From the Book of Giants 9780226890517

Citation preview

from the book of giants

P H O E N I X

POET S

From the Book of Giants

joshua weiner The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

j o s h u a w e i n e r is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of The World’s Room, published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in Washington, D.C. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2006 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America 15  14  13  12  11  10  09  08  07  06       1  2  3  4  5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-89045-6 isbn-13: 978-0-226-89046-3 isbn-10: 0-226-89045-7 isbn-10: 0-226-89046-5

(cloth) (paper) (cloth) (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weiner, Joshua.  From the book of giants / Joshua Weiner.    p. cm.—(Phoenix poets)   isbn 0-226-89045-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 0-226-89046-5 (pbk : alk. paper)   i. Title. ii. Series.   PS3573 .E3937F76 2006   877'.6—dc22         2006006188 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.



for Eli & Gus

and to Sarah— Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte Mi guida Amor . . . (Petrarch)

American jump, American jump, One—two—three. Under the water, under the sea, Catching fishes for my tea, —Dead, Or, Alive, Or, Round the world?

Contents

Acknowledgments

•

xi

I Bocca della Verità • 3 Dante: To Guido Cavalcanti • 5 Twister • 6 Elegy: Reading Dugan in Rome • 10 Hanging Mobile • 12 National Pastime • 14 2004 • 17 Postcard to Thom • 20 Found Letter • 21 Tempo • 22 Trampoline • 25 Cloak • 26 II Vita Nuova

•

31

III Weegee: Coney Island Beach after Midnight In the Country • 43 Games for Someone • 46 The Bed • 48 Quilt • 50 Song for Staying • 52 Out of Range • 54 Cricket • 56

•

41



•

ix

•

Mosaic • 58 Departure • 62 Net • 63 Song • 65 Searchlight • 66 Lament from the Book of Giants Notes



•

•

•

73

•

68

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of the following magazines and journals in which these poems first appeared, some in different versions: Agni: “In the Country,” “Twister” Beltway: “National Pastime” Cincinnati Review: “Tempo” Colorado Review: “Postcard to Thom” Faculty Voice (University of Maryland): “Cloak” Index (American Academy in Rome): “Elegy: Reading Dugan in Rome” New York Review of Books: “Dante: To Guido Cavalcanti” (Reprinted with permission. Copyright © nyrev, Inc.) Pequod: “Lament from the Book of Giants” Poetry: “Departure,” “Searchlight” Provincetown Arts: “Found Letter” Slate: “Trampoline” Southwest Review: “Song for Staying” Threepenny Review: “The Bed” Tigertail: “2004” TriQuarterly: “Cricket,” “Hanging Mobile,” “Mosaic,” “Out of Range,” “Song” Yale Review: “Weegee: Coney Island Beach after Midnight” Many thanks to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the University of Maryland for their support.



•

xi

•

I

B o c c a d e l l a Ve r i t à

See that crack at the corner of my eye? —a track running like a tear blown back by an unforgiving wind gathering force from the mind’s black accumulations. It’s for you, that crack, those jealousies and false heroics made meaningless in the face of certainties; my face, you see it emerging from the stone, your vain denials, the theatrics of home, the opera for which you’ve trained your voice, its capriciousness, its talent for carrying opportunity’s tune; it’s for giving in to anger, the pleasure you feel drawing bristles over a rash, for your cheapest satisfactions—when you cut someone off, miss another call, forget yourself; when you hold back from an easy true compliment and jump to take offense; all the smallest murders you commit when you close the door, turn away, draw shades against the sun; for not quite hearing or remembering; for your thoughtfulness pointing to another’s lack; for making the right point

•



•

at the wrong time, for falling out of touch, touching what would rather be left alone; for leaving well enough alone that calls for your intervention— So the single tear digs its groove, knowing, dispassionate, running from the corner of my eye to the rim of my perfect radius, a medallion, a coin you cannot spend, bank, or wear around your neck. Once a mere drain cover, I’ve risen up—your applause is not a factor —my mouth opening for your hand, that takes what is not given, that gives when it should grasp and drops what it must carry. Billions served, but it is yours I hunger for. Place it inside and see if I don’t return some night to chew it off with incisors hidden from the casual glance into such caverns of insignificance; how you file them so keenly I can taste it even now, the plum lie inside your pie.



•

•

D a n t e : To G u i d o C a v a l c a n t i

Guido, how I wish that Lapo, you, and I Could speed away in a speed boat Without a care for wind or wave Or the Dramamine you know I have to have. Clear skies, clear tempers; luck’s barometer Pointing to fair; nothing in the way Of jealousy, no rocks unseen in the narrows, Hidden by a sudden glare; But we, awakened by the force of friendship Should still hope to be friends. And Lady Joan and Lady Lagia And my most beloved Only-one-for-me Should set out for the desired ends Of easy conversation journeying to love: The three of them would be laughing, Happy to have each other, eating each other’s food, As we should, too, if only we could.



•



•

Tw i s t e r

A Letter

After a long silence another letter asking my help while insinuating my quisling guilt for having secured a position from which I could aid you. Through such twisting if I succeed in opening your way the folded arms of sponsorship I will have testified against myself upon your urging. Is this what you really want, more than whatever you think I can do for you, this evidence that I can do it, and am thereby not to be trusted? So call your first witness. You see high fences everywhere you once envisioned access, and gates locked with combinations you cannot learn: ingratiation (two turns left), subservience (one turn right), satisfaction with mediocrity (stop at zero), and smug indifference toward true work (yank hard).



