The other tugged at her pearls and stayed
Near the smiles, her dress insinuated
Among the lead crystal teardrops
On the fixture above her, each one
The size, and now the color, of a blossom
On an apple bough outside, and herself
Inside, tiny and helplessly upsidedown.
•
The first month of the first marriage.
The second year of the second marriage.
The third betrayal of the third marriage.
And love. Love. Always love.
•
a deep winter yawn
the wind caught napping
static on the news
charred ozone glaze
dead-petal weather
the air’s loose skin
the albino’s birthmark
the vinegar mother
a bubble in the artery
the pebble in Demosthenes’ mouth
love asleep at the wheel
childhood stunned and dumped
the philosopher’s divorce
the psychopomp’s coin
self-pity’s last tissue
the blister on the burn
the emptiness added daily
the abstract’s arsenal
quarry of doubts
earthrise from the dark side
the holy sleeve
the beatific blindness
white root of heaven
the hedge around happiness
•
The sound of it? A silence
Understood as all the noise
Ignored or stifled, nods
Exchanged on the trading floor,
Or sex in the next room,
His hand over her mouth,
Her belt, the overcast leather,
Clenched between his teeth.
Where the needle stuck,
Its hiss and hard swallow
Halfway into the heart
Of the nocturne, two notes
Fell further apart, the space
Between them a darkness
Clotting, the moon
Having passed behind
A black key, then risen
Higher across the record’s
Rutted, familiar road.
•
Suddenly, lengths of storm gauze
Drawn across the clearing.
We must not want too much
To know. Uncertainty
Condenses on the windshield,
Then runs down the cheek,
A single waxen tear.
When last night’s grief
Is pulled back from,
Who will be the brighter?
Hush. Be careful. Turn
Those headlights down, low
As a curtained candle flame
Shivering in the dark dispelled.
•
First, the diagnosis: those night sweats
And thrush, the breathing that misplaces air,
The clouds gathering on a horizon of lung …
Translated as pneumocystis, the word from a dead
Language meant to sound like a swab
On a wound open but everywhere unseen.
Then, the options. There were options,
Left like food trays outside your door.
Protocols, support groups, diets,
A promising treatment.
But three months later
You began to forget the doctor’s appointments,
And the next week no longer cared that you forgot.
The friends who failed to visit, even their letters
Grew hard to parse. It was not as if their “real”
Feelings lay between the lines, but that the lines
Themselves would break apart: the fight so long
All your work the circumstances remember when.
But remember was precisely what you couldn’t do,
And to pay attention more than you could afford.
The books you’d read now looked back at you
With blank pages memories might fill in
With makeshift, events haphazardly recalled—
Snow swarming on the canal that Christmas
In Venice with Claudio who cried to see it,
Or globes of watery sunlight in your Chelsea flat,
White lilacs at their lips last May, no one there
For a change but just you two.
And here you are
Still, propped up in the half-light, my shadow,
My likeness, your hand wandering to the arm
Of the chair, as if your fingers might trace
The chalkdust of whole years erased.
Is this, then, what it means to lose your life?
But the question is forgotten before it can be
Answered. I take your hand, and give it back
To you, and watch you then look up, giving in,
Unknowing all, whose pain has just begun.
HEADS
As if layered in a wedge of honey cake,
The aromas of split persimmon,
Mint, cat spray, and cardamom
All mingle with the bitter coffee
On this morning’s scuffed brass tray
Brought into the shop by a cripple with wings.
The match for two Marlboros also now strikes
The end to one loud bit of holy
(“Faith” in Arabic is “din”)
Bargaining at the end of the street.
Peels of old light lie scattered
Outside. Dogs barking. Market day in the souk.
Muhammad deals in goat heads. His rival’s shop
Is beef, swags of lung and counters heaped
With livers like paving stones,
A child-high pile of squat, outsize shins
And marbleized, harelipped hearts—
Food the rich man eats to settle his conscience.
And there are flies next door, and a hose to wash
Dung out of the cow guts … which reminds
Muhammad of his brother
Who left to become headwaiter at
Rasputin’s Piano-Bar.
Both his grandfathers, his father too, had worked
In this tiled hollow lit by one bare bulb.
