But bewildered, like us, having learned
From us what pain is, and thus
What it is to be tame, and human.
Wind Turbines
Heading west out of the hills
Above Fremont, the Pacific
Knocking itself senseless in the distance,
You come upon them, an orchard,
A forest, an army of windmills
Marching over the horizon,
Their great props spinning in the sky
As if you’d stumbled upon the propellers
That drive the world’s revolution,
Harvesting the wind,
Catching a tidal zephyr by the tail,
Grinding it through the gears,
Cramming it into the mighty, high voltage cables
And firing it down into the distant city
To spin the blades
Of Jasmine’s blender
As she whips up the evening’s
Third pitcher of margaritas,
The conversation out on the balcony
Just getting interesting, unreal,
Although it’s only with a girlfriend,
Also divorced, and they’re just about to reach
The point when they raise their glasses
And say, Fuck ’em all, by which they mean,
Of course,
Let something smooth and lovely
Slide from the darkness
And into the hungry sockets
Of our bodies, lifting us
Once more to gallop
Through the electrical night
On the wild back of the world.
The Good Kiss
And then there was the night, not long
After my wife had left me and taken on the world-
Destroying fact of a lover, and the city
Roared in flames with it outside my window,
I brought home a nice woman who had listened
To me chant my epic woe for three
Consecutive nights of epic drinking,
Both of us holding on to the bar’s
Darkly flowing river of swirling grain
As my own misery flowed past and joined
The tributary of hers, our murmured consolations
Entwining in precisely the same recitative,
The same duet that has been sung
In dark caves of drink since the beginning
Of despair, the song going on
Until there was nothing for it
But to drive through an early summer
Thunderstorm in the windy night
To my little east side apartment
And gently take off her clothes
And lay her down on my bed
By the light of a single candle
And the lightning, and kiss her
For a long time in gratitude
And then desire, and then gently
Kiss the full moons of her breasts,
Which I discovered by candlelight
Were not hers, exactly;
Under each of them was the saddest,
Tenderest little smile of a scar,
Like two sad smiles of apology.
I had them done
So he wouldn’t leave, she said,
But in the end he left anyway,
Her breasts standing like two
Cold cathedrals in the light
Of the flaming city, and my lips touched
The little wounds he had left her,
As if a kiss, a good kiss, could heal them,
And I kissed the nipples he had left behind
Until they smoldered like the ashes
Of a campfire the posse finds
Days after the fugitive has slept there
And moved on, drawn by the beautiful
And terrible light of the distant city.
Blues for Cleveland
There’s something about middle-aged white guys
Who idolize black jazz and blues musicians
That always makes me uncomfortable.
Charlie Parker, they’ll say, pouring the wine.
Bird. Mingus. Oh yeah. They get this
Dreamy, faraway gaze, they exchange
Signs of the brotherhood. Coleman. Monk.
Brother Miles. Their wives
Look away, wait for the subject to change.
Outside it’s getting dark.
The streetlights flicker into life.
We switch on the security systems.
Laundry
My mother stands in this black
And white arrangement of shadows
In the sunny backyard of her marriage,
Struggling to pin the white ghosts
Of her family on the line.
I watch from my blanket on the grass
As my mother’s blouses lift and billow,
Bursting with the day.
My father’s white work shirts
Wave their empty sleeves at me,
And my own little shirts and pants
Flap and exult like flags
In the immaculate light.
It is mid-century, and the future lies
Just beyond the white borders
Of this snapshot; soon that wind
Will get the better of her
And her marriage. Soon the future
I live in will break
Through those borders and make
A photograph of her—but
For now the shirts and blouses
Are joyous with her in the yard
As she stands with a wooden clothespin
In her mouth, struggling to keep
The bed sheets from blowing away.
Inherit the Wind
When Mrs. Hoffman, my best friend’s mother,
Would pick us up from rehearsals
At the junior high and take us back
To their little apartment
For cookies and milk, she always said
A funny little German phrase
Under her breath as she unlocked
The door and let us in. One day,
We got curious and asked her
What it meant: Smells like
A dead Jew in here, she said. Just
A saying, and then she lit
A cigarette and sat down
For the evening news, while we
Stuffed ourselves in the kitchen.
