ordinarily accompanies it.
So I’ve locked myself into the first because,
though farther from the lightbulb overhead,
it remains the more conventional
and thereby illuminating choice.
The wit on its walls is more desperate.
As if I had written them
there myself, but only because by now
I have seen them day after day,
I know each boast, each plea,
the runty widower’s resentments,
the phone number for good head.
Today’s fresh drawing:
a woman’s torso, neck to outflung knees,
with breasts like targets and at her crotch
red felt-tip “hair” to guard
a treasure half wound, half wisecrack.
The first critic of the flesh is always
the self-possessed sensualist.
With all that wall as his margin,
he had sniffed in smug ballpoint
OBVIOUSLY DONE BY SOMEONE
WHO HAS NEVER SEEN THE REAL THING.
Under that, in a later hand,
the local pinstripe aesthete
had dismissed the daydreamer’s crudity
and its critic’s edgy literalism.
His block letters had squared,
not sloping shoulders: NO,
BY SOMEONE WHO JUST CAN’T DRAW.
Were the two opinions
converging on the same moral point?
That a good drawing is the real thing?
Or that the real thing
can be truly seen only through another’s
eyes? But now that I trace it through
other jokes and members,
the bottom line leads to a higher inch
of free space on the partition—
a perch above the loose
remarks, like the pimp’s doorway
or the Zen master’s cliff-face ledge.
THERE ARE NO REAL THINGS
writes the philosopher. But he too
has been misled by everything
the mind makes of a body.
When the torso is fleshed out
and turns over in the artist’s bed,
when the sensualist sobs over her,
when the critic buttons his pants,
when the philosopher’s scorn sinks back
from a gratified ecstasy,
then it will be clear to each
in his own way. There is nothing
we cannot possibly not know.
TEA WITH THE LOCAL SAINT
I’d bought a cone of solid sugar and a box
Of tea for the saint himself, a flashlight
For his son, the saint-elect, and bubblegum
For a confusion of small fry—the five-year-old
Aunt, say, and her seven-year-old nephew.
Nothing for the women, of course, the tattooed,
One-eyed, moon-faced matron, or her daughter
Whose husband had long ago run away
After killing their newborn by pouring
A bottle of cheap cologne down its throat.
This was, after all, our first meeting.
I was to be introduced by a Peace Corps pal
Whose easy, open California ways
Had brought a water system to the village
And an up-to-date word to its vocabulary.
Every other guttural spillway of Arabic
Included a carefully enunciated “awesome,”
The speaker bright-eyed with his own banter.
We sat on a pair of Kurt Cobain beach towels
And under a High-Quality Quartz Clock,
The plastic butterflies attached to whose hands
Seemed to keep time with those in my stomach.
At last, he entered the room, the saint himself,
Moulay Madani, in a white head scarf and caftan
The fading blue of a map’s Moroccan coastline,
Its hem embroidered with geometric ports of call.
A rugged sixty, with a longshoreman’s jaw,
A courtier’s guile, and a statesman’s earnest pauses,
He first explained the crescent dagger he fingered
Had been made two centuries ago by a clever Jew.
Then he squinted for my reaction. I’ve no taste
For bad blood, and gingerly cleared my throat to say
I was inclined to trust any saint who carried a knife.
From a copper urn, glasses of mint tea were poured,
Of a tongue-stiffening sweetness. I was allowed to wave
Away the tray of nougat—or rather, the flies on it.
Sipping, I waited for a word, a sign from the saint.
I’d wanted to lie, as if underground, and watch
Him dig up the sky, or stand at a riverbank
And have the water sweep off my presumptions,
Have him blow light into my changeling bones.
I wanted to feel the stalk rise and the blade fall.
I wanted my life’s arithmetic glazed and fired.
I wanted the hush, the wingstroke, the shudder.
But sainthood, I learned soon enough, is a fate
Worse than life, nights on call for the demons
In a vomiting lamb, a dry breast, a broken radio,
And days spent parroting the timeless adages,
Spent arbitrating water rights, property lines,
Or feuds between rival herdsmen over scrub brush,
Spent blessing every bride and anyone’s big-bellied
Fourth or fifth wife, praying that they deliver sons.
I thought back to the time, not ten feet from him,
I heard a homily delivered by old John XXIII,
Sounding wholly seraphic in his murmured Italian.
Ten interpreters stepped from behind the throne.
