1269 Arts and sciences poems

The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester, the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which (from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe. In this night I moved on the territory with combinations (new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader, my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts. My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop, there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then, I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me) before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf- house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son, I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years. But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country. His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I found him intimate with my former wife: this boy was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts! Black space, old fish-house. Motions of ghosts. I, dogging his steps. He (not my father, by name himself with his face twisted at birth) possessed of knowledge pretentious giving me what in the instant I knew better of. But the somber place, the flooring crude like a wharf’s and a barn’s space I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut! But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort. The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern The places still half-dark, mud, coal dust. There is no light east of the Bridge Only on the headland toward the harbor from Cressy’s have I seen it (once when my daughter ran out on a spit of sand isn’t even there.) Where is Bristow? when does I-A get me home? I am caught in Gloucester. (What’s buried behind Lufkin’s Diner? Who is Frank Moore?

Paulatim lachrymas rerum experentia tersit. Petrarch Father’s books lying on the living-room floor Must be divided into threes: art history, Classical letters and, left from my days here, Unsteady stacks of quasi-educational lore That show yellowing Geographic scientists Perennially lost in rain forest mists. An instant choice will cull some from the rest So they may become mine—a banausic test. Prewar light glimmers in the apartment: A shadowplay that summons an adolescence Of slammed doors and risible nothings Hurled at retreating parental backs —The most telling blows always sotto voce— As I stormed and wept and read in silence. Now, standing again in silence, I stare At a word trove given two sons to share. Some are dated in the first blank page:1 January 1938

1 He got taken quick. Then he hung around. And anyway, he never really wanted to be anywhere he was—so why not? Then from out there and for years the prodigal wrote back to them—indolent letters, lying about jobs, a wife he found, kids they had. Things he used to hear people talking about. He never even bothered to make it up. Or tried to keep his stories straight. His wife? A harem of hair colors. Kids fizzed up like bugs, then fizzled out. Well, that’s the way his life was, in pieces. Sometimes his head flashed on something fat and beautiful. He watched it shoot by. Then he listened for the crash. Mostly, he was in the dark, drifting. And, within limits, less of a chump. He walked away from a lot of stuff. There were some things he did. This and that. Lucky, real dirty work never came looking. Once he dumped a woman. Later she dumped him back. That’s how the game was played out there, where he was. So that was that. Well, just say he was down on his luck. Or starting now to get it together. Or he was taking things one day at a time. Sure, one day at a time—for years on end. One more also-ran playing out the string. Or, staring straight ahead, out of the blue he’d tell whoever was drinking alongside him, Don’t look back, champ, your crap could be gaining. To which—years later—he took to adding, And don’t look up—you could be overtaking the next guy’s you-know-what . . . (Solo guffaws.) So, what did they think of him, out there? Joke. Embarrassment. Eyesore. Take your pick. But how could it matter what anyone said in that rasping, hissing, clanging tongue of theirs? To tell the truth, since he’d first come to their country he hadn’t heard a thing that stuck to his bones. Then every once in a while he sat down and wrote. 2 His words returned—in another’s hand: everyday things people put in their letters, and howlers only a mother would believe, and reassuring fluff about the weather, as if sun were sun, and his rain, like theirs, could fill the cistern and make green things grow. And here they were, grinning back at him, every pitiful, dumb phrase he wrote, copied over like a holy scripture in his mother’s homespun penmanship that made his snarled, uncontrollable scrawl round and plan and easy to read. Her ABCs were good enough to eat —bits of dough she’d squeezed, patted, baked slowly in the little oven of her hands and strung into necklaces of script. But if he read those letters at all, his eyes scribbled some glare before he fed the page, balled up, to the dark, muttering demon of trash chained in the corner, when, drunk or stoned, he plummeted straight down —with the bulb he never extinguished burning above his swollen, already aging face. 3 And then. And then. And then. And then no letter came back. And soon no letter went forward. Why listen now to people talking? The demon settled into self-consumption. And everything was still. Dust silted over the phantom children he’d never wanted anyhow; at the end of its rainbow his wife’s hair came to rest on red—forever; their house faded in the manuscripts. Though old now, he was still a son —though no one’s son. A promise, then, without witnesses anywhere to say if the promise had been kept or not kept. But didn’t he, having no lands, no house, no wife, no child, no works, didn’t he know what he had done with his heritage? Then let their silence mute the judgment, hush the accusation against him! And now this little corner where he sat need be no worse than any other little corner of the universe. 4 And then one day a witness came forward —from an old pair of pants, from the pocket. An old piece of paper. Wrinkled. Worn. Smudged with the dregs of big numbers. And under their blur, in palest blue —blue of the veins of a vanished wrist— his mother’s hand at its homework was being true to the words it found. But there, between the words, in the smeared void he saw his sentence spelled out. Of his waste life: pain. Of falsity: pain. It was a lash. A lifeline.His lifeline —flung out to him, laid on his hands,in his hand. With a pencil stub he traced the faint line of her letters across the yellowed page. As faithfully as she, as patiently —as if he need never reach their end and the words might now become his life—he wrote. He wrote the date. He wrote, “Dear Son.” He wrote, “We’re glad the children all are well again and getting A’s.” He wrote, “We’re also happy that you like your job . . .” He, too, was happy. He, too, was glad. He wrote.

