61 Heartbreak poems

I know I’ll lose her. One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up. She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring. Nothing from her will reach me after that. I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house mine too if I can make them take her place. I’ll have to. I mustn’t think her room and whether if by nine one morning in a year she will have left it, sleepy, late, remembering tomorrow is New York, her interview with UN General Services a cinch to go well. What I must think instead is Bobby’s follow-through from the left side. He pulls my lob past Geoff, who’s bored. Shagging five soaked balls isn’t Geoff’s idea. I tell him he can hit soon. He takes his time, then underhands the first off line and halfway back. Ground fog, right field, the freeway, LAX. She has both official languages. For the International Court, “The Registrar shall arrange to have interpreted from French to English and from English into French each statement, question and response.” Or maybe it will be Washington she’ll work for. On mission to a new West African republic, she might sign on with Reynolds, Kaiser, Bethlehem Steel. They needed Guinea’s bauxite for aluminum, manganese from Gabon, their dealings for more plants and harbors slowed by lengthy phonecalls through Paris, When there were snags, she’d fly there that same afternoon, her calendar a mix of eighty hours on and whole weeks off. There’d be sidetrips to England by Calais and one aisle over from her on the crossing, by himself, the man I saw this week I fear she’d like. He’d have noticed her before they cleared the dock, she’d been writing something, left wrist bent toward him, the card almost filled, now, with whatever she’d been telling someone else. She’d start another, the address first. Eased that he’d sense it in his shoulders when she stood to leave, he’d keep himself from looking, it was much better not to look, he might not interest her, better not to be left remembering how she looked. Dover. He’d follow her to the train and sit across from her, apply himself convincingly to his four appointments and their dossiers. After she’d make notes to herself from a bed and breakfast guide, from The Guide to the National Trust, she’d put the books back in her hemp bag. He didn’t mean to be nosy, he’d say, but was she going to see some country houses while she’s here? Comfortably, she’d tell him which ones. Though he knew them all, he’d be so taken with her that he’d lose what she was saying, he’d undergo the list and ask if she’d be hiring a car. She’d pick one up tomorrow in Hammersmith and then drive west. Would she have dinner with him tonight? She’d say she’d like that: she was booked at the St. Margaret’s, off Russell Square, could he meet her there at seven? When she’d close her eyes, her head against the cushioned wing of the seat, he’d think her managing to rest was not so much a carelessness to his attentions as that she wasn’t vain. She wouldn’t catch him watching if he angled his look away from her toward the window, in the tunnels especially he’d see reflected in its glass her gradual full outline as she breathed. There would be time all evening to talk. He’d tell her then about his uncle’s place in Surrey where they’d both be welcome, its rubble-stone and leaded casements, tile, an east loggia to the lawns and wooded slope. He’d loved the kitchen garden as a boy, the path there, silver lavender and catmint borders, an oak-doored archway framing for him on chains above a well the twin coronas of roses in the cool damp light. [...] Our house is a winter rental. Each June, we store everything we don’t take with us in the camper to Idaho and Montana. It’s two full days’ drive with desert much of the way, then farms. Only in the last half hour, past Ashton, up the hill, are there logging roads and lodgepole, spruce and fir. It agrees with us to be outdoors all summer. I’m shameless about how much I want to fish the broad wadeable meadow streams. The new mayflies can’t lift themselves from the surface film until their wings dry. When I watch them drift down over the slack water, disturbances are rocks sometimes and sometimes fish. Linda does needlepoint and crossword puzzles. She keeps checklists of the flowers she finds on her long woodland walks. We do our wash in town and play cards in the hotel lobby. We have time to read. By August, there are berries. A six-pack of Grain Belt beer is ninety-nine cents. Friends have a ranch with acres that stretch back through bottomland to their mountain pasture. The old Hodges’ place is vacant. They ask us to stay. In the upstairs bedroom under the cottonwood, it’s almost dark when it clouds up late in the afternoon. We find cancelled checks in the homestead down by the creek. Lots are for sale. In our fifth summer there, we buy one. A contractor frames a house for us which I have six weeks to enclose. I want to be, but I’m not good at it, it doesn’t please me at all when my rip-cut splinters the cedar batten, I miss the stud completely with a second nail and I throw things and scream. She can’t stand it when I’m like this. But though she has to leave sometimes and not come back for hours, the work gets done. We drain the pipes, hang shutters, close the place up. [...] After five years of saying it, it became a joke with us that we’d have a baby in five years. We’re waiting for the EPT. Sitting as far away from it as she can and still be home, she wants me to