each of which clings to those on whom
enough has long ago, luckily, been spent.
The year I had my impacted wisdom teeth
cracked and tweezered out, I took codeine
for pain and beyond, until a day I could feel
my body faking pain; for which I rewarded it
with codeine. In this exchange the bad
marriage of mind and body was writ large,
and that a good one is work which is work's pay,
and that blame is not an explanation of pain
but a prolonging of pain, and that marriage
isn't a sacrament, although memory is.
When Williams called the tufty, stubbled
ground around the contagious hospital
"the new world," did he mean monumental
Europe was diseased and America needs,
like a fire set against a fire, a home-
made virus? I think so. These may be
the dead, the sick, those gone into rage
and madness, gone bad, but they're our dead
and our sick, and we will slake their lips
with our very hearts if we must, and we must.
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Just as we were amazed to learn
that the skin itself is an organ—
I'd thought it a flexible sack,
always exact—we're stunned
to think the skimpiest mental
event, even forgetting, has meaning.
If one thinks of the sky as scenery,
like photographs of food, one stills it
with that wish and appetite,
but the placid expanse that results
is an illusion. The air is restless
everywhere inside our atmosphere
but the higher and thinner it gets
the less it has to push around
(how else do we see air?) but itself.
It seems that the mind, too,
is like that sky, not shiftless;
and come to think of it, the body
is no slouch at constant commerce,
bicker and haggle, provide and deny.
When we tire of work we should think
how the mind and body relentlessly
work for our living, though since
their labors end in death we greet
their ceaseless fealty with mixed emotions.
Of course the mind must pay attention
to itself, vast sky in the small skull.
In this we like to think we are alone:
evolutionary pride: it's lonely
at the top, self-consciousness. We forget
that the trout isn't beautiful and stupid
but a system of urges that works
even when the trout's small brain is somewhere
else, watching its shadow on the streambed,
maybe, daydreaming of food.
Even when we think we're not,
we're paying attention to everything;
this may be the origin of prayer
(and if we listen to ourselves,
how much in our prayers is well-dressed
complaint, how much we are loneliest Sundays
though whatever we do, say, or forget
is prayer and daily bread):
Doesn't everything mean something?
O God who composed this dense
text, our only beloved planet
—at this point the supplicants look upward—
why have You larded it against our hope
with allusions to itself, and how
can it bear the weight of such
self-reference and such self-ignorance?
Loyal
They gave him an overdose
of anesthetic, and its fog
shut down his heart in seconds.
I tried to hold him, but he was
somewhere else. For so much of love
one of the principals is missing,
it's no wonder we confuse love
with longing. Oh I was thick
with both. I wanted my dog
to live forever and while I was
working on impossibilities
I wanted to live forever, too.
I wanted company and to be alone.
I wanted to know how they trash
a stiff ninety-five-pound dog
and I paid them to do it
and not tell me. What else?
I wanted a letter of apology
delivered by decrepit hand,
by someone shattered for each time
I'd had to eat pure pain. I wanted
to weep, not "like a baby,"
in gulps and breath-stretching
howls, but steadily, like an adult,
according to the fiction
that there is work to be done,
and almost inconsolably.
A Happy Childhood
Babies do not want to hear about babies;
they like to be told of giants and castles.
—Dr. Johnson
No one keeps a secret so well as a child.
—Victor Hugo
My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
"Out out damn Spot," she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air
like a hollyhock, I'm so proud to be loved
like this. The air is tight to my nervous body.
I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded
soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily.
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing
to myself all day like a fieldful of August
insects, just things I whisper, really,
a trance in sneakers. I'm learning
to read from my mother and soon I'll go to school.
I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air
goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself,
a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road-
side park. I love to be called for dinner.
Spot goes out and I go in and the lights
in the kitchen go on and the dark,
which also has a body like a cloud's,
leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow
I'll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges.
Here's a sky no higher than a streetlamp,
and a stack of morning papers cinched by wire.
It's 4:00 A.M. A stout dog, vaguely beagle,
minces over the dry, fresh-fallen snow;
and here's our sleep-sodden paperboy
with his pliers, his bike, his matronly dog,
his unclouding face set for paper route
like an alarm clock. Here's a memory
in the making, for this could be the morning
he doesn't come home and his parents
two hours later drive his route until
they find him asleep, propped against a streetlamp,
his papers all delivered and his dirty paper-
satchel slack, like an emptied lung,
and he blur-faced and iconic in the morning
air rinsing itself a paler and paler blue
through which a last few dandruff-flecks
of snow meander casually down.
The dog squeaks in out of the dark,
snuffling me too me too. And here he goes
home to memory, and to hot chocolate
on which no crinkled skin forms like infant ice,
and to the long and ordinary day,
school, two triumphs and one severe
humiliation on the playground, the past
already growing its scabs, the busride home,
dinner, and evening leading to sleep
like the slide that will spill him out, come June,
into the eye-reddening chlorine waters
of the municipal pool. Here he goes to bed.
Kiss. Kis
s. Teeth. Prayers. Dark. Dark.
Here the dog lies down by his bed,
and sighs and farts. Will he always be
this skinny, chicken-bones?
He'll remember like a prayer
how his mother made breakfast for him
every morning before he trudged out
to snip the papers free. Just as
his mother will remember she felt
guilty never to wake up with him
to give him breakfast. It was Cream
of Wheat they always or never had together.
