I continue watching the breakers
Stagger to their knees, and listen
To the gulls work through
Their chronic desolation,
Thinking, for some reason,
Of my mother, struggling
Into the cross-stitched straitjacket
Of her girdle
Before a night out with my father,
And I think of the boundless
Surge and heave of the oceans,
Swollen and unfettered
Before any man, crazed
By indifferent beauty, raised
White sails to cup
The wind’s breasts
And girdle the globe.
Tamed
This summer my nephew
Is old enough for his first job:
Mowing the lawn.
I watch him lean his skinny chest
To the bar of the pushmower,
Put his weight into it, and become,
For the first time, a beast in harness,
A laborer on the face of the earth,
Somehow withering and expanding at the same time
Into something worn and ancient, but still
A kid withal, and I remember
How bitterly I went into the traces,
Hating that Saturday ritual,
For a while, then growing inexplicably
Into it, gradually mastering
The topography of the yard,
Sometimes using the back and forth technique,
Sometimes going for the checkerboard effect,
Or my favorite, the ever-diminishing square
That left, at the lawn’s center, one
Last uncut stand of grass, a wild fortress
I annihilated with a strange thrill,
Then stood back to take a look—
To survey the field. To cast
A critical eye on my work.
Just as this kid is doing, standing
At the edge of the mowed clearance.
Taking his own measure. And liking it.
Eden
When Sarah and Jill, after a few years
Together, decided Sarah should become a man,
They thought about it for a long time,
Staring at Sarah’s breasts in the candlelight
As they hung dejectedly
Like a pair of old dogs
Someone decided to put to sleep.
And they looked between her legs
At that wild gate that was like the first sentence
Of a story they had grown tired of telling.
They seemed to hear a kind of music
Under the surface of her skin, a far-off joy—
And years later, after the hormones and the stitches,
The lopping and relocating,
I met a slim, serious young guy
Who had been Sarah
At a cocktail party in Monterey,
And we shook hands and had a couple of beers
While I smiled and tried very hard not to feel
As if a woman had slit open the sack
Of my scrotum and crawled inside,
Confidently palming my testicles in her strong hands,
Saying, There will be no more
Secrets around here.
Westward Ho
I drive up and down the same five- or six-mile stretch
Of coastline north of Santa Cruz, the sun
Just about to touch down
On the heads of surfers waiting for a last good ride.
Johnny Cash is on the tape deck
For no particular reason, but the songs seem
To bend and straighten with the road,
Their rhythm following the coast’s.
I love this, the way the car and the music
Go together with the way the road
And the ocean go together, joining
In this strange pleasure, this thing called
Cruising, this lovely way of wasting time
That only humans of the twentieth century
Could know, and I think of the wagonmasters
Leading their convoys of Conestogas
Over Kansas and Wyoming and Nevada,
Feeling the thrill and the dread
Of the oceanic emptiness full of savages,
The ice-locked mountain ranges
Where some of them would famously
Eat each other, and beyond it all
The green promise of the Pacific,
A glitter in the mind that kept them moving
Across that vastness into John Ford westerns
Unreeling through the insomniac hours.
They couldn’t have imagined
This drive up and down the coast, their long
Westward haul detoured, stymied, turned inward
Into a daydream, a sad love song, rising
Like an elegy for all ended journeys
The windshield, the ocean flashing on my left
While in the houses on my right
The TVs are flickering into prime time,
And married couples, becalmed at the end
Of the day, of the wild journey
That got them here, sit down
In front of their screens.
St. Paul’s
Dwells with me still mine irksome memory
Which, both to keepe, and lose, grieves equally.
—John Donne
Sitting at St. Paul’s,
Listening to the word of God,
I try to imagine what it would be like
To hear John Donne up there,
Cleaning up his act to a packed house,
Listing the pros and cons of this world,
Weighing the odds against entering the next—
And my mind drifts back to a summer evening
At Fairmont Lake, parked by the shore with someone
Named Barbara, watching the lights
Of the little electric boats, red and green,
My arm around her shoulders
As couples navigated the dark waters.
