The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: Wesley McNair
Over many years, Wesley McNair has written several essays about craft, advising poets-in-the-making about writing poems. To sample his short-take essays on craft, click here: http://wesleymcnair.com/craft.php?p=2
New Poems
by Wesley McNair
All five will appear in
The Unfastening (David R. Godine, spring 2017), his ninth full length collection.
Nursing Home Haikus
A decorative front door, the back rehabbed for anything on wheels.
With each step, the right foot finds the floor for the left foot, which cannot feel.
When guests come he looks up, then down for the open place in his darkness.
It stops at each door: an ice-cream truck with no bell, just pills, a clipboard.
Right then, waving them off, smiling, she was having her last heart attack.
Are you going? When are you going? When are you going to come back?
Once this whole floor was the ballroom of a mansion. Think of the rooms cleared
away for dancing, the gowns, the music that said now, and only now.
Delight
What did the milk know when my youngest spilled it from a cup all those mealtimes except to follow the long slant
of our table that led to my lap, and what did the four children know when I rose, to invoke the name of our Lord,
except to laugh, then laugh because they shouldn’t, and how could my son, the lover of books, who crawled under our new
mattress to discover a curtained chamber, read to himself without lighting the candle? He was no less surprised than I was, waking up
from my nap and smelling smoke, that he’d set the box-springs on fire, and when my two oldest gazed, as if for the first time,
at the topmost windows of our rented barn feeling an itch in their fingers for stones small enough to fly,
what were they to do but search for them? It was only delight that called their attention to the milk that jogged past
their plates down our table, and to the candle that lit up the chamber, and to the sharp,
warned them or chased them or drew them toward me for my explanations, it was only delight I wanted myself, my lessons
breaking into shouts, my spent lungs struggling for breath.
The Unfastening
As the father turns away from the thought of his failure, the hands remove his glasses and rub his eyes over
and over, drying the nonexistent tears. Unknown to the one who is troubled about losing his hair, his fingers stroke
his baldness as he speaks. The body, our constant companion, understands the loneliness of the hostess in her dark
driveway, embracing herself after the guests who promised more and soon have gone, and even visits the old schoolteacher
who reads the same happy ending to each new class, working her toes in her shoes. How could the people of the kingdom
not have known the curse of sorrow was nothing more than a long sleep they had only to wake from? In dreams
the body, which longs for transformation too, suddenly lifts us above the dark roofs of our houses, and far above
the streets of the town, until they seem like any other small things fastened to earth.
The Longing to See
You won’t be able to see through it, said the surgeon who put the dark bubble
of gas into my sick eye, yet if I held it just so, I could steal inside its small,
refracted world, broken into beautiful colors that sickness and dark had made,
a sort of poetry without the words, which I returned to even after the bubble
was gone — all well except for my old incompleteness and the longing
for its way of seeing, the irresistible looking out while looking in.
The Revolution
for Kathleen
On a day in this post-9/11 nation, where our cars are protected by sensors and cameras and black glass that keeps us safe
from the sun and each other, my daughter-in-law drove me and her kids down the main street of Felton, California, in an SUV that wore brand new, long
eyelashes over its headlights. The tinted glass of parked vans refused our reflection. A pickup with window guards, and cars
with squinting, watchful headlights passed by before we turned into the parking lot of the school. But on this day of the eyelashes, which transformed her SUV
into a human face, the face of a woman, mothers we didn't recognize honked their horns, putting up their thumbs,
and when the black glass of the SUVs and the mini-vans opened, other moms came out with their kids to gather around us in intimacy and wonder. “I love
the lashes,” one woman said, clutching her heart and laughing. “Where can we get a pair?” somebody else wanted to know,
the start of a small revolution to free us from the protections of Homeland America. Selected Poems by Wesley McNair
From his selected poems, Lovers of the Lost, and seven other collections: The Lost Child, The Ghosts of You and Me, Fire, Talking in the Dark, My Brother Running, The Town of No, and The Faces of Americans in 1853. 1. SELF
How I Became a Poet
“Wanted” was the word I chose for him at age eight, drawing the face of a bad guy with comic-book whiskers, then showing it to my mother. This was how,
after my father left us, I made her smile at the same time I told her I missed him, and how I managed to keep him close by in that house of perpetual anger,
becoming his accuser and his devoted accomplice. I learned by writing to negotiate between what I had, and that more distant thing I dreamed of.
