They'd slur off line and drift
to a ditch—or creep back down,
the driver squinting out from a half-
open door, his hindsight glazed
by snow on the rear window
and cold breath on the mirrors.
Soon he'd be at the house to use
the phone and peer a few feet out
the kitchen window at the black
night and insulating snow.
Those were the uphill cars. One night
a clump of them had gathered
at the turn and I'd gone out
to make my usual remark—
something smug about pride disguised
as something about machines and snow—
and to be in a clump myself. Then
over the hillbrow one mile up the road
came two pale headlights and the whine
of a car doing fifty downhill through
four tufted inches of snow atop a thin
sheet of new ice. That shut us up,
and we turned in thrall, like grass
in wind, to watch the car and all
its people die. Their only chance
would be never to brake, but to let
the force of their folly carry them, as if
it were a law of physics, where it would,
and since the hill was straight until
the hairpin turn, they might make it
that far, and so we unclumped fast
from the turn and its scatter of abandoned cars;
and down the hill it came, the accident.
How beautifully shaped it was, like an arrow,
this violent privation and story
I would have, and it was only beginning.
It must have been going seventy when it
somehow insinuated through the cars
we'd got as far away from as we could,
and it left the road where the road left
a straight downhill line. Halfway
down the Morgans' boulder- and stump-
strewn meadow it clanged and yawed,
one door flew open like a wing, and then
it rolled and tossed in the surf of its last
momentum, and there was no noise from it.
The many I'd imagined in the car were only one.
A woman wiped blood from his crushed
face with a Tampax, though he was dead,
and we stood in the field and stuttered.
Back at the turn two collies barked
at the snowplow with its blue light
turning mildly, at the wrecker, at the police
to whom we told our names and what we saw.
So we began to ravel from the stunned
calm single thing we had become
by not dying, and the county cleared
the turn and everyone went home, and, while
the plow dragged up the slick hill the staunch
clank of its chains, the county cleared the field.
Twins
One may be a blameless
bachelor, and it is but a
step to Congreve.
—Marianne Moore
When I was eleven and they
were twenty-two, I fell in love
with twins: that's how I thought
of them, in sum, five run-on
syllables, Connie-and-Bonnie.
They were so resolutely given
as a pair—like father-and-
mother—I never thought to prefer one,
warm in her matching bed
like half an English muffin
in a toaster, though Bonnie
was blonde, lithe, walleyed,
angular, and fey. And Connie
was brunette, shiny-eyed, and
shy, as most true flirts
describe themselves, over and over.
And shouldn't love be an exclusive
passion? To fall in love with twins
made me unfaithful in advance?
It made me paralyzed, or I made
it—my love doubled forever
into mathematical heaven—paralysis.
Frocks rhyme and names confuse
and the world is thicker with sad
futures than lost pasts. And I,
who hoarded names like marbles,
how could I say what I knew?
Indeed, how can I say it now?
I knew the two meanings of cleave.
I looked into those eyes I loved,
two brown, two blue, and shut my own
(grey) from any light but mine
and walked straight home and kissed
my parents equally and climbed my growing
body's staircase to the very tip of sleep.
Our Strange and Lovable Weather
for Daniel Halpern
First frost, and on the windows snow
is visible in embryo,
though Seattle has only one
snow a winter. Mostly we have
cool rain in fog, in drizzle, in mist
and sometimes in fat, candid drops
that lubricate our long, slow springs.
But I'm way ahead of myself.
From behind windows one season
is another. You have to go
out to feel if this is winter
gathering or giving itself up,
though whichever it may be, soon
enough turmoil under leafmold
begins, and the bulbs swell, and up
the longings of themselves spring's first
flowers shinny. February.
Here you can fill in the bad jokes
about weather and change, about
mixed feelings, about time, about
not wanting to die, and by the time
you've run round their circumference
the year has turned to May, and night
drags its feet home slow and dusty
as a schoolboy. But soon it's June,
usually rainy here, then summer
arrives in earnest, as we say,
with its long, flat light pulling
like an anchor against the sun.
How can the year have gone so fast?
Already the cool nights tuned
so perfectly to deep sleep admit
a few slivers of cold, then swatches,
and then they meet and are patterns.
First frost once again, we think.
Time to clear the clog of wet leaves
from the gutters, time to turn off
the water to the outside faucets.
And time to think how what we know
about our lives from watching this
is true enough to live them by,
though anyplace lies about its weather,
just as we lie about our childhoods,
and for the same reason: we can't
say surely what we've undergone,
and need to know, and need to know.
Descriptive Passages
Your hair is drunk again,
someone explains to me.
And it's not only my hair:
no matter how rack-natty
my clothes were, they're rum-
pled on my body, dressed up
like a child performing
for its parents' guests.
How much of childhood
is spent on tiptoe! Clean up,
wise up, speak up, wake up
and act your age. But also one
is uppity: something's gone
to his head, a bubble
in the bloodstream, a scratch
in the record, a bad habit.
No theory can explain
personality, which expands
to include, if it can, all
its contradictory urges.
It's so hard to think about
this fact that we don't:
we use crude code. The one
with the limp, with big ti
ts,
with the drunk hair. And we love
so much to be loved—
or failing that, remembered—
that we limp a little, and thrust
out our chests. On me it looks
good, as the hunchback said.
Use description carefully.
