25 Living poems

It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lights burned distant, dull. I was tired, but you insisted on one more, so I chalked the cue—the bored blue—broke, scratched. It was always possible for you to run the table, leave me nothing. But I recall the easy shot you missed, and then the way we both studied, circling—keeping what you had left me between us.

the woman whose face has just finished breaking with a joy so infinite and heavy that it might be grief has won a car on a giveaway show, for her family, for an expanse of souls that washes from a million picture tubes onto the blank reaches of the air. meanwhile, the screams are packing the air to a hardness: in the studio the audience will no longer move, will be caught slowly, like ancient, staring mammals, figuring out the double-cross within the terrible progress of a glacier. here, i am suddenly towering with loneliness, repeating to this woman's only face,this time, again, i have not won.

To think I might have been dead, he said to himself, ashamed, as if this were a curse of the heart, raising a bundle of bones to a man’s height. As if it were suddenly forbidden to touch even words that had dropped to the ground. Besides, he was afraid of finding his body in a metal press. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. the tram stood jammed above him like an icebreaker’s prow and all that was left of the car was a grotesque pretzel with a chunk bitten off by the dentures of a demented angel. Something dark was dripping on the rails, and a strikingly pale wind was leafing through a book still warm. People were forming a circle and with deaf-mute sympathy awaited the play’s catharsis, like maggots emerging from under the wings of a beheaded chicken. From afar came the approaching wail of sirens, congealing in the jinxed air-conditioning of that day and that minute. Dewdrops were falling on the back of the neck like remnants of atmospheric dignity. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. No, thank you, he said, I’ll wait; for a silent film had started to run without subtitles, without colour and without answers. And what about the magnetic monopoles escaping seconds after the Big Bang, protons violating the irreversibility of the flow of time? What about the giant molecular clouds under the galaxy’s shoulders, conceiving the embryos of stars? What about the loneliness of the first genes accumulating amino acids in shallow primeval pools at the expense of entropic usurers? What about the desiccated starfish like proto-eagles’ talons dug into the bed of a vanishing sea? What about the mortal migrations of birds observing the sun’s inclination and the roar of sex hormones? What about the caged half-crazed orang-utan who vomits because he has nothing else to do? What about the mice which for a thousand years have learned to sing and the frogs balancing on one leg like the thigh of a beauty queen from Mesopotamia? What about poetry, an enterprise so disorderly it twists the rulers and increases the squint of school inspectors? And what about the little girl in the leukemia ward who, on the toilet, tried to show what kind of moustache the kind doctor has, but as her skinny sticks of hands let go of the edge of the bowl, she falls in and so tried again and again? And what about the weak-kneed intellectual, the professor who understood the approximate universe but forgot the traffic rules? No, thank you, he said to some uniform, I don’t need anything. My papers are in my pocket but I can’t reach there. And he tried to smile a little at this embarrassment of complicated creation. It’s all my fault, he said, thank you. And then he died.

August is the cruelest month: never enough daylight, too much heat, no holidays and nothing matters except September’s dawning responsibilities, but the August of 1994 I was Holden Caulfield, summer camp senior counselor for the junior trail blazers, black and brown children two weeks shy of first, second, and third grade. Nothing is as positive, as motivating a force within one’s life as a school bus full of kids singing along to the local radio station blazing hip-hop and R&B. (Imagine this cherubic chorus riding upstate to Ini Kamoze’s “Here Comes the Hotstepper.” [“Muuur-derah!”]) My workday is filled with hazards like chocolate melted sticky swim trunk pockets, insistent sunburn, and the assorted rah rah of parental unsupervision, but those bus rides back from upstate water parks and pools were my favorite times working. Have you ever ridden in a cheesebus with ashy children asleep against you, staring at sudden trees — more numerous than project windows — blurring along the highways like confusion giving way to doubt, the heady smell of dried chlorine and musty towels lulling you into the soft timbre of a Midwest falsetto? Tell me what it is to fall in love with a lightskin girl covering the Isley Brothers. I was not two weeks into 21 years old. I had yet to wear a box cutter in my fifth pocket, or see a semi-automatic aimed at my center mass, to feel its dumbness against my spine. My life was uncertain, save for its unlikely length under my control, like the pilot who falls short of what he says, what he says he’s all about, all about. All my homeboys were still alive, just like Aaliyah Dana Haughton, not yet an angel of the cruelest August, begging a boy, who may not be in the mood to learn what he thinks he knows, to look beyond his world and try to find a place for her.

