Alan R. Shapiro

Did you ever have a family? Dark dining room, bright kitchen, white steam from the big pot my mother’s stirring reaching in wavy tendrils to her face, around her face, all the way around to me at the table, then beyond me into the darkness where my brother is. Were you ever a child? I’m hungry but I know we’ll eat soon, so even the hunger’s sweet. Did you ever really have a brother? He’s singing there in the dark corner beside the stereo, the volume turned down so low all we hear is him, his voice, and his eyes are closed so that there’s nothing around him anywhere that might reveal he isn’t who the song insists he is. And that is? Irresistible, unforgettable, someone to whom as in imaginary gardens where “the nectarine and curious peach into my hands themselves do reach,” love comes as soon as called, comes just as dreamed. Did any of this ever happen? The hunger’s sweet, it’s as if the song weaves through the fragrance of the braiding steam from him to me to her to me to him because her eyes are closed now too; her slippered feet tap, caper a soft shoe while the ladle sways in her hand as she stirs. Were you ever a child? I know I’ll eat soon. Did you ever really have a brother? You should have heard him, his voice was unforgettable, irresistible, his voice was an imaginary garden woven through with fragrance. Did you ever have a family? Their eyes are closed. That’s how I know we’re there inside it, it’s made of sound and steam that weaves between dark dining room, bright kitchen. We’re there because I’m hungry, and we’ll all be eating soon together, and the hunger’s sweet.

There were two voices in the fever dream: Hers speaking from another room, and theirs, The teeny-boppers, singing from the screen. Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks, And thankful worries, who did what to whom, And why, and thank God it wasn’t worse, poor bastard, Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears short Shorts, we wear short shorts, over and over Till I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last, Was out of it, and some one else, thank God, Had only lost a breast, and Shirley what A good kid, what a beauty, what a doll, She let herself go when the bum walked out. Thank God they never had a child. Thank God They smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog; Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sang To me on little stages on the stage Where boys and girls were dancing all around them, Singing and dancing where it wasn’t worse, Thank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonder Who to thank for just how bad it was.

Long scree of pill bottles spilling over the tipped brim of the wicker basket, fifty or more, a hundred, your name on every one and under your name the brusque rune of instructions— which ones to take, how many, and often, on what days, with or without food, before or after eating, impossible toward the end to keep them all straight, not even with your charts, your calendars, the bottles ranged in sequence along the kitchen counter—you always so efficient, organized, never without a plan, even when planning had come down to this and nothing more, for there was still a future in it, though the future reached only from one bottle to the next, from pill to pill, each one another toehold giving way beneath you on the steep slope you never stopped struggling against, unable not to climb, and then, when climbing was impossible, not to try slowing the quickening descent. You had descended now, your body thinned to the machine of holding on, while I exhausted by the vigil, with all your medicine spread before me, looked for something, anything at all to help me sleep. To help me for a short while anyway not be aware of you, your gaunt hand clutching the guardrail, your eyes blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed, the air above them for their own sight, and the whimper far back in the throat, the barely audible continuous half-cry half- wheeze I couldn’t hear and not think you were saying something, though I couldn’t make out what. I wanted to sleep, I wanted if just for that one night to meet you there on that steep slope, the two of us together, facing opposite directions, I, because I wasn’t dying, looking down, desiring what you, still looking up, resisted, because you were.

1 Water roared everywhere around us, yet from the bank all we could see of it were quick spumes and flashes here and there, in among the boulders. Cautiously, as if they might awaken, we clambered over the gigantic slabs and humps, the sun-baked ovals lumpy as hammered clay, and saw downstream below us only the vague shapes of others, almost billowy, like magnified amoebas, stretching away to even vaguer ones beyond them, turning the narrow streambed through the valley to a lunar seam. 2 Easing ourselves down over the massive sides (we were hot and tired, eager for the pools below) we could make out older water in the rough grain, undulating and immobile currents, band swirled on band, mica-speckled, cloudy, each seeming to move off, as it faded, through the stone—each one a glacial rune, each boulder an innumerable pebble in the ice sheet’s tidal suck and drag: two hundred thousand years, two billion, five, the molten core, spoor of gasses in the vast night, at our fingertips. 3 Then the pool: your clothes shed, with one hand braced against the rock ledge you had slipped into the hip-high rushing water, and were wading out, bent over, reaching like the blind before you for the slippery boulder you slid across, pushing against the white weight of the pouring mist, your skin goose-fleshed, speckled bright as mica, and then, part mist yourself, you turned back, smiling, calling though I couldn’t hear you, calling and waving for me to climb down to where you were, to join you there. And so I did.