The Good-Boy Suit
I was four when my mother stitched herself, working late at night, my father gone. She put her hand into the light
of the Singer and pressed the treadle until the needle sang through her thumb. I stood back from the sleeves
and pant cuffs she sewed afterward with her bandaged hand, pins shining in her shut, angry mouth, gone away herself.
She would not stitch me, I thought. But I was a bad boy, and why did my mother say over and over she would sew me
a new suit if I was good? I was afraid to be good, I was afraid not to be good. My mother switched me.
My mother switched and stitched. Turn around, she said, pushing pins with her bandage into the patterns on my arms and chest, Stand still,
making a tickle when she measured my inseam. I was the bad boy who couldn’t, who forgot to flush, who was afraid
to clean out from under the bed or watch my mother lean forward putting her hand into the Singer’s light that was like fire
in her eyes and hair. The good boy suit just let her stick pins in it and cut it and push it into the fire again
and again with her shut face to stitch it, only the two of them together in the dark all night long. So when I came downstairs
to find them, my mother held up the good boy suit that had my arms and chest and legs. It’s perfect, she said,
smiling at it, and her hand, with no bandage now, was perfect too. I was the one who wasn’t. I couldn’t answer when my mother
asked me why I did not like or want the good boy suit, or why, even at a time like this, I had to be such a bad boy.
Hearing that My Father Died in a Supermarket
At first it is difficult to see you are dropping dead —
you seem lost in thought, adjusting your tie as if to rehearse
some imaginary speech though of course beginning to fall,
your mouth opening wider than I have ever seen a mouth,
your hands deep in your shirt, going down
into the cheeses, making the sound that is not my name,
that explains nothing over and over, going away
into your hands into your face, leaving this great body
on its knees, the father of my body
which holds me in this world, watching you go
on falling through the musak, making the sound
that is not my name, that will never explain anything, oh father,
stranger, all dressed up and abandoning me for the last time.
The One I Think of Now
At the end of my stepfather’s life when his anger was gone, and the saplings of his failed nursery had grown into trees, my newly feminist mother had him in the kitchen to pay for all those years he only did the carving. “You know where that is,” she would say as he looked for a knife to cut the cheese and a tray to serve it with, his apron wide as a dress above his work boots, confused as a girl. He is the one I think of now, lifting the tray for my family, the guests, until at last he comes to me. And I, no less confused, look down from his hurt eyes as if there were nothing between us except an arrangement of cheese, and not this bafflement, these almost tender hands that once swung hammers and drove machines and insisted that I learn to be a man.
The Boy Carrying the Flag
Once, as the teenage boy marched up and down the gutter with the wide blade of a shovel above his head, and the goats turned toward him in their stalls undoing with their blats the band music he held in his mind,
his stepfather, who had only asked, for Christ’s sake, to have the barn cleaned out, rested his hand on his hip in the doorway. The boy would not have guessed when he marched in his first parade
that he carried the flag for his stepfather, or for his angry mother, also raised for work and self-denial during the Depression. Seeing him dressed up like that to leave her stuck on a failing farm with chores
as she had been stuck when she was just his age, his mother remembered he forgot to feed the chickens and refused to drive him to the football game. The old barns and dead cornfields along the road in the sunless cold
had never seen a hitch-hiker in red wearing spats and lifting a white- gloved thumb. Everyone stared from the cars that passed him by, and when at last he jumped down from the door of a semi, the whole
marching band waiting in formation by the buckling steps of the school and Mr. Paskevitch, whose hands twitched worse than ever, watched him walk across the lawn looking down at his size-fourteen black shoes.
