One Summer Evening at the Falls 9780226737256

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One Summer Evening at the Falls

Peter Campion

One Summer Evening at the Falls

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21   1 2 3 4 5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­73711-­9 (paper) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­73725-­6 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226737256.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Campion, Peter, 1976– author. Title: One summer evening at the falls / Peter Campion. Other titles: Phoenix poets. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Phoenix poets Identifiers: lccn 2020019225 | isbn 9780226737119 (paperback) | isbn 9780226737256 (ebook) Subjects: lcgft: Poetry. Classification: lcc ps3603.a486 o64 2021 | ddc 811/.6—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019225 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Sarah

Contents

Acknowledgments ix One One Summer Evening at the Falls  3 The Lingering  5 Bud, the Photographer  7 Commuters 19 She Dreamed a Giant Screen  20 Saint Anthony Falls  22 Le Chien 23 After Ovid: The House of Rumor  24 Two Chorus 29 Ice Cream  30 After Sappho: The Drill  32 After Horace  33 In Memory of Terry Adkins  35 1. His Shoes 35 2. Bees 37 After Baudelaire: The Cover  39 Sitcom Set  41 After Jin Eun Yung: Long Finger Poem  43

Three The Street We Lived On  47 Greensleeves 48 Uncle 56 1. His Picture 56 2. The End of Your Sentence 58 2B 60 1989 61 Pacific 64 One Summer Evening at the Falls (II)  65 Night Hill  67 Call 68

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of the magazines in which these poems first appeared: Agni: “After Sappho: The Drill” B O D Y: “2B” Dalhousie Review: “Sitcom Set” Faultline: “One Summer Evening at the Falls (I),” “Ice Cream,” and “Call” Harlequin: “1989” Locomotive: “Commuters” and “After Baudelaire: The Cover” Ploughshares: “After Horace” Plume: “The Lingering,” “Bud, the Photographer,” “Bees,” “Uncle,” and “Pacific” Poetry: “After Jin Eun Yung: Long Finger Poem” Two Lines: “After Ovid: The House of Rumor” (as “Fama”) “Bees” was commissioned by Terry Adkins for Meteor Stream, his installation on John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. “The Street We Lived On” and “Night Hill” were included in Enclave (飞地) with translations into Chinese by Jiang Hao and Zhang Er. “After Horace” is dedicated to David Ferry. “Pacific” is dedicated to Michael C. Peterson.

ix

One

One Summer Evening at the Falls

Sun spikes through drifts of charcoal smoke. And the ledge right there: four stories down to shatter its plunge pool. And you can take the stairs to a gate beside the falls, where you can enter (it’s allowed) this big, cool gray-­green basin behind the water. Someone is kissing someone or shielding a lighter. Some high school girl shouts “Echo!” I came here wanting my remorse, my coiled-­up guilt and spoiled nostalgia, grief for my former life, to vanish. And staring from a stone mouth at liquid screens kaleidoscoping trees and faces—­sure, the ache subsides a moment, shrinks to sensory input pulsing through: white noise of nerves, “the surface of the silent depth.” Back in the world, that girl’s still shouting. On his way down and jabbering to his headset, here comes sweater-­vest: “Big-­time on the short sell, and guess the margin price.” Spray-­painted tags along the stairs, long beards of moss brilliantly dripping where you step back up on pavement. That charge of summer nights, that edge, like everyone’s checking everyone out. Lingering a moment in the crowd gathered to watch the rush and crash and let the mist drift upward to our faces, I’m here: the future feels open again. Even alone tonight—­still: open.

3

And then the woman at the rail, who must have needed somewhere to call from: “So now he wants me back. Or wants to plant it in my mind that everything our children dream would happen, I could make it happen.” No one to me, this woman turning close to show my daughter’s jawline. “What he can’t get, and maybe none of them can, is how it’s trust.” Dark blonde tinged red with sun, she sees my seeing and stares right past. I’m standing still. I’m listening. “Like sex and work and what you build’s all trust. You fall in love and feel fantastic: making love was never so fantastic. And then, with him or now my boyfriend, anyone, comes work and pain, and I was up for hours last night rehearsing for Des Moines. Forget about reborn. I’m sad. Though more committed to the future. More free.”

