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The
Forthright Wishes of the Dead, © 2002, Karl J. Sherlock |
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II ___________________________ |
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III ___________________________ |
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AUBADE
Listen! to morning: sparrows cluster in the frondsthat gather up the chatter
like skirts. Out there, under the stained fingers
of the migrants: the mud-caked watermelons hefted into a
bassinet of arms; strawberries culled below the humid
leaves. Where are they, the lifted voices of those
shunned ones to turn back the heat and discord of an
ugly tribe spinning past the washed
curbs of the boulevards to work? Where is their
weedy chant to deliver me from bed to the taciturn
bus stop when I've shattered out of a dream of sobbing,
and been amazed to find my face still dry?
Who will spare a hundred scattered birds
while the chainsaw nearby grouses through the wild date
palm? And what of them, hunched workers
stifled by the spigots irrigating morning?
Sonorous, trenchant, aloof-- Listen! Somewhere:
overlords. |
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It's well enough to imagine
that, for one who surveys, this
was once mere notion, dutifully
spread all new across marshes,
bouldered acres, and scouted with an outcome
of architecture unpeopled and blameless.
But now, the aerial photo taken for the real estate
ad--in all its mapped separateness of shingles,
titmouse at the pinnacle of the tall tree out back,
pickaxe in the compost heap, roof crosshatched by telephone
lines, effluvial leaves of willow,
unseemly fault line in the concrete
patio--culls a record of the moment and
a nearness to those unalterable lives
beyond the periphery of exposure,
and so becomes a moment of story all its
own, crying out: Mrs. Owens open to the
corner lot, scouring down her driveway; the
menopausal Mrs. Gunther northeast on the
intersecting street, provoked day-long by her two boys;
Harriet McConkey, crocheting sadly on the patio
furniture, calling my name now and then to come, help
her lift a heavy package; hedged beside us, the Greek
woman Nikki thickly labored with the
dust of sugar, trouncing across the front
yard with trays full of wedding cookies; in
the cul-de-sac the German shepherd Tammy
that flailed bitterly at passers-by,
choke-chained to the rattling garage
door; angled to the northwest the police officer and his
stricken wife, who together nightly shuffled
as far as the curbside and back, he leading her
like the blind, and she, always looking down at the
cumbersome stride of her feet; next door, the Kucharski's corner lot,
its wafting smell of bitter cigars, the gas barbecue
that plumed onto our driveway, and Phyllis, drunk, prodding
for something lost between the rows of sugar
beets; the Alexanders two lots west, Louie with
only one lung in his chest, patiently sweeping the lawn
cuttings from the sidewalk; touching
corners to the south, the LePines' lot with its
yellow two-story flanked by sycamores that rustled
under the sweep of incoming jets, and Gail,
their oldest daughter, who would coax down the
wing-clipped crow, call up to it,
Charlotte, come on girl, fly to me; the teacher's
son opposite the privet hedge, with his
long bow and arrow; the thug named
Kelly, neighbors spilling out in pajamas, to
shake their fists, cuss him while he gunned the car
around the block into morning; or Natalie,
most of all, Natalie who'd always appear
from precious nowhere with the crescents
of candied orange, sit with me on the front
stoop, predict the moment when the street
lights would blink on; how we'd watch
the sky for satellites in the failing dusk, hunt
out falling stars, lull ourselves into the
nearby interstate's buzzing of semi-trailers. And
now, because I'd like to set a memory's
distortion straight, advance the story
with a kinder thesis, I must be there in the washed
moments of their love-making, breathe deeply from the
same bottles of bourbon, follow them drunkenly from
fridge to bedroom to the tender stroke
against the grain of the dog's fur, know exactly the familiar
footing of the floor-plans in the dark, or how they
believed life would spool ahead, peaceable
chapters tumbling into graceful
endings, lives within other homes
cavorting beyond control, rushing toward a death
confounding in its own fixity, its
aimless and separate truth which asks that I try now
to stop what's already moving, what's been
racing faster than imagination frantically
recomposed. And because we are all
moving faster, farther away from what is
true of all people we no longer know beyond
the images they have left us. Because
in the absence between these neighbors and
myself, at least the stumbled couple still
may circle the block as a testament to something
good, the thwarted housewife still kneeling on the
driveway to shake out her brush against bucket,
the dog yet whining for the sake of
someone's mercy. And because of this,
I am nearer now to my own end, ever more at
work finessing this hopeful fiction,
and playing my role, bestowing all the
justice I can, keenly fused into
the unfair emptiness, the stilted
crescendos of their lives imagined in this image.
This is the surveyor's agony transfixed in the
nearness of death, the tug and movement of the picture.
This is the beauty of a memory's
lonesome moment almost lost. And
here at least for someone, thank God: a record of it. |
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i. In its cardboard box what looked more than human was humiliation: rife with that frozen moment on
the bed when the heart failed.
Helpless to take its own tongue back
inside, or to lower its stiff tail; to save itself from a dog's
death. He rolled it into a
blanket, and wept, and they burned it for him: a grey fist-full in a plastic
bag and the pieces of crushed
bone that were light and soft as nothing. Yet, when he found the
taste of its name on his lips, the
roundness of consonants, soulful
vowels, everything was there--the
belly, the choked lungs, relaxed defecation on the sheets, the vagueness of memory. Everything his from the beginning,
reclaimed-- the name, the soul, the all
of it. ii. Stefan's three dogs shuffle
a canine skull washed ashore. Now blanched
by water there's no taste to moisten
interest, no uterine scent to call them
into an ancient character. They leave it be. But
driven to imagine the squirming litter tied
into potato sacks and drowned, or a senile
dog stumbled by the confusion of waves,
I have to make a metaphor of death
again: the brainpan's scallops are fused into a
ragged globe like plates of continents,
encasing a few phantom memories of human
hands that needled the soft spots
on its body with pity. At the house, Stefan props
it up against the porch screen
door: a good thing to fight the torque of the
spring hinge. iii. Lifting her over the
difficult threshold steeped with wet snow, I take the
terry towel that smells of her, and
begin to wipe off the back, the vulnerable hollows of
ears, saturated muzzle. Dry the sparing
hair around the buds and the belly's scar.
Careful at the mouth to her shunted
ovaries. I take the foot matted with
a pearl of ice where the bones of the paw come together, melt it in
the heat of my hand, until she pulls
back deciding, That's enough
now. The ritual is finished. I
fold the towel to leave her be, wash the
wet, indifferent hairs from my
hands. |
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At the back of the place,
she has stopped inside the storm door, caught between the warm sweat of the
tavern talk and the stab of snowy air. Something's moved-- a flutter in the pale heaps
and ash bins. Vermin is yesterday's news. Remember the river rats by the
Thames? Remember walking along the ghostly reflections of boats that night,
beacons from the bridges and masts rippling on the water, like a flame stitch? They
were there, too, spoiling the moment. Hunkered down in the trickle of drains
and ditches. She could have died when the one emerged blankly before her from the
water like a filthy rag and shivered to a bit of trash. Since then, the rats have followed her
heels, in the cargo hulls of transatlantic passage, under the cellar hatch, sidewalk
grates. Everything's tainted by them now. Back inside, she's back to burnishing
the chrome appointments of the pinball machine, swabbing out knot holes in the
polyurethaned table tops dribbled with booze. Behind the bar, her husband is blithe, stacking
schooners barely washed and rattling shot glasses. His hands, trembling the way they do,
grapple with one, then, to hell with it, and let it drop. It's a mess. Twice, she's
tried to make a clean break from him, even invited those stark and prodding
caresses from the Florida carpenter who shimmed the storeroom shelves,
until she had no choice but to do it with him, which never worked anyway once she'd pondered
her husband's burgeoning liver, or he'd collapse into a corpus of pleas; his
whole body, even the plainest parts, cried out for her to stay, just put up with it. That
night, remember, she squeezed out the sponge to wash him, his hands looming helplessly
about, until one, stupefied, touched her in a gentle way, his
hard-on just below the grey veil of bath water. What more did he want from her? What
more than the patience to stay with him and live? The shot glass has
proliferated into little arrow tips and axe heads of glass. She sweeps up then flogs it all from the
dustpan to the trash bin out back; a shadow, slapdash, bolts left then, panicked, down
the alley. Not a rat at all. In the muted light of street lamps, the skeletal hedges by the
carport, flocked and crushed, bow down over the yards: stitches of the eerie pock
marks left by a winter hare, as though even the shadow of a living thing could
leave behind a refuse just as empty. |
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Manure, sacked and drowsed across
the taut shoulder, bellies down onto Mike's bare chest
and stretched biceps of an arm arcked and torqued against
the offense that labor does. Here again I regard his old rage to
place body and tools apart, see them as achingly distinct: patience
the rake across rocks submerged in clay, cajole
the spade to pry up cables of old roots, or
lower four bags of black soil like infants into cribs. But
weary of tippling seed, he'll pause with chin atop the broom
handle, dawdle over differences, note how I have paused beside
him, dignifying the richest burden of his effort, his
change into something separate but vulnerable, like garden
shrubs and weeds. They witness all those tolls exacted,
all the finer tools of a work we compel ourselves to do
at rest. |
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a villanelle Old age . . . is not a
disease--it's a triumph. Because you've survived.
