by David Lehman
I wanted to be a lucid hammer. I was trying to play
like the first mechanic asked to repair the first automobile.
Once, Piano, every man-made song could fit in your mouth.
But I was trying to play Burial’s “Ghost Hardware.”
I was trying to play “Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan”
without the artificial bells and smoke. I was trying to play
the sound of applause by trying to play the sound of rain.
I was trying to mimic the stain on a bed, the sound
of a woman’s soft, contracting bellow, the answer to who I am.
Before I trust the god who makes me rot, I trust you, Piano.
Something deathless fills your wood. Because I wanted to be
invisible, I was trying to play like a woman blacker
than an unpaid light bill, like a white boy lost in the snow.
I wanted to be a ghost because the skull is just a few holes
covered in meat. The skin has no teeth. I was trying to play
the sound of a shattered window. I was trying to play what I felt
singing in the mirror as a boy. I was trying to play what I overheard:
the old questions, the hunger, the rattle of spines. The body
that only loves what it can touch always turns to dust.
What would a mother feel if her child sang “Sometimes I Feel
Like a Motherless Child” too beautifully? A hole has no teeth.
A bird has no teeth. But you got teeth, Piano. You make me high.
You make me dance as only a sail can dance its ragged assailable
dance. You make me believe there is good in me.
I was trying to play “California Dreaming” with José Feliciano’s
warble. I was trying to play it the way George Benson played it
on the guitar his daddy made him at the end of the war. My lady,
she dreams of Chicago. I was trying to play “Mouhamadou Bamba”
like a band of Africans named after a tree. A tree has no teeth.
A horn has no teeth. Don’t chew, Piano. Don’t chew, sing to me
you fine-ass lounging harp. You fancy engine doing other people’s
work. I was trying to play the sound of an empty house
because that’s how I get by when the darkness in my body
starts to bleed. I was trying to play “Autumn Leaves”
because that’s what my lady’s falling dress sounds like to me.
Before you, Piano, I was just a rap of knuckles on the sill. I am filled
with the sound of her breathing and only you can bring it out of me.
from Tin House
STEVEN HEIGHTON
Collision
Away in the eyefar
nightrise over the sapwood, and one likes
under hooves the heatfeel after sun flees, heat stays on this
smooth to the hoof hardpan, part trail
part saltlick now as snowlast moults back
into the sapwood
to yard and rot
and one sees moonrise mounding
over a groundswell, but too soon and swifter
like never the moon one knows, no moon at all,
two moons fawned, both small, too hot, they
come with a growling and
hold one fast, so chafing for flight
but what, what, what, what
wondering——
and one can’t move and can’t although one
knows from backdays, eared and glimpsed
through sapwood budwood cracklewood bonewood
flashes of this same Wolfing
now upon one, still
stalls the hooves on the saltlick and the eyebright
creature squeals afraid?——and one somehow
uphoofed in a bound not chosen high as if to flee with no
trying, no feeling, fallen flankflat, fawnlike
eyes above in the eyefar closing small
with the world
and now from the stopped thing
comes what its cub? legged up on its hinds,
kneels low to touch, but in that awful
touch, no feel no fear to feel
no at all—
from The Literary Review
BRENDA HILLMAN
Moaning Action at the Gas Pump
. . . in the tragic world, all moaning tends to consider itself music.
Nicole Loraux
Soon it will be necessary to start a behavior of moaning outdoors when pumping gas . . . That capital S is a sort of gas nozzle. Pulling up, beginning a low moaning action, pulling a deep choral moan with cracks up through the body, the crude through the cracks of sea & earth, pulling neurotransmitters glutamate, acetylcholine, & others across chasms in the nervous system, into the larynx until the sound acts by itself. Customer copy, look us in the eye. So we shred the song to continue. Meaning morning moaning mourning. i am able to complete 34 moans by the time i’ve filled half the tank. City-states outlawed open wailing because it was not good for democracy, but you will merely be embarrassed even if you drive a hybrid. Please be embarrassed. Please.