4

The Lingering

Together on the porch that’s now not theirs but hers, discussing which nights each gets the kids, they linger so long between their words he thinks for a moment they could be on their first date, what, twenty years ago? This hesitance a tensed surrender to the slow unfolding summer night: a mesh of vines surrounding a cool stone patio, as she tried to show attraction but not too much, he tried to admire her discernment, not just what he was not yet allowed to touch. Of course he knows: for her their lingering could be no “ghost desire” but the strain of biting back “I can’t believe the years I wasted. If you knew how glad I am you’re gone.” He knows. Or doesn’t know.

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Or knows he doesn’t know. The masks of courtesy growing to both their faces growing real as the festering tangle beneath—­the tangle’s still all there’s left to feel as everyone falls back to any one other person, and the house falls back into its row of houses.

6

Bud, the Photographer

i. Five years of nothing. Then one night she calls and tells: she followed Neal and “sure enough he visited my so-­called friend Rochelle.” I have my own failed marriage story. She’s heard. But she’s not calling to commiserate. This is Samantha, whose intelligence was all bemusement, calm, but now some put-­on casual singsong frays to show: obsession narrowing every subject down to one. “He leaned his head back, so Rochelle could lick his neck, and his eyes were asking: lower? Lower?”

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ii. They were my friends because they let me shoot them. That’s who I am. I have the kids on weekends and then: just me, alone in the darkroom, hovering with the tongs at the stop bath. Here, from the night we met: Neal sliding down his shirt to flaunt his glistening shoulder blade. “My family’s tartan crest. It barely hurt.” Next morning they were leaving for the summer. He said, “Tomorrow maybe we can make southeast Montana. Park on a side road. No Comfort Inn when the bedroom is your car.”

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iii. I thought they were a younger, brasher us: kids, leaving home to enter the whirlwind. Her dissertation on Irigaray. Her fellowship next fall. The way my wife wanted to tell her all about the book she left off writing when she had our son. The bashful way she asked, could she just peek into the crib? And here, this close-­up here: Samantha bends and sways her braids to flash her new one too. Peace sign, except the twist is where they link to the circle, each bar hooks like arrowing kanji script, minutely back.

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iv. She wanted to remember that night too. And liked that she was in the show. But wanted most to remember her dismay and not to feel the shock absorbed now, draining off into her whole life story, but to feel her whole life story draining off, uncovering just: shock. “So there I was. So that was me. The woman in the fucking rhododendrons. The woman weeping at a windowsill. Like, my actual tears on a windowsill.”

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v. Maybe she has some other man by now. She must have. People are made resilient.

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vi. Her voice that night returns though. I remember: she spoke the whole time of herself, but there were pauses she left, like questions or suspicions. And that was why I told—­about the woman I met in other towns at photo shows. And after shows, hotels. So commonplace and so like nothing else, since to this woman (who with the same stung fervor hates me now) I was famous, I could do anything.

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vii. And told: two years, no giving up the lie. And all fights ended with my now ex-­wife promising she was sorry, she would try.

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viii. No sign of disappointment from Samantha. No surprise. Except the pause she left grows longer here, is more a “Really? Hunh.” Even returning to describe her own humiliations all over again, she (how to put this?) spaces her sentences so there arrives a right out in the open feeling of being people who need nothing from each other but the needing nothing.

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ix. You have to understand. I became one of the ones who “lives in the present.” It’s not some guided meditation. Try fatal and filled with idiot error. Try shadows finding each other by fires in the parks.

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x. And always, back of my mind—­I could be shooting joggers or cubicles at Northrop Grumman: some place where time comes round again. Or else seems never to have gone in the first place. Or else time’s going, but the place stands still.

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xi. For me, one mountain road where we come from. A brook descends and crosses side to side through culvert pipes. Drive high enough, and trails climb from the pull-­offs to a fire tower. Big scissoring pine boughs. Car window smudges. And in this dream that is no dream, before her being “wife” or “mom” or “mine,” she’s there. Her single, fierce, free presence in the mist her outline made of tremoring sunlight: this trusted thing our imaginations shared that I made—­just lost, just never there—­is there.

