- proving what?
his self-disgust?
The ideas are neither opposite nor the same.
The proverbialist lies.
No man chooses self as he chooses enemy
or friend. He is.
They are, in passing, what he becomes in hoping
they will love him,
or the notions he can't swallow that swallow him.
So, in a fury,
he accepts the love and hate that take him in.
11.
One's relatives
are relative to one's ideas of pretense
and disease.
Let them take the breeze -- the whole lot, near and far,
real and foster --
then see for certain whose life it is one leads,
and how come.
Everyone at some time had a girl friend who wanted
to be his sister,
and a sister who wanted to be a girl friend. But
did one ask,
For whose sake? and At a sacrifice of what
to whom or whose?
Read Pirandello's will: When I am dead,
do not clothe me.
Wrap me naked in a sheet. No flowers on the bed,
no lighted candle.
A pauper's cart. Let no one accompany me,
relatives or friends.
The cart, the horse, the coachman, e basta. Burn me.
We say it's hard
to fly alone -- forgetting we all do.
Take it from
the birds: The business of flying is so intense
that birds must eat
their weight in food and prey once a day;
the humming bird
would die if it stopped for twenty minutes.
12.
Another spring,
late afternoon and driving back from Boston
just past the woods
where tree frogs were mating and chirping, neither sad nor glad,
a new theory of comedy
flew out of the blue, inaudibly making its way
through a sonic boom
and the routine blare of the car radio's everyday
box score of doom
(Our boys killed in Viet Nam last week, two hundred
and three, the Reds
lost three times that many, and more unaccounted for.) --
to wit: the babble
of man in knowledgeable skin, whose sublimest expression
(Shakespeare, let's say)
is only a hair's breadth removed from gibberish,
is grounded in words
that slide into puns or carelessly melt into
obscenities, or
maliciously push the most heartbreaking sense around
until it helplessly
turns into self-travesty, booming the tune:
All is comedy!
As in a novel where life widens or narrows
beyond all possible
hope or despair, but still goes on happening
(the gifted young man
is broken, as one would expect, grows diseased until
he vanishes into
the abstract sky of the novelist's own manic depression;
and the young beauty
he missed, sweet as she is, betraying herself,
like Cressida
with some cocksure pick up Jack Diomed, goes down
into the sloughs.
We enjoy seeing them sink; no one that gifted
or sweet should exist
without being dumped), till we find ourselves fingering
the page before
we have finished reading it, ready to slam shut
the book we know
we never really believed in, worn out on the rack
of . . . what can it be,
too many possibilities? Like life that continues
after the jig is up,
after the dearest one dies, goes madly
dissolving, reforming,
with something always happening, but really as though
nothing had happened.
One forgets the novel is pointless. And life? One regrets
the same cannot
be said of life (except by suicides) until
there's an end, because
no one expects the end is an end, and of course
it's not. Because
like the novel, good or bad, after it's over,
life goes on
being written in just the same way by another novelist.
13.
So what have you got,
Jack Diomed asks, but a big bubbly bottle of babble?
And who'd swig on that?
I would, replies a voice in the air (I being
the voice in the air),
if you allow me each time to take the detail,
lovely or punishing,
for mine alone, for what must pertain to me,
because it lights
up me, and respects me, because it is true.
14.
To Israel I went
grieving, after losing my wife of so many years.
(Do you still read me?)
Before going, trying to jot down what it was like,
her dying that spring,
I threw up this raw, unfinishable thing:
The shaggy gray light declares us alive,
hunched in this Connecticut brick house breathing.
Fields bumble with bluejays and finches that yawk
and scream us awake. Can we last out the spring?
Tied down to cancer's dumb sickroom downstairs,
I watch you, inching away through the night,
unravelled by pain, hands twitching, palms red,
to snatch at the hem of the coverlet.
Agog in the world outdoors, full spring
is having its say: a perpetual gabble
of maniac words to the oblivious births
under bird wings that hammer and tear away.
I cannot take it -- stuffing my ears --
I cannot take this riot all day
each day, and still go on with your dying,
disbelieving your death, day after day.
Arrived, in love with mortality, I was flooded
with it everywhere.
In traipsing the warm summer streets at night and eying
the slow-moving crowds
munching hot corn, their expectant, preoccupied mouths
open and chewing;
or some lonely eater behind plate glass in a café
creeping with waiters
fussing over the lazy décor, and the round dark O
of his glistening mouth
as he jams into it a forkful of peas, some meat,
a piece of bread --
these acts grow suddenly awesome with poignancy.
What people do,
whatever they say, their gestures, their smiles, their wrinkles,
their sighs while dabbing
hot sweating faces with handkerchiefs; and all
their unconscious motions,
the movement of limbs, the crawl of the old ones, the jaunty
wide comfortable swing
of the young, of women with bodies in snug dresses
leisurely bending,
the full naked calves of their legs like separate beings
in golden sandals,
open shoes with high heels, small pointed toes in the light;
the arm-in-arm couples
lazing along, and the electric excitement of faces
about to share something --
the frank lovely kisses, sly eyes withdrawing, and passing,
falling into the mass
of all movement, leaves and insects and flowers, the rise
of a shout with an answering
scream; while a confident driver whisks by intently
aiming his car
through the glittering traffic -- and all these casual lives
unconscious of death,
of my private death, their death, the deaths of those dear,
and the pain still to come.
This I watch like a man enclosed in a booth seeing all
and unseen, or like
someone behind a duck-hunter's blind observing
the animals feed
in their pond, unaware of him. Where does one hide?
15.
One wants to tell
how the memory rushes hungrily back to the remembered
life of the dead
beloved, until at a touch, of themselves, the episodes
rush on unreeling,
speed up beyond one's grasping; imagined again,
retelling themselves,
great hunks of life that plead again to be real!
Lived, how they ask
to be unlived in order to be lived again, right now,
for the first time!
16.
Verse is the faulty hammer I use on the faces
backing up in the dark.
Foul! Deception! A lie! Simply your own
shabby way of pushing
them out of the way or palming off bits of the daily
indigestibles
in a puffed-up language you think turns them magical.
Touché! Hurray!
You've hit the weak spot, so now you can tell the whole
thing's a fraud. Please
stop reading. I cannot charm you, and you, you cannot
disarm me.
Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself; which was so much,
That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and
Destroy'd the sweet'st companion that e'er man
Bred his hopes out of.
Leontes mourning his wife, dead sixteen years,
not knowing that she,
Hermione, would soon be restored to him through
the pretend-magic
of Paulina (who said, those that think it is
unlawful business
I am about, let them depart -- but none did ),
himself exclaimed:
O! she's warm.
If this be magic let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
(Reader, do you read me? Let's go on eating.)
17.
What's the compulsion
to be always wearing my heart on this paper sleeve?
Eat as you read me?
A way to feel tidy, or even a way to feel visible?
A way to add up
what is only vagrantly there, unnamed -- or maybe
really unnameable,
so that it would otherwise have to stay muffled and dumb,
like a silenced shriek?
18.
Coming back from New York on the New Haven Line, the day
hovered raw and gray,
oozing in through the window. I floated out with it,
into it, watching,
observed, all the way back to Providence.
Then the poem
that came through seemed written through me as through glass:
Spring Northbound
Leafmold prepares the ground.
A hidden star wakes.
An unknown star discovers night,
moonlight on snow in crevices.
Piles of ermine break the ground.
A lemon haze flares up
among stripped trees,
naming a source there.
Sight returns and twitters.
Light stands among the trees.
Litters of seen things
unknown to one another
meet touching, still,
but in the scratchy light <