Yet bunions and receding gums
have humbled me; I know my station
as a member of their generation.
Maybe they’d let me play the drums,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.
Office Hours
Unlock the door, drop my backpack,
turn the computer on, and the kettle;
waiting for both to warm up, settle
behind the unfilable disaster
of my cabinet, and ignore that stack
on the floor since last semester.
What a strange job I have—supplying
people with meter and metaphors!
I could be trying to write poems.
Instead, I’ve tried improving yours—
the ones about your grandmothers dying,
your cats, your broken homes,
your clueless junior years in Europe;
vainly I’ve tried to quash the onset
of another sonnet on a sunset.
Commencement Day should make me cheer up;
and although today I feel elated
a pack of you graduated
(the few who slaved to get a summa,
the hundreds who will die not knowing
the proper placement of the comma),
I must admit that, watching caps
and gowns go by, I had a lapse
in judgment: I was growing
sorry to lose—well, two of you.
Funny, clever, and modest too,
fresh from an internship at Glamour,
lovely Amanda would always bring—
throughout the autumn, winter, spring—
poems about sex last summer.
Diane was writing a Book of Hours.
Terse through her Terce, mutely applauding
her Lauds, I knew my place, at least.
Deferring to her higher powers,
behind the grille of my desk, nodding,
I listened like a priest.
Sure, it was selfish that I booked
you both for Tuesdays at eleven,
but didn’t you find to your surprise
(as I did) that fine-tuning even
projects unlike as yours soon looked
part of one enterprise,
and to hell with “independent studies”?
To view the whole thing as a game
we’d dare to lose at; to focus on
one line until it’s more than one—
yes, you got that, and I came
to see you as my buddies,
who reminded me of that grand plan
I had, I think, when I was young.
You showed we could write anything
at all, if we took the time to do it.
Excuse me, Amanda and Diane,
if I now start to get to it.
The Big Sleep
Two bodies in bed, each with a book.
“Would you mind if I turn
the light off?” I ask nicely.
“Would you mind waiting
just a few more pages?” he asks nicely;
“They just found another dead body.”
(My husband is reading Raymond Chandler.)
“Sure,” I say. “I understand.”
So I go back to my book.
Mine is about the disastrous history
of navigation, before the solution
of the problem of longitude.
More often, he’s reading about science,
and I’m reading fiction.
After a while I set down the book,
and behind my lids I see floaters of planets
slide and flicker—
celestial bodies, all unlabeled,
that could never guide me if I were a sailor.
My husband’s the one
with the sense of direction.
(Yes, I’m aware
of the gender cliché—
but what can I do? It’s true.)
Amazing what he doesn’t notice—
what I’m wearing, what he’s wearing,
half the things I notice.
But he can’t believe I’d never dare
to experiment with a new route home;
that before reading this book, this week,
I’d always confused latitude and longitude.
For now, though, nobody’s going far.
“Want me to read this aloud to you?”
he offers. “It might help you sleep.”
He reads me a few pages
of snappy dialogue and guns
before I stop him.
“It’s too funny,” I say.
“It’s too wonderful. It makes me laugh.
I’ll never get to sleep.”
He turns off the light—
which may mean what it does
in Raymond Chandler movies.
But soon we slide, lock, side to side,
my stomach to his back,
like continents buckling
over the rumpled waters,
and in time, although no observer
is there to report it, we probably look
like corpses, except that he always snores.
Sometimes I do. We wake each other up
a lot, and apologize,
his body and my body,
till death do us part.
Readings
PART TWO
Another Session
1.
You opened with the rules. Outside this room
nothing I said inside would be repeated
unless in your best judgment I posed harm
to myself or others. It was like being read
my rights in some film noir—but I was glad
already I’d at last turned myself in,
guilty of anxiety and depression.
And worse. Confess it: worse. Of narcissist
indifference to how other people felt.
Railing against myself, making a list
of everything (I thought), I’d left a fault
unturned: the one of needing to be praised
for forcing these indictments from my throat.
