by David Lehman
(though if you eliminate dogs and pie and swimming
feels about right to me—
oh shut up, Lucia. The rule is: you can’t nullify the world
in the middle of your singing.)
4.
In the Autonomous Vehicle Laboratory
Roboseed is flying.
It is not a sorrow though its motor makes an annoying sound.
The doctoral students have calculated
the correct thrust-to-weight ratio and heave dynamics.
On YouTube you can watch it flying in the moonlight
outside the engineering building with the fake Ionic columns.
I said “sorrow” for the fear that in the future all the beauties
will be replaced by replicas that have more glare and blare and bling.
Roboseed, roborose, roboheart, robosoul—
this way there’ll be no blight
on any of the cherished encapsulations
when the blight was what we loved.
5.
They grow in chains from the Bigleaf Maple, chains
that lengthen until they break.
In June,
when the days are long and the sky is full
and the swept pile thickens
with the ones grown brown and brittle,
oh see how I’ve underestimated the persistence
of the lace in their one wing.
6.
Is there no slim chance I will feel it
when some molecule of me
(annealed by fire, like coal or glass)
is drawn up in the phloem of a maple
(please scatter my ashes under a maple)
so my speck can blip out
on a stem sprouting out of the fork of a branch,
the afterthought of a flower
that was the afterthought of a bud,
transformed now into a seed with a wing,
like the one I wore on the tip of my nose
back when I was green.
from The American Poetry Review
ROBERT PINSKY
Improvisation on Yiddish
I’ve got you in my pocket, Ich hob mir fer pacht.
It sees me and I cannot spell it.
Ich hob dich in bud, which means I see you as if
You were in the bathtub naked: I know you completely.
Kischkas: guts. Tongue of the guts, tongue
Of the heart naked, the guts of the tongue.
Bubbeh loschen. Tongue of my grandmother
That I can’t spell in these characters I know.
I know “Hob dich in bud” which means I see you
And through you, tongue of irony. Intimate.
Tongue of the dear and the dead, tongue of death.
Tongue of laughing in the guts, naked and completely.
Bubbeh loschen, lost tongue of the lost, “Get away
From me” which means, come closer: Gei
Avek fun mir, Ich hob dich in bud. I see you
Completely. Naked. I’ve got you in my pocket.
from The Threepenny Review
DEAN RADER
Self-Portrait as Dido to Aeneas
We wake: the night star-scorched & stained, morning fetal and uncoiling:
everything lifting: treehush and moondive: you at the window, the window
at day’s limn. The day (heart’s fulcrum) lists. Hear me: even if the bed
is an iron net, and the mattress a cage of twine and sawgrass: even if my legs
are bars and my arms are bars, the body’s chain of sweat and skin
is no prison: it’s the floating cell of the ship that will lock you down.
from The Cincinnati Review
SPENCER REECE
The Road to Emmaus
for Nathan Gebert
I.
The chair from Goodwill smelled of mildew.
I sat with Sister Ann, a Franciscan.
In her small office, at the Cenacle Retreat House,
right off Dixie Highway in Lantana, Florida,
I began my story—
it was an interview, much of life is an interview.
She said I did not need to pay her, but donations,
yes, donations were appreciated:
they could be left anonymously in a plain white envelope
that she could take back to the cloister.
She was dressed in a turtleneck and a denim jumper.
She could have been mistaken in a grocery store for an aging housewife.
My meetings with her went on for a few years.
I had come to speak about Durell.
I did not know how to end sentences about Durell.
He had taught me—what? To live? Not to wince in the mirror?
What? There were so many ways to end my sentence.
He was an unlikely candidate for so many things.
Outside, it was always some subtle variation of summer.
I paused, then spoke urgently, not wanting to forget some fact,
but much I knew I would forget or remember in a way my own,
which would not exactly be correct, no, not exactly.
Durell was dead, I said, and I needed to make sense of things.
Sister Ann’s face was open, fragile—
parts were chipped as on a recovered fresco.
Above her gray head,
a garish postcard of the Emmaus scene,
the colors off, as if painted by numbers, with no concern for shading—
the style of it had an unoriginal Catholic institutional uniformity.
There it hung, askew in its golden drugstore frame.
It was the scene from the end of Luke, the two disciples,
one named Cleopas, the other anonymous,
forever mumbling Christ’s name, and with them,
the resurrected Christ masquerading as a stranger.
