David Ignatow

For Harvey Shapiro I stand and listen, head bowed, to my inner complaint. Persons passing by think I am searching for a lost coin. You’re fired, I yell inside after an especially bad episode. I’m letting you go without notice or terminal pay. You just lost another chance to make good. But then I watch myself standing at the exit, depressed and about to leave, and wave myself back in wearily, for who else could I get in my place to do the job in dark, airless conditions?

As I enter the theatre the play is going on. I hear the father say to the son on stage, You’ve taken the motor apart. The son replies, The roof is leaking. The father retorts, The tire is flat. Tiptoeing down the aisle, I find my seat, edge my way in across a dozen kneecaps as I tremble for my sanity. I have heard doomed voices calling on god the electrode. Sure enough, as I start to sit a scream rises from beneath me. It is one of the players. If I come down, I’ll break his neck, caught between the seat and the backrest. Now the audience and the players on stage, their heads turned towards me, are waiting for the sound of the break. Must I? Those in my aisle nod slowly, reading my mind, their eyes fixed on me, and I understand that each has done the same. Must I kill this man as the price of my admission to this play? His screams continue loud and long. I am at a loss as to what to do, I panic, I freeze. My training has been to eat the flesh of pig. I might even have been able to slit a throat. As a child I witnessed the dead chickens over a barrel of sawdust absorbing their blood. I then brought them in a bag to my father who sold them across his counter. Liking him, I learned to like people and enjoy their company too, which of course brought me to this play. But how angry I become. Now everybody is shouting at me to sit down, sit down or I’ll be thrown out. The father and son have stepped off stage and come striding down the aisle side by side. They reach me, grab me by the shoulder and force me down. I scream, I scream, as if to cover the sound of the neck breaking. All through the play I scream and am invited on stage to take a bow. I lose my senses and kick the actors in the teeth. There is more laughter and the actors acknowledge my performance with a bow. How should I understand this? Is it to say that if I machine-gun the theatre from left to right they will respond with applause that would only gradually diminish with each death? I wonder then whether logically I should kill myself too out of admiration. A question indeed, as I return to my seat and observe a new act of children playfully aiming their kicks at each other’s groins.

Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton. It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it with me—this other thing I will become at death, and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk, my rival. What will the living see of me if they should open my grave but my bones that will stare at them through hollow sockets and bared teeth. I write this to warn my friends not to be shocked at my changed attitude toward them, but to be aware that I have it in me to be someone other than I am, and I write to ask forgiveness that death is not wholesome for friendships, that bones do not talk, have no quarrel with me, do not even know I exist. A machine called skeleton will take my place in the minds of others when I am dead among the living, and that machine will make it obvious that I have died to be identified by bones that have no speech, no thought, no mind to speak of having let themselves be carried once around in me, as at my service at the podium or as I lay beside my love or when I held my child at birth or embraced a friend or shook a critic's hand or held a pen to sign a check or book or wrote a farewell letter to a love or held my penis at the bowl or lay my hand upon my face at the mirror and approved of it. There is Ignatow, it will be said, looking down inside the open grave. I'll be somewhere in my poems, I think, to be mistaken for my bones, but There's Ignatow will be said. I say to those who persist, just read what I have written. I'll be there, held together by another kind of structure, of thought and imagery, mind and matter, love and longing, tensions opposite, such as the skeleton requires to stand upright, to move with speed, to sit with confidence, my friend the skeleton and I its friend, shielding it from harm.

You wept in your mother's arms and I knew that from then on I was to forget myself. Listening to your sobs, I was resolved against my will to do well by us and so I said, without thinking, in great panic, To do wrong in one's own judgment, though others thrive by it, is the right road to blessedness. Not to submit to error is in itself wrong and pride. Standing beside you, I took an oath to make your life simpler by complicating mine and what I always thought would happen did: I was lifted up in joy.

I am looking for a past I can rely on in order to look to death with equanimity. What was given me: my mother’s largeness to protect me, my father’s regularity in coming home from work at night, his opening the door silently and smiling, pleased to be back and the lights on in all the rooms through which I could run freely or sit at ease at table and do my homework undisturbed: love arranged as order directed at the next day. Going to bed was a journey.

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.

I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body—the fly that tried to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am the one who brought it to an end. Tired of the day and with night coming on I lay my body down beside the fly.

I close my eyes like a good little boy at night in bed, as I was told to do by my mother when she lived, and before bed I brush my teeth and slip on my pajamas, as I was told, and look forward to tomorrow. I do all things required of me to make me a citizen of sterling worth. I keep a job and come home each evening for dinner. I arrive at the same time on the same train to give my family a sense of order. I obey traffic signals. I am cordial to strangers, I answer my mail promptly. I keep a balanced checking account. Why can’t I live forever?

Whatever we do, whether we light strangers’ cigarettes—it may turn out to be a detective wanting to know who is free with a light on a lonely street nights— or whether we turn away and get a knife planted between our shoulders for our discourtesy; whatever we do—whether we marry for love and wake up to find love is a task, or whether for convenience to find love must be won over, or we are desperate— whatever we do; save by dying, and there too we are caught, by being planted too close to our parents.

As I reach to close each book lying open on my desk, it leaps up to snap at my fingers. My legs won’t hold me, I must sit down. My fingers pain me where the thick leaves snapped together at my touch. All my life I’ve held books in my hands like children, carefully turning their pages and straightening out their creases. I use books almost apologetically. I believe I often think their thoughts for them. Reading, I never know where theirs leave off and mine begin. I am so much alone in the world, I can observe the stars or study the breeze, I can count the steps on a stair on the way up or down, and I can look at another human being and get a smile, knowing it is for the sake of politeness. Nothing must be said of estrangement among the human race and yet nothing is said at all because of that. But no book will help either. I stroke my desk, its wood so smooth, so patient and still. I set a typewriter on its surface and begin to type to tell myself my troubles. Against the evidence, I live by choice.