Geoffrey Brock

Often the slightest gesture is most telling, As when he reaches tenderly in passing To pluck the yellow leaf from the dark fall Of her hair, or even the absence of all gesture: The way she doesn’t need to turn to know Who, in this gathering of friends, has touched her. It was as if he dreamed some private garden. Perhaps he woke from it, mid-reach, to find His hand too near her hair in this crowded yard, And maybe even now she’s shuttering in (She’s even better than you or I at that) A storm of worry and recrimination— Did anyone notice? how could he do that here!— By seamlessly continuing to tell you About her trip to see her favorite Vermeer This morning in the Delft show at the Met: “So now they say she isn’t weighing pearls Or gold or anything—it’s just the light Gleaming off empty scales.” So much is hard To know for sure. If I confronted her, She’d say it was just a leaf—who could afford To disagree? Could we? Now she’s explaining How the girl faces a mirror we can’t see into And how behind her hangs a gloomy painting Of the Last Judgment: “Over her head God Floats in a cloud,” she says, “like a thought balloon.” But you don’t hear. You’re watching me. I nod.

For Allison Hogge, in memory of Brian Wilkie I was a math major—fond of all things rational. It was the first day of my first poetry class. The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass, told us that we could “make great poetry personal,” could own it, since poetry we memorize sings inside us always. By way of illustration he began reciting Shelley with real passion, but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”— because, with that last plosive, his top denture popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair. He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture, a promise so splendid it made me give up math: “More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.”

The screamer sleeps, inside. The desert's wide awake: the mouse, the rattlesnake. I've come out here to hide, behind our house, below the riddled sky, afraid of what our bodies made. To the south: Mexico... These are the nights men run. Guaymas before midday, a beach-town life...I play it out. Such things are done. The Rincons seep like a stain into the paling east. The borders are policed. The wail, nearby, of a train.

We knew the rules and punishments: three lashes for lack of diligence, eight for disobeying mother or telling lies....No blood, he’d say, and no remission. Came a day he started keeping my account, as at a store. And came another he called me to the tannery: a Sunday, day of settlement. I’d paid one-third the owed amount when he, to my astonishment, handed the blue-beech switch to me. Always, the greatest of my fears were not his whippings, but his tears, and he was tearful now. I dared not disobey, nor strike him hard. “I will consider a weak blow no blow at all, rather a show of cowardice,” he said.No blood and no remission

It hangs on its stem like a plum at the edge of a darkening thicket. It’s swelling and blushing and ripe and I reach out a hand to pick it but flesh moves slow through time and evening comes on fast and just when I think my fingers might seize that sweetness at last the gentlest of breezes rises and the plum lets go of   the stem. And now it’s my fingers ripening and evening that’s reaching for them.

If one takes a walk on a clear sunny day in middle April, when the first willows are in bloom, one may often see young bumblebee queens eagerly sipping nectar from the catkins

Let’s get this straight: Charles Graner is not America. America would never hold a knife to his wife’s throat, then say when she woke that he was considering killing her. And America’s wife in turn would never call her husband “my own Hannibal Lecter.” Am I right, or what? Charles Graner may be Hannibal Lecter, but he is not America. America is not that kind of husband. Nor would America email his adolescent children photos of himself torturing naked Iraqi prisoners and say “look what Daddy gets to do!” Am I right? America is not that kind of father. America would never torture naked Iraqi prisoners. Let’s be absolutely clear about all of this. And America’s ex-lover and co-defendant would never whisper to the sketch artist at America’s trial: “You forgot the horns.” Charles Graner may or may not have horns, but America is horn-free. America does not torture prisoners. America may render them, fully clothed, to Egypt or Syria, for further interrogation, or to men like Charles Graner, but America is not, ipso facto, Egypt or Syria, and Charles Graner is not now nor has he ever been America. And don’t talk to me about Guantanamo. Please! Let’s get this straight. You and I know who America is. We know what America does and doesn’t do, because we (not Charles Graner!) are America. Am I right? Is this all clear? Tell me—am I right, or what?

Floodlights have flared on behind and above Where I sit in my public chair. The lawn that had gradually darkened has brightened. The library windows stare. I’m alone in a crowd—e pluribus plures. Far from a family I miss. I’d almost say I’m lonely, but lonely Is worse, I recall, than this. Loneliness is a genuine poverty. I’m like a man who is flush But forgot his wallet on the nightstand When he left for work in a rush, And now must go without food and coffee For a few hours more than he’d wish. That’s all. He still has a wallet. It’s bulging. It floats through his brain like a fish... Money for love: a terrible simile, But maybe it’s fitting here, A couple of blocks from Madison Avenue Where commodities are dear, Where all around me, rich skyscrapers Woo the impoverished sky, Having sent on their way the spent commuters Who stream, uncertain, by— And as for this whole splurge of a city, Isn’t money at its heart? But I’m blathering now. Forgetting my subject. What I meant to say at the start Is that I noticed a woman reading In a chair not far from mine. Silver-haired, calm, she stirred a hunger Hard for me to define, Perhaps because she doesn’t seem lonely. And what I loved was this: The way, when dusk had darkened her pages, As if expecting a kiss, She closed her eyes and threw her head back, Book open on her lap. Perhaps she was thinking about her story, Or the fall air, or a nap. I thought she’d leave me then for pastimes More suited to the dark. But she is on intimate terms, it seems, With the rhythms of Bryant Park, For that’s when the floodlights came on, slowly, Somewhere far above my need, And the grass grew green again, and the woman Reopened her eyes to read.

By the time I recalled that it is also terrifying, we had gone too far into the charmed woods to return. It was then the beautiful animal appeared in our path: ribs jutting, moon-fed eyes moving from me to you and back. If we show none of the fear, it may tire of waiting for the triggering flight, it may ask only to lie between us and sleep, fur warm on our skin, breath sweet on our necks as it dreams of slaughter, as we dream alternately of feeding and taming it and of being the first to run. The woods close tight around us, lying nested here like spoons in a drawer of knives, to see who wakes first, and from which dream.

It was so simple: you came back to me And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter But that. That you had gone away from me And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter. That I had been left to care for our old dog And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less! On all this, you and I and our happy dog Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless. I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work And started in:Item: it’s years, not days. Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back, In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you Left her, remember?