where he went down again like a duffel bag full of earth
in front of the reception desk where I was sitting.
I watched the one male nurse turn pale as ash
when he knelt to certify the heartbeat
of this man whose lips were blue and wet.
The other nurse took the group to the auditorium,
saying James isn’t feeling very well right now.
James is sick. Get away from him. Then I heard
the dopey music of the automated slide show
behind those doors from which she never reappeared.
The male nurse was too young to leave stranded
with a man down on the smooth wood floor:
his cheek still velvet, his dark fingers
worrying the valleys of the man’s white wrist.
He’s okay, he’s breathing, as the man’s skin
turned gray, his mouth open, a cherry sore
at either edge. I don’t remember what I did at first,
I must have puttered off to perform some
stupid task that would seem useful —
gathering premoistened towelettes
or picking up the phone while the nurse repeated
He’s okay, he’s breathing. But the colors
got worse until nothing could spare me
from having to walk my hand in the crease
of the man’s blue throat, where his carotid
should have pulsed. Nothing.
I said You breathe for him and I’ll compress,
and for a while we worked together like a clumsy
railroad handcar, me humping at arm’s length
over the ribs, the nurse sealing his lips around
the man’s scabbed mouth, while yellow mucus
drained from James’s eyes and nose and throat.
Each time the nurse pressed his mouth to the man’s
like a reluctant lover, the stink of cud
was on his lips when he lifted up. Sometimes
he had to hold his face out to the side,
to catch a few breaths of good salt air.
Until he was no longer able to choke back his gut
and asked whether I would trade places with him.
For a moment I studied the man’s staved chest,
which even my small knuckles had banged to jelly,
then the yellow pulp that flecked the nurse’s lips,
that sour, raw smell from their mix of spit.
And I said: No. I don’t think I could...
It’s strange what we do with the dead
— burning them or burying them in earth —
when the body always tries to revert to water.
Later, a doctor called to say the man’s heart
had exploded like a paper sack: death hooked him
before he even hit the floor. So everything we did
was useless — we might as well have banged a drum
and blown into a horn. And notice how I just said “we” —
as though the nurse and I had somehow married
spirits in a pact of gambled blood, when in truth
the nurse, like the man, rode off in an ambulance,
the man for a pointless go-round in the ER, the nurse
for a shot of gamma globulin, while I stood
in the parking lot, picking lint off my shirt.
End of story. Except that since then James
has followed me, showing up sometimes at the house
to read my gas meter, sometimes behind the counter
where I ask him what I owe. No surprise then
that I’ve made my life with another James,
who swears my biggest defect is still the limits
on what I’ll bring myself to do for someone else.
I know there are people who’ll cut out their kidney
to replace a friend’s cankered one, people
who’ll rush into burning buildings to save the lives
of strangers. But every time I ponder selflessness
I hear the beats of my heart, that common loon,
most primitive of birds. Then my life seems most
like a naked, frail thing that must be protected,
and I have suddenly become its mother, paddling
with my own life saddled on my back.
There’s one last thing I didn’t mention —
when I refused to breathe for the dying James
what happened next was that I began to laugh:
a thin laugh, nervous laugh… but loud enough
to drift outside, where it stood on the hill
and creaked its wings a minute before lifting—
over the levees, across those shallowest of waters.
Needles
So first there’s the chemo: three sticks, once a week,
twenty-six weeks.
Then you add interferon: one stick, three times a week,
forever.
And then there’s the blood tests. How many blood tests?
(Too many to count.)
Add all the sticks up and they come down to this: either
your coming out clean
or else… well, nobody’s talking
about the B-side,
an or else that plows through your life like a combine
driven at stock-car speed,
shucking the past into two piles: things that mattered
and things that didn’t.
And the first pile looks so small when you think of
everything you haven’t done —
never seeing the Serengeti or Graceland, never running
with the bulls in Spain.
Not to mention all the women you haven’t done yet!—
and double that number of breasts.
