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I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t. I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die. The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen choices by way of reasons. Even so, some won’t. Won’t play along once their number’s up. The “rainbow bridge” in the offing as the posher clinics put it, a pig’s ear as a final treat, a venison chew, the profession behaving beautifully at a time like this. Still, those that won’t. Won’t go nicely, I mean, with a gaze to melt, a last slobbed lick. Those with a soul’s defiance, though embarrassment in the lunchroom should you come at that one! Even after the bag is zipped, you feel it: We’re real at the end as you are, buster. We sniff the wind. What say if we say it together?

“Mister Johnson I see you look to buyin' Mister Johnson That all you want is Fame? Mister Johnson Now what you got to offer? Mister Johnson Salvation is my name With a rhythm on a riff That's practically God Oh Lord, I'm a pure Undivining rod I'm a flickerin' candle With the blackest light I'm the darkest angel And I own the night Mister Johnson That instrument you got there Mister Johnson It's Lucifer's guitar Mister Johnson I'll tune it for you, baby Mister Johnson They won't know who you are I'm a cutthroat seller, The Magician of Deal Who can stoke sweet fire That'll make you feel Like a hothouse flower On double defrost Who won't give a nickel For the petals it lost Mister Johnson You slink on back to livin' Mister Johnson In devil-may-care control Mister Johnson Don't thank me for the favor Mister Johnson I thank you for your soul”

Week upon week at the dorm she watched him working at a table with a pencil in his teeth, eating with a stack of books and papers, reading while he walked. His hair was groups of angry men, his sweaty cuffs were wrinkled at his forearms: he seemed to be loved by no one. But always there were pairs of houseflies hovering above him, landing on his nest of notes, trailing him as if with streamers and sound. A farm girl, she knew to follow the flies: they'll take you to the milk just pulled to the pail, to the cow's haunch where the meat will one day be sweetest, the swelled pond, the unlatched gate. Everything, she knew, was in those notebooks he would carry: her future, the distances of islands, poles and stars, the reason for the network of men's follies, how to spend the night.

