Wesley
McNair has been called by poet Philip Levine “one of the great storytellers of
contemporary poetry.” He is the author of eleven volumes of poems, including two
limited editions, and twenty-two books, comprising poetry, nonfiction, and edited
anthologies. McNair has held grants from the Guggenheim and Fulbright
foundations, two Rockefeller grants for study at the Bellagio Center in Italy,
two NEA fellowships. He has been selected for a United States Artist Fellowship,
and he has twice been invited to read his poetry by the Library of Congress.
Other honors include the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, the
Theodore Roethke Prize, an Emmy Award, and the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, for
his “distinguished contribution to the world of letters.” His poetry has been
featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Saturday and Sunday editions, and 22
times on Garrison Keillor’s Writer's Almanac. It has also appeared in
the Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize annual, and over sixty
anthologies and textbooks. Last year he was named as the recipient of the 2015
PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence for his collection, The
Lost Child: Ozark Poems.
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,
winged stones, and when
I
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’s
disdain 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
behind something so big.
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’t
noticed 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.
