Take the disappearing ship
As death’s vehicle!
Distant, you remain in view,
Still running on drops of ink.
Glasses
Tattooed, goateed, burly, a huge
guy you’d expect to find in a hardhat,
drilling a hole in the road,
he pulls out from his T-shirt pocket
a crumpled, quietly crafted page
in praise of a fellow poet.
Then steps up to the podium, slips
his glasses on, and everything blurs.
Sorry, he laughs, they’re hers—
these glasses are my wife’s. I’ve met
his wife. She’s blond, fine-boned, serene,
with a face you’d swear was painted
five hundred years ago by Van Eyck.
Don’t worry, he’s chuckling into the mike,
I’ve found my own. But his tone
is a little disappointed.
Hare
At odd times, harum-scarum,
after we haven’t seen him
for a week or so, he hops
from the bushes at stage right
onto our green proscenium.
Why do I say it’s ours?
At best, I’m just a warden,
standing with hands in suds
at the kitchen window when
he breaks out of his warren.
Jittery, hunted vagrant,
he leaps as fast as Aesop
claimed his kind could leap,
then stops still in the grass
merely because it’s fragrant—
a wholly interested,
systematic sensualist,
a silent, smooth lawn mower
that hardly can go slower.
Sometimes he gets ahead
(or tries to) with the jet set,
in a long line at the airport
pulling his legs behind him
like luggage, bit by bit—
the nametag of his scut
attached at the last minute.
Meanwhile, I stay put
inside the house we bought
a year ago, a new
woman at the window—
but of that he has no clue,
now pawn, now skipping knight
on sun-squares on the lawn,
while dreaming the old dream
a hare has, of his harem.
Is he in fact the same
animal all the time?
In my way promiscuous
as he, how could I swear
he’s not some other hare
that pauses blank-eyed, poses
as if for praise, and then,
rather than jump over,
inserts himself within
a low bush, like a lover?
Both of us bad at faces,
mere samples of our species,
will either of us be missed?
The dishes in my hands
are shards for the archeologist.
In the Guesthouse
1. LONG EXPOSURE, 1892
All of them dead by now, and posed
so stiffly, in their sepia Sunday
best, they seem half-dead already.
Father and Eldest Son, each dressed
in high-cut jacket and floppy tie,
never get to sit in the sitting room.
They stand to face a firing squad
behind Mother and the little girls—
themselves bolt upright on the sofa,
hands at their sides, their center-parted
hair pulled back, two rows of rickrack
flanking the twenty buttons down
the plumb line of their bodices.
And here, discovered alone downstage
and slightly to the left, the boy—
such a beautiful boy. Although
they’ve tried to make him a little man,
upholstering him in herringbone,
you can see him itching to run out
with his hoop and stick, happy because
even at this moment, when
nobody could be happy, he knows—
in the tilt of his blond head, the frank
time-burning gaze beneath his cowlick—
that he is the most loved.
2. FLAPPERS, 1925
I’m in the guesthouse some days before
professional, black-and-white, composed
to lend a spacious dignity
to the one life lived behind each face.
Again, the date’s approximate;
I’m guessing from the arty look,
the Flapperish, drop-waisted frock
and ropes of wooden beads on the wife
of—yes, it has to be. No more
the poster boy for posterity,
he’s a commanding forty. The cowlick’s
still there (although now he slicks
it down with something), and he still
cocks his head to one side, a hint
of flirtation, exasperation—what?—
in the eyes he trains at the camera
as if he’d give me what I want
if only he could emerge now from
the frame. We stare in mutual
boldness while his wife’s long profile
is tendered to the child between them.
One girl: a modern family.
I speculate a little son
was lost to the great flu; even so,
this fair-haired Zelda in a bob,
ten years old, would come to seem
enough, the image of her father.
The smile high-cheeked and confident,
the shining eyes, the upturned chin—
people matter more now; they’ll die
less often, now that the Great War’s over;
everyone’s allowed to sit down.
