Human Hours
Page 3
I have always, all of my life, writes Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights, been looking for help from a man.
As the boots glided past, I tried to think of a question, any question, a question for my thoughts.
On a first date, my dinner companion seemed bemused I was doing all the asking. Sorry! I said. I can be quiet, I’d like that.
Then it was nice listening in to other conversations, noticing the sweat on the water glass, letting time pass all on its own, sipping a little wine while he ate more squid.
What do you want to ask me now, he said after a few slow bites, that you didn’t want to ask me before?
The interrobang was invented just a few decades ago and is a mark I’ve never been tempted to use though it’s mostly what my eyes say.
Four minutes Is that a long kiss?
Were you a piece of punctuation, wouldn’t you just love to be the sexy little round black curve of the question pressed up against a lanky exclamation,
like this
Even pressed against you I’m trying to read lips.
The closer you are to your addressee the more fragile language is.
It took me a long afternoon to memorize Shakespeare’s When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes. Sitting in my old car on Roosevelt Island watching my son play baseball, I felt the ache that comes when you commit something beautiful to heart. Then I looked through the rest of the sonnets and counted. I saw nine others begin with when.
When I think of when, I think of the simple one-word question.
If I don’t dawdle, don’t pause between recitations, don’t get up and start making dinner or rereading your old letters, I can recite Sonnet 29 four times in four minutes.
Starting when? Now.
It’s amazing. For someone who thinks she’s so smart. Until this very moment, I thought haply I think on thee meant happily—
Why did I so rarely mention love when we were holding each other?
Does Anbesol work on the heart or only on the mind?
Did I misuse everything?
Did Kant really have a parrot?
What was the punch line?
Are sex and death the only rafts out of here?
Where did we think we were going?
Unasked questions between us all.
The Humanities
A classmate and I chose pendulums,
what happens when a pendulum
hangs from a pendulum?
How does gravity work then?
We were studying invisible forces
and left the classroom, heading into
the world with just our two bodies,
which were to be both string and bob.
In the woods behind school, he climbed into a tree
and lowered himself down,
holding a branch.
I reached up to his thin ankles
and lifted my bare feet off the ground.
Someone must have been there to try to make us swing,
record the harmonic oscillations,
and take the polaroids,
still stapled to this yellowed lab report.
It’s haunting to discover it now, to see in the photos
how we hung there smiling, white,
safe and dumb.
How little history we knew.
If only all feet could come back
to stand on the ground,
not get buried under it,
left to hang above, left outside
in the told and untold,
in the toll of hot municipal suns.
We didn’t understand much of anything
but completed the assignment,
typed up the results, passed physics,
went to college and typed and typed
and never took another science class,
we were humanities majors.
Sometimes when I’m not typing now
I run lines with an actor friend
and can’t get them out of my head.
Another heavenly day,
says Winnie as the curtain rises.
She’s buried to her waist in earth
and for a while you think it can’t get any worse.
The humanities.
What are they, really?
Don’t let me sleep on.
Calamity Jane on Etsy after the 2016 Election
As we lay together under the gabled roof, a lover
called me solicitous. That’s me,
I thought, straightening my mussed-up hair,
Solicity Jane, anxious version
of Calamity Jane, the only female action figure to show up
on the UPS truck filled with soldiers and presidents
manufactured by my grandfather and sent out west
to my sisters and brother and me.
We were only five of his many grandchildren,
five kids who wanted to make-believe.
Often I find her at vintage stores, priced out of my range,
but today Calamity’s cheap,
lying face down in the Etsy pixels.
Blond, wearing turquoise blue and an empty lasso,
she doesn’t look a thing like me
unless you count the pose.
Right about now I want to wake up.
I want a round of shots, straight up.
And one for all my sisters,
and one for all my brothers.
And one for all my mothers.
At least she’s only polymer.
No man can grab her by the smooth blue patina
between her unspreadable legs.
How long will she be lying here?
As I find myself again now,
saying god help us into the fitted sheet.
Hey, you there, Calamity, wake up!
It’s not too late to fight back.
Calamity et al!
Get up, we love you!
I solicit you!
Calamity ends with amity,
amity save us all.