Radiant child of Leto, farworking Lord Apollo, with lyre in hand and golden plectrum, you sang to the gods on Mount Olympus almost as soon as you were born. You sang, and the Muses sang in answer, and together your voices so delighted all your deathless elders that their perfect happiness was made more perfect still. What was it, though, that overwhelmed them, that suffused, astonished, even the endless ether? Was it the freshest, most wonderful stops of breath, the flawless intervals and scales whose harmonies were mimicking in sound the beauty of the gods themselves, or what you joined to that, what you were singing of, our balked desires, the miseries we suffer at your indifferent hands, devastation and bereavement, old age and death? Farworking, radiant child, what do you know about us? Here is my father, half blind, and palsied, at the toilet, he’s shouting at his penis, Piss, you! Piss! Piss! but the penis (like the heavenly host to mortal prayers) is deaf and dumb; here, too, my mother with her bad knee, on the eve of surgery, hobbling by the bathroom, pausing, saying, who are you talking to in there? and he replies, no one you would know, sweetheart. Supernal one, in your untested mastery, your easy excellence, with nothing to overcome, and needing nothing but the most calamitous and abject stories to prove how powerful you are, how truly free, watch them as they laugh so briefly, godlike, better than gods, if only for a moment in which what goes wrong is converted to a rightness, if only because now she’s hobbling back to bed where she won’t sleep, if only because he pees at last, missing the bowl, and has to get down on his knees to wipe it up. You don’t know anything about us.

proceeds by chance and necessity becomes nonrandom through randomness builds complexity from simplicity nurtures consciousness unconsciously evolves purposelessly creatures who demand purpose and discover natural selection

Up in the billboard, over old South Station, the Captain, all wide grin and ruddy cheek, held up a golden shot of Cutty Sark high as the skyline where the sunset spread a gold fan from the twig-like spars and rigging of a departing clipper ship. Above the picture the dull haze of a real sun rose, dragging the day up with it. Seven o’clock. The agitated horns, brakes, fingers, and catcalls down below me were already merging and channeling everybody on to warehouse, factory, department store and office. My father and uncle talking over all the goods to be received that day, the goods delivered, their two reflections in the window floating like blurry ghosts within the Captain’s grin, their voices raised a little above the soft erratic humming of the big machines, the riveters and pressers, warming, rousing: The Century order, did it get out last night? And had the buckles come from Personal? Who’d go do Jaffey? Who’d diddle Abramowitz and Saperstein? Those cocksucking sons of bitches, cut their balls off if they fuck with us . . . How automatically at any provocation I can aim the words at anybody now, woman or man, the reverberating angry this, not that, in ‘pussy’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘fuckhead’, hammered down so far inside me it’s almost too securely there to feel. But I was thirteen then, and for the first time old enough to have my father say these things in front of me, which must have meant I was a man now too, I listened (blushing, ashamed of blushing) for clues of what it was I had become, or was supposed to be: It did and didn’t have to do with bodies, being a man, it wasn’t fixed in bodies, but somehow passed between them, going to by being taken from, ever departing, ever arriving, unstoppable as money, and moving in a limited supply it seemed to follow where the money went. Being a man was something that you did to other men, which meant a woman was what other men became when you would do them. Either you gave a fucking, or you took one, did or were done to, it was simple as that. Somebody shouted from beyond the office that Tony had passed out in the can again. ‘The lush, the no good lush,’ my uncle said, ‘get him the fuck out of here for good, will ya.’ The stall door swung back, scrawled with giant cocks, tits, asses and cunts, beyond which in the shadows my father was gently wrestling with the man, trying to hold him steady while his free hand shimmied the tangled shorts and trousers up over the knees and hips, and even got the shirt tucked in, the pants zipped deftly enough for Tony not to notice, though he did. Even then I knew they’d fire him, and that it wasn’t gratitude at all that made the man weep inconsolably, his head bowed, nodding, as my father led him to the elevator, still with his arm around him, patting his shoulder, easing him through the door. I knew the tenderness that somewhere else could possibly have been a lover’s or a father’s could here be only an efficient way to minimize the trouble. And yet it seemed somehow my father was too adept at it, too skillful, not to feel it in some way. And feeling it not to need to pull back, to separate himself from what the rest of him was doing, which was why, I think, his face throughout was blank, expressionless like the faces of the presidents on the bills he handed Tony as the door slid shut. The men fast at the riveters and pressers and the long row of women at the Singers were oil now even more than men or women, mute oil in the loud revving of the place, a blur of hands on automatic pilot, slipping leather through the pumping needles, under the thrusting rods, the furious hammers, the nearly invisible whirring of the blades. ‘Come on now, Al, it’s time,’ my father said, and the Captain seemed to grin a little wider, as if his pleasure there at the end of his unending day grew freer, more disencumbered, because he saw me at the start of mine, under my father’s arm, his soft voice broken against the noise into an unfollowable tune of favors and petty cash, and how much ass he had to kiss to get me this, and I should be a man now and not disappoint him.

