understand is why one would balk to die
if death were entry to such heaven.
Right
We always talked about getting it right,
and finally, by making it smaller and smaller,
like inept diamond cutters, we did. We chiseled
love's radiant play and refraction
to a problem in tact and solved it
by an exact and mannerly contempt,
by the arrogance of severity,
by stubble, by silence, by grudge,
by mistaking sensibility for form,
by giving ourselves up to be right.
You have the right to be silent, blank
as an unminted coin, sullen or joyfully
fierce, how would we know? What's truly yours
you'll learn irremediably from prison.
You have the right to clamp your eyes shut,
not to assent nor to eat nor to use our only
toilet in your turn, but to hold your breath
and frail body like secrets, and to turn blue
and to be beautiful briefly to yourself.
And we have our rights, too, which you can guess.
There's fan belts stiffening out back for cars
they haven't made in fifteen years, but if one
of them geezer wagons wobbles in here, we got
the right fan belt for it. We got a regular
cat with a fight-crimped ear and a yawn pinker
than cotton candy in fluorescent light, and we
got the oldest rotating Shell sign on Route 17;
hell, we're a museum. You can get halfway
from here to days beyond recall, and the last
half you never had a chance at, from the start.
Too right, my son accuses me when I correct
his grammar, but then, like an anaconda
digesting a piglet and stunned by how much blood
he needs to get this one thing done, he pales,
and then he's gone, slipped totally inside
himself, someplace I can't get from here
or anywhere, and now I need to tease him out
from his torpid sulk, or to wait till he slithers
out on his own. Come to think of it, that's how
I got here, eager, willful, approximate.
Four months of his life a man spends shaving,
a third of it asleep or pacing his room in want
of the civil wilderness of sleep, like a zoo lion
surveying the domain of its metabolism,
and what slice of his life does he pass
mincing shallots, who loves cooking?
If time is money, it's inherited
wealth, a relic worn smooth and then
worn to nothing by pilgrims' kisses,
and there's no right way to keep or spend it.
Right as rain you are, rain that shrivels
the grapes and then plumps the raisins.
You were right when you felt peeled,
like a crab in molt, and right you were
when you chafed stiffly against your shell
and wanted out. You're condemned to be right,
to agonize with what's right as the future
invades you and to explain the inevitable
past as it leaves you to colonize yourself,
to be you, finally to stand up for your rights.
Gauche, sinister, but finally harmless because
flaky, somehow miswired, a southpaw
(there's no more a northpaw than there is a soft-
nosed realist: the curse and blazon of rectitude
is that even the jokes about you are dull,
and your fire is embers and cozy, grey at the edge
and pink in the middle, like a well-cooked steak),
a figure of fun, as someone outnumbered so often
is, and all because you bring me, and you're right,
On the way to the rink one fog-and sleep-thick
morning we got the work fuck spat at us,
my sister fluffed for figure skating and I in pads
for hockey. The slash of casual violence in it
befuddled me, and when I asked my parents
I got a long, strained lecture on married love.
Have I remembered this right? The past is lost
to memory. Under the Zamboni's slathering tongue
the ice is opaque and thick. Family life is easy.
You just push off into heartbreak and go on your nerve.
The Theme of the Three Caskets
Men and women are two locked caskets,
each of which contains the key to the other.
—Isak Dinesen
One gold, one silver, one lead: who thinks
this test easy has already flunked.
Or, you have three daughters, two humming-
birds and the youngest, Cordelia, a grackle.
And here's Cinderella, the ash-princess.
Three guesses, three wishes, three strikes and
you're out. You've been practicing for this
for years, jumping rope, counting out,
learning to waltz, games and puzzles,
tests and chores. And work, in which strain
and ease fill and drain the body like air
having its way with the lungs. And now?
Your palms are mossy with sweat.
The more you think the less you understand.
It's your only life you must choose, daily.
Freud, father of psychoanalysis,
the study of self-deception and survival,
saw the wish-fulfillment in this theme:
that we can choose death and make what we can't
refuse a trophy to self-knowledge, grey,
malleable, dense with low tensile strength
and poisonous in every compound.
And that a vote for death elects love.
If death is the mother of love (Freud wrote
more, and more lovingly, on mothers
than on fathers), she is also the mother
of envy and gossip and spite, and she
loves her children equally. It isn't mom
who folds us finally in her arms,
and it is we who are elected.
Is love the reward, or the test itself?
That kind of thought speeds our swift lives
along. The August air is stale in
the slack leaves, and a new moon thin
as a fingernail-paring tilts orange
and low in the rusty sky, and the city
is thick with trysts and spats,
and the banked blue fires of TV sets,
and the anger and depression that bead
on the body like an acid dew when it's hot.
Tonight it seems that love is what's
missing, the better half. But think
with your body: not to be dead is to be
sexual, vivid, tender and harsh, a riot
of mixed feelings, and able to choose.
Masterful
They say you can't think and hit at the same time,
but they're wrong: you think with your body, and the whole
wave of impact surges patiently through you
into your wrists, into your bat, and meets the ball
as if this exact and violent tryst had been a fevered
secret for a week. The wrists "break," as the batting
coaches like to say, but what they do is give away
their power, spend themselves, and the ball benefits.
When Ted Williams took—we should say "gave"—
batting practice, he'd stand in and chant to himself
"My name is Ted Fucking Ballgame and I'm the best
grim, lining them out pitch after pitch, crouching
and u
ncoiling from the sweet ferocity of excellence.