One of those appointments you postpone until anxiety propels you to the phone, then have to wait too long for, to take an inconvenient time . . . Late in the day, an old man and I watch the minute hand on the waiting room wall. I’ve papers to grade, but he wants someone to talk to, and his attendant’s rude, so he turns his whiskery face to me: “Y’ know, I lived my whole life in Waltham, worked 40 years at the watch factory—oh, that city used to be so beautiful, now it’s a mess, those Cubans and Puerto Ricans, they ruined it.” Coiled in his wheelchair, he’s mad for company, probably scared he’s dying, * and so am I. I don’t remember Watch City as beautiful the year I was eleven, when Merle and I rode the Grove Street bus to Moody Street to shoplift haircurlers and Pond’s Vanishing Cream, nickel items at the Waltham Woolworth’s. It was an old factory town, wooden triple-deckers, water rats swimming in the oily river. Merle and I didn’t risk a furtive life of crime in our well-kempt Auburndale where we thought we were well-known, and canoers paddled the same Charles River past our homes. And I still wonder what could have vanished when we rubbed the mystery elixir on our silky cheeks? * His cheeks sucked in, this geezer could be my grandfather forty years ago, so I ignore his racist overture and agree Waltham was beautiful, as the attendant takes his Social Security card, and whistles: “Boy, are you old!” then mutters something else in Spanish. The number must be low. . . . “1936— that was the first year of Social Security!” the old guy brags. The kid forsakes our ancient history, flexes his muscles. He’s probably been listening to insults for an hour in the Elder Van, he’s bored and angry—why should he be nice? Yet hungry for a distracting fact or story, I encourage the grandfather, I want to be treated well myself some day, when I’ll need it even more than I do now. . . . My little bids for attention, my birds, fragile fluttering words, desire to be visible and seen. . . . “FDR was okay, wasn’t he?” I’m playing 90, it’s what I do to make us both less lonely, reminisce as if we’d shared the ’30s, as if I’d been there, come from Sicily or Limerick, a seamstress earning her hard living one town over. I always sat this way with Doc, years after he’d retired, his best treasure (besides my golden mother) a gold pocket watch, a Handsome Waltham watch— * a different time, when the things a person held or owned weren’t many but were permanent, a part of who you were. So his elegant watch confused me toward the idea my little dentist grandfather had some connection to the company, as if he’d labored there, a master craftsman, had been rewarded by a grateful boss. His bit of luxury, the swirling monogram on the back (which opened with a click), IR, for Isaac Rosenberg, timepiece connected by a chain to a safety pin at his frayed striped trouser pocket; another pin secured his Shawmut bankbook, deposits he’d made decades before * that I’d inherit, $214, Shawmut branch nearby the long-gone Waldorf Cafeteria where he idled weekday mornings with his cronies, also reminiscing, I suppose (although then I didn’t think of it), the Good Old Days before the motorcar, before their children moved away. Dexterity and skill gone, too, from his arthritic hands. He relished those mornings! The black-and-white tiled floor, the nearly empty tables, the Perfection Salad, Welsh rarebit, the “bloomberry pie.” The counterman. They serve an elegant porridge there, he told me, gourmet of the ordinary, State-of-Maine-ah grandfather, my Mainiac. The soon-to-be-widowed wives elsewhere, polishing mahogany veneer, or playing bridge, or shopping Coolidge Corner from butcher to baker in prescient black dresses. Old men and women so relieved to be rid of the burden of one another for a whole morning, of the tired bickering sentences of long American marriages, of pain and disappointment. What memories they’d had of courtships long since passed on to grandchildren, and half-false anyway, like studio photographs, mythic stories they could live with; now forgotten, the mistakes they’d been too fearful or devout to rectify. I miss that cafeteria, the whole idea of cafeterias, although Doc never took me, just pointed to it on our Sunday drive, repeating paeans to gray porridge, something no description’s glow could make me want. Waltham had them, too, free-fire zones a kid alone could enter with five cents for huge iced cookies, black-and-whites, * half chocolate, half vanilla, all Crisco and white sugar, chewed in gluttonous companionable half-light, wonderful— But who’d know that now? Who cares? Merle and I did everything subversive we could imagine—which wasn’t much. I’m sure I cruised Sin City in my mind, decayed old town—nowhere—but to me forbidden fruit: the 5 & 10, eyelash curlers, odd metal torture instruments I smuggled home that pinched my lids and made my lashes angle wildly up, delinquent startled in the bathroom mirror; Tangee lipsticks the size of my little finger, unflattering coral; pink girdles I’d eye furtively, wondering that I’d have to wriggle into one someday, or wear the bony corset my grandmother assured me was my fate. Oh, esoteric glamorous puzzle of the vanished vanishing cream . . . * Later, not so much later, the first day of my driver’s license, I drove the family station wagon down Moody Street and banged the traffic policeman’s rubber perch. He jumped down before it bounced the street, and yelled me over in a rage. Or maybe, he was kindly, it’s only my criminal terror I remember, of punishment fine-tuned, my ruined life, my new rights vanishing. Hardly a threat, I know now, the feckless cop. I gripped the steering wheel so hard to stop the huge recalcitrant Ford, doomed to lose my brand-new temporary license— How could I think, my budding power stripped, I’d ever get the chance to live or drive?