Later that spring, I stole one of her bras
As it hung on the line behind the building.
I’d never touched one before. So far,
The closest I’d come was a close inspection
Of the tiny shaking of hands
Between hooks and eyelets just above
The middle vertebrae and beneath
The white blouse of that lovely
Vertebrate, Heather Bailey,
As she sat in front of me taking notes
On the differences between mammals
And reptiles. Now
I sat in my bedroom, flushed with the white
Lace in my hands, hooking
And unhooking it like a quick draw artist,
Imagining a liquid Mrs. Hoffman
Floating in the empty cups.
Was man descended from the apes?
We didn’t much care, although the speeches
For God or monkey banged on the rafters
Of the musty theater with all the passion
Our reedy voices could muster. To us
It seemed enough that Heather’s breasts
Nodded their secret affirmation
Of the world’s essential injustice,
Of life’s ineffable anguish and despair,
As she walked across the quad, her hand
In the apish hand of a bruising ninth grader.
Mrs. Hoffman’s first husband, Hans,
Had been killed on some front, we knew,
And his body lay for six months in a rail car
On a lonely siding in a bombed-out German
town.
But that was ancient history,
And we were living in the now,
In the blank spot, the held breath
Between the fifties
And Vietnam, between
Looking and touching,
And years later, when I was finally able
To unhook a bra with an actual girl in it,
It was as if I’d unlocked
The whole mystery: women were descended
From angels, it was clear. And men—
Men were merely chimps
With clever fingers,
Capable of tearing things apart.
They could ruin things so utterly
That even beautiful Mrs. Hoffman,
After all those years,
Could unlock her stuffy apartment
And still smell Hans in there.
Ike
It’s the way they say Eisenhower
That makes me tune in
To the two old guys at the next table.
That’s how my father said it,
And he hasn’t said a word in forty years.
So it’s good to know the word
Is still in circulation, like a rare coin,
A first edition.
My father said Ike
As if he were nailing down
The precise, original texture of a hot night
In mid-century St. Louis, the sound
As essential to evenings out
On the screened-in porch
As cicadas, crickets, or the Cards
Ebbing and flowing on somebody’s radio.
Ike,
He said, with a knowing chuckle
That made it perfectly clear
He knew the man intimately, and liked him.
In which an entire era was compressed
With the terrific density of a star’s core,
A sound as open and friendly
As Hopalong Cassidy’s wink, a clean keel
Cutting through the fifties, beautifully free
Of the seaweed and barnacles, the faint,
Ironic frisson that would come
To round out the name
Of every politician. My mother
Could say nigger
Just as fluently, though never
When the maid was around. She said it
Like she meant it, with an ease
And casual mastery
That embraced an entire history.
Like Ike, it’s a word
You don’t hear much anymore.
Mockingbird
Shriek like a rip
In the dry day. Wry
Imprecation, as the ice cream truck
Disappears around the corner
Of the summer.
The teenager’s smile
As she catches me staring
At her halter top.
Gray puff of feathers, gone.
The night manager holding up my time sheet.
The track coach holding up the watch.
Fleet vessel of bone.
My history professor handing back
The essay he hadn’t bothered to read and I
Hadn’t bothered to write.
The weight inside the halter top.
Squawk like metal
Scraping the day’s low-slung chassis
Or hurled down on me
From the TV aerial. The lethal,
Barely perceptible rise
Of my ex-wife’s eyebrow.
Gray tail ticking on the phone line.
On the redwood fence. White chevrons
Whirring over the desiccated neighborhood.
A tanned hand
Covering a yawn when I told her
I loved her.
My mother, white-faced
With cancer, asking what my plans were
For the summer.
A hard eye and a sharp beak.
My father putting down his drink
And telling me it was the last time,
With a wink.
Summer’s end.
Dead leaves in the dust.
Gray feather
Twirling on a spider’s web.
