Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
I
Sixtieth-Birthday Dinner
A Cartoon of Hurt
Airplane Food
Dachau
I Had a Tapeworm
Fucked Up
Half Mile Down
Insult
No Warning No Reason
Hard Times
My Young Mother
Odd Moment
In the Mirror
II
The Dog
Mug
Garbage Truck
The Daily News
Splitsville
Melanoma Clinic Infusion Center Waiting Area
Open Window Truck Noise 3 A.M.
Daredevil
Here I Am
Sabbatical
A Round
Funeral
Ill Wind
III
Against Which
Very Hot Day
Sustenance
Earphones
Petting Zoo
Campus Vagrant
This Morning
Contentment
Happy Anniversary
Spring
Miss Joy
Condolence
Girls Middle School Orchestra
Acknowledgments
Copyright © 2012 by Michael Ryan
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ryan, Michael, date.
This morning : poems / Michael Ryan.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-68459-8
I. Title.
PS3568.Y39T45 2012
811'.54—dc23
2011042370
Book design by Greta D. Sibley
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Doreen and Emily
I
Sixtieth-Birthday Dinner
If in the men’s room of our favorite restaurant
while blissfully pissing riserva spumante
I punch the wall because I am so old,
I promise not to punch too carelessly.
Our friend Franco cooks all night and day
to transform blood and bones to osso buco.
He shouldn’t have to clean them off his wall
or worry that a customer gone cuckoo
has mushed his knuckles like a slugger
whose steroid dosage needs a little tweaking.
My life with you has been beyond beyond
and there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking.
I just don’t want to leave it, and I am
with every silken bite of tiramisu.
I wouldn’t mind being dead
if I could still be with you.
A Cartoon of Hurt
Burglar noise brought me downstairs bare-chested
wielding my daughter’s aluminum softball bat
as if in three A.M. living-room shadowland
I’d be terrible Hector instead of a senior English professor
and there you were, my father—
forty years dead, rummaging my liquor,
younger than me now and ageless and faint,
your grip too soft to lift the fifths and quarts
but rattling them to the old family music:
falsetto amber-bottle-scrape-and-clink of a man
rushing to fix himself a drink, as you always did
the moment you came home from work.
How could you be so unchanged by death?
Even out of this world you want out of this world.
—Unchanged in me, I guess. Watching you,
aluminum softball bat drooping like a penis,
I’m a cartoon of hurt, embarrassed by it.
“Dad,” I whimper, but you can’t hear it.
You abandon the liquor to open the refrigerator.
Its sudden light flashes through you like a bomb blast.
The twist-off beer caps shred your hands to Kleenex.
The pulltab of a tallboy pulls half a finger off.
You howl in pain you couldn’t feel but felt,
the same pain of yours I couldn’t feel but felt,
which now morphs obligingly into all my ugliness,
demons and ogres dancing in my kitchen,
envy and resentment, despair and disappointment
spitting and farting, sticking out their thorned tongues.
Airplane Food
Compressed chicken product, festive succotashed rice,
dead iceberg lettuce with a pale cherry tomato
hard as a mothball, and the coup de grâce: a baby bundt cake
I expect will taste like my passport
but to my delight is not bad,
half bad, or even sort of bad: it is good.
Good good good good good all good
this plain sweet baby bundt cake like much else
I shall never taste touch hear see or smell,
baked for the heavens in its own fluted tube pan
for every blessed one of us ticketed passengers,
purely for our pleasure and then only briefly—
ingested, enjoyed, absorbed, and fading from memory
since we lack the capacity to retaste baby bundt cake
unlike the many childhood wounds I experience
half a century later from the faintest reminders.
This same baby bundt cake might seem scandalous
to the incognito Michelin Guide reviewer
in a three-star restaurant in the south of France.
It could cost the owner-and-chef all his stars
when losing one drives such men to relentless self-torment.
It could cause his wife-the-hostess to cease loving him
instantly, if she had worked eighty-hour weeks with him in concert
painstakingly perfecting the desserts they were known for.
“Marcel, have you lost your senses?”
she’d scream (in French, of course).
“This bundt cake tastes like Michael Ryan’s passport!”
All right, she wouldn’t say like my passport
but some local invective for culinary blasphemy
such as “this bundt cake tastes like duck drop—
the underside of a sink—reduction of pig bristle—
your incontinent mother’s bidet brush holder”—
an untranslatable invective for premeditated betrayals
like secretly developing and serving a recipe
based on the winner of a Pillsbury Bake-Off.
God knows what happened after their disgrace
to the couple, or their employees, much less their children,
especially the boy who loved nothing more
than working in the kitchen alongside his parents.
He certainly wouldn’t touch a bundt cake for the rest of his life.