Near the Naked Juices I passed A man my fingers walking Across his back he turned and held up A box said what Might this be I said oh You’re tactile too what’s your name He said William Amos Miller I said I thought you were born in 1872 he said so You know who I am yes you’re the man Who journeyed to the center of Earth In your mind he smiled on my arm said do You know that the Earth also journeyed To the center of my mind I said I never thought of that he asked Again about the box I shook it sniffed Said Mike and Ike is it fruit He inquired not exactly well I think I shall have an apple wait You haven’t paid oh My money nowadays is no money he pushed Outside we walked across the ice To the intersection he made to go across Wait you can’t go across we have to wait For help oh help he said crouching Until our hands touched the cold ground He said I said we said we see With our hands I jumped up and said you’re the man

for John At a party I spy a handsome psychiatrist, And wish, as we all do, to get her advice for free. Doctor, I’ll say, I’m supposed to be a poet. All life’s awfulness has been grist to me. We learn that happiness is a Chinese meal, While sorrow is a nourishment forever. My new environment is California Dreamer. I’m fearful I’m forgetting how to brood. And, Doctor, another thing has got me worried: I’m not drinking as much as I should . . . At home, I want to write a happy poem On love, or a love poem of happiness. But they won’t do, the tensions of every day, The rub, the minor abrasions of any two Who share one space. Ah, there’s no substitute for tragedy! But in this chapter, tragedy belongs To that other life, the old life before us. Here is my aphorism of the day: Happy people are monogamous. Even in California. So how does the poem play Without the paraphernalia of betrayal and loss? I don’t have a jealous eye or fear And neither do you. In truth, I’m fond Of your ex-mate, whom I name “my wife-in-law.” My former husband, that old disaster, is now just funny, So laugh we do, in what Cyril Connolly Has called the endless, nocturnal conversation Of marriage. Which may be the best part. Darling, must I love you in light verse Without the tribute of profoundest art? Of course it won’t last. You will break my heart Or I yours, by dying. I could weep over that. But now it seems forced, here in these heaven hills, The mourning doves mourning, the squirrels mating, My old cat warm in my lap, here on our terrace As from below comes a musical cursing As you mend my favorite plate. Later of course I could pick a fight; there is always material in that. But we don’t come from fighting people, those Who scream out red-hot iambs in their hate. No, love, the heavy poem will have to come From temps perdu, fertile with pain, or perhaps Detonated by terrors far beyond this place Where the world rends itself, and its tainted waters Rise in the east to erode our safety here. Much as I want to gather a lifetime thrift And craft, my cunning skills tied in a knot for you, There is only this useless happiness as gift.

The giant world is no damned genius with its basket of latitude, its schedule for wanting to be touched. Now, slow asleep I’m song to break in on, a strength less lost than gone. I borrow minute, hour, day, day. The waves as cruel replacements pass for crutches.

I washed a load of clothes and hung them out to dry. Then I went up to town and busied myself all day. The sleeve of your best shirt rose ceremonious when I drove in; our night- clothes twined and untwined in a little gust of wind. For me it was getting late; for you, where you were, not. The harvest moon was full but sparse clouds made its light not quite reliable. The bed on your side seemed as wide and flat as Kansas; your pillow plump, cool, and allegorical. . . .

Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow, their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait: Denver, Cheyenne. Hibernating in the library of the school on the hill a few pieces by Thomas Aquinas or Saint Teresa and the fragmentary explorations of people like Alfred North Whitehead crouch and wait amid research folders on energy and military recruitment posters glimpsed by the hard stars. The school bus by the door, a yellow mound, clangs open and shut as the wind finds a loose door and worries it all night, letting the hollow students count off and break up and blow away over the frozen ground.

In Tucson when a university student goes home she might leave her desk and a chair, a bookcase outside her cave with a sign, “Take me.” And who could resist heat radiating over furniture like a mirage? You hoist an old Victrola into your pickup and ratchet up a new song. You start that life in the West, invent a past, and when that tune winds down, it’s okay to put out, “Take me.” What do we have in life but comings and goings?