Inside the pump, you can hear a bird, a screech-covered Pelecanus occidentalis lugged out of the Gulf with 4 million tons of the used booms in non-leakable plastic, 13 million tons of liquid in nonleakable plastic 5 miles up the road—their 5 has a leak in it by the way—the moan fans out as you put your head down on the hood of your car; please moan though the other drivers are staring. Squeak, there are other animals inside the pump, the great manatee—Trichechus manatus—you’ve seen it float like a rug that has something wrapped in it among grasses that will not return. eeeoooiieeooooouuuuu, this moan won’t be the same mammal but is a democracy with no false knowledge, the sounds pushed to the edge of a painting, globs of oil floating to shores of salt-marshes. The broadcaster says the globs “look like peanut butter,” wanting to sound lovable so we can begin to feel friendly about them. Ever since 3 wars ago the moan meeting other moans & you ask how to get over it . . . is it like Gilgamesh & Enkidu, David & Absolom, like Isis & Osiris, like Ishmael & history, is it like Hecuba & her kids, Cassandra who did not drive, is it like Mary, like Antigone who could barely lift the body to bury it, probably you don’t you don’t have to probably you don’t have to get over it—
from Gulf Coast
JANE HIRSHFIELD
In a Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed
In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed,
the mushroom scent lingers.
As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.
As a person who’s once loved completely,
a country once conquered,
does not release that stunned knowledge.
They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels,
clownish puffballs.
Lichens have served as a lamp wick.
Clean-burning coconuts, olives.
Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing:
light that is fume and abradement.
Unburnable mushrooms are other.
They darken the air they come into.
Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken.
from Ploughshares
RICHARD HOWARD
A Proposed Curriculum Change
Dear Mrs Masters,
It’s happened again!
and the whole Fifth-Grade Class is upset
(which is why we’re writing again: you told us
to tell you when “anything related to
school” upsets the class,
so now we’re telling).
You see, just last week,
thanks to Mr Lee’s
connections (that’s what he calls the friends
who do him favors), our Fifth-Grade Science Class,
all twelve, until the Klein twins got mumps,
—together, of course—
&
nbsp; and had to stay home,
so we invited
Mike Rahn and Clark Taft,
the two smartest kids in the Fourth-Grade,
to come instead, since Mr Lee had specified
there would be twelve students visiting
the Sandusky Labs
for our winter-term
science field trip, and
no one wants to see
two favors go to waste. Dinny—that’s
Mr Lee: he asked us all to call him that,
and now he’s the one teacher at school
we’re on first-name, or
maybe nick-name terms
with . . . whom. Anyway,
Dinny has this friend Mr Morton
who works in the Labs (he told us right away,
“Call me Mort, everyone does”—first names
must be a sort of
code for Scientists),
on the development
of cancerous tumors that he trained
to grow in mice (induced was the word he used).
When he offered to show us how
his experiment
was coming along,
Lucy Wensley asked
“Mr Mort” if he could tell one mouse
from the next: “Do you ever see something
individual about a mouse—
some particular
mouse you’re working on?”
(Lucy sometimes brings
her pet guinea-pig to school with her,
so of course she’d ask a thing like that.)
Her question really surprised Mort, but
maybe what he said
was a good answer;
after a moment
he told this story: last week he had
to kill a mouse with a newborn litter, and
to save her young, gave them to another
mouse to bring them up
with her own; and when
that experiment
worked, he gave that foster-mother mouse
another litter of newborn young, to see
what she would do. At first all went well:
the new babies were
fat and already
growing fur, though still
blind—and then one night she ate them all! . . .
Not just Lucy but our whole Class, including
the two Fourth-Graders, listened without
saying anything.
Nobody moved. Mort
opened the lab door,
saying “Boys and girls, please come with me”
and the spell was broken. But Mrs Masters,
no one has forgotten Mort’s story.
Over and over
in Dinny’s classes
we’ve learned this lesson:
In the Animal World—and aren’t we
animals too?—mothers and fathers go
after their young, all shapes and sizes,
pigs in model farms,
Komodo dragons,
and now even mice!