The sight of someone enjoying one could make him furious
and the aroma of baking bundt cake wafting from a Paris apartment,
unidentifiable to other strollers among the aromas of the city,
could make him weep as automatically as turning a faucet.
He would never discuss the bundt cake episode in interviews
after he had revolutionized the national pastry
and become famous for his supernal puffy napoleons.
Bundt cake could mean only his father’s sudden dementia
and the years of grief and poverty suffered by his family,
but, since my experience and circumstances are so different,
I thought this bundt cake was really good.
Dachau
Dachau isn’t Dachau
to the people who live there:
it’s like “Chapel Hill” or “Charlottesville”
only smaller and older, the quaint
medieval city preserved meticulously
at its center, innocent and neat,
as if to say, “Here’s history too”
to tourists like me who come for the death camp.
This is what’s disturbing about it:
the citizens of Dachau aren’t wrong
not to not have children anymore
and slowly starve themselves to death
on an eight-hundred-calorie diet,
or even—though this is less certain—
not to drop to their knees every morning
and press their foreheads to the ground
and weep for what they allowed to happen.
The most hopeful idea of all—that no matter what,
life goes on—in Dachau
becomes horrifying. People buying toothpaste,
lunching on delicious beer and Weisswurst—
as if nothing’s heinous enough
to permanently eradicate commerce and good cheer,
love and friendship and laughter
that express how unfathomably lucky it is
just to be alive. But isn’t this terrifying?
It means humans can do anything
to one another and go on living.
Dachau could be an advertisement for it,
such pastel charm and calm and beauty
while the death camp squats on the outskirts:
aptly closed the day I took the train from Munich—
aptly to its place in my life
born into postwar prosperity in the United States
as skeletons stumbled out of death camps
I didn’t see even on newsreels until I was in college.
Their specter, the specter of being a good German
as I read now about tortures in Iraq and Guantánamo,
which are no doubt a fraction of what’s hidden,
made me feel I’d better see what I can in person.
The cab driver, a bright retired woman
who was only a baby during the war,
drove me through kilometer after kilometer
of manicured farmland, and when I mentioned
how far from town the Nazis built the death camp,
she said the townspeople then
never spoke of it, they knew but didn’t want to know
what was going on out there, and this common agreement
was so effective that some people
actually were surprised when they “found out”
after the war was over.
Was this the story she told to tourists?
Then it was there: a low fortress,
eerily unimposing, startlingly small,
a few acres defined by an eight-foot concrete wall
topped with double struts of barbed wire,
nothing like a maximum security prison now
at Guantánamo or anywhere else.
I did a chin-up to hold my face above the concrete
and peer through the strands of barbed wire
and, though I didn’t expect rusty gasworks
and blood-soaked mud, the fresh white
with gravel paths looked like a prep school campus
or, at worst, an army base, shut down.
I held myself up as long as I could
to feel my weight hurt the soft flesh of my hands
before I let myself down. “It’s pretty bizarre,”
I said more to myself than to the cab driver
as I slid onto the back seat’s padded leather
and cupped its soothing plumpness in my palms.
She turned and smiled as if at a child
and asked, “It’s a pretty bazaar?”
(June 2005)
I Had a Tapeworm
I had a tapeworm, and imagined it
flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps,
pallid red, a quarter-inch wide
with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes
peeking out of my asshole as I lolled
in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool
(the kind that used to be in inner-city Y’s:
windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings
chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither
seen nor heard of for thirty years
were saying I’d give everyone in the pool
my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten
my insides and now had threaded through
both my intestines and was trying to get out.
Where were we? Everyone was old, old—
gray, infirm; flaccid and thin
or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping—
the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps
and black one-piece suits as if we were all
on an outing from a nursing home.
I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was,
but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty,
as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed
brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair
after cheating on the lover you were cheating
on your husband with, who was at that moment
waiting for you in another motel room
from which you had slipped to meet me secretly:
a secret inside a secret, buried, encased,
as if if we dug deep enough into it
we’d find what we were trying
to get or stop.
Fucked Up
I needed to be wanted
So I made myself into
Someone you would look at
If he looked at you.
You were cute (or not) and smart (or not),
A lovely soul (or not)—
What mattered most to me about you
Was if I made you hot.
You think I didn’t know even then
What this meant about me?
I was not the only one
Locked in fantasy
Because real life was terrifying
And difficult and dull.
Which made you (plural squared)
Irreplaceable.
Of all enslavements, not the worst.
But there weren’t enough of you,
And many too many others
Who so easily saw through
The ecstatic adventure I offered
To my self-loathing despair
That the creep with the come-on look
Simply was not there.
He’s still not there, or anywhere.
It’s years since he’s been fed.
But he likes to bite my brain
To show me he’s not dead