They were on their way to that town, Emmaus,
seven miles out from Jerusalem,
gossiping about the impress of Christ’s vanishing—
they argued about whether to believe what they had seen;
they were restless, back and forth the debate went—
when there is estrangement there is little peace.
II.
Every time we met, Sister Ann prayed first.
At times, my recollections blurred or a presumption would reverse.
Sister Ann told me Durell was with me still,
in a more intimate way than when he lived.
She frequently lost her equilibrium, as older people sometimes do,
before settling into her worn-out chair
where she listened to me, week after week.
The day I met Durell, I said, the morning light was clear,
startling the town with ornament.
The steeple of Christ Church held the horizon in place,
or so I imagined, as if it had been painted first
with confident amounts of titanium white
before the rest was added. Trees clattered.
The reiterating brick puzzle of Cambridge brightened—
Mass Avenue, Mount Auburn, Dunster, Holyoke—
proclaimed a new September, and new students trudged the streets.
Every blood-warm structure was defined in relief.
Hours before, while the moon’s neck wobbled on the Charles
like a giraffe’s, or the ghost of a giraffe’s neck,
I imagined Durell labored, having slept only a few hours,
caged in his worries of doctor bills, no money,
and running out of people to ask for it:
mulling over mistakes, broken love affairs—
a hospital orderly, a man upstairs,
he probably mumbled unkind epithets about blacks and Jews,
even though the men he loved were blacks and Jews.
Some of his blasphemies, if you want to call them that,
embarrassed me in front of Sister Ann,
but she seemed unflappably tolerant.
At sixty, he was unemployable.
He had taught school and guarded buildings,
each job ending worse than the last.
His refrain was always: “It is not easy being an impoverished aristocrat.”
He spoke with the old Harvard accent,
I can still hear it, I will probably always hear it,
with New York City, the North Shore and the army mixed in,
the a’s broadened, the r’s were flat, the t’s snapped—
so a sentence would calibrate to a confident close,
like “My dee-ah boy, that is that.”
He lived on 19 Garden Street in a rent-controlled studio
on the second floor, number 25; he said the “25” reminded him of Christmas.
At eleven o’clock,
he probably pulled on his support hose,
increasing the circulation in his legs, blotched green and black.
Next, he would have locked the door with his gold key
and moved deliberately, his smile beleaguered.
Bowing to Miss Littlefield in the landlord’s office
at the building’s dark cubbyhole of an entrance:
they probably spoke of Queen Elizabeth II,
her disappointments, for Miss Littlefield and he were Royalists both.
Then Durell began to move towards me, entering the Square.
Breathing heavily, he might have passed the Brattle
advertising Judgment at Nuremberg—
inside the shut black theatrical box where the world repeated the past,
Maximilian Schell interrogated Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift;
Marlene Dietrich let the phone ring and ring.
Maybe he passed the Store 24 sign, bright orange,
passed Nini’s Corner where sex magazines were stacked like a cliff.
Maybe, maybe. But, maybe not.
Maybe he went another way.
Then I recalled how the T shook that place,
the subway grates pushing up the scent of rat-life and all things fallen,
mixing with Leavitt & Peirce exuding its masculine snuff.
Down Plympton Street he might have gone, past the Grolier,
which I always remembered, for some reason, as closed,
gilded with spines of poetry books for its reredos.
Yes, he probably, most likely, certainly, did that.
Sister Ann wondered if I thought he paused.
I thought not—
poetry offered him no solutions.
At twelve o’clock,
the chairperson called our AA meeting to order.
We called ourselves “The Loony Nooners,”
and met in a Lutheran church basement.
We ate salads out of Tupperware,
shaking the contents like dice to mix the dressing.
Some knitted. Schizophrenics lit multiple cigarettes.
Acne-pocked Kate wanted to be a model,
Electroshock Mike read paperbacks,
and an Irish professor named Tom
welcomed Tellus, who could not get over Nam.
Darkened figures in the poor light, we looked like the burghers of Calais,
and smelled of brewed coffee, smoke, perfume, urine, human brine.
We were aristocrats of time:
“I have twenty-one years,” “I have one week,” “I have one day.”
I have often thought we were like first-century Christians—
a strident, hidden throng, electrified by a message.
Or, another way of thinking of us
is that we were inconvenient obstacles
momentarily removed, much to the city’s relief.
From each window well, high heels and business shoes hurried.