•

•

Such is the system that makes the system to run the system through the system for the system . . . Where are we free of systems? Pessoa, who worked in a factory office, had a friend, a partner in a firm doing very well because of all the business it does with the government, who said to him “You’re being exploited.” “That reminded me that I am,” he writes, “but since in life we all have to be exploited I wonder if it would be less worthwhile to be exploited by Vasques with his textiles than exploited by vanity, glory, spite, envy, or impossibilities.” . . . Adjustment, accommodation, collaboration . . . Perhaps he broke into pieces to short-circuit his indifference, split wires spitting beneath black tape, while we just wrap around each other in confusion spiraling into my dismay. May I quote you, then, as when you rhymed clarity with charity, and made a room for all of us in correspondence?

•



•

All of us a year together in the designated room, a hive thick with the page’s pollen as we argued for poetry’s complex of complaint and praise . . . If knowledge ungrounded by charity is the power of demons outside the City of God (by which they occupy the air, and torment us) then we fought such demons late into the afternoon, losing what we won to win again before losing, the East Bay light smearing the single pane as knowing burnished into a giving we each received from each, and tried to realize more firmly in our forms (by which we reached to know each other, even as we failed). Has it all turned to mind-smoke, blearing memory—its cycling recycling— and blacking out the bulb? I remember the Augustine as I do your epigram about the knives growing sharper as the pie grows smaller. Who are you now? —No doubt you’ll cut me for this ink I spill as you’d cut a weed caught coiling for some purchase in your garden. But here’s my son, six years old and strong as a vine climbing up the oak out back. 

•

•

He loves to wrestle, to test himself against my natural advantage and make safe full contact with his father’s body. I’ve been teaching him some moves, classics of the mat, how to swing the legs out and contort himself beneath me to gain some leverage and squirm his way on top where his corkscrew locks stick damp to the brow inviting me to dive there like a mound of loose hay. Someday he’ll be far from me, that’s for sure, maybe even at school somewhere, hard at study, and he’ll write of all he’s learning now, his mind a kind of instrument picking out the best songs; and some there are that thrill him, that seem to choose him, rather, as he reads them to friends and to himself again, late at night or on the El alone, that ease his worry, enfolding him with a rush sweet sound tangling the ear, warming it in a plush insinuation of spirit curving round conventional goods, to bend and send him, fill him up and empty him so he never feels too full enough, by a poet he thinks I know, that I must know, who in truth I never knew.



•



•

Elegy: Reading Dugan in Rome

Alone in the garden perilous, the sun so mellow, the air so still inside and outside seem indistinguishable, I hope to hear your certain swing between two words, two lines that drive the meaning home and double back to surprise when a fly touches down to disturb my hair. What peril here you felt yourself, far from the Empire you knew best (American), the dominion of all your experience and most meaningful action of your tongue. But, Dugan, no matter where you were you had swing enough and in it found the sting. These flies don’t sting. They smear me with shit, satisfied somewhat with my salted skin.

10

•

•

So this is Rome and Rome is anywhere that history is forgotten, and not lamented by the whip of motorini. Death to the pedestrian! cries the Marinetti of the mind rushing to its future. Even now Professor Lyttleton is lecturing inside and I’m missing it, the unification of the nation state, to skim above the academic ear and lift from air the Punch-and-Judy strains floating down from the Villa Pamphili puppet show that hardly costs a euro. Dugan, you share your death month with Charles Bronson and Elia Kazan. Some win awards for complexity or wit, some make the surface shimmer. But surface is our mythology. “What wins?” you ask, alluding to the future in lesson six like an Italian teacher of Italian. “The river” is your answer.



•

11

•

Hanging Mobile

The parrot’s eye speaks to the sun, my son coos back on his back, on the run. Mosquito in the shade, the night crows green. Who rings the bell where you’ve never been? Baby Gus, Asparagus, tips make a fist to knock back the sun. The parrot’s eye grows with the moon, my son sings a bubble in the bubble of his room. Rubies in the griddle, the cake falls down, the knife runs for president, the parrot runs the sun.

12

•

•

Baby Gus, Asparagus, who rings the bell when you ring the bell? Smoke across the bridge plunders the eyes, the wind speaks back what you recognize. Jimmies rain down the frozen zone, the drops drop green, who dropped the sun?



•

13

•

National Pastime



(Washington, D.C., 2002)

Late spring evenings at the neighborhood diamond, the light a mellow custard before the bugs come out, extra dads walk the outfield spotting for glass and dog shit, anticipating season’s end with each spill of Gatorade. When the league director shows up with a surprise invitation, who can believe it: Eli’s team to play the South Lawn, inexplicably, with the worst record in the league—until a parent points out later, “He’s courting the Spanish vote,” the District’s one bilingual school, pitching logic into relief. The parents mostly Democrats, labor lawyers, journalists, the coach a Mid-East peace negotiator, explicably out of work—should we boycott, or protest somehow the children’s fairy tale finale? Should our censure ruin the six-year olds’ requested appearance at the White House?—Conviction competing with conviction, we hear our cameras calling to be fingered from their sleep. Game day, fresh Cardinal duds throw glow on expectant faces, the new world order here a batting roster. Players take positions, charmed by the announcer’s melody massaging the mind as if in Camden Yards. Bush sweats with pleasure, Big Kid among the kids, with Tom Ridge coaching first, Homeland Security radio curling like an ear inside his ear; Mayor Williams coaches third, his bemused stoic posture 14