The English one at last explained the Holy Father
Had urged us all to wear seatbelts while driving.
My heart sank at its plain good sense, as hymns
Echoed and golden canopies enfolded the pope.
How like home it seemed, with my own father
A preoccupied patriarch of practicality
When what was wanted veered wildly between
The gruff headmaster and the drunken playwright.
Instead, I got the distant advertising salesman,
The suburban dad of what turned out to be my dreams.…
Dreams that, decades later, back at my hotel in Fez,
A bucket of cold water was suddenly poured on.
I’d gone to the hamam, stripped, and lay on a pattern
Of sopping tiles that might have spelled God’s will.
Steam shrouded the attendant methodically soaping
The knots of disappointment he’d knuckled in my back.
He paused. I drifted. [Yowza!] I looked up
At a bald, toothless gnome in swaddling clothes
On his way back to the fountain for more bad news.
Something in his bowlegged walk—perhaps the weary
Routine of it—made me think of the saint again,
Of how, when tea was done, and everyone had stood,
He reached for my head, put his hands over it,
And gently pulled me to his chest, which smelled
Of dung-smoke and cinnamon and mutton grease.
I could hear his wheezy breathing now, like the prophet’s
Last whispered word repeated by the faithful.
Then he prayed for what no one had time to translate—
His son interrupted the old man to tell him a group
Of snake charmers sought his blessing, and a blind thief.
The saint pushed me away, took one long look,
Then straightened my collar and nodded me toward the door.
for Jane Garmey
UNDER HYDRA
To disbelieve in God—or worse, in His servants—
Of old incited mobs
With stones or stakes grimly to atone for what,
Like a bomb not lobbed
But planted in the garage of a mirror-skin
High-rise, has from deep within
Too suddenly exposed
The common desire to learn
Less than had been supposed.
Bedsores, point shaving, a taste for sarongs. There are signs
Everywhere—like the thumbprints,
Say, of thin-lipped men or sluggish women
On an heirloom violin.
So mine is the culture of laugh track and chat room.
Authority’s foredoomed.
Where is distance, and what
Can frighten or inspire, condemn or redeem?
All transcendence is cut
With a canned, buttoned-down, fork-tongued coziness.
The stars are hooded now.
The heart’s cloud chamber weeps its nuclear tears.
My nails are bitten, and how
All-consuming my vanities, the fancied slights
To my air-kissing appetites.
Millennial echoes
Fill the abandoned stadium. Homeless
Frauds crowd the two back rows.
Compel them to come in, the evangelist
Insists. There are empty
Seats at the table for minims and ranters.
Join the ancient family
Squabbles—whose is bigger? who deserves more?
Prophecy’s the trapdoor
Whose fatal saving grace
Leads to listening for a voice within
That doubles as self-praise.
His lips cut off, and flames at work on his bubbling guts,
The wandering monk is tied
To his own refusal—a book or belief.
The scholar, for his pride,
Is whipped, branded, and in midwinter sent out
On the road of his doubt
To perish of the cold.
Judge and martyr each invokes God’s mercy
On his innocent soul.
There goes the pitiful procession of mumblers,
Slave masters and skinheads,
Witches, dealers, backwoods ayatollahs.
And here am I, tucked in bed,
Wondering if I believe in anything more
Than my devotions and four
Squares. And if forced to say,
Wouldn’t I deny even you, love, for a future?
Who spoke the truth today?
AUDEN’S OED
in the old oxblood edition, the color
of the mother tongue, all foxed and forked,
its threadbare edges dented, once a fixture
in the second-storey Kirchstetten
room where day by day he fashioned the silence
into objects, often sitting on
Poy–Ry, say, or Sole–Sz, and after his death
sent packing from cozy Austria
to Athens, where fortune dropped it from Chester’s
trembling hands into a legacy
that exiled it next to page-curling Key West
and finally to Connecticut,
is shelved here now, a long arm’s-length from my desk.
What he made of himself he had found
in this book, the exact weight of each soft spot
and sore point, how each casts a shadow
understudying our hungers and our whims.
If history is just plain dull facts,
the facts are these, these ruling nouns and upstart
verbs, these slick adjectival toadies
and adverbial agents with their collars
pulled up, privileged phrasal moments,
and full-scale clausal changes that qualify
or contradict the course of a life.
This book is all we can remember and dream.