Just one year from now, Paskevitch would suffer a nervous breakdown he would never return from, but today, he raised the baton to begin the only thing on earth that could steady his hands, and the boy,
taller than the others, took his position in the color guard to carry the flag for Paskevitch, and for the sergeant- at-arms, Pete LaRoche, so upset by the hold-up he was screaming his commands. For this first parade belonged to LaRoche, too, and to O’Neill, another son of immigrants, hoisting the school colors, and to the rifle-bearers, Wirkkala and Turco, the fat kid who squinted helplessly against the wind. Marching with a shuffle, Turco was already
resigned to his life in the shoe shop, but this was before he went to work on the night shift and drank all day, and before Ann Riley, the head majorette following the boy past the stopped traffic kicking up her lovely legs,
got pregnant by the quarterback and was forced to drop out of the senior class. In this moment of possibility in the unforgiving 1950s, she wore nobody’s ring around her neck, and the boy imagined
how easily she had forgiven him his lateness, and the times his mind wandered and he fell out of step. For in his secret heart he carried the flag for Ann as he marched onto the football field, leaving the town
with its three factories and wasted farms far behind. There were La Roche’s and O’Neill’s mothers, on their day off from the flock mill, and there were the fathers in their shop-pants, and the classmates in school jackets,
and the teachers who looked strange without their ties, all applauding and shouting while the band, capped, plumed, and lifting up the shining bells of their instruments, marched by—all here on this dark and windy day
to watch the quarterback, Joe Costello, Ann’s lover-to-be, lead them into the sun, as were the band and the tallest boy in the color guard himself, carrying the stars and stripes for everyone who was here
and not here in this broken town, and for the hope in the uncertain promise that struggled against his hand as he marched to his place in the bleachers among these, his fellow Americans.
2. HOME
The Rules of the New Car
After I got married and became the stepfather of two children, just before we had two more, I bought it, the bright blue sorrowful car that slowly turned to scratches and the flat black spots of gum in the seats and stains impossible to remove from the floor mats. Never again, I said as our kids, four of them by now, climbed into the new car. This time, there will be rules. The first to go was the rule I made for myself about cleaning it once a week, though why, I shouted at the kids in the rear view mirror, should I have to clean it if they would just remember to fold their hands. Three years later, it was the same car I had before, except for the dent my wife put in the grille when, ignoring the regulation about snacks, she reached for a bag of chips on her way home from work and hit a tow truck. Oh, the ache I felt for the broken rules, and the beautiful car that had been lost, and the car that we now had, on soft shocks in the driveway, still unpaid for. Then one day, for no particular reason except that the car was loaded down with wood for the fireplace at my in-laws’ camp and groceries and sheets and clothes for the week, my wife in the passenger seat, the dog lightly panting beside the kids in the back, all innocent anticipation, waiting for me to join them, I opened the door to my life.
For My Wife
How were we to know, leaving your two kids behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap hotels in New York City to draw customers like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby? Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door with a cut on one side the exact shape of the toilet bowl that was in its way when I closed it. I opened and shut the door, admiring the fit and despairing of it. You discovered the initials of lovers carved on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart. How wrong the place was to us then, unable to see the portents of our future that seem so clear now in the naiveté of the arrangements we made, the hotel’sdisdain for those with little money, the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay our love down, and in this way began our unwise and persistent and lucky life together.
Happiness
Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand feeling the roof for the right spot to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle — why does her sister, coaching outside on her cane, have to make her laugh so, she flops back just as she was, though now looking wistfully out through the restaurant reflected in her back window, she seems bigger, and couldn’t possibly mean we should go ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so when you finally place the pillow behind her back and lift her right out into the sunshine, all four of us are happy, none more than she, who straightens the blossoms on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out once in awhile, and then goes in to eat with the greatest delicacy (oh I could never finish all that) and aplomb the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp and ice cream, just a small scoop.
