Letter from Brooklyn

by Jacob Scheier

  saying we should stay for a while, though I’m not sure

  if I mean Toronto, since soon we will live an ocean apart,

  or your kitchen. It’s hard to imagine, I say, never

  seeing you again. But already I can see

  the kitchen window becoming soft,

  the bird feeder slightly pixelated,

  the snow blanket dimming, everything turning

  to the way I will remember it.

  SINGLE MAN’S SONG

  After Al Purdy

  After he makes love to himself

  the not quite middle-aged single man

  listens to his sigh

  sail to the end of the room

  With pants around his ankles

  and wearing a grey wool sweater

  she called his rat suit

  he peers at his cock’s sad pug head

  and returns to the Kraft Dinner

  he has been eating with a ladle

  astonished and a little frightened

  by his immense freedom

  He does up his buckle

  and walks out the door

  taking pleasure

  in not knowing the precise nature

  of his fashion crime

  only that he’s committed one

  if not several

  and that he’ll get away

  with them all

  As he clashes down Queen Street

  the oak leaves applaud

  I am myself again

  he sings into the wind

  Not that she would have stopped him

  from wearing that sweater

  only told him the truth —

  that he looked bad

  Freedom it occurs to him

  is no one caring

  what you look like

  At home he imagines someone watches —

  imagining otherwise is unbearable

  but he cannot call this witness god

  and instead thinks of himself as on a TV show

  where he is a lovable sort

  for wearing such an ugly sweater

  but knows its magic was contained

  in her dislike

  in the way she gave so much thought

  to what he did

  and sometimes hated what he did

  but never loved him any less

  It was just the day before

  when he took relief in draping

  his sweater over the sofa

  and flinging his underwear

  to the four corners of the earth

  but he now hangs his rat suit carefully

  and the scratching of the hanger’s wire stem

  sliding along the aluminum

  is a chime bringing him back to a moist day in April

  that felt like November

  when despite her protests

  he bought the sweater

  for the change in his pocket

  He only said then he liked it

  not that he pictured clear as the day before him

  a widow in a time of war

  knitting the sweater’s basket weave

  in a cabin where a doe slows by a window

  and stretches her small mouth to a birdfeeder

  half full of rain

  and her slender legs are momentary sundials

  but all of this goes unseen

  by the woman

  as she draws the needles together

  and then pulls them apart

  in a time and place

  where what mattered most

  was staying warm

  BIKING DOWN A COUNTRY ROAD

  IN SOUTH-WESTERN MANITOBA

  The bales are fat as boulders.

  At your back, the hill of silos and the feed factory —

  red as the sun in The Grapes of Wrath, the book

  you stayed up half the night reading

  that made you understand something

  about your father. Life settles like dust

  inside some men. And the train tracks you passed,

  three and a half miles back, must not depart

  much from the ones his brother lay upon

  decades before, as though he were

  a coin, and the bridge you passed

  an hour ago isn’t that different from the one

  his niece leaped from last week, drifting

  like something stirred from a field.

  And the sky above the prairie is pink

  as the pills your mother popped,

  making her belly a salmon-filled river.

  Before you the dry land is still as a frozen river.

  You hear your father’s voice

  on the phone, last night, telling you

  what happened to your cousin. Hear

  his breath push the dust

  when he says he wants things to be

  different while there is still time,

  as though he has found a track

  to lay your life upon while you wait

  for the train to change its shape.

  As he speaks you fear that he might breathe

  his dust into you. Or that he already has.

  The flies rise from the roadside marshes

  in the fading yellow of the day, and pelt

  your helmet like sheets of rain.

  You are far enough down this road

  to no longer see the lights of town.

  It is so flat you see the precise point

  where you see no further. You stop and stare

  into the limits of your sight, glad to be alone.

  If someone else were here, they might ask

  what you’re looking at. And what

  could you say? You’d say

  “nothing” and look away,

  as you look away now

  at the nothing all around

  and crowding in.

  THE OPPOSITE OF CUBISM

  You were the sum of the things you once did.