It’s how spur gears mesh and rocks are parsed
into geodes, how the blood engorges
a glance, how the fig ripens to fall,
or what quarter-tones and quarks may signal deep
inside a precise idea of space.
It is to this book he sat for the lessons
the past had set him—how our Greeks died,
whom your Romans killed, how her Germans
overreached, what his English understood,
how my Americans denied history
was anything but an innocence
the others had simply skimmed or mispronounced.
He knew history is a grammar,
and grammar a metaphor, and poetry
nothing more or less than death itself—
it never lies because it never affirms.
From the start, squinting at the propped score
with Mother in their duets at the upright
or biting his nails while arguing
the quidditas of thuggish jacks-in-office,
he knew what he called truth always lies
in the words and so in this dictionary,
which like him has become a conscience
with all its roots, all its ramifications,
meanings and examples down the years.
It was on this book he sat for the lessons
learned five inches above a desk chair,
five inches to lean down closer to the page,
one volume at a time, day by day,
slightly above the sense of things, but closer
to what tomorrow so many others
will consider to have somehow been the truth.
The hard part is not so much telling the truth
as knowing which truth to tell—or worse,
what it is you want to tell the truth, and how
at last one learns to unlove others,
to uncast the spells, to rewind the romance
back to its original desire
for something else altogether, its grievance,
say, against that year’s dazzling head boy
or the crippled wide-eyed horse you couldn’t shoot.
And, as innocent as the future
has no morality other than
definition itself. The large, functional
Indo-European family
will do for a murky myth of origin,
and the iron laws of shift and change
go unquestioned by the puzzled rummager.
Our names for things tend to hold them fast
in place, give an X its features or its pitch,
a fourth dimension of distinctness.
And what may seem vague awaits the Supplement
just now pulling into the depot,
late as usual but looming through the steam.
Words have their unflappable habits
of being, constellations of fixed ideas
that still move. Sentimentality,
Snobbery, Sympathy, Sorrow—each queues up
at the same window. No raised eyebrow
for the faked orgasm or press conference
to issue official denials.
No sigh for the botanist’s crabbed notebook.
No praise for the florilegium.
No regret for the sinking tanker’s oil slick
glittering now off Cape Flattery.
No truck with bandbox grooming, fashion runways,
the foot binder’s stale apology,
or the dream’s down payment and layaway plan.
Everything adds up to or sinks back
into the word we know it by in this book.
A believer in words—common prayers
or textbook theories—this wrinkled metaphor
of the mind itself abided by
what grave and lucid laws, what keen exemptions
these columns of small print have upheld.
He could be sitting beside one, chin in hand,
listening to a late quartet, a gaze
on his face
only the final chord will break.
Here is that faraway something else,
here between the crowded lines of scholarship.
Here is the first rapture and final
dread of being found out by words, terms, phrases
for what is unknown, unfelt, unloved.
Here in the end is the language of a life.
Half my life ago, before retiring
to new digs under Oxford’s old spires,
as a part of his farewell tour of the States,
one last look at the rooms of the house
he’d made of our poised, mechanical largesse,
he visited my alma mater.
The crowd—tweedy townies and student groundlings—
packed the hall and spilled over the lawn
outside, where the lucky ones pressed their faces
to windows suspense was steaming up.
How did I find a place at the master’s feet?
My view was of the great man’s ankles,
and close enough to see his socks didn’t match.
I sat there uncomfortably but spellbound
to his oracular mumble. And later,
after the applause and the sherry,
while he wambled tipsily toward his guest suite,
I sprang as if by coincidence
from its darkened doorway where I’d been waiting.
But, well, waiting for what exactly?
Suddenly speechless, I counted on a lie
and told him I knew his work by heart
and would he autograph my unread copy.
He reached in his jacket for a pen
and at last looked distractedly up at me.
A pause. “Turn around and bend over,”
he ordered in a voice vexed with impatience
I at once mistook for genuine
interest—almost a proposition, in fact.
The coy young man I was then is not
my type, but I can recognize the appeal.
Even as I wheeled slowly around
and put my hands on my knees, I realized
what he wanted, what he’d asked of me.
To write in the book, he required a desk.
My back would do as well as any
Tree trunk or cafeteria tabletop.
Only years later did it make sense.
By then I’d figured out that he’d been writing
on me ever since that encounter,
or that I’d unconsciously made of myself
a desk so that he could continue—
the common imagination’s dogsbody
and ringmaster—still to speak up,
however halting or indirect the voice.