Sitting on my stone-cold pew
Like an errant thought
In the mind of Christopher Wren, I realize
That I would rather be back there
In the front seat of my mother’s bargelike Bonneville
With Barbara, weighing the odds against
Unbuttoning her blouse—
And knowing what I know
Of John Donne, I’m guessing
He’d rather be there, too, mystified
By the green-eyed radio and Sam Cooke
Doing “Saturday Night,” but entranced
By Barbara and the plush velour bench seat,
The glassed-in room, cozy as a sonnet
He’d write about our failure to be serious
At growing old; time, he would argue,
Will drag us presently from the warm car
And Barbara and the boat-lit summer
And into the cold cathedral,
So for God’s sake hold your tongue
And let me love.
Elegy for the LP
There, in the twilight,
A long-necked bird
Lowers its head
And dark beak
To drink
So deeply
From the flowing river.
When at last it looks up
To see me watching,
Saddened and amazed,
The woods grow silent again.
For a long time,
We both sit very still.
Let Down
We’re sitting on the deck at the day’s end,
Drinks melting into the redwood table,
The fresh green lawn lapping at our feet.
This early dusk has all the ease
Of a tense muscle letting go, of the unexpected,
Delicious release I sometimes feel, deep down,
When I pass a beautiful woman.
The day is letting its pent-up kindness
Descend upon me, upon my sister and her husband
Whose marriage sails on imperturbably
Through the mild squall they’re having
Just now over the small and beautiful
Problem of when to sell the stock options.
My own marriage has foundered, gone down
Somewhere beyond the green gulf of lawn. Her chair
From past summers when we sat here
Sits alone, in dry dock, over by the fence,
Disgraced somehow, as if it had let us down,
As if it had failed to deliver her,
With her unexpected laughter
And torrent of black hair
She used to let down on me
With a smile, when the day had let down
Its darkness, and I think of how
A nursing woman lets down her milk,
Something a man cannot imagine
But tries to imagine, and how
I let her down gently, but so often
That finally she let me down hard,
Leaving only three chairs drawn together
Against the night. And now Niel goes in
To file a late report, and Merry
Goes in to read aloud to her boys.
I sit out for another hour
In her chair.
Night Flight
I am doing laps at night, alone
In the indoor pool. Outside
It is snowing, but I am warm
And weightless, suspended and out
Of time like a fly in amber.
She is thousands of miles
From here, and miles above me,
Ghosting the stratosphere,
Heading from New York to London.
Though it is late, even
At that height, I know her light
Is on, her window a square
Of gold as she reads mysteries
Above the Atlantic. I watch
The line of black tile on the pool’s
Floor, leading me down the lane.
If she looks down by moonlight,
Under a clear sky, she will see
Black water. She will see me
Swimming distantly, moving far
From shore, suspended with her
In flight through the wide gulf
As we swim toward land together.
Stupid
We were so fucked up,
She says to her friend, laughing.
We were so fucked up, it was. . . .
It was like. . . .
And her friend says, Yeah,
We totally were,
And I wonder
What it would be like
To be permanently stupid,
To go through life
At that altitude, just clearing
The lowest rooftops and TV aerials,
Heading for the mountains. . . .
My friends and I used to try it,
Sitting around a Day-Glo bong, brains
Turned to low, then lower,
So unmoored and adrift,
So hopelessly out of range
Of our calls to the lost
Vessels of each other,
We could only giggle, wondering,
Even as we did so,
Why.
Now and then,
The crippled sub of an idea
Would try to surface out there
On the stoned moment’s
Glassy horizon
Where the strawberry-scented candle
Burned like. . . .
Like. . . .
The Garage
On these summer nights, I play
Ping-Pong with my brother-in-law,
A couple of beers sweating
On the tool shelf, the Giants game
Coming in loud and clear
On the paint-spattered shop radio,
And tonight I’m working very seriously
On my troublesome forehand,
Giving more concentration than usual
To the problem of topspin.
