Plundered Hearts

  After colliding with a cloudberg, the chopper

  sinks through more, like feelings gone soft

  around the edges, forming shapeless moist

  masses and as easily dissolving, until underhead

  we approach the ashen, lopsided cones,

  the brimstone stench of steam, the mess of gods.

  Headphones dip into the sliding plates

  dragged over soft forces divided by stress,

  some fracturing crust of indifference

  through which the buried magma seeps.

  Or have I got it all wrong again?

  Does he mean instead that, once home,

  after we’re back, set down, driven off,

  the sunset’s backwash sloshing

  in the rearview’s little sac of sorrows,

  the tremors will start again, the leakage?

  LITTLE ELEGY

  But now that I am used to pain,

  Its knuckles in my mouth the same

  Today as yesterday, the cause

  As clear-obscure as who’s to blame,

  A fascination with the flaws

  Sets in—the plundered heart, the pause

  Between those earnest, oversold

  Liberties that took like laws.

  What should have been I never told,

  Afraid of outbursts you’d withhold.

  Why are desires something to share?

  I’m shivering, though it isn’t cold.

  Beneath your window, I stand and stare.

  The planets turn. The trees are bare.

  I’ll toss a pebble at the pane,

  But softly, knowing you are not there.

  OUIJA

  Years ago—long enough at least for bitter

  Leaves to have cooled at the bottom of a cup

  Then brimful and steaming with insecurities—

  Four spellbound friends were huddled around

  What might as well have been a campfire,

  Their shadows thrown back on the world

  By candlelight, the flames of anticipation

  Fed by skittish questions of whatever voice

  Any one of them had felt clearing its throat

  Inside the jelly lid with its toothpick pointer

  Patrolling a border of hand-drawn letters—

  Not theirs, of course, the timidly curious

  Weekend houseguests in rainy Stonington,

  But JM’s, the loom from which bolts of blues

  Lay stacked on his desk, Ephraim’s final galleys.

  The master had been unexpectedly

  Summoned by redundancy—a family crisis—

  But insisted … look, the steak’s been marinating,

  There’s plenty to drink, the weather forecast’s glum.

  They’d stay? And why not take an idle turn

  At the board? His Honda was barely in reverse

  When Mickey’s mop and pail were blithely tossed

  Aside and motley, ill-fitting robes assumed—

  In their case, a cheap imitation mantle

  That, like any religion, risked mocking

  What it worshipped. But then, how else learn

  What can’t be taught than play the earnest fool?

  Left alone with a luster and delirium

  About to be cut with callow, flavorless slush,

  They pulled their chairs up to the round table,

  Guarded by votive griffins, a saltcellar,

  And a spineless cactus that waited patiently

  Under a bite-size crystal hanging from the dome.

  Roach clip. Jug wine. The conventional aids

  To inspiration were reluctantly foresworn

  In favor of seltzer and cold credulity.

  They sat there edgily, hour after hour,

  Watching the voices muster into words—

  As when, between the scenes of a play, the stage

  Is briefly darkened but still slightly visible,

  Enough for us to see the stagehands moving

  Furniture around, the props of what’s to come—

  So that what had clumsily been transcribed

  Into a notebook later came clear in ways

  Each might have made light of there in the dark.

  A——, for instance, at thirty buffed and tan

  But oddly pious and almost too eager for word

  Of how immanent the Beyond would turn out to be,

  A lens in the black box of lives led here below.

  He begins by chance with Agul, a priest of Aton,

  Standoffish and abstract. Egyptians not concerned

  With sin, only singularity. We wait for sunrise.

  Friends exchange light. Love, light, are one.

  I breathe your light. Aton knows your aspect.

  And for those who don’t care, whose beliefs start

  When their eyes are shut? Night is sun for others.

  Doggedly the acolyte buttonholes the board.

  At last one Mary Wentworth gently picks up

  The extension, a London mother and mystic

  Two centuries dead. Your soul, sweet A——,

  The shape of a healthy body, shelters under my wing.

  Wing? Down is warmer than up. Up?

  The Pharisees are cold on their mountain tops.

  They will not sin & so they freeze. Your body

  Sins to warm your heart. How easily tenderness

  Rinses the dirty hands temptation lathers.

  Then B——, saddled with a Fifties adolescence

  Spent peeping at encyclopedia cross-sections

  And nudist colony glossies—all shrivel and sag—

  Until transfixed by martyred Oscar’s wit,

  Its gay science devoted to curing the heart,

  Shyly asks, after combing his hair, for Himself.

  The Other Life, within us or abroad,

  Acts—and why not?—as if it had all the time

  In either world, exaggerating its courtesies.