Okay—
you’ve got a woman, a good woman, make no mistake.
But how come you get just one woman when you’re getting
many lifetimes’ worth of sticks?
Where is the justice in that? You feel like someone
who’s run out of clean clothes
with laundry day still half a week away; all those women
you tossed in the pile
marked things that didn’t matter, now you can’t help but
drag them out.
Like the blond on trail crew who lugged the chain saw
on her shoulder up a mountain
and bucked up chunks of blighted trees — how could you
have forgotten
how her arms quaked when the saw whined and the muscles
went liquid in her quads,
or the sweaty patch on her chest where a mosaic formed
of shiny flies and moss?
Or that swarthy-haired dancer, her underpants hooked
across her face like the Lone Ranger,
the one your friends paid to come to the table, where
she pawed and made you blush:
How come yer getting married when you could be muff-diving
every night?
At college they swore it was John Dewey, they swore
by the quadruped Rousseau,
and it took cancer to step up and punch your gut
before you figured
that all along immortal truth’s one best embodiment
was just
some sixteen-year-old table-dancing on a forged ID
at Ponders Corners.
You should have bought a red sports car, skimmed it under
the descending arms at the railroad crossing,
the blond and brunette beside you under its moonroof
and everything smelling of leather —
yes yes—this has been your flaw: how you have always
turned away from the moment
your life was about to be stripped so the bone of it
lies bare and glittering.
You even tried wearing a White Sox cap to bed but its bill
nearly pu
t your wife’s eye out.
So now you’re left no choice but going capless, scarred;
you must stand erect;
you must unveil yourself as a bald man in that most
treacherous darkness.
You remember the first night your parents left town, left
you home without a sitter.
Two friends came over and one of them drove the Mercury
your dad had parked stalwartly
in the drive (you didn’t know how yet) — took it down
to some skinny junkie’s place
in Wicker Park, cousin of a friend of a cousin, friend
of a cousin of a friend,
what did it matter but that his name was Sczabo.
Sczabo! —
as though this guy were a skin disease, or a magician
about to make doves appear.
What he did was tie off your friends with a surgical tube,
piece of lurid chitterling
smudged with grease along its length. Then needle, spoon —
he did the whole bit,
it was just like in the movies, only your turn turned you
chicken (or were you defiant? — )
Somebody’s got to drive home, and that’s what you did
though you’d never
made it even as far as the driveway’s end before your dad
put his foot over the transmission hump
to forestall some calamity he thought would compromise
the hedges.
All the way back to Evanston you piloted the Mercury
like General Montgomery in his tank,
your friends huddled in the backseat, spines coiled,
arms cradled to their ribs —
as though each held a baby being rocked too furiously
for any payoff less than panic.
It’s the same motion your wife blames on some blown-out
muscle in her chest
when at the end of making love she pitches violently,
except instead of saying
something normal like god or jesus she screams ow! ow!
and afterward,
when you try sorting out her pleasure from her pain,
she refuses you the difference.
Maybe you wish you took the needle at Sczabo’s place —
what’s one more stick
among the many you’ll endure, your two friends not such
a far cry from being women,
machines shaking and arching in the wide backseat
as Sczabo’s doves appeared —
or so you thought then, though now you understand
all the gestures the body will employ
just to keep from puking. Snow was damping the concrete
and icing the trees,
a silence stoppered in the back of your friends’ throats
as you let the Mercury’s wheel pass
hand over hand, steering into the fishtails, remembering
your dad’s admonition:
when everything goes to hell the worst you can do
is hit the brakes.
Monorail
Seattle, at the old World’s Fair
He stands by the helm, his face full of blue
from the buildings at twilight, his hand
knuckled around a metal pole that keeps him
from falling, as he flies past the vaults
of startled mannequins, the red ohs of their lips.
Christmas lights are also falling
through the windshield, onto his chest:
right side green, left side red —
dark then back again.
Wait… my father is not moving yet:
no one has claimed the worn leather throne.
