The Sound, Page 3

  Votaries of all casts and ages, genders, voices,

  bow to you as they must, for nothing follows without you.

  I once met a man in an iron lung, puffing his words,

  and youth was a much-too-long parade of unfortunate data:

  the infirm, the wizened, the washout, the accidental suicide . . .

  An old man with a tinkling highball sat like a lord

  orating, When I was a boy, and we knew a story was coming.

  I never minded those times, being an odd duck

  who actually listened, but the lesson I failed to get was the one

  he always meant: One of these days, you smug twit,

  you’ll be me.

  Now my sage joints prophesy like rats

  from a leaking ship, and every morning’s gulp of pills

  pules in silent offering to Hygeia. Keep moving

  until you stop. The hell with the good opinion of others.

  Wisdom of age, goddess—the sort we laugh about

  if lucky enough.

  In dreams I’m still the boy who listens.

  Others suffer sleepless nights, others find the day

  too hard to climb, but climb to summits anyway.

  Think of them, betrayed by their own bones or blood,

  bent inside with maladies no one else can see,

  for whom merely to walk a city block would be

  a woozy flight.

  So I’ve become a spinner of yarns—

  hopefully not a sower of yawns—my hearing aids,

  crow’s feet and specs, and all my hidden pangs and pains

  pleading the Fifth before I find a fifth and pour

  a neat inch at cocktail time. Look with thine ears,

  said Lear to the world prolonging. Well, I’ve been there,

  half-hearing my way through human mazes.

  When I was a boy

  I listened to men weathered and withered, withstanding all

  the way they’d ducked at mortar fire or kamikazes,

  and women who took my arm to make it to the car.

  I chauffeured the old, cajoled them to keep up the work of living,

  helped them to their doors, found keys, conveyed them

  to dough-smelling kitchens, pans of foiled leftovers,

  letters they’d never written, love they’d never conveyed,

  whatever decay of night was left to wander in.

  Now I’ve only to hallow their too-neglected names

  with yours, goddess, each time I offer a lit candle

  or swallow the pills and pride or raise my ringing glass.

  THE NEW DOPE

  It was softer on the throat,

  harder on the heart.

  Two tokes deep in the lungs

  and I saw double,

  troubled my friends, I didn’t feel

  so well, so well.

  It was a kind of hell

  of harmlessness, except

  the sad division of the world

  I feared was permanent,

  no longer sane or self,

  no longer sole or whole

  so long as brick streets multiplied

  on the long, the short, the long drive home.

  So long, I said. It took so long

  to say So long.

  Next day I was glad

  that gravity was back, and this

  abyss-less ordinary mug

  of coffee in my hands.

  DISTURBED PARADELLE

  Do not repeat yourself.

  Do not repeat yourself.

  Habits are hard to break.

  Habits are hard to break.

  Repeat: Hard. Break. Habits

  Are not to do yourself.

  Why do you look that way?

  Why do you look that way?

  Am I so very strange to you?

  Am I so very strange to you?

  To look way strange, why that?

  So you do. I am very you.

  The days go slipping by.

  The days go slipping by

  Before you can catch them.

  Before you can catch them.

  Slipping before you go,

  Catch them. Days. By the can.

  Habits catch you slipping

  By yourself. Look to th

  Hard days. Am I to go?

  Way before them, do not

  Break. You repeat why so you are

  That can do. Very strange.

  THE GREAT CHANGER

  Without a song to find a lover by,

  some days she floated like a driftwood log,

  beached at high tide beneath a dismal sky.

  She was not Salmon Woman swimming under fog.

  She was not Echo, nor was she Talking River.

  She was not Thunder and she was not ever

  the mouse who changed her skin for woman’s skin.

  She was not Milky Way. She was not Moon.

  She had to move a mountain with a spoon

  and never ask forgiveness of the sun.

  When change came it was a gradual dying.

  She was not Owl Woman. This was not flying.

  But she was Fox and found her gnawed-off limb

  and the Great Changer came. And she welcomed him.

  HORSE PEOPLE

  When Quanah Parker’s mother as a young girl

  saw her family lanced and hacked to pieces,

  and was herself thrown on the hurtling rump

  of a warrior’s pony whipped to the far off

  and utterly unwritten Comancheria,

  the little blonde began her life, outcast

  only when the whites recaptured her and killed

  the man she loved, the father of her children.