  Wilde extends an invisible gloved hand

  To B——, who stutters about his nervousness.

  Confession is good for one’s soul & one’s royalties.

  I sold my lower depths & made a good thing of them.

  But his own feelings … for the young man, say?

  Bosie was ornamental. That was enough.

  No real love then? Your wife? Constance

  Was as her name suggests. That was not enough.

  Though Paris is, of course, better on the whole,

  I think most of Oxford, where, donning robes,

  Pater drew on airy nothing to burn with a flame

  Of the first water, in whose heat our damp clay

  Was fired into well-wrought urnings. (“The ease,”

  B—— marvels, “with which a practiced stagecraft

  Flicks its iridescent fan!”) No window

  Can without some dressing up long hold

  A discerning eye. For birds of our feather

  The pen that is a plume adds panache.

  But—oh, this is as it must be written—

  A thousand admiring eyes in the world

  Of letters finally matter less than the one

  Understanding heart in a country retreat.

  Blushing, B—— withdraws, interested only

  In how prudently to spend his overdraft.

  Then C——, whose reedy, wire-rimmed pretense,

  Goosed by Southern manners and a French degree,

  The saccharine-coated pill B—— had been swallowing

  For a decade, insinuates his clubman’s smarm

  And succeeds in raising static on the line.

  A giggling Indian scout—ice filled my seeing,

  Great ice-haired mounts, English—trails off

  To a corpuscle who or which insists eternity

  Is the plucked tension between limit and nothing.

  A yawn gets passed around. A Chinese sage

  Wanders across the screen, dropping frag
ments

  Of a fortune cookie. We do not gain the moon

  By telling her to be still. Fingers in silhouette

  Mug redwood trees, or German armaments

  Tycoon, or chef, or silent movie vamp,

  The manic Cuisinart finally shredding

  Soul into a slaw of nonsense syllables.

  The others glower at C—— and call a break,

  When suddenly, as from another room,

  A stricken whisper: Was I that humpback

  At whom you laughed when you believed me

  Out of hearing? Oh sweet betrayal, my bridegroom!

  And D——. (But why “D―”? His name was Drew.

  I knew him, loved him.) A tenant of his body,

  He was hurt by everything he took for remedy—

  Waiting tables, acupuncture, coke—

  And longed to leap against the painted drop,

  Some grand pirouette center stage, sweat whipped

  Into the spotlight, sequined corsair or satyr.

  He asks for Isadora. Hail, friend!

  Why do they never book me anymore?

  Drew then nudges into the dressing room

  With a question. Will I ever dance like you?

  You know in your bones. I died broken on the wheel

  Of circumstance. Now it’s just tableau vivant.

  The happiness of the body is all on earth.

  The beauty of the body in motion and repose

  I wanted to give, long after it was probable.

  Drew’s charged resolve saw him through the drill

  (Temp job to tryout) of making a name for himself,

  Until he met the dancer who infected him.

  The virus flic-flacked through his system, aswirl

  In cells that faltered and too soon abandoned

  The soloist whose stumble a falling curtain concealed.

  For that matter, you too, JM, have gone

  And done it, become a voice, letters on a page—

  Not like love’s sweet thoughtless routine

  But a new romance, hazard and implication,

  Promises as yet unmade, possibilities

  Slipping, say, from N to O … —Oh,

  Why will words cohere and dissolve on this blank

  And not their darker meanings, an unspoken grief

  I’ve reached for and felt sliding as if over

  Poster board smoothed by years of being used

  To giving back the bright presence drawn

  Up from within yourself, your starry heart

  So empty, so large, too filled with others

  Not to fear an unworthiness indwelling.

  You took everything on faith but death,

  An old friend’s or the breathless lining

  Of any new encounter, so that fresh acolytes,

  Once back home, would remark with wonder

  On your otherworldliness. What they failed

  To see was something that has just now begun

  To sink in on me: how little your detachment

  Had to do with the demands of a formal art

  Or a mind at once too sovereign and too spent

  By being trolled for schools of thought or feeling.

  Stage fright can apply or smear what make-up

  Seems necessary for any evening’s encores,

  And lines rehearsed before the smoked mirror’s

  Critical gaze can turn to ashes in the mouth

  When spoken to some poor stick mugging there

  Who you hope will stay the night and fear

  May last until the end. How seldom, I sense,

  You gave yourself up, how often instead

  Had to borrow back what had already been lent.

  Even the board is under wraps in a closet upstairs.

  Funny, I’ve not tried to do it since you died,

  Even for a simple jabbing toward the consoling Yes

  In answer to the obvious questions posed

  By missing you. Or have I instead been fearing

  The No—the not-happy No, the not-there No?

