blank for some emotion
no zoo can induce.
In the wild their bloat outlopes
hunger, but here they're fed
exactly, cut short
of the smug digestive stupors
across which they drag their swag-
ridden bellies to a sleep
that smells like vomit,
acrid, carrion-soaked, stale.
They sleep off as much as they can.
The Cincinnati lions pace as clocks pace.
They measure themselves again
and again, and they fit.
A Walk with John Logan, 1973
Roads lined by dirtied curds of snow,
I remember that. The sky over the Finger
Lakes was marled and low. I'd made pâté
for the after-reading party the night before
and my dog, that genial cadge, had slurped
a good half-pound of it, and ever since
had farted like a pan of popcorn in full
fusillade. Even in trudge, John was a scholar:
he spun out intermittently a short-
breathed paragraph on flatulence in the Greek
Anthology with, like a maraschino cherry
in a drink, an apt allusion to "Three Essays
on Infant Sexuality." I remember being young
and stupid, though time of course applied
its usual and savage remedies. John, who
waddled wisely along Krums Corners Rd.
with me, is dead, ditto the dog, and I'm
the age now he was then. I walk a little
like a duck myself, arthritic hip and all,
and just a month ago a basketball opponent
less than half my age told me, "Nice shot,
sir." I was short of breath and watery
of legs, playing a bland-faced oaf
such as I'd been myself and proud of it.
The voice I heard in my head was John's,
reedy and pinched like a bad clarinetist's,
the way George Lewis's tone or Pee Wee
Russell's tone, to name two sentimental
geniuses, was watery and flat. "They got
it wrong, the rhetoricians," he was saying.
Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950
Each dockpost comes with a pelican
who seems to my eight-year-old eye
to be a very distinguished bat. And then
one languidly unrumples itself and flies
off like a purposeful overcoat.
Signs on the causeway warn not to eat
the oleander leaves. A new place means
new poisons. And the palmetto grass,
and the topknotted bromeliads, and
the jellyfish like clouds of clear brains
trailing rain.... The scenery is in another
language, and I'm still besotted by
my own, half books and half Ohio.
A children's work is never done, so
I'm up early, stubbing my whole foot
on the sprinkler caps in the rosetted
grass. Is it too early to cry? Do I talk
too much? What does it mean to be full
of yourself, or on vacation?
There's something from church—a living
coal on the tongue—I remember. What's
a dead coal? It won't be breakfast
until the grown-ups break their blur and crust
of sleep and come downstairs, and al-
ready, once again, I'm given to language.
Though how could they have saved me?
I'm staunch in the light-blanched yard
and they're in sleep, through which their last
dreams of the morning drain,
and I'm in the small fort of my sunburnt body.
Jilted
How quickly the landscape fills
with figures, with code, with the palpable
unspoken, where once trees,
for example, bore in each leaf
only a little slow factory
making work for itself tomorrow,
one day ahead of itself like trust.
Bent to themselves like that,
if you will come or not, or be late
merely, or disappear?
Now that trees
stand for something I can't
understand, and so must be figures
for articulate loss, they seem
as tragic as we are, emblems
rather than habits. If again this time
you don't come, perhaps it will be
because you are already
allegorical, and I will turn here
like a weathervane, a rooster
soldered to his useless work.
A Happy Childhood (1984)
Good
I'd seen wallpaper—I had buckaroos all over my
bedroom—but my friend the only child had ceiling paper;
in the dark he had a flat sky, if stars make
a sky. Six feet above his bed, where the soul hovers
when the body's in doubt, he had a phosphorous
future, a lifetime of good marks for being alone.
He's an only child, you know, my parents would say.
OK, but I slept with no lid, like a shoe left out-
doors or an imaginary friend, with no sky to hold
him down nor light by which to watch him drift away.
Listen, my little mongoose, I know
the difference between this and love,
for I've had love, and had it taken away.
This feeling-sorry-for-ourselves-but-outward
is one of desire's shiftier shapes:
see how the deep of night is crept upon our love-
making, and how we believe what we disbelieve,
and find in our hopeful arms what we'd thought
to have thrown away, my stolen good,
the map by which we'll part, and love others.
Romantic, you could call him,
since he walks the balance beam
of his obsession like a triumphant
drunk passing a police test;
though, like a man in love
with a woman fools would find plain,
he doesn't turn aside for beauty;
he's a classicist, and studies
nightly a book so persistently good
he can't exhaust it, nor can it him.
Most of the time nothing happens here, we're fond
of saying. I love those stories and poems
an editor for Scrotum or Terrorist Quarterly
would describe that way, and besides,
every time in all my life I've said or heard
the phrase it's been a good lie, meaning
at least that crime and melodrama rates
are low enough that we can see, if we want,
the huge slow wheel of daily life, love and boredom,
turning deep in the ship-eating waters.
"The whole city of London uses the words rich
and good as equivalent terms," wrote Wesley
(1788), who failed to include in his whole city
the "honest poor," condemned by such a name
to improve their diet at the cost of honor.
"My good man" means "good for his debts,"
and not for nothing. What better faith
is there for the future than the braid of debt
we make, all of us? The day of reckoning
had better take its time: we're good for it.
I shouldn't pick on myself, but I do:
pimples and scabs and wens, warts, pustules,
the duff of the body sifting out, the dust
and sawdust of the spirit, blotches and slurs
and liver spots, the scar from the dogbite,
the plum-colored birthmark.... All this scuff
and tarnish and waste, t
hese shavings
and leavings.... Deep in my body the future
is intact, in smolder, in the very bone,
and I dig for it like a dog, good dog.
