they careen around the cabin and terrify
less experienced fliers, an acrid dew formed
on our palms, and none of us in coach
thought the word "steerage." There are certain
things the legal department has decreed
the cap'n must not say to an open microphone—
e.g., Uh-oh — for we have paid for tickets
and that means contract law, and these are
corporate lawyers, not the sorts who buy ad space
on matchbooks. (Spinal Injury? Slither on in
to Tort, Writ and Blackmail for a free
consultation. Hablamos español.) Of course
if they'd done better at law school they wouldn't
work for an airline, they'd be free lances,
though "free" seems a strange word just there
indeed. Once in a hotel lobby in St. Louis
I overheard a celebrity lawyer spit into
a pay phone that he was sick and tired of all
the little people, and if cars look like ants
from a mile up imagine what we look like now—
a needle—if he could see us through the hotel
roof; his rage; the towering curds and paling wisps
of clouds; the blue, sourceless, amniotic light
in which the world, hidden by clouds, seems
from 39,000 feet to float. Drinks and then food
rumbled down the aisle. The cap'n came back
on the horn: How do you like the flight so far?
And lemme ask you all about that squall of baby
protest we rose through to level off. How
did you feel about it, and can you blame
the little imps? We couldn't. We were starting
our descent. Rich as we were in misgiving
when we took off, we liked the chill and lull
of 39,000 feet, for there we felt, I'm not sure
how to say this, somehow American. The law
seemed still a beautiful abstraction, and the land
we sped so far above was like the land we grew
up on, before the malls and apartment
complexes were named for what had been destroyed
to build them: Fair Meadows Mall, Tall Oaks
Townhouses. Trapped in the same experiment,
as ever, we turned to each other
our desperate American friendliness,
now our most spurned export, and rode
down, through tufts and tatters of clouds
and through mild chop, into Detroit, where
cap'n bade us good-bye and then the first-
class passengers deplaned, and then the rest
of us, some with imps and some without.
Mood Indigo
From the porch; from the hayrick where her prickled
brothers hid and chortled and slurped into their young pink
lungs the ash-blond dusty air that lay above the bales
like low clouds; and from the squeak and suck
of the well-pump and from the glove of rust it implied
on her hand; from the dress parade of clothes
in her mothproofed closet; from her tiny Philco
with its cracked speaker and Sunday litany
(Nick Carter, The Shadow, The Green Hornet, Sky King);
from the loosening bud of her body; from hunger,
as they say, and from reading; from the finger
she used to dial her own number; from the dark
loam of the harrowed fields and from the very sky;
it came from everywhere. Which is to say it was
always there, and that it came from nowhere.
It evaporated with the dew, and at dusk when dark
spread in the sky like water in a blotter, it spread, too,
but it came back and curdled with milk and stung
with nettles. It was in the bleat of the lamb, the way
a clapper is in a bell, and in the raucous, scratchy
gossip of the crows. It walked with her to school and lay
with her to sleep and at last she was well pleased.
If she were to sew, she would prick her finger with it.
If she were to bake, it would linger in the kitchen
like an odor snarled in the deepest folds of childhood.
It became her dead pet, her lost love, the baby sister
blue and dead at birth, the chill headwaters of the river
that purled and meandered and ran and ran until
and it was wholly hers. She kept to her room, as we
learned to say, but now and then she'd come down
and pass through the kitchen, and the screen door
would close behind her with no more sound than
an envelope being sealed, and she'd walk for hours
in the fields like a lithe blue rain, and end up
in the barn, and one of us would go and bring her in.
Housecooling
Those ashes shimmering dully in the fireplace,
like tarnished fish scales? I swept them out.
Those tiny tumbleweeds of dust that stalled
against a penny or a paperclip under the bed?
I lay along the grain of the floorboards
and stared each pill into the vacuum's mouth.
I loved that house and I was moving out.