Durell H., as he was known to us, took his place,
his thick hair fixed as the waves of an 1800s nautical painting
(perhaps he kept it set with hair spray?),
his Tiffany ring polished to a brilliance,
he set himself apart in his metal folding chair.
He had the clotted girth of Hermann Göring.
What was he thinking about?
Was he thinking about blood clots and possible aneurysms?
Imperious, behind prism-like trifocals,
quietly he said to me, “I’ve grown as fat as Elizabeth Taylor.”
III.
The meeting ended and Durell folded his metal chair.
He hated his Christian name—
“Durell,” he said, “Who names their child Durell?”
Moving among the crowd, listening to success and failure,
he passed out meeting lists, literature, leaflets.
Durell sponsored men, he referred to them as “pigeons.”
I met him that day. I was his last.
After that, every day we spoke on rotary phones.
I was young and spoke as if my story was the only one.
I told him I had underlined key passages in Plato’s Symposium,
told him I had been graded unfairly on Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio,
told him my schedule might not allow for the Paradiso.
He matched my telling with listening, advising,
and more listening, mostly over the phone,
and the more he listened the more he was alone.
“Why was that?” Sister Ann asked.
It was some sort of offering, perhaps.
At times it seemed he needed to guarantee a pardon,
that old Catholic idea of indulgences
lurked somewhere there unspoken,
as if he believed a larger offering might guarantee a larger pardon.
Such a task demanded his increased singleness.
Yes, that was true. Or was it?
I had trouble settling on the right words with Sister Ann.
Many of my words were not exactly right, the syntax awkward.
I kept having trouble translating Durell, so much I guessed.
How to know?
(Why hadn’t I asked him more questions?
He wasn’t the sort that invited questions, I do remember that.)
Another way of saying it was that when he was with me,
on the phone, then and only then, did he seem to move in truth
and in his truths, reprimanding and hard,
he was made more singular. Maybe that was it.
Whatever the case, he listened, he listened to me.
I missed his listening.
Listening, Sister Ann said, is a memorable form of love.
After the meeting, he gave me his calling card.
The cards were placed inside his compulsively polished silver card case,
the black capitals raised on their ecru background,
containing his name, bracketed by a “Mr.” and a “Jr.”—
the “Mr.” denoting lost civility,
the “Jr.” tallying a lineage that did not bridge.
As we walked down Church Street, the bells of St. John the Evangelist rang.
The road was bright, the road full.
Behind the brown gate with the thick black rusted latch,
the monks sang, “It is well, it is well, with my soul, with my soul.”
We peered in at bookshop clerks locating titles,
watch repairmen bent over lit ocular devices, fixing movements,
florists, hands wet, arranging stems and branches broken.
We saw ourselves reflected.
I laughed with deference, the way a student laughs before a teacher.
His skin was flecked with milk-blues, lead-whites, earthen reds.
In dress and demeanor he was as rigid as a toy soldier,
for he was a part of a republic with standards, atrophied, devoted to order.
Everyone found him impossible,
including, at times, me.
Of queers, his word for what he was but could
not admit to,
he said, “You know in the army they could never be trusted.”
I mentioned romantic love.
In profile, a silhouette, he paused.
He said, “It has been very vexing, indeed.”
By his tone, I knew never to ask again.
A decorum of opprobrium kept him whole,
and so he guarded himself with intensity.
Maybe, Sister Ann suggested, he was guarding me.
Durell said, “I’ve whittled my world down to no one,
Spencer, with the possible exception of you.”
IV.
“What happened then?” Sister Ann asked.
He excused himself with a handshake, his palms soft as bread dough
from all the Jergens he had slathered on,
and then he probably returned to his ambry of a studio,
a place where I would be one of his only visitors.
Although he handed out his number, he did not always answer.
I remember . . . (What do I remember?) . . .
I was free to turn away but the moment I looked back,
Durell would come back to me,
waiting for me. It seems to me now, after all this time,
few things have as much fidelity as the past.
I remember he had nailed memorabilia above his head
as one would place stones to fortify a castle:
a photograph of him in the army, liberating people, undoing Russian codes;
a framed marriage license from England
(although the marriage failed, he often mumbled her name);
his framed diploma, Harvard, and over the corner hung
his graduation cap’s faded black tassel.
Next to his pill bottles, an Edward VIII coronation mug he doted on,
commemorating an event that never took place.
Maybe he made a bread and