  Sentences a series of used tos and stills. Used to:

  cocaine, dance for money, thought

  about dying a lot. When we met you had begun

  to work in an office. Still: wrote poems and songs. Still

  dyed your hair from blond to red according to the seasonal shifts

  within. Looking back, there was a winter you were

  mostly in love with me. It was written in your faded hair,

  the colour of blood retreating. You told me with your unstill hands. Come here,

  but not for very long, you were saying. I don’t know

  what you were saying. We fucked nightly

  in the glow of a Pentecostal church. Its signboard punch lines

  greeting our naked and smoke-drawn bodies. It didn’t take long

  before we stopped even deserving the love we had

  for the person we were betraying.

  How hurt she will be when she finds out we told

  one another, solemnly, piously.

  Then we started writing poems to each other

  and they were bad, but worse were the poems

  we would write at each other. The last time we made

  love, I woke as you were leaving for work. My flickering eyes

  making a slide show of you putting on your face,

  pulling your suit on. Then gone.

  I stared at your minimalist room: a guitar leaning against the wall

  and little else. Girl with a Mandolin, absent the girl.

  If there were truly an opposite of cubism,

  not a singular point of view, but n
one whatsoever,

  I was looking at it. I left your house as the morning sun soaked

  the brown brick of the church and walked homeward for hours.

  I stopped in nearly every personal landmark along the way

  and stayed awhile in the lobby of the hospital I had surgery in

  where the three of us, I include myself here, fell in love with me

  for about two weeks. That was five years ago.

  Your hair has remained a single colour in that time,

  and I find there is nothing your husband says

  that is true. He doesn’t lie. Just has nothing true to say.

  You know this. It’s your final small betrayal.

  Even though it has little to do with me. Or rather

  that’s the precise nature of it. You live in the suburbs. You are

  pregnant. Have stock options. Believe in the free market.

  Think I need to grow up. Your husband throws his garbage

  at the sanitary workers’ picket line

  and you laugh. You are the opposite

  of your list of used tos and stills. Girl with a Mandolin

  absent the girl, absent the mandolin.

  THE LIGHTHOUSE

  It has something to do with the osprey nest like a black spool of yarn

  sitting empty atop a telephone pole, and the beached, rusted rib bones

  of the oil tanker and the seaweed snaked

  through sockets of a car engine. Something

  about how little this place resembles the postcards.

  I’m not leaving this province until I see a fucking lighthouse

  I tell you and begin to turn. I’m going to sit on the beach and meditate

  you say, reminding me the boatman will be back

  in two hours, and offer me the map, which I refuse.

  It has something to do with the moment the ideal drifts

  and seeing up ahead that everything that seems to matter

  so much, won’t very soon.

  The rocks along the shore are dull punches

  under my feet, and I let the salt-stung air envelope me

  and feel what a flimsy partition my senses are —

  how it might be possible to let everything in

  and listen to the ocean, what it has to say

  on the limits of limits.

  I am sprinting, tripping with nearly every step,

  desperate to reach the lighthouse, miles away. But I stop.

  I know to go further will mean a kind of chaos,

  the boatman and you, waiting and wondering.

  I imagine search parties and you trying, and I can only hope failing,

  to believe this too is happening for a reason. Because, yes,

  everything does; it’s just the reasons are poor. I turn around,

  head back to wherever there is for us to go to from here.

  I take one last look behind. The lighthouse is white as a cloud

  with a halo of dull fire just below its peak, with waves splashed

  in still frames against the small distant boulders.

  I know it is beautiful but, at this moment, cannot feel its beauty.

  Something in me is ruined, which is refreshing: I had thought

  everything that could break in me had done so some time ago.

  I try a shortcut through an abandoned barrack and find myself

  walking past several empty forts; broken windows

  reveal bottle-strewn floors and concrete benches arranged

  like pews,

  reminding me of the wooded seats on the boat here,

  where I looked up at you once, and you appeared

  not so much like a stranger, but an acquaintance

  I had once wanted to know intimately.

  I walk through these thoughts till there’s only bramble

  and the ocean, heard but unseen, at my back. l call

  to tell you I’m lost. You ask me How lost? And I say

  Only a little. I ask you to tell the boatman to wait.

  But he can’t. He’ll be back for me in four hours.

