when I was reminded just then, perhaps by the art, perhaps the science
of this legendary maestro, the most gifted disciple of you-know-who in Berne,
how weary I had become, not so much of the staircases and grand hotels,
but my failures at navigation and proper scheduling, both.
AGAINST SOCIALIZATION
Your alarming non sequitur sits there, defiant,
not unlike a tiny incandescent meteorite,
trembling with radioactive menace on the end table.
Do not be alarmed; rather give yourself over to gratitude.
Regard this as a kind of gift, from the very heavens above.
That dismay on the faces of those others in the room around you
will abate, and, over time, transform into something like wonder.
Like a date gone horribly wrong, where your every word and gesture
refracts into what seems an inadvertent, ghastly insult
until she pulls her chair back from the table and stands there,
too stunned by the affront to register the rage and disgust
that later take on clarity and burn like a sharp slap to the cheek.
This episode will resuscitate itself for several decades at least,
first as a darkly instructive moment under the heading:
Appalling and gratuitous male behavior, Exhibit A,
or as a can-you-top-this war story over brunch.
And yes, they will all shake their heads in dismay and disbelief,
perhaps even a bleak chuckle or two: Krikee, what pigs …
But that too will transfigure over time into a more significant event,
one that not so much informed her sense of—what?—outrage? No,
no, as with the other, a marvel, a windfall, an undreamt-of visitation.
CLUB MESSINA
—What city is this? I inquired.
I might better have asked what country …
She either didn’t hear or chose not to heed.
I could tell by the light just over the rise
we were close, a block or two from water,
a river or harbor, a few old battlements
commanding two separate heights nearby.
I had forgotten to change my dollars to the local currency,
a failure of mine so obstinately, repeatedly insistent,
even in the face of …
The Versateller was guarded by three women,
each with a pistol, bandolier, and evil look about her.
I ignored them as is my custom and began to punch
my code into the keypad, but there was no number 5.
—What happened to the 5? I inquired. No reply.
The women in this town seemed notably unresponsive.
Of course, there was that book I dearly wanted to get hold of,
the famously illustrated one about medieval siege engines,
and a bookstore, swank, mahogany-paneled walls,
attached to the Hotel Central, open still at this eldritch hour,
but not a clerk in sight, and, if I might be allowed,
so poorly stocked that one could easily infer
the very act of reading here had drifted into desuetude.
MURPH & ME
Windshield wipers slapping back and forth, Murph’s Celebrity Sedan
hugged the curve as it sped onto the Edison Bridge, Super 88 4 barrel
High Compression 394 Rocket V8, Roto Hydro-Matic transmission, power steering,
Pedal-Ease power brakes, the rolling black cylinder speedometer
flashing green, yellow, and red, holding steady at 65 mph, midnight-blue frame
encasing me in terror, where I remain still, sleeping or awake
when I conjure that ride across the old deck plate and girder bridge
with its big hump in the middle, all 29 spans, the muddy Raritan 135 feet below,
Murph’s foot to the floor as he wove through the pack, growling
imprecations, outraged by the pace of the rest of the world, frantic
to get nowhere in particular except in the early a.m. on the GW Bridge
dropping me off at the IRT on 168th then heading downtown to his taxi place.
He was at his best, or worst (“wurst,” he would have said), in that meat-grinder,
a heavy-lidded Steve McQueen gone to seed, bald, paunch, sporty double-knit
casual wear of an indeterminate era, banging on his Roto-Matic steering wheel.
—So who’s that little broad with freckles and orange hair?
(Lord God-Lady, forgive me, forgive Murph: Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn,
born the same day as that misfortune with the Archduke, right?)
—Maxine, I say.—Are you doing her?—Christ, Murph, I’m only 14!
This plainly displeased him. You could say Murph was my unofficial guardian,
the Jack Teagarden to my Stan Getz, sans horns, a somewhat unsavory coupling,
and one not without implications down the road …
But you can imagine how purgatorial, that rolling, rackety, fitful journey uptown
after the 25 minutes pinned back in the death seat beside Murph,
taking in the world, at speed, the river beneath, always trying to beat his record,
with me beside him in that selfsame seat, the blur of tail fins, cables, sky
through that curvilinear windshield, across bridges for the most part, but not just.
Every year Murph would flip cars, trading in the 88 for a 98 Custom Sports Coupe,
345 horsepower Starfire engine, dual rear cigarette lighters, leather interior.
Malcolm X drove the very same car, before things went south with Elijah M.
Hard to imagine Murph and Malcolm would have much to say to one another.
No matter where we were—Anchorage, the Azores—Murph had the radio on.
Sports mostly, we’d talk sports, but the news too. Murph hated Robert Kennedy.