  The language she forgot would call her ruined

  and beyond redemption like the young she suckled,

  among them the “last Chief of the Comanche,”

  a man who died in comforts his mother spurned,

  but who, like her, remembered how the manes

  of the remuda caught the breezes as they ran,

  and how the grass caught fire in the scalp-red sun.

  SAND CREEK

  The land flayed open like a skin

  on which the stories would be drawn

  The sky a turtled bowl, powdered

  blue of a broken robin’s egg

  and there beside the washboard road

  where the wire fences lean and sing

  rust-colored feathers of a hawk

  a turret-turning beak and eye

  I bend a knee

  and lean on shatterings of rock

  to watch a beetle right itself

  and struggle into stems and weeds

  a cricket like an autumn leaf

  crackling in crooked flight

  The compass draws around me blue

  A whittled bone-white moon fades west

  and there is unheard lamentation here

  and there is blood, blood everywhere

  the dried blood color of the weeds

  the blood of recollection, true

  or not true as the case may be

  The hawk, the beetle and the rest

  go on, the stream goes on, the trees

  all offering, all lifted high

  and opened like the land, the skin

  with its evaporating stain.

  FRANGIPANI

  Cut blossoms floating in a bowl of water

  are what they are. Someone saw and gathered

  the pale white and yellow stars and leaned

  intimately down. To know the fragile blooms

  with breathing color is to be reborn

  astir, astray, and happier than before.

  They float to survive now, a mystery like the dead

  wake up to in the cradle of the night,

  flesh of frangipani sweetening the bed

  between the mown grass and the Southern Cross,

  and if the memory bleeds at such a loss


  it’s only the cost of living with desire.

  So let the sphinx moths hunting nectar there

  where none exists be go-betweens for life,

  purposefully duped. Let the perfume rise.

  GALAHS IN THE WIND

  The tents are coming loose,

  whole households on a string

  and no one knows just where

  the children have run off to.

  Oh joy, the limbs and leaves

  are tearing like the waves.

  We are galahs. Galahs in the wind!

  The sunlight shouts and we

  tsup-tsup in riotous flight.

  The world is all a seed to eat,

  a song to answer everywhere,

  we must be everywhere

  at once we must, we must

  tsup-tsup to the sun

  our flight beneath the blue

  and endless racing heaven.

  MY SCOTTISH GRANDMOTHER’S LOBOTOMY

  The tool used hardly mattered.

  The procedure could be done

  even with a screwdriver

  slipped in through the eye socket,

  scraping pre-frontal tissue,

  and what was lost—neurosis

  or addiction, flights of high

  or crashing spirits—mattered

  to a world made calmer. Thus.

  And thus it was, the patient

  lost the village window she

  had once crawled out of, fleeing

  her carpenter father’s house,

  lost the need to find escape,

  pilfered morphine, syringes

  slipped from hospital closets,

  lost years of nurse’s training,

  lost her own words—you might say

  lost her mind, the part of her

  those who loved her thought they loved,

  got rid of now. The mad girl

  wrecked and pinioned in a bed,

  aired in a hospital chair,

  out of it, mouthing drivel.

  She lived that way for decades.

  I never heard her accent,

  her laughter, even a cough.

  BILDUNGSROMAN

  i. m. Seamus Heaney

  Because for us all things were living

  the night train could not pass unwatched—

  the way it threw the forest shadows

  spinning across our bedroom wall,

  the way it shook the house, the way

  the revving diesel blew its top—

  so I climbed the metal ladder up

  to the upper bunk to see the light

  that cast the passing images,

  and somehow slipped and stuck my foot

  right through the bedroom window glass.

  No cut but a shock of the real

  and a brother’s mockery for trying

  to see beyond, and a moment’s crying.

  HANGMAN

  A Big Chief tablet and a Bic

  between us on the car’s back seat,

  the scaffold drawn, and underneath

  a code of dashes in a row

  for seven letters. Part of a stick-figure

  fixed to the noose’s O

  for every letter missed, until

  if I’m not careful my poor guy

  will hang with x’s for his eyes.

  My brother parlays his resource

  for big boy words with taunting skill:

  “It starts with d and rhymes with force.”

  But I don’t know the word, don’t know

  the wet world being slapped away

  by wiper blades, or why the day

  moved like an old stop-action film

  or an interrupted TV show

  about a family on the lam.