August
Just when you’d begun to feel
You could rely on the summer,
That each morning would deliver
The same mourning dove singing
From his station on the phone pole,
The same smell of bacon frying
Somewhere in the neighborhood,
The same sun burning off
The coastal fog by noon,
When you could reward yourself
For a good morning’s work
With lunch at the same little seaside café
With its shaded deck and iced tea,
The day’s routine finally down
Like an old song with minor variations,
There comes that morning when the light
Tilts ever so slightly on its track,
A cool gust out of nowhere
Whirlwinds a litter of dead grass
Across the sidewalk, the swimsuits
Are piled on the sale table,
And the back of your hand,
Which you thought you knew,
Has begun to look like an old leaf.
Or the back of someone else’s hand.
Nevada
Ten miles from the air base,
Out on the desert floor, is a Quonset hut
Ringed in barbed wire, where the pilots crash-
Land on the whores.
In back, their new Corvettes
And Trans Ams are cooling
Like getaway ponies, while inside
Young guys who spent the day
Carving up the clouds, splitting
The canyons, riding the state
Of the art, are being ancient,
Cracking jokes about cockpits
And joysticks with women
Who might actually find them funny,
Even for the hundredth time, who might
Actually enjoy being flown,
Feeling in some whacked-out way
Like a Phantom, a Corsair, anything
Sounding better than whore,
Although the word is hard
Of others in the language
Which serve to provide a base,
A runway, from which we rise,
Eyes wide, head thrown back,
Pulling the heavy G’s
Of absolute sin: whore
I called her in bed, at the beginning,
In the kind of weird play
Sex can be made of, as if rehearsing
For the time to come
When I called her that
Out of bed and in earnest,
Like these grounded pilots
Describing the wreckage
Of the women they climb out of.
Mysterious Island
My nephew slides
His skinny body into bed,
Shivering a little because it’s chilly
And because it just feels so good
To get into bed when you’re nine
And your mother’s going to read to you
From The Mysterious Island
And your big yellow cat leaps up
To his place at the foot of the bed,
Purring with the sheer pleasure
Of the day’s lamp-lit ending.
This was my bed, forty years ago,
The little boat I navigated
Through childhood, when the world
Was still perfectly coherent
And nightmares were something
I woke from, and the small universe
Of my room, the house, the yard,
Was so tidy and well-mannered
That being asleep and being awake
Were not so very different—just two
P
leasant, adjoining neighborhoods
I drifted through on my bike
Or my bed until I grew tired
And woke one summer
To that dull sound rising
Beyond the farthest trees,
A muted roar at the edges
Of the neighborhood.
Something about twilight
Was just beginning
To turn me inside out—but
The feeling passed quickly;
My mother cleared her throat,
I closed my eyes. Now the men
Are loading their ship
With backpacks and rifles and telescopes.
They are setting out on the dark ocean.
Old Man River
Unable to stand it any longer,
My father got up, made his way
Through the tables in the crowded restaurant
And up to the stage
Where a skinny crooner
Using a microphone to murder
“Old Man River”
Gaped in amazement
As this huge guy, fuelled by five or six
Jack and sodas, joined in
With a baritone not even TB
And a lost lung could entirely destroy,
And made the rafters shake, singing
The goddamn song like it should be sung,
The crooner with his shiny mike
Crumpling into silence
Like one of Penelope’s suitors,
My mother at the table,
Proud and unembarrassed,
Already planning the divorce.
Divorce
I think of the scene in Othello,
After they’ve traveled
In separate ships through a terrible storm
And come to each other in the dark,
Cavernous hall
In the palace at Cyprus.
It’s as if, through some miracle,
They’ve both been born, or reborn,
At precisely the same moment,
Emerging from the dangerous night
To the sight of each other.
And so the torches are lit;
There is music; life begins.
That’s why, walking up the ramp
From the plane at the end of summer,
Home again and heading for the crowded terminal
Where, for the first time, I will not be met,
I think this is what death must be like:
Farewell and departure. The long dark flight,
And arrival in a vast room of smiling strangers
Who have come to meet everyone but you.
Retrospective
For a while
Everything stayed the same;
Time stood still,
Or seemed to, and had