What do you want to do when you grow up?
they asked, and I never said, I want to haunt
a house. But I grew pale. The way the cops "lift"
fingerprints, that's how I touched the house.
The way one of my sons would stand in front
of me and say, I'm outta here, and he would mean
it, his crisp, heart-creasing husk delivering
a kind of telegram from wherever the rest of him
had gone—that's how I laved and scoured
and patrolled the house, and how I made my small
withdrawals and made my wan way outta there.
And then I was gone. I took what I could.
Each smudge I left, each slur, each whorl, I left
for love, but love of what I cannot say.
Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog
Most of the time he wrote, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I'll never know;
the lax sprawl sleep allowed him
began to set from the edges in,
like a custard, and then he was awake—
me too, of course, wriggling my ears
while he unlocked his bladder and stream
of dopey wake-up jokes. The one
about the wine-dark pee I hated instantly.
I stood at the ready, like a god
in an epic, but there was never much
to do. Oh, now and then I'd make a sure
intervention, save a life, whatever.
But my exploits don't interest you,
and of his life all I can say is that
when he'd poured out his work
the best of it was gone and then he died.
He was a great man and I loved him.
Not a whimper about his sex life—
how I detest your prurience—
but here's a farewell literary tip:
I myself am the model for Penelope.
Don't snicker, you hairless moron,
I know so well what "faithful" means
there's not even a word for it in Dog.
I just embody it. I think you bipeds
have a catch phrase for it: "To thine own self
be true...," though like a blind man's shadow,
the second half is only there for those who know
it's missing. Merely a dog, I'll tell you
what it is: "...as if you had a choice."
&n
bsp; The Blues
What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinet
and boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?
I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelve
you think the heart and memory are different.
"'It's a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,' the Queen remarked." Alice in Wonderland.
Although I knew the way music can fill a room,
even with loneliness, which is of course a kind
of company. I could swelter through an August
afternoon—torpor rising from the river—and listen
to J. J. Johnson and Stan Getz braid variations
on "My Funny Valentine," and feel there in the room
with me the force and weight of what I couldn't
say. What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all around me
like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,
but I was quick and furtive like a fox
who has thirty miles a day metabolism
to burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence
of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless
tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few
bars—they were enough—of music. Looking back,
it almost seems as though I could remember—
but this can't be; how could I bear it?—
the future toward which I'd clatter
with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,
a brave man and a coward both,
to break and break my metronomic heart
and just enough to learn to love the blues.
Moonlight in Vermont
It's the very end of summer
and one night, probably this week, frost will sear,
like dry ice, a few leaves on trees that forayed
a few feet from the huddle of the woods, and there
they'll be, come morning, waving their red hands
like proud culprits.
One year mosquitoes clung to and trailed from
the walls and ceilings thick as tatty fabric,
and another rain lambasted us derisively
until the sogged lawns steeped like rice
in paddies. But each
year there's a dusk when the moon, like tonight's,
has risen early and every hue and tint of blue
creeps out, like an audience come to music,
to be warmed by the moon's pale fire. A car
or truck whisks
by on 125.
Somebody's hurrying home, I suppose.
Each blue is lined with a deeper blue, the way
an old magician's sleeves might be composed
of handkerchiefs. There's no illusion here.
It's beautiful to watch
and that's reason enough for blue after blue
to blossom, for each decaying swatch
to die into the next. The faster it goes
the less hurry I'm in for home or anywhere.
Like a vast grape the full
moon hangs above an empty Adirondack chair.
By now the moon itself is blue. By this
we mean that we can see in it the full freight
of our unspent love for it, for the blue night,
and for the hour, which is late.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
I love the smoky libidinal murmur
of a jazz crowd, and the smoke coiling
and lithely uncoiling like a choir
of vaporous cats. I like to slouch back
with that I'll-be-here-awhile tilt
and sip a little Scotch and listen,
keeping time and remembering the changes,
and now and then light up a cigarette.