•

•

resigned to the symbolic placement; and the Orioles mascot works the parents in the stand, the staffers, and special invites— families of the most recent publicly acknowledged Pentagon dead. Mercifully, one inning, two photo ops, and a picnic. A White House reporter approaches Eli for an interview; the tape recorder insinuating official history, the boy’s back straightens as if tied to puppet strings. “If you were putting together a team and you had to choose between President Bush and Cal Ripken, who would you choose?” Eli thinks a moment, shrugging off expectations. “Cal Ripken,” he throws back. “And why is that?”—the newsman’s glove is ready. “He’s a real baseball player.” (Pitching logic into relief.) Laid out under shade, on grass plush as any carpet, I watch the team of marksmen camouflaged in foliage along the fence, binoculars searching the streets while the House music spins —is this possible?—Wild Cherry, 1976: “I tried to understand this / I thought they were out of their minds / How could I be so foolish / To not see I was the one behind”—behind the fence, inside the game, America’s national pastime, America’s number one show, streaming back through the bicentennial Tomahawk testing Legionnaire’s disease, Israel to Ford: Send in the Clowns Saul Bellow Rocky All

•

15

•

the President’s Men, as the New York Yankees take Entebbe, Pol Pot makes use of the Steadicam and the Supreme Court, after great deliberation, rules that Robert Lowell’s Selected Poems is neither inherently cruel nor unusual, though Richard Leakey’s discovery falls outside their jurisdiction: a skull of homo erectus from 1.5 million years ago; and when he lifts it to his ear like a transistor radio it sings him the song I hear “losing every step by the way,” snaking through Tom Ridge’s wire, the soundtrack to Colin Powell’s tears, “burnin’ down the night stands” of President Bush’s brain— “And just when / it hit me / somebody turned around and shouted / ‘Play that funky music, white boy, / Play that funky music right / Play that funky music, white boy / Lay down that boogie, and play that funky music till you die / Till you die / Oh, till you die’” —deciduous giants of the South Lawn stretching out their arms, leaves whispering frantically to an empty blue sky . . .

16

•

•

2004

How was it I felt nothing that last Ides of March in the busy downtown square of Largo Argentina, where Caesar felt the determined point of conspirators? All across Europe, the morning papers read, five minutes of silence held for the Spanish dead: that noon the buses shifted down and motorini slowed, trailing fashionable scarves flapping like standards on a field. Why was it not quiet enough for a personal public grief, though Rome stood dutifully observing more than itself? The handsome Senegalese stopped selling for the moment their poetry against apartheid, while carabinieri hovered by Pompey’s portico latrine used exclusively by wild cats that spray the travertine. Goddess of Fortune of the Present Day,

•

17

•

your temple is the rubble venerated by Il Duce; and the tired Communist Party still prints the most colorful posters competing with the Lotto sign yellowing Berlusconi’s eye. A gypsy family that sleeps three generations outside split sandwiches, played cards, and waited to ask for change; and the Bengal tiger stitched on the father’s leather back stared down the promising awning of the Chinese restaurant. The warm sun reached us faithfully through oceans of cool air, the war had never ceased, and all the art of the Renaissance seemed part of this being fucked. Then five minutes were up and we heard the children shout from across the ancient square and release their bright balloons into the afternoon air— red and blue and gold, they rose above all things ruined and not yet ruined, perfected in themselves disappearing from the world, manmade yet natural shapes, fresh as the painted birds

18

•

•

fading from Etruscan tombs escaping the hunter’s net also depicted there in the living necropolis.



•

19

•

Postcard to Thom

Addressed, it lately sits propped on my desk with no reason now to go—you’re gone, somewhere behind the snow screen, though I think you’d laugh at this lucky charm from Herculaneum suspended by a chain in opened doors even the bravest might have fled through— a gladiator, and in both raised fists a knife to strike himself, his own huge leaping cock curving up with a snarling panther’s head to savage the source of its awakening: the mind, alarm of want ringing the blood as appetite grows to feel itself grow longer, twisting back on the hot stone of the heart. And dangling down from panther cock, each foot, the muscled back and swollen scrotal sac— a little bell provoked by the cooling wind.

20

•

•

Found Letter

What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this: Gifts freely given, that you never earned; Open affection with your wife and kids; Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit; Few days in court, with little consequence; A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours In the office; close friends who speak the truth; Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich Enough to build the future with; a bed In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love; A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep, And sleep to trim the long night coming; Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be None other; freedom to forget the time; To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined Yet does not seek the terms of its release, Like a child’s kite catching at the wind That flies because the hand holds tight the line.



•

21

•

Te m p o

The cardinal’s red plume works sexmagic on the boy in the classroom, stuck at his desk; but eyes seek beyond the pane for imagination’s mate, the phenomenal world. The white paper invites him to the wide-ruled field with wood chips still visible, where pinched lead will scratch the composition in the compost. Like the bird, the boy can sing, though words come slowly

22

•

•

when they come, to make the tune that keeps the cardinal there in view. A story of red: ripe cherry, poppy flame and fox fur lit by sun, as when the sun rises red expect wind and rain, red earth releasing vapors to make red gold for great fingers, iron hot in red cinder, red with guilt and tempered ointments, red gills pulsing in sudden air, Garibaldi’s shirt billowing in red sea fog, red on red, the butcher’s hand holding a rose, a bow, a burn,



•

23

•

a trove. Stay, bird! who would sooner bend to a beetle’s promise than play the role pathetic, or startle on your perch by the lunch truck’s silver hood, radiant and humming hoarsely— I love this boy, off-tempo, who keeps the pencil to the page, drilling through dream to the brightest realest red he has ever seen.