Failure, disappointment, sickness, loss-- you're still here. --Maggie Kuhn, Gray
Panthers founder, 1906-1995 Having always wanted death before
severe old age had rendered life a
drain on others' lives, you'd fail to sickness, loss. The
steely herd of youth might make us feel
ashamed, but never lie about your years, you
said. And being young I didn't think of death
before I severed age from beauty.
Superficial? Sure. But now, of course, that
middle age approaches, how to foil sickness? Loss?
Bestill what I might hear about the squalid,
disappointing years that lie ahead? And much,
much worse, bemoan my sordid past or,
dying--forced to suffer thoughts of leaving love
behind--weary those nearby who gently
might have tried to soothe my awful sickness, solace
me, say, Still here, love. We're still
here. I prize those protests,
years of changing myths, of rage
against outrageous youth. But if in death, dear
Maggie, you and I should persevere, failure, sickness,
loss--these still are soundly here. |
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". . . We are such
stuff As dreams are made on. And
our little lives Are rounded with a sleep. .
. ." The Tempest, III.i. I've dreamt of it so often,
this stuff of archetype: a three-story mansion of
mansard roofs, such a sad mystery in the
day's first moments. Then in the logical light of
breakfast, I might think less of it: a sleight of hand our
grown-up minds perform, to swell the old house to
toddler dimensions. But why three floors where
a large bungalow might have done nicely? Why
the west wing where all the merciless
ghosts are penned? Prattle on, Karl, over coffee and a bit
of waffle, that this third floor might be my youth!
(Unlikely I'll ever be climbing those rickety steps again.)
And what about down here, on the trustworthy ground
where servants I've never employed, scuttle
through the candlelit foyer and carry out the dead like
a hammock between them-- well, really, can one's
unspoken fear of death be this insipid? I think
not. The nagging more of it prevails. And after all,
there's comfort, too, in knowing sleep somewhere has a home,
and that the lover who shares the troubled
pillow against daylight's insecurities has helped me
to build it large enough for the family of my sins,
helped me chase those twinkling ghosts into
its corners, lock up after ourselves, wake up to
a God fetely in his heaven, make the day impossibly
simple. One misses the moments when the house
of my waking day leans in behind me,
considers what I mean, this misty, savage shape poised before
the basin, and warily swabs away its little dream
of me. |
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Cate was the one who couldn't
dance her way out of a paper bag under the
rice paper lamp shade of her flat, the
one that spiraled out bits of light that landed
on everything in sight, making our bodies, the
carpets and the torrents of wall swim a field of ripe
pollen. And what use was it to tell her I didn't love
her that way? She had troubles enough just keeping time,
especially in the jolt of being unrequited. I
convinced myself it was nothing and I'd do
well to think of her as a product of this light,
a stumbling flower swarmed by the little white
bees speckling the complexion of the room.
And to my amazement, that dried mud-path to the harbor in
Howth--the misgiven head-over-heel tumble that landed her on
her feet with her thick legs holding down the ground
below us, and her arms waving off the dust, at
last given the grace of recovery--made me fall in
love with something. Julia's love was to swan across the
perfect lake of the dance floor,
but the rape and quiet bulimia enfolded her in a
pain too deep and too ugly to bear itself
with poise. So too in December when I fumbled the skeletal hardness of
her ribs, and she said it weakened her to say
goodbye. And in May, the clipping dropped from
the letter, somersaulting to the floor and I held my
arms quietly around nothing, struggling to pull back
from the darkness, my own feet heavy as anchors, the
ground moving with its own complicated
steps. I listened inside me to how she spread
out her arms and dove into a sea of
greenery, twenty-two stories away, rending apart the places where the
insects sleep, the place where she landed into the arms of a
ballet that was bottomless. Michelle was good at jigs and with a nimbleness I
could never keep up with. Slipping her
arm around me in the
sea-sickening air of Dun Laoghaire port, we
fumbled through the awkward steps of a
dance, and I blamed an ailment for leaning closer.
"Slightly deaf in the left ear, you know, and it's throwing
my balance," which she didn't fall for,
I know that now, but at least gracefully pretended it was
all for real. And when dusk dimmed us to the strangest
point where embarrassments and desires become reasons
to be killed by darkness, Michelle and I balanced ourselves on
the pier wall. I stretched out my arm behind her in the
warm exposure of her back; I
thought of us as swallows, plunging into
storms of gnats-- those living tangles which
hovered above the blue-- black water. Down below,
distant waves seemed to hold up our feet,
keep us airborne, make the liquid
floor dance and dance for us, the
chilled pathetic groin wading
through its necessary hopes,
holding on hopelessly to movement of
her face landing quietly against
mine, enough in its tepid warmth, its
untrained and weightless moment. We were
landing into each other's arms. We
were falling. and coming to rest against
the small, solid ground of someone's
soul. |
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My landlady drops her soaked gloves beside our
boots and welcomes me back,
inquiring about my trip home, the
sick twinge in my voice;
divested of what I can say, I unpack those few things that
crossed her mind three weeks ago: five rolls
of mercerized cotton thread; vegetable
peeler; digital watch for a nephew's
birthday. Then the unexpected: a pungent
paper bag filled with navel oranges, small,
seedless; that's how she likes them. I don't wait for thanks. I
know she won't admit to needing
them, or wanting anything. I've
listened to her family talk at Sunday dinners,
clamoring over unwashed dishes: the
changes in her ways; the comfort now of her
sons, their children; how the rental of the room was
a help to her. Never the mention of my
name. Never "Karl". Never "Karolku."
But later, crossing paths in the foyer, she squeezes my hand full of softened bills,
fingers hooking into mine. I want to make
it plain: "No money. They're gifts."
And her other fist drifts out, and flattens,
holding a 1 zloty coin: "Symboliczna," she
says-- that nothing which absolves
her from my acts of kindness,
and draws me in to hold her, weak and large
inside my arms, her fingers reluctant to
touch down, then alighting with the
lightness of flies on the small of my back. It's then I realize I've
only pretended that I've come to
know her better; to know the definitions of
her smokey shawls, silent hours of sewing into
evening; all the tacit things demanding the payment and
taking of this token. So I reinvent its aluminum,
taking more: an edge of thread; or,
wrapped with the sweat of my hand,
the gluey, meaningful skin of an orange. I tell
myself it's me she's holding. |
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At this early weekday hour only the ancient
parishioners showed in their Sunday silk
suits and furs, fussy perfumes,
skin jaundiced by the Sacristy
light and sunrise--that care and
deliberate crossing of themselves, the
quivering through octaves, stubbornly
fleshing out even the neglected verses.