For example, today as I
glower out at morning fog
I can feel the fatigue
of matter, how glum a job
endurance is. The gulls
over Lake Union look heavy
and disconsolate, like office life.
Is this all there is, I could ask,
because if it is I've saved
myself so much response
and responsibility.
It's harder than we think
to name our children, but how
can we be accurate?
They'll find stories to live by.
I envision my children
sitting loosely in middle age.
I give them good wine to talk by,
I've lit them a fire if it's cold.
I can't leave them alone, I think
from the grave: a father's work
is never done. One son turns
to the other and says, You know
how I always think of him?
I remember his drunk hair.
There's a pause. It's harder
than we think to name
our emotions. There were those
sentimental poems he wrote
about us, and his drunk hair,
the other son says, proud
for the intimate talk and sad
for how little such talk says,
though it wasn't drunk that often.
Good Company
At dinner we discuss marriage.
Three men, three women (one couple
among us), all six of us wary.
"I use it to frighten myself."
Our true subject is loneliness.
We've been divorced 1.5 times
per heart. "The trick the last half
of our lives is to get our work done."
The golfer we saw from the car
this afternoon, his angered
face in bloom with blood, lashed
his strict ball for going where he'd hit it.
We watched him turn from a worse shot
yet and give us a look like our own,
and on we dawdled through
the afternoon toward dinner,
here. Here means the married
couple's house, of course.
The rest of us use so much time
being alone we don't entertain much.
The wind loops and subsides.
"What a fine night to sleep!"
Upstairs a book falls off a shelf.
We'll be sitting here ages hence:
the scent of lawns, good company, Sancerre,
fitful breezes suddenly earnest.
"What sense does marriage make now?
Both people want jobs, the sad
pleasures of travel, and also
want homes. They don't want dark houses
or to live with cats. They have lives
waiting up for them at home.
Take me, I must read half an hour
of Horace before I can sleep."
The conversation luffs. The last
bottle of wine was probably too much
but God we're happy here.
"My husband stopped the papers
and flea-bathed the dog
before he left." One of us has a friend
whose analyst died in mid-session,
non-directive to the end.
Now we're drifting off to our nine lives
and more. Melodramatic wind,
bright moon, dishes to do, a last
little puddle of brandy or not,
and the cars amble home:
the door, the stairs, the sheets
aglow with reticence and moonlight,
and the bed full to its blank brim
with the violent poise of dreams.
School Figures
for Susan
It's best to work before dawn:
fresh ice, its surface silvered
and opaque, and you scritch out
onto the milky ice, not avid
for grammar, too sleepy for speech.
It's not that you're marking time;
you're melting it grainy under
your runners. Each time you sweep
in your half-sleep around the figure
eight, your blades are duller
and record how far you've slid
from your margin of error, zero.
That's why you skate it backwards.
again, alert enough to numb
every muscle memory but one.
So much learning is forgetting
the many mistakes for the few
lines clear of the flourishes
you thought were style, but were
only personality, indelible as
it seemed. Who but you could
forge those stern exclusions? Where
the line of concentration crosses
itself, cutting and tying its knot
both, there learning and forgetting
are one attention, and are the thrall
that pulls you stiff-ankled over
the ice before dawn, turning
over your shoulder as if you could
skate back into your first
path and get it right for once.
Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal
It's so cold my cock is furled
like a nutmeat and cold,
for all its warm aspirations
and traffic of urine. 37
years old and it takes me a second
to find it, the poor pink slug,
so far from the brash volunteer
of the boudoir. I arc a few
finishing stutters into the water.
Already they're converted,
opaque and chill. How com-
modious the dark universe is,
and companionable the stars.
How drunk I am. I shake
my shriveled nozzle and three
drops lurk out like syllables
from before there were languages. Snug
in my pants it will leak a whole sentence
in Latin. How like a lock-keeper's
life a penis biography would be,
bucolic and dull. What the penis
knows of sex is only arithmetic.
The tongue can kiss and tell.
But the imagination has,
as usual, most of the fun.
It makes discriminations,
bad jokes. It knows itself
to be tragic and thereby silly.
And it can tell a dull story well,
drop by reluctant drop.
What it can't do is be a body
nor survive time's acid work
on the body it enlivens,
I think as I try not to pitch
my wine-dulled body and wary
imagination with it into the inky
canal by the small force
of tugging my zipper up.
How much damage to themselves
the body and imagination
can absorb, I think as I drizzle
to sleep, and how much
the imagination makes
of its body of work
a place to recover itself.
The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives
I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star—the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package.
He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body, like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but sometimes I think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.
Bmp Bmp
for James McGarrell
Lugubriously enough they're playing
Yes We Have No Bananas at deadpan
half-tempo, and Bechet's beginning
to climb like a fakir's snake,
as if that boulevard-broad vibrato
of his could claim space in the air,
out of the low register. Here comes
a spurious growl from the trombone,
and here comes a flutter of tourist
barrelhouse from the pianist's left hand.
Life is fun when you're good at something
good. Soon they'll do the Tin Roof Blues
and use their 246 years
of habit and convention hard.
Now they're headed out and everyone
stops to let Bechet inveigle his way
through eight bars unaccompanied
and then they'll doo dah doo dah doo
bmp bmp. Bechet's in mid-surge as usual
by his first note, which he holds, wobbles
and then pinches off to a staccato spat
with the melody. For a moment this stupid,
lumpy and cynically composed little money-