Maybe our own parents will eat us
eventually—they may have eaten us
already, and the rest of our life
is just the process
of their digestion.
That’s not our life, it’s
our education, but it seems so . . .
one-sided! Maybe in Sixth-Grade, things will work
the other way around, so that sons
murder their fathers,
babies eat grownups,
and Snow White poisons
her wicked step-mother. So far that’s
the best reason to leave Fifth-Grade behind us.
Still, we don’t see why Science—at least
Dinny Lee’s version—
has to be so . . . so
animalistic.
That may be how life is, but we’d like
to put in a word—two words—for Other Things
we could learn at Park School, Duncan Chu
says that the right phrase
for what we mean is
human interest:
what we want to study at Park School
is how people have managed to avoid
behaving like animals, instead
of becoming them.
Is Science only
a history of death?
Maybe we’ll find out in Sixth-Grade that
no Fate is worse than death after all,
and that life is going to be ours.
Dear Mrs Masters,
if these suggestions
make sense to you, please
let us (and Dinny Lee) know about
what courses we’ll be taking next year along
the lines we have designated here,
and the kind of books
we should be reading
over the summer.
(signed) Respectfully, the Fifth-Grade Class:
Judy Abrams, Nancy Akers, Jean Sturges, David Halperin,
David Stashower, Jane McCullough,
Arthur Englander,
Anne Wiebe, Lois
Hexter, Jeunesse Ames,
David McConnehey, Duncan Chu
and today’s guests, Mike Rahn & Clark Taft
visiting from the Fourth-Grade Class
from The Antioch Review
MARIE HOWE
Magdalene—The Seven Devils
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out
—Luke 8:2
The first was that I was very busy.
The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could
not happen to me, not like that.
The third—I worried.
The fourth—envy, disguised as compassion.
The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
the aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too—its face. And the ant—its bifurcated body.
Ok the first was that I was so busy.
The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.
The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer
of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.
The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living
The sixth—if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I
touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had
to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.
The seventh—I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that
was alive and I couldn’t stand it,
I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word—cheesecloth—
to breathe through that would trap it—whatever was inside everyone else that
entered me when I breathed in
No. That was the first one.
The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened?
How had our lives gotten like this?
The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it—distinct, separate
from me in a bowl or on a plate.
Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.
The second was that the laundry was never finally done.
The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
love?
The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong
to anyone.
Historians would assume my s
in was sexual.
The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.
The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.
The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.
The sound she made—the gurgling sound—so loud we had to speak louder
to hear each other over it.
And that I couldn’t stop hearing it—years later—
grocery shopping, crossing the street—
No, not the sound—it was her body’s hunger
finally evident—what our mother had hidden all her life.
For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.
The underneath—that was the first devil. It was always with me.
And that I didn’t think you—if I told you—would understand any of this—
from The American Poetry Review
AMORAK HUEY
Memphis
You like to pretend you will meet her again someday in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis.
Tennessee—state of forgiveness, of makeup sex, of uneaten ribs. O Memphis!
Drink more, hit on waitress with tattoo & pierced navel, slouch toward gracelessness.
Imagine there are no consequences. What fails in your fantasies stays in Memphis.
Any home not your own offers a chance to shed skin & slither free from what is.
Ancient city covered with silt now, no earthen dam legible enough to protect Memphis.
You are so prepared to be disappointed by Graceland that you fall in love with it.
How have I failed to mention the music? That is, after all, why you come to Memphis.
Buy a shirt at B. B. King’s, guzzle beer on Beale Street. Hell yeah, Elvis lives.
Just another plastic anagram. Why would anywhere be different? Why Memphis?
Sun sets over this river city: the transient slap & echo of blues. Water makes the best witness.
If you never stand still, there’s nowhere you can’t end up. Why not Memphis?
None of us ever falls where we belong—we are ghosts on our way to someplace else.
This is especially true in the American South. Write me a letter from Memphis.
If you think you are happy, you need a more accurate measure. Nothing lasts. Ask Ramses.
Floods will always find you, water seeking other water. Even here, even Memphis.