Such passion, he thought, impressed him.
Keeping vigilance over the steady
Hosts that dipped in and out of
sight, he followed with his own grace the
patten from chalice to chin, and back,
malevolently waited until one disc at
last anointed the dirt of the
church floor. Father was cross. He hadn't
let such a thing happen since
1949. Confess it, he was told,
wash his soul clean from all cruelty.
Home, he bathed and bathed his hands in the
holy tap water, watched the flesh wrinkle
into bloodless wounds, as if larger hands were taking
his, holding them hostage to guilt, the tap
running wild and away from him that
God-given cold of just plain water. |
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the architectural study: Max and I study a picture's salmon cochlea of cornice, buffeted and brackish green of a basilica's dome, and streets seersuckered with cobblestone we both agree to color
"dun." We say this cannot be art since
art can never be itself; it must always
cower its burden. But lower left: a human
figure minuscule in his passage
through the stretched and narrow shadow of a
steeple that grimly fixes down upon him a moment of its history and
changing the tiniest object into
lumbering subject: something of the
great or nothing more. the nude: The boy has pressed the
dark lens of his ear to the door, and pictures
her tepid limbs budding from the white bowl
of a bath to burrow about the towels,
to lavender the clean crotch of
underarm, moist folds between the toes that
peal lightly on the warm
linoleum. In that moment his mother throttles the
door, fills the threshold: Go on, look! she says. Go on, if this is what you're so
sick to see . . . the body slick with bath
water, the tight bulges and lilt of talc, the breasts
at once abandoned from the cups of her hands
then bashfully summoned to hands once
more. When his eyes shut tight, her body then
burgeons forth, changed and cloaked this
time for the strike: becoming the tense, white glove at the Sunday mass, just nearly touching down upon a taut surface of holy water. the portrait: His profile marked by
proscenium arch of car window and scribbled loosely on a
blank matte of illness, Max has weakly
braced my knee cap, then folded
his hand emphatically against his pelvis, which begs me to open up
the galley of pictures, and focus painterly on his
insides fluttering, reeking with agonies of the
bowels, bilious strokes of the
body, or sketch his eye lids flashed below
the blotches of street light, and varicose,
bled of hue for his pain until it's fashioned into
the trope of smoke that hangs limber and
laboriously over the bilge or stacks of ships, ghostly
in its subtle want to be more than all of
these yet less. He knows I'm
without choice but to see it in this way,
a pain a thing of flesh and sight unutterable but loudly
dire. And louder still in all it is incapable of saying, but yielding all the same to a lover's art. the scenic study: In the cemetery, oil lamps were perched like
tea cups on the graves, candles burning all those ghosts, all the
ghosts of generals and composers,
noble women, enemies of the
state, murdered priests, gone now,
all in the twinkling of a
polemical dream; and so night became unmistakably more than
night, the rambles through the
dead larger than Warsaw itself,
all mourners, all paltry tourists,
folding inside out, becoming tombs
filled of sense and all its
palpable sorrows: the smoke of
martyrs, the soot, the dullest odors of
unguent or paraffin and such; and out
beyond the muted quarters: a
church where the dead priest,
beaten and drowned in the Wisla River, haunted the damp
antechambers, acrid vestibules, folded
vestments, and with disturbing ease,
as if to mean one's shade in death
transpired again into being by an
evensong's pained suggestion of
prayer, burned patiently into the mind of
God by constellations of
beeswax candles in quiet thousands. the still life: Max has tweezed a thin volume of poems from our crowded book shelf, pew-like in its neatness of flush and attentive rows: and opens it: a buried snapshot,
unforeseen and loosely wedged into the tight spine: it is my family's custom: for the overseas relative, a photo of the casket pivoted like the poised centerpiece: in this the left hand, a soft rake upon the right, drawn demurely to her breast: nail polish pearlescent and subtle: no more mahogany oil stains, or loam from the gardening gloves: no hidden fauna to fill, like footnotes, the text of skin and cells which now barely surmount the greater task: the
lasting look of a woman at rest: except to glean perhaps the hope of seeming who she was: I watch him shyly close the book, return it to its niche, and assume the frozen random pose of one dispossessed: he senses, surely I've been studying him all along: and, yes, I have and must beyond my will: that after all is how the
stories of the dead are known and told: plainly, once and for all. |
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In this photograph a family of immigrants is pinned to cushions of
the couch by children hugged into their
laps, warming the knees, chest, their
breath suspended by the motion on
the screen, the motion of the train
carrying the conversation of
foreigners across a continent
stretched wide in all directions on
the t.v. set, on its stand, wheeling its way to some corner of the room, the
ongoing conversation in the dining
car drawing them in like the
disoriented motion of a train coming to
rest, becoming an emotion as though
they've traveled thousands of miles for this
moment, the room its own station, the t.v. its own country, the heart its own belabored train, this snapshot speeding by. |
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Now the blizzard is glazing the lakefront, now its
clouds are dropping down, pregnant
on waves cutting open the air, a
night sky broken over and seeded with snow,
snuffing out the small lights in the
warm houses on shore, banding
out over the breakwater, over the cold whitecaps, into
the darkness of the living room where
his mother is whispering things about the time he was inside her,
the ripple of his foot against her
stomach, and his father is lowing a
yawn throttled and large and
slow the way evenings in bed moved when
sleep took so long, and t.v.
rained-in delicately from down the
hall, or jarred awake by the
dumbstruck television, the darkened
house, he'd glimpse her nightgown window-lit,
watch it phantom gently into her
room, where touches sang lightly, distant,
muted. He doesn't recall that crib within her belly;
a gathering absence of her touch has
bellowed distance he doesn't
understand; it drifts like snow, the sleepy
pulling away of her soft body from his;
he no longer fits restfully across one lap,
no longer sleeps soundly in two arms,
his limbs now fitly pulling themselves in when
he stands up from the bath water and
holds the small chill of his separate self. |
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Bicycle tires crunched bits of loose gravel that
had spilled from the builders' trucks.
And a boy was biking him through
other neighborhoods, places he was too young to
find on foot: fast, to his big house with
all the older sisters, to his friend's house with
the pinball machine; then to the highway's edge
where the cars would drag the dust right
off the road. Leaving far from home was a thing he'd
never felt before: houses losing familiar
colors; the odd sight of undeveloped, weedy
plots. He was lying on his back,
hot, and blood splashing one knee, one
elbow. The other boy, he was okay.
They rode back to the playground, slowly. He walked home from there, was late for the meal. Crouched in the dusky
kitchen, his mother painted his
elbow with iodine while the cold supper went
warm. Sweat had dried on his
face, and she swept him in to the warmth
of her sweater curling his toes under the
pleats of a skirt. She asked him sensible
things like, what was his name? Where
was he trying to take him? She asked him, what could make him do a
thing like that? And so out of the numb embrace of
nameless arms, and warmed by the gravelly voice of
her chest, he whispered: I don't know,
I don't know, I don't know. |
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In the soft parabola of her
arms, his slivers are coaxed from knuckles,
and caressed by the point of a needle
which stabs or gently pries up against the grain,
the child's body hunched toward the panic of skin,
and at this place where her fingertip burrows
beneath the brass thimble, he invents the reasonable
love that dully comforts out the blood and
enigmatic self drawn from seeming nothing. |
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Drunk, and intent on
patches of Warsaw receding fast behind us, he
cupped a hand against the tram
window. He was lost. Buses, I said, they could take him home now, if he knew what
was what, where things stopped and
went. He slid closer then, pretending we were
passengers crowded in the night bus. I
must go with him, he said, it
was too far, too much to be alone. But the
tram had slowed to where I'd always stopped
before-- rushing out to be less than
a passing thought to strangers half asleep or
bored. In bed, so often I would listen for the last
trams whizzing back to their
ports; or watch the window for electric
bursts fusing into the ground fog.
