before a finch dips and percolates through
the backyard air like the talk of old friends.
It feels like the very middle, the exact
fulcrum of our lives. Our places wait for us
in the yard, like shadows furled in bud.
On the chill wands of the forsythia pale
yellow tatters wave. How long has Mr. Forsyth
been dead? Onto the lawn we go.
Lights, camera, action: the story of our lives.
Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig
Behind its snout like a huge button,
like an almost clean plate, the pig
looks candid compared to the author,
and why not? He has a way with words,
but the unspeakable pig, squat
and foursquare as a bathtub,
squints frankly. Nobody knows
the trouble it's seen, this rained-out
pork roast, this ham escaped into
its corpulent jokes, its body of work.
The author is skinny and looks serious:
what will he say next? The copious pig
has every appearance of knowing,
from his pert, coiled tail to the wispy tips
of his edible ears, but the pig isn't telling.
The Accompanist
Don't play too much, don't play
too loud, don't play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.
She used to give me her smoky
eye when I got boisterous,
so I learned to play on tip-
toe and to play the better half
of what I might. I don't like
to complain, though I notice
that I get around to it somehow.
We made a living and good music,
both, night after night, the blue
curlicues of smoke rubbing their
staling and wispy backs
against the ceilings, the flat
drinks and scarce taxis, the jazz life
we bitch about the way Army pals
complain about the food and then
re-up. Some people like to say
with smut in their voices how playing
the way we did at our best is partly
sexual. OK, I could tell them
a tale or two, and I've heard
the records Lester cut with Lady Day
and all that rap, and it's partly
sexual but it's mostly practice
and music. As for partly sexual,
I'll take wholly sexual any day,
but that's a duet and we're talking
accompaniment. Remember "Reckless
Blues"? Bessie Smith sings out "Daddy"
and Louis Armstrong plays back "Daddy"
as clear through his horn as if he'd
spoken it. But it's her daddy and her
story. When you play it you become
your part in it, one of her beautiful
troubles, and then, however much music
can do this, part of her consolation,
the way pain and joy eat off each other's
plates, but mostly you play to drunks,
to the night, to the way you judge
and pardon yourself, to all that goes
not unsung, but unrecorded.
Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri on Ice
If dragonflies can mate atop the surface tension
of water, surely these tons of bison can mince
across the river, their fur peeling in strips like old
wallpaper, their huge eyes adjusting to how far
they can see when there's no big or little bluestem,
no Indian grass nor prairie cord grass to plod through.
Maybe because it's bright in the blown snow
and swirling grit, their vast heads are lowered
to the gray ice: nothing to eat, little to smell.
of running pronghorn swerve like a river rounding
a meander and see better what I mean. But
bison are a deeper, deliberate water, and there will
never be enough water for any West but the one
into which we watch these bison carefully disappear.
Caddies' Day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio
On Mondays even the rich work,
we'd joke around the caddy shack,
though our idea of the rich
was Buick dealers we resented
for their unappeasable daughters.
Mondays the club was closed
except to us, who toiled around
its easy eighteen holes: three hills,
six traps. The water hazard was the pool.
We'd play as slowly as we could,
as if to stretch a day of rest
weeklong. That's any Monday but
the one Bruce Ransome came up
from the bottom of the pool
like a negative rising in a tank,
his body clear, dead, abstract.
Our ignorance lay all around us
like a landscape. So this
is the surface of earth, this loam
so fecund it's almost money,
the top half dredged from Canada
by kindly glaciers, the bottom
ours by blind luck, nature's version
of justice. So this is the first death.
And there I was, green as the sick
and dying elephant in the Babar
book I thought I had outgrown.
That elephant was so wrinkled
he might have drowned over and over,
like a character in a story
whom the author had made unlucky.
The lucky stand in a green stupor
like a beautiful forest. And
their gossip is about how the lucky
link arms, and the living, how the surface
bears us up from Monday to Monday
like a story about persistence,
so that the long work of memory
goes on, its boredom and its courage
and its theology of luck, which
is finally a contest that luck wins.
Do you want my premature stroke?
Do I want your retarded child?
Do you want Bruce Ransome green
in your dowsing arms you can't link
anymore with mine, they're so full
of death-rinsed Bruce, or do you want
to lay him down forever,
one long Monday to the next
and to the next one after that,
and let the long week adhere
to your fingers like grime, like matter's
fingerprints, like manual labor,
like an entire life's work?
Dog Life
Scuffed snout, infected ear, ticks like interest
on a loan. Butt of jokes that would, forgive me,
raise hair on a bald dog. Like the one about the baby
so ugly that to get a dog to play with it,
they had to tie a pork chop around the baby's neck.
Or, get this, when you're not working like a dog,
you're dogging it. Yet those staunch workers,
human feet, are casually called dogs, and they're
like miners or men who work in submarines,
hard men who call each other sons of bitches
when they're mad. No wonder it's not loyalty
to dogs that dogs are famous for, since it's men
who've made dogs famous. And don't we under-
stand about having masters, and having food?
Masters are almost good enough for us.
Recovery Room
How bright it would be, I'd been warned.
To my left an old woman keened steadily,
elivered
false and stark balm to her crumpled ear:
You'll be all right. Freshly filleted, we lay
drug-docile on our rolling trays, each boat
becalmed in its slip. I was numb waist-down
to wherever I left off, somewhere between my waist
and Budapest, for I was pointed feet-first east.
I had the responsibility of legs, like tubes
of wet sand, but no sensation from them.
