David Yezzi

The water off these rocks is green and cold. The sandless coast takes the tide in its mouth, as a wolf brings down a deer or lifts its child. I walked this bay before you were my child. Your fingers stinging brightly in the cold, I take each one and warm it in my mouth. Though I’ve known this shore for years, my mouth holds no charms of use to you, my child. You will have to learn the words to ward off cold and know them cold, child, in your open mouth.

The only time I’ve been to Switzerland was early one spring on a train through the mountains. There was a lake—I guess it was Lucerne? Above me cliff tops ridged with snow fanned out so that where I stood at the edge of the platform light bathed the empty siding all around with a diffused opalescence off the water. Behind the station must have been a town, spires of churches, municipal arcades, and coffee squelching in the fogged caf és. I never saw the place, though I remember thinking this is Switzerland and took a mind-shot of the pines, breathing in the cold as the porter whistled at us to reboard.

There are days I don’t think about the sea; weeks wash by in fact, then a shearwater—or some such—flutters by on the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye, reflected there, a shimmering reverie, recalling the pact I once made (and renew today) to hold to a higher altitude. But note the difference between this bird and me: a slight disruption or harsh word and I crash, folded seaward, letting cold life intrude; whereas the petrel, mindless of such height, scales each watery hill that rises up, adapting to the shape of each impediment, each low escape instinct in it, the scope of its flight fitted to its will.

This guy I know, a rabbi, Friday nights, on his way home before sunset in winter, always stops at a florist or bodega and buys a bunch of flowers for his wife. Every week the same, a ritual, regardless of her mood that morning, fresh upsets at work, or snarling on the bridge; he brings her roses wrapped in cellophane. But isn’t there a ring of hokiness in that? Why should a good man have to show his devotion? Some things go unspoken; some things get tested on the real world, and isn’t that the place that matters most? So when you told me I should bring you flowers, I joked, “But don’t I show my feelings more in dog walks, diapers, and rewiring lamps?” The flowers, I learned later, weren’t for wooing, not for affection in long marriage, but for something seeded even deeper down, through frost heaves, and which might be, roughly, peace. (It’s funny that I just assumed romance.) Now there’s no peace with us. I wonder what they might have meant to you, those simple tokens, holding in sight what no rite can grow back.

I don’t say things I don’t want to say or chew the fat with fat cats just because. With favor-givers who want favors back, I tend to pass on going for the ask. I send, instead, a series of regrets, slip the winding snares that people lay. The unruffledness I feel as a result, the lank repose, the psychic field of rye swayed in wavy air, is my respite among the shivaree of clanging egos on the packed commuter train again tonight. Sapping and demeaning—it takes a lot to get from bed to work and back to bed. I barely go an hour before I’m caught wincing at the way that woman laughs or he keeps clucking at his magazine. And my annoyance fills me with annoyance. It’s laziness that lets them seem unreal —a radio with in-and-out reception blaring like hell when it finally hits a station. The song that’s on is not the one I’d hoped for, so I wait distractedly for what comes next.

Hard to reach, so you yank your clothes getting at it—the button at your neck, the knotted shoe. You snake your fingers in until your nails possess the patch of skin that’s eating you. And now you’re in the throes of ecstasy, eyes lolling in your skull, as if sensing the first time the joy one takes in being purely animal. It’s so good to have a scratch, though isn’t it a drag living like this, jounced on a high wire of impulses, every wish the same programmed response to another signal passed from cell to cell, amounting in the end to a distraction— if truth be told—from rarer things, thoughts free from the anchor-chain of self? For even the least sweetness, we behave like the old man on the low wall I saw outside the hospital today, who had his hand inside his flannel shirt, scratching at his chest, trancelike, agog, his eyelids fluttering like butterflies in a meadow of snowy Queen Anne’s lace. I never saw him stop. Such root satisfaction is like the dying desert legionnaire’s in films, when he finds, against all odds, a water jug and, lifting it, delights to feel it heavy. The score swells, his eyes relume. He tugs the stopper out, then fills his mouth with sand. Though, worse: we’ve seen the film; we know it’s sand; we gulp it anyway.

A friend calls, so I ask him to stop by. We sip old Scotch, the good stuff, order in, some Indian—no frills too fine for him or me, particularly since it's been ages since we made the time. Two drinks in, we've caught up on our plans. I've sleepwalked through the last few years by rote; he's had a nasty rough patch, quote unquote, on the home front. So, we commiserate, cupping our lowballs in our hands. It's great to see him, good to have a friend who feels the same as you about his lot— that, while some grass is greener, your small plot is crudely arable, and though you're not so young, it's still not quite the end. As if remembering then, he spills his news. Though I was pretty lit, I swear it's true, it was as if a gold glow filled the room and shone on him, a sun-shaft piercing through dense clouds, behind which swept long views. In that rich light, he looked not like my friend but some acquaintance brushed by on the train. Had his good fortune kept me from the same, I had to wonder, a zero-sum game that gave the night its early end? Nothing strange. Our drinks were done, that's all. We haven't spoken since. By morning, I couldn't remember half of what the guy had said, just his good news, my slurred goodbye, the click of the latch, the quiet hall.

I From the false summit, coxcomb-cum-arête, cool thermals underscore our frailties, past edges where our wingless feet are set and the long look down dilutes the evergreens. As sandstone ends, the world of ghosts begins— they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love. With one hand firm, I step onto the skin of the abyss, embracing what’s above and severing spent ties to the scree below. The filtered light turns lichen eerie green, ushering in a world we hardly know, at least not one we’re sure we’ve ever seen just so, each climber brand new in his skin, no longer mired in waiting to begin. ii

Zigging, mid- block, he’s off: on a torn-up, trafficked slab of Second Avenue— his cane sweeping over broken asphalt, like a sapper or an open skiff on back-splashing seas. For a few seconds it’s unclear if he gets the risk, as yellow cabs swoop down and flock at the light. Then, safe home on the other side. And I for one cannot take my eyes off him as he pivots, compassing north. We’re never truly clear. Now he jams himself at pace between a giant planter and cross-braced scaffold newly set up at Finnegans. And wham. The guy is smack on his ass, un-staring up to heaven, stunned. Damn, I think, what in hell was that? It’s not like the pain of loving someone who doesn’t want you back (though that once ate up years of my life and left me blown like an artery after too many bypasses), nor does it compare to frittering away in a job that I’m ill-suited to and which I’ll probably lose. It’s more as if a hammer dropped from a sill and laid him out cold. That scaffold just appeared there overnight. And for all my hard-won bile I’m not worse off than he is, except in this: I’ve come to think I am.

Paper creased is with a touch made less by half, reduced as much again by a second fold—so the wish to press our designs can diminish what we hold. But by your hand’s careful work, I understand how this unleaving makes of what’s before something finer and finally more.