I'd wonder what had snagged on the
cables; what would be found on the
tracks next day, oil-tinted,
degraded by wheels. Outside, we struggled to the taxi. I worked a
loose crumple of cab fare into
his hand. Then left him mumbling
"wait, wait." And moments later, tucked inside an archway's
pocket, I watched his body undo its
drunkenness, tongue still twisting to speak, to
beg, his jilted glances focused on the
shadows of trees, darkened doorways. He must have
known I was waiting to hear what feeble plea
hung inside his mouth. To see
how the tram's movement still drowsed in
his breath: the sobering headlong whisper of the
almost-morning's rush. |
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Andre in a college discotheque tells me candidly about things he
misses, the privacy of a woman's hip bone in darkness, the
innocent affection between men back
home in Mozambique. Strangers familiar from dormitory
hallways watch the proximity of our
gestures--how we follow each other's lips
rounding out those utterances against
the noise, his darker face reeling
closer, nearly resting on me. They wait to see what I allow. To
witness it, name it something. But I've been no better,
standing with them at the dormitory
showers where we taunted him and
the woman who was his lover, this
lumbering foreigner's desire unnatural and ugly
to us. Until Andre billowed darkly through the
steam, stepping closer to us, eerie and
comfortable in his nakedness. Now, when
he says, "Shall we buy some
alcoholic beverage," and takes
me loosely by a few fingers, unabashed, through
a swelter of backs and lit
cigarettes, I watch the watchful hold their
distance, and my forefinger and thumb follow limply into his fist where the intimate is
really nothing but what the word intimate and its three breathless syllables pronounce: two men just holding hands. |
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As his mother stumbles from the garden hedges,
spike of privet lodged within her wrist, he
marvels at its dry majolica swirl, the ease of
the foreign at rest within her skin, now at
home, and tugging it from the flesh, bracing her
gasp against the fear of blood
which doesn't draw up, after all, they
let it usher each into the other's tears
of something saved and compromised. |
|
John fracturing his
soft-boiled eggs over a sink is summoned to the
timbre of Paul lumbering awake, his
familiar flushing out of nicotine from throat.
Then eggs are abandoned for the nervous task of
skinning rye bread hastily from
cellophane, pouring tea not sugared to
Paul's liking; for all of that, he'll be
cursed. But in a rush the proper tie might be
teased miraculously from the
wardrobe; or the daily tablets and pills, and the
measure of whiskey dappled thoughtfully across the
counter, could command some tenderness, some
covenant of vassal and his liege which could
spare me at least from that
inarticulate guilt of one who witnesses the
vulnerability of another's lover. I
recall studying the odd decades of
indentured servants in our history
lessons; and how red-haired Jim penned his contract,
gave himself for all those unoriginal
errands--buffing my ox-blood shoes, or
bringing me his lacquered wooden rulers
from home, extra lunch-box fruit--until he
was weary for want of himself again. I
watched him bumble through the contents of my
desk and tear our contract into shreds,
sobbing and shredding. That is how boys love each
other: the hidden happiness of tearing apart
those easy bonds when it is time,
of snuffing out confidence granted
gift-like. And now, in the lean years of knowing what
obligation to love is meant to be, I say I
love myself too much, blame some dispassionate aplomb that will never
yield to the loneliness of women
and men obsequious in their cowering
for the confident other. It is my gift to
myself, to say I've smacked of
self-sufficiency, always bullied myself at will and,
like anyone, been smitten by a kind of pain.
Even John in these panicky mornings,
the docile loved one refilling the
resonant kettle enough for the two of them,
hollow of complaint or the
weariness of chore, his too must be the quiet duty of a
lover choosing freely that crushing love
of self, tethering his life to the deepest
defeats. And each time those pills are flushed down
the helpless throat of one who is
infatuated with the task and thankful for the burden of
being love, it is a victory after all for each of us--to
witness ourselves like slaves adored without
masters. |
|
(for David VanDensen) Eumaios: "Friend,
friend, how could this fantasy take
hold of you? You dally with your life,
and nothing less, if you feel drawn to mingle
in that company-- reckless, violent, and
famous for it out to the rim of heaven.
Slaves they have, but not like
you. . . ." -- The Odyssey, XV When the Military Macaws,
Jean-Claude and Jezebel, fan the panoply of tail, the rough red pours forth from green. The
blood caul bejewelled across the Red-fronted Kakariki, still unnamed: soft to touch. The lapis
and flower of the Splendid Grass Parrakeet, and the gentle sulfur of the Peach-Faced
Lovebird; the Red-Rumped Finches and cheerful Cockatiels: all gems. Each preen and stretch: for
the wolf call whistle. Each bow of head to prickle the slick nape into a rice field of sheath
and down. The brocade of feathers to the cage bars; and the larger hooked bill,
some lumbering and exposed bone, it seems, that hangs impossibly light in the
palm or takes in the nub of the fragile pinky with gentility. Some could shatter bones.
In fact, have. Snipping off, clean below the second knuckle, sensing, perhaps, some
lurking unworthiness recessed within fronds of kindness, or behind the canopy of bright
face, some corruption, some vestigial spirit of the dark to be pruned and dropped, like
the mouldy berry, unfit. They know. They pose the tests. And recognize you, good and
faithful: one of them. A burden, just the same, to have to brave the plangent screeches, be
a servant to the demands of mood, the fickled scurry to the back of the cage, that leaves
one with the fear there is something entirely inappropriate and human about the way you love
them. At night, with the locks and coverlets in place, they can be let be, and you drive to
work: the bar where the semantics of mimicry are understood, at least, to be nothing
more than that. Smokey hued men challenge the meaning of standing still: a
studied curve of the pectoral, strained beneath a white cotton v-neck, means love my body; the amber
beer bottle, tugged out against the thigh of an army type, peninsular, croons for tenderness;
someone's slump over the sloppy bar, his bare vertebrae that express
themselves from the lumbar--a question
of worthiness that is, after all, only rhetorical. Try to comfort them, try to embrocate the wounds
of lust, and what is only human pounces into place. Their bodies retreat into their skins.
Their old lonely anthems--exchanged once more for the fuss and arrogant strut to the other
side of the room. Stunned and, all of them, penned together and aloof. Given chase by something.
Outside, in the next day's afternoon, the canyon's isolated grassfire plumes forth behind the
house. From within, the aviary's jittery rift and cackles peal forth. They call you,
call you back to the cages. But you keep still. Study the branches of eucalyptus, the parched
lawn. You've seen it before, beneath the cactus too, the riot of feathers under the vice-grip of
cat's jaw, and the sparrows nearby, in the fray of the bougainvillaea. You've
watched the scrub jays once,
spoiling to snap the head of the titmouse. The refracted glimmer of
hummingbirds worn out and gasping near
the footpath. All the wormy nestlings of spring thrown from the eaves. The small and the wild that
fall beyond the pale. No shelter. The world unfit. The bright and smokey day, so bitter. Shut the
windows. Run to them. Keep them calm. Out with the predatory rage of life. Be
gone. |
|
The genitals unfurl: the
lover's mouth a soft womb, and the
clouded coming a nimbus come undone. Each
time implicit is a closure to
his life, his body an estuary home to someone
else's skin and yielding to the
greatness of taking, saving this greater homesick self
from all diminishment, bravely to
glimpse how skin will mould him
into something else or deeply, deeply nothing
but the empty deliverance of embrace. |
|
In a surgical mirror, I
watched my blood tumor cauterized,
swabbed and gauzed by Dr. Fujihara,
his eerie tuber of an eleventh finger
erected from the side of his hand and
glinting the tiny waxing of a nail.
