Fifty years live and relive the infamous experiment through the ruin
of your life.
Fifty years sleepless made to recall the silence after you’d delivered
four hundred seventy-five volts . . .
Fifty years shame, you’d killed a human being.
Followed orders, to the end. Nor would being debriefed lessen the
horror—Killed a human being.
For it was explained to you at last, the protocol of the
experiment. The role you’d played, you had not realized.
The acts you’d perpetrated, you had not realized.
No volts, no shocks. No “learner.”
Only you, the “teacher.” Yet not a “teacher.”
You, the experimental subject.
Always and only you.
Everyone in the lab was in collusion against you.
All of history was in collusion against you.
Not your fault. Following orders. Continue to the end.
You will not be blamed.
Loney
Old fears in dead of night
like lozenges
stuck dry
on the tongue.
Wakened numb
as Novocain.
In dead of night ask
For God’s sake what
did you miss. You know
God-damned well you
have missed what
they hid from you.
The lost, the loney.
You knew them too late.
Dying too soon.
The young uncle you’d loved most.
Killed himself to free
his spirit, trapped like a genie
in a Coke bottle.
Never knew why. How
was a secret too whispered
in the cornstalks.
Misshapen ears of corn,
wizened faces. By November
you could see them
seeing you along the rows
of stalks.
You ran from the faces,
hid your eyes. Gut-kick,
spine-cold, sick
with fear of what
had no name.
Oh that was terrible! Just—
terrible . . . Something
like that, in a family—
you never forget.
Forty years ago.
Like yesterday.
A rifle, he’d used. You knew
this—didn’t you? One of his.
Somehow he’d missed where
he was aiming. Not once,
not twice, three times pulled
the trigger pressing the barrel
against his chest . . .
We heard the shots
at the back of the house
and then the quiet.
It’s the quiet
after gunshots you remember.
The Coming Storm
Oblivion was a familiar blue sky, once.
And the lake, too, familiar though now turned to ink.
That border of marshgrass luridly bright!
Sun-glaring amid darkness as a demon eye.
If it’s 1859 you believe, probably,
in the radiant soul. That single white sail
at the prow of oblivion.
Or are you, a man in shirtsleeves, that solitary rower
in an invisible boat? Straining at the oars
and never to reach shore.
As by quickened pulsebeat the end-of-things
blows out of the fabled Northeast.
Oh, oblivion! That gnarly tarry taste.
That smell of airborne wet.
You won’t have time even for prayer.
Or have you become a paper cutout in red shirt,
Beige vest, straw hat, a figure jauntily seated
at the edge of the nightmare lake?
A fisherman? That’s what you are?
And your little dog?
At the edge of the pit?
Oh, where are the adults who once loved you,
and stood guard?
(Martin Johnson Heade, The Coming Storm, 1859)
Edward Hopper’s “Eleven A.M.,” 1926
She’s naked yet wearing shoes.
Wants to think nude. And happy in her body.
Though it’s a fleshy aging body. And her posture
in the chair—leaning forward, arms on knees,
staring out the window—makes her belly bulge,
but what the hell.
What the hell, he isn’t here.
Lived in this damn drab apartment at Third Avenue,
Twenty-third Street, Manhattan, how many
damn years, has to be at least fifteen. Moved to the city
from Hackensack needing to breathe.
She’d never looked back. Sure they called her selfish,
cruel. What the hell, the use they’d have made of her,
she’d be sucked dry like bone marrow.
First job was file clerk at Trinity Trust. Wasted
three years of her young life waiting
for R.B. to leave his wife and wouldn’t you think
a smart girl like her would know better?
Second job also file clerk but then she’d been promoted
to Mr. Castle’s secretarial staff at Lyman Typewriters. The
least the old bastard could do for her and she’d
have done a lot better except for fat-face Stella Czechi.
Third job, Tvek Realtors & Insurance and she’s
Mr. Tvek’s private secretary—What would I do
without you my dear one?
As long as Tvek pays her decent. And he doesn’t
let her down like last Christmas, she’d wanted to die.