The Abandonment
Climbing on top of him and breathing into his mouth this way she could be showing her desire except that when she draws back from him to make her little cries she is turning to her young son just coming into the room to find his father my brother on the bed with his eyes closed and the slightest smile on his lips as if when they both beat on his chest as they do now he will come back from the dream he is enjoying so much he cannot hear her calling his name louder and louder and the son saying get up get up discovering both of them discovering for the first time that all along he has lived in this body this thing with shut lids dangling its arms that have nothing to do with him and everything they can ever know the wife listening weeping at his chest and the mute son who will never forget how she takes the face into her hands now as if there were nothing in the world but the face and breathes oh breathes into the mouth that does not breathe back.
When She Wouldn’t
When her recorded voice on the phone said who she was again and again to the piles of newspapers and magazines and the clothes
in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
When she could no longer walk through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody- to-help me way of walking, with her head
bent down to her knees as if she were searching for a dime that had rolled into a crack
on the floor, though it was impossible to see the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed to no one was so bad she could not stand
at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff to find what was edible. When she could hardly
even sit as she loved to sit, all night on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers hanging nearby on the curtainless bar
of the shower stall, and the shoes lined up in the tub, falling asleep and waking up
while she cut out newspaper clippings and listened to the late-night talk on her crackling radio about alien landings
and why the government had denied them. When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing
ache of her foot trying over and over to wash the black from her big toe and could not because it was gangrene.
When at last they came to carry my mother out of the wilderness of that house
and she lay thin and frail and disoriented between bouts of tests and x-rays, and I came to find her in the white bed
of her white room among nurses who brushed her hair while she looked up at them and smiled
with her yellow upper plate that seemed to hold her face together, dazed and disbelieving, as if she were in heaven,
then turned, still smiling, to the door where her stout, bestroked younger brother
teetered into the room on his cane, all the way from Missouri with her elderly sister and her bald-headed baby brother,
whom she despised. When he smiled back and dipped his bald head down to kiss her,
and her sister and her other brother hugged her with serious expressions, and her childish astonishment slowly changed
to suspicion and the old wildness returned to her eye because she began to see
this was not what she wanted at all, I sitting down by her good ear holding her hand to talk to her about going into the home
that was not her home, her baby brother winking, the others nodding and saying, Listen to Wesley.
When it became clear to her that we were not her people, the ones she had left behind in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper
clippings, in the bags of unopened mail, in her mind, and she turned her face away
so I could see the print of red on her cheek as if she had been slapped hard. When the three of them began to implore
their older sister saying, Ruth, Ruth, and We come out here for your own good,
and That time rolls around for all of us, getting frustrated and mad because they meant, but did not know they meant, themselves too.
When the gray sister, the angriest of them, finally said through her pleated lips
and lower plate, You was always the stubborn one, we ain’t here to poison you, turn around and say something.
When she wouldn’t.
3. PLACE
The Last Time Shorty Towers Fetched the Cows
In the only story we have of Shorty Towers, it is five o’clock and he is dead drunk on his roof deciding to fetch the cows. How he got in this condition, shingling all afternoon, is what the son-in-law, the one who made the back pasture into a golf course, can’t figure out. So, with an expression somewhere between shock and recognition, he just watches Shorty pull himself up to his not-so- full height, square his shoulders, and sigh that small sigh as if caught once again in an invisible swarm of bees. Let us imagine, in that moment just before he turns to the roof’s edge and the abrupt end of the joke which is all anyone thought to remember of his life, Shorty is listening to what seems to be the voice of a lost heifer, just breaking upward. And let us think that when he walks with such odd purpose down that hill jagged with shingles, he suddenly feels it open into the wide, incredibly green meadow where all the cows are.
Glass Night
Come, warm rain and cold snap, come, car light
and country road winding me around dark’s finger,
come, flash of mailbox and sign, and shine
of brush, stubble and all the lit lonely
windows wrapped in the glass branches of tree
after flying tree. Come, moon-coated snow hills, and flung
far ahead pole by pole the long glass cobweb
in my high beam that carries me deeper. Come, deeper
and mute dark and speech of light. Come, glass night.