An Elegy for Bob Marley
In an elegy for a musician,
one talks a lot about music,
which is a way to think about time
instead of death or Marley,
and isn't poetry itself about time?
But death is about death and not time.
Surely the real fuel for elegy
is anger to be mortal.
No wonder Marley sang so often
of an ever-arriving future, that verb tense
invented by religion and political rage.
Soon come. Readiness is all,
and not enough. From the urinous
dust and sodden torpor
of Trenchtown, from the fruitpeels
and imprecations, from cunning,
from truculence, from the luck
to be alive, however, cruelly,
Marley made a brave music—
a rebel music, he called it,
though music calls us together,
however briefly—and a fortune.
One is supposed to praise the dead
in elegies for leaving us their songs,
though they had no choice; nor could
the dead bury the dead if we could pay
them to. This is something else we can't
control, another loss, which is, as someone
said in hope of consolation,
only temporary, though the same phrase
could be used of our lives and bodies
and all that we hope survives them.
Wrong
There's some wrong that can't be salved,
something irreversible besides aging.
This salt, like a light in the wound it rankles....
It seems the wound might exist to uncover
the salt, the anger, the petulance we hoard
cell by cell, treasure the body can bury.
As J. Paul Getty knew, the meek will
inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.
And what's our love for the future but greed,
who can't let go the unbearable past?
By itself wrong spreads nearly five pages
in the OED, and meant in its ancestral forms
curved, bent, the rib of a ship—neither
straight, nor true, but apt for its work.
The heart's full cargo is so immense it's not
hard to feel the weight of the word
shift, and we might as well admit it's easy
to think of the spites and treacheries
and worse the poised word had to bear
lest some poor heart break unexplained, inept.
It's wrong to sleep late and wake like a fog,
and to start each paragraph of a letter with I,
and wrong to be cruel to others, the swarms
of others damp from their mutual exhalations,
and wrong to complain more than once
if others are cruel to you, wrong to be lonely,
to come home in spirals and not to unscrew
but to whistle and twist by yourself like a seed
which the wind will know how to carry
and the wind will know when to drop.
It's too quiet out there. There's something wrong.
I smell a rat. You can't fire me, I quit, the boss
will never pay enough, it's so hot in here I think
I'll take off my job. Then I ripped off her dress, then
I hit her, I was like a wild man, except I was ashamed.
I've read about creeps in the papers, they hear voices
and don't disobey. I don't obey one, not even me,
and I'm all of my voices. Creeps, I said, and Creeps,
I sang, but I'm one. So are you. Let me buy you a beer.
I'll bet you're full of good stories. Let me buy you another.
Even in sleep, the world is smaller. In a dream
I want you to go somewhere with me, and you
won't come. When I wake there's fog at the waists
of the trees, like a sash. There are treetops
and treetrunks, and a smear where the two don't
join. It's wrong to be in this much pain. The bay
is out there somewhere. Yes. I can hear someone
singing badly over the waters. No. It's a radio
with a cracked speaker drilling through the fog,
faithfully towing a lobsterboat to its traps.
Maybe what's wrong, if wrong is the right word,
is that we like to think the body is defending us,
as if when some part of the world gets in you
that shouldn't, you're done for, and so
your antibodies run wild and do not stop
when the work they're designed for is done,
but they rage against the very body. What
little I know of the mind, I know it sometimes
works like that, if works is the right word,
and it is. Not the body, nor the mind, has a boss.
What's wrong is to live by correction, to be good
for a living—proofreader, inspector of public works—,
to go into the tunnels of error like a rat terrier
and come out and know you will be fed for it.
Sop, mash, some dark velvety food rich as bogbottom,
some archival soup with one of every nutrient,
an unbearably dense Babel of foodstuffs, what you get
for knowing wrong when you see it, for knowing
what to do next and doing it well, for eating
the food and knowing there is nothing wrong with it.
Corms and bulbs into the ground, bone meal
buried with them like a pharaoh's retainers,
and an exact scatter of bark on top for mulch....
And the rank weeds winter down there, too,
as if the mulch were strewn for them, as if
diligent worms broke ground for them; and who's
to say, turning this soil, that they're wrong?
The detection of wrong and the study of error
are lonely chores; though who is wrong by himself,
and who is by himself except in error?
Foreseeable Futures (1987)
Fellow Oddballs
The sodden sleep from which we open like umbrellas,
the way money keeps us in circulation, the scumbled lists
we make of what to do and what, God help us, to undo—
an oddball knows an oddball at forty or at 40,000
paces. Let's raise our dribble glasses. Here's to us,
morose at dances and giggly in committee,
and here's to us on whose ironic bodies new clothes
pucker that clung like shrink wrap to the manikins.
And here's to the threadbare charm of our self-pity.
For when the waiters, who are really actors between parts,
have crumbed for the last time our wobbly tables,
and we've patted our pockets for keys and cigarettes
enough until tomorrow, for the coat-check token
and for whatever's missing, well then, what next? God knows,
who counts us on God's shapely toes, one and one and one.
April in the Berkshires
Dogs skulk, clouds moil and froth, humans
begin to cook—butter, a blue waver of flame,
chopped onions. A styptic rain stings grit and soot
from the noon air. Here and there, like the mess
after a party, pink smudgily tinges the bushes,
but they'll be long weeks of mud and sweaters