The hearing without ears, the seeing
Without eyes. Isn't heaven just this
Unbearable presence under leaves?
I had thought so. I had believed
At times in a meadow and at other
Times in a wood where we'd emerge
No longer ourselves, but reduced
To many small things that we could
Not presume to know, except as my
Friend's wife begins to disappear,
He feels no solvent in all the earth,
And me, far off, still amateur at grief.
Walking the creek behind the house,
I cross to the old homeplace, find
A scattering of chimney rocks, the
Seeds my grandmother watered, the
Human lifetime of middle-aged trees.
SEX
It was when I read Lawrence that I first saw the world
As a prime lushness, an opening not to be refused.
Wonderful hairs, wonderful mysterious equations,
Each hedge dripping, each clock breathlessly ticking
In the heat of that transcendent, pollinating clarity.
Not a rock or tree that was not suffused with it.
Every bug-ratty spiderweb a doppelganger
For the flimsy verbal chiffon that revealed it.
Each sermon, each lecture, a wire that carried it
To where I lay studying it, if I studied anything
More resonant than the tiles on the ceiling.
For even as I smudged real numbers on a grid
Or traced vectors to a nexus of force and speed,
My mind kept struggling manfully to represent
Its infinitely compelling budding and lubricity.
And one morning Professor Nielsen said with regard
To my heroic inability to accept what was given,
Try to imagine a circle whose circumference
Is inside a proton, and whose center is everywhere.
I have thought of it long as a figure for desire:
A patent for the ridiculous, one of the paradoxes
The need for grace conjures up from lassitude and greed
Like a logical boulder or a Latin-speaking frog.
Often it takes the form of a vulva or a nipple
When it is not moonlighting with the physicists
As a black hole in one of those baroque cosmologies
That lead us like a big head through blinding insights
Until we end up bodiless in a mathematical field.
But as the boy I was grows distant, he seems
Not me but some antiquated piece of fiction
Expurgated from the years and quoted by testosterone.
Beef and ambition, fluttering under damp sheets,
He hums his soulful ditty to the sixth dimension,
And for a while the god in his britches brings him
The ambiguous miscellanies and etceteras of pleasure
Like bisque that comes on a flounder-shaped platter
At La Lastra in Puebla, a deep and pungent gruel
Alive in black olives, the crab leg indistinguishable
From the eye of the octopus, and all of it compounded
In many spices, like those prayers of penitence
The young Baptists weep onto the altar cloth
Less because they are admissions of guilt
Than because they are truly elegies for promiscuity.
Wonderful hairs, wonderful mysterious equations
I could confess, too, now, as my early lusts
Begin ossifying into greed. I could counsel
Abstinence. I know the sorry old man is sorry
For something. One night a woman
Came to me, not as a tree or rock, but in the one fire
Of her true life. What has that got to do
With anything naked in the naked faces of children?
This afternoon I am barely aware of the young women
As they jog over the bridge into Thompson Woods,
But someone must stand very still in the shadows,
Listening to the gusts that come just behind them
As though the veil of matter had been ripped
All the way back to the light of the beginning.
I hear it, too, fainter and fainter. Then darkness comes.
Why should I praise the exemplary life,
Possible only in age or failing health?
All that I love was founded on the same premise
As heaven: that pleasure lasts longer than death.
DIRTY BLUES
This young living legend leaning
Over the sink of the washroom
Of the Maple Leaf Tavern
Was not twenty minutes ago
Blowing the steel bolts out of
The twelve bars of "Stormy Monday."
Now I imagine he has
Come in from whatever
He kept briefly in the back seat
Of a buddy's parked car
To wash the fresh sediment
Of the flooding of the river Venus
From the skin of his prepuce.
Or is he just now anointing
Himself for some mystical
Communion to commence
Shortly in the scented
Cathedral of a stranger's mouth?
In a minute he will return
For the last set, the songs
So much alike, the women
Dancing with the women,
And the men lighting joints
In the courtyard where
The poet is buried. Just now
The way he goes at it
So carefully, from the tip
Back to the shaft, I think
He might be a stockbroker
Wiping a crust of salt
From the pores of a pair
Of expensive black wingtips
Before going in to purchase
Ten thousand shares
Of Microsoft I know
It is none of my business
Where he comes or goes,
To what perilous conference
In the mean streets
Of the erogenous zones,
But I will tell my friends
Who wait at the oak bar,
Who will still be laughing
When again his music
Begins to darken inwardly.
