And this is the way it had been done for years in the provinces,
With a nice young assistant decked out in tweed and denim
Standing up at the beginning to evoke some rusty quiddity
Or baroque valentine of the curriculum vitae
To tweak the vanity of the esteemed visitor,
Who would just then be wringing from a backpack
A handful of faded books and the new precious one
That had just from the soul been freshly delivered
And pressed in the black binder, from which
The torqued syllables would soon come springing.
This would be as a wonder to some:
Four who had already heard what was to be spoken
And loved or dismissed it; twelve who had dreamed
Of the ones they had heard of attending,
Who would take off their clothes for anyone;
Five who knew the name, but not the work
They had characterized often as promising or derivative;
And two who had blundered into the wrong room,
Thinking to learn of crocodile habitats
Or occult heresies of the Spanish Inquisition.
Still others would be here except that tomorrow
They would be called on to name the elements,
Trample a sonata, or defend a thesis;
If it did not happen on the night of the tournament,
Or on a day when debaters were flapping like puppets
From our greediest and most altruistic intentions;
Or at an hour when Christian bodybuilders
Had donned crucifixes and greased pectorals
To mount scaffolds at the center of the coliseum
And hunch in oddly hopeful positions.
But perhaps the university is not the place for poetry.
Picture our venerable line of shamans, bards,
And nervous wrecks, pulling themselves up
From the sticky kitchens of bohemia
To ascend the rungs of respectability.
Here one drones, whinges, signals with a fist.
Oh it is especially icky when the poet's
Less virile than his photograph, the African's
Too pale, the lesbian is insufficiently militant,
Or the lights make that noise of frying fish.
After all, not much happens in this lounge
Or small auditorium under the library,
And yet those who are here hear, don't they,
Among these lubricated delicacies for the auditory senses,
A thing that is right and singular to the heart?
Oh it does not always have to issue from guilt
Or some lingering inferiority to the British.
It can be done plainly or in elaborate meters.
Afterward, someone still unheard from
May actually go into a room alone and read it.
REFUSING TO BAPTIZE A SON
Twilight came and my mother-in-law
Insisting again it would mean nothing,
The ceremony and the holy water,
And happiness of friends and family,
Which is everything to an old woman.
High tide at el estero, the Pacific roared
As beer turned to wine and wine to bourbon.
Midnight, fireworks, Feliz Año Nuevo,
And us, deep in our cups, and drinking on:
Me with my immutable gringo silence,
And her parrying, "What if he should die?"
And "You don't understand. You're not Roman."
What's changed now that she's buried?
Not nature, not my no, as dumb as yes,
Not the luck of the Spanish armada,
Or high muck I dreamed of defending:
Post-ethnic, post-religious, eclectic—
It's like her heaven. It doesn't exist.
Her spirit does. Stubborn. Procrustean. Loving
The palm tree's lovely freedom from knowledge.
May my son remember his grandmother
Alive in the tropics, standing for him,
Even in these words, even if they mark
The superstitions of an agnostic.
NOT SEE AGAIN
Long I parried hearty with Hogdoo and weird Harold,
One of the hippies waiting the orbit of the strobing joint,
Talking sidemen on the liner notes of albums
And exotic booby traps of Cambodia and Vietnam,
Until, out of money, I compromised and took a job
Working beside Floyd, a pinkish African American
With tattoos up his neck and improbably orange hair.
Meeting, we'd hardly speak, passing the paper slip
We'd consult separately, filling the same order.
Loading boxes on the warehouse's high shelves,
I thought of the sports-car elect, free those afternoons
To motor past the magnolias and daffodils of Greek Row,
And assistant professors cooing toward whispering trysts
In borrowed efficiencies, and desperate women
Shimmying onto the mirrored stage of the Pussycat
To bare and jiggle their breasts for crystal meth.
But, also, oddly, each day I grew more attached
To the unspoken etiquettes of that work;
To the secretary Jane, who materialized each morning,
Split skirt flashing from her Triumph's green shine;
And to the men, each with his legend and games.
