Alan R. Shapiro

The gregarious dark is shifting when she puts her second drink, the free one, half on the coaster. The tipped wine poised at the brim is the beginning of the bad girl she’ll promise never to be again tomorrow, who can taunt him now to prove he doesn’t love her and never could: her hand slides up his thigh until he tenses— ‘My little prig, don’t you want to fuck me?’ the bad girl she couldn’t be at home, his wife on ice. All he can do is smile back as though she’s made a harmless good-natured joke, and struggle not to look around to see who’s heard, who’s watching. He wants to smash the wine glass in her face so he can know for once exactly what he’s done wrong; but he places it instead back safely on the coaster quickly before she sees. Never cautious enough, he is prepared even if she knocks it over to go down on his hands and knees and wipe it up, kind and forgiving. In all ways careful to acquit himself so that tomorrow when she says she doesn’t deserve him, he’s too good, he can believe her. Tomorrow will be his happy hour. There won’t be anything she wouldn’t do for him.

The present tense is the body’s past tense here; hence the ghost sludge of hands on the now gray strip of towel hanging limp from the jammed dispenser; hence the mirror squinting through grime at grime, and the worn- to-a-sliver of soiled soap on the soiled sink. The streaked bowl, the sticky toilet seat, air claustral with stink— all residues and traces of the ancestral spirit of body free of spirit—hence, behind the station, at the back end of the store, hidden away and dimly lit this cramped and solitary carnival inversion—Paul becoming Saul becoming scents anonymous and animal; hence, over the insides of the lockless stall the cave-like scribblings and glyphs declaring unto all who come to it in time: “heaven is here at hand and dark, and hell is odorless; hell is bright and clean.”

Over an edge of cloud the naked angel blasts his long horn downward and they rise, or try to, skeletons, half-skeletons, the still-fleshed bodies of the newly dead, rising and pushing up the stone lids, heaving the crypt doors open, clambering over one another, dumbstruck, frightened, warily peeking out from inside tombs, or out of ditches, their eye holes blacker than the black they peek from while some reach out of habit for a robe to hide a nakedness they have no longer, a phantom shame that must be all the bones remember of the living flesh they were, and all of them worn away to nearly nothing, more wisp of form than form, more wraith than wisp, as if before your eyes they’re sinking into what they’re rising out of, coming into view by fading from it, there and gone, as if the very stone, unsure of what it holds, can neither cling to nor relinquish now the dream of something in it more than stone, other than hard or heavy, as over the face of it the air of a wished-for morning ripples the robes to water while it washes through the skulls and half-skulls tilted back to see just what the noise is that won’t let them sleep.

I lay back on the carpeted bottom step Of the stairwell that like a well extended Darkly up to the window near the ceiling, Up where the Chinaman under the wide-brimmed hat That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held No flower across the sill no one could reach. There was a television on somewhere Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking, Someone was saying. Someone was saying something About a blockade and a quarantine, Who would blink first, lose face, or push the button. A fat man banged a shoe against a desk. The Chinaman however didn’t care. Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers, He was content to be a clot of darkness Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass— The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms, The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled. And everywhere within the light’s slow fall Infinities of particles were falling Into the flowerpot they’d never fill.

