Collected Poems (14 page)

then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be,

and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he’d known,

all along, that I was watching and I can’t help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,

I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.

It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold,

and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then realized made a figure eight,

what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,

and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.

Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he’d blazed,

but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away,

up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight,

with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signaling erratically

against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.

In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white,

its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.

My Mother’s Lips

Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could

but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my mother, all through my childhood,

when I was saying something to her, something important, would move her lips as I was speaking

so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.

Or, even more disconcertingly — wildly so now that my puberty had erupted —
before
I said them.

When I was smaller, I must just have assumed that she was omniscient. Why not?

She knew everything else — when I was tired, or lying; she’d know I was ill before I did.

I may even have thought — how could it not have come into my mind? — that she
caused
what I said.

All she was really doing of course was mouthing my words a split second after I said them myself,

but it wasn’t until my own children were learning to talk that I really understood how,

and understood, too, the edge of anxiety in it, the wanting to bring you along out of the silence,

the compulsion to lift you again from those blank caverns of namelessness we encase.

That was long afterward, though: where I was now was just wanting to get her to stop,

and considering how I brooded and raged in those days, how quickly my teeth went on edge,

the restraint I approached her with seems remarkable, although her so unprotestingly,

readily taming a habit by then three children and a dozen years old was as much so.

It’s endearing to watch us again in that long-ago dusk, facing each other, my mother and me.

I’ve just grown to her height, or just past it: there are our lips moving together,

now the unison suddenly breaks, I have to go on by myself, no maestro, no score to follow.

I wonder what finally made me take umbrage enough, or heart enough, to confront her?

It’s not important. My cocoon at that age was already unwinding: the threads ravel and snarl.

When I find one again, it’s that two o’clock in the morning, a grim hotel on a square,

the impenetrable maze of an endless city, when, really alone for the first time in my life,

I found myself leaning from the window, incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems.

I’d love to know what I raved that night to the night, what those innocent dithyrambs were,

or to feel what so ecstatically drew me out of myself and beyond … Nothing is there, though,

only the solemn piazza beneath me, the riot of dim, tiled roofs and impassable alleys,

my desolate bed behind me, and my voice, hoarse, and the sweet, alien air against me like a kiss.

The Dog

Except for the dog, that she wouldn’t have him put away, wouldn’t let him die, I’d have liked her.

She was handsome, busty, chunky, early middle-aged, very black, with a stiff, exotic dignity

that flurried up in me a mix of warmth and sexual apprehension neither of which, to tell the truth,

I tried very hard to nail down: she was that much older and in those days there was still the race thing.

This was just at the time of civil rights: the neighborhood I was living in was mixed.

In the narrow streets, the tiny three-floored houses they called father-son-holy-ghosts

which had been servants’ quarters first, workers’ tenements, then slums, still were, but enclaves of us,

beatniks and young artists, squatted there and commerce between everyone was fairly easy.

Her dog, a grinning mongrel, rib and knob, gristle and grizzle, wasn’t terribly offensive.

The trouble was that he was ill, or the trouble more exactly was that I had to know about it.

She used to walk him on a lot I overlooked, he must have had a tumor or a blockage of some sort

because every time he moved his bowels, he shrieked, a chilling, almost human scream of anguish.

It nearly always caught me unawares, but even when I’d see them first, it wasn’t better.

The limp leash coiled in her hand, the woman would be profiled to the dog, staring into the distance,

apparently oblivious, those breasts of hers like stone, while he, not a step away, laboring,

trying to eject the feeble, mucus-coated, blood-flecked chains that finally spurted from him,

would set himself on tiptoe and hump into a question mark, one quivering back leg grotesquely lifted.

Every other moment he’d turn his head, as though he wanted her, to no avail, to look at him,

then his eyes would dim and he’d drive his wounded anus in the dirt, keening uncontrollably,

lurching forward in a hideous, electric dance as though someone were at him with a club.

When at last he’d finish, she’d wipe him with a tissue like a child; he’d lick her hand.

It was horrifying; I was always going to call the police; once I actually went out to chastise her —

didn’t she know how selfish she was, how the animal was suffering? — she scared me off, though.

She was older than I’d thought, for one thing, her flesh was loosening, pouches of fat beneath the eyes,

and poorer, too, shabby, tarnished: I imagined smelling something faintly acrid as I passed.

Had I ever really mooned for such a creature? I slunk around the block, chagrined, abashed.

I don’t recall them too long after that. Maybe the dog died, maybe I was just less sensitive.

Maybe one year when the cold came and I closed my windows, I forgot them … then I moved.

Everything was complicated now, so many tensions, so much bothersome self-consciousness.

Anyway, those back streets, especially in bad weather when the ginkgos lost their leaves, were bleak.

It’s restored there now, ivy, pointed brick, garden walls with broken bottles mortared on them,

but you’d get sick and tired then: the rubbish in the gutter, the general sense of dereliction.

Also, I’d found a girl to be in love with: all we wanted was to live together, so we did.

The Color of Time

Although the lamp is out, and although it’s dusk, late, dull, stifling summer dusk,

a wash of the column of grimy light reflects from the airshaft the boy’s bedroom faces:

he can still make out his model bomber twisting and untwisting on its thread from the ceiling.

