873 Life poems

Of  that string of memories about our lost friendship I remember being invited places as a pair, like a comedy team; and after one party, our self-parody of our own stammering speechlessness when introduced to Henrik, the Swedish god auto mechanic; our twin, garish, purple-flowered swimsuits from Kmart, outlining, around Texas, our sameness and differences; our dual waitressing shifts across town, and the long phone calls that followed with their emphatic reiteration of every stingy six-top ordering candy-flavored alcoholic drinks; the after-work visit where we brayed, stomped, then blinked stupidly (while the needle hit the LP’s end) at the empty fifth of gin left on the coffee table, prompting a dim:Uh oh; your imitation of your mother’s habitual and by-the-way inexplicable confession about you to shoe salesmen: She has a funny foot; the apartments, the Olivettis, the boyfriends, all the thoughts exchanged unedited like an experiment of the big, walk-in consciousness, which we might have assumed the verbal equivalent of sex for friends, and whatever closeness meant, we wanted as much as we could have, it was our post-graduate work in The Humanities. Even now, I can’t resist striking up a conversation while standing on line, any line, or introducing myself enthusiastically to whomever I am introduced, but the truth is I am not looking for new friends at this point; I am trying to locate the lost ones, the ones who left through the hole of an argument decades ago, a time more panicked and carefree than any other, except maybe the early years of motherhood, which I missed sharing with you on playground benches. But surely I will see you on the bus someday, and your greeting will package our jokes, advice, tears, book talk, our years of reliance. And so I will expect you will tell me how much I have misunderstood and wrongly assumed in these descriptions, because I never expect those people who have mattered to remain completely gone, even through death, or rebuke. And of course I have to remember what parted us, that I found faults with your other friends, that I spoke as critically and crassly about them as I did about my own person, and to this day I have to be careful of that trait, my junkyard dog of expression, safe only with me on a too-long leash. Here, again, telling you everything with no reason but for memory’s insistence that I string an apology from what I see.

As my Scotch, spared the water, blondly sloshes About its tumbler, and gay manic flame Is snapping in the fireplace, I grow youthful: I realize that calendars aren’t truthful And that for all of my grand unsuccesses External causes are to blame. And if at present somewhat destitute, I plan to alter, prove myself more able, And suavely stroll into the coming years As into rooms with thick rugs, chandeliers, And colorfully pyramided fruit On linened lengths of table. At times I fear the future won’t reward My failures with sufficient compensation, But dump me, aging, in a garret room Appointed with twilit, slant-ceilinged gloom And a lone bulb depending from a cord Suggestive of self-strangulation. Then, too, I have bad dreams, in one of which A cowled, scythe-bearing figure beckons me. Dark plains glow at his back: it seems I’ve died, And my soul, weighed and judged, has qualified For an extended, hyper-sultry hitch Down in eternity. Such fears and dreams, however, always pass. And gazing from my window at the dark, My drink in hand, I’m jauntily unbowed. The sky’s tiered, windy galleries stream with cloud, And higher still, the dazed stars thickly mass In their long Ptolemaic arc. What constellated powers, unkind or kind, Sway me, what far preposterous ghosts of air? Whoever they are, whatever our connection, I toast them (toasting also my reflection), Not minding that the words which come to mind Make the toast less toast than prayer: Here’s to the next year, to the best year yet; To mixed joys, to my harum-scarum prime; To auguries reliable and specious; To times to come, such times being precious, If only for the reason that they get Shorter all the time.

Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star that the mall map linked to GPS. As if you’d stared into your nowhere like a sun and photoreceptors compensated with a point. Lostness is an immaculately well-dressed person or a room laid out like charcuterie. It’s a feeling someone loves you after a ten-minute talk. Oh yes, but lostness is loving someone too, knowing you would take the raft out further if it meant a few more minutes. Sometimes, I want to tell my dog that I’m the only one in the world who knows her whereabouts and that’s lostness but it’s lived in. It isn’t sadness. Lostness is the job I had in ’98 in a warehouse unpacking chic decor where I began to unravel and unmake the very things the company was selling. It was the boxes I moved forward on the shelves until they lined up well, pop choruses that played again for the beautiful and found. It’s almost gladness. It’s the walk I took one day trying to decide should I live in Montreal? and thinking that I knew something to make it plain. Lostness is the many rains of money that I once watched from an open window. It’s long been here. It was the semilunate carpal flowering in late-Cretaceous bones where everything was going then never more unclear. It was the first prokaryote closing off its little O and all that it could be instead. But lostness is a steady wage. I remember when my grandfather would come home from the squats and thousand double checks of electrical work and wash his hands: all the dirt moved in his laundry sink like garter snakes that turned up under stones, a living current so bearable in its lostness that I could know it, only, for a hundred years and still be happy. Lostness was the school I went to where leaving crumbs on rectangles of paper meant showing the way someone would have to come. It was having your knapsack up on the table like a personal flotation device. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything, like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness that if you look deep into, you see a great balance beam that everything that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.

