872 Life poems

I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer. The war is on and the Department of Homeland Security has decided we have an elevated national-threat level, a code-orange alert. I could say something, but my packages are getting heavier by the minute and besides, what is there to say since rhetorically it's not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Saddam is “that man who tried to kill my father” and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British, but not the French, and Germany won't and Turkey won't join us but the coalition is inside Baghdad where the future is the threat the Americans feel they can escape though there is no escaping the Americans because war, this war, is about peace: “The war in Iraq is really about peace. Trying to make the world more peaceful. This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful.”

This could be the town you’re from, marked only by what it’s near. The gas station man speaks of weather and the high school football team just as you knew he would— kind to strangers, happy to live here. Tell yourself it doesn’t matter now, you’re only driving through. Past the sagging, empty porches locked up tight to travelers’ stares, toward the great dark of the fields, your headlights startle a flock of old love letters—still undelivered, enroute for years.

The veiled shape is a grandmother To the young boys working beside Her—packing stones from the field On the journey toward subsistence. Above them the Hindu Kush Disappears behind storm clouds the color of Milk in a metal pail. The grandfather is grinding Blades the way time sharpens Distrust—the stones fall From the mountains all winter— Almost always at night— The sound of them ganging up On starlight leaves a musical note Like jostled skewers. There’s nothing militant Here unless the noise of a shovel Is the voice of heresy— The missile enters the poem The way a horse defecates on an ant colony Simply because everything is Where it is when shit happens— If I were writing this poem I’d ignore the falcon hunting What small life escapes the heat signature Because it’s pushed by million-year- Old imperatives and unlike Us it has no off switch. This is where the poem Fails—where all literature fails— To thirst sufficiently to drink the last drip From the cold faucet attached To the executioner’s heart.

At the drycleaners I stand in line, my feet shuffling weight from side to side, impatience all over me while the woman, light brown, with her Creole story drones on. In New Orleans none would notice. She’s exotic in Baltimore, a dawn bird everything hears. Even the clerk leans into her tale, clucking softly. When people behind me cough, she won’t be rushed. She’s got her whole story to go. Soon there’s a man she never married, her mother opposed, far away still, and he went into a bar, wrong place, wrong color, wrong words, maybe, a good man. He’ll never come away of there, not comin’ home, geraniums on the back porch, and not replace the bad tire her Honda has, who could always be telling her what time does in the kitchen if she stand half naked letting his dog go on out. So let me pay you for him, give you money because you is nice and I remember, her nearly singing voice sighs. The sleeved pants, two shirts hang on the brass ring, all finished, unclaimed, the stiffened stains gone away. The perfectly starched cloth a redemption so beautiful it might be the linen of royalty, but small for a man two of us will think of as sleep scuffs house walls like tide under a boat. How nice they are, these women doing the little one person can for another which is, in the end, a wash of memorable words that leave you standing.

Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knickknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael— something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun’s accomplice, the tree. Maurice. November 1981

Every day a wilderness—no shade in sight. Beulah patient among knicknacks, the solarium a rage of light, a grainstorm as her gray cloth brings dark wood to life. Under her hand scrolls and crests gleam darker still. What was his name, that silly boy at the fair with the rifle booth? And his kiss and the clear bowl with one bright fish, rippling wound! Not Michael— something finer. Each dust stroke a deep breath and the canary in bloom. Wavery memory: home from a dance, the front door blown open and the parlor in snow, she rushed the bowl to the stove, watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free. That was years before Father gave her up with her name, years before her name grew to mean Promise, then Desert-in-Peace. Long before the shadow and sun’s accomplice, the tree. Maurice.

Earbud—a tiny marble sheathed in foam to wear like an interior earring so you can enjoy private noises wherever you go, protected from any sudden silence. Only check your batteries, then copy a thousand secret songs and stories on the tiny pod you carry in your pocket. You are safe now from other noises made by other people, other machines, by chance, noises you have not chosen as your own. To get your attention, I touch your arm to show you the tornado or the polar bear. Sometimes I catch you humming or talking to the air as if to a shrunken lover waiting in your ear.

Like being reassigned to a case being made—to win? for a world mocked-up—terms to contest? Or,self glutting the market of experience— am am, a did this that— as “voice” script? Or, reining in the thrusting impulse that’d burst—out! and into. . . timed pattern a male’s—“mine?” Or, a hyper-local cultural thing—to do— conscious stance between friends strung along? Or, some gnawing negation—impelling all this? din’ wanna (really did) am “writing?” Or, being dispatched to a cramped corner of the vast. . . work-a-day transactions transmission? Or, alibis for (if not from) the near Black Out— detecting vital signs or dissent? Or, The National—reifying itself—can read? preemptive authorships as “progress”? Or, a once-elitist practice—popularized— aimless youth called forth—I came (aimed at?) Or, recombinant ruses of power—“allure”— who writes who here—and how sex—transects? Or, Capital’s quandaries of identity— certified— the stakes—now lowered? raised? Or, malingering with History’s inducements— disciplined we won’t be though are—need? Or, a schedule of vanguardist—occupations— vacuum left by the left to fill out? Or, the Nors that can’t be stated (just yet) can—mean? forming trends at the base asserting? Or, wouldn’t non-pop perspectives be also writ? discursive bumps and grinds to report? Or, logging on to a collectivizing—chance? bodies here plunked down—will plunk up. . . toward? Or, newly glozed invectives—to desublimate? old belles lettres upgraded downplays gain? Or, the pervasive liberinage of Genres— which clothes which strips which—for thrills—mostly? Or, a progressivist (scientistic)—complex? regrounding the grounds (props dignity? Or, an overdue reunion with precedence— compulsion to just flake kept in check? Or, why did you come—to hear something you don’t know? already— sorting terms— assigned to? Or, a realization of what’s yet unrealized— postscript or preamble to praxis?

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945 — in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,— Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?