  Or had you perhaps been receding all along—

  Like those friends of a quarter century ago,

  Faded to vanishing points like death or California,

  Where everything to be lost is finally regained,

  The figures of speech for once beyond compare?

  No. I can hear your voice from the other side,

  That kingdom-come memory makes of the past,

  The old recordings, the stiffening onionskin

  Letters your Olivetti punched out from Athens

  Or Isfahan, notebook cities shaped

  By anecdotes of love—no, antidotes,

  Spelled out to be kept suspended at a distance,

  As now I imagine your nights with pencil and cup.

  From my seat, somehow above or below the table,

  Your hand moving steadily back and forth

  Across the board seems like a wave goodbye.

  in memory of James Merrill

  from MERCURY DRESSING

  2009

  MERCURY DRESSING

  To steal a glance and, anxious, see

  Him slipping into transparency—

  The feathered helmet already in place,

  Its shadow fallen across his face

  (His hooded sex its counterpart)—

  Unsteadies the routines of the heart.

  If I reach out and touch his wing,

  What harm, what help might he then bring?

  But suddenly he disappears,

  As so much else has down the years …

  Until I feel him deep inside

  The emptiness, preoccupied.

  His nerve electrifies the air.

  His message is his being there.

  ER

  I hesitate to mention now the time

  I hesitated—was it weeks or months?—

  Before telling him I was leaving, leaving for good,

  So that, in the end, it was he who left me,

  And my fear of his decision, or no … well,

  His tonelessly announcing it one night,

  Only that, always that, has clouded the scene,

  Not unlike the way the years of happiness

  Until that day, all of them a delusion,

  Had prevented my recalling just how long

  I’d waited to discover my feelings at the start.

  Two weeks—no, less—on my own, secret cell

  Phone calls, a rented post office box,

  The desperate joking, the passionate or-elses,

  Seemed only to discover the nowhere

  I lingered in, the time I wanted to postpone

  Hurting myself or him, the time I wanted

  To wait until I could turn into something

  He would never leave. Years later, forcing me

  To divide the shoebox full of snapshots

  Or the letters from our long-dead companions,

  He waited while I chose, through tears, the things

  I didn’t want to see, and did not look back

  Through the closing door, though it only seemed

  As if he were standing there and I was falling

  Back, back to a time when I couldn’t delay

  Any longer, the time I leaned down to select

  My lot, lying there on the ground, in the field,

  Where I recognized so many others waiting their turn.

  •

  In Plato’s Republic, there is an explanation of this.

  Twelve days after his death in battle, the body of Er—

  Son of Armenius, a hero of legend in far Pamphylia—

  As torches were readied, came to life again on his funeral pyre,

  And told what he had seen of the other world,

  That his soul in a crush of companions had journeyed

  To a mysterious place, two openings, it seemed, in the earth

  And two others above, between them the seats of judgesr />
  Who bound men to their sentences, that they should climb

  Or descend, the symbols of their deeds fastened to their backs.

  But Er was told only to watch and bear the message back to men.

  He saw the dead arrive, dusty with travel, and the souls

  Of those already saved step down into a meadow to meet them.

  Those who knew one another embraced and wept at tales

  Of what they had endured and seen, while those above

  Told of delights to come, of injustices reversed, of tyrants

  Cast into terrors worse than they had themselves inflicted.

  Er then looked up at a column of light to which the chains

  Of heaven were attached that held the spindle of Necessity,

  Its eight hollowed whorls broadening into spangled ranks

  Of wheeling planetary orbits moving as they must,

  Each sounding a note in harmony with the rest, and the Fates

  Adding their overtones, their hands touching, turning,

  Guiding the spindle through its past, its present, its future.

  As Er looked on, each mortal soul was asked to choose its genius.

  The first were told not to be careless, the last not to despair—

  Each would have the lot of his desire, the length of a new life.

  Er stood in astonishment as, one after another, men and women,

  Because the memory of their previous lives was still so strong,

  Asked to be animals in the next, no matter bird or beast,

  A blameless, unknowing being not in love with death.

  The soul that had once been Orpheus chose the life of a swan,

  Not wanting to be born of a woman, hating

  The race of women who had murdered him.

  Others chose sparrow or horse or, remembering their pain,

  An eagle that could circle the slain in their bloody armor,

  Slowly circle, high over what men do to themselves.

  Then each was given a cup of Unmindfulness

  From which some carelessly drank too much

  And some too little, so that the past would haunt them.

  Er himself was kept from drinking, and how

  His body was returned he could never say,

  But as the others were driven, like stars shooting,

  Up to their births in the world, torches were lit

  And Er suddenly woke and found himself