24

•



•











Tr a m p o l i n e

The kids next door who bought it for their mom on Mother’s Day—a joke?— play it like palms on a marching drum, a rhythmic coital creak that carries clear across the open yard to call my son like a Barnum top-hat bard. He runs out in his socks, my turn my turn! They haul him up so he might bounce and stamp and lift his legs to learn how little one can weigh up there, the moment when the body peaks and hangs, becoming what the body seeks: weightlessness and weight; self launching beyond self; before the theory, fact. Yet as he flies he drops down like a leaf the earth tries to give back. He tumbles, caught at last in the canvas sheet, then feels again through socks the warm concrete.





•

25

•

Cloak

Late May, skin tingled true with riot, the screen door clapping shut behind me on the final days of school. Beneath the dogwood’s white explosion, fragrance of milk floated down and floated up, each petal a portal, a pure cup and sweet pill to cure us of winter and call back the birds. The body dies but today I am taller, I can tell time (but what will I tell him?) I’m not good at reading . . . Running then not to be late, the dogwood casting one beam like a full daytime moon over shortcuts, bamboo, bulldog, and quiet creek water. A waking bulldozer: who are the sleepless, who do they carry? Nights I felt plagued by my body’s heat I’d strip and climb the dogwood branches. Who wears the final cloak of summer? The son of an ancient seed–caster, I was searching for a gate. I worked hard but remained lost among faster numerals interacting through blizzards of feeling. I would not pick my scab

26

•

•

to speed the healing. One day, every year, I’d return to find the dogwood blossoms fallen like a great snow cape silencing capacities of green.



•

27

•

II

Vi t a N u o v a

They called him the Polka Dot Man —so I also picked up the custom— but what did he call himself? This was Berkeley, the early nineties; The Movement hadn’t completely died, though threatened by tides of cappuccino foam and hair conditioner. There were still protests, of course—communist, animal rights, anti-apartheid, pro-Palestinian rallies, and rallies against the Gulf War— as before, as now. But the merchants wanted Telegraph Avenue —“the interface of town and gown”— cleaned up, however not too clean: property should be safe; customers should not feel threatened—though a certain amount of general non-standard behavior was good for business—historical, identifying, in its own way consumable. The Avenue felt the pressure, social programs giving way to corporate crackdowns, as UC executed its plan to retake People’s Park by planting flowers and volleyball nets: with their jockstrap arsenal, frat boys would flush out the undesirables; the police would intensify a routine

•

31

•

of breaking down the “free” bins in which people left discarded clothes for the people in the park; people would then rebuild the bins (though that wasn’t part of the plan) and the police would tear them down to find them later rebuilt. The situation, as they say, escalated. And people—especially the people in the park— eventually felt called to action as if on a grid of legendary actions, where all the moves were known, yet given life in the new patterns unfolding. A woman with a machete and a knife, an anarchist, even broke into the chancellor’s mansion with a blowtorch and a questionable cop shot her in the back and in the heart. This was 1992; people gathered for that one, even some poets, and rioted (but without looting: it was a protest). And People’s Park —where she shared food and shelter and fought the University—was renamed after her. But it never stuck; it’s still People’s Park, the people named it and custom kept it. Her name was Rosebud Abigail Denovo; her parents named her Laura, but she broke that custom, renamed herself, and fled the institution. The cops thought she was crazy. They knew she had a history, or they didn’t know, that’s why they shot her, or why they didn’t not shoot her. (“There was no opportunity to utilize the dog.”) Her friends didn’t think so, 32

•

•

(“Why didn’t they flush her out with gas?”) that she was on the edge, though one friend found her eating pieces of glass for breakfast, upset he no longer wished to make bombs. But the best poet—he said, “If she had broken into my home with a machete I’d have shot her too.” He knew better than anyone how to make a rhyme sound wholly natural, and he kept the hell away from graduate students. In the end, her “excessive force” lost to the cop’s, the confusion of what happened now part of the public record: Denovo, Rosebud. Of the new, soon to flower —in her desperation and despair, her anger, her desire to belong somewhere, her sense of being with others, of belonging to her commitment, her steady Pepsi-and-candy-bar diet, sleep deprived and constantly harassed by the law, by the streets she fled to and that led her to the Park she fought for, where she lived at the center of a web, the strands of a practical ideal (let people be in the Park) dissolving in the heat of her senseless martyrdom as though a rose should shut and be a bud again—