Anyone proud of his brain should try to drag
his body with it before bragging. I had to wait
for my legs and bowels and groin to burn
not with their usual restlessness but
back toward it from anesthetic null. I felt—
if feel is the right verb here—like a diver
serving time against the bends. And O
there were eight of us parked parallel
as piano keys against the west wall of that
light-shrill room, and by noon we were seven,
though it took me until I got to the surface
to miss her. Especially if half of me's been trans-
planted by Dr. Flowers, the anesthesiologist,
I'm divided, forgetful. I hated having an equator,
below which my numb bowels stalled and my bladder
dully brimmed. A terrible remedy for these
drug-triggered truancies was "introduced,"
as the night nurse nicely put it, and all
the amber night I seeped into a plastic pouch,
and by dawn, so eager was I to escape, and ever
the good student, I coaxed my bowels to turn
a paltry dowel. Here was proof for all of us:
my legs were mine to flee on once again.
Even a poet can't tell you how death enters
an ear, but an old woman whose grating voice
I hated and whose pain I feared died next to me
while I waited like a lizard for the first fizzles
of sensation from my lower, absent, better half:
and like a truculent champagne,
the bottom of my body loosed a few
petulant bubbles, then a few more,
and then.... You know the rest.
Soon they let me go home and I did.
Welcome back, somebody said. Back? Back?
Black Box
Because the cockpit, like the snowy village in a paperweight,
parodies the undomed world outside, and because
even a randomly composed society like Air Florida
flight #7 needs minutes for its meeting, the tape
in the black box slithers and loops with its slow,
urinary hiss like the air-filtering system in a fall-
out shelter. What's normally on the tape? Office life
at 39,000 feet, radio sputter and blab, language
on automatic pilot. Suppose the flight should fail.
Cosseted against impact and armored against fire,
the black box records not time but history. Bad choice.
The most frequent last word on the black box
tape is "Mother." Will this change if we get
more female pilots? Who knows? But here's
the best exchange: "We're going down." "I know."
Vasectomy
After the vas deferens is cut, the constantly
manufactured sperm cells die into the bloodstream
and the constant body produces antibodies
to kill them. Dozens of feet of coiled wiring
need to be teased out and snipped at the right spot,
and then, local anesthetic winding down, the doc
has to stuff it all back in like a flustered motorist
struggling to refold a road map. But never mind,
you'll fire blanks forever after. At first you may feel
peeled and solitary without your gang of unborn
children, so like the imaginary friends of childhood
and also like those alternate futures you'll never
live out and never relinquish because they're company,
and who'd blame you preferring company to love?
Most of the other animals live in groups we've named
so lavishly we must love them. Lions: a pride.
Foxes: a skulk. Larks: an exaltation. And geese:
a skein in the sky and a gaggle on the ground.
Venereal nouns, they're called, for the power Venus
had to provoke allegiances. But the future comes
by subtraction. The list dwindles of people
you'd rather be than you. Nobody in a dream
is dead, so when you wake at 5:00 A.M. to scuffle
across the hall and pee, to lower your umber line
and reel it back in dry, and then to lie back down
and bob like a moored boat two hours more,
you think how if you brought them all—the dead,
the living, the unborn—promiscuously on stage
as if for bows, what a pageant they'd make!
They would. They do. But by then you're back to sleep.
Blues If You Want (1989)
Nabokov's Blues
The wallful of quoted passages from his work,
with the requisite specimens pinned next
to their literary cameo appearances, was too good
a temptation to resist, and if the curator couldn't,
why should we? The prose dipped and shimmered
and the "flies," as I heard a buff call them, stood
at lurid attention on their pins. If you love to read
and look, you could be happy a month in that small
room. One of the Nabokov photos I'd never seen:
he's writing (left-handed! why did I never trouble
to find out?) at his stand-up desk in the hotel
apartment in Montreux. The picture's mostly
of his back and the small wedge of face that shows
brims with indifference to anything not on the page.
The window's shut. A tiny lamp trails a veil of light
over the page, too far away for us to read.
We also liked the chest of specimen drawers
labeled, as if for apprentice Freudians,
"Genitalia," wherein languished in phials
the thousands he examined for his monograph
on the Lycaenidae, the silver-studded Blues.
And there in the center of the room a carillon
of Blues rang mutely out. There must have been
three hundred of them. Amanda's Blue was there,
and the Chalk Hill Blue, the Karner Blue
(Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov),
a Violet-Tinged Copper, the Mourning Cloak,
an Echo Azure, the White-Lined Green Hairstreak,
the Cretan Argus (known only from Mt. Ida:
in the series Nabokov did on this beauty
he noted for each specimen the altitude at which
it had been taken), and as the ads and lovers say,
"and much, much more." The stilled belle of the tower
was a Lycaeides melissa melissa. No doubt
it's an accident Melissa rhymes, sort of, with Lolita.
The scant hour we could lavish on the Blues
flew by, and we improvised a path through cars
and slush and boot-high berms of mud-blurred snow
to wherever we went next. I must have been mute,
or whatever I said won from silence nothing
it mourned to lose. I was back in that small
room, vast by love of each flickering detail,
each genital dusting to nothing, the turn,
like a worm's or caterpillar's, of each phrase.
I stood up to my ankles in sludge pooled
over a stopped sewer grate and thought—
wouldn't you know it—about love and art:
you can be ruined ("ru
rnt," as we said in south-
western Ohio) by a book or improved by
a butterfly. You can dodder in the slop,
septic with a rage not for order but for the love
the senses bear for what they do, for the detail
that's never annexed, like a reluctant crumb
to a vacuum cleaner, to a coherence.
You can be bead after bead on perception's rosary.
This is the sweet ache that hurts most, the way
desire burns bluely at its phosphorescent core:
just as you're having what you wanted most,
you want it more and more until that's more
than you, or it, or both of you, can bear.
39,000 Feet
The cap'n never drawls, We're seven miles
or so above the earth and weigh more than
the town I grew up in. He says, We've reached
our cruising altitude. And how we labored
to get there. We held our armrests down lest