moving from west to east effortless above the pines
In this New Jersey smudged air. In March 1963
the final stroke. “Died in his sleep.” Eyes
moving restlessly down the naked body.
On a gurney? Since when? The shock of it, his young
male body restored. Svelte dark down of the chest,
groin and soft stirring penis. Winter-pale
haunches, muscles hard as bone. Lifts
his head. Where? Christ, he’s alert, he’s curious—
God-damned ready to begin it all again—
This is the time for which we have been waiting.
Note: The letter from William Carlos Williams to his friend and editor James Laughlin was written sometime shortly prior to June 1962, when Williams’s last book, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, was published.
The Tunnel
Early April, descending
the long broken hill
behind Panoramic Way.
Morning radioactive-bright.
The hill a puzzle of concrete outcroppings
broken and discontinuous as the aphorisms of Nietzsche.
And the Tunnel not (yet) visible
though its peristalsis begins
to pull, squeeze, tug.
In the dazzling distance,
San Francisco Bay.
As you descend the hill
the glittering Bay retreats
like a memory of happiness
but still
the palette is wide, seemingly random
in sunshine like spangled coins
the curious uneven descent
like a drunk
staggering
and the Tunnel not (yet)
defined as in a canvas
of Magritte where it’s the absence of
depth that assures
This is art, not life.
This will not hurt you.
And now passing
the abandoned house
gigantic, stucco
strangely surrounded by chain-link fencing,
razor wire absurd in swagger
protecting what no one wants.
And still you descend the hill
bravely, boldly
blindly seeing now
the deserted playing field,
deserted playground.
Stilled swings, rusted slide
O where has life gone?—
abandoning these places
abruptly at Warring Street,
and then to Derby
more rapidly now
the Tunnel narrows
at Stuart, College, Russell too
swiftly passing way-stations
of ordinary life
your descent
except sucked by peristalsis
tugged past, breathless
and now the sky lowered
like a sound-proofed ceiling
unremitting, no mercy
at Ashby Avenue
rudely tugged as a teat
made to turn right onto Ashby,
as the morning shudders
visibly, you can feel shrinkage
as out of pastel treetops
the Hospital emerges
grim in efficiency
the “boundless” sky
has vanished, at the Hospital
driveway in the grip
of peristalsis tugged
through the automatic doors
in whose glass a frightened face
appears, disappears
and into the twilit foyer
and to the double elevators
rising inexorably to the sixth floor
to room 765
where your life awaits you
sleeping, a tube in his bruised nose
clasped hands on the distended belly
breathing in random gusts
like the lone wind at shore,
and a sickle moon above.
O Love—where will you abide when our frail bodies are no more?
Palliative
1.
Hate hope!
Arsenic for weeks
we’d taken in micro-drops
on credulous tongues.
Hope the thing
with noisome wings
clattering
about our heads
with a broom at last swatted to earth.
Stomped, smashed.
Now, clarity of silence.
Only the drip of minimal liquids—saline, Dilaudid.
Only the labored and arrhythmic breathing
as the chest rises, falls—rises,
falls.
Faintest of echoes—Give up on.
2.
Hold desperation
like a playing card
close to the heart
reluctant to reveal
what you feel
but (yes) you risk
the irrevocable loss
too late.
(when no one else is in the room)
(for a hospice room can be crowded)
(by “crowded” meaning more than two people)
you tell your husband that you love him
so much, what a wonderful
husband he has been
and he says—But I failed you by dying.
And you protest—But why are you saying
such a thing, you are not
dying, we are talking
Here together!—
And he says Because I am dead.
As after the final biopsy
he’d been incensed—They took my soul from me.
They took me to the crematorium, I saw the sign.
Don’t try to tell me I didn’t see the sign.
3.
Trapped in this bed like a prison.
Is the car out front? Drive the car around.
Where are the keys to the car?
Joyce, don’t leave. Joyce?
We need to get the car. Where are the keys . . .
I want to go home. Take me home. Joyce—
don’t leave me!
What did we do with the car?
4.
In hospice time ceases.
Hours lapse into days
and days into night
and again day, and
night and the mouth
once fierce in kissing
and being kissed
is slack, mute.
And breathing slows,
asymmetrical
as a listing boat.
And fever dreams rage
beneath bluish eyelids
quivering in secret life.
Until at last the deepest sigh
of a lifetime . . .
5.
After such struggle
you must love
the unrippled dark
water in which
the perfect cold O
of the moon floats
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my poet-friends Henri Cole and the late C. K. Williams for having read many of these poems in manuscript, and for their overall generosity and encouragement; and to my dear late husband Charlie Gross for his hope that I would gather the poems into a volume.
Much gratitude and thanks are also due to the editors of those magazines in which most of these poems appeared, which include New Yorker (“Harlow’s Monkeys”; “In Hemp-Woven Hammocks Reading the Nation,” under the title, “This Is the Season”; “Edward Hopper’s ‘Eleven A.M.,’ 1926”; “Too Young to Marry but Not Too Young to Die”; “Jubilate: An Homage in Catterel Verse” (New Yorker online); New York Review of Books (“Exsanguination,” “Loney”); Poetry (“Little Albert, 1920,” “The Coming Storm,” “The First Room,” “Sinkholes,” “That Other,” “The Blessing,” “American Sign Language”); Atlantic (“Apocalypso”); Salmagundi (“Hometown”; “To Marlon Brand
o in Hell,” “Old America Has Come Home to Die,” “The Tunnel,” “Palliative”); Paris Review (“The Mercy,” “Harvesting Skin”); Boulevard (“Doctor Help Me”); New Republic (“Hatefugue”); Kenyon Review (“Bloodline, Elegy”); Yale Review (“A Dream of Stopped-Up Drains”).
“Kite Poem” was included by Robert Pinsky in a Slate (online) poetry project (2003) and “This Is the Time for Which We Have Been Waiting” was included in Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired By the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams, ed. Sheila Coghill and Thom Tammaro (2011). “To Marlon Brando in Hell” was included in The Best American Poetry 2017, ed. Natasha Trethewey and David Lehman.
Photo credit: Charlie Gross, Lake George, 2018.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has several times been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Joyce Carol Oates
Women in Love and Other Poems (1968)
Anonymous Sins and Other Poems (1969)
Love and Its Derangements (1970)
Angel Fire (1973)
Dreaming America (1973)
The Fabulous Beasts (1975)
Season of Peril (1977)
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978)
Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982 (1982)
The Time Traveler (1989)
Tenderness (1996)
Copyright
AMERICAN MELANCHOLY. Copyright © 2021 by Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph by Charlie Gross
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-303528-7
Version 01142021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-303526-3
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*“Catterel”—an elevated variant of “doggerel.”