Murph said he’d win because he made “all the broads cream in their jeans.”
Dad hated Kennedy too, all of ’em, Poppa Joe to his toothy, roguering whelps.
But Dad loved Murph, and Murph loved Dad. That’s why he let Murph drive me.
One day Murph brought Dad back a baby alligator from Miami.
—Whadayawant from Florida, Marv? Murph asked.—An alligator, Dad said.
Mother wasn’t happy. She put the little reptile behind the fridge hydrator
and fed it bits of raw hamburger until one day it escaped and bit the dog’s nose,
bit it bad so it never looked quite right again. That was that for the alligator.
But Murph, he seemed to like the General Casimir Pulaski Skyway best,
a steel truss cantilever affair, a monstrous Erector set from Hell,
the Meadowlands and railyards below, Hoffa’s bones likely somewhere near.
Any excuse. He’d blast past the Budweiser sign and drop me at the heliport,
then head down to Bayonne for a round of pinochle with his old rag-trade pals
in a cloud of cigar smoke, going through the booty “what fell off a truck.”
—I got a Sylvania 9000 F.M., Marv, fell off a truck, $22, can’t beat the price.
He’d try to best 28 minutes crossing the Pulaski, the GW record was 12 and some,
no small feat along that bottle-necked death trap. Oh, I ride with Murph still,
across the Verrazzano to the family grave plots, the Brooklyn Bridge, where once,
half-way across, he asks, out of the blue,—Howz the poetry game treating you?
Then, in that old-timey, low-rent Flatbush accent, starts declaiming:
Through the bound cable strands, the arching path / Upward, veering with light …
I’m talking the first three stanzas … The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.
I could never figure out how he pulled that one out of the air, to this very day.
The Lio
ns Gate, the Seven Mile Bridge across the Keys, and even farther afield:
Crossing Lake Maracaibo on the General Rafael Urdaneta, the Akashi-Kaikyo …
He’s still there beside me, roaring across the Lupu, Bloukrans, Øresund:
—Check out the knockers on that broad; it’s a wonder she don’t tilt right over.
BOY
I lent him some bone from my one good leg
as a shillelagh or battering ram, just in case,
which seemed to calm him down.
That first day is never a picnic, this we know.
Why, wasn’t it only last fall …
Now, his own legs seem to no longer belong,
certainly not to him, as if abandoning
his torso, gone off to wander on their own.
He stands before me, festooned
with pneumatocysts, red, testosterone, blue, cortisol,
pompadour and cowlick rigid with gel,
orange knee socks, “laser green” running shoes.
I do love him—would that I didn’t—
but not when he lifts me over his head
and makes like to throw me against the wall.
Mother says: —Goddamn it, JackJack, what the hell!
He grows and grows. Soon he will simply step over me
as if I were an ottoman or dozing pet.
Is that not a look of scorn I see?
Off into the world, thermos filled with meatballs, he goes.
HEAT
The blue-bellied fence lizards have died back
into stone or the walls they attach themselves to,
drinking in mineral and sun, proliferating
almost before one’s eyes,
a slow-motion saurian mitosis
a reticulated vine with eyes and split tongues,
threatening to blanket every surface.
Gone, overnight it would seem,
like the sun at day’s end below the horizon
but not returning: a conjury, the Lord
retracting his edict of fiery serpents upon the Israelites—
disappeared into a compost of shadow.
The summer’s heat retreats slowly here in the valley,
a dusting of snow already on the mountain summits.
Tirelessly, the roots of camphor and live oak
probe in the loam for moisture—
roof tiles, brass doorknobs, hot as griddles,
silence in the village.
SHADOW MAN
Shadow man’s still there,
his back to it all, huddled over the picnic table,
even after Halloween, after the first big December rain,
the pre-Christmas all day Church & Baseball Posada,
mariachi trumpet, impassioned orators:
GOD LOVES BASEBALL. GOD LOVES YOU.
Still there, under the sycamores,
big dun leaves plastering the basketball court,
staring, as he does, at nothing.
I envy him that nothing,
and the way his days take shape around it.
In the heat of midsummer,
awakening on his bench courtside,
moving across the way to the shade of a live oak
as the sun lifts overhead.
Not always easy to spot him there in the shadows,
at least not straightaway:
black tracksuit, black skin, black do-rag
he goes off to soak in the fountain every so often,
the day stretching before him,
sun making its transit across the sky.
One might well think him mad, living the way he does,
soundless,
marooned somewhere inside his head,
up to nothing, nothing in hand,
moving spot to spot over the course of the day,
his stations in the park,
finding the sun when it’s chill, the shade when hot,
nothing more,
very nearly a mendicant of nothing.