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xii. Then less Romantic. More trained automatic moves in the amber glow of a safelight. More reek of the fixative. I’m me. I’m standing in my darkroom and watching a timer while the children sleep, and the semis on the interstate breathe their distant, long, metallic breath, and beneath the little cell phone grille, (like lines of poems that go on reading themselves back to themselves, even when no one’s reading) Samantha keeps talking into eternity: “He wore the same face he would wear with me. I knew that face. ‘I love this, please don’t stop’ that looks like ‘stop it, get away from me.’ I must have worn it. You must have too. You know: ‘Devour me’ and ‘Yes, I’ll devour you.’”

18

Commuters

Because the house we lived in after our mother married had just some maple trees to screen us from the tracks, they hovered close and clear, those people on the train held by some holding pattern in their shuddering glow. And now again, my home no longer what I thought my home was, they’ve returned. Briefcase. A Kangol cap. Pale woman in a shawl medallioned like tapestries. Floating suspended in their phosphorescent tube through the evening blue, cut off from any story of who they are and where they’re going, as galactic rivers of headlights squiggle past, those strangers held on the train and dreaming all those different elsewheres (or else not dreaming but just calmly waiting there) still rivet me: bright bodies startling the dark.

19

She Dreamed a Giant Screen

The voice assuring “you made it here at last. The family you wanted” turned to “not so fast. When this comes crashing down like all the others . . . ,” and then a roar absorbed them, and the screen-­slash-­wall shattered to glints. Imagine swimming in an opal: this primal simmer of shivers all over. But strangest was she woke: for long enough to check the spreadsheets (“What do these fuckers want?”) she was awake. The roar was still right there and also: reality of “Will his kids accept me ever as more than someone they lean on, love, okay, but picture maybe not here?” reality of needing money and soon, reality of Hampton Inn free coffee and tea and courtesy mints, and still the roar from just the other side of everything, primordial: “All nature was lifeless chaos. No sun as yet spread down his rays to earth, no moon renewed her slender horns. The ocean’s arms could not yet clutch the cliffs,”

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only as waves of static, pulsing surrender to an element so not human and so near, it soothed: “The land existed and sea and air, but none could walk the earth or swim the waves, until the force called God or Nature picked apart the tangle—­cutting sky from land from water” only as ambient whir.

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Saint Anthony Falls

From the Monongahela colliding with the Allegheny to make the Ohio, from limestone springs, from leaked refrigerants near Omaha, the river braids into that one thing called the river. Drainage from Itasca and Leech Lake means it’s already wide and fast here: long gray chute two pile driver cranes are beaking into. Spray in the air from the dam. Under some condos with Tyvek on the windows struts pistachio dustcoat man with the curls: “So what? You get the licenses, you lead with our news on seepage, you got to do this fast, don’t tell me borrow cost when we’re liquid, and bye-­bye, taconite.” The vibe some places get on Fridays. Chests flared at each other in the lot. Tires spat gravel. I drink. I sing to the lady on the stereo singing over the drums and bass and pedal steel, “Where does he think I’d be now? Weeping down a well?”

22

Le Chien

The anh and ew of French your parents spoke to hide their meanings from you, how enchanting those syllables once were: blue waves of leaves on a locked gate, and you the spaniel panting to be let in. And even then their words melted to air. Their dreamed-­up Europe blurred to a station wagon, night, New Hampshire—­ick and stick of squirming on the Naugahyde. And even now as trusted, grumbling guard of family and home, should any one glimmer of close warm creature stir the urge (possessed by your desire to possess), you chew and chew: you chew to barest matter and, lost in chewing, chew to nothingness. You bite your way inside your fleur, your fleuve. You dog, you sink your muzzle in, you gorge.

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After Ovid: The House of Rumor

Between the earth and ocean and the sky there is a border where all three touch. From here whatever place however far can be seen, and every word we utter, heard. Rumor—­whom some call Fama—­has her house on an alp at the summit. There are a thousand windows and doorframes on this house but no door, no window. The always echoing walls are echoing brass, so the rooms swell with voices doubling. No quiet. Never silence in any part. But also never clamor—­little murmur of voices. Imagine ocean when you listen from far off. Or thunder from vanished cloud banks: low receding tremors even as halls

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fill with arrivals: mixtures and dispersals, truths and interpretations, rumors by the thousand bend and merge as some pour discourse into empty ears, as others jabber elsewhere, as their stories grow, as their listeners all go tell some others. Here comes stray faith and, harebrained, here comes error with vacuous satisfaction and poor, reflexive fear. Here come surprise revolt and the specious whispers. *

Fama—­whatever happens round the earth or skies or oceans, she sees who everywhere listens.