be the one to read it. I’m surprised how glad I am. Her not being glad lasts half an hour. She’ll work for the library until she’s due in June. The baby does its tours inside her. When we put the big headphones on her tummy, it seems to hear. Her doctor tells her to cut down on salt, her blood pressure’s high. We buy a stethoscope and cuff. She tells Linda to quit her job and go to bed. The salt-free cottage cheese is cardboard, but it’s not working, nothing is, I can wait until she’s been resting for an hour before I take it, it doesn’t help. Since her diastolic number’s always high, it’s of course high when she sees the doctor: she’ll be in the hospital tomorrow morning if we don’t change doctors tonight. La Leche League has two it recommends. The one who calls back asks everything. If she were his wife, he says, he’d want her in the hospital. We’re too frightened to sleep. I hold her. I fall off only when it’s almost light and by then the birds have started. It makes her cry to hear them. When she’s admitted to the ward, they hook an IV up to her that hurts her hand. On the vacant bed next to her, there’s a tray with a syringe and drugs: if she goes into labor she might have convulsions. They tell us on Monday that the baby wouldn’t be able to breathe yet on its own, on Wednesday that it could suffocate inside her, her placenta’s shutting down. They’ll do another amniocentesis in the morning, they’ll take the baby in the afternoon. She and I are such cases by now that I think they’ll lie, they’ll want to quiet us for the birth by telling us the baby’s lungs are ready, that stranger things have happened in three days. A nurse comes in and says the baby’s lungs are ready, let’s go to prep. Since Linda can’t have it naturally, it matters all the more to her that she at least be awake. She’ll get to be. Both doctors promised me this morning that she’ll have a local, it’s up to them. I get scrubbed. Everyone’s in greens. Down a corridor, away from me so I won’t hear, the anesthesiologist is talking to her doctors, who are very intent. The scene breaks up. Her doctors don’t have to tell me, I know already, I want to hit them, I say I’d promised her because they’d promised, I’d told her she could be awake, that I could be there with her. Stop it, you can’t let her see you like this, her pediatrician says. She’s partly sedated. I tell her I’ll be waiting right down the hall. From another room than hers, a baby, a first cry. I have to hear it or not listen too for our baby, Linda’s asleep, she can’t. If it’s from her room now that I’m hearing something fainter, someone should tell me soon. I believe the nurse who says “I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s really good.” “How is Linda?” “They’re sewing her up now, she’ll be fine.” There’s no reason not to believe her, Linda’s not going to die, she’s not going to die or have to hate it that she didn’t, her baby’s all right, we haven’t killed it by not changing doctors. It won’t have to be breathed for by a machine. Almost a month early, he’s a wonder to the staff at five pounds ten, he’s Linda’s doing, she should be proud of him, she’ll nurse him and she’ll heal. I can buy her now the blue- and white-checked gingham mother and baby rabbit. I can buy her a robe. He comes home with her after the weekend. The two of them feel so hallowed to me that I’m slow to tell it hasn’t worked out for her at all. She writes an essay about it. His having been taken from her early means she failed. Bodies are bodies. They know things, they have their own ways. She could have done it if she’d gotten the chance. Her doctor didn’t want Linda caring how things went. That had to be her job, not Linda’s. She’d gone on to say it almost proudly of Linda at the last: “This little girl would be fine if she didn’t have a brain.” It’s a long essay. I recognize everything but me. Not her antagonist, exactly, I’d been another thing she’d had to worry. Whenever I’d taken her blood pressure, she’d felt blamed by me if it was high. Each crisis had been hers to deal with by herself. Too busy or aloof to find her a better doctor, I’d taught my classes, read, worked on my poem. [...] She’s at the mirror. I need to get behind it to the aspirin, do so, close it. “Goodness you wake up with a lot of headaches.” “Sorry.” “Don’t be sorry, I’m sorry for you.” Surprised that it turned out like that, and hating her, hating what I’d heard in my own voice, I get out of her way. From the privacy of brooding on it in another room, I hear what she meant: “Congratulations. As good as you are at headaches, why settle for so little, why not work up a malignancy of some kind?” And I remember that yesterday, when we were getting in the car, she winced. She’s always twisting her neck or back or something, so I didn’t ask her “Did you hurt yourself?” but “Did you hurt yourself again?” [...] I move the rest of my clothes out of the house. Our fights about money pass. In having to leave her, I also have to think again the most forgettable of our outings. Over the years, we’d taken our bodies along in company to certain places. In front of me a little to the left, she’d answered “Yes” to “Two for dinner?” I wasn’t thinking, at the time, how I fit into what she cared about: she fit for me. It comes back to me now because I have to change it, I’d gotten it wrong. Normal, expected, there’s a brittle politeness between us when I stop by to pick up Owen. Below the hem of her flannel housedress, her bare feet.