I think not;
mad, that is, at least not when his eyes have met mine
those mornings I’ve been out there,
just the two of us at that early hour.
A man is there, present in that gaze,
careworn, to be sure, but in no way raddled or elsewhere.
Nor is he displeased to see me here,
come to pay a visit to the place he lives,
come with my ball to shoot awhile and watch the leaves
drift down, amber, dun, and gold, the sun
sometimes catching a train of motes in their wake,
the sough of traffic along Claremont Boulevard.
I’ll wave. He may or may not wave back.
Usually not, or maybe offer the barest of nods.
Some days more than others weigh heavily upon him,
I can tell that by now.
One day I thought I even overheard a sob,
which is all the noise I’ve ever heard come out of him.
Shadow Man is out there now, always out there.
I can tell you where by the hour on the clock,
under which tree, what corner of the park,
almost as if he’s waiting for someone,
someone who, when ready, will know to come find him there.
TRAVELER’S TALES: CHAPTER 66
The semester is winding down.
Mid-afternoon sun already low in the sky.
A week since the clatter of cleats at dusk.
The train rattles along behind First Street sounding its horn,
to L.A. or east to San Bernardino.
The top of Mt. Baldy hidden behind cloud.
TODAY’S LUNCH SPECIAL
Polenta-Stuffed Tomato & Pulled Pork
Students clustered at tables, TV overhead.
Chlamydia in bloom throughout the dining hall.
Professor Murchison, Emeritus,
far too old and too tall to be doing this,
and at such a late hour,
not long before closing,
bent over a text in the library stacks,
turning the pages slowly
but with some urgency.
—I just needed to tell you,
Buffy, the women’s soccer coach,
says to her striker,
a lanky brunette who calls herself Suze,
how much …
Coach pauses, caught up, it would seem,
by emotion, perhaps fear.
The tiny angel on her right shoulder
in an oversized football jersey,
school colors, navy blue and emerald green:
—Not again, Buff,
You know what happened the last time.
And the tiny devil on her left,
orange leotards, black angora sweater vest:
—Well?
CHAUNCEY HARE
It was just a block or two off Palisade Ave.,
a sprawling, second-floor living room,
faux wood-paneled, stuffed chairs, big sofa,
cheap ceramic Disney figurines on the coffee table,
but with a wall-sized picture window facing east,
the midtown “moody, water-loving giants of Manhattan”
nearly in our laps, a 3-D mirage, a Fata Morgana
of the sort you see sometimes on Rte. 46 headed south for the GW Bridge,
ghostly buildings in the sky ahead of you the size of Himalayas.
The principal actors were locals, acquaintances, once featured in
Kraft Foods Midday Matinee, stretching torturously toward some bleak horizon,
reminiscent of those stupefying 12-hour art films of the ’70s
time-lapse photography of a ladybug over many months,
first venturing left a millimeter, then right,
then collapsing of her own weight and disintegrating
atop the flaccid member of a junked-out blond love object.
All of us much alike, in manner, background, dr
ess,
sans ambition, personality—well, perhaps a dismal aggregate of TV knock-offs,
supporting-role types: Fatty, Perky, Poufy, Pesty …
having lived lives, if not wasted, distinguished in no way whatsoever:
“Middle-Aged Sears Shoppers in Repose Among Themselves,”
an installation piece best kept in the garage, ersatz Kienholz,
or “Portrait of a New Jersey Interior, Cliffside Park, 1974” by Chauncey Hare.
Ordinariness seemed to cling to us like dinge or some kind of mold,
I no more nor less than the others.
But I am now compelled here to confess: what altered me,
rendered me a sort of dybbuk or freak, this capacity I had for—
what?: time travel, astral projection, roaming impostiture—knock, knock/
who’s there?—ever in disguise, as if dispatched by some o’er-governing impulse,
that radiated and infused my inner being, veiled but present,
decals of exotic ports of call sprouting across the inside of my skull—
not unlike the old, cordovan-colored suitcase belonging to my late Great-Uncle Nandor—
along with the attendant, requisite tricks of mimicry, vanishing
in a trice, transformation, all picked up on the fly, beyond any normal’s ken
and, of course, hidden in a vest pocket, as it were, that served to make me master
of the room in which we all together sat that very same afternoon, the house
in which it belonged, and any number of other rooms and houses just like them …
TRAVELER’S TALES: CHAPTER 90
It was a fortnight before le couple coiffure turned up for the high season.
A small flat her tante in Paris owned and let to the couple every year,
and for many years. They were not young. Mlle.’s discomfort was evident
from the moment they stepped off the bus that night, as if she found him
Snow Approaching on the Hudson Page 3