Making Things Clean
One would hardly recognize him like this, the high-school shop teacher, glasses off, bent over the kitchen sink. Nearby, house-dresses and underpants flutter in the window of the Maytag he bought for his mother. Its groaning is the only sound while she washes his hair, lifting the trembling water in her hands as she has always done, working foam up from his gray locks like the lightest batter she ever made. Soon enough, glasses back on, he will stand before students who mock his dullness; soon, putting up clothes, she’ll feel the ache of a body surrendering to age. A little longer let him close his eyes against soap by her apron, let her move her fingers slowly, slowly in this way the two of them have found to be together, this transfiguring moment in the world’s old work of making things clean.
Remembering Aprons
Who recalls the darkness of your other life, sewn shut
around feed grain, or remembers your release to join your sisters,
the dishcloths, now ampleness and holes? Not the absent hands
which tied you behind the back, already forgetting.
How thoughtlessly they used you, old stove-gloves,
soft baskets for tomatoes, and yet how wonderfully
such being left out shows your inclusion!
Oh, tough dresses without closets, lovely petticoats that flashed
beneath the frayed hemlines of barncoats all over Maine.
The Puppy
From down the road, starting up and stopping once more, the sound of a puppy on a chain who has not yet discovered he will spend his life there. Foolish dog, to forget where he is and wander until he feels the collar close fast around his throat, then cry all over again about the little space in which he finds himself. Soon, when there is no grass left in it and he understands it is all he has, he will snarl and bark whenever he senses a threat to it. Who would believe this small sorrow could lead to such fury no one would ever come near him?
4. AMERICA
Hymn to the Comb-Over
How the thickest of them erupt just above the ear, cresting in waves so stiff no wind can move them. Let us praise them in all of their varieties, some skinny as the bands of headphones, some rising from a part that extends halfway around the head, others four or five strings stretched so taut the scalp resembles a musical instrument. Let us praise the sprays that hold them, and the combs that coax such abundance to the front of the head in the mirror, the combers entirely forget the back. And let us celebrate the combers, who address the old sorrow of time’s passing day after day, bringing out of the barrenness of mid-life this ridiculous and wonderful harvest, no wishful flag of hope but, thick or thin, the flag itself, unfurled for us all in subways, offices and malls across America.
The Thugs of Old Comics
At first the job is a cinch, like they said. They manage to get the bank teller a couple of times in the head and blow the vault door so high it never comes down. Money bags line the shelves inside like groceries. They are rich, richer than they can believe. Above his purple suit the boss is grinning half outside of his face. Two goons are taking the dough in their arms like their first women. For a minute nobody sees the little thug with the beanie is sweating drops the size of hot dogs and pointing straight up. There is a blue man flying down through the skylight and landing with his arms crossed. They exhale their astonishment into small balloons. “What the,” they say, “What the,” watching their bullets drop off his chest over and over. Soon he begins to talk about the fight against evil, beating them half to death with his fists. Soon they are picking themselves up from the floor of the prison. Out the window Superman is just clearing a tall building and couldn't care less when they shout his name through the bars. “We’re trapped! We got no chance!” they say, tightening their teeth,
thinking, like you, how it always gets down to the same old shit: no fun, no dough, no power to rise out of their bodies.
November 22, 1963
We were just starting out when it happened. At the school where I taught the day was over. As far as they could tell, it wouldn’t be fatal. But the principal couldn’t finish the announcement.
At the school where I taught the day was over. I had a dentist appointment right after work. But the principal couldn’t finish the announcement. By then, we now know, the president was dead.
I had a dentist appointment right after work. On the way, I hurried home to tell my wife. By then, we now know, the president was dead. I remember Jackie’s pink pillbox hat in the film.