Extravagant sweep of clear sky darkening in the big picture window beside the bed, lights here and there already flashing all across the city down below us— Ellen and the girls out somewhere, you and I alone, you with your eyes closed, I with a drink in hand: you suddenly in character, your voice a wraith’s voice, faint, stumbling, slurry with morphine, and yet still artful as ever, even if the art was obvious, the dying brother playing the dying brother— Do you think you have a problem with that?

What never comes when called. What hides when held. Guest most at home where least expected. Vagrant balm of Gilead. What, soon as here, becomes the body’s native ground and, soon as not, its banishment. Coming and going, indifferent, magisterial. My lovely daughter— walking me to the car to say goodbye the day I left to keep watch at my brother’s bedside— suddenly singing “I feel pretty, oh so pretty” as she raised her arms up in a loose oval over her head and pirouetted all along the walk. Savage and magisterial— the joy of it, the animal candor of each arabesque, each leaping turn and counterturn, her voice now wobbly with laughter, “And I pity any girl who isn’t me tonight.” Savagely beautiful, not so much like the lion that the camera freezes in mid- pounce, claws outstretched for the stumbling antelope, as like the herd escaping that the camera pans to, zig- zagging, swerving as one, their leaping strides now leaping higher, faster, even after, it seems, the fear subsides— after the fear and the relief they keep on running for nothing but the joy of running, though it could be any one of them is running from its fallen mother or father, sister or brother, across the wide savanna, under a bright sun into fresher grass.

Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law she thought to violate, man-set as it was, and, here, inconsequential as the sun at midnight, drought at flood-time— when she heard a baby in the tall reeds at the river’s brink, she was nobody’s daughter, subject of no rule but the one his need for her established as she knelt down to quell his crying with a little tune just seeing him there had taught her how to hum. Now as then, it is the same tune, timelessly in time, your mother hums as she kneels down beside your little barge of foam, smiling to see you smile when she wrings out from the sponge a ragged string of water over the chest and belly, the dimpled loins, the bud so far from flowering, and the foot slick as a fish your hand tries to hold up till it slips back splashing with such mild turbulence that she laughs, and you laugh to see her laugh. Here now, as it was then, it is still so many years before the blood’s smeared over doorposts, before the Nile clots with the first-born, and the women wailing,wailing throughout the city; here now again is the kingdom of pleasure, where they are safe still, mother and child, from the chartered rod of the Fathers, and where a father can still pray, Lord, Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep away from them, just keep away.