THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by J. D. McClatchy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClatchy, J. D., 1945–
[Poems. Selections]
Plundered Hearts : New and Selected Poems / By J. D. McClatchy.
—First Edition.
pages cm
“Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.”
ISBN 978-0-385-35151-5 (Hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-35152-2 (eBook)
I. Title.
PS3563.A26123A6 2014
8112.54—dc23 2013023979
Jacket painting: Sleep by Vincent Desiderio, 2008. Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery.
Jacket design by Chip Kidd
First Edition
v3.1
for Chip Kidd
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
New Poems
My Hand Collection
Three Poems by Wilhelm Müller
Prelude, Delay, and Epitaph
The Novelist
One Year Later
Wolf’s Trees
Bacon’s Easel
Palm Beach Sightings
Kiss Kiss
My Robotic Prostatectomy
Two Arias from The Marriage of Figaro
His Own Life
Cağaloğlu
from Scenes from Another Life | 1981
Aubade
A Winter Without Snow
The Tears of the Pilgrims
from Stars Principal | 1986
At a Reading
The Cup
Anthem
The Palace Dwarf
A Cold in Venice
The Lesson in Prepositions
Bees
Hummingbird
Ovid’s Farewell
from The Rest of the Way | 1990
Medea in Tokyo
The Rented House
The Shield of Herakles
Fog Tropes
Heads
An Essay on Friendship
The Window
Kilim
from Ten Commandments | 1998
The Ledger
My Sideshow
My Early Hearts
My Old Idols
My Mammogram
Found Parable
Tea With the Local Saint
Under Hydra
Auden’s OED
What They Left Behind
Proust in Bed
Three Dreams About Elizabeth Bishop
Late Night Ode
from Hazmat | 2002
Fado
Glanum
Jihad
Orchid
Cancer
Penis
Tattoos
The Agave
The Fever
The Infection
Late Afternoon, Rome
The Bookcase
Hotel Bar
A Tour of the Volcano
Little Elegy
Ouija
from Mercury Dressing | 2009
Mercury Dressing
Er
Self-Portrait as Amundsen
The Frame
Resignation
Sorrow in 1944
Lingering Doubts
Trees, Walking
Going Back to Bed
Full Cause of Weeping
A View of the Sea
Notes
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
NEW POEMS
MY HAND COLLECTION
Arranged around the lamp’s mercury glass globe,
They reach out for or defend against
The attention that wood or bronze or resin
Shakily command at this late stage
Of reproduction. After all, none is like
My own one of a kind, its rigging
Of creases, its scuffed half-moons and bitten nails,
Its quivering index and moiré
Pattern of skin loosely draped over the bones—
Liver spots carelessly spilled on it,
Along with whatever dings or oily stains
The insincere handshake and backslap,
The dog’s tongue or jock’s package have left behind.
Those on this table are innocent.
The pair unscrewed from a side chapel’s martyr
Still holding crazed flakes of their own thumbs,
The pharaoh’s fist implacably denying
The idea there are more gods than one,
A factory glove mold, the madam’s ring holder,
A mannequin’s milk-white come-hither,
The miniature ecstatic’s stigmata,
Someone’s smartly cuffed, celluloid brooch,
A Buddha’s gilded fingertips joined and poised,
Like a conductor’s, at last to re-
lease the final, tremulous, resolving chord—
Each frozen in a single gesture,
Pleading, threatening, clinging, shielding, the sorry
Travelling company called Fierce Desire,
These here on the left knowing only too well
What those on the right have been up to.
Patiently assembled on their glass senate
Floor, forever in session, the ayes
Have it over and over again (despite
Gloria Vanderbilt’s birthday gift,
A rough-cut back-country tobaccoed pine paw
That flatly refuses to take sides).
And of living hands, how many have I held,
As it were, for keeps—say, wordlessly,
After the promise that bodies can make, held
While staring at his sweetly shut eyes.
What, time and again, was I holding onto,
As if it had been for dear life’s sake?
Looking back, I guess I am glad they let go.
Theirs are not the hands that haunt me now.
The one that does belonged to a blustery,
Timid soul at home in dull routines,
Forfeiting glamour and curiosity,
A life sustained by its denials.
I reached for it, only because B-movies
Demand one pick it up off the sheet,
A shrivelled, damp, and fetid wedge still clutching
Nothing but a bed railing of air,
Its slackened tendons stiff and crusted with scabs
And knots of scar tissue abutting
Deep-sunk hematomas, from which the knucklebones
Jutted like cairns, nails cracked and yellow.
Though dead for hours, it was not yet cold.
I didn’t know what to do with it.
So I held onto it without wanting to,
Fearful of letting it go too soon.
It was what—now for the last time—I first held.
It was a hand. It was my mother’s.
THREE POEMS BY WILHELM MÜLLER
1. On the Stream
How swift you rushed along,
Your torrent so wild, so bright.
How quiet you have become.
No farewell words tonight.
A hard, unyielding crust
Hides you where you stand
.
Cold and motionless you lie
There, on your bed of sand.
On your surface I scratch
With a sharp stone’s edge
The name of my beloved,
The day, the hour, the pledge:
The day when first we met,
The day I left in spring,
Name and numbers inside
The shape of a broken ring.
And in this brook, my heart,
Do you see yourself portrayed?
See beneath its frozen crust
The turbulent cascade?
2. The Gray Head
The frost had left a white
Covering on my head.
I thought I had grown old.
At last! I joyfully said.
It melted soon enough.
Again my hair was black.
I am left here with my youth.
Between the dusk and dawnlight
Many heads turned gray.
Imagine! Mine has not,
Having come now all this way.
3. The Hurdy-Gurdy Man
There, beyond the village,
Stands a hurdy-gurdy man.