3. WHEELCHAIR, 2000
The jumbles of grinning faces jammed
together at birthdays and Christmases
in color photos around the house
don’t interest me.
They’re merely today, or close enough;
anybody can record it
and does; if everything’s recorded
nothing is.
But puttering about, the guest
of a ghost I now am half in love with,
I’m drawn one day to pluck one image
off the piano.
A wedding. Or some minutes after,
outside a church I’ve seen in town.
The bride, who has exercised her right
to veil, white gown,
and any decorum life affords
these days, is surrounded by the girls—
some floral aunts, a gawky niece
in her first pearls—
and all the men in blazers, khakis …
running shoes? Boys will be boys.
Squirming, they squint into the sun:
some amateur
shutterbug has made sure they can’t
see us, or we see them, and yet
I understand now who is shaded
there in the wheelchair.
Dwindled, elderly, it’s Zelda—
her lumpy little body slumped
like a doll’s in a high chair, shoes just
grazing the footrest.
It must be she. However many
lives her hair went through—Forties
complications held with tortoise-
shell combs; beehives;
softer bouffants like Jackie’s; fried
and sprayed gray-pincurl granny perms—
in all the years (say, seventy-five?)
since I last saw her,
she’s come back to that sleek, side-parted
bob, which (though it’s white) encloses
the girl who’s smiling, pert, high-cheeked,
despite the pull
of gr
avity: just like her father.
Or as he was. When did he die,
and how? What was his name? What’s yours?
I could find out,
surely, when I leave here; the owner
might well be her granddaughter.
I could scout, too, for snapshots even
more recent—some
get-together with no wheelchair—
to prove what I’m sensing: Zelda’s gone.
Why would they think to frame this scene,
unless it’s the last?
But why should we care so for people
not us or ours—recognized by sight
alone—whose voices never spoke
with wit or comfort
to us, and whose very thoughts,
imagined, every year grow quainter?
Yet they must have felt this tug as well,
repeatedly
peering at someone they were bound
to come back to, as in a mirror.
Who says they’re more anonymous
than I am,
packing up after my two weeks
in the guesthouse? I make one last study
of Zelda’s father, lingering with
the boy, the man,
sealing his developing
face in myself for safekeeping.
Too soon to leave. But then, nobody
ever stays here long.
Night Thoughts
1.
The hunchback is curled
all night in my shut closet.
I am six years old.
2.
Dark in the cabin.
No lamp but the blue moon of
the computer screen.
3.
Pebbles on the beach:
the waves, without swallowing,
deliver a speech.
4.
I’d need a furnace
(if I were a glassblower)
to make icicles.
5.
She’s alone in bed.
In an earlier time zone
he dines a lover.
6.
A page of haiku:
among the caught fireflies, one
lights the whole bottle.
Snowed-on Snowman
“Want to make a snowman?”
—So goes her wide-eyed question
on a Sunday in January.
I’ve been sweeping the kitchen floor
and prop the broom, like a bookmark,
against the vertical line
that joins one wall to another.
I check my watch: 3:30.
The last light of the weekend,
her last such invitation,
maybe: she’s thirteen.
“I’m not sure it’s packable.
It may not be good snow,
or enough snow for a snowman.”
—So go my instinctive,
unfun, nay-saying quibbles:
I’ve been an adult a long time.
“Could we make a snowchild then?”
Straight-faced, without guile,
she doesn’t seem to know
she’s just invented a word—
or that its snow-fresh sound
compels the thing’s creation.
Seize the day in a snowball
and roll it across the yard;
leave a paper-thin
membrane between winter
and a spring that’s coming up
in clumps of grass and soil;
roll the ball rounder, bigger,
make a second, a third,
then pile them, roughly centered,
one on top of the other,
like marshmallows on a stick.