Stuck in the mirror are their postcards
Of the Kaaba, the silk-veiled,
Quartz-veined sky-stone, Islam’s one closed eye.
Muhammad hasn’t made his
Required pilgrimage. He went west instead,
The hajj to California, but came up six
Credits shy at Fresno State. (Shy too
Of the girlfriend who’d wanted
To marry “for good,” not a green card.)
So he’s back in the shop now,
Next to a copper tub of boiling water.
He takes another head by the ear and dips
It—eight, nine, ten—into the kettle,
Then quickly starts to shave it
With a bone-handled wartime Gillette.
The black matted shag falls in
Patches to the floor and floats toward the clogged drain.
One after another, the heads are stacked up
Behind, like odd-lot, disassembled
Plastic replicas of goats.
Though their lips are hardened now, the teeth
Of some can be seen—perfect!
But Muhammad hacks the jaws off anyway,
And the skulls with their nubbly horns and ears.
What’s left is meant for his faithful poor,
For their daily meager stew.
He lines up six on a shelf out front.
(As if all turned inside out,
The heads, no longer heads exactly, strangely
Bring to mind relief maps of the “occupied
Territories.” Born on the wrong side
Of a new border, he’s made
To carry his alien’s ID,
Its sulle
n headshot labeled
In the two warring tongues.) Goat heads feel them all,
The refugee, the single man, and his dog—
Their delicacy. Cartilage knobs.
Fat sacs. The small cache of flesh.
The eyeballs staring out at nothing
In all directions. The tongue
Lolling up, as if with something more to say.
Jerusalem, November 1987
AN ESSAY ON FRIENDSHIP
Friendship is love without wings.
—FRENCH PROVERB
I.
Cloud swells. Ocean chop. Exhaustion’s
Black-and-white. The drone at last picked up
By floodlights a mile above Le Bourget.
Bravado touches down. And surging past
Police toward their hero’s spitfire engine,
His cockpit now become the moment’s mirror,
The crowd from inside dissolves to flashbulbs.
Goggles, then gloves, impatiently pulled off,
He climbs down out of his boy’s-own myth.
His sudden shyness protests the plane deserves
The credit. But his eyes are searching for a reason.
Then, to anyone who’d listen: “She’s not here?
But … but I flew the Atlantic because of her.”
At which broadcast remark, she walks across
Her dressing room to turn the radio off.
Remember how it always begins? The film,
That is. The Rules of the Game, Renoir’s tragi-
Comedy of manners even then
Outdated, one suspects, that night before
The world woke up at war and all-for-love
Heroes posed a sudden risk, no longer
A curiosity like the silly marquis’s
Mechanical toys, time’s fools, his stuffed
Warbler or the wind-up blackamoor.
Besides, she prefers Octave who shared those years,
From twelve until last week, before and after
The men who let her make the mistakes she would
The morning after endlessly analyze—
This puzzle of a heart in flight from limits—
With her pudgy, devoted, witty, earthbound friend.
II.
—A friend who, after all, was her director,
Who’d written her lines and figured out the angles,
Soulful auteur and comic relief in one,
His roles confused as he stepped center-stage
(Albeit costumed as a performing bear)
From behind the camera—or rather, out
Of character. Renoir later told her
The question “how to belong, how to meet”
Was the film’s only moral preoccupation,
A problem the hero, the Jew, and the woman share
With the rest of us whose impulsive sympathies
For the admirable success or loveable failure
Keep from realizing the one terrible thing
Is that everyone has his own good reasons.
The husband wants the logic of the harem—
I.e., no one is thrown out, no one hurt—,
His electric organ with its gaudy trim and come-on,
Stenciled nudes. His wife, who’s had too much
To drink, stumbles into the château’s library
And searches for a lover on the shelf just out
Of reach, the one she learned by heart at school.
The lover, meanwhile (our aviator in tails)
Because love is the rule that breaks the rules,
Dutifully submits to the enchantment of type.
If each person has just one story to tell,
The self a Scheherazade postponing The End,
It’s the friend alone who, night after night, listens,
His back to the camera, his expression now quizzical,
Now encouraging even though, because he has
A story himself, he’s heard it all before.
III.
