J. D. McClatchy

I. AT TEN 1955. A scratchy waltz Buzzed over the ice rink’s P.A. My classmate Tony, the barber’s son: “Alls He wantsa do is, you know, like, play.” Bored with perfecting my languid figure eights, I trailed him to a basement door marked GENTS With its metal silhouette of high-laced skates (Symbols, I guess, of methods desire invents). Tony’s older brother was waiting inside. I’d been “requested,” it seemed. He was sixteen, Tall, rawboned, blue-eyed, Thumbs hooked into faded, tightening jeans. I fumbled with small talk, pretending to be shy. Looking past me, he slowly unzipped his fly. II. CALLAS Her voice: steeped in a rancid syrupy phlegm: Whatever’s not believed remains a grace While again she invokes the power that yields: Splintered timber and quick consuming flame: The simplest way to take hold of the heart’s Complications, its pool of spilt religion: A long black hair sweat-stuck to the skin: The bitter sleep of the dying: the Jew in Berlin: Who sent you here? the sharp blade pleads: Stormcloud: thornhedge: starchill: Blood bubble floating to the top of the glass: The light, from fleshrise to soulset: The world dragging the slow weight of its shame Like the train of pomp: guttering candle: her voice. III. IN CLASS Parasangs, satraps, the daily drill . . . Beginner’s Greek its own touchstone. The sophomore teacher was Father Moan, Whom I longed to have praise my skill. The illustrated reader’s best Accounts of murder and sacrifice Only suggested the heavy price I longed to pay at his behest. He’d slap the pointer against his thigh. I quivered. What coldness may construe Of devotion was an experience As hard to learn as catch his eye. I kept my hand up.Here! I knew The right answer. The case. The tense.

Decades now of looking back at it— in some old satellite’s rearview mirror, say— has something to show beyond the folds and feeders, the volumes of magma risen into native rock or the buried flow of old fires cooling in ocean beds. The damage has been memorized. Tool marks left by loose doubts dragged across a certainty. Tongues of river sediment slumped but still flickering in the eye. And how pale the surfaces are! From miles above what even to others is familiar, the erosion—tears that freeze and crack the heart, small habits a wind blasts against whatever’s exposed—seems apparent: all’s worn down, weathered, notched, seeping, yet eerily polished, as if at last defined. Your map of me? Let your pencil trace the old quarries and splintered outcrops, let it analyze the faults, describe their throes, let it reveal how the light is laid over them all.

HORACE IV. i It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now, Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears, The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis, The sour taste of each day’s first lie, And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling A swaying bead-chain of moonlight, Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark Along a body like my own, but blameless. What good’s my cut-glass conversation now, Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad? You get from life what you can shake from it? For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN. Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level At eighty grand, who pouts about overtime, Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym, And hash in tinfoil under the office fern. There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples. His answering machine always has room for one more Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who. Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now? I long ago gave up pretending to believe Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets. So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream Almost every night of holding you again, Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone, Through the bruised unbalanced waves?

Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday’s attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when, among the fixed stars in paradise, he sees Adam suddenly, the first man, there in a flame that hides his body, and when it moves to speak, what is inside seems not free, not happy, but huge and weak, like an animal in a sack. Who had captured him? What did he want to say? I lay down beside you again, not knowing if I’d stay, not knowing where I’d been.

In the men’s room at the office today some wag has labelled the two stalls the Erotic and the Political. The second seems suitable for the results of my business, not for what thinking ordinarily accompanies it. So I’ve locked myself into the first because, though farther from the lightbulb overhead, it remains the more conventional and thereby illuminating choice. The wit on its walls is more desperate. As if I had written them there myself, but only because by now I have seen them day after day, I know each boast, each plea, the runty widower’s resentments, the phone number for good head. Today’s fresh drawing: a woman’s torso, neck to outflung knees, with breasts like targets and at her crotch red felt-tip “hair” to guard a treasure half wound, half wisecrack. The first critic of the flesh is always the self-possessed sensualist. With all that wall as his margin, he had sniffed in smug ballpoint OBVIOUSLY DONE BY SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER SEEN THE REAL THING. Under that, in a later hand, the local pinstripe aesthete had dismissed the daydreamer’s crudity and its critic’s edgy literalism. His block letters had squared, not sloping shoulders: NO, BY SOMEONE WHO JUST CAN’T DRAW. Were the two opinions converging on the same moral point? That a good drawing is the real thing? Or that the real thing can be truly seen only through another’s eyes? But now that I trace it through other jokes and members, the bottom line leads to a higher inch of free space on the partition— a perch above the loose remarks, like the pimp’s doorway or the Zen master’s cliff-face ledge. THERE ARE NO REAL THINGS writes the philosopher. But he too has been misled by everything the mind makes of a body. When the torso is fleshed out and turns over in the artist’s bed, when the sensualist sobs over her, when the critic buttons his pants, when the philosopher’s scorn sinks back from a gratified ecstasy, then it will be clear to each in his own way. There is nothing we cannot possibly not know.