THE UNRAVELING STRANGENESS
BOOKS BY BRUCE WEIGL
POETRY
Executioner
A Sack Full of Old Quarrels
A Romance
The Monkey Wars
Song of Napalm
What Saves Us
Sweet Lorain
Archaeology of the Circle
After the Others
PROSE
The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir
CRITICISM
The Giver of Morning: On Dave Smith
The Imagination As Glory: On the Poetry of James Dickey (edited with T. R. Hummer)
Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry
ANTHOLOGY
Between the Lines: Writing on War and Its Social Consequences (edited with Kevin Bowen)
TRANSLATIONS
Poems from Captured Documents (cotranslated from the Vietnamese with Nguyen Thanh)
Mountain River: Poetry from the Vietnam Wars (cotranslated and coedited with Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung)
Angel Riding a Beast: Poems for America, by Liliana Ursu (cotranslated from the Romanian with the author)
THE UNRAVELING STRANGENESS
POEMS BY BRUCE WEIGL
Copyright © 2002 by Bruce Weigl
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weigl, Bruce, 1949–
The unraveling strangeness : poems / by Bruce Weigl.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9516-6
I. Title
PS3573.E3835 U57 2002
811′.54—dc21 2002021468
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
In memory of George Eichi Kondo
CONTENTS
Part One
Oh, Atonement
Immorality of Beauty
Folktale
I Waited for the Spirit Soldiers
I Put a Shotgun to My Mouth
My Pants
The Super
Nixon
Hinckley
Baby Crying, 3 A.M.
Black-and-Tan Dog
One of the Wives of God
The Unknowns
Nothing Else Sutra
Teaching Hanh the Blues
Home
Part Two
Incident at Eagle’s Peak
Part Three
Time After Time
Elegy for Myself
The Thing (Part One)
The Thing (Part Two)
The Roads in Our Brain
For A, at Fourteen
My Autumn Leaves
The Buddhas of the Bamiyan Valley
That Towering Feeling
The New Year Two Thousand
After Horace (I, V)
After Horace (II, V)
Why Plato Left for Megara
On the Event of My Untimely Death
Finding Their Bodies at Home
By the Suburban Swimming Pool
Meeting Mr. Death
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment, along with my appreciation for their generous support, is due to the editors of the magazines in which these poems first appeared:
The American Poetry Review: “I Waited for the Spirit Soldiers,” “Home,” “Why Plato Left for Megara,” “The Unknowns,” “Nixon,” “One of the Wives of God,” “The Roads in Our Brain,” “That Towering Feeling,” “The Thing (Part Two),” and “Oh, Atonement.”
Field: “Home.”
Gulf Coast: “Meeting Mr. Death,” “Time After Time,” and “Hinckley.”
Poetry International: “Elegy for Myself” and “The Immorality of Beauty.”
The Southern Review: “Folktale,” “The Unknowns,” and “After Horace (I, V).”
I am grateful for the continued support of Morgan Entrekin, Eric Price, and Ellen Levine. I also want to acknowledge the support of Roy Church, Robert Dudash, and Robert Beckstrom, who made it possible for me to come home.
It is the time of sundering …
Beneath the green silk counterpane.
Hart Crane
PART ONE
OH, ATONEMENT
Through lonely motel walls
I heard that human ah
of pleasure from a woman
with a man.
I don’t remember who I was then,
only that I was
alive again somehow,
so I sat up all that night,
grateful for whatever
noisy business they could give me,
but there was never enough,
so I entered the stream
and moved then
at my ease
with the current
and the dark
shapes of my baggage
through a winding
journey of a life
until some people
murdered the truth.
Yet this evening,
along roads
I have come home to
after the many deaths
and the many betrayals,
I can watch a giant
thunderhead
grow and form itself
like a living thing
into one corner
of our flat Ohio sky
and I can say,
This is where I’ll pray.
IMMORALITY OF BEAUTY
The river where Faith drowned.
The marks her desperate fingers
gouged into the muddy bank.
Her pale hair
swept back in the cold current.
The heavy vines she tangled in
she hadn’t known were there.
One sutra teaches
that beauty should never be possessed,
only encountered
so briefly
you are left with a kind of sorrow
and then let go
into nothing.
FOLKTALE
Nineteen fifty-seven: you
remember the fins,
don’t you,
on the baby-
blue-and-white Bel Air?
Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,
beyond the
many-colored rabbits
penned for the evening
by the tap-tap
of the old man’s cane, you can see
another man
through the muslin of time
throw his baby
high into the air. Women
scream from the porch, laughing.
Oh, the night is thick with blossoms
from the blue plum tree,
and this man is full of liquor
and of his own young life,
so he throws his baby boy
high into the sky
as it is taken by evening
irrevocably away from them
so that it seemed
that I would not come down.
I WAITED FOR THE SPIRIT SOLDIERS
I waited for the spirit soldiers
in the mist-torn
nineteen sixty-seven
year of our lord of the nothing,
while on the other side,
my friend James Holmes
held a shotgun
on a guard in a bank.
It was summer
and he trembled, someone said,
as he stood there,
stunned in his own plans.
He was not a dangerous or
a cruel man, James Holmes,
but he needed the money
to feed the many people
and their children
of his family
who had come into his sweet care.
He could have gotten twenty years,
but his story saved him:
the taped-up heartbroken
shotgun that fell to pieces in his hands
saved him;
how he had borrowed it
from his cousin
on a desperate
whim; how
no shell was chambered
or loaded there. Someone said
his whole large body
shook through the telling.