Today a woman on our street,
Running late for work, backed up
Her SUV and rolled over
Her three-year-old son. All day,
I’ve thought of her as she goes
Through the hours, living in that remote,
Astonishing place she has discovered,
Someplace wholly new
Where few of us have ever ventured,
And as I trot down the driveway
To retrieve an errant smash,
I realize that the sheer speed and pressure
Of her passage out of the world
I’m living in tonight, and into the blazing
Spaces where she is traveling
Far beyond me, like the blue fleck
Of a satellite, utterly alone,
Is what makes the lighted mouth
Of the garage, with its beer and ball game,
Its smell of oil and gas, its cardboard boxes
Of family history, seem like a sweet
Refuge, a cave I return to gratefully,
Holding the white moon of the ball—
A fragile, weightless thing.
Nectarines
The gay man standing next to me
At the organic food store
Is squeezing the nectarines
With the same concentration
I would give a woman’s breasts,
Or he would give,
Or might give—I don’t really know—
The weight between his lover’s legs.
He is trim, fortyish, wearing a pair
Of vaguely European loafers
And the kind of perfect haircut
No stylist has ever felt I deserved.
His slacks and T-shirt exist at a point
On the spectrum of casual elegance
Just beyond my ability to actually detect it
But which nonetheless makes me feel,
In my jeans and JC Penney’s sports shirt,
Like a shambling, half-trained circus bear.
When standing next to a woman
In a supermarket, I sometimes feel
As if we were back in the Garden,
A realm of fertile ferment
Where we walk in a kind of heady sexual buzz
Among the ripe fruits and frozen dinners of the world,
Temptation everywhere
As we scan the zebra codes
Of our deliciously
Unfamiliar flesh.
And when I pass a straight guy
In the aisles, we nod, or raise an eyebrow
To acknowledge our place
In the hairy fellowship of predators.
But when this man and I
Look briefly into the Sanskrit, the blank
Scrabble tiles of each other’s eyes,
We smile briefly and go back
To thinking, quite seriously,
Of nectarines.
Threepenny Opera
The elderly modern dance instructor
And his elderly wife are dancing
In top hats and tails, doing a Kurt Weill
Number as old as their marriage.
They’ve reached that age when the body
Is starting to wonder how it got here,
When it has become strange, even to itself,
And moves around uncertainly
As if looking for a lost pair of glasses.
They do not mean for what they’re doing
To be a parody, but, of course, it is;
The word means something like
“To sing alongside,” and it’s just
Possible to see the lithe dark lovers
They used to be, singing just beyond
The penumbra of the spotlight.
When they tap dance and set
Their old skeletons c
lattering
Across the stage, the teenage boy
In front of me smiles and nudges his girlfriend
Who has reached the moment
Of her beauty that will keep everyone
On the edge of their seats
For the next two or three years.
Denver
In that frayed summer hat,
She’d pick the strawberries
From our little backyard plot
While the bone-white wave
Of the Rockies
Rose in the background
And broke without a sound.
I’d get the ice and rum
And drop it all together
Into our unpredictable blender.
Now for the bony crunch and hum
Of the blades cutting through
To clearer water.
We sat at the kitchen table
Until our tongues grew numb
With stories that grew ever truer:
Stories of our fathers and mothers.
Elegies for past lovers.
Pencil sketches of things to come.
And our time-proof laughter.
With the last of the daiquiris,
We sat out on the porch stoop
To watch the Rockies
And each other
Disappear.
Pain
Animals in the wild are perfect and know nothing
About pain. Also perfect
Is an Olympic sprinter pulling off
His jersey after a race; the body, flexing
For TV, blinds you; Oh, you say,
That’s what it’s supposed to look like.
But all wild animals are like this because they live
In a perpetual Olympics. There’s no
Margin for error out there,
And any ragged flock of gulls
Surfing a wind current, any rag
Of a jackrabbit poised by the roadside
Dwells in the lean, perfected moment; one
Busted bone, one gray hair, one
Moment’s inattention, and he’s a goner,
Crunched in the maw of a larger, wilder
Perfection. That’s why
They’re wild: pain
Never has a chance to teach them
A thing. The parakeet in his cage
Of pain, the ferret on his sexy chain,
Nosing the nipple ring
Of a tattooed punker, the cocker
Spaniel tied by the neck
To the railing outside Starbuck’s, waiting
For the slim blonde in the pale
Translucent blouse to finish her latte
With a pale unshaven man she’s enjoying
Breaking up with—they’re not wild