The oldest sister, her two hands on the table, about to push herself up, stares with grim determination at the affronting dishes, waiting, it seems, until the middle sister finishes her story, so she can clear them away. Her gaze so tense with purpose she can almost see germs spawning in the mess of white fish flaking from the spines, the smear of egg yolk and the torn rolls disfiguring the china; as if the meal, the moment it is over, the meal she made a point of telling them she shopped for, got up early to prepare, were now inedible, because uneaten. It’s no great comfort either that her brother sitting opposite holds up a flared match over the pipe from which smoke rolls away across the table like a phantom mold in and around the open tub of butter, the gouged block of cream cheese and the coffee cups; so in a moment when she finally does stand she’ll say again, as always, For love or money in my mouth I’d never put such filth, and he’ll say, winking at the middle sister, That’s what she said on her honeymoon. The youngest sister is sitting on the couch behind the table; her face—sheer disengagement, toneless and still—appears to hang suspended beyond the oldest sister’s shoulder, far enough away for no one yet to notice as her legs cross that the ashtray in her lap spills ash over the sunflowers of her housedress. Or that the cigarette between her fingers sags loosely and is dangling while the hand lifts like a puppet’s on a string of smoke. Her death is just three months away. Even though it’s summer (otherwise the brother and middle sister would be home, in Florida), summer and late morning— with sunlight only just now catching on a corner of the window shut behind them, shut against the smog, the steady traffic and the panicked blare and drawn-out whining fade of sirens—the apartment is still quiet, still cool enough, right now, to keep the body in the wavering frail zone of what it needs to be forgotten, so they can sit like this together, with the oldest sister’s sharp eye on the wrecked meal, the brother and sister talking: Listen, she would be saying, listen, Charlie, her elbows on the table, both hands open, the body fashioned to the voice’s weary What can you do? What are ya gonna do? in answer to some story of a cousin’s sudden illness (And he was my age, just like that one day he’s shaving with the toothpaste), or a friend’s death (That one, she didn’t care how sick she got, she always had her hair done), his back pain, her arthritis, or the daughter who won’t diet (And she’d be such a beauty!); after his joke about the nurse, and hers about the bedpan, Listen, they each say, Listen, what are ya gonna do? “The Schmo, he never should’ve married her, for Christ sake, until he told her that he had a problem, that was his first mistake, then he goes throwing away his pills, because he’s happy he doesn’t need them anymore, the schmo, so of course what happens is she wakes up and finds him weeping at the kitchen table, just weeping, he doesn’t know why, he won’t eat, won’t get dressed, says he’s quittin’ his job, you know, nuts, nuts, so naturally she leaves him, the poor schmo, and he’s such a good boy . . . ” All of the harm that’s imperceptibly but surely coming for them (the way the sun burns brick by brick all morning toward the window like a slow fuse)—all of the bad news now is in the body only enough to hold the middle sister’s two hands open, shrug her shoulders in a way they recognize as hers, the way their mother did; as if all trouble were, for now, no heavier than the familiar voice repeating, Listen, Listen it could be worse; So who’s to say?; What was, was; When your number’s up—like old charms woven around each story till they’ve made what happens what was only meant to happen, coherent with fate, fated as family. After the funeral three months from now, they’ll have to listen to the oldest sister tell them they had no business moving away to Florida, and Irene sick as she was. And selfish. She was selfish, that one. After all those years of living with that bum, her husband, may his cheap soul rest in peace, didn’t she deserve a little pleasure? And anyway, what could be done for her? Didn’t the stroke just make it easier for her to sit all day, and smoke, and not care ashes were falling on the couch, the carpet; her bathrobe filthy, filthy? Oh it was terrible— and now they will hear the old unfairnesses, old feuds and resentments come to her voice like consolation, like a mother helping her recite the story of that last bad day— all that smoke, and running in with nothing but the dishtowel to beat down the flames, and Irene, just Irene, just sitting there, the queen of Sheba—What difference did it make since she was there,she was always there, her big sister, to clean up the mess? Only three months, and yet it could be years, or decades, for the sun has only just now caught in the window, and its bright plaque warms the air so gradually that none of them can know it’s warming, or that soon someone, distracted by a faint sheen prickling the skin, will break the story, look up toward the window and, startled by the full glare, check the time. Right now, though, the future is a luxury of instances in which the cigarette, raised halfway to the lips, will go on rising. Nothing bad, right now, can happen here except as news, bad news the brother and sister mull and rehearse, puzzle and fret until it seems the very telling of it is what keeps them safe. And safe, too, the oldest sister, dreaming of all the perishables sealed, wrapped up and hurried back into the fridge’s uncontaminated airlessness, dreaming of how the soapsuds curdle and slide over the dishes in a soothing fury, not minding that it scalds her hands to hold each plate and cup and bowl under the hot, hard jet of water, if it gets them clean.

(for Saul Chessler, 1953-1974) I walked from my house down Coolidge Street last night And air, beginning movement in the trees, Shook down a hushing from the branches. On either side of me the houses Like solid shadow, blocks of silence In the violet light, so dim without dimming. And I saw you, Saul, my old friend, waiting For me at the corner where our two streets met. I wanted to ask you what it was like to die But you said first, as if you didn’t want to tell me, ‘The doctors made me better. We can run again.’ You ran behind me (the way you always did), Your slow strides lunging; though they never could keep up This time they stayed right there at my heels. Turning, I saw one pocket inside out Clapping on your coat front like a white hand. Your breath quickened, scrawled in the chilling air Like mine, and vanishing. We ran on a field of snow. Our footsteps pattered the smooth crust, Each one feeling like it might break through. Around us the pure white kindled under violet. And we returned by train. Sitting next to you, Staring through the window, I saw your body Lying like a dark slash in the snow, Your arms flung up, your legs crossed, Even as I heard you next to me Still struggling to catch your breath. You were just Pretending to be alive—remembering to breathe. Lumbering under living weight, saying you were cured, Your flushed cheeks—all just to put me at my ease, Afraid that your death might embarrass me, even then Saul, you were more a friend to me than you were dead. But in my mind the question was still circling: What is it like to die? But how could I catch you In a lie which you intended as a kindness? Beside you on the train, hurtling back Into the strange familiarity of Coolidge Street, Remaining silent, I returned the courtesy.

