The leg leapt forward on its own.
They also called it a tomahawk hammer.
My Father in the Shadows
Mute in drink,
my father scraped a fork across the dinner plate.
Vermouth slouched in the cabinet.
The rotting Morgan had been auctioned off.
Bills layered his desk
like drafts of snow.
The house on Private Road in escrow,
its blowsy, prize-winning horse chestnut
cast off dandruff blossoms
that shrouded a swatch of lawn.
I’ve seen the satellite photo.
The new house verged on a ravine.
Something dead lay at the bottom.
The new kitchen was a galley
with a wobbly floor.
He had taken to pissing in crystal dinner-goblets.
Out the window,
the crocus’s hairy eye
watched the snail-like progress of the snail,
but nothing stung him to words again.
There, on the desk, he had propped the Kodak
of my mother, feathered hat askew,
grinning like a demon
with a bald baby in her arms.
Mary Sowle
The butternut curl of honeysuckle spent
its somnolent perfumes.
Bees yellowed with pollen hung heavily
in summer’s clotted air, when with our fellows
we gathered before the orb-weaver
to watch it do battle
with the Japanese beetle,
the first time I heard the phrase “Pyrrhic victory.”
Was Mary Sowle
not unlike a spider, harboring the web
of some 1920s secret we were too young to know?
Only the memory, or half a memory,
of the graying brunette—bewigged?—
in that seaside village
troubles my recollection of the grass-verged macadam
that brought our houses formally together,
hers Gothic and in need of paint.
Down the road, the Methodists plied their trade
on bended knee, harmonizing to the blue firmament
I recognize now as populated with judgment.
The vanity of it! Those accusing looks!
The Mail
The cock’s tail, cocked up, enameled—
so, the red flag on the steel mailbox
standing sentry by our stone wall,
the mail waiting to be pulled out
like an egg! Ah, wrong. Neighbors kept hens;
we waited for bills. Father had taken
to country ways, the gentleman
farmer with his one vacant field,
mown every year on Labor Day.
Who was he then, ten years home
from a war on the U.S.S.
Something-or-Other? Why not hole up
far from the head office
in a fishing village where every farm
had been seeded with arrowheads,
home to some Tripp or Sowle
whose father’s father’s father
lay in his grave
beside his father’s father’s father’s father?
The town’s two-room schoolhouse
had a witch for a principal,
a kindly witch; and one of the Sowles
swept it out every afternoon,
lining up oak desks as if with a ruler.
I was too young for a letter.
I watched the red cock’s tail
with the patience of a hawk.
The Box Kite
The lift, the very lift and pull of it!
They’d wasted the summer morning,
father and son in the devil’s
breath of July—gnats wheedling
madly above the drive—pasting Sunday comics
across the struts, like the canvas skin
of a Sopwith Camel. Into the close-gnawn yard
with its humpback boulder,
they dragged it triumphantly, unreeling the twine
until the contraption yanked itself
from bald earth, high above
the matchbox houses by the sweetly reeking bog,
beneath the shadow of woods,
to a height where a boy might peer over the horizon
The son was my father. I tottered at his legs,
having borrowed his name and my grandfather’s.
They paid out the ramshackle affair
until it became a postage stamp. The line
burned a bloody groove into my palms,
the last time they stood at ease with each other.
On the Banks of the Allegheny
We had started over again—
an unpainted house with the new Chevy in the drive,
the model with the push-button transmission.
The lots were new. Rich brown
like expensive leather, the fresh turds
nested in the unseeded lawn,
shivering with inner life,
the maggots squirming wildly toward the light.
The Other Other Country
I wrote you a brief but rather dull letter.
—T. S. Eliot
The days bled alabaster,
the nothing of sky over Paradise,
where the original sin was weather.
Did they miss the wildness
of the palms, the angels
who brought breakfast on tea trays?
Each dawn would be a palimpsest
of storms almost forgotten,
humiliation, love.