For saying them well. For speaking as I wrote.
2.
Not that the goal was chalking up demerits.
Indeed, I hoped you were basically on my side.
That’s how I interpreted your nod,
your pleasant face (at first, a little hard
to judge behind that beard), your intelligent
air of listening further than I meant.
And never falsely, just to raise my spirits,
but because you couldn’t not be interested.
“You writers!” When the outburst came, I started
out of my chair. (I’d had a habit then—
feet on your coffee table. Never again.)
“This is real life. You don’t live in a novel.
People aren’t characters. They’re not a symbol.”
We stared, stunned at the other, stony-hearted.
3.
Once or twice a week, for a year. But ten
years ago already, so that today
those intimate, subtle, freeform sessions shrink
to memorized refrains: “You seem to think
people can read your mind. You have to say”—
itself said kindly—or that time you accused me
of picturing love too much like “Barbie and Ken.
Why does it have to be all youth and beauty?”
Therapists have themes, as writers do.
(A few of mine, then: the repertoire includes
clocks, hands, untimely death, snow-swollen clouds.)
Like it or not, I picked up more from you:
No showing off. In failure, no surprise.
Gratitude. Trust. Forgiveness. Fantasies.
4.
The last time I saw your face—how far back now?—
was when I took my daughters (I still don’t
know what possessed me) to a “family restaurant.”
Dinosaur portions, butter enough to drown
all sorrows in, cakes melded from candy bars …
Having filed you away for years and years,
suddenly I was nervous, my life on show.
I’m still married, thanks. Husband’s out of town.
But there was no talking to you across the aisle
where, by some predestined trick of seating,
your brood in its entirety was eating
(their dinners, I suppose, were just as vile)
with backs to me, remaining as they must
faceless to patients even from the past.
5.
Killed instantly. That’s what a mutual friend
told me when I asked how it had happened.
Good, I said, I’m glad he didn’t suffer—
each of us reaching (not far) for a phrase
from a lifetime stock of journalists’ clichés
which, we had learned, provide a saving buffer
within our bifurcated selves: the one
that’s horrified; the one that must go on.
Killed in a bicycle race. I’ve scrapped the Wheel
of Fortune, the Road of Life. No, this is real,
there’s no script to consult: you’ve lost your body.
Still having one, I pace, I stretch, I cough,
I wash my face. But then I’m never ready.
This is the sonnet I’ve been putting off.
6.
And also this one, in which your fancy bike
hits a concrete barrier and you fly
over it into fast oncoming traffic—
the obituary’s formula for one man
driving a truck, who didn’t even have
time to believe the corner of his eye,
until the thing was done, and he must live
always as if this nightmare were the one
deed he was born to do and to relive,
precisely the sort of person you would trust
in fifty-minute sessions to forgive
himself, to give himself at least two years
of post-traumatic whatsit to adjust
to thoughts of all those people left in tears.
7.
Only once did you confide a story
from your own life. (And only to illustrate
how long “people” take to overcome a shock.)
An accident—you broke your neck? Your back?
Shameful I don’t remember—and for three
years you’d take a detour to avoid
the sight of it: that swinging, high red light
somebody ran, that road that crossed a road.
A run-through of the sped-up, drawn-out second
of terror before your second, actual end.
Swinging past the turnoff to your clinic
today, I saw I’d never choose to drive
that street again; would steer around the panic
rather than fail to find you there alive.
8.
Notice—but you can’t—I don’t write your name.
People aren’t characters. Here’s my concession
(small) to that view, and your need of privacy
which, I suspect, went beyond your profession.
When I knew you—no, you knew me—I’d missed the easy
truth we had acquaintances in common.
(A good thing, probably, I’d been too dim
to ask you; you too classy to let on.)
Nor did I find the public facts in print
(age 53, father of three, an active
member of his church) until you’d long
been dead. That July I came and went.
You reached me in a place I don’t belong—
seventeen months later, Christmas Eve.
9.