After a week of sullen heat, the drenched air
bunched as if it needed to sneeze but couldn't,
the sky gives up its grip on itself and—good—
rain swabs the thick air sweet. The body's dirty
windows are flung open, and the spirit squints
out frankly. A kind of wink runs through
the whole failing body, and the spirit begins,
under its breath at first, talking to itself.
Mumbles, snickers, declamations, and next
it's singing loudly into the glistening streets.
Hi Mom, as athletes say on TV,
and here's a grateful hello to my mild
and courageous father. While I'm at it
I'd like to thank my teachers (though
not some—they know who they are) and
my friends, who by loving me freed
my poems from seeking love. Instead
they go their own strange ways
to peculiar moments like this one, when
the heart's good manners are their guide.
Sympathetic
In Throne of Blood, when they come to kill
Macbeth, the screen goes white. No sound.
It could be that the film has broken,
so some of us look back at the booth,
but it's fog on the screen, and from it,
first in one corner and then in another,
sprigs bristle. The killers close in further—
we're already fogged in by the story—
using pine boughs for camouflage,
and Birnam Forest comes to Dunsinane.
Even in Japanese, tragedy works:
he seems to extrude the arrows
that kill him—he's like a pincushion—,
as if we grew our failures and topples,
as if there were no larger force than will,
as if his life seemed strange to us
until he gave it up, half-king, half-
porcupine. We understand. We too were fooled
by the fog and the pines, and didn't
recognize ourselves, until too late, as killers.
Whiplash
That month he was broke,
so when the brakes to his car
went sloshy, he let them go.
Next month his mother came
to visit, and out they went
to gawk, to shop, to have something
to do while they talked besides
sitting down like a seminar
to talk. One day soon he'd fix
the brakes, or—as he joked
after nearly bashing a cab
and skidding widdershins
through the intersection
of Viewcrest and Edgecliff—
they'd fix him, one of these
oncoming days. We like
to explain our lives to ourselves,
so many of our fictions
are about causality—chess
problems (where the ?! after
White's 16th move marks
the beginning of disaster),
insurance policies, box scores,
psychotherapy ("Were your
needs being met in this
relationship?"), readers' guides
to pity and terror—, and about
the possibility that because
aging is relentless, logic too
runs straight and one way only.
By this hope to know how
our disasters almost shatter us,
it would make sense to say
the accident he drove into
the day after his mother left
began the month he was broke.
Though why was he broke?
Because of decisions he'd made
the month before to balance
decisions the month before that,
and so on all the way back
to birth and beyond, for his
mother and father brought
to his life the luck of theirs.
And so when his car one slick day
oversped its dwindling ability
to stop itself and smacked two
parked cars and lightly kissed
another, like a satisfying
billiards shot, and all this action
(so slow in compression and
preparation) exploded so quickly,
it seemed not that his whole life
swam or skidded before him,
but that his whole life was behind
him, like a physical force,
the way a dinosaur's body
was behind its brain and the news
surged up and down its vast
and clumsy spine like an early
version of the blues; indeed,
indeed, what might he do
but sing, as if to remind himself
by the power of anthem that the body's
disparate and selfish provinces
are connected. And that's how
the police found him, full-throated,
dried blood on his white suit
as if he'd been caught in a rust-
storm, song running back and forth
along his hurt body like the action
of a wave, which is not water,
strictly speaking, but a force
that water welcomes and displays.
Bad
Dew, sweat, grass-prickle, tantrums,
lemonade. One minute summer is all balm
and the next it's boredom and fury,
the library closed, the back yard blandly
familiar. The horizonless summer
recedes with a whoosh on all sides
like air being sucked out of a house
by a tornado, and there in the dead
center stands a child with a crumpling
face, whom somebody soon will call bad.
Beloved of mothers, too good in school and manners
to be true, can this unctuous wimp be real?
He'd be less dangerous if he had no good
at all in him, this level teaspoonful of virtue,
this festoon of fellowship, most likely
to succeed by filling in the blanks and hollows
like a fog or flood. Every morning he counts
his blessings backwards: he's not a crook,
not a recent thief, hates only the despised, and
(here it comes up his throat like a flag) he's not bad.
To pay a bad debt with bad coin, to breathe
bad air between bites (bad bites, an ortho-
dontist would say) of bad food, or worse,
food gone bad....
By such a token bad
means discreditable, that hope is a bad lien
on belief, as if there were no evil but mis-
judgment, bad budgeting,
or in the case
of those teeth, bad genes. But let's say it:
evil exists, because choice does, and because
luck does and the rage that is luck's wake.
Here's bad luck for you: on your way to buy
shoelaces you're struck by a would-be suicide
as you pass beneath the Smith Tower. He's saved
and you're maimed, and long after he's released
he comes to visit you in the hospital and you'd
rip his lungs out of his trunk with your poor bare
hands if they'd obey you anymore, though as luck
would have it, they won't. Or, after the operation
cleared out every one of his cancer cells, a new crop
of them blooms along the line of the incision.
All the wrapping paper stuffed into the fireplace
Christmas morning, and all the white and brown
bags, the wax and butcher's paper, the shimmers
and crinkles of spent foil, plastic wrap in shrivels,
the envelopes ripped open 2,500 miles away.
And the letters unfolded which are neither true
nor false, bad nor better, but all that the hurt heart
would cook or eat, or give and take. The ghosts
that swirl and stall and dive in the wind
like daunted kites. That we are all old haunts.
The granular fog gives each streetlight
an aura of bright haze, like a rumor:
it blobs as far as it can from its impulse.
The way gossip is truest about who says it,
the world we see is about the way we see;
if this is truth, it's easier than we thought.
What's bad about such truth is needing
to have it, as if it were money or love,