Stephen Sandy

No one knew what the stones like squatting frogs signified. There they were, fuming in rows, out of the ground; every critic had his explanation or hers. But—we had to remember—they came to nothing, every one; those large stones out of the earth served the systems of those who considered them, as explaining something about the past it was important for the explainer to explain. And yet no one had any idea truly; there was no basis in fact for any view of them, and they remained like their origins—or like smiling Olmec babies, sweet but ominous figures come from the earth to reproach us, almost cheerfully, for our ignorance—a mystery, just as the probe of our feelings came up with nothing.

After the declaration by emperor to stop the war many people in Tokyo killed themselves, for instance, in front of the imperial palace. But few people knows those facts. Hence you must teach me where you got the news or what sort of book gave you the fact that quite few people knows. To know the fact of our nation’s subjection is not so comfortable but the fact of many people’s spontaneous death gives me more complicated feelings. In the matter of what William Gass said I must describe my feelings. I went to Nagasaki on an educational trip four years ago. I can recollect those serious moment which was given by the beamed materials in the memorial hall. But most youth after the war are indifferent to those nightmares because of our no experience. Surely, I think, those barbarious conducts shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten at all and we must not close our eyes to the rebombing at any place in this world. In conclusion I may say that most people except sufferers or the like will not have ill feelings toward your country but they will reproach the suffocative fact in history. Where were you when the World War II was over. Please share your experience of the war with me. I’m now interested in the wars concerned with Japan for the past 100 years. If you tell me your reflections I can suspect more seriously. You have abandoned such cursed things as useless? In that war 3 million people were killed on the side of our nation, especially three hundred thousand people by the A-bomb. Over the war between the imperialism and militarism America won a victory. What does this word mean?

Sewn straw, exact pattern. Fields of rice-sprigs evenly set, a mile of herringbone tweed. The town, a sea of gunmetal, fish-scale tiles. By morning each floor a casserole of pillows, coverlets, comforters, towels:    flown nests. Imprint of bodies, fading. They fold the beds away, the room waits empty all day. All day the bodies circle, leaving no impression on each other. Tooled in the foundry of the streets. School-caps, factory-packed subway, miracle train: one territorial imperative, an emperor’s. On his platform one yard square perched on a roof that slopes in waves of tiles up toward other tiled cascades, the karate student for  hours does running in place, deep knee bends on his surfboard perch. All his free time to make his body efficient, tight, exact, rising and falling, mint piston pumping in its shaft.

I passed him by at first. From the photograph Peered sepia eyes, blindered, unappeased From a lair of brows and beard: one not amazed At anything, as if to have looked enough Then turned aside worked best for him—as if Night vision was the discipline that eased The weight of what he saw. A man’s gaze posed Too long in the sun goes blank; comes to grief. That face could be a focus for this back room, For pack-rat papers strewn as if in rage, Fond notes unread: each wary eye a phial Unstopped to let huge Melville out, to calm The sea of pages; Melville in older age: The grown man’s sleepy defiance of denial.

Back of the church the busy forsythias bow and scrape to May and all these blessed stones stiff in their careful finery of words; the mess of markers makes me go and browse. Somehow the blocks of slate and marble hate to be cut and carved to the dimensions of Mary Monday’s age and her virtues. At heart they hurt to be made literate and they are rebelling, fast as they can, shedding an edge, a letter, as they go —a year, a part of a skull, a bone— it hurts them to stand so long for this kind of death not theirs. Fast as they can they are leaning away from their duty and look down longing for the warm sod. The prides and fears they stand witness to, the ladies and gents, are only whimsy now. They cease to reflect that wary pride the flesh beneath them took in lying down. To the last date line and death’s-head-stare, the legend reads, “There! I’ve done it!” But these are only beginning, the blocks of shale forget their lines letting the sunlight and rain divide and subdivide their veins and bone. They do not care, they only feel an unnatural heaviness, tottering so in the hot light. They long to be off and away, they toss and jibe in the sun; a whole regatta of black sails, they are sailing away over the lumpy green yard of time, and never coming about for home until they capsize turned turtle by boys from Central Square. Tired of holding—they are tired of holding up; their always-leaning makes me hold my tongue and sit with them awhile. We heave our shoulders, or our shadows, on the mounds, while under the hills, memorials more fine lie lip to paper lip and keep their impossible word.