This song he plays now
Is nothing but the blues.
DON'T WORRY
Most of us are compositions that begin in error
And curl like telephones in the umbilical swamp
And break into the light, rending the living portal,
And after long waddling, stagger to our feet,
And after long goo-gahing, stutter into our voices.
Some would rather hear of Methuselah or Noah's ark.
A great many would prefer to meditate on springs
That slip right up from darkness unawares
And arrive, after much idyllic meandering, at the sea
Than imagine their fathers and mothers lost
To that act that often yields such indecorous mixtures
Of pain and pleasure we profane to call it love.
The talk that is only talk goes on talking its talk.
The priest talks to the pretty maid pregnant by a soldier.
She worries because there is war, or because soon
The war will be over, and there will not be
Enough work in the fields. The priest comforts her,
Saying this too will pass, saying what priests say
In the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit,
As if each child came with a loaf of bread under its arm.
The professional grandmother counsels her granddaughter:
Get on with it, get it over, just don't marry a fool.
When my cousin went on the pill, my aunt inscribed
Letters to Billy Graham and N
orman Vincent Peale.
Young, and risking car sex without a condom
Because the least trespass of sheepskin or latex
Against the glans seemed sacrilege against Eros,
When I arrived at that stage where the seminal vesicles
Begin to secrete their first milky pearls
And the girl there with me had at last vanished
Into the riptide of her own unstoppable motions,
I would think of mangled bodies at accident scenes
Or old men in Bermuda shorts with tar on their legs
In order to hold back the spasm of nearly intolerable pleasure
That was just my own spring, musicking itself
From beyond volition, like a violin in a cavalry charge.
Passing the clinic with a friend, I see a woman
Bow out of a taxi and move through the chanting gauntlet
Of fanatics raising their pickled fetuses, photographs,
And bloody flags. When one with a greasy
Beard and a ring in his ear darts from the crowd
And spits the word murderer right in her face,
My friend shouts back at him from across the street,
Something stupid and forgettable, to defend her,
Who already has gone in to wait among the glossy
Plants and magazines, as though her own guilt
Had assumed palpable form and attached itself deep.
She sits there. It must feel almost as bad as being born.
What does a man know of love? His secret deliverance,
His blind spring joining the human river?
It flows darkly. It lasts as long as it lets him.
Because a man's immersion in pleasure stops
As it starts, he may spout bits of spasmodic wisdom
That seem leaked from the very plumbing of oblivion.
When my wife lay thrashing in the birthing room
Racked by the seventeenth hour of contractions,
And I passed a damp towel across her forehead,
I made the mistake of voicing the first words
That graced my mind, I know just how you feel.
She looked at me and said, You don't know anything.
LURLEEN
We're talking Bosnia and eating veal but also lasagna
My wife's tailored for my friend's vegetarian daughters,
A collage of asparagus, mushrooms, onions, and cheese.
But cheese—there's the hang-up for one, who's so devout,
Her father explains, she won't wear leather shoes or silk.
Pure she seems, but also gregarious, taking her salad
Like a bridge, devouring her cabbage and peas as the talk
Unwinds a ticker tape of gang rapes, shellings, genocide.
When she's aware that I'm aware of her, she smiles.
No need to apologize, I know, but the way she watches
The veal transmogrify across the table, I'm wondering
If there's not, in the fine relish of her dining, an assertion
Of distaste. She doesn't say a thing. She sees
The juice coursing down my chin. I'm eating
Proust and Galileo, but she doesn't chastise. She's quiet
And unreproachful, laying into a leaf as if it were not just
Mushy fiber, but the vital, incarnadine tincture of a feast.
Also I'm wondering if it's consciousness that makes
Her good. Aren't women, by nature, herbivorous?
So I'd thought: herbivorous women, carnivorous men—
A suspicion I'd be hard put to admit, reared as it was
From such a tenuous complex of things, a botched
Sense of history, mother's cravings for beans?