•

33

•

But this isn’t a political poem, nor a Romantic dream. Because the Polka Dot Man paid no attention, as before, as then, in 1992; he was a life-artist, or something, and his name— the name that custom gave him— was not a mystery, nor an allegory, though he wore his origins like a coat of arms: sweat suits with perfect polka dots painted on them, upper body and lower, polka dots of every color, every size. He was lean, roughly handsome, with a squint like Clint Eastwood; and he wore a sun visor like Clint Eastwood on the golfing green, and sometimes even carried an umbrella open against the sun, its indisputable midday authority. If it rained, he kept the umbrella closed and stayed home, wherever that was. Under the sun, though, he would sometimes sleep in the plaza between Wheeler Hall and Dwinelle, his body laid out in the warmth, on the hot stones, with his head cool enough under the umbrella he opened on the ground. Awake, he’d pace the square patterns of the inlaid plaza brickwork, careful to keep on a course of straight lines and ninety-degree angles, which he otherwise improvised on the legendary grid—where to turn, when to continue on the straight path until it was time to turn. So that his work, you could say, 34

•

•

was to wear a suit of circles and trace a path of squares. He carried himself erect, his dignified gait crisp, militant even, expressing delineated intention, but visibly open to possibility as well. He had style and something like a subject, a commitment, his mode; yet one was never quite sure how he would do it, what path he would choose, as he chose it, for he did not know himself. That was his pleasure at the center of repose. He was never seen anywhere other than the plaza, at work in the web of his tracings, or asleep. He wouldn’t talk to anyone, except girls; but from a distance he appeared capable of great charm, I could see he possessed what you’d call a winning smile, of welcoming white teeth. His program was working, no question, but what was it? This went on for years. In the meantime I was studying, trying to learn how to write a line and how to make a turn, when to circle back, and all the girls I talked to wore black and understood the paradigm



•

35

•

of the political unconscious, and I was getting nowhere. I was reading Robert Duncan to open the chain of rhyme in search of new structures, a new correspondence for ancient responsibilities; but I was like an open sheet in a closed book, a human faculty without sufficient will . . . At some point I noticed his polka dots were changing, opening up from the center, as if from a gradually increasing centrifugal force felt within each dot, as if some kind of internal revolution were gaining speed. Each week, a new suit, with a new set of dots opening further, swirling, spiraling, as he edged week by week from the center of Sproul Plaza towards the busy sidewalk crowded with hungry students forming lines in front of food stalls, circling around themselves, negotiating the crowd they were a part of: as if he too were at the center of a world represented by a dot, and by virtue of some force, pulled to the perimeter and yearning beyond it: till the circles undid themselves entirely, becoming sets of lines, some even parallel lines like equal signs between shapes, or stories, the present 36

•

•

in correspondence with a future he was working out, from the center, where he remained isolated and in control, to the margin, where people lived more fully engaged with each other in the customary happiness of eating modestly and joking around, the bright colors and patterns of their clothes all mixing together in the loose weave of the sidewalk. (This must be a political poem.) Then one day, he appeared in a blank suit, white, without dots or swirls or lines, completely erased of its former signs; he seemed tenuous at first, confronting the open sheet of his own being; then his posture took the shape of interest, enjoyment, as he spent the afternoon mingling in the crowded street bordering the campus; and the next day he disappeared, as if the rose should pluck herself and float away on the current. No public record of such an act exists, this private integration, a re-seeding into the public campo we call the city, in which he calls himself by the name he’s now known, though none of us knew it, who saw him each week on his invented stage— the new life, in flower, having turned with the existential seasons . . .



•

37

•

Until a few months later I ran into him working downtown at the recycling center: from the outside, looking through the glass door, I caught his eye, and he shot back a look of aloof amusement: it was no big deal, the new life here, returning redemptions to a point of origin. He seemed decked out in a suit of modest defiance, I refúse your réfuse, though he leisurely made for the door. As if I stood in a crowd, waiting to throw it all away in the right colored bins, my courtesy and patience rendered me absurd, out of line. It was my turn to move, but time moved instead; and I was still standing there when, with a curt nod, he opened the door and said, “Whose permission are you waiting for?”

38

•

•

III

We e g e e : C o n e y I s l a n d B e a c h after Midnight

No moon is good. I take off my shoes And go silently so as not to lose The shot I know is lurking there— American made Is my stock-in-trade, As whatever’s in the frame I choose, I chose, though it’s like I wasn’t there. What’s out there? Why, sweethearts in love Making love out where it’s dark enough. I wouldn’t disturb them for the world. Each kiss, what’s left Between each breath— Hard work, but the kind that makes you laugh. There goes a match. What’s that I heard? There, in the lifeguard station lookout, Lovers exhausting each other’s doubt. I’ll catch them fast without a flash: To make it clear How they appear Like drags inhaling their way to ash, Or a mouth getting ready to shout . . . Too dark to have used the range finder there, It’s like scooping yourself, your feeling, where

•

41

•

Trying to find the way, you’re caught (The frame in which Your subjects twitch) Alive, exposed, and as if too near: The lens opens and you take the shot. Why they were up there near the sky I thought I’d see as the fluid primed The image into a final shape; But all I found Was a kind of sound, A woman up there like a lie, Alone and bewildered after the rape. You can read the “Lifeguard Only” sign She leans against. There’s no clear line Between her hair and where the night Begins to fan Out in a plan Expanding further than stars can shine, And outside my frame to make it right. What did she choose, which choice was deferred As she waited for the bus without a word No matter where she sat to wait? All that is there: The apparent stare Out to the wave that can’t be heard That she readies herself to contemplate.