Everything else is utterly still. The air, breathed, breathed again, is thick, decomposed,

a dense, almost organic, almost visible volume of soiled grains suspended in the liquid heat.

The boy, in briefs and T-shirt, his limp sheet disarrayed, sweats lightly, not disagreeably —

his frictionless skin and the complex savor at the corners of his mouth intrigue him.

Suddenly, outside, a few feet away, a voice, a woman’s, harsh but affectless, droning.

“I can’t go on,” it says. Pause. Then, more fervor, more conviction:
I can’t go on.

The boy looks across: the window on the other side of the shaft, a blur of uncertain amber,

its panes streaked as though someone had swiped a greasy rag across them, is shut,

the yellowed paint on the rotting sill beneath it has bubbled and scabbed in erratic strips.

More plaintively now, almost whining, “You’re drunk,” the voice says, “you’re drunk, aren’t you?”

Everything twice, the boy notes. His mother and father are out. What time must it be?

“I’m beating my head.” The boy lifts in a more focused, more definite interest this time.

Pause.
I’m beating my head,
the voice at last reaffirms. A door crashes somewhere.

The boy has only infrequently seen the woman: out back, by the trash, sometimes they pass,

but her image is vivid — slippers, a housedress with a lifeless nightgown hanging under the hem.

Something about her repels the boy, maybe the nightgown, maybe that their eyes never meet.

Nothing now. The boy’s testicles somehow have slipped out of the leg of his shorts.

Awkwardly, he tucks them back in: how wrinkled they are, the skin tougher than the soles of his feet.

Later, the boy sits up. Has he been sleeping? The night seems stricter, the other window is dark.

The boy knows that sometimes he wakes: the next morning his mother will say with exasperation,

“You woke up screaming again,” and sometimes he’ll remember her arms or his father’s around him.

He never remembers the scream, just the embrace, usually not even that, but once, he knows,

he called out, his father came to him:
Listen,
the boy said,
outside, there are babies crying.

Cats,
his father, angry beyond what the occasion seemed to imply, had whispered,
Go to sleep,

jerking roughly, irrationally, the boy had thought, the sheet up nearly over the boy’s head.

Although it’s quiet now, not a sound, it’s hard — the boy doesn’t know why — not to cry out.

He tries to imagine the bar of warm glow from his parents’ room bisecting the hall

but the darkness stays stubbornly intact and whatever it is shuddering in his chest keeps on.

I hope I don’t cry, he thinks; his thighs lock over his fists: he can hold it, he thinks.

Flight

The last party before I left was in an old, run-down apartment house, The Greystone Arms,

the owners of which were involved in a drawn-out legal wrangle with some of the tenants.

The building was to be razed and redeveloped, the tenants, mostly older women who’d lived there forever,

were contesting being evicted — I forget on what grounds — and in the meantime everyone else had vacated

and the apartments had been rented to anyone who’d take them month-to-month, without leases.

The party when I heard about it had apparently been going on all night every night for weeks

in the penthouse a few hippie types I knew vaguely and didn’t particularly care for had taken over.

I was tempted anyway: this was still the Sixties when if anything was happening, you went,

besides, I was at loose ends, and, although I didn’t like admitting it, chronically adrift and lonely.

I’d been curious about the Greystone, I could tell myself that all I wanted was to get inside.

The exterior had mostly kept its splendors, brass fittings, carved stone urns and lintels:

even the grisly old awning still somehow hung together, though all it seemed ever to shelter now

was the congregation of tranquillized ex–mental patients whose agencies had parked them in the building

and whom you’d see huddled there, day and the down and out dead of night, nowhere to go, nothing to do,

shuffling dreamily aside when the speed-freaks and junkies would flit out to make their hits

or when the ladies who still were living in all this would huff past into the dilapidated lobby.

The ladies: that they’d have wanted to stay on at all by now was a triumph of pure indignation,

the place was crawling down so fast, but they hung on, barricaded in their genteel cubicles.

How dire it must have been for them — the hallways with bare, underwatted fixtures,

the rotten plumbing booming through the night, the hiss of the addicts outside their doors.

Whatever elegance there might have been was eaten by neglect: the wallpaper hung in ratty strips,

its ribbons and roses had bled through onto the ocher plaster underneath, and everything,

even the palsied elevator, emitted the spermy, scummy odor of half a century of secret damp.

The penthouse, up an extra flight of filthy stairs, was as bad, and the party, if possible, was worse.

Every misfit in the city, every freeloader, every blown-out druggie and glazed teenybopper

plus the crazies from the building and no telling who or what else had filtered up there.

Stunned on rotgut wine or grass or acid, they danced mechanically in the daze of the deafening music,

or sprawled on the floor, offhandedly fumbling at one another as though no one else was in the room.

There was something almost maniacally mindless about it, but at the same time it was like a battle,

that intense, that lunatic, and, as I hesitated in the doorway, something made me realize just how much

without noticing I’d come to be of that, to want or need it, and I swear I must have swayed,

the way, over their imaginary chaos, Manfred must have swayed, and Faust, before it swallowed them.

There’s a park there now. The morning I came back, I wandered by and stopped to sit awhile.