While I touched it, he explained recessive
genes, the finger's unfeelingness, how it was
passed on through generations. What
was it like, I asked, the feeling of it crushed
inside a tight glove, then offered up my pledge to
become a doctor. Such a thing, my parents
said, would be useful in their
years of old age, and with that a
kind of contract had been sealed
between us. Only now, a duty of hope
goes on at odds with practical
need. I've sworn to tell them who I've really
become, what I do to thwart my own
disappointments. But what was scripted from
an oath to love, to honor memory,
must always take over. I've chanced that someday
we could live together again, unashamed
and debtless. I've lied about the solid careers, or
unlikely grandchildren they've pined for, quietly
praying to shatter our family into prolific
branches. Perhaps they knew, have always known, I might
let my family come limping to its end,
feared I'd extinguish even the oldest genes: the primal
smiles, congenital aberrations, the
odd mole fondly teased out, all
those molecular distinctions that are all
we have to give. Once, in the late sleeve of night, my mother woke me
to swear she'd live again in Ireland
when the youngest of us moved on.
But instead she kept up the gardens,
worked furiously to refinish the
chairs, can the fruit for winter. She is dead
now, and what remains persists in the way I
resemble her, the way she is remembered. And my
father, retired, longing for the patch of
farmland again in Poland-- he has settled into the
part time job, pledging his earnings to his
children's bland crises, boldly certain how much
better it will be, for all of us, when he too
is gone, useful again. I say over
and over what pity there can be lives
on in my recessive longing to
outlast their disappointments. Yet
I never seem to stop begging them in the numb
periphery of my days to let go just once. To
pretend extinction is really the
fondest gesture of all and that I still live to have
lauded them in ways misunderstood but
rife with the only love I could
have shown. Perhaps then the tired
bonds could realign just long enough to glimpse
some truth about our lives. Perhaps
then, all at last might show that rarified
mercy: some gift of legacy which begs only
in the simplest and saddest terms it be
perpetual like the millions of
daughters and sons now sleeping deftly in our cells. |
|
From it, he blandishes three brilliant peaches, washes it meekly, an old Belleek soup bowl blighted
by hairline cracks. He's glad
I once admired it so much, but
admits the treatments unhinged his memory of me.
Had we ever been close? How long? What
excuse for not writing all this
time, or reuniting? He's wary of what more I
know about him, how capriciously I can
change the kernels of our old conversations,
or withhold, grant only the history of us I
care to. The bowl he admits has value. But
struggles to recall how he came by it, how he
is obliged. "Go on, take it,"
he says. "In case I ever owed you
something." |
  |
|
I have flaunted her antique
opalescent coffee cups on my shelves,
teased out the dust from the rime of porcelain
rosettes, and pampered the pale gold
inscriptions, Remember me and Forget Me
Not. They do not cajole me to recollect her,
nor do I ever dwell on that vague and motherly
kindness of giving another's child such gifts.
For the ways I have bottled her memory in the
comfort of occasion or the warm touch of her hands; for my
unmindful laughter during her funeral vigil:
it is a necessary lie each time I say I'm sorry, never to be
undone, that haunting need to linger just outside the chance of another's
death or grief. All of this is a ghostliness suffered
by the living that lets the cup call out its longing, jog
the quiet memory. Even the least loved token of the dead is set to
task when remorse, wishing bravely to have
done with, has done its braver nothing. |
|
It is always his place to
beg me, listen to a few he's practiced in fidgets
of boredom, chest whaled out with the
accordion's bellows and ebony knobbles, thumb and
fingers denting the keyboard's pearl
retentive surface; never mind that there are always
things I'd rather tell him as he plays--be
shoring up the tamber and squashing out of chords
against agendas, or pealing the room's
length awash with dialogue where words should state
some plainness and put the gesture of giving
audience in its thankful, proper place. When the concert
ends I clap--a hollow, unchorused clap a son must
grant--worry for the sincerity of this,
help him slough off the burden, return it to
its case. As evening hangs over the end of supper,
we leave off the talking. We leave for
his sturdier chore of tending to the
commonplace of gravestones flush with the velvet
lawns. He's grateful to have me to witness the whisking
away of dried cuttings, the dusting out of names:
he notes for my sake three friends, a
stepfather, a woman he'd known since childhood; there and
here lay all the vague company cajoled years back to come,
sit in our kitchen, hear me sing for the merciful
praise of adults. Quietly their appointed places in his mind become more
embossed, more distinct, and how well the world
works now to listen to the gestures of his life
are always matters of another's
memory. And paused before his own
unfinished placard, lips tacitly locked in
prayer for himself, he has drawn, not on the ear of God or
me, but the rounds of the
hushed, the held-in-place words of the begging who
surround him in applause for the home he
has found here, the emptiness embraced with
all its mettled voice of endless
thanks. |
|
SOMETHING TO DO WITH VOLCANOES Daybreak: filaments of webs
curdle, an ethereal drift downward, incessant, down to the grass, the
hedges of Tess and Paul's place. The source is a puzzle. What spiders are so
prolific, their spume can carry across this distance? Through to the hour of lunch, I'm
fixed on the crossword and staring out at the flotsam. Not much gets said here.
Tess has braved a line of laundry while the clear sun still shines, her jawline
firm to the task, hands unrelenting and deliberate with the pins. She knows, too--unable to
let go of our bodies when we sense the watching. At the airport, arms
reaching around herself, she held in all that she wanted to weep as though, upon emerging
from the terminal, we had been named as those who should have died instead;
damaged without the comfort of her sister's hand to present us in the proper
way with "Welcome home, Moya!" and "Remember Jimmy?" I remember the one tense
trek we made together, last year when we wanted to scour the ruins of the Dunns'
cottage--nothing but cattle dung, the shattered hearth, a recipe for lovelier skin in a
watermarked envelope, some primitive chairs under an open roof. I settled for a slip of
heather, and when we turned back we had only each other to prod: Tess told me they never
wanted children; and were glad to put London behind them now, be nearer to home. So I
spoke of my mother's homesickness in a language like the cows', disjointed and crooned,
confessed how likely she'd move back to Ireland soon, and as we battled the briars in loose
wellingtons, the barbed wire gates between the fields, she said, "Your
mam fancies she'll live with
you if your father dies." I pictured my mother then, home, seated on the hot grass and weary
of a garage sale prefacing the hasty trip westward, where I lived, two rooms of a flat like
the bulbs of an hour glass; a place to mourn. In the kitchen now, Tess and I taciturn over
the tenderizing of steaks, the deep fry of chips, her careful brooding voice gently
intrudes: how am I getting along with the crossword puzzle, and, would we all care for a
round on the pitch and putt course after the meal. We eat then, sort the clubs and irons, a
few newer golf balls in with the old. At play, the dusk drifts down between us, the sour
fields come between us, the darkness of our gestures and encouragements, guiled
and estranged until my father misfires the ball beyond the hedgerows, and on the
other side, drawn shivering and stunned: all of it, webs, webbed on webs, gauzed and
dewy, spread over the field like a shroud. How is it made? I ask. To Tess, I mean the heart
of the sunset, its turgid red, distended into the lowland fog that reaches to her hand on hip,
her putter at counterpoint to the sloping shoulder: "It's something to do with volcanoes far
away." I touch the field with my shoe, look deep past the fine threads, to where the millions of
spiders, dormant, have blossomed out their spinnerets, terrible and sure. |
|
His safety lamp is hooked from a basement cross
bream, cord straightened to counter the
overhead floor. He moves it here, and over a little, until the light timbering
all sides is just so. So many years,
this has been the carpentry of my
haircuts, a stage nailed out from his lamp,
and bearing out gently his disappointments. "I don't
understand it," he says. "Your mother,
sometimes, you know she's sick in the head."
Again, he'll say he's the victim of a madwoman, of her
hatred for the foundries, and the cigarette smoke
from neighbors' bedrooms that fumed its way
through her open windows years ago.