When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can sooth her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom—is to die.

You might as well take a razor to your pecker as let a woman in your heart. First they do the wash and then they kill you. They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke. They bring it to you folded—if you see her stepping between the coin laundry and your building over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam, you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you. It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter, the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me when I was changing him—that one got a laugh from the characters I wasted all my chances with at Popeye’s establishment when it was over by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed now and I understand one of those shopping malls that are like great monuments of blindness and folly stands there. And next door, the grimy restaurants of men with movies where they used to wear human faces, the sad people from space. But that was never me, because everything in those days depended on my work. “Listen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say, and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform of Texaco and wade into my life. I felt like a man of honor and substance, but the situation was dancing underneath me— once I walked into the living room at my sister’s and saw that the two of them, her and my sister, had turned sometime behind my back not exactly fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons moving across the television in front of them, surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas standing up next to the iron on the board. I stepped out into the yard of bricks and trash and watched the light light up the blood inside each leaf, and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm on this mother? Where do you turn it on? I think you understand how I felt. I’m not saying everything changed in the space of one second of seeing two women, but I did start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted she be sexy. I just wanted to live. And I did: some nights were so sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers— but the strategies of others broke my promise. At closing time once, she kept talking to a man when I was trying to catch her attention to leave. It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines and black masses and black hydrants filled with black water. When the lights came on you could see all kinds of intentions in the air. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass, but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are, motherfucker, nigger, here they are.” There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on. At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me from the end of the world where I saw her standing, and the way the sacred light played across her face all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end my life pours into one ocean: into this prison with its empty ballfield and its empty preparations for Never Happen. If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her, I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing. I’m just an alien from another planet. I am not happy. Disappointment lights its stupid fire in my heart, but two days a week I staff the Max Security laundry above the world on the seventh level, looking at two long roads out there that go to a couple of towns. Young girls accelerating through the intersection make me want to live forever, they make me think of the grand things, of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies. Sometimes I stand against the window for hours tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body. Jesus Christ, your doors close and open, you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters, I could say a million things about you and never get that silence out of time that happens when the blank muscle hangs between its beats—that is what I mean by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth, where nothing bad has happened. I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told when you will come to save us. I have written several poems and several hymns, and one has been performed on the religious ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.

It is not that I love you less Than when before your feet I lay, But to prevent the sad increase Of hopeless love, I keep away. In vain (alas!) for everything Which I have known belong to you, Your form does to my fancy bring, And makes my old wounds bleed anew. Who in the spring from the new sun Already has a fever got, Too late begins those shafts to shun, Which Phœbus through his veins has shot. Too late he would the pain assuage, And to thick shadows does retire; About with him he bears the rage, And in his tainted blood the fire. But vow’d I have, and never must Your banish’d servant trouble you; For if I break, you may distrust The vow I made to love you, too.

Others, I am not the first, Have willed more mischief than they durst: If in the breathless night I too Shiver now, 'tis nothing new. More than I, if truth were told, Have stood and sweated hot and cold, And through their reins in ice and fire Fear contended with desire. Agued once like me were they, But I like them shall win my way Lastly to the bed of mould Where there's neither heat nor cold. But from my grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night.

Then came the darker sooner, came the later lower. We were no longer a sweeter-here happily-ever-after. We were after ever. We were farther and further. More was the word we used for harder. Lost was our standard-bearer. Our gods were fallen faster, and fallen larger. The day was duller, duller was disaster. Our charge was error. Instead of leader we had louder, instead of lover, never. And over this river broke the winter’s black weather.

It wasn’t a man That knocked me down With the thrill of a slice Of my will. She was mannish, Chilled, flung Her will across Mine then laughed At my shock, when she Gripped my neck while Lingering over a request For the evening meal. Later I sliced a tomato Close to my wrist. The door was open. She had warned me: Never shut it against Her. Otherwise I was free to come And go. Maybe she was Right: I was zero To the bone. Meanwhile, I had left the hose In the pond. The goldfish Cowered in the reeds. Whose side were they on? I am ill, I thought, Slogging across Soggy green. If I bow any lower I will be looking up At moss.

Turning your back, you button your blouse. That’s new. You redirect the conversation. A man has entered it. Your therapist has given you permission to discuss this with me, the word you’ve been looking for in desire. You can now say “heterosexual” with me. We mean different things when we say it. I mean the life I left behind forever. For you, it’s a new beginning, a stab at being normal again, a desire to enter the world with a man instead of a woman, and of course, there’s the word you won’t claim for yourself anymore, you who have children to think of, you who have put me in line behind them and mean to keep the order clear. It’s really my word against yours anymore in this new language, in this battle over how a man is about to enter this closed room of desire we’ve gingerly exchanged keys to, but desire isn’t what’s at issue anyway, you say to me. Instead I learn a man can protect you in a way a woman only means to but never can, and my world is too new when there’s real life out there, word after word for how normal looks, each word cutting like scissors a profile of desire— a man facing a woman, nothing particularly new or interesting to me. I’ve wanted only to face you and the world simultaneously, say what I mean with my body, my choice to not be a man, to be a woman with you, forget the man’s part or how his body is the word for what touch can contain, what love means. If this were only about desire, you say, I’d still desire you. But it isn’t passion we’re defining, new consequences emerge when a man and desire are part of the words we hurl, you changing how you mean loving—this terrible final news.

The anthology of love poems I bought for a quarter is brittle, anyway, and comes apart when I read it. One at a time, I throw pages on the fire and watch smoke make its way up and out. I’m almost to the index when I hear a murmuring in the street. My neighbors are watching it snow. I put on my blue jacket and join them. The children stand with their mouths open. I can see nouns — longing, rapture, bliss —

You smiled, you spoke, and I believed, By every word and smile deceived. Another man would hope no more; Nor hope I what I hoped before: But let not this last wish be vain; Deceive, deceive me once again!