Fifteen Poems Read online

  The man she wanted all her life

  was hanging by a thread.

  “I never even knew how much

  I wanted you,” she said.

  His muscles they were numbered

  and his style was obsolete.

  “O baby, I have come too late.”

  She knelt beside his feet.

  “I’ll never see a face like yours

  in years of men to come,

  I’ll never see such arms again

  in wrestling or in love.”

  And all his virtues burning

  in the smoky holocaust,

  she took unto herself

  most everything her lover lost.

  Now the master of this landscape

  he was standing at the view

  with a sparrow of St. Francis

  that he was preaching to.

  She beckoned to the sentry

  of his high religious mood.

  She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,

  I’ll teach you solitude.”

  He offered her an orgy

  in a many-mirrored room;

  he promised her protection

  for the issue of her womb.

  She moved her body hard

  against a sharpened metal spoon,

  she stopped the bloody rituals

  of passage to the moon.

  She took his much-admired

  oriental frame of mind,

  and the heart-of-darkness alibi

  his money hides behind.

  She took his blonde madonna

  and his monastery wine.

  “This mental space is occupied

  and everything is mine.”

  He tried to make a final stand

  beside the railway track.

  She said, “The art of longing’s over

  and it’s never coming back.”

  She took his tavern parliament,

  his cap, his cocky dance;

  she mocked his female fashions

  and his working-class moustache.

  The last time that I saw him

  he was trying hard to get

  a woman’s education

  but he’s not a woman yet.

  And the last time that I saw her

  she was living with a boy

  who gives her soul an empty room

  and gives her body joy.

  So the great affair is over

  but whoever would have guessed

  it would leave us all so vacant

  and so deeply unimpressed.

  It’s like our visit to the moon

  or to that other star:

  I guess you go for nothing

  if you really want to go that far.

  —from Death of a Lady’s Man, 1978

  THE NEWS YOU REALLY HATE

  You fucking whore, I thought that you were really interested in music. I thought your heart was somewhat sorrowful. I might have gone with you under the desk and eaten a soft-boiled egg. I’m going to tell my baby brother not to do what I have done. I’m going to tune you until the string breaks. The Communists do not know how evil you really are.

  We are different from you. That’s the news you really hate. That’s the news to ring the bells and start the fires while your boyfriend serves you the hairball lunch. I have been admitted through the stained-glass shadows where your stench is unwelcome. How dare you pay us any attention? I’m going to eat now. I have declared war on you forever and ever. Disguised as a hat I will rip off your eyebrows. I am going to be here in the sun for a long time. The fragrance comes up again. It does not reach you. It does not invite you to close your eyes in the storm. The trumpets cry up inside me and my king is home. I am judged again with mercy.

  —from Death of a Lady’s Man, 1978

  I DRAW ASIDE THE CURTAIN

  I draw aside the curtain. You mock us with the beauty of your world. My heart hates the trees, the wind moving the branches, the dead diamond machinery of the sky. I pace the corridor between my teeth and my bladder, angry, murderous, comforted by the smell of my sweat. I weakened myself in your name. In my own eyes I disgraced myself for trusting you, against all evidence, against the prevailing winds of horror, over the bully’s laughter, the torturer’s loyalty, the sweet questions of the sly. Find me here, you whom David found in hell. The skeletons are waiting for your famous mechanical salvation. Swim through the blood, father of mercy. Broadcast your light through the apple of pain, radiant one, sourceless, source of light. I wait for you, king of the dead, here in this garden where you placed me, beside the poisonous grass, miasmal homesteads, black Hebrew gibberish of pruned grapevines. I wait for you in the springtime of beatings and gross unnecessary death. Direct me out of this, O magnet of the falling cherry petals. Make a truce between my disgust and the impeccable landscape of fields and milky towns. Crush my swollen smallness, infiltrate my shame. Broken in the unemployment of my soul, I have driven a wedge into your world, fallen on both sides of it. Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.

  —from Book of Mercy, 1984

  THE NIGHT COMES ON

  I went down to the place where I knew she lay waiting

  under the marble and the snow.

  I said, “Mother, I’m frightened; the thunder and the lightning;

  I’ll never come through this alone.”

  She said, “I’ll be with you, my shawl wrapped around you,

  my hand on your head when you go.”

  And the night came on; it was very calm;

  I wanted the night to go on and on,

  but she said, “Go back, go back to the world.”

  We were fighting in Egypt, when they signed this agreement

  that nobody else had to die.

  There was this terrible sound and my father went down

  with a terrible wound in his side.

  He said, “Try to go on, take my books, take my gun,

  and remember, my son, how they lied.”

  And the night comes on, and it’s very calm;

  I’d like to pretend that my father was wrong,

  but you don’t want to lie, not to the young.

  We were locked in this kitchen; I took to religion,

  and I wondered how long she would stay.

  I needed so much to have nothing to touch:

  I’ve always been greedy that way.

  But my son and my daughter climbed out of the water,

  crying “Papa, you promised to play.”

  And they lead me away to the great surprise;

  it’s “Papa, don’t peek, Papa, cover your eyes.”

  And they hide, they hide in the world.

  Now I look for her always; I’m lost in this calling;

  I’m tied to the threads of some prayer.

  Saying, “When will she summon me, when will she come to me,

  what must I do to prepare?”—

  Then she bends to my longing, like a willow, like a fountain,

  she stands in the luminous air.

  And the night comes on, and it’s very calm,

  I lie in her arms, she says, “When I’m gone

  I’ll be yours, yours for a song.”

  The crickets are singing, the vesper bells ringing,

  the cat’s curled asleep in his chair.

&nbs
p; I’ll go down to Bill’s Bar, I can make it that far,

  and I’ll see if my friends are still there.

  Yes, and here’s to the few who forgive what you do,

  and the fewer who don’t even care!

  And the night comes on; it’s very calm;

  I want to cross over, I want to go home,

  But she says, “Go back, go back to the world.”

  —from Various Positions, 1984

  THE EMBRACE

  When you stumble suddenly

  into his full embrace,

  he hides away so not to see

  his creature face to face.

  You yourself are hidden too,

  with all your sins of state;

  there is no king to pardon you;

  his mercy is more intimate.

  He does not stand before you,

  he does not dwell within;

  this passion has no point of view,

  it is the heart of everything.

  There is no hill to see this from.

  You share one body now

  with the serpent you forbid,

  and with the dove that you allow.

  The imitations of his love

  he suffers patiently,

  until you can be born with him

  some hopeless night in Galilee;

  until you lose your pride in him,

  until your faith objective fails,

  until you stretch your arms so wide

  you do not need these Roman nails.

  Idolators on every side,

  they make an object of the Lord.

  They hang him on a cross so high

  that you must ever move toward.

  They bid you cast the world aside

  and hurl your prayers at him.

  Then the idol-makers dance all night

  upon your suffering.

  But when you rise from his embrace

  I trust you will be strong and free

  and tell no tales about his face,

  and praise Creation joyously.

  —from Stranger Music, 1993

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