Didn't Socrates warn against the philosophy
Of young men? They had, he owned, such a narrow
Phalanx of particulars from which to derive generalizations.
But what I felt at her age, those paralyzing sensitivities
To lives opposed to mine, the universe condensed
In each cell, and my indifference in the face of it all:
Wasn't that real, the longing for holiness, and terror,
When it seemed a normal walk across a sticky floor
To answer a phone might kill millions, maybe billions
Of microscopic lives, and one of them might be God?
Then there was the war, complicating judgment,
As now the wine begins to act on deeply plural whims.
Suddenly I want to blurt out everything I've killed
And eaten: rabbits, chickens, many fish, the sow
I'd named Lurleen for the governor's wife and raised
From a pig, things that seemed natural on the farm,
The killing and being killed, and knowing the names:
Important to know the things we eat, good or bad,
That is what I'd say to her of love. That or this:
"Lurleen," my father would say, "pass the Lurleen."
And I had an uncle who, as the cancer ate at him,
Began to love the cancer, even as he turned yellow,
An alien thing going up like the wing of a cathedral
Before it took and whispered him up into the grass.
How innocently the desserts arrive, pale saucers,
Beautiful and sweet fruit, and the human afterlife
Wearing its grass to the ruminations of the cow.
Oh, my dear one, it watches us watching it.
We know, as it bends to the grass and lives,
The cow knows a few things that it's not telling.
From Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999)
DOWN TIME
Where there had been a landscape, I saw everything
Bare and no need for description, now that depression
Had soaked me up: no noise from the pine, the only green.
Sleep bore me on its inward-bearing gale,
Just blood veering off the bone, neither voice nor dream,
And when I woke, the weak music of sewage
Rushing behind walls. I needed to lean away
From the face no one would recognize, and the name
No one would call. If I could have imagined
That I was truly alive, I would have wanted to die.
Then, each morning, with a little less dread,
I went out and saw the frost on the lawn
And the awkward water frozen under the bridge;
But for weeks, in the birds limping on oily wings
Across the snow, and the foxes cringing
From dumpsters, I felt my life twinned
With everything that sinks, all the lost women
And men who, finding no door, sleep in the cold,
And the children, beaten down, foundering in disease.
How casually they seemed to bear the knowledge
Of their deaths. And then, poof! It was over.
Light took in the crystals of the thaw. I could
Look into the eyes of others without shame.
It would take time, and still, I was not there,
If there is here, excited again, on the other side.
Before the pleasure of lying with a woman,
There would be the pleasure of washing hands.
DOING LAUNDRY
Here finally I have shriven myself and am saint,
Pouring the detergent just so, collating the whites
With the whites, and the coloreds with the coloreds,
Though I slip in a light green towel with the load
Of whites for Vivian Malone and Medgar Evers,
Though I leave a pale shift among the blue jeans
For criminals and the ones who took small chances.
O brides and grooms, it is not always perfect.
It is not always the folded, foursquare, neat soul
Of sheets pressed and scented for lovemaking,
But also this Friday, stooping in a dark corner
Of the bedroom, harvesting diasporas of socks,
Extracting like splinters the T-shirts from the shirts.
I do not do this with any anger, as the poor chef
May add to a banker's consommé the tail of a rat,
But with the joy of a salesman closing a sweet deal,
I tamp loosely around the shaft of the agitator
And mop the kitchen while it runs the cycles.
Because of my diligence, one woman has time
To teach geography, another to design a hospital.
The organ transplant arrives. The helicopter pilot
Steps down, dressed in an immaculate garment.
She waves to me and smiles as I hoist the great
Moist snake of fabric and heave it into the dryer.
I who popped rivets into the roof of a hangar,
Who herded copper tubes into the furnace,
Who sweated bales of alfalfa into the rafters
High in the barn loft of July, who dug the ditch
For the gas line under the Fourteenth Street overpass
And repaired the fence the new bull had ruined,
Will wash the dishes and scrub the counters
Before unclogging the drain and vacuuming.
When I tied steel on the bridge, I was not so holy
As now, taking the hot sheets from the dryer,
Thinking of the song I will make in praise of women,
But also of ordinary men, doing laundry.
THE POETRY READING