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Two

Chorus

Before they register as cars, trucks, planes, the steel containers streaming through at five are lines of force in a green-­black industrial dream corridor. And language also whipping round as if on winds from outer space: some Thrasher magazine ad copy or Wordsworth’s “City now doth, like a garment, wear . . .” boomerangs past with blips of family on the line, our who’s divorced and who’s in prison and he was the who was the she was. Here’s the nightmare I want no one to shake me from: I run through subway station tunnels, following trails of sentences sliced off by walls, until in this palatial and vacant hotel the PA booms the splutters and rasps of accusation: “You chose to walk on wire, you tailored your slender hell,” leaving my jaw all bitten down, all clenched in anger even as Jack and Lizzie rustle in their rooms and the sun comes, God—­like Julie Andrews in the flowers: the hills are alive this morning, sparrows sing from our gutters.

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Ice Cream

“I never wet my lips in that horse spring, Hippocrene. I don’t remember drowsing, cradled by the twin peaks of Parnassus, to awake, surprise: a poet.” Those are the first three lines of the Satires of Persius. But reading them today, I pictured someone else. Her name was Martha, and she ran the ice cream parlor over our subway station. Maybe my memory varnishes, but the neighborhood felt easier then. More trees. Less everyone all streamlined, like “the hunted.” Summer of weed smoke from porches. Fingers through chain-­link. And Martha, at the frosted dipping cabinet she keeps between herself and us three high school boys after the parlor closes, doesn’t flirt so much as spin us to marionettes in her outlandish tease: “Oh yeah? You think you boys are big? You think you can?” And one time, “I have had, no joke, ten thousand men.” Taut, sunburned cheek beneath her squint . . . what melted me to dribbled puddles back then was dirty talk, a tack Persius also takes—­bracing some bozo from the reign of Nero: “You never had one fellow from behind? Another, running his hands all over you and his 30

tongue, this long one, like some Apulian hound’s?” But now the crude, much like the delicate, obscures. Bring me down in the thick of it, the actual chill from the canted glass, somebody’s Triumph muffler growling outside as Martha flicks a strand of gray fallen across her eyes. I know I half invent this: memory grants distance, distance seems control. And soon the neighborhood will turn out slick as a website: no hippy shops with dangling spider plants, no Martha. But there, beyond what I could want or even know to ask for, as the darkness gathers, all her talk of fucking and getting fucked distills to just its tone of gusto, edged with a sweet, corrective sting. “The heights of Helicon and limpid Corinthian streams I leave to men on pedestals, their ivy garlands lapping themselves. I come here as a semipagan, smuggling my songs to the altar edge of poetry. Who makes the magpies, when they’re near us, try to speak? Who taught that parrot how to squawk hey there in Greek? It was the master of all arts, ingenious maker of bodies, maestro of forbidden noises—­Belly. Just let the slightest chance of salary gleam, and grackle poets flap their beaks so much you’d guess they were gobbling nectar saved for Pegasus.”

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After Sappho: The Drill

Some say the Lockheed Martin Raptor breaking the barrier over desert must be the most astonishing sight on earth, and some fine-­grained Carrara marble, but me, I choose my friend remembering the line of men who ran from a hilltop into sprays of machine gunfire while he stood stultified against wide-­open sky where the line had been, though he knew the bullet storm was blanks, and even in a bar in Cleveland when he told us, “So you see I am a coward,” and stretched his elegant fingers round his tumbler, I saw him, as defiant as defensive, shiver.

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After Horace

Birds on a limb so far as we know sing no early bird elegies. So bird on a limb, here’s no grim gift but low squawked hackle trembling antiphony to your lines about the birds not knowing who in the trees they’re singing for, though rattling the world awake, so that the rain and air and stones seem things their bird cries make: those lines make me remember how one poet wrote, “There lived ten thousand

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Agamemnons before Agamemnon: night-­blooming jasmine blistering off the same one stem. But no one ever (since no poet wrote this for us) cried for them.”

