872 Life poems

It is my emotions that early me through Lambertville, New Jersey, sheer feeling—and an obscure detour—that brings me to a coffee shop called “This Is It” and a small New Jersey clapboard with a charming fake sign announcing it to be the first condemned building in the United States and an old obese collie sitting on the cement steps of the front porch begging forgiveness with his red eyes. I talk to the coughing lady for five minutes, admire her sign, her antique flag, her dog, and share her grief over the loss of the house next door, boarded up forever, tied up in estates, surrounded by grass, doomed to an early fire. Everyone is into my myth! The whole countryside is studying weeds, collecting sadness, dreaming of odd connections and no place more than Lambertville will do for ghosts to go through your body or people to live out their lives with a blurred vision. The old woman is still talking. She tells me about her youth, she tells me about her mother’s ganglia and how the doctor slammed a heavy Bible down on her watery wrist, scattering spoons and bread crumbs and turning over little tin containers of alyssum and snapdragon. She tells me about the curved green glass that is gone forever. She tells me about her dog and its monotonous existence. Ah, but for sadness there are very few towns like Lambertville. It drips with grief, it almost sags from the weight. I know Frackville, Pa., and Sandusky, Ohio, and I know coal chutes, empty stores and rusty rivers but Lambertville is special, it is a wooden stage set, a dream-ridden carcass where people live out serious lives with other people’s secrets, trying to touch with their hands and eat with their cold forks, and open houses with their keys; and sometimes, on a damp Sunday, they leave the papers on the front porch to walk down York Street or Buttonwood Street past abandoned factories and wooden garages, past the cannon with balls and the new band shell, past the downtown churches and the antique shops, and even across the metal plates on the Delaware River to stinking New Hope, where all their deep longing is reduced to an hour and a half of greedy buying. I crawl across the street to have my coffee at the low counter, to listen to the noise of the saws drifting through the open window and to study the strange spirit of this tar paper café stuck on a residential street three or four blocks from Main and Bridge where except for the sudden windfall of the looping detour it would be relegated forever to the quiet company of three or four close friends and the unexpected attention of a bored crossing guard or exhausted meter man or truck driver. I listen to the plans of the three teen-age businessmen about to make their fortune in this rotting shack and walk—periodically—past the stainless steel sink to take my piss in the misplaced men’s room. I watch the bright happy girls organize their futures over and around the silent muscular boys and I wait, like a peaceful man, hours on end, for the truck out back to start, for the collie to die, for the flies to come, for the summer to bring its reckoning.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

1 Outside the room where you have lived a long time Are other rooms, another building, just like yours. Each night a ship sails past, wider than the building, taller than the highest church. And though the passengers would like to visit the city, No one in the city ever boards the ship. Would you? Each night this spectacle is seen by you. The street surveyed, The air inhaled. Grapes from the west, Cinnamon from the east — If I’ve employed too liberally the passive voice, Remember it’s the thoughts, The feelings that are of consequence here, Not the one who feels them. 2 Shall we walk to the market? You could walk there blind, like Gloucester, smelling your way. Shall we stop for coffee? Which café? The one that’s commandeered by women, delicate cups? Or the one where men preside, baristas in tuxedos, the coffee rich enough for rainy days? A window, the desk, a lamp, and a chair — You’ve liked the room, you like to rearrange it for winter, Put things back for spring. But you’ve been young for a long time, An embarrassingly long time. Look what you wrote! Remember how much, despite Your ridiculous behavior, you’ve been loved. 3 The city never changes, it’s never the same. Sometimes the inhabitants restore a building, patch it up, But in a generation they’re dissatisfied, they try again, Expose the old parts so you see them Plainly, ruined or not. Who schooled you? What made you scared of change? Vividly you remember a child’s body; likewise you remember a man’s. You woke up one morning, There you were, a stinking adult. What happened between? What will it be like, You’ve seen the images, to watch your body spoiling From the inside out, your lungs, your arms, The muscles in your face — Look out the window, Choose a single brick. Once, a long time ago, the city was old. 4 Clouds desire the sky, the sky the sun. The wave Desires the land on which it trembles, Repeating the same question, day after day — Am I allowed to ask for what I want? And every day the land responds, Of course you’re allowed. You’re allowed to be angry, to rail, You’re allowed to curse the God who put you here. I’ve buried many people, old people, young people. I’ve buried children while their parents wept beside the grave. But I’ve also seen miracles. Remember when they told you You might die? You didn’t, you’re alive. And every month since then, each minute, every second is a miracle. What happens next you cannot know. Is it better or worse to live longer? Really the words better and worse do not obtain.