It's the reverse of music: only a small
blue slur comes out—parody and rehearsal,
both, for giving up the ghost. There's a nostril-
billowing, sulphurous blossom from the match,
a dismissive waggle of the wrist,
and the match is out. What would I look like
in that thumb-sucking, torpid, eyes-glazed
and happy instant if I could snare myself
suddenly in a mirror, unprepared by vanity
for self-regard? I'd loose a cumulus of smoke,
like a speech balloon in the comic strips,
though I'd be talking mutely to myself,
and I'd look like I love the fuss of smoking:
hands like these, I should be dealing blackjack
for a living. And doesn't habit make us
predictable to ourselves? The stubs pile up
and ashes drift against the ashtray rims
like snow against a snow fence. The boy
who held his breath till he turned blue
has caught a writhing wisp of time itself
in his long-suffering lungs. It'll take years—
he'll tap his feet to music, check his watch
(you can't fire him; he quits), shun fatty foods—
but he'll have his revenge; he's killing time.
School Days
Once those fences kept me in. Mr. Mote
threw a dictionary at me in that room
on the corner, second floor, he and I
hypnotized by spite and everyone else
docile by default, for all we had was
fourth-grade manners: two gasped,
three tittered, Laneta hid her lovely head,
six palely watched their shoes as if they'd
brim and then flood urine, and the rest ...
Good God, I'd forgot the rest. It's been
thirty-some years. The smart-ass afternoon
I loved them all and today all I can remember
is the name of one I loved and one I hated.
Wasn't he right to hurl at me a box
of words? By the time the dictionary spun
to rest under the radiator, its every page
was blank and the silent room was strewn
with print. I can't remember how we found
something to do, to bore up through that pall.
It would be as hard as that to remember
all their names—though, come to think of it,
I can. Isn't that how I got here,
and with you? I'm going to start at the north-
east corner of that hallucinated room
and name them one by one and row by row.
Little Blue Nude
Outside, the crackhead who panhandles an eight-
hour day at 106th and Broadway croons
for Earl, his man, to let him in and make him well.
Soon the super 's son will take his triumvirate
of dogs across the street to crap in Central Park.
Through my wall I'll hear the scrabble of their claws
and the low whirl of near-barks in their throats
as they tug their leashes down the hall and out
the door. The night a burglar forced the gate
across my kitchen window and slithered in to clean
me out, those dogs slept next door like drunken clouds.
I was in Tennessee. When I got off the plane there,
my host glanced at my tiny bag and asked, "Those
all your worldly goods?" I know you didn't ask me
what they took, but you can guess you're going to hear
the list. People tell these stories until they've worn
them out. A TV and a tape deck, two phones,
an answering machine, an alarm clock that didn't
work—these you'd expect, for they can be most
easily swept, like flecks of silt, into the swift
currents of the River Fence. The anomalies
make such lists interesting. These were mine:
two sets of sheets and pillowcases, and a bottle
of Côte
Roti, 1982. Now these were clues. Also
he left my typewriter. And I knew right away
who'd robbed me. The mere pressure of my key
in the lock, before I'd even turned it, swung my door
open and my body knew he'd come in through
the kitchen but left like a guest by the front door.
Tony, my dumpster-diving friend, would bring by
things to sell: a ream of letterhead stationery
from The Children's Aid Society and two half
gallons of orange juice. Three dollars. "Whoo," he'd say.
"Ain't it a wonder what people will throw out."
So you see I was a sort of fence myself. "Being
a writer, you could probably use some paper"
was the way he'd introduced himself. The night
before I left for Tennessee he'd pasted his girlfriend
Shirley in the eye and she came by my apartment
to complain. I gave her some ice cubes nested
in a kitchen towel to hold against her bruise,
and a glass of wine. So that explains the Côte Roti.
As for the sheets, when I confronted Tony,
he yelled at me, "A dick don't have no conscience."