The Other Life
I possessed a secret life: the seedy coastal town,
the shuttered colonial of twining hallways,
a wife with the flaring prettiness
of my mother, a smudge-mouthed child or two.
Awake, I never thought of that other life.
The two existed in mutual ignorance,
until one night the rough fields
and the volatile scent of my wife—my wife!—
with her Liz Taylor grin, her shock
of blond hair, rose from the smell
of my real garden. Had I died in my sleep,
I might have woken to that new life,
ignorant of what I had lost,
if indeed anything had been lost—
like the phosphorescent wake
trailing a swimmer in the bay.
My secret left the faintest trace:
the Atlantic over the dunes,
the north flecked with the fall
that is fall. One day the dream was gone,
had been gone some months,
like a gas flame blown out.
Mysteries of the Armchair
News of the world lay in the rain.
Maple leaves fell, pre-foxed,
as if stored for decades on library shelves.
The horse chestnuts had been oiled,
their waxy polish glowing
like the Madonna in the Portuguese church
up the harbor. Immaculate, without sin,
by winter they burned with mildew.
His fedora and trench coat damp in the closet,
Father in his armchair with an icy dry-martini
quarreled with the rose-trellised wallpaper.
Mother stood locked in the kitchen—
the terra cognita of canned vegetables,
pearly slabs of swordfish, the heaving
paper sack in whic
h two ill-tempered lobsters
brooded over their death sentence.
Sonnet
All is confusion. Much is understood,
lost in the fractured hour the freezing wind
took to its silences, as in a wood
where automatic birds live dumb and blind.
Where is the hardship in such holiness?
Like the idea of God, or just the soul,
the beatitude of things lives on unseen.
Where did she go, the girl in the see-through dress?
Her open blouse, her razor, her window screen—
those partial partial things that made us whole.
Descending into Philadelphia
The chalk fields hung,
new snow planing away
all but stick-like trees
that fringed the blistered
stone walls, fatally unbalanced,
and the worn-out hose of black river.
The sovereign touch—that, that
too, proved a short fuse.
They were just toys,
the first rates and tall ships.
Cod balls, the disillusions of wine—
such the bill of fare
laid by, the iron beams
underpinning the Quaker
easements of conscience.
The plain man constitutes
my argument with history.
The Schuylkill lost its flocks
of mournful birds feeding
on politics, its “pontifical works.”
In the Gallery of the Ordinary
In their excess, their blowsy dreaming
and King Solomon–like tempers, the clouds
possessed the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils,
when a painter earned his profession
as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris
and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps,
treated that blank pasture of the “heavens”
like something that had lived.
Their crawly undoings remind us
of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s
half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls
of cotton—the morning phosphorescent
or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt.
The nights there were scumbled with light.
How could we ever have taken them
for the abstinence of art?
Sunday Out
The rain day’s a muddy blur in the foreground,
a John Crome elbowed into color,
frayed at the edges. The sublime rests like laid paper.
The lawns as well. The hours are translucent,
truculent, slipped onto the day’s page
like the thinnest washes. Nature is the one thing
the Christian surrenders to the Lucretian.
The Field
The field was more a painting than a field,
the flowers oily in their despairing freshness
and, beyond, the scumble of jack pines,
the thumbed portion of stream. Along the stone wall,
a child’s version of a wall, shocks of knee-grass
rose like lightning. We might have lived
in some summer-watercolorist’s summer,
the afternoon like other afternoons
gathering in that field, arguing with that sky,
as if there were nothing to be done.
Sea Turtles
And there they were, sandy, armored,
clawing their way from beach potholes,
one with a fragment of egg stuck to his head.
The ocean lay exhausted,
a blue sheet feathered with froth,
working its businesslike way toward the dunes,
as if it had an appointment never to be met.