42

•



•











In the Country

We made love twice on the way to your funeral, the two boys in the other bed bundled in the heat they made themselves, dreaming, not dreaming, ever so slowly rising to a surface they would not break, not yet, just stirring beneath it. We could hear the sheets ruffle, as of a bird nearby, unseen, preparing its feathers. Awake, the elder’s curiosity about his uncle dying was turning into a feeling he practiced on the way there: “Are you sad? It’s sad; isn’t it sad? That he’s dead. Is he dead? Will I remember him?” What answers we had only led to more questions, each answer a soft release that bound us to the next without constraint, as when pulling back from water that is too hot, and then less hot, yields slowly to a sinking down, a succumbing

•

43

•

that becomes relief, as knowing, not knowing turns to grief. So, what all practice, none perfect. The younger, he too was practicing that day, crawling to a cord’s inserted plug to announce his only word, hot, that he repeated to the steaming bowl and the watchful tub of water, hot, its tense permeable surface inviting his hand as if to pet a cat. Clean for church, he spent his last hour lining up little horses on the floor and marching them marching them into the house of blocks his brother built, empty and waiting for whatever might arrive (horses, not-horses). The house was many hues of one color, like a tree in autumn. It was autumn, and we could smell the wine of apples rotting into the ground. We saw the horse in the field before feeling your absence inside, and walked the hill down to see. But it saw us first and waited at the fence patronizing as a physician behind a desk. 44

•

•

A kind of welcome, perfected without practice. The younger in my arms reaching out a hand smaller than an apple . . . The horse stretching his neck across the fence . . . We were close, closer, too close when he asked “Hot? Hot?” “Very hot”—but I did not pull him back.



•

45

•

Games for Someone

Someone is a peach Someone is a mouth The peach runs north The peach runs south The mouth is open Its teeth are sharp It need not run to taste you on its tongue The peach is flesh Its heart is a stone It shines with spit like a medal or a bone Someone is a vine Someone is a blade The blade trains the vine to grow its own shade Inside the shade someone is a nest Inside the nest someone is afraid

46

•

•

Someone is a lock Someone is a key Someone is a rhyme for liberty Someone is a breath Someone a balloon A third one knows a knot but cannot find their room



•

47

•

The Bed

Outside the house, the field stretches out fully, dark and inviting, it opens to the night rain. It rains on the houses, it rains on the boy coming home late, after supper’s been served. His brother’s asleep in his own room, he orbits in sleep the other rooms of the house. The boy hasn’t eaten, it feels good to feel empty; he’s hungry but empty. He hears the rain hit the field. He listens for the mother, but he hears nothing. He climbs to his room, the second floor, next to his brother’s. The father works late now; now it is night, now time for bed. He opens the door and discovers a secret. What is the secret? He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. His mother lies there asleep on his bed, laid out in a field. The boy is tired, why is she there? He touches her shoulder, shakes her gently and calls her. Her face is relaxed, the shut eyes have grown younger. Her hand curls around nothing, nesting the ghost of an egg. She is tired and spent by the day. She is utterly spent, hair undone, shirt loose; but she is dressed as she was that very morning, as the sun warmed the kitchen and the father walked out. The sunlight was silent. Two white cups rested on the counter, still full of coffee, a lactate skin slowly sealing the surface. The dry toast stiffened. All the colors outside, the morning air rinsed by the light, nourished the boy’s hunger to be out in the world. 48

•

•

Now his mother dreams of walking out in the world, she walks past her high school and sees her old friends. She sits down to eat at her mother’s kitchen table stretching out fully, blueberries stewed, topped with sour cream. The bowl is too small for so many berries, so much sour cream. The sunlight rains down, it pours into the room. She lowers her head and begins to eat like a cat. Her mama’s favorite cat, she feels herself petted, she likes it like that. The boy tries to wake her, why won’t she wake up? She shouldn’t sleep here, this isn’t her bed. He can see the large bed she shares with his father, the sheets would be taut, the bedspread smoothed out, tucked neatly under pillows white as two eggs. The bed is made in its hunger; it’s empty but hungry. In her dream her legs feel like springs, they’re tan as if made of copper, she could walk forever away from the house to have her adventure. Why is she so tired, so alive and so still? The mother is not a child to be sleeping in his bed. This is his bed, where he dreams of adventure. He is not the parent. Doesn’t she know it’s his bedtime now? Of course, she must know. His hand on her shoulder looks like a starfish. Her body gathers breath, as if greedy for air. Even her shoes wish to rouse her, still on her feet. Time to wake up, he sings in her tune. You have to wake up. The tree outside the window awakens in the rain, the rain is a whisper, the boy is grown up. Time to wake (time to sleep). The mother’s in love.

•

49

•

Quilt

Ancient, hand-stitched, faded. Beneath it, floating in late afternoon Maine shadow, you sense the warm press of elder slough kindled brighter by your body’s heat. Wet breeze teases the flag outside, its flap lapping the house like a swathe or tide of air lacing the screen, playing frayed embroidered thread and fresher skin, scabby bitten summer skin of children tumbling downhill, loose steamroller drums, runaway timber racing for the water, their aggressive pleasure a bragging solicitation the air stream folds into silence. Your silence. Unroused idle vessel caught under gulfweed without purchase, your voicelessness is hidden by clapping flag cord 50

•

•

ringing alloy music from the pole, a nearby boat’s wake rocking the dock, the children’s shouts like warning bells disguised as delight. Unlifted, inside, still. You can move but when, but how, hanging like pine scent, the osprey calling as if to each falling deepening hue of the bay’s blue becoming black— They’re not coming back and you’ll never know what you cannot know: some melody, with the words flown off; but can you see yourself just passing through, a spore floating free and sinking down with the coming evening’s drop to settle on a kid’s blond strand and cling to it? Without a doubt. And the quilt having been removed at last, it wags forgotten on the line, a ululating tongue even the children refuse to hide behind as they improvise the early dark and seek each other out.