There was Dalton, infamous for his marriage
To an heiress; and Bayard, who'd served two years
For manslaughter after accidentally shooting
His wife while trying to kill another woman;
And others, remembered faintly from remarks:
"Boss don't fuck with me. He knows I'll cut him."
They called me Buttcut, Shorty, the Presbyterian,
And wanted to know what the notebook was for.
"I'm studying the poetry of Christopher Marlowe,"
I would say, and someone would answer, "Huh"—
Not that huh meant anything anyone would want to study.
Even shipping clerks know poetry means romance.
All day Floyd would croon at the top of his bad voice,
The Temptations, Otis Redding, or Stevie Wonder.
And one afternoon he cornered Roy, the foreman,
To say how the night before he'd met a woman
In a bar, and when the bar shut down, they'd gone
To a party way out in the country, a house, music,
Dancing, more drinking, and this is where it got fuzzy.
Either the lights had gone out and there'd been
A fight or there hadn't, but when he came to
The next morning, the car was missing and the girl.
Roy looked at Floyd the way a roofer looks
At sleet. "Goddam," he said, and shook his head.
But the next morning, daybreak, he picked us up,
And we rode around looking for Floyd's car.
Roy drove slowly, grunting as he sucked his pipe.
We circled, hollering to families on porches
Whenever Floyd seemed to remember a bridge or barn.
By eleven o'clock we'd stopped twice for beer.
It hurt Floyd to ask Roy for help, to admit
It wasn't the car, a rusted-out and bunged-up
Oldsmobile, he wanted to find, but the girl.
Roy spoke in an urgently deliberate patois
Of South Carolina, which seemed, in the way
The words got enjambed and the way the vowels
Dragged the voice through the consonants,
To be more singing impediment than speech.
Dalton mumbled of the fifties on the Riviera,
And, as he got drunker, Bayard kept pitching in,
"I told the bitch, come back, your ass is mine."
Okay, it wasn'
t poetry, but it made Floyd laugh.
We didn't find the car. Christopher Marlowe
Never finished his translation of Hero and Leander.
By dark we'd finished our last six-pack of malt liquor.
The stars had just come out. How lucky I was
To have gone broke, not to have it all regurgitated
For me from a book, but to have lain in a field
With the tongue-tied, the murderous, the illiterate,
And the alcoholic, since I've ended up like this,
The sedative raconteur, the contemplative man.
PLEA FOR FORGIVENESS
The old man William Carlos Williams, who had been famous
for kindness
And for bringing to our poetry a mannerless speaking,
In the aftermath of a stroke was possessed by guilt
And began to construct for his wife the chronicle
Of his peccadilloes, an unforgivable thing, a mistake
Like all pleas for forgiveness, but he persisted
Blindly, obstinately, each day, as though in the end
It would relieve her to know the particulars
Of affairs she must have guessed and tacitly permitted,
For she encouraged his Sunday drives across the river.
His poems suggest as much; anyone can see it.
The thread, the binding of the voice, is a single hair
Spliced from the different hairs of different lovers,
And it clings to his poems, blond and dark,
Tangled and straight, and runs on beyond the page.
I carry it with me, saying, "I have found it so."
It is a world of human blossoming, after all.
But the old woman, sitting there like rust—
For her there would be no more poems of stolen
Plums, of round and firm trunks of young trees,
Only the candor of the bedpan and fouled sheets,
When there could no longer have been any hope
That he would recover, when the thing she desired
Was not his health so much as his speechlessness.
THE LIMOUSINE BRINGING ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER TO CARBONDALE
A town is the size of a language.
In four more years he would be dead; but now,
A rare hot day in late April,
The middle of St. Louis
And the air conditioner didn't work,
The great black sedan
That Kenny had rented from Mr. D's
Quit, so they had to sit there for more than an hour
Before the tow truck and another car arrived,
Also black, two more hours to Carbondale:
The great man with the great drops
Of sweat registering on his brow.
Perhaps because the faculty
Of every backwater university
Endures by the prescient myth
That even to invite a venerable presence
To read in Starkville or Athens
Inevitably causes grave illness
And to have the person actually show up
Sets the leaves rattling above tombs,
Kenny asked, in that modest
And considerate way he has,
"Have you ever been in a car this long?"