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In Memory of Terry Adkins

1. His Shoes This was before he “died with his boots on.” He was moving his studio: whole weeks his milk crates—­first edition Toomer, not to mention exorbitant shoes—­ lay in our lobby. This was before his show at the Embassy. Blow-­ups of young men hanging from trees but cropped so just their airborne feet appeared and the loop of Carmela reading Dante: “Love that spins the sun and all the other stars . . .” all must have made his own interior sidereal cascade. Meanwhile, the shoes were not “stolen” so much as, como se dice, “disposed of.” The Academy’s head maid had to apologize to Terry.

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No-­bullshit Roman woman weeping in front of him: “But they were Gucci,” and he threw his arm, his right arm, up into air. I saw him: half Lord of Amelioration, half John Steuart Curry’s maniacal John Brown: Gucci—­vaffanculo! before eight billion days strode past: blank blue, clear staggered waterfalls.

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2. Bees prologue for the installation Meteor Stream

Wherever the assemblage reassembles may there be this video screen surrounded by the hanging maps of Harpers Ferry: cell on cell down squiggled streets accruing round the arsenal. And may the whole screen be a clump of bees Because John Brown code-­named his raid “The Hiving of the Bees.” Because the bees in their bee-­loud glades in poems straining honey-­sweet with thyme stand for the state: collecting electrostatic drive to shatter to create. Because when the hero madman hears his mother in his dream (her blonde fur molting black), he sees her conjure sinuous from air 37

mirages of a fortress grown to wonder cabinet: casements for starfish and wolf pelt, and from one each time it’s opened comes his tenor’s C-­sharp riptooth overtone. Because o queen, where networked cells chain families in their thrall, where madman and hero turned the same, turned “meteor of war,” he heard you command “bite down the wall.”

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After Baudelaire: The Cover

Anywhere he goes on land or water under the sun or sunless blankness Christian or pagan king in the sun in shadows a beggar country or city seeking or hiding man always sees the mystery he barely dares face then turns his eyes: the sky penning him in the cave-­pocked wall

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or coffered ceiling of a concert hall where costumed players trample the blood-­slick floors: the fear of the free and hope of a few left lonesome: sky the searing arc and cover of all innumerable people

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Sitcom Set

That living room inside the living room (central and enclosing as a womb) spinning its dreams of wholesome families . . . of course it was illusion, though it told you here was the payoff—­glowing splash of ease. And for these thirty minutes, ease would hold you. But once the faces popped to static, drawn back through the cathode rays, their dream was gone. The actual house surrounding the TV felt smaller, temporary: single station plugged to the turbo-­scape, Sargasso Sea of city lights aswim in charged relation. That’s how I saw the future, riled-­up fizz that was the real world, that was distances. At least I thought so, thought my life would form a line, collecting meaning as it went and not just scribbles tangling into swarms, then botched, abandoned, never my intent. Tonight, the kids are at their mom’s. A chill’s settling, summer’s easing into fall. I took a walk where paths along the river 41

border backyards, and nursing my regret, I almost missed it—­that electric quiver through a screen of leaves: the sitcom set floating in someone’s window. Digital smear of faces crinkled with happiness, hanging there framed by the dark: the beery companionship was fake and at the same time true, a trick to get the real thing to reveal itself—­rip out of its simulacrum, come back.

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After Jin Eun Yung: Long Finger Poem

I’m working on my poems and working more with my fingers than my head. Because my fingers are the farthest stretching things from me. Look at the tree. Like its longest branch, I touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Rain shimmers to vapor off the bark. The tree nerves everywhere. The branches can’t reach to their roots though. Growing longer, they grow weaker also. Can’t make use of water. Rain falls, but I’m working with these farthest stretching things from me. Around my fingertips bare shoots of days, months, years unfurl into cool air.