But his thoughts are moving, wondering
whether movement is the same as growing old
in the province of space, not time. Inside his shoes,
his toes are as blue as the city streets,
and the drum in his chest, his red-lit chest,
is growing dim. He knows the train he’s about to ride
has one rail: no steering, no turns.
And the only skill is in the brake.
The brake. His lips roll over the words:
the dead man’s brake. And a small boy
— come to ride up front — hears him,
tugs my father’s coat and asks:
Hey mister, are you the driver of this train?
Cairn for Future Travel
I was young for a minute, but then I got old.
Already the black cane stands by
the threshold, already my feet are flowerpots
in thick black shoes. So not long now
before I will have what follows:
a spidery hairnet to circle my scalp, a hand
callused enough to whack your ear. And with them,
the deep wisdom of Sicilian great-aunts:
how to plumb for the melon’s ripeness, how
to stand the loaves upright in my twine sack.
And you, are you ready? Have you brushed
your brown suitcoat and hat? Have you counted
your mahogany chessmen and oiled the zipper
on their leather case? Have you filled
your sack of crumbs for the pigeons?
the bocce-court sand. And as for this second-floor
window where I shake my fist: soon you will learn
to feign deafness, fishing the silver ball
up from your loose, deep pocket.
from
The Oldest Map with the Name America
(1999)
The printing press could disseminate, but it could not retrieve.
To his annoyance, Waldseemüller himself learned the fantastic,
irreversible reach of this new technology. When Waldseemüller
changed his mind and decided that after all Amerigo Vespucci
should not be credited as the true discoverer of the New World,
it was too late.… The printed messages advertising America
were already diffused into a thousand places and could not
be recalled.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, THE DISCOVERERS
Beige Trash
Who is to blame for there being no tractors
churning the soil into veils
to drape over the telling
where and how I grew, in a suburb
with no men that I could in good conscience adorn
with prosthetic limbs or even crushed straw hats?
Kudzu was something we shouted
jujitsuing air like the Green Hornet’s sidekick
whose name still needed some time to ferment
in those years separating the yellow peril
from kung-fu mania, before BRUCE LEE
floated up to the marquee lights.
Like the stripers you could not eat
floating on top of the poisonous river,
to whose bank we never carried our burdens
and let them weep down into Jersey.
Because surely these words would have profited
from at least one silo lording over,
with some earthmoving equipment
parked nearby in a nest of wire
belonging to some good old boy named…
what? Leldon? Lemuel? But sorry:
in no barn did the whiskey bottles lie
like Confederate casualties at Appomattox —
no tent revivals, no cousins with red hair
and freckled hands, no words as exotic as po’boy
or chifforobe or muffuletta. Which meant
we had no means to wrangle Beauty
into the cathedrals of our mouths,
though on occasion an ordinary cow
could make the car’s eight-chambered heart
stop dead beside a pasture, where none of us
dared
get out for fear of stampedes or hay fever
or maybe even fangs hidden behind the lips.
Call us ignorant: everything we knew poured out
those two-at-a-time black-and-white TVS —
one for picture, one for sound — & antlered
with coat hangers that gave even Hawaii Five-O
the speckling of constant winter. The snow
fell like the fur of our fat white dog
for whom my mother cooked lamb chops every night
in an attempt to cure its baldness,
while we dug our fingers in the chopmeat
before she slapped it into patties.
Then Star Trek came on. Then for an hour
the men faded in and out of light.
And there is nothing about this past
it does any service to the language to recall:
Art was what the fire department sold tickets to,
raising money for the hook and ladder.
It took place inside the school auditorium,
where an old Italian couple hid
by donning black and standing
just outside the purple spotlight.
Then music surged that was vaguely familiar
though we’d fail to lure its elaborate name
in from the borders of what we knew,
while the marionette-swan bobbled to its feet
as if newly born. I can say it now:
Tchaikovsky. Of course, the whole time
they worked the sticks and strings,