"Oh yes, once in Sweden,
They kept me in a car for weeks."
He got here a little before dark.
He read slowly, deliberately,
A story called "The Missing Line."
When he had finished enunciating
Every word on a page, with a noise
Like a needle ripping the grooves
Of a warped 78, he would ratchet
The page from the staple
And lay it to the side and pause
To take an amplified sip of water
While everyone in the auditorium
Hushed to see if the great old man
Would push through the next hyphen—
Though, of course, the thing was,
The print was small. In the end
He would apologize, though all he did
Was to rush understandably from the elite
Of "The Missing Line" to the pica
Of "The Beard," omitting the last page
Of "The Missing Line." Though
All he did was to pretend to read
What now he began to improvise,
Mating the details of the two stories;
But then, suddenly, knew; was devastated, abashed;
And so had to backtrack and search
Awkwardly before three hundred people
For the missing closure, and so
Would write later, being an honorable
Man, and insist on returning the check.
He was a tiny man with big ears
And palms moist as opened pears.
At the session just after the reading,
When the professors of this and that
Were trotting out those tumors
Of erudition and septic ego
They like to pose as questions,
One of the more sensitive ones asked,
As everyone always asked,
"Why do you write in a dead language?"
And he answered without guile, "Luck."
The next morning one of the students
"I wish someone would write about love."
He had the courage to be simple and precise,
And this would be the last of him.
He would not do it again, no matter the money.
A town is the size of a language.
It is not a language that you would have
Any reason to visit though it is not dead yet
Nothing survives that has not been scarred
Lovingly in the brain
And dented by the human voice.
SACRAMENT FOR MY PENIS
How do I approach it, bald as it is, dangling
Over the urinal to some golden expression
Of lemony bitterness, an old Trappist,
Blind in one eye, kneeling to his paternosters?
Is it mine? It never seemed to be mine.
It was old when I first saw it. A joke
Chaucer might have told but didn't.
A frumpish soldier slumped in a jeep
Above the caption Dejected Nazi colonel
Waits to be transported to POW camp.
Yet even now, in the spatulate dark,
Where it lies all day, secret as escape,
Sometimes it will leap of its own volition.
A young terrorist, sprung from prison
And bound for home, bent on sedition.
No, not that—here was my religion—look
Here, blue in the distances of skin—God
Flowers in this nerve. May it remain
Sovereign, inviolable, and unconfessed.
Honor most delicately this feverish guest.
THE OBSOLESCENCE OF THOU
Last heard in a country church, in a prayer
That an elderly spinster had decked out
In what manner she thought befitting
For heaven's immoderate ears, it seemed
All a Sunday rite and benediction
Except some grave care in its blurting out
Made me think of the papa she'd tended
And kisses forgone for her all-mending,
Hands-on balm and alertness to afflictions
Just surrendered to the cemetery.
But also the way her prayer always ended
("Have thine own sweet way, sweet Lord,
Have thine own sweet way") broadened the context,
So I'd attach it to Pound wooing Keats
("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"),
And love that did get made, often sweetly
(But how soon antiqued and caricatured)—
Not that I'd managed it
yet myself,
Just that it seemed prudent to have some sins
To repent, and that one in particular.
ELEGY FOR THE SOUTHERN DRAWL
1
It is all dying out now in a voice asking,
"Where you from? How ya'll folks doin'?"
On the blank verse of the forklift man,
From way off down there and yonder,
Is draining, thou and thine, from prayers
Of spinsters in the Nazarene church—
Is dying of knowledge of the world,
But still going, barely, in a grunted "hidey"
In the line at the cash register at Shoney's,
A father telling how he came north
To visit his son, impatience starting up
Its coughs behind him, his yes'ms and no'ms
An impediment here, Confederate money.
Kid's in my office, slow-talking. I ask,
"Where you from?" He doesn't seem to want
To say, thinks again, then does. "All over."
2
"Local area," my friend Beth Lordan tells me,
Was the code, in the hospital where she worked,
For genitalia, and she would use it
When she was bathing the old and infirm,
From the head down and then from the feet up,
Respecting that one spot, and one day,
Around the waist or the thighs, she stopped