A longish poem about wallpaper. A short lyric about discouragement in white. A medium-length thesis of uncertain importance. Another sonnet, about scholarship. A couplet of olives. A long narrative about the exaggeration of your absence. Several quatrains about candle stubs. That old sestina on Isaiah. Palindromes about Scots presbyters of the 18th century. Some rock lyrics from Benares. A nature poem about committees. Seven heroic couplets about Art Murphy. Several more heroic couplets on Murphy’s Law. A ballad about studying Latin in Latium. A masque for Mercedes and her Benz.

Tell me the way to the wedding Tell me the way to the war, Tell me the needle you’re threading I won’t raise my voice anymore. And tell me what axe you are grinding Where the boy on the bivouac believes, What reel you are unwinding For the girl in her bed who grieves. While behind a derrick’s girder He watches the sinking sun, He asks what he’ll do for murder And what he will do for fun. Will you read him the ways of war His Miranda rights in sin, Will you tell him what to ignore When he studies your discipline? He dozes off—but he shakes In a dream that he is the one Death finds abed and wakes Just as the night is done. Tell me what boats go ashore Riding the oil-dimmed tide, Red streamers and black in store For the boy with a pain in his side. And tell me where they are heading Tonight; now tell me the score. Tell me the way to their wedding I won’t raise my own voice anymore.

The great house birch with its girth he never quite could get his arms around, long felled, at last only its bark like a larva’s husk in grass leaning neck-high, hollow below mansards. He does not live in the peeling mansion, but a more-than-ample keeper’s cottage beyond rolled lawns and relics of Victorian elms where he muses in his study alcove. Touches the ancient coins, silver or bronze, their gleam on the baize-topped writing table — proud Athena helmeted; her owl agog beneath. Eternity glimpsed in the boy ruler Gordian’s profile, copper green. Trees on guard in browed dignity now the seething barrack of bees. Nearby a maple twisted by wind for decades spirals, a stair winding above the cone of shade. In his covert the son, reading Herodotus, Suetonius — staggering run of drachmas, staters, tetradrachms, glinting in rows.

I remember the dusty floorboards of wood in the streetcar Of the Minneapolis Street Railway Company And the varnished yellow banquettes of tight-knit rattan Worn smooth by decades of passengers The worn gleaming brass grips at the corners of the seats And the motorman’s little bell Windows trembling in their casings as we crossed the avenue Liberty dimes falling softly into the steel-rimmed hour glass The gnarled hand of the motorman near. My grandmother arranged herself against the seat Her back as straight as a soldier’s beside me Her navy hat with velvet band And net veil down making her head seem distant, Her dreaming smile and the patient Roman nose, A repose so deep; from my place I watched her when we rode like princes Rattling past traffic stopped on the granite cobbles Riding downtown together, my hands in hers; All that so much That I love yet but feel no sadness for, that Time crossed out like the trolley tracks taken up Or entombed under the pliant blacktop of the modernized.

Minnesota, May 1945 DMZ, September 1967 1 In Tokyo our gallant boys dance rock-and-roll, squint eyes wary at standing easy. They leer and reel on a springboard tip and then jackknife toward the electronic noise . . . And Charley, when Time Inc. said he said the President had his head wedged about Vietnam burning for honor or—who knows? the Action he had said— married the Marines. He showered for vows on those who took his word who taught him shoot it out and shout “Yes Sir Yes Sir!” and sent him out like napalm obedient to any itchy finger. I hope the fields of Minnesota gave perspective when he moved out as to the starting line on the command,survive,survive. . . . our juiced doughboys feel their girls. 2 What did I tell you when we met last and it “after the leeches and the food” on a break in the rain was already up with you, Charley? Mouthing the big cigar like a gangster at the wheel . . . cigarette between thumb and finger the way we all even in junior high learned not to your men watching in wonder him tasting the strange (turned officer so young) foreign taste that smoke:     and all was dark except what sparks he scattered there, stubbing it out What could we do for you you hugging your knees who taught you to raise your voice? 3 No more the wide Mankato pearled with ice under blue January sky your arm around the shoulder of the friend who ran faster no more the long hours pad in hand composing reasons for your belief a belief in fathers has no reason no more the simple passion of going first your hatless straightness, the struggle, the deep worry, the dark Africa of being alive in a country run by chiefs without tribes no more of all that, only your brief beauty in many hearts in a time when fathers bury their sons, and you surrounded, cut down in a war you were fated never to see, blinded by love for all men.