I listen till the scissors and the fast
hands work obliviously, and the
endless blames have become his own
confession. And choked inside his
barber-spread, practice at changing his subjects,
telling him, "Don't trim over my
ears." Yet, with the silent moments of hair painting my
shoulders, I hear myself quietly blaming him for my
awkward looks-- that unbending neatness,
his stale ideas about clean appearance,
good families, and what love should be. And when he's
caught my head between his hands, muscled and squeezed it
into the good positions, the best
light, I question if this is all
he knows about love for me: his
fingertips warming between scalp and
scissors, needing to flourish his lines with the shuffle of a whisk
broom beating my shoulders; sick in his heart, and wearied
for the moment when the cut hair falls
into the light, perfect and blameless, and lands at
his feet. |
|
Ambling the vehicle up along side me, her hand travels the upholstery to the door-lock; and the
thick hinges inflect the phrases
familiar to me: how she has swerved the
patient car into the high pitched turns
so many times, her fist battering the
dash, or my shoulder; how all feeling had to be
abandoned until leaving her to drive alone was the only
way; her relentless unburdening of secrets in
the car: telling me about my older brother,
dead at birth, or the abortion she couldn't
carry through, would never forgive herself for thinking it, and after
all, wasn't I here, thank God? How could I possibly
answer? Once, I shook her crazily while my father
careened the Plymouth around traffic, a
half-bottle of valium churning her inside-out
while she struggled to talk against
sleep and the curdle of speech:
Couldn't I, please, just put the coat
around her, she was cold; and why
didn't we let her finish it off? Later, she would never remember these questions,
or the absence of answers, or how I left
the coat off, praying the cold would keep
her conscious. Later, such things always conceal themselves in our changed memories,
the car become anchored in its
driveway. And our figures, seated in the lateness of back
yard, might talk of nothing--watch the bats stagger from the
shadows of trees at night. Or laugh quietly, stretching the one
sweater across two backs, knowing
this is all I must expect of her, no more than the letting go of
questions when the silence becomes round
with those answers we can't bring ourselves to
speak. I know now that she won't let go
of me; that the silence will belong to
her; that anything I do, even the precious nothing, might tilt the frail quiet against me. Yet, that would be enough. Even now, as the car idles
patiently, it's enough. And something,
my God, is understood after all
when her calm and joyless voice,
cudgeled by the loose pistons and
the plaintive exhaust, begs, "Get back in. Do you hear what I'm
asking?" |
|
He taps the velvet of the
sponge cake cooling, sidles the wet
blade of a butter knife till the pan yawns its warm
pelt across the tea cloth. And with the
jam-enfolded spoon spreading, It will be
something, he hopes-- to calm a drugged stomach,
melt the tongue that quelled its bile into
the crescent basin last night. It will place
inside his mother what they cannot speak, crumbs of the
cake roll swallowing down the jot of language,
butter-creamed and yeasty, guiled and
conciliatory in the rightness of a pain now
done, an injury self-inflicted, now
clemently distanced all in deed, all self-enfolded
and denounced. But the dough has gone
wrong: marchpaned and leaden,
intractably torn and mired in its
choleric scroll unfurled and coiled again. With shame, the cake is fleeced of its foil and
jettisoned into the tissue pail of the
nurse's station. Sidelong to her bed, he touches
the hospital gown's flannel, layers their
hands, kneading stiff humiliation from her
joints, and urging out the the smallness of
her act, turning out its fettered dread and
longing till she folds the
knuckles, limply rolling up her fist in his,
consenting to the failure of such
moments that find unfinished voice in
the quiet conch of bones and flesh. |
|
We hope something is to be
found among the dark hillsides and oasting houses, a reason why we've dallied this bothersome
far to visit relatives who exist like a smudge on the margin of a page. But must we
always be the ones in disgrace: voyagers foreign, and shabby? Or come empty handed,
beggarly with a sideshow of family photographs, a half-hearted go at arrangement of our
little history, and the faintly penciled yeardates and place names, as if the past were a
flimflam conjuration. Near Canterbury, their house, brick and anchored above the stone engulfed
seaside, is hot baths, soup and dressing gowns, mint chews and scotch. Suitcases slouch against
the chifforobes, are ugly and anachronistic: sweaters, underthings, damply strewn against their
unfamiliar rugs and plainly inelegant in this autumn effulgence. Unwearable. Later, to stroll the
dormant primrose garden, my father, asthmatic, is urged to wear Peter's riding cap, keep it jaunty
and brim-down against the coastal winds. After evening supper, my sister in Kitty's
kimono: at once unburdened of the travel, unforeign with the mug of tea. On the naked edge of a sofa,
stacking snapshots of a life so prosaic it can barely be our own, I am slouched under the
slipcover of a wool cardigan several times my size. And over the faithful patching together of
portraits, and coffins, and arm-in-arm salutes, these tombs and parties, we peruse one another,
furtively, as if to say, there is something more familiar about us now. |
|
I've been to him as one who followed close
behind, mapping from astern the scars and bedlam of
skin on his shoulders, or nearer to the whiff of his
glands, soaping the flannel cloth to wash
from the small of his back upwards, dodging moles,
tendrilled skin tags. What I did emptied of aim when the
white shirt went up like a sail, his
Sunday trousers buckled and squeezed, the
shoes tied in double knots for the
slow walk to church, where the
reckless aphid managed to jot and smear
across his sleeve; in my love for
him has gleamed a brash aplomb
of godliness bruised by some wanton task
to shape another's soul, make it
squared with the neatness of his
guise, or hide the naked color of loss to
the gaze of others. And dutiful to
this in the numbing vigil to her
funeral, I fixed his oxblood
cordovans at the bed's foot, left him tying and
retying the laces into perfect
knots, watched him bracing hard his soul
against the dying and the death of
all, of me, the world and, God help him, vexed to remake himself until the body's plaintive universe was placed and placed aright. |
|
Enkidu: "In the house of
ashes, where I entered, . . . There sits the queen of
below-earth, Ereshkigal: Belit-tseri, tablet-scribe
of the underworld, kneels before her. [She holds a tablet] and
reads aloud to her. Lifting her head,
[Ereshkigal] looked directly at me--me: '[Who] has brought this one
here . . .?'" -- Gilgamesh, XII.iv I bring this to his
attention, for no reason but the impulse to make my
mother's words his own and infelt: her
letter to him, drafted then abandoned in the
unabridged dictionary. And now, after she died,
after her lilting voice, too, has begun to vanish, these
words are suddenly exhumed to
trammel her tacit husband. Misery
is here; each sentence is
preponderant--fitful and desperately precise so that
he might reckon even her compulsion to heft
these words in the very crucible of
words, a language more savage than her own. I
think I understand what those
faintly pencilled choices, those painstaking hyphenations in
the letter's margins-- "lach·ry·mose (shedding my tears);"
"pusillanimous (you are fainthearted, uncourageous)"-- must have meant to her,
teased out of the wider knowledge.
Darkly aboriginal. My inexplicable and hackneyed
whim to crush, for instance, inside that
very book, the slip of bog brush I
snipped in her memory. I wouldn't think to look at
it again until, one day, from out of
the pages, from out of the very word
"heather," the clumsy purplescent
scatter on corduroy. Powerfully spoken. Or years
later, this sensual ritual with my
lover: the two of us arched again above the
dictionary, shaping our mouths to the sound, the
syllables of things: the accents on
"concupiscence," or soulful pleasures of pronunciation in
"agapé," and more. How seeking out the names of feeling would
itself become an urgent glossary of
gesture more moving than language,
such that my father, imbued here with prophecy from a vast speechless repository of
souls, crumples her burgeoning
letter back into its germinal
seeds, and that is all. Once read, the forthright wishes of the dead have
already come to pass. |
|
Which songs warbled capably across her canning of those plums, or what
inside her shrank from his small cry after miscarriage, or which
mute appeals lamented over the
dead, or me or you. I have committed these
reverent guesses to leave you
something worthy of her memory. And
have failed. But in my casual taking hold of the snow shovel to
dash away the fuss of the postman's
fall on ice, to put it aright
and unacknowledged--in so much, some small-minded honor has
said enough of me: what I have
judged by memory, and once and for
all obligingly striven to
forgive, forgive. Help me take up the spoon now,
break the paraffin seal. |
  |
|
At Telegraph and Bancroft,
a homeless man offers a standing
ovation--minutes of it. Shyly at first, then
bemused, passers-by furtively glance beyond
themselves, then at themselves, then on.