On the way, I hurried home to tell my wife. Turn off the vacuum cleaner! I shouted at her. I remember Jackie’s pink pillbox hat in the film. I kept thinking I was going to be late.
Turn off the vacuum cleaner! I shouted at her. I had never made her cry like that. I kept thinking I was going to be late. In one frame Kennedy’s head goes out of focus.
I had never made her cry like that. The funny thing was, the dentist didn’t care. In one frame Kennedy’s head goes out of focus. We didn’t realize there would soon be others.
The funny thing was, the dentist didn’t care. We were just starting out when it happened. We didn’t realize there would soon be others. As far as they could tell, it wouldn’t be fatal.
Smoking
Once, when cigarettes meant pleasure instead of death, before Bogart got lung cancer and Bacall’s voice, called “smoky,” fell
into the gravel of a lower octave, people went to the movies just to watch the two of them smoke. Life was nothing but a job,
Bogart’s face told us, expressionless except for the recurrent grimace, then it lit up with the fire he held in his hands and breathed
into himself with pure enjoyment until each word he spoke afterward had its own tail of smoke. When he offered a cigarette
to Bacall, she looked right at him, took it into her elegant mouth and inhaled while its smoke curled and tangled with his. After the show,
just to let their hearts race and taste what they’d seen for themselves, the audiences felt in purses, shirt pockets, and even inside
the sleeves of T-shirts where packs of cigarettes were folded, by a method now largely forgotten. “Got a light?” somebody would say, “Could I bum
one of yours?” never thinking that two of the questions most asked by Americans everywhere would undo themselves and disappear
like the smoke that rose between their two upturned fingers, unwanted in a new nation of smoke-free movie theaters,
malls and restaurants, where politicians in every state take moral positions against cigarettes so they can tax them for their favorite projects. Just fifty
years after Bogart and Bacall, smoking is mostly left in the hands of waitresses huddled outside fancy inns, or old clerks on the night shift in mini-marts,
or hard-hats from the road crew on a coffee-break around the battered tailgate of a sand truck — all paying on installment with every drag
for bridges and schools. Yet who else but these, who understand tomorrow is only more debt, and know better than Bogart that life is work,
should be trusted with this pleasure of the tingling breath they take today, these cigarettes they bum and fondle, calling them affectionate names
like “weeds” and “cancer sticks,” holding smoke and fire between their fingers more casually than Humphrey Bogart and blowing it into death’s eye.
Massive
They never guessed the dead man had something so large as that in him, yet each day
walking past their doors down the long, fluorescent hall toward his, he had been carrying this
crisis about to happen, this statement so massive that making it took everything he had.
All morning they gathered outside the identical hums of their offices, uncertain what it meant
that he of all people, the one they hardly knew with the small, benign wave, had caused the absence
they felt now in every memo, policy, and deadline, had gone and left
5. THE WORLD
Waving Goodbye
Why, when we say goodbye at the end of an evening, do we deny we are saying it at all, as in We’ll be seeing you or I’ll call or Stop in, somebody’s always at home? Meanwhile, our friends, telling us the same things, go on disappearing beyond the porch light into the space which except for a moment here or there is always between us, no matter what we do. Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens when the space gets too large for words — a gesture so innocent and lonely, it could make a person weep for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel patting and stroking the growing distance between their nameless ship and the port they are leaving, as if to promise I’ll always remember, and just as urgently, Always remember me. Is it loneliness too that makes the neighbor down the road lift two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes day after day on his way to work in the hello that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised fingers do for him, locked in his masculine purposes and speeding away inside the glass? How can our waving wipe away the reflex so deep in the woman next door to smile and wave on her way into her house with the mail, we’ll never know if she is happy or sad or lost? It can’t. Yet in that moment before she and all the others and we ourselves turn back to our separate lives, how extraordinary it is that we make this small flag with our hands to show the closeness we wish for in spite of what pulls us apart again and again: the porch light snapping off, the car picking its way down the road through the dark.