Baby waves fanned across the sand,
touched in by a painter in eyelash-dashes—
frayed and silvery. How damp and glittery
they looked, the sea turtles! They tumbled forth,
jerky as Chaplin or Harold Lloyd—
and stumped from step to step,
like rusty trucks bumping over a corduroy road.
On the horizon, the blot of a container ship
muscled along, running hours late,
or years, if it were owned by Zeno.
The sea lay always before them.
My Grandfather’s Second Wife to My Father, 1958
Don, dearest,
Please, please don’t think ill of me.
I never wanted to break up our dear home,
but I couldn’t see
the least turn for the better
after all your father’s “accidents.”
The poor guy will never change
so long as some floozie begs to be his crutch.
All alcoholics
hit bottom sooner or later.
From there, they master it or perish.
That dope just never wised up.
I feel a real heel being so tough on him.
You tell me you think
you got through to him. Hardy-har!
Don’t buy that stuff for a minute, Don.
He’d promise you Red China
to get out of a jam. When a college man
can’t support himself,
that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?
Your dad goes about telling his pals
I took him for every dime.
He spent everything he could draw, and then some.
His bosses got smart—
he never ever worked past noon,
those months at Buffalo Electric.
No wonder you were so glad
to pull out of Cleveland. The further away
you stay, the better.
For God’s sake, don’t write him a word
or you’ll never get rid of the fool—
that guy can be so darned sweet
when he needs to salve his poor wounded conscience.
Send me a letter
at my daughter’s—the landlady
goes through my things when I’m down to work.
Nights I’m playing the desk clerk
at the old Lakeshore Hotel. You know the place.
We use brand-new bills—
boy, I’d love a stack of those things!
They think I’m a widow—otherwise
no one would give me a chance.
Don, I know I’ve landed in a real bad spot.
I’ve lost twenty pounds
since skulking back home to Cleveland.
To think I wanted to get thinner!
Love, Marion
Christmas Trees
How should I now recall
the icy lace of the pane
like a sheet of cellophane,
or the skies of alcohol
poured over the saltbox town?
On that stony New England tableau,
the halo of falling snow
glared like a waxy crown.
Through blue frozen lots
my giant parents strolled,
wrapped tight against the cold
like woolen Argonauts,
searching for that tall
perfection of Scotch pine
from the hundreds laid in line
like the dead at Guadalcanal.
The clapboard village aglow
that starry stark December
I barely now remember,
or the brutish ache of snow
burning my face like quicklime.
Yet one thing was still missing.
I saw my
parents kissing,
perhaps for the last time.
Snow
How did we come to this cold place?
It is not listed on the maps.
The cold has disarranged your face.
These memories are not ours, perhaps.
But still we must pretend to know
the reason for things as they are.
We do not recognize the snow.
Perhaps that makes us what we are.
The Servants’ Stairs
Always in that back corner,
the paint peeling like burned skin,
and the flight that by some hard twist
brought the pockmarked maid
stumbling into the kitchen,
where we gave our faces to the fire.
IV
Louise Brooks
Certain memories, uncertain,
and bearing toward gentle impoverishment—
Brooks, I mean, of the bow mouth
and ink-rimmed eye, the raccoon’s
calculating, injured stare,
and a black coiffure like an Achaean helmet.
There were few like her along the Niobrara.
The End of the Road
Satan stood on the viaduct, suffering laryngitis.
We lived the squalor of the ordinary,
mouth to mouth in those old-school towns
where the dogs still wore collars;
and the preachers, dog collars.
Gold tipped the cattails in the marshes.
A cellophane spread over the fresh pond.
The rusty sores of oaks lingered into spring.
There were other, harsher deadlines,
not that we knew the cost of perfection,
or where to go once we had reached the end.
The Pheasant in His Empires
The fesaunt, skornere of the cok by nyghte.
—Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowles
The laser of English sunlight
etches the yellow rape,
heating the stranger’s eye
to thoughts of mild escape
to lonely unkempt moors,
the cankered rose of Blake’s