Yes, he's clapping at nothing. No need to
sentimentalize him; say, everything but his
tiny life is worth applause. No. Neither vilify him,
crazy man that he is. In time, one might recall
the fine, cluttered threads of his beard, or
his gray trousers. Maybe they were red. It matters
little. Whether flesh or metaphor,
his kind degrade so easily. And this
is Berkeley. And I was once here too,
and for a few blinding summer minutes,
saw nothing in much the same manner. |
|
A STALINIST BUILDING AND ITS REASONS From the tram, its top five
stories and pinnacle disappear into a thick sky;
long queues of school children wait to
enter; so much embellishment rises
up one tier after another;
tired ghettos have been chewed and
swallowed underneath the weight of its concrete,
crushing an area I can't entirely
take in. These are the usual reasons this
Stalinist building leaves its mark. While my neck twists up, Zbyszek stares down. He's
watching tram wheels skating the
iron seam, waiting to see those places where the ground bucks and takes us by
surprise, where the tracks jolt us. All over Warsaw, he says,
the souls of those buried under the remnants
of buildings push through pavement stones. They
become free. We struggle at our stop to
get out, cross to a crumbling shop that's
sunken below street level: down in the
window, canned beans stacked in a pyramid, tall and precarious. He pulls me
closer to the concrete wall, says, "Look. Here they are,"
drawing my fingertips to fill the rough hollows
of five bullet holes. |
|
Here, nothing can be heard,
I know. Statues peer up
thoughtfully past spires redundant and perforating
the silence; the prayerful hands of
churchgoers puncture silence too, then
slouch into double fists. Hopes and pleas this large,
it seems, collapse upon themselves. It's
inevitable. Even in that fraudulent
quiet pinning me down into the
moments awaiting sleep, I'll look up and within (the smallest
canyon that ever was) and send in
those prayers from a heart that fears for
itself and everyone as only the heart of God
can. That's when I toil with my own ego,
wonder my way back through the hoodwink
of conscience: the fault of that first
vain and luckless soul who must have waited for the
still clarity of water, seen his face reflected
against sky, and known it to be his own, yet not his;
or heard his voice speak, really
speak to him for the first time with the
troublesome smallness of a thing so
weighty as to seem other and godly. Nowadays,
like Echo, I'm resigned to the burden
of being unheard: leave telephone messages to
be reviewed like handbills, then
discarded; or invent the daunted voice of a
friend reading aloud my letter as
I'm writing it; no different from all those
times as a child when I'd pull the empty tin
and string more tightly to comprehend
the answer, enunciate loudly enough for
anyone to hear, "I can't understand
you. Say it again." We all discover early on,
one's own words are clearer, more
deeply felt and discerned. That's why,
drained of heart and self and speech,
somehow my instinct knows well enough to fold
my hands against my ear at night,
let slumber be what it is, a chance to listen to my prayers, a chance to answer what's larger than my self, but smaller than God. |
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As hay bends and divides
beneath the blades, as the terrier, vigilant, courts the danger
of the tractor tires, my uncle's harvester grumbles to a standstill. He's hit a pheasant nest
unwittingly in the tall palisades of
yellow grasses, and dismounts. Somehow the
hen still lives, however frenzied, and now
at the field's far end she careers around the
thick shoulders of lower branches, thrashing and tilling the
air, but won't alight with those raw and
glistening nubs where her legs once were. And here in this
rousted place where she had once
scratched aside the dirt and hatched out several
chicks--the terrier gnashes the half-dead
things, his teeth drawing in the flattened
corpus of down and parody of stricken
yellow claws, until we try to stay the horror: snatch
the dead nestling from the obdurate jaw; flag
my uncle's jacket after the skeet of stumbling
feathers so that the hen wheezes forth a phrase,
bewildered, and lurches into the hopeless shelter
of other fields. There's an end to it. And when the growing season
has ebbed, we'll deny again what the
terrier's teeth were meant for all along.
Somewhere, the viscous coil of the
terrier's spoor sinks below the moss.
Somewhere, the thorny bits of claws and bones
hedge themselves in roots. Somewhere, the
thresher has long since flocked the
field with a pale distance of
dirt, and a bird will never drop from the
sky. Somehow, we were never there to see
it happen. |
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i. Flynn up and left--to the
States, was our guess--with the promise
that my family and I would take care of
the place as if it were our own. So we picked up
where he left off, dutifully beating his land into
reasonable shape until one day everything became clear as
if according to plan. He'd be gone for years, and
how many, who could tell? So we
fingered the keys off our pantry
nail and shoved in Flynn's cottage
door, rounding up a pail of rotted potatoes,
and Flynn's small brass candlestick,
dented on one side and nearly hidden in the
hollow where the ceiling beam meets
the wall. Out of all of Flynn's
rubble, at least that was useful to me. ii. We became whimsical at last
with Flynn's untried acres across the
road. We juggled his fields for pasture this year,
haystacks the next. Once we let the place go wild,
giving the mule free reign over knee-deep
weeds. Even Flynn's bitter old blackberries,
left to their whims, grew back in sweet and edible
thousands. Sometimes on bad days, I'd
look out over Flynn's with that dismal want, half
expecting the letter that would set
things right again. Flynn could
return, seize it all: his house and
fields, berries, and candlestick. And we
would watch him digging new crops of
things, cutting out brand new ditches, piling
new heaps of briars to mark the strange
separation of fields where blackberries would go
unpicked and rot. iii. All that was Flynn's comes
down to this: bits and pieces that at last
become the commonplace, so that all possessions,
even the ground, are useless by any other
name than his. After years of so much forgotten ownership, land I suppose
changes hands in a way that's barely
noticed. No one else cares what squeezes out
from the ground or doesn't. Or what yields itself up
from ripe corners of a boarded up house. And
in the end, what never changes is that we
still call it Flynn's because
that at least is a useful thing. |
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We accept that some things
are too great to bear; we just let them wash over us. The
white birch and these black oaks, for instance, no longer
convene the birds; only the crow is hale enough to roost
here. The scurrilous red squirrels, too, are legion no longer.
We assume that blizzards drive life back into its
sanctuaries, but our sense is that so much here has
disappeared for good. Snow delicately appointed to
the bare branches is welcome enough, but at
thirty-two inches thick, it's quite bombastic now.
Roads have closed, in fact will remain so until paltry
sums are diverted from elsewhere to plow and bolster the
collapsed welts of asphalt. The frayed reporter for the
local news, even she cannot make her practiced
hand--outstretched to the wreckage of industry--promise hope
with any fervor. And the cargo train stalled there on a
tributary of terminus railways stymied in the sleet, it has stolen
past the small-town wooded plots with vague
insinuations of jobs; we suspect its
provisions are burdened by something toxic and seeping; it's
gradually poisoning us. And in the building's
vestibule, our neighbors speak of such things detained around the clement
anchor of a snow shovel, or chafing past one another,
implacable and suffering amid the wet musk and slush of the
squall. We've seen their raw hands ring themselves over
children just ushered onto squalid buses routed through the piebald
towns, the lackluster pipe dream of cheerless cities and the
certitude of a Christian upbringing packed off with them.