Losses
It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itself? Or is God more like us, made in His image – shaking his head because He can’t be expected to keep track of which voice goes with what name and address, He being just one God. Either way, we seem to be left here to discover our losses, everything from car keys to larger items we can’t search our pockets for, destined to face them on our own. Even though the dentist gives us music to listen to and the assistant looks down with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves, we always go over and over what’s missing – tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop reaching for on the other side of his bed a year later. Then one odd afternoon, watching some ordinary event, like the way light from the window lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves on his backyard tree change colors all at once in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness, as if all his loss has led to finding just this. Only God knows where the feeling came from, or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud, but there in the eye, which tears up now at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.
The Longing of the Feet
At first the crawling child makes his whole body a foot.
One day, dazed as if by memory, he pulls himself up,
discovering, suddenly, that the feet are for carrying
hands. He is so happy he cannot stop taking the hands
from room to room, learning the names of everything he wants.
This lasts for many years until the feet, no longer fast enough,
lie forgotten, say, in the office under a desk. Above them
the rest of the body, where the child has come to live,
is sending its voice hundreds of miles through a machine.
Left to themselves over and over, the feet sleep,
awakening one day beyond the dead conversation of the mind and the hands. Mute in their shoes,
your shoes and mine, they wait,
longing only to stand the body and take it
into its low, mysterious flight along the earth.
Love Handles
If the biker’s head where the hair was shines in the sun while he blows into his helmet to get the heat out of it, she doesn’t mind. It’s not him with the bald spot, it's just him. And she likes feeling the fleshy overhang in the front when she climbs on behind and takes him into her arms. How else could he carry her up and up the wild, quick, five- note scale that they float off on? Anyway, who doesn’t love a belly? Forget the revulsion we’re supposed to feel looking at the before picture in the diet ad and remember the last time you asked a good friend you hadn't seen in years, What’s this? patting where the shirt stuck out. Or think of feeling somebody’s back, like the two old lovers lying in bed, she turned away from him inquiring over her shoulder with her finger, What’s that, right there, is it a bug bite or a mole? And he, the one trusted with this place so private not even she can see it, touching it, not skin or flesh in this special, ordinary moment but something else, something more, like the hand the hunched old lady has in hers going across the fast-food parking lot. Beside her an old man, the hand’s owner is walking with what you and I might think of as a sort of kick over and over, but what they don’t think of at all, balancing each other like this so they can arrive together to get a burger. The point is, you can’t begin to know how to hold another body in your eye until you've held it a few times in your hand or in your arms. Any ten couples at the Fireman's Ball could tell you that. Put aside your TV dreams of youth running its fingers over the hood of a new car, or the smiling faces of Tammy the weather girl and Bob on sports, she with the unreal hair and he with the hair that’s not real, and imagine the baldies with their corsaged wives under the whirling chunks of light at the Ball. Think of their innocence, all dressed up to be with the ones they’ve known half their lives. See how after those years of nudging and hugging and looking each other all over, they glide, eyes closed, on love handles across the floor.
Why We Need Poetry
Everyone else is in bed, it being, after all, three in the morning, and you can hear how quiet the house has become each time you pause in the conversation you are having with your close friend to take a bite of your sandwich. Is it getting the wallpaper around you in the kitchen up at last that makes cucumbers and white bread, the only things you could find to eat, taste so good, or is it the satisfaction of having discovered a project that could carry the two of you into this moment made for nobody else? Either way, you’re here in the pleasure of the tongue, which continues after you’ve finished your sandwich, for now you are savoring the talk alone, how by staring at the band of fluorescent light over the sink or the pattern you hadn’tnoticed in the wallpaper, you can see where the sentence you’ve started, line by line should go. Only love could lead you to think this way, or to care so little about how you speak, you end up saying what you care most about exactly right, each small allusion growing larger in the light of your friend’s eye. And when the light itself grows larger, it’s not the next day coming through the windows of that redone kitchen, but you, changed by your hunger for the words you listen to and speak, their taste which you can never get enough of.
Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
