872 Life poems

O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes. Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice. Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day. Behold the time of the Assassins.

I tell my attendants, Right there, When they rub me where it itches. They rub for a few seconds, then move on, There’s so much of it to wash, “It” being me, a former person, Now something that must be washed every day In so little time. Fifty minutes outside my breathing machine, And all I can do is stare As my breath recedes like the woman Who would not love me. It’s almost over, I say over and over to myself As soon as the machine is turned off. An idiotic mantra perhaps, But it helps when the ache descends into my eyes And my words quit coming out right. Left hand, I say. Right foot? the attendant says, guessing. I begin to fantasize about gusts of air Rushing down my windpipe with hurricane force. Garish and impossible, they’re respiratory porn. My re-entry is stalled By the attendant straightening a sheet That no one will see. Enraged, I squeeze my eyes closed. Christ. “What?” Never mind. Once back in and turned on, I cough violently and with conviction. Shocked by the force of the inrushing air, I feel my lungs expand like birthday balloons, My terror-flattened mind pops up into 3-D, As I return to the land of breathing. January, 1990

—for Melissa L. Whiteman “Hi, guy,” said I to a robin perched on a pole in the middle of the garden. Pink and yellow firecracker zinnias, rough green leaves of broccoli, and deep red tomatoes on dying stems frame his still presence. “I’ve heard you’re not THE REAL ROBIN. Bird watchers have agreed,” I said. “ THE REAL ROBIN lives in England. They claim your are misnamed and that we ought to call you ‘a red-breasted thrush’ because you are indigenous.” He fluffed up. “Am I not Jis ko ko?” he cried, “that persistent warrior who carries warmth northward every spring?” He seemed so young, his red belly a bit light and his wings, still faded brown. He watched me untangling the hose to water squash. “Look who’s talking!” he chirruped. “Your people didn’t come from Europe or even India. The turtles say you’re a relative to red clay on this great island.” Drops of crystal water sparkled on the squash. “Indigenous!” he teased as he flew by.

The loop of rusty cable incises its shadow on the stucco wall. My father smiles shyly and takes one of my cigarettes, holding it awkwardly at first, as if it were a dart, while the yard slowly swings across the wide sill of daylight. Then it is a young man’s quick hand that rises to his lips, he leans against the wall, his white shirt open at the throat, where the skin is weathered, and he chats and daydreams, something he never does. Smoking his cigarette, he is even younger than I am, a brother who begins to guess, amazed, that what he will do will turn out to be this. He recalls the house he had when I was born, leaning against it now after work, the pale stucco of memory, 1947. Baby bottles stand near the sink inside. The new wire of the telephone, dozing in a coil, waits for the first call. The years are smoke.

Ever imagining the dire, the sudden the menace with no thought of the gradual, the lingering itch of whatever. That was my sister. A stomach ache had to be diagnosed. “Oh, come on, it’s no big deal.” “How do you know? You aren’t me.” At the doctor’s office she waited. He reached for his stethoscope, held it to her back and put it away in his pocket. Then, leaning across his desk, he asked importantly, “How long have you been eating your hair?” She couldn’t answer. After surgery they came into the recovery room where she had just wakened. “You are a lucky lady. We found nothing.” She had an incision and several visitors. Besides, she was so lucky (incisions heal) and not a little disgusted. “Me, eating my hair.”

Lucky day still spent wrestling the private problems and obsessions encountered first in your youth but played out now within the spectacle of public aging (tho, strangely, as you age you feel less & less seen by the young, a citizen active in frequencies of light waves increasingly invisible—not even boring to 15-year-olds). Of course, some problems you once had really have vanished—you can sense that as your daughter lays out the tactics crucial to "pre-gaming," her teen friends setting out to get toasted or stoned before house parties, parties at which they've been warned not to drug or drink— no longer a worry for you (except as relates, of course, to your daughter)—you can drink & drug somewhat "it would seem" to your heart's content. Not your style, you say? Not any longer? Still, the urge to lift or get lifted from self-conscious woes hasn't gone away totally, has it? Wanting to be free of your self has always been a mission big in your church—evangelically so! You got in a way (the wrong way) your wish— your skin certainly got looser on you—baggy, rounder, wrinkled—prescriptions for departure—the rigging's untuned, & no milk bath full of rose hips can compensate (so your friend likes to say), no fish oil omega-3 in gel capsules manufactured by entrepreneurial ex-hippies no wifely fruit smoothies or mod boots will cure jowls now or allow for glamour without the costume.

Travel is a vanishing act Only to those who are left behind. What the traveler knows Is that he accompanies himself, Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked, Stolen, or lost, or mistaken. So one took, past outposts of empire, “Calmly as if in the British Museum,” Not only her Victorian skirts, Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith In the civilizing mission of women, Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor; Another, friend of witch-doctors, Living on native chop, Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes, Heralded her astonishing arrival Under shivering stars By calling, “It’s only me!” A third, Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate That a woman could travel as easily as a man, Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears And only once permitted a tribal chieftain To stroke her long, golden hair.

From the point of view of all time, these recent changes signal more a return to nature than a departure, than degradation. In the beginning, after all, there was boiling rock. Then waters arranging their bodies around an era of softer forms: lichen, grassland, swaying treetops. Then creatures, movingly fleshed, treading pathways that hardened. Then pavement hardening and cities, monumental. Soon mostly rock again, and radiant. More and more like moon. Soon, sooner than is being thought, there will be even more light. The creatures will have stopped being able to move or be moved. And the rock will boil.

The luncheon voucher years (the bus pass and digitized medical record always in the inside pocket come later, and the constant orientation to the nearest hospital). The years of “sir” (long past “mate,” much less “dearie”), of invisibility, of woozy pacifism, of the preemptive smile of the hard-of-hearing, of stiff joints and the small pains that will do me in. The ninth complement of fresh — stale — cells, the Late Middle Years (say, 1400 AD — on the geological calendar), the years of the incalculable spreading middle, the years of speculatively counting down from an unknown terminus, because the whole long stack — shale, vertebrae, pancakes, platelets, plates — won’t balance anymore, and doesn’t correspond anyway to the thing behind the eyes that says “I” and feels uncertain green and treble and wants its kilt as it climbs up to the lectern to blush and read “thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb.” The years of taking the stairs two at a time (though not at weekends) a bizarre debt to Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe, the years of a deliberate lightness of tread, perceived as a nod to Franz   Josef thinking with his knees and rubber-tired Viennese Fiaker. The years when the dead are starting to stack up. The years of incuriosity and novarum rerum in cupidissimus, the years of cheap acquisition and irresponsible postponement, or cheap postponement and irresponsible acquisition, of   listlessness, of   miniaturism, of irascibility, of   being soft on myself, of   being hard on myself, and neither knowing nor especially caring which. The years of   re-reading (at arm’s length). The fiercely objected-to professional years, the appalling indulgent years, the years of no challenge and comfort zone and safely within my borders. The years of   no impressions and little memory. The years of standing in elevators under the elevator lights in the elevator mirror, feeling and looking like leathered frizz, an old cheese-topped dish under an infrared hot plate. The years of one over the thirst and another one over the hunger, of   insomnia and sleeping in, of creases and pouches and heaviness and the hairdresser offering to trim my eyebrows. The years of the unbeautiful corpse in preparation. The years to choose:sild, or flamber ...?

Knowlt Hoheimer ran away to the war The day before Curl Trenary Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett For stealing hogs. But that's not the reason he turned a soldier. He caught me running with Lucius Atherton. We quarreled and I told him never again To cross my path. Then he stole the hogs and went to the war— Back of every soldier is a woman.