The stems of  the sun bent over the eye The sleeping man The whole of  the earth And this head heavy with fear In the night This complete hole Vast And even so streaming with water The noise The peals of  little bells mingled with the Clinking of glasses And bursts of laughter The head moves On the carpet the body shifts And turns over the warm spot At the slipping feet of  the animal It’s that they’re waiting For the summons of the shock And the signal of  the eyelid The ray relaxes Sleep Light And what is left shines at the edge of  the white rock

Hard to know which is more gnarled, the posts he hammers staples into or the blue hummocks which run across his hands like molehills. Work has reduced his wrists to bones, cut out of him the easy flesh and brought him down to this, the crowbar’s teeth caught just behind a barb. Again this morning the crowbar’s neck will make its blue slip into wood, there will be that moment when too much strength will cause the wire to break. But even at 70, he says, he has to have it right, and more than right. This morning, in the pewter light, he has the scars to prove it.

Everything measured. A man twists a tuft of your hair out for no reason other than you are naked before him and he is bored with nakedness. Moments before he was weighing your gallbladder, and then he was staring at the empty space where your lungs were. Even dead, we still say you are an organ donor, as if something other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician, nothing that suggests that a woman loved you until you died. From the time your body was carted before him to the time your dead body is being sent to the coffin, every pound is accounted for, except 21 grams. The man is a praying man and has figured what it means. He says this is the soul, finally, after the breath has gone. The soul: less than $4,000 worth of crack—21 grams— all that moves you through this world.

I here I’m here I’m here I’m here here here here

for J. L. D. Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done? —Freud 1 My name is James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. He tried to teach me kindness. I return Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried, To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried, Had I not run away before my time. Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime, His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best Of all the arts men learn in a dead place. I walked here once. I made my loud display, Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice. Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past. I add my easy grievance to the rest: 2 Doty, if I confess I do not love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, My mind. I run like the bewildered mad At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk, Arch and cunning, under the maple trees, Pleased to be playing guilty after dark. Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies. Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead. I croon my tears at fifty cents per line. 3 Idiot, he demanded love from girls, And murdered one. Also, he was a thief. He left two women, and a ghost with child. The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head, Made such revolting Ohio animals Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief. I waste no pity on the dead that stink, And no love’s lost between me and the crying Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink. Christ may restore them whole, for all of me. Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago Can do without my widely printed sighing Over their pains with paid sincerity. I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying. 4 I pity myself, because a man is dead. If Belmont County killed him, what of me? His victims never loved him. Why should we? And yet, nobody had to kill him either. It does no good to woo the grass, to veil The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame. Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them. I kick the clods away, and speak my name. 5 This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal, When all are caught with what they had to do In fear of love, when every man stands still By the last sea, And the princes of the sea come down To lay away their robes, to judge the earth And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere, And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal— Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars, My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars. 6 Staring politely, they will not mark my face From any murderer’s, buried in this place. Why should they? We are nothing but a man. 7 Doty, the rapist and the murderer, Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear; And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace, Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I. Angels and pebbles mock me under trees. Earth is a door I cannot even face. Order be damned, I do not want to die, Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe. The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief. (Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!) I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass, Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness. Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.

I. Springing Jack Green wooden leaves clap light away, Severely practical, as they Shelter the children candy-pale, The chestnut-candles flicker, fail . . . The showman’s face is cubed clear as The shapes reflected in a glass Of water—(glog, glut, a ghost’s speech Fumbling for space from each to each). The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dust The universe, for fear it gain Its freedom from my cube of brain. Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace Behind my crude-striped wooden face As I, a puppet tinsel-pink Leap on my springs, learn how to think— Till like the trembling golden stalk Of some long-petalled star, I walk Through the dark heavens, and the dew Falls on my eyes and sense thrills through. II. The Ape Watches “Aunt Sally” The apples are an angel’s meat; The shining dark leaves make clear sweet The juice; green wooden fruits alway Fall on these flowers as white as day— (Clear angel-face on hairy stalk: Soul grown from flesh, an ape’s young talk!) And in this green and lovely ground The Fair, world-like, turns round and round And bumpkins throw their pence to shed Aunt Sally’s wooden clear-striped head.— I do not care if men should throw Round sun and moon to make me go— As bright as gold and silver pence . . . They cannot drive their black shade hence!