And human, for all that:
remarkable how little
skill it takes to make us
believe in, fall in love with,
this lopsided Galatea
(and why do we say it’s male?
Why do we feel that poking
a tarnished candle-snuffer
for a pipe in his mouthless head
will finally clinch the matter?).
Dressed, at last, in every
cliché we can think of—scarf
wrapped against the cold
of himself, a wide-brimmed hat
shielding his unshelled
almond eyes and carrot
nose from a burning snowlight
ruddied by low sun—
he’s readier than she
(reverting, herself, to pure
put-upon type, the impatient
teenager) to pose
for a snapshot side by side—
each soon to disappear,
him shrinking as she grows.
But not before Monday morning.
Slipping out to hunt
the rolled-up paper, dreading
along with it the widespread
old news of Sunday’s snow
gone smudged, a little yellow,
I find instead a fine
life-dust on everything:
snow on the snowman’s hat
(whose brim serves to define
the line between what’s molded
by us, and snow like that);
snow too light to burden
his rounded back or shoulders,
or mine, the shoveler’s;
snow like breakfast crumbs
I nearly brush from his scarf
before I catch myself.
Inside, I stamp my boots
and call upstairs. You’re late,
I usually say; you must
eat your toast, it’s getting cold;
how can you take an hour
to decide which jeans to wear?
In a corner, the forgotten
broom still marks the place
of yesterday in the room.
“Come down,” I call up again.
“Come see the snowed-on snowman.”
Light-Footed
AN INTERLUDE
Deliveries Only
for Sarah Marjorie Lyon, born in a service elevator
Your whole life long, you’ll dine
out on the same questions:
In your building? On what floor?
Was it going up or down?
They’ll need the precise location—
Seventy-ninth and Lex?—
as if learning it could shield them
from the consequences of sex.
Wasn’t your mother a doctor?
Didn’t she talk him through
how to do it? And then you’ll tell them
how your father delivered you,
that only after your birth
did he think to reach in her bag
and dial 911.
He held you up like a phone
and was taught how to cut the cord.
What about proper hygiene?
When did the ambulance come?
Waiting, you were the siren,
squalling in a rage
behind the old-fashioned mesh
of the elevator door:
a Lyon cub in her cage.
Didn’t your parents worry?
Hadn’t they done Lamaze?
But you’ll only shrug at your story:
That was the way it was.
School Pictures
Nobody wants them, not even Mom. And Dad
always pretends they fell out of his wallet.
Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.
Maybe it’s trick photography, like an ad.
We combed our hair. When did somebody maul it?
Nobody wants them, not even Mom and Dad.
No self-respecting kid would wear that plaid.
She looks so Eighties in that whatchamacallit.
Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.
Say cheese at 9 a.m.? Jeez, we were mad.
But we meant to please the public, not appall it.
&nbs
p; Nobody wants them. Not even Mom and Dad,
homely as they are, have ever had
a girl you might mistake for Tobias Smollett.
Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.
We could try to call it art, the latest fad,
but could we find a gallery to install it?
Nobody wants them, not even Mom and Dad.
Not even at thirteen could we look that bad.
A Morris Dance
Across the Common, on a lovely May
day in New England, I see and hear
the Middle Ages drawing near,
bells tinkling, pennants bright and gay—
a parade of Morris dancers.
One plucks a lute. One twirls a cape.
Up close, a lifted pinafore
exposes cellulite, and more.
O why aren’t they in better shape,
the middle-aged Morris dancers?
Already it’s not hard to guess
their treasurer—her; their president—him;
the Wednesday night meetings at the gym.
They ought to practice more, or less,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.
Short-winded troubadours and pages,
milkmaids with osteoporosis—
what really makes me so morose is
how they can’t admit their ages,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.
Watching them gamboling and tripping
on Maypole ribbons like leashed dogs,
then landing, thunderously, on clogs,
I have to say I feel like skipping
the middle-aged Morris dancers.