Another Divine Comedy
It’s not age or cold or shame
or even the promise of heaven,
the proof of hell
that makes my sturdy self-lubricating relic
shake as it glides down Broadway
on this narrow ultra-low-resistance scooter.
No matter how hard I push,
I can’t outrun the news,
can’t stop the trucks, destruction, blood,
ICE, uranium, plutonium, floods.
I ride so wildly now it’s like surfing.
I’m afraid to look down,
afraid to look back up.
I used to think the cries were only in my head,
but no.
That was logic.
Now I hear them in the wheels’ raucous junket
down the avenues.
I hear them issuing from the manholes,
from the towers, from the cosmos
tossed in the way of the truck
as if we were no hardier than flowers.
Have mercy on us.
No hardier than flowers!
Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World
The facts aren’t quiet and the facts weren’t calm.
They’re like weeds that even cut down to the root still flourish,
sending shouts up through whatever kept trying to smother us.
All of you, said the new president,
All of you have got to go, you’re ruining us.
He tried to graffiti his name everywhere,
he tried to graft it everywhere,
even here, in the aftermath, in the wake of facts
never sleeping but only resting, pretending a death,
like the female moorland hawker falls from the sky
to avoid harassment then lifts up again,
like rhizomes cold hard drunk in winter soil
each spring rise up like the impossible promise,
like the derelict premise
I wrote down again at the top of this page,
copied verbatim from an earlier declaration,
might look like—look up—
like tombstone or horizon.
Metaphor on the Crosstown
A man carries an armful of dogwood into the bus,
into the pluribus, the branches wrapped
in the day’s paper, the news no longer legible
but scrapped, reused, dampened, darkened,
waterlogged, bleeding. What was it
we thought we could go on reading?
Civility, justice, the First Amendment.
We look him over, as if to ask what he is meant
to mean carrying his dogwood into our crowded bus,
wrapped in poor passing facts and alive, furiously, like us.
Summons
Do I have a Certificate of Good Conduct,
Justice Milton Tingling wants to know.
I don’t think I do, no—
For years I asked the court for exemptions
and when I did serve I was useless,
I didn’t care about the chiropractor and his wife,
about theft, delinquency, malfeasance.
Justice was a beautiful
abstraction I counted on from within the walls
of my exhausted mothermind.
It’s a long time since I’ve been summoned,
and now Milton Tingling
has replaced County Clerk Norman Goodman,
who ruled the courts for forty-five years,
including the eighteen it took me to raise my son.
You don’t know me, Justice Tingling,
but I like the sound of your name,
I like the sound of Justice Anything,
you who refuse to honor exemptions
I have none of now.
The boy is no longer exempt, no,
and I want to serve, I want to make amends
for my absences,
my failures of civic duty.
I don’t need to ask for time to raise him,
he’s been raised, he no longer lives with me,
he’s not waiting for me to come pick him up
to the sound of twenty questions
and the sound of the phone ringing and the dead dog barking.
He’s a mystery to me,
old enough now for his own summons,
Justice Tingling, but he’s not home
to receive it or fill it out,
he’s not here to answer your questionnaire
about his own Good Conduct.
I listen to the traffic outside my window,
what would I do without it, it’s a boon,
it croons,
it idled us through the days I tended
to the child who right at this moment
might be drinking his own lovely self
into a stupor
or watching the fraternity kids
drink themselves into stupors
in the basement and backrooms
of a self-replicating Upsilon Upsilon
across whose exterior in black poster paint
early one spring morning
someone spray-painted the words rape haven.
Anonymous, the papers said.
Anonymous, the brothers said
for the brother who is not my son, no,
my son has no brothers, Justice Tingling,
he’s an only child, or he’s only
a man now
who for all I know is or is not,
is or is not
with other young men
washing paint off a stone wall
with a high-powered hose and a stiff brush
like it never happened,
like it never happens.
Justice, forgive me.
Forgive me, Justice.
The Sky Flashes
Often when I’m in despair I turn to the back page
of the New Yorker and try to think up something
funny to say. The little drawings are so succinct
it can be hard to tell who’s talking. Berryman’s
Life, friends, is boring,
though recited by poets everywhere,
has probably been the winning caption
for no cartoon. Last summer I was so low
I ran out of magazines.
I got obsessed with entropy.