This damn room she hates. Dimlit like a region of the soul
into which light doesn’t penetrate. Soft-shabby old furniture
and sagging mattress like those bodies in dreams we feel
but don’t see. But she keeps her bed made
every God-damn day visitors or not.
He doesn’t like disorder. He’d told her how he’d learned
to make a proper bed in the U.S. Army in 1917.
The trick is, he says, you make the bed as soon as you get up.
Detaches himself from her as soon as it’s over. Sticky skin,
hairy legs, patches of scratchy hair on his shoulders, chest,
belly. She’d like him to hold her and they could drift into
sleep together but rarely this happens. She hates feeling the
nerves twitching in his legs. He’d leap from her as soon as he
came she thinks, the bastard.
Crazy wanting her, then abruptly it’s over—he’s inside his head,
and she’s inside hers.
Now this morning she’s thinking God-damn bastard, this has
got to be the last time. Waiting for him to call to explain
the night before when he didn’t show up. She’d
waited from 8 P.M. until midnight and in those hours
sick with hating him and hating herself and yet—the leap
of hope when the phone rang. Telling her
Unavoidable, crisis at home. Love you.
Now she’s waiting for him to call again. And there’s the chance
he might come here before calling which he has done more than
once. Couldn’t keep away.
God, I’m crazy for you.
In this somber painting by Edward Hopper who could paint only
his wife since Jo Hopper was jealous of nude models you can’t see
her face but it’s a girl’s face grown heavy and pouty, and her lips
lipstick-red, sulky-brunette face still damned good-looking and he
knows it, he’s excited seeing men on the street following her with
their eyes then it turns sour and he blames her.
She’s thinking she will give the bastard ten more minutes.
She’s Jo Hopper with her plain red-head’s face stretched
on this fleshy female’s face and he’s the artist but also
the lover and last week he’d come to take her
out to Delmonico’s but in this dimlit room they’d made love
in her bed and never got out until too late and she’d overheard
him on the phone explaining—there’s the sound of a man’s voice
explaining to a wife that is so callow, so craven, she’s sick
with contempt recalling. Yet he says he has left his family, he loves her.
Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And
the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in the
way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t
leave me.
Once in secret she’d seen him in the street with his younger son,
scrawny boy of thirteen, father and son walking together so bonded
they didn’t need to talk. Sharing a mood of solitude like
their hawk-faces and widow’s-peak black hair. The son
will grow into the father she saw and felt a stab of humiliation,
excluded.
He’d told her it wasn’t what she thought. Wasn’t his family
that kept him from loving her all he could but his life
he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry,
in France. What crept like paralysis through him.
Things that had happened to him, and things
that he’d witnessed, and things that he’d perpetrated himself
with his own hands. And she’d taken his hands and kissed
them, and brought them against her breasts that were aching
like the breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck,
and sustenance. And she said No. That is your old life.
I am your new life.
She will give her new life five more minutes.
II.
The First Room
The First Room
In every dream of a room
the first room intrudes.
No matter the years, the tears dried
and forgotten, it is the skeleton
of the first that protrudes.
Sinkholes
take you where
you don’t want to go.
Where you’d been
and had passed smilingly through,
and were alive. Then.
That Other
They laughed, but no. You
don’t remember that.
What you think you remember—
it wasn’t that.
Yes—you remember
some things. And
some things did
happen. Except not
that way.
And anyway, not
to you.
The Mercy
So much depends
upon
forgetting much
for our
earliest
yearnings never
abandon us.
The stroke
that wipes out
memory
is another word
for mercy.
The Blessing
Barefoot daring
to walk
amid
the thrashing eye-glitter
of what remains
when the tide
retreats
we ask ourselves
why did it matter
so much
to have the last
word?
or any
word?
Here, please—
take what
remains.
It is yours.
This Is not a Poem
in which the poet discovers
delicate white-parched bones
of a small creature
on a Great Lake shore
or the desiccated remains
of cruder road-kill
beside the rushing highway.
Nor is it a poem in which
a cracked mirror yields
a startled face,
or sere grasses hiss-
ing like consonants
in a foreign language.