On the lawn at the villa— That’s the way to start, eh, reader? We know where we stand—somewhere expensive— You and I imperturbes, as Walt would say, Before the diversions of wealth, you and I engagés. On the lawn at the villa Sat a manufacturer of explosives, His wife from Paris, And a young man named Bruno, And myself, being American, Willing to talk to these malefactors, The manufacturer of explosives, and so on, But somehow superior. By that I mean democratic. It’s complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem. We were all sitting there paralyzed In the hot Tuscan afternoon, And the bodies of the machine-gun crew were draped over the balcony. So we sat there all afternoon.

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known. I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg. The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train, and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again, (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back, (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows, Has nested in the trees and undergrowth. Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both, One moves with an uncertain violence Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense Or the dull thunder of approximate words. On motorcycles, up the road, they come: Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys, Until the distance throws them forth, their hum Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh. In goggles, donned impersonality, In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust, They strap in doubt – by hiding it, robust – And almost hear a meaning in their noise. Exact conclusion of their hardiness Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts They ride, direction where the tyres press. They scare a flight of birds across the field: Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes. It is a part solution, after all. One is not necessarily discord On earth; or damned because, half animal, One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes Afloat on movement that divides and breaks. One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward. A minute holds them, who have come to go: The self-defined, astride the created will They burst away; the towns they travel through Are home for neither bird nor holiness, For birds and saints complete their purposes. At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon, The dinosaur, who left dried tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow, I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness Have lain too long Facedown in ignorance, Your mouths spilling words Armed for slaughter. The Rock cries out to us today, You may stand upon me, But do not hide your face. [...]

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller, those hotel rooms where the TV remote waits by the bed like a suicide pistol, those hours in the air amid white shirts whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers, those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts— such venues of transit grow dearer than home. The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss, the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life? No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror, in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent, and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide down through the cloud cover to a single runway at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.

You’re speeding me down the Ventura freeway in your battered Scout, patched since your angry crash into the drunken pole that swerved into your road. We’ve got no seat belts, no top, bald tires, so I clutch any metal that seems as though it might be firm, belie its rusted rattling. Under my August burn I’m fainting white, but I’m trying to give you what you want: an easy mother. For the last two days you’ve been plugged into your guitar, earphones on, door closed. I spoiled our holiday with warnings about your accidental life, said this time I wouldn’t rescue you, knowing you’d hate me, knowing I’d make myself sick. We’re speaking now, the airport is so near, New York closer than my birthday tomorrow, close as bearded death whose Porsche just cut us off in the fast lane. When you were three, you asked if God lived under the street. I said I didn’t know, although a world opened under my feet walking with you over strange angels, busy arranging our fate. Soon, if we make it, I’ll be in the air, where people say God lives, the line between you and me stretched thinner, thinner but tight enough still to bind us, choke us both with love. Your Scout, putty-colored as L.A. mornings, protests loudly but hangs on.

Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay, from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets I take to work. The front yard of roses — did I write their names down correctly? — Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale. Q31 bus, among the words I hear are Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated, Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not physically well, a poor man, arrested on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose, on the street, held, choked, left unconscious, still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death, according to the autopsy report, a homicide — rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins, by employees of the Agency’s contractor, isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence explains, but, merely, legally justified means of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house. He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace, the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual. In what place, the Federal Reserve’s monetary spigots and banks’ access to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce the market’s decline — in what places, violations of which forms of which eternal laws? Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place? On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike, in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.