  I let myself be hanged, and learn

  a new word whispered out of fear,

  though it will be another year

  before I feel the house cut loose,

  my dangling body and the burn

  of shame enclosing like a noose.

  SECURITY LIGHT

  The glow outside our window is no fallen star.

  It is futility itself. It is the fear of night

  a neighbor burns with, nightmare of a stubborn child.

  I dreamed of chasing crows in a dark of sea fog

  and no wind, the chill smell of kelp and changing things,

  knowing the sea’s edge and the sand met where the fish lived.

  I saw the waters running out to meet the water

  coming in, the small crabs lifted off their claws.

  I saw the trysting place of cormorants, the cliffs

  of guarded nests where eagles watched like sated kings

  alive, alive at the moving sand clock of the sea

  where all’s dissolved, where earth itself is taken down.

  THE STUDENT

  Just hours before he went to hang himself

  he smiled at me and promised poems would come,

  then waved goodbye, apprentice to the word.

  He lived. But in fractions. A feeding tube

  uncoiling from his abdomen. His aunt

  and mother held him still to shave his face.

  I bent and kissed the boy. He mouthed the air

  and murmured what we hoped was meaning speech.

  He wasn’t fully made when he strung up

  his life. His instrument was still untuned.

  That was a year ago. Word comes of struggle,

  as if a strangled soul would find the strength

  to love what wasn’t wholly there before,

  only the promised happiness of song

  beyond the comprehension of the mind.

  What else could explain the effort to crawl back

  among the living, for whom speech is easy

  but understanding never comes in peace?

  OLD MAN WALKING

  The old man walking on the road

  alone, with stark trees and a sky

  as gray-white as his heavy head,

  had lifted many a thought on high,

  had lifted them to dream-head trees,

  the witnesses of all the weight

  dropping the old man to his knees

  when no one saw him in the night.

  Days when he did not dare to write,

  the black dog for his only friend,

  he stepped out on the road, the white

  unwritten sky without an end.

  An old man never walks alone.

  Let others judge what others see.

  The old man walking on the road

  had words to keep him company.

  PASSION

  It isn’t the choir of small boys, casting about, singing shyly or with perfect oval mouths,

  and it isn’t the gentle rocking solo on the violin

  played by a man who’d sooner mooch a meal from anyone than pay,

  and it isn’t the lovely rapture of the cellist who, between her legs and in the fluent embrace of her arms,

  gives birth to a god who makes the audience tremble,

  and it isn’t the white-haired athlete marking time with his stick and coaxing the lot of them to music,

  and it isn’t the long-dead Lutheran Kapellmeister who built this temple of sound with a crew of amateurs,

  and it isn’t the packed house too eager to spring to its feet in applause,

  or the flaws of performance, or the whole tragic lift of the night as the story surges to its close.

  It is all of them. And it passes. And will never be heard again on earth.

  THE SHOW

  At first you can almost believe

  by the breeze in the outdoor café’s slender trees

  and the family outing atmosphere

  among the approving people gathered here

  the night will turn to poetry,

  but the angry man at the microphone

  appears to think that he and he alone

  by virtue of his earnest shout
>
  can turn opinions into art.

  One longs for a quiet thought

  no one applauds,

  and words that are not clods.

  MICHAEL DONAGHY 1954–2004

  Like a wash of paint on board, transparent figures,

  unsolid as shadows and the passing river . . .

  I look at them, and look again, again—

  a lifetime passing in a shower of rain.

  WE STAND TOGETHER TALKING

  We stand together talking, like making love

  in a burning city where forsaken love

  hurls stones and bullets, and the livid face

  declares it never had a stake in love.

  Where love requires denying other love

  like hammers driving nails in, breaking love.

  From sleep I find you rising from your sleep

  and kiss your eyes, so full of aching love.

  My love, the harm was hidden, but the hate

  would damn us living for the sake of love.

  EPIGRAM

  The baby’s bawling and the old man’s laughter

  rise from the center of the same I am.

  Say it to windows, doors. Say it to rafters

  on rivers of light. Say it to the breaking dam.

  from SEA SALT: POEMS OF A DECADE 2014

  KÉFI

  Every meal a communion.

  The uninvited dead are here.

  Do they miss the taste of wine

  or the flickering glare

  of the candle in the window?

  I remember some of their names.