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Three

The Street We Lived On

turned at the end to a walkway leading down the bluffs, between two boulders, and into the Atlantic Ocean. There were cedar slats for your toes to catch, but weeds attached there too and grew so slippery—­before a storm one day the waves swept higher than the posts and scooped me up. Time held as whole suspended walls of water sloshed against the stone. Under at first, I watched light murk, resharpen. Minnows cast diamonds down the planks. One powder-­blue-­and-­orange claw dangled while eelgrass billowed, voluptuous, off the drop-­off. And this intensest burst of life (when love and hate and need dissolve to one sheer fire of nerve . . . our daughter in her incubator decades away yet) hovered above fine terraces of sand showing no end—­at the same time as a rusted post jutted beneath, and there it was: the central cylinder’s small disc of dark, down in. 47

Greensleeves

i. Singing while wiping counters in the kitchen, she could have been inviting me if not to sing along with her at least to listen. “Oh, honey, here I am again: in pain. My parents dead. My two divorces. Yours. And now your uncle, oh my god, in prison.” Her song was cooler though. More elevated. More her imagined gesture of grandeur. Which, truth be told, I hated. Not the high notes quavering sharp at the same time they swelled but the distance that her singing claimed: we were at my apartment in Saint Paul while she was wandering the rock spit beyond her parents’ home at the harbor lip. She was escaping that mothball formality (“tradition touching all . . .”) or was it enchantment hanging with elm-­branch shadows round the bureau where her brother’s old letters lay, medallions

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circling Southeast Asia with stars and stripes. His tone of cool good cheer, he learned this bluff of normal from their parents, years oh years ago. She was twelve, she overheard: those times their doctor “needed crew” he sailed her brother past the cove, then anchored there. Out on this lick of brush and rock, the ocean wind all around her, everything that elsewhere spelled wreckage—­prisoners filing out to meet their visitors, that moment when the guard’s not watching signaled she could risk one furtive squeeze with her brother, then a whole day driving back to the couch she crashed on because she’d left her husband—­wasn’t wreckage, not out here. Waves frothing up the rock, the channel markers lighting their way through darkness: her emotion before she called it rage or joy or sorrow came as just being: being shimmering through her.

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ii. Maybe it’s a stretch to claim she was there. This was my apartment in Minnesota, not Cape Cod, much less Elsinore. And she spoke that evening in the dry prose of someone offering advice: “Fresh vegetables are cheaper and more nutritious than deli food.” “Museums sometimes offer free activities for kids.” “The only paper towels to buy are Bounty.” Wasn’t my irritation really hampered desire? I wanted to be together. Out of our marriages, at last we could see each other. But she was lecturing on paper towels, then singing at the sink with such high tones about “thy petticoat of slender white with gold embroidered gorgeously.” Maybe the urge was mine alone. But this was my mother. This was the whole, unweeded garden of our language together, and the garden’s paths kept winding from that house above the water. Just then at dinner: “I’m learning from my therapy. See, there are voices circling a person’s head. Not wing wongs. Everyone hears voices. When I’m visiting the prison, we talk about this stuff. How the old days live. How everyone has a childhood home inside.”

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iii. How to describe that moment, how a glow gathered and brimmed: there must have been a lamp, but objects in the room seemed to give off light on their own. The salad bowl, the ivy printing against the windowpane, my daughter’s tricycle at the center of the floor pulsed with a shine that kept replenishing. “Everyone has a childhood home inside.” Except, as she talked, a memory came of leaving. The night she drove us to the Amtrak station. I remembered: how my father stood receding to a dot in our front door. I realized they were through, but felt no pain. The houses blistered from the hills like hives floating their honeyed cells in the snowfall whirling outside. My mother gripped the wheel electric with purpose. I was at the center everything flew from. Barest rage to live. All bone, blood, passion, marrow, feeling spiraled around me, and whatever “I” frayed and seared at the core of me was absence.

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Snow on the platform squeaked beneath our feet. Sodium shine off corrugated steel. Beside the train there stood (guess who) the man she worked for and his daughter. We were—­ten? That night they left me with her in a sleeper. Blonde hair strewn back. Lips parting so she seemed to speak, or chew, some sentence in her dream. This was the secret I was held inside and held inside me. Trestles and birch trunks. Then moonlight dribbling over snow flashed past. For once the world made sense. And I became a child detective. Here was evidence. But thirty years later now, holding each other’s stare in the strange glow, we were more that stare than she and I, becoming one single tone now: past calm, this silent language of our searching pupils intelligent in ignorance, the way a blunt, unfabricated fact precedes all judgment: brambles swipe your arm, and all you feel’s a warm, wet tingling until you see the ripped, now bleeding sleeve.