Family photo album
filled with yearning
strangers long-deceased,
closet of beautiful
clothes of the dead.
Attic trunk, stone well
or metonymic moon
time-traveling for wisdom
in the Paleolithic
age, in the Middle Kingdom
or Genesis
or the time of Basho . . . .
Instead it is a slew
of words in search
of a container—
a sleek green stalk,
a transparent lung,
a single hair’s curl,
a cooing of vowels
like doves.
Apocalypso
Something thrill-
ing in cata-
clysm &
in the col-
lapse of Empires.
Irrevocable, ir-
remediable,
Apocalypso
& this myriad
bloom-
in which,
we’d hoped,
we might
have steered
more bravely,
sensibly &
to more pur-
pose, the
effort of be-
ing human,
& “moral”
& “good”
coming,
at last,
finally
terribly
& simply
to
The End
III.
American Melancholy
To Marlon Brando in Hell
Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.
Because you made of our adoration, mockery.
Because you were the predator male, without remorse.
Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away
greatness like trash.
Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.
Because in this you made mockery of our lives.
Because you died encased in fat
And even then, you’d lived too long.
Because you loathed yourself, and made of yourself a loathsome
person.
Because the wheelchair paraplegic of The Men was made to suffocate
in the fat of the bloated Kurtz.
Because your love was carelessly sown, debris tossed from a
speeding vehicle.
And because you loved both men and women, except not enough.
Because the slow suicide of self-disgust is horrible to us, and fascinating
as the collapse of tragedy into farce is fascinating
and the monstrousness of festered beauty.
Because you lured a girl of 15 to deceive her parents on a wintry-
dark December school day, 1953.
Because you lured this girl to lie about where she was going, what
she was doing, in the most reckless act of her young life.
Because you lured this girl to take a Greyhound bus from
Williamsville, New York, to downtown Buffalo, New York, alone in
the wintry dusk, as she had not ever been alone in her previous life.
Because you lured this girl, shivering, daring to step onto the bus in
front of Williamsville High School at 4:55 P.M. to be taken twelve
miles to the small shabby second-run Main Street Cinema for a
6:00 P.M. showing of The Wild One—a place that would’ve been
forbidden, if the girl’s parents had known.
What might have happened!—by chance, did not happen.
Because
inside the Main Street Cinema were rows of seats near-
empty in the dark, commingled smells of stale popcorn and
cigarette smoke—(for this was an era when there was “smoking
in the loge”), and on the screen the astonishing magnified figure
of “Johnny” in black leather jacket, opaque dark sunglasses, on his
motorcycle exuding the sulky authority of the young predator-male.
Because when asked what you were rebelling against, you said with
wonderful disdain, What’ve you got?
Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to
utter.
Because as Johnny you took us on the outlaw motorcycle, we clung
to your waist like the sleep of children.
Because as Johnny you were the face of danger, and you were
unrepentant.
Because as Johnny you could not say Thank you.
Because as Johnny you abandoned us in the end.
Because on that motorcycle you grew smaller and smaller on the
road out of the small town, and vanishing.
Because you have vanished. Because in plain sight you vanished.
Because the recklessness of adolescence is such elation, the heart is
filled to bursting.
Because recklessness is the happy quotient of desperation, and
contiguous with shame, and yet it is neither of these, and greater
than the sum of these.
Because the girl will recall through her life how you entered her
life like sunlight illuminating a landscape wrongly believed to be
denuded of beauty.
Because there is a savage delight in loss, and in the finality of loss.
Because at age twenty-three on Broadway you derailed A Streetcar
Named Desire, and made the tragedy of Blanche DuBois the first of
your triumphs.
So defiantly Stanley Kowalski, there has been none since.
Because after Brando, all who follow are failed impersonators.
Bawling and bestial and funny, crude laughter of the Polack male,
the humiliation of the Southern female whose rape is but another
joke.
Because you were the consummate rapist, with the swagger of the
rapist enacting the worst brute will of the audience.
Because you were Terry Malloy, the screen filled with your battered