Is the world more closely allied with chaos
or with order? I asked everyone I love.
Chaos, my sister said, because she’s a doctor.
Order, my mother said,
because she’s an abstract expressionist.
I showed my father a cartoon
with a psychiatrist wearing a halo
and a man stretched out on the couch.
I’m afraid I can’t help you with that one, he said,
and I was sure he’d win.
I told my sisters look, dad’s ok, his mind still works,
he’s still a funny man.
It took me all these months to realize
he was only answering me—
I’m afraid I can’t help you with that one,
you, whoever you are.
I keep sending that caption in, every week,
hoping one day to win, one day soon,
before we lose him.
Truth is we ought to buy a book of jokes
and practice them over and over until we
perfect the hospice of it,
things are that bad.
My father’s name is still funny,
one syllable, rhymes with pain.
Our friends used to call him Pain
and my mother Wacky, but I don’t think
anyone could make me laugh right now.
If you’d laugh, I’d feel less alone.
Do you know my favorite joke,
about the man condemned to be hanged?
When the priest asks if he has anything
to say before they spring the trap, the man
says yes, this thing doesn’t look safe.
Origin Story
When I was little I thought Karl Marx
was part of my extended family.
I assumed Groucho was, too,
because my mother had a passel of brothers
and before she was my mother she was a Marx.
The vice my uncles most effortlessly forgave was gullibility,
and who wouldn’t want that in an ancestor?
The only real laughter comes from despair, Groucho said.
I intend to live forever or die trying, he said, which I’ve taken to heart.
I intend to cry forever or die laughing, said one version of this poem.
To laugh forever or die living, said another.
I intend to love forever—
Meanwhile, fires are burning again out west,
you can drive right through but who can stop them?
I grew up in California, and spent most of my childhood in a car
or a tent. Once my family camped out in Glacier National Park
and at a restaurant there I noticed people were leaving money
on tables, so I gathered it up. Geworfenheit
is a German term for being thrown into a game
without knowing the rules.
That pretty much explains it.
If only I could speak to whoever’s in charge.
What would I ask for, if I could ask? Send up
a larger room! says one of my uncles in the stateroom scene.
Peace in the world, yes.
Clean air. Water. Less prejudice.
More intimacy, fewer lies.
Sometimes after sex my mind wanders
and the clock resets and I’m supposed to explain
into someone’s armpit why I’m laughing.
Even I want to know.
Already it looks like we have to go soon,
you and I. But try.
Try t
o stay awhile longer.
Don’t check your phone, the news, the various pages.
This is a page and you’re still looking at it.
Your face is a page, as is mine.
Maybe numbered, maybe unnumbered.
Central Park
I’d like to buy one when I die,
one of the benches not yet spoken for,
not yet tagged with a small stainless plaque
and someone else’s name.
If they’re all gone, please,
help me carry a replica
to the boat pond so I can sit
and watch the model boats get nowhere
beautifully, rented by the fixed hours
I’m grateful not to be out of yet.
Another flicker of love,
an updated AAA membership,
and a handful of Pilot G-Tec-C4 blue-black pens,
what else do I need?
Universe,
watch over us.
Boat, my poor faraway father says,
as if my mother has never seen one.
Boat, he says, and we say, Yes,
aren’t they beautiful.
Come winter,
the boathouse here is locked up,
the pond drained,
except one year it wasn’t
and my son and I convinced ourselves
his new Golden Bright
could sail across.
Merry Christmas, no one said
as I pulled the black plastic liner bags
from the empty trash cans
and stepped into them,
one for each leg,
and waded into the addled water
to salvage the present.
I think that moment is something to remember,
or something to remember me by,
brief, vivid, foolhardy—
even the revenants watching from the line of benches
said so:
thus have been our travels.
Oblivion, they said,
there’s no unenduring it.
Accursed Questions, iii
My friend asks if I ask questions to stay in control, but I’m just not into the crossword puzzle or the Yankees or slow cooking or pornography, I don’t know how to participate in the usual exchanges, so what is a loud noise you secretly like the sound of? I ask as we walk down the avenue and there I am controlling things again like I’m some kind of walking thermostat, or an intercom, yes, press mute and let me not hear doors slamming, not saying goodbye.