His fingers numb with cold,
He plays as best he can.
Barefoot on the ice,
To and fro he sways.
The little plate beside him
Is empty day after day.
No one stops to listen,
Or even notice him.
The dogs start to snarl
When the old man begins.
And he lets it all go by,
Lets it go as it will.
He grinds the wooden handle,
His hand is never still.
O wondrous old man,
Will you take me along?
Will your hurdy-gurdy
Ever play my song?
PRELUDE, DELAY, AND EPITAPH
1.
A finger is cut from a rubber glove
And cinched as a tourniquet around my toe.
The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed.
The shots supposed to have pricked and burned
The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice.
The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish
Gray, the color of flesh on a slab, the size
Of a fetus floating on the toilet’s Styx,
But lumpen, the blunt hull of a tug slowly
Nosing the huge, clumsy vessel into port.
2.
The February
Moon, its arms around itself,
Still sits stalled beneath
Points being made about love
And death in the sky above.
The moral is spread
On some month-old snow out back—
A design we like
To think night can make of day,
The summons again delayed.
3.
You who read this too will die.
None loved his life as much as I,
Yet trees burst brightly into bloom
Without me, here in my darkened room.
THE NOVELIST
The books sit silently on the shelf,
Their spines broken but unresentful.
He sits there too, thinking to himself
Of nothing—at last an uneventful
Evening, an hour to sulk or drift,
No joy to worry, no burden to lift,
As if on board some two-star ocean
Liner, able to roam at will
While confined to its slow motion
Through the middle of nowhere until
The dinner bell when the stateroom saves
Him from what he both avoids and craves.
Company. Others. The idle crowd
Beyond his bolted metal door—
So insatiable, so empty and loud.
Then, for a moment, the corridor
Seems like a page in some roman-fleuve
Where people live the lives they deserve.
A young man arrives in the glittering city.
The heroine writes her famous letter.
Emma stares at the vial with pity.
Pierre or Pip promises to do better.
Men and women find in each other
Why he must kill rather than love her.
In other words, it resembles the world
In the books above him, where so much
Sadness is fingered and then unfurled.
The wrong address, the inadvertent touch,
The revolution, the unanswered call,
The poisoned bouquet, the back-alley brawl.
He changes his mind. He will accept
The captain’s invitation to dine.
His secret, after all, can be kept
Like those on the shelf: chance and design,
Until opened, closed but in reach,
Like words before they become speech.
ONE YEAR LATER
In this photograph
He is knee-deep in water,
Half-smiling, half-scared.
His cracked Transformer,
His knapsack, his cup, his cat.
Why did they survive?
How is it we leave so much
Behind for others to touch?
•
Ministers, tell me,
Why did you think that power
Would stay where it was?
Aging cores collapse
Under waves of a future
No one can live in.
The reactors stand there still.
What is left to warm or kill?
•
The news crawl’s moved on
To other smaller, larger,
Distant disasters.
Get on with your life,
A shy inner voice insists
On the crowded screen.
Our lives lengthen into death,
As if into one last breath.
•
He watched for too long.
He could not run fast enough.
He was lifted up
With all the others
Into reruns of the day
No one’s come back from.
When I took that photograph
He was seven and a half.
March 11, 2012
WOLF’S TREES
If trees fall in a wood and no one hears them,
Do they exist except as a page of lines
That words of rapture or grief are written on?
They are lines too while alive, pointing away
From the primer of damped air and leafmold
That underlie, or would if certain of them
Were not melon or maize, solferino or smoke,
Colors into which a sunset will collapse
On a high branch of broken promises.
Or they nail the late summer’s shingles of noon
Back onto the horizon’s overlap, reflecting
An emptiness visible on leaves that come and go.
How does a life flash before one’s eyes
At the end? How is there time for so much time?
You pick up the book and hold it, knowing
Long since the failed romance, the strained
Marriage, the messenger, the mistake,
Knowing it all at once, as if looking through
A lighted dormer on the dark crest of a barn.
You know who is inside, and who has always been
At the other edge of the wood. She is waiting
For no one in particular. It could be you.
If you can discover which tree she has become,
You will know whether it has all been true.
for Wolf Kahn
BACON’S EASEL
On it, the figure of something dead
Inside a man who’s penetrated
Another man articulated
Against a square that could be read
As a proper balance
or a purple bruise.
They go about it silently,
Neither rapt, neither free
To do as he might elsewhere choose.
The one, his head wrenched to the side,
His scrotum like a cortex but hairy,
His penis eerily catenary,
Seems to know the other has lied.
The other has lied, pretending
To like a no-questions-asked
Approach to love’s brutal task
And the overmastered scream it ends in.
•
Around it, tiny continents
Of rust on the lids of oil paint,
Brushes in coffee tins, the faint
Smell of urine and arguments.
Propped up are the photographs
Of martyrs and their rigmarole,
The open car and grassy knoll,
A wartime starlet’s shimmery calf,
And clippings from some local paper,
The story of a boy who’d seen
His father shove a rifle between
His silent mother’s legs and rape her.
He sat on a folding stool and stared
At what he’d done. The edges of flesh
Where the colors unpredictably thresh—
There is the soul’s final repair.
PALM BEACH SIGHTINGS
The topiaried ficus shrub,
Snipped into monumentality,
Can neither slump its shoulders nor shrug
When its pyramid complains, “Why me?”
•
Raucous parakeets
In the crotch of a palm stump
Find their tax haven.
•
The supermarket’s valet parker,
Who lives with a storied widow rent-free,
Sites his orange cone to earmark her
Slip of shade for the silver Bentley—
The color her hair would be were it not
For the bi-stylist who’d asked her to fox-trot.