"Just wait a while longer," they were told, "things will get
better once the snow melts." But already the ice-flows on the
Susquehana are colliding and muscling through, like a
tug and scow. The bilge is on the move, rising over
the doomed roots of trees, the trusses of eroding
embankments. It's creeping and sighing toward the shoulders of the
slick highway. The flood season will burst forth another
dull inconvenience. Pay it no mind. For now,
the neighbor must wail on about the heavy snow and
his stuck car, and any talk of more work is out of its
element until he relinquish himself among the nexus of
streets clotted in drifts, the veiled, superfluous changing
of traffic lights whipping about in a city
that has paused inside its footfall. |
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Entombed below the slipper
or a boot's passionate step
against bricks, a city is struggling for
the arbitrary contours of voice: it lets masonry's
grit stand for
abstractions--pain, desire, history; lets the torn
pavement mean itself; the
exhilarated black to white of the pigeon
flock thrashing sudden direction over the
statues-- it lets this speak of
neglect. Above inside the concrete apartment,
beneath the heaviness of goose down
quilt and cotton, a man is at rest. The
damaged arms have long since thickened with shapeless
battle scars, transmutable only in the undoing lilt of
sleep where the wounds open the tainted desires,
the mismatched sensations of freedom and
pains still buried deep. In his dreams, the
specters of vanished neighbors, burning lovers
and the odd acquaintance now turned against him--they
have stretched into his flesh. They pull
the fallen structures of Danzig around
them. They have begun to etch the byways of
his face; they keep the washed
beaches of emotions, the fossils of memory which
ache to say something but for now are
voiceless in the softer stone of his
skin. Miles from the ebb and desire of his breath, an
amber washed Baltic is eking out the city's edges where the
mosaic of streets is undone and Danzig fractures
into sand. But the stones now are flaring into
morning. The swill and clank of shipyards, the
tumult of shoreline, begin to wake him. They are
liquefying the mawkish phrases of his
dreams. They are erasing the moment when the ghosts
are rounding out the words at last, when the edges of
their want are just sinking down into the
solid. They are washing over again the helpless voice of
his history until, defeated and jutting into the reflex
of dawn, he'll listen to how the city surrenders its
language, reclaim that quiet brickwork of who he is. |
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Soft-spoken, he has stepped into hail stones to meet
me, unfurling his hand: his
faintest uttering, embarrassed and studied with desperation, "God bless you. Please . . ." I cannot
help that he is guilty of his
metaphor: squalid and plural, separate from
me in all their hunger, misfortune, wanton longing
for everything. The pity which signs our distance
is a sin we both suffer unless we
conquer the guilt, or surrender again to an eased
conscience. I want to let him weaken
me, unwind in me what is coiled tightly as
in the secret loosening of a watch-spring. I want
to be duty-bound, grace myself to him, as to
all who have placed their lives inside his
image, my icon. But I know I'll
never manage to make the odd
pocket-change mean millions, nor leap the
tacit flaw of unfit commitment or
even the private nature of this humbling. And I wave aside his hand, leave with his image
studded by hail and the quell of
prayer. I stay single-minded, circumspect. I know, I've not behaved in conscience, but to blame no one is to own again the precious self. |
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". . . just as the eye
was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole
body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the
movement of the whole soul be turned from the
world of becoming into that of being, and learn by
degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest
and best of being, or in other words, of the good." --Plato, Republic, Book VII
("The Allegory of the Cave") A guide signals a lackey with a wink so that vines of light bulbs will flicker out then die. It's an old trick wrung lackluster now through years of slogging tourists through the
caverns. But just the same, in this
dark where even smell is
fatigued by the lichenous
miasma--this dark (darkest by its dense and
clammy seal of mineral crust), darkness
which is the be all and end all of dark-- no twinkling universe or interstitial crack of light remains to cheat the hunch that this must be our end. The blind youth,
unimpressed of course, says "Big
deal" and from others come the tentative sniggers or elated ghostly groans that soon enough grumble for the lights again, but
the seconds seem blacker now, our tour guide holding out for the thrill so that, like a dark star, a shadow imprisoned by shadow, I
have to prod the abyss, shuffle
woefully in inches for a wall, the
task wrapped in the focus of my own silence, the horror of colliding
bodies nearby, the breathy
emptiness of feeling nothing, of
becoming nothing, until a thumb and a broad palm, which are
igneously light and stiff at first,
unfold across my cheek, and the two of us,
without courage to move on or speak, see
the good in seizing one another. |
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One beleaguered reading,
and the tarot has spoken to him. And next, the philosophical
banter that moors his hand to the tyg of scotch, and
balks his shoulders up against a wingback. Then the house
lets go, and our books tire out beside tchochkes, and the parrot
drowses into the onyx of a window pane then hunkers down more into
the arcane arrangement of sleep. And we remain,
quietly. Until his secret voice tips out his dream of a
mountain zen garden to summon the others, the
anguished. Afterall, what was an ex-journeyman
to do to make his spiritual center hold fast? A
sanctuary must fill itself with tempests of concerns, must turn back
the dark quilts of the world's iniquities. But how was he
to square such plans this late in life? And so
on, until his drink no longer is topped off, and I cower
from the gentle off-putting remark or tidbit of advice I can't
really offer, and the vessel of our talk runs dry: a
page, filled with as much as it will
bear, then turned down, reticently, for the words
to spill back fruitlessly. |
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In the rush hour at dusk,
dim head lamps cut brighter paths; cars resign
their shapes to twilight unraveling identities. And
hovering overhead, the landing beams of the
jet bow down against the swallowed
mountains, arch landward, and burn faintly
out of the gray plane of sky, knowing which way means
bending to inertia, which to a sundered state of
travel. The steering column yields to the shepherding
of tired trucks, the abulia of radial tires etching
pavement. The planet brakes and the driver's
body turns its maps and latitudes to place
itself where it cannot arrive for miles of stops,
so willing to let the landscape be God's
proxy, urging "home" to seek what gives it
origin and earn its own rest. |
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 INDEX
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Many of these poems were completed
under the editorial auspices of the following writers, academicians and dear
friends: Ruth Anderson, Eavon Boland, Max E. Hughey, Jr., Terry Hummer,
Cynthia Huntington, Milton Kessler, James Liddy, James McAuley, James
McMichael, Paula Meehan, Kenneth Pobo, Sherod Santos, Alan Shapiro, Myron
Simon. Some individual poems have been published in the
following journals: The Elephant-ear Free Lunch The Jacaranda Review Dickinson Review The Ear Toyon Galley Sail Review James White Review The Cowles Mountain Journal South Coast Poetry Journal  BIOGRAPHICAL DATA
 Having been raised by immigrant parents in Milwaukee, a city whose history of ethnic diversity and racial tensions has ushered me through childhood, I have spent much of my adult life attempting to reconcile the contradiction of "community" and "boundary;" this was the initial inspiration for my writing. I have been fortunate enough to receive several awards for my work, including an Academy of American Poets Prize in 1983, and a Polish National Alliance Award in 1982. But with my completion of a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English in 1982, and a Master of Arts Degree in English (with a concentration in Creative Writing) in 1983 from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I decided it was time to live abroad to conduct literary research, continue writing, and, most importantly, explore my own ethnic ties to Ireland and Poland in a context completely removed from the charged definition of "community" that existed in Milwaukee. In 1984 I attended college in Dublin, Ireland. And that same year I received a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year of study in Warsaw, Poland. These experiences have informed a substantial number of the poems which appear in the following collection. In March, 1990 I completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Writing at the University of California, Irvine; during the summer of 1989, the University of California, Irvine awarded me a Humanities Research Grant to return to Dublin, conduct follow-up research and complete part of this book. I have since been teaching Writing and Literature in San Diego community colleges.  LINKS
 Six Descending Notes
by Karl J. Sherlock
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