I PUT A SHOTGUN TO MY MOUTH
I put a shotgun to my mouth before:
a warmer feeling came, an end to nights
that never seemed to end, but opens a door
you may not want to step inside. The light’s
not all we think it is; the black a place
that’s more inviting every day, where
you may find yourself alone with grace,
with how it felt before the deaths. I can’t abide
by words that simply decorate, or ask
that beauty only be the things inside of us,
apart from humanness, removed and pure, a mask
to cover who we are, as if the heart
exposed would be too much to bear. We hide
so many fears inside, so many lives.
MY PANTS
I lost some weight
until one day my pants fell down
and I felt like a little boy,
only my heart was old,
and my bloody soul
was older yet
mercifully, what the body could forget,
and because of the ghostly
company that it kept.
What are you going to do?
You lose some weight
and your pants won’t stay up,
and now, and now,
I find some happiness and pleasure
just mowing my lawn
in the twilight.
I love to make the lines
straight, and breathe in
the musty sexual smell
of new-mowed grass.
I don’t know
where the little boy
whose pants fell down
lives now, but it must be
somewhere in my skull,
rattling around
like a bullet, or like a scream.
THE SUPER
I met the super
on the battleship-
gray-painted
stoop
of the five-floor walk-up,
MacDougal Street, back
when it was neighborhood
and I’d
hooked up with a woman
who had money
from her folks and a job
that paid good
and who told me,
Come stay with me, honey, that
nearly forgotten summer
in the postwar
black grief and loss, and
all I had to do was
sleep up there
on the fifth floor with her and
love her some nights.
We ate dinner together in restaurants.
But that first morning
I got there ahead of her
and met the super
on the stoop
on MacDougal Street. I
was twenty. I
had already seen
inside the storm of shit,
and this woman
said with a nasal screech
that she was the super and
that I couldn’t get in
nohow, as it wasn’t my place,
and she called some Puerto Rican
young men to her aid
when I barely resisted
in defense of my
stupid rights
and of the rights
of the not-yet-arrived
woman who expected me, she
expected things of me if
I were to get this walk-up
room to write in or
no, I never wrote, I couldn’t
write when I heard her
breathe at night so close,
although there was some
loveliness there too, I recall.
The tough guys said
they’d cut my fucking
heart out if I didn’t
leave the super alone and
get the hell back
to wherever
I was supposed to be,
a question, I believe,
they had no idea
how to answer. I know
that I didn’t. Later,
when the would-be
keeper of me
finally showed up,
the super relented, and
later still,
once summer
had become something
we could both bear,
we got to talking
one evening on the stoop.
August nighttime traffic and
lovers I watched, unworthy,
and in the middle
of the super’s
winter story about
how the heat went off
one night in the place
so she nearly froze and
so dragged her chair
to the gas stove’s
open door, propped
her tired feet there, and
fell hard to sleep, she
lifted her dress
to show me. Like you
I could hardly believe the
scars on her legs from
where they’d caught fire,
that human acid, and this
eight months after the fact.
Give us back our lives, I say.
NIXON
Everyone hated him,
and that
brought us all together
at the loins and
philosophically.
One couple among us
kept a wolf
penned in their backyard
that paced fitfully
every time I saw it,
and that never looked at you
in the eyes, although
that’s not important
except for the way
that the maddening penned-up
wolf is a detail,
as in a painting,
of the lives we imagined
those nights
we would come together
to smoke
and to talk about
Nixon,
whom we had seen
in all of his flesh,
standing
on the White House balcony,
Apollonian
above the half-million
citizens who had come
to stop his killing; he
even waved to us, or
maybe it wasn’t him, maybe
it was a stand-in look-alike or
one of those
cutout presidents
with a mechanical arm
that waves. Anymore
the anniversaries of the deaths
are so many
that there is little time
for anything else.
HINCKLEY
People wait for vultures,
who arrive
all spring morning long,
singularly
and then in pairs
and then in small groups
like black V’s against the white sky,
or like lilies
opening in that
pond I can’t bloody remember,
as if our lives
had some kind of wings.
Take this hand, stranger,
outstretched to you;
take these lilies;
take this vulture’s air.
BABY CRYING, 3 A.M.
I’ve heard that hungry cry before. I know
it’s hard to take sometimes, an aching, deep
abiding need to fill that human hole,
our birth and strange inheritance, the leap
into a space expanding as we breathe
it in. The mother’s up. I see her through
the lamp-lit window’s glare, her silhouette received
by other people’s rooms and arms, those ghosts who fool
themselves and won’t let go. The baby cries
until the humid black-lit street is changed.
We’ll never be the same again. Our eyes
won’t close as easily, our nights arranged
around the hungry cry that comes in waves.
BLACK-AND-TAN DOG
I hit a black-and-tan dog
with my car,
at night on a windy road
at 50 mph.
Thump, thump
was all that it said, sitting
strangely in the middle of my lane
like a suicide,
and it saw my eyes
in a moment
that I didn’t want to
have with him,
so the next morning I drove back
to find who owned the dog,
and to say my grief
under gray autumn clouds
that hung so low
they seemed to want me. We
shift around from thing to thing
inside our minds. The geese
have come to rest
all over these cornfields.
There are so many,
like a blanket, but
no one home at the farmhouse,
where there’s a bloodstain
in the road near the driveway
where the dog must have landed,
or where they had dragged it
earlier in the morning, and
stuck in the weedy ditch nearby
a homemade wreath of wildflowers