I’ve been excited about him as an individual. I’ve met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow. Indeed it is remarkable. Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that the desolation of hopes not merely deferred but by impracticability brutalized little marred his genial spirit. How such a one, so circumstanced by parentage— the mother crippled by disappointment; the father by rotgut and Percodan— as to blight his prospects, and blacken with untimely frost the buds of those ambitions justly excited by manifest powers, graces, and propensities, should nonetheless display discrimination not inferior to those we deem wise, sympathy judicious and above reproach, is cause for a wonder neither cynicism can besmirch nor incredulity subvert. In and out of juvie, jacking cars at fifteen, snorting lines of Adderall, his nostrils stained blue, kicked out, taken back, kicked out, busted, paroled, busted again, straining to reach the shiny object fallen through the grate, tantalizing, just beyond his fingers, finding and losing God, thinking as he rakes the leaves of the linden tree outside the sublet bungalow that eating, sleeping, dying are what it’s all about, nothing else, maybe a few sunsets, forget about sex.

The bioluminescent undersides of squid render them invisible to predators below. That the radiance of the boy’s anger might protect him. Walking the dog and stepping on a patch of repaired road, I remember the soft spot in his head. You’re deaf as a beagle. No, you are. Can I feel the tide’s drag on the turning earth increase each day’s duration? A hair in my nostril has gone white. In absolute night, from my bed, I hear him aiming for the toilet’s center. The sound deepens, voice finding its register. Scientists call it an entangled system. We survive Christmas, his face pressed to the smooshed bosom of his grandmother in a house so immaculate, the spider in the seam of the ceiling stands out obscenely. Like a star at the outskirts of the galaxy, and slung around by the gravity of dark matter. For now, he goes where we go, but he does not belong to us. I begin to begin my sentences leaning toward him, taking a deep breath. He relinquishes the conversation with a contraction of his pupils. What is for one of us the throb of the immediate is, for the other, the imminent mundane. When napalm hits my brain, he takes on the tranquillity of a blinking newt. She finds a photograph of him at seven. The sheer expressed of his face. As among Michelangelo’s early drawings, there is a copy of Masacchio’s lost Sagra, the consecration. We search our memories of him for a certain unity of characteristics that would hold through the permutations he now submits to us. When it clings to the wire-and-rug surrogate, lab technicians shock it again. Instead of releasing, it clings tighter. Throwing himself into the back seat after wrestling practice, mat burns on his cheek and forehead. His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.

I always thought reality was something you became when you grew up. In the square stands Fata Morgana looking tired, shouting Morning paper—morning paper.

If I stand alone in the snow it is clear that I am a clock how else would eternity find its way around

It’s very strange the eggs are everywhere There must be some mistake the eggs are so close together There seems to be no room for us Push the eggs closer together It’s impossible We must get closer together but beloved what will happen with all the eggs everywhere what will happen everywhere to us There must be some mistake

All summer connotations fill this light, a symmetry of different scales—the site of fibrous silence, the velvet lace of iris, alders the moon can ignite. One feels the amplitude of grief, the pace of oscillating stars, power in place where time has crossed and left a breathy stain. A body needs the weight and thrust of grace. I want to parse the logic, spin and domain, the structure mourning will allow, the grain of certainty in two estates, the dance of perfect order, flowing toward its plane. That bird you see has caught a proper stance, unfaithful to its measure, a pert mischance of divination on the move, the trace of sacred darkness true to light's advance.

and you press into the dark, imagine the stranger two rows back, that fragile chance you’ll forget in the second trailer. Now it’s quiet, still this burden of being watcher and screen and what floats across it–light pouring out its time and necklines and train wrecks. What a relief to yield to the EXIT sign red “I” blinking like a candle. Soon the enormous figures moving across rooms, the emphatic narrative arcs. (There’s the thrum of the subway, its engine of extras.) Here now the beginning of trivia tests. Warning puppets with brown-bag faces and fringy hair. You’re almost here. But what you want is the after. How yourself you are now walking into the night, full moon over Houston Street, at the bright fruit stand touching the yellow mums. Here you are: Woman with Cilantro listening to the rattle of the wrap, the paper sound paper makes after you have heard movie paper. Apples are more apples. Paper more paper. Cilantro, its sweaty green self.