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iv. Just beforehand, I was telling her I don’t know how I got down that trench of misery last year—­my letting my restlessness whip me, my stupid needing to get caught between my life and somewhere else. Above the necklacing lines thrown off from her glass, she was miles away and grinning. She said, “Before I met your father,” the year she lived in Tokyo, over the pachinko parlors, she took in a lodger, another American, from Michigan, a hippy living off scraps and, to make his spending money, “getting deeper and deeper into genre.” “He played the western ogre, and, get this, deflowered the virgin on the snow-­topped mountain. The set was pillow feathers and red paint.”

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v. Too soon the little rankle and recoil. Chiming “next week I get to go to prison” like that was privilege, prestige, she stepped beyond me now, and I became distraught. Why couldn’t she stay here and solve my life? “Everyone has this childhood home inside. I’m learning how . . .” and I lost patience: “How’s your whole thing link with leaving marriages?” and she snapped back, “Oh, not one bit, no link,” and rose to clear the dishes. Then her singing: her waltz-­time faltering rock to rock above the wave spray, where the path ends, and the last lick of land’s a treacherous tumble, the rocks all barnacles and streaming clusters of slimy bladder wrack, she was singing “for I have loved you well and long” not to escape but stay out here: to feel the bare conviction calling out to everyone and no one and the world and the waves. But also, since the world and waves so seldom listen, she was singing to darkness “alas my love you do me wrong.”

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vi. All this happened in about two minutes. If an eighteen-­wheeler passed my window on the southbound run from Minot—­because the driver turned off 94 to get a coffee at the SuperAmerica or just because he wanted to—­if he parked beneath the spruce boughs and saw the two of us rising to clear the dishes, who would we, what would we be then? Any two figures? Any two people in our window-­slice of light? People who, if they only saw themselves from here, would see?

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Uncle

1. His Picture Here is the man who tells you prison’s like Vietnam: always that fear of “up the river.” Here is the man some people wanted dead and had reasons standing in his living room and holding his picture. Here in the picture is the box he holds, so he’s the man inside the box of the gate door inside the larger box of the prison and holding the box he brought here how many months ago. And not in some professor’s embroidery on the picture but the picture. So the box’s a box. And here is the ocean under his condominium and wedges of lemon sun in his curtains and sun-­webbed ocean in his eyes as he turns from his picture

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to make his point finally clear because for once the facts stand still: right here. Though where his words would be he for this moment just shakes his picture.

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2. The End of Your Sentence I don’t know how after the guard towers and concertina wire recede to glints in the rear view you patch a life together but need to tell you: *

here where we come from I have felt this tremble strike through salt mist like a falling shiver before surrender to sleep *

and all turns chillier but clearer: *

releases to that open element a body enters ignorant of blame and endings as the seals

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down by the sodium dock lights: flippers and whiskered snouts, and their flared eyes, all pupil.

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2B

He slides his tongue in her ear. That wet heat cold at the tip. That shudder of another melding with you, and you him—­stippled, sweet. You savor and recoil from it. You slither. So she turns from their couch to the window. She checks beyond their reflected skins and finds no watcher in the blinking lines of snow. There must be someone though. Not just your mind. Some force must cause this feeling—­like fright, like elation: this offering up, except who knows to whom. She moves with him, and still the ghost sensation searches, less nervous now, beyond the room: the way, one time, their son was sick, in bed between them, warmth against her chest, he twisted from their nuzzling and screamed his loudest scream at the emptiness but burrowed back then, toddler murmur soft on her neck, as if to make from warm skin one center in the sectored sweep of night: one source, where all returns to life begin.