It turns out you are the story of your childhood
and you're under constant revision,
like a lonely folktale whose invisible folks
are all the selves you've been, lifelong,
shadows in fog, grey glimmers at dusk.
And each of these selves had a childhood
it traded for love and grudged to give away,
now lost irretrievably, in storage
like a set of dishes from which no food,
no Cream of Wheat, no rabbit in mustard
sauce, nor even a single raspberry,
can be eaten until the afterlife,
which is only childhood in its last
disguise, all radiance or all humiliation,
and so it is forfeit a final time.
In fact it was awful, you think, or why
should the piecework of grief be endless?
Only because death is, and likewise loss,
which is not awful, but only breathtaking.
There's no truth about your childhood,
though there's a story, yours to tend,
like a fire or garden. Make it a good one,
since you'll have to live it out, and all
its revisions, so long as you all shall live,
for they shall be gathered to your deathbed,
and they'll have known to what you and they
would come, and this one time they'll weep for you.
The map in the shopping center has an X
signed "you are here." A dream is like that.
In a dream you are never eighty, though
you may risk death by other means:
you're on a ledge and memory calls you
to jump, but a deft cop talks you in
to a small, bright room, and snickers.
And in a dream, you're everyone somewhat,
but not wholly. I think I know how that
works: for twenty-one years I had a father
and then I became a father, replacing him
but not really. Soon my sons will be fathers.
Surely, that's what middle-aged means,
being father and son to sons and father.
That a male has only one mother is another
story, told wherever men weep wholly.
Though nobody's replaced. In one dream
I'm leading a rope of children to safety,
through a snowy farm. The farmer comes out
and I have to throw snowballs well to him
so we may pass. Even dreaming, I know
he's my father, at ease in his catcher's
squat, and that the dream has revived
to us both an old unspoken fantasy:
we're a battery. I'm young, I'm brash,
I don't know how to pitch but I can
throw a lamb chop past a wolf. And he
can handle pitchers and control a game.
I look to him for a sign. I'd nod
for anything. The damn thing is hard to grip
without seams, and I don't rely only
on my live, young arm, but throw by all
the body I can get behind it, and it fluffs
toward him no faster than the snow
in the dream drifts down. Nothing
takes forever, but I know what the phrase
means. The children grow more cold
and hungry and cruel to each other
the longer the ball's in the air, and it begins
to melt. By the time it gets to him we'll be
our waking ages, and each of us is himself
alone, and we all join hands and go.
Toward dawn, rain explodes on the tin roof
like popcorn. The pale light is streaked by grey
and that green you see just under the surface
of water, a shimmer more than a color.
Time to dive back into sleep, as if into
happiness, that neglected discipline....
In those sixth-grade book reports
or not, and everyone looked at you
the same way: how would he turn out?
He rolls in his sleep like an otter.
Uncle Ed has a neck so fat it's funny,
and on the way to work he pries the cap
off a Pepsi. Damn rain didn't cool one weary
thing for long; it's gonna be a cooker.
The boy sleeps with a thin chain of sweat
on his upper lip, as if waking itself,
becoming explicit, were hard work.
Who knows if he's happy or not?
A child is all the tools a child has,
growing up, who makes what he can.
Civilization and Its Discontents
Integration in, or adaptation to, a human community
appears as a scarcely avoidable condition which must be
fulfilled before [our] aim of happiness can be achieved.
If it could be done without that condition, it would
perhaps be preferable.
—Freud
How much of the great poetry
of solitude in the woods is one
long cadenza on the sadness
of civilization, and how much
thought on beaches, between drowsing
and sleep, along the borders,
between one place and another,
as if such poise were home to us?
On the far side of these woods, stew,
gelatinous from cracked lamb shanks,
is being ladled into bowls, and
a family scuffs its chairs close
to an inherited table.
Maybe there's wine, maybe not. We don't
know because our thoughts are with
the great sad soul in the woods again.
We suppose that even now
some poignant speck of litter
borne by the river of psychic murmur
has been grafted by the brooding soul
to a beloved piece of music,
and that from the general plaint
a shape is about to be made, though
maybe not: we can't see into
the soul the way we can into
that cottage where now they're done with food
until next meal. Here's what I think:
the soul in the woods is not alone.
All he came there to leave behind
is in him, like a garrison
in a conquered city. When he goes
back to it, and goes gratefully
because it's nearly time for dinner,
he will be entering himself,
though when he faced the woods,
from the road, that's what he thought then, too.
Familial
When the kitchen is lit by lilacs
and everyone's list is crumpled or forgot,
when love seems to work without plans
and to use, like an anthill, all its frenetic
extra energy, then we all hold,
like a mugful of cooling tea,
my grandmother's advice: Don't ever
grow old. But I'm disobedient
to the end, eager to have overcome
something, to be laved by this light,
to have gone to the heaven of grown-ups
even if my body cracks and sputters
and my young heart grows t
oo thick.
I want my place in line, the way
each word in this genial chatter
has its place. That's why we call it
grammar school, where we learn to behave.
I understand why everyone wants
to go up to heaven, to rise,
like a ship through a curriculum
of locks, into the eternal light
of talk after dinner. What I don't