I’d got there early, casually saved a front
pew for the whole family with some flung
mittens and hats. (In gestures we assume
the shoulder-to-shoulder permanence of home.)
Shouldn’t we come more often? “The Power of Love”:
our sermon. A list called “Flowers in Memory of”
on the program’s final page. I was feeling faint.
Your name. Your father’s name? Something was wrong.
I knew it was you. The church was going black.
Head down: my first anxiety attack
since the bad old days. Your face at the restaurant.
My plate heaped up with food I didn’t want.
Keep the head down. People would be saying
to themselves (and close enough) that I was praying.
10.
Revise our last encounter. I’d rather say
it was that day a decade ago we made
a formal farewell: I was going away
on a long trip. If I needed you, I said,
when I got back, I’d be sure to give a call.
You stood up, and I finally saw how tall
you were; I’d never registered how fit.
Well, all we’d done for a year was talk and sit.
Paris, you said. Then, awkwardly, Lucky you.
Possessor of my secrets, not a friend,
colder, closer, our link unbreakable.
Yet we parted better than people often do.
We looked straight at each other. Was that a smile?
I thanked you for everything. You shook my hand.
For Emily at Fifteen
Sirens living in silence, why would they leave the sea?
—Emily Leithauser
Allow me one more try,
though you and I both know
you’re too old now to need
writing about by me—
you who composed a sonnet
and enclosed it in a letter,
while I was away;
who rummaged in convention’s
midden for tools and symbols
and made with them a maiden
voyage from mere verse
into the unmapped world
of poetry. A mermaid
(like Eve, you wrote—a good
analogy, and yet
your creature acts alone)
chooses to rise from wordless
unmindful happiness
up to the babbling surface
of paradox and pain.
I whose job it’s been
to protect you read my lesson:
you’ll wriggle from protection.
Half-human and half-fish
of adolescence, take
my compliments, meant half
as from a mother, half
one writer to another,
for rhymes in which you bury
ironies—for instance,
sirens into silence;
and since I’ve glimpsed a shadow,
forgive how glad I felt
when I set down your sonnet
to read your letter again
with only silliness in it,
the old tenth-grade bravado:
“Oh well, I bombed the chem test.
Latin’s a yawn a minute.”
Midsummer, Georgia Avenue
Happiness: a high, wide porch, white columns
crowned by the crepe-paper party hats
of hibiscus; a rocking chair; iced tea; a book;
an afternoon in late July to read it,
or read the middle of it, having leisure
to mark the place and enter it tomorrow
just as you left it (knock-knock of woodpecker
keeping yesterday’s time, cicada’s buzz,
the turning of another page, and somewhere
a question raised and dropped, the pendulum-
swing of a wind-chime). Back and forth, the rocker
and the reading eye, and isn’t half
your jittery, odd j
oy the looking out
now and again across the road to where,
under the lush allées of long-lived trees
conferring shade and breeze on those who feel
none of it, a hundred stories stand confined,
each to their single page of stone? Not far,
the distance between you and them: a breath,
a heartbeat dropped, a word in your two-faced
book that invites you to its party only
to sadden you when it’s over. And so you stay
on your teetering perch, you move and go nowhere,
gazing past the heat-struck street that’s split
down the middle—not to put too fine
a point on it—by a double yellow line.
Snowbirds
Profiles framed in the window’s
glare of Florida sun,
two friends, both snow-capped widows,
are sharing a cinnamon bun.
Are they economizing?
Fearing their waists can afford
just half of that white icing?
Neither one says a word
while they divide with a knife
the whorling galaxy
of their treat, like girls at tea,
starting to play at life.
Alike impeccable
in Keds and peds and pleated
tennis shorts, they’re seated
at their accustomed table—
or what feels customary
now that they needn’t worry
about filling another’s mouth;
now that they don’t fly south
anymore, or north, or provide
eggs for anybody.
And yet our cares die hard.
One woman is still ready,
unasked, not looking up,
to pour a long white stream
from a tiny pitcher of cream
into the other’s cup.