•

51

•

Song for Staying

How can I call you, God of the sky, deities of night, of rain, of rivers, most worthy to be worshipped even now in our disbelief; so distant, how we seek you in our sleep, Diana, kind goddess of birthing who brings us our kind, how can you come back again to watch over the mother of my brother’s boy, only two, and the scalpel in the surgeon’s hand; how the inner-eye feels the cold spectral light striking the blade as if cutting the bevel—how can you dull that fear now, how can I call you? And my brother, having taken Hippocrates’ oath, reticent by nature, keen of eye, keen of mind, whose knowledge is both salt and salve on the incision, the body an envelope holding notice from the fates; can you dull his vision tonight sharpened by all he’s learned from long study? Some apertures must close for each body to rest.

52

•

•

And the boy, who lies waiting for one more moonlit night, catch him falling as you caught Hippolytus before he dropped to the kingdom of shadows. Goddess of the crossroads, you are lore to me, old science; but do you still live outside of our systems, principles, departments, methods, breakdowns; even as fear turns to fear?



•

53

•

Out of Range

Between one screen Behind your dream Another screen The broken lamp Beside her lip Inside the needle The whistle-stop When you wake up Between your plan And how it ends Behind the lock The mis-cut key An opened door Beneath the field The ruddock drills With hidden skill Between two noons One grip one strap 54

•

•

You’ll hear the speech Of speech unheard Before the storm Above the hawk You’ll feel the rain It will not slake



•

55

•

Cricket

Cricket says you know cricket by my rubbing and cricket knows you by a like tune, vain lovers, playing games of sweet moan to seal the hour. Watch cricket leap across your ugly tile floor and play to your boot as it misses once again. I’m cricket, blacker than coffee and tobacco juice, my song more bitter, more buzz if you’d only quit your typing and shut up a minute. Cricket says your lips confuse the issue, cricket’s long antennae pick it all up, cricket knows where cricket is.

56

•

•

Cricket burrows with forelegs, chews your paper. Cricket says stop straining for effect. Cricket loves a napper in the grass. Cricket is never wretched. In a room of smoke cricket can breathe. Cricket sings outside your sealed room of stone.



















•

57

•

Mosaic

Will we remember you, child we never knew, never saw, never touched, infant we never touched though flesh of our flesh, whose skin we never smelled with a cutting inarticulate animal love made of our one love formed from dream shards and diverging strands, the splits we sequenced to envision you, now without a name . . . (the name we would have called out to the living, or the dead; but if the dead never lived outside another body in this world?). So I seek my shelves, my selves, to find there fate and character inscribed as one action, in time, blind; still, we are assured of striding 58

•

•

the right path to experience; thus pathos, to learn to know through pain. Do we need to entertain that character can be remade, and fate made plastic by true intentions’ heat? (And if one is hardly one, a cipher, unbegun?) Such is pride, scratching figments of pliability, false characters. Proud parents, we say . . . Yet when I say “you,” the peak of energy in utterance spikes to question elements of who— who died by this mosaic of a gene, (mosaicism, pathogen’s crooked path to crippling deviation) who did we burn to ash, whose ashes did we carry to the coast, whose ashes did we set down on that rock above a sea repetitive as a lullaby, it was that quiet, barely a breeze to carry further the remains . . . So I had to lean into the small heap of ash to make from my breath a single strong current and send the ashes over—;



•

59

•

yet when I breathed in, my nose inches from them, (I could make out, I thought, the larger chips of bone) particles of ash lifted to my throat and stuck there. I coughed, swallowed some ashes, my face close enough to the ground, I recognized like a word an ant—with effort, with continually renewed determination and its famous instinct for logistics— carrying as if along a legendary route another ant, dead, its own ant, across the cliff . . . pathetic chimera of grief, earth-dweller gathering beyond reason in an awkward script of movement this improbable coincidence, chance strand in the ninth position, the body’s winter deformation. A mosaic now of unborn possibility: the future had breathed like a muslin veil we peered through to see ourselves in another life (in the nucleus), nucellus 60

•

•

with you

of the new, nut meat hungered for as we prepared to pass through curtains puffed with beckoning

(chance currents lapsing to fainter cadence) . . .



—yet when I breathed in—

We see ourselves there still, where we cannot pass through to, disappearing avenue, mosaic of promise, musaicum, music, museum . . . Broken code, unwritten book we cannot open. You were our girl we never held that memory wishes it could read.



•

61

•

Departure

Open the door and let me through to make my own first day where green turns gray into a blue you’ve never seen, because it’s you: you could not stay. I could not stay. But the blue turns gray and returns, though new, and becomes my Now; and this now burns completely physical, which bones do, too. Am I far enough from you as from a rhyme? –I hear the world rush in, as though out flew a sparrow, panicked by what it knew, (its nest of fear) with bones hollow as a piccolo piping its bright flight high above tree, town, and radio, to find the climate clean, to not know the rhyme for die.

62

•

•

Net

You live with it, your restlessness, pacing the rooms where no comfort lies. (Grief. Grave. A falling

pitch, an openness.)