Tho’ lack of laurels and of wreaths not one Prove you our lives abortive, shall we yet Vaunt us our single aim, our hearts full set To win the guerdon which is never won. Witness, a purpose never is undone. And tho’ fate drain our seas of violet To gather round our lives her wide-hung net, Memories of hopes that are not shall atone. Not wholly starless is the ill-starred life, Not all is night in failure, and the shield Sometimes well grasped, tho’ shattered in the strife. And here while all the lowering heaven is ringed With our loud death-shouts echoed, on the field Stands forth our Nikè, proud, tho’ broken-winged.

That slow person you left behind when, finally, you mastered the world, and scaled the heights you now command, where is he while you walk around the shaved lawn in your plus fours, organizing with an electric clipboard your big push to tomorrow? Oh, I’ve come across him, yes I have, more than once, coaxing his battered grocery cart down the freeway meridian. Others see in you sundry mythic types distinguished not just in themselves but by the stories we put them in, with beginnings, ends, surprises: the baby Oedipus on the hillside with his broken feet or the dog whose barking saves the grandmother flailing in the millpond beyond the weir, dragged down by her woolen skirt. He doesn’t see you as a story, though. He feels you as his atmosphere. When your sun shines, he chortles. When your barometric pressure drops and the thunderheads gather, he huddles under the overpass and writes me long letters with the stubby little pencils he steals from the public library. He asks me to look out for you.

REVERSALS There are graves under the houses and houses under the graves and linking the three a broad stone staircase where the dead go up and the living go down. They pass one another wordlessly which might mean they don’t know, or else they’re pretending not to know. You can smell the orange grove on the hill; you can hear children bowling barrel hoops down the street. Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring. Their secrets cloud the water. Later they walk back through an avenue of   cypresses, carrying the jug like a bastard child. TRAPPED In the house across the street, in a room directly opposite his, was a long mirror. When he looked out of   his window, he would see himself   in the room like a thief caught in a trap. He threw a stone. His neighbor ran in to the sound of   breaking glass, then came to the window and shouted across: “Thank God for that: whenever I looked in my mirror there you were, doing something shifty behind my back.” The first man turned away. The long mirror in his room brought him face to face with his neighbor, knife in hand. THE ACCUSED Just as he locked the door, as he pocketed the key, as he glanced over his shoulder, they arrested him. They tortured him until they tired of   it. “Look,” they said, “the key is your key, the house is your house, we accept that now; but why did you put the key in your pocket as if to hide it from us?” They let him go, but his name is still on a list.

Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing. In Leland’s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor. The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story? Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping softly away while Sam’s sneakers made the wood stairs creak. The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store. The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went. Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet. Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen purple corduroys. They were pants of the day; one possibility. On the tilted table sat the damaged typewriter. What about Thomas Merton? Did he know the central story? Someone was quietly reading by the fireplace but not Sam. Next day there was badminton with the troubled carpenter and the story of an awful egg salad, causing laughter; but Sam had forgotten some thing. Then Alice brought in the brownies and minor pleasure colored the house and there went the evening. J.J. came downstairs all gleamy from her bath. She had three reasons to get downtown fast. Sam picked up a novel by Sukenick. The clue must be nearby. Between Sam and the page swarmed the gnats of possibility. Leland stowed his bicycle in the basement and came upstairs with a point about capitalism. Look at the time said someone. Where was J.J. now? Where was the story? Under the red chair lay the newspaper whose relevance was all mystery or not mystery enough. Then Alice went out to see a movie. Some man meets some woman with big eyes on a jet and changes his whole life for her, disastrously but thrillingly. Alice told about it briefly, and went to make tea. Sam paused on the hard wooden stairs. J.J. was gone. She was gone. Leland was eating yogurt at midnight. The whole brown house was floating, gliding very smoothly for some reason with Sam not clear whether the gliding was a story and if so was it central and was it his?

a man and his dog what fun chasing twigs into the water! young girls bicycle by in pairs and plaid shorts a wind so soft one’s whole back tingles with cilia a gentle lake the sun boils at the center, radiates the zone for man and lays a healing pad across his nape an airplane small and flat as a paper model roars behind the Virgilian scene an old man tips his straw hat down to shade his eyes, pulls up his fishline and moves on to a new spot the poor small wood louse crawls along the bark ridge for his life

You’ve planted and weeded and wheelbarrowed, now tapping a pencil, trying to remember the next thing—what was it?—when a shape drops from the sky, shudders and stops at a tree—red blotch—whack, whack. A creature big enough on this slow spring day to make you mutter,

That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s impecunious craftsman, making what he makes turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk- white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree. What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is you are meant to aspire to before you retire to that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly be contained in these boxes. And again—no contest. And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off in the long-winded ploys of a winless October, unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . . —At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands, turned down a dock I remembered and wept. I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept. Looking out on the water in time we came to see being itself had made things fall apart this way. We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges and similar marine life, their resistance to changes across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface. We admired the example the whole sea set, actually. Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges. We wondered that much longer before we had left.