Old court. Old chain net hanging in frayed links from the rim, the metal blackboard dented, darker where the ball for over thirty years has kissed it, the blacktop buckling, the white lines nearly worn away. Old common ground where none of the black men warming up before the basket will answer or even look in my direction when I ask if I can run too, the chill a mutual understanding, one of the last we share, letting me join them here, if nowhere else, by not letting me forget I don’t belong. Old court. Old courtesy, handshake, exchange of names, in the early days of bussing, between assassinations, before our quaint welcoming of them had come to seem, even to ourselves, the haughty overflow of wealth so thoroughly our own we didn’t need to see it. Old beautiful delusion in those courtly gestures that everything now beyond our wanting just to play was out of bounds, and we were free between the white lines of whatever we assumed we each of us assumed. Old court, old dream dreamed by the weave, the trap, the backdoor pass. Old fluid legacy, among the others, that conjures even now within our bodies and between them such a useless, such an intimate forgetting, as in the moment when you get a step on your defender and can tell exactly by how another man comes at you where your own man is and, without looking, lob the ball up in the air so perfectly as he arrives that in a single motion he can catch and finger roll it in. Old court. Old dwindling cease fire, with no hope of peace, that we silently turn away from when the game is over, hurrying back (as if believing contact meant contagion) to our separate tribes, to the cleansing fires of what, despite ourselves, we momentarily forgot: old lore, old news, old burning certitudes we can’t stoke high or hot enough, yet won’t stop ever stoking until whatever it is we think we are anneals and toughens into an impenetrable shield.

The two boys lean out on the railing of the front porch, looking up. Behind them they can hear their mother in one room watching “Name That Tune,” their father in another watching a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs turned up high and higher till they each can’t hear the other’s show. The older boy is saying that no matter how many stars you counted there were always more stars beyond them and beyond the stars black space going on forever in all directions, so that even if you flew up millions and millions of years you’d be no closer to the end of it than they were now here on the porch on Tuesday night in the middle of summer. The younger boy can think somehow only of his mother’s closet, how he likes to crawl in back behind the heavy drapery of shirts, nightgowns and dresses, into the sheer black where no matter how close he holds his hand up to his face there’s no hand ever, no face to hold it to. A woman from another street is calling to her stray cat or dog, clapping and whistling it in, and farther away deep in the city sirens now and again veer in and out of hearing. The boys edge closer, shoulder to shoulder now, sad Ptolemies, the older looking up, the younger as he thinks back straight ahead into the black leaves of the maple where the street lights flicker like another watery skein of stars. “Name That Tune” and Walter Cronkite struggle like rough water to rise above each other. And the woman now comes walking in a nightgown down the middle of the street, clapping and whistling, while the older boy goes on about what light years are, and solar winds, black holes, and how the sun is cooling and what will happen to them all when it is cold.

The songs swept down from the northern steppes with cinerary horse and sword and vestment in the wake of battle suicidal for a bronze translation of flesh burnt to a vertical vapor trail of fame which, so they claimed, would be undying by which they meant the dying would be just prolonged a little longer as on a ladder made of air each legendary smoke of name could only climb by thinning till it wasn’t there. And now as the steel tips of our devices dig, sort through and analyze what’s left behind: scant traces of berserk debris, dumb soot of ritual effaced by dumber ash, beneath ghost towns the ghosts have all abandoned, all we unearth intact now are the untranslated bones of babies, inhumed at home in older dwellings on deeper strata under mud floors in pits — placed carefully on sides, knees drawn to chests, skulls cupped in pebble bones of hand, the dead nursling, the stillborn, the miscarried — unnamed, unadorned, as if the only grave goods buried with them were their perishing — as if that were what the mothers wanted to keep close, keep hidden, safe from the heroic stench of burning upward while their breasts still swelling dripping freshened the black dirt sucking at their feet.