What is your work? Where can you learn to spread your net on the face of water? Born in the world, we live together. And if not together,

what is a world?

Necessity. Choice: Hope. Constraint.



•

63

•

Those that are gone, Braid makes the rope;

they’re part of the figure. lake waits for sun thaw.

64

•

•

Song for Thom Gunn

There is no east or west in the wood you fear and seek, stumbling past a gate of moss and what you would not take. And what you thought you had (the Here that is no rest) you make from it an aid to form no east, no west. No east. No west. No need for given map or bell, vehicle, screen, or speed. Forget the house, forget the hill.



•

65

•

Searchlight

Eye turned to see you, mind-star, ancient beam sharpened to a blade by memory cutting a path through many years’ midnight. Tormentor, nurse, imp flouting a floral print; would that I could ignore you, rank delighted heckler— Hey Fuckhead, remember when . . . like a lighthouse blinking open forgotten regrets; each lucent snake hunts the weedfloor of a neglected garden. Also my singing council, my 66

•

•

circling titan daughter, defender against memory’s noisy magpie— Serve your dry lick to the inner ear; clear my way for the finding, cut through all the lies. Sever the sutures: reveal me as the same, false raveller who cherishes the chiding (the chiming) he knows will heal him to conceal him.



•

67

•

Lament from the Book of Giants

I . . . And remember that you are poor, you live in a tent of skin, and if you taste sweetness, bitterness must follow. And if you delight in truth it will pass you like a Golden Perch to new waters, your ears plugged against the breath of forms. The children of righteousness torment you with their dancing. You have forgotten your mother’s face, and your father’s, their voices remain unburned. You seek

68

•

•

comfort in carnival, you honor false boundaries; you speak into the wind and lecture those who are sleeping. Seeking purchase in the city of night, you find refuge in facsimiles of gardens and depictions of night. You fight by proxy, you accept judgments as lullabies. Radio too weak for the innermost stations, lips too dry to sound the horn— sprinkle dust on your meat: The hand you seek has been withdrawn; you have succumbed to the lure of nations . . .

II So I tried to shut the Book of Giants from my mind: I didn’t care

•

69

•

to read it, I was already dumb and my heart distressed. I sought council in a covenant of my own making as I perceived my nature a strong tower built from bricks baked in the backyard kiln and supported by improvised ramparts. Of course, I was a fool. Pleased with the work of my own hands, still I sought shelter amongst the men of Marvel and their marvelous mighty powers, the great goodness of their actions shining like a seven-fold light upon foreign fields shredded to chaff and the beautiful deserts ruined. I had cast my lot in the congregation of Vanity and Cunning. I conjured beds of cypress and cinnamon on a plantation fed by a hidden watercourse. But I knew no joy. When I laughed or opened my mouth, I barked as though welcoming a pox. When I bathed, a new film covered my limbs and torso such that dancing became impossible, treacherous. Conversation melted into discourse which slowed to a phatic trickle and froze, finally, into shackles. 70

•

•

From the Book of Giants grew the frond of an old understanding; its claim rooted in my soil gathered strength there— Then why did I resist? Didn’t I belong to my neighbors; were their fears and desires not mine? The Book of Giants stayed shut, though I dreamed of withered grapevines mired in salt, shadowed by a glory branch reaching past the past.

III Thus the Giants shut their Book with sadness. They searched for one to explain to them the dream. The interpreter-scribe confessed his ignorance. The Giants fell asleep in the midday heat And sleep on, with faces to the sun.



•

71

•

Notes

The epigraph is found under the heading “Games for Small Toughs” in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, assembled by Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford University Press, 1955, 1960). Instructions for the game are as follows: “The child holds the grownup’s hands and is jumped up and down to the first two lines. At ‘three’ the child has an extra big jump and twists his legs around the adult’s waist. The child’s body is then allowed to fall backwards until his head nearly touches the floor. He is asked ‘Dead or alive or round the world’. If he chooses ‘Dead’ he is dropped on to the floor; if ‘Alive’ he is pulled upright; if, as usual, he chooses ‘Round the world’, he is whirled round and round for as long as possible.” “Bocca della Verità” puts words in the mouth of truth, in this case an ancient Roman drain cover in the shape of a marble disc and representing a human face. It was believed the open mouth would close on the hand of any perjurer who placed it inside. It now hangs on an exterior wall of the Santa Maria in Cosmedin church in Rome, a popular tourist stop. “Dante: To Guido Cavalcanti” is an imitation of Dante’s untitled sonnet. “Twister” quotes from Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred MacAdams (1991; Exact Change, 1998). “Elegy: Reading Dugan in Rome” quotes from his poem “Advertising in Paris.” “National Pastime” quotes from “Play That Funky Music (White Boy),” lyrics by Wild Cherry (1976).

•

73

•

“Found Letter” is an imitation of Martial, Epigram XLVII, Book X. “Vita Nuova” draws from What Really Killed Rosebud? by Claire Burch (Regent Press, 2001), an account of the life and death of Rosebud Abigail DeNovo, a nineteen-year-old radical activist killed by the Oakland police in 1992; and Berkeley: A City in History, by Charles Wollenberg (Berkeley Public Library, 2002). “Weegee: Coney Island Beach after Midnight” is based on a photograph and prose that appear in Weegee’s book, Naked City (1945; reprinted by Da Capo, 2002).

74

•

•