  You say I’m going back with him. Since, as you will state later

  It doesn’t make sense for us both to suffer.

  Later, I will yell. I will rip the blankets off and say

  You have no feelings. But I have done nothing, you will respond.

  And I will say Yes, that’s it exactly, and yell louder.

  I will call you a robot and imitate you speaking in a robot voice.

  It will almost be funny. It will never be funny,

  but we will laugh about it, years from now, alone.

  And it will sound strange even to our own ears

  as though it came from somewhere else.

  When suffering finally pushes to the surface of your face,

  I am both smug and ashamed, and something else.

  A feeling that comes with realizing the worst thing about shame

  is that it never stings quite as much

  as it should. And yet this is the best thing I can say

  for life right now, and possibly the worst —

  that we get away with it. And it’s probably true,

  without god everything is permitted,

  but I never thought before how this meant

  we are also capable of doing so little.

  OCCUPY

  “We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire.”

  — Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street

  You look thin again, in that way . . . Bubble. Burst.

  More things haven’t changed. You still

  carry a Diet Coke bottle, half full of rum

  in your purse. My first time here since I said

  goodbye to all that — those days we traded Taibbi

  articles, went to free lectures at the Brecht,

  and believed the whole thing was about

  to collapse in an instant, like a feeling

  between two people that can’t be sustained

  once the moment passes. “We were blindsided . . .

  We didn’t see it coming.” You swig

  what’s left as we watch Seeger’s procession

  on the bar TV, arrive at Zuccotti. “I’m not

  going down there,” you say, “I’m sick of activists.”

  ELEGY FOR TEENAGE LOVE

  How did we not know it would be so quick

  and irrevocable. Our love

  of broken snow globes. Of spilled

  water and plastic flakes. Of curved glass

  jagged in your hands. Of light

  held to your wrist like you were

  holding your breath. Our breath. We held

  the certainty that is the provenance of the young

  who know grief a little earlier than they should.

  We were hardened alchemists, transformed wise

  from hurt. We knew our love was

  everything. We hid inside its immense pocket

  and it was hard to tell if it might be larger

  than our lives or if we just grew very small

  inside it. We could not have stayed together like that

  and lived. But we compromised, being together

  till we ruined ourselves, just a little,

  just enough, to extinguish what permitted us

  to love that way. We didn’t know

  we were kind. We knew

  we weren’t beautiful but we were young

  and beautiful for that.

  THE BROKEN HEART IS A CLICHÉ

  I tell my students. />
  When you write that,

  we hear an echo

  of the first heart to break.

  And the few after that.

  But not your own.

  I tell them there may have been a time

  when those words would cause us

  to hear something

  like frozen puddles cracking

  under the rubber boot

  of a small child.

  But these days we no longer hear

  a boy stomping just to see how easily

  surfaces can splinter.

  I just don’t hear your hearts break,

  I tell them. Inevitably,

  there are objections,

  for they know very little about most things,

  except heartbreak. Perhaps,

  not more quantitatively,

  but the sound of it is closer

  or louder to them

  as though another child

  knelt beside her friend’s falling boot

  to be as close

  to the precise moment of the break

  as possible. I am becoming

  too old to kneel

  beside thinly frozen streams,

  and so I only hear them break

  from the distance

  of one who passes by hurriedly

  on his way somewhere important

  like to teach a poetry class.

  But my heart does break,

  one of the very young will protest.

  There just are no better words for it.

  It’s hard, because

  I know what he means,

  but I must play numb

  for their sake.

  Soon they replace their broken hearts

  with a simile they believe

  will please me. And I know

  it does not sound like that

  to them. You need to invent

  more earnestly, I tell them,

  and I begin to sense some tension,

  a question about whether that bioethics course

  might have been a more enjoyable elective.

  Things get worse when I ask

  if the very subject of love

  is stale. Some agree, because

  they think it’s what I want

  to hear. Not knowing I want

  maybe need

  them with their freshly broken hearts

  to remind me

  no heart has

  unfolded before like an origami swan

  or locked itself like a parent’s liquor cabinet

  or opened up too much like light collapsing

  or just broke