Is there such a thing as unrequited
Friendship? I doubt it. Even what’s about
The house, as ordinary, as humble as habit—
The mutt, the TV, the rusted window tray
Of African violets in their tinfoil ruffs—
Returns our affection with a loyalty
Two parts pluck and the third a bright instinct
To please. (Our habits too are friends, of course.
The sloppy and aggressive ones as well
Seem pleas for attention from puberty’s
Imaginary comrade or the Job’s comforters
Of middle age.) Office mates or children
Don’t form bonds but are merely busy together,
And acquaintances—that pen pal from Porlock is one—
Slip between the hours. But those we eagerly
Pursue bedevil the clock’s idle hands,
And years later, by then the best of friends,
The two of you familiar as an old pair of socks,
Each darning the other with faint praise.
More easily mapped than kept to, friendships
Can stray, and who has not taken a wrong turn?
(Nor later put that misstep to good use.)
Ex-friends, dead friends, friends never made but missed,
How they resemble those shrouded chandeliers
Still hanging, embarrassed, noble, in the old palace
Now a state-run district conference center.
One peevish delegate is sitting there
Tapping his earphones because he’s picking up
Static that sounds almost like trembling crystal.
IV.
Most friendships in New York are telephonic,
The actual meetings—the brunch or gallery hop
Or, best, a double-feature of French classics—
Less important than the daily schmooze.
Flopped on the sofa in my drip-dry kimono,
I kick off the morning’s dance of hours with you,
Natalie, doyenne of the daily calls,
Master-mistress of crisis and charm.
Contentedly we chew the cud of yesterday’s
Running feud with what part of the self
Had been mistaken—yes?—for someone else.
And grunt. Or laugh. Or leave to stir the stew.
Then talk behind the world’s back—how, say,
Those friends of friends simply Will Not Do,
While gingerly stepping back (as we never would
With lover or stranger) from any disappointment
In each other. Grooming like baboons? Perhaps.
Or taking on a ballast of gossip to steady
Nerves already bobbing in the wake of that grand
Liner, the SS Domesticity,
With its ghost crew and endless fire drills.
But isn’t the point to get a few things
Clear at last, some uncommon sense to rely
Upon in all this slow-motion vertigo
That lumbers from dream to real-life drama?
You alone, dear heart, remember what it’s like
To be me; remember too the dollop of truth,
Cheating on that regime of artificially
Sweetened, salt-free fictions the dangerous
Years concoct for tonight’s floating island.
V.
Different friends sound different registers.
The morning impromptu, when replayed this afternoon
For you, Jimmy, will have been transcribed
For downtown argot, oltrano, and Irish harp,
And the novelist in you draw out as anecdote
What news from nowhere had earlier surfaced as whim.
On your end of the line (I picture a fire laid
And high-tech teapot under a gingham cozy),
Patience humors my warmed-over grievance or gush.
Eac
h adds the lover’s past to his own, experience
Greedily annexed, heartland by buffer state,
While the friend lends his field glasses to survey
The ransacked loot and spot the weak defenses.
Though it believes all things, it’s not love
That bears and hopes and endures, but the comrade-in-arms.
How often you’ve found me abandoned on your doormat,
Pleading to be taken in and plied
With seltzer and Chinese take-out, while you bandaged
My psyche’s melodramatically slashed wrists
(In any case two superficial wounds),
The razor’s edge of romance having fallen
Onto the bathroom tiles next to a lurid
Pool of self-regard. “Basta! Love
Would bake its bread of you, then butter it.
The braver remedy for sorrow is to stand up
Under fire, or lie low on a therapist’s couch,
Whistling an old barcarole into the dark.
Get a grip. Buckle on your parachute.
Now, out the door with you, and just remember:
A friend in need is fortune’s darling indeed.”
VI.
Subtle Plato, patron saint of friendship,
Scolded those nurslings of the myrtle-bed
Whose tender souls, first seized by love’s madness,
Then stirred to rapturous frenzies, overnight
Turn sour, their eyes narrowed with suspicions,
Sleepless, feverishly refusing company.
The soul, in constant motion because immortal,
Again and again is “deeply moved” and flies
To a new favorite, patrolling the upper air