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1989

No luminous jade that divers fished where Szechuan cliffs fell purple to an emerald river. No sweet brew distilled from mare’s milk savoring of almonds. But closed eyes stinging when you screamed “Marco . . . ,” the others called “Polo.” *

All that summer was enchantment of the almost-­there-­not-­quite-­yet straining of bodies. Older kids on a lifeguard chair. Zinc oxide stripes beneath their eyes. Their laughter was allure, was menace. *

No silken sedans lofted by concubines.

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No assassins wandering the Gardens of the Saracens. But word got round about our baseball coach busted at Motel 6 with butane torch and pipe. “He was wearing old fatigues, and the girl was fourteen.” Or rivers of Hungarians flooded a border gate while Uncle Dennis sobbed at his TV. Long, soprano whimpers from a man who would send terror through his cadets. *

Half-­remembered poems mumbled in half sleep: “We all stand right-­side up, when earth lies upside down. The way an old man, at his birth . . .” *

One recurring dream went ectoplasmic Planet of the Apes, and screeching up the elevator wires of my voice box,

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words like ogres pounded home their one conclusion: “I am a monkey on the moon, alone.” *

No Dairy Queen and driving range. No bellies oiled to smell of coconut. Growing so slow, then fast as a wave falls desire turned the world right here unreal. *

“Marco. Marco . . .” and there never was a choice but follow.

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Pacific

Balconies and streams of cars on the 101, the sour milk smell, dumpsters in Vacaville and mist between the promontories dripping on ice plant all patch inside the day as earth circles and comes up streaked with dew. But the shape a life makes while rage and affection, bliss and pain, revolve? There has to be some promise beyond this barest animal drive, though it has felt enough before (so many times) as night hits, and orange blotches the hills, as someone is coming for you, and blood beats, and miles and hours pass as generous and indiscriminate as rain.

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One Summer Evening at the Falls (II)

We were just strangers, crowding the fence to watch the falls keep falling. Bodies jostled and shifted, raised their phones over their heads for pictures. Summer making me feel the city night lay open, mansions down the bluffs and glassed-­in plazas and paths by the river branched together, storylines implicit in the places all those people were coming from and going. Needing to write it down for you tonight though—­just her voice comes back: slender punk lady, neck tattoo a meteoric burst, she edges only an instant into view,

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scolding her boyfriend for all to hear, “I know you care. That’s not enough.” I chant it to myself tonight. We’re kissing through screen doors again, and all I want to show you’s this day after day making a life. Bodega, bus stop, laundromat. Public garden with pergola where you took my kids when you lived here. Azalea branches in our sink.

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Night Hill

Even the stars could crash inside that dark: flaming out like the singer who hanged himself or actress who OD’ed in a trailer park. From up the hill, the land was shelf on shelf of circuit board, sheer movement everywhere. But where was everyone going? Thin as air, what richer being lured from just beyond (what dream shazamed your Zenith set alive) glimmered and tantalized but never dawned. Or always did. Whole moments seemed to strive to touch it. Hours in the clutch of home or round the park all summer, under the dome of blazing sky or strapped in your parents’ car, you were enclosed inside this narrative not knowing what the plot, the cue-­lines were. Except you knew it was your role to live.

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Call

Mumbles and shouts, sweet talk and haggling turned ones and zeros traveling light speed over gutter spouts and lilac sprigs. Invisible and everywhere, incessant coil and spill building to wide, electromagnetizing wave on wave. And soon one voice in there is everything: the way a city glints on the windshield then becomes your life. Those tenuous first weeks, a thousand miles apart, the lilt of your “hey babe” (or clipped, sidestepping hesitance, or abandon) played on my mind all day, enveloping, and apart again now, thinking our shared heat, our tacit animal pact dissolved to habit because I squandered it, I picture you: your hair let down and sparkling through motes in the slant rays. The image smudges, leaves a retinal streak of distances: wheat fields and highways tapering to heat mirages, strip malls and gullies of ragweed, as everywhere the messages fissure and merge, devotion and disparagement and cries in one long river through the air, surrender and command fused with complaint and praise, the voices flume through grand hotels 68

and rotted sides of railroad cars abandoned to scraggling sumac. Only no code I punch unlocks the dream that’s come three nights now running: guardrails stream past, then brownstones lashed by sheets of rain, and you, beyond my dream of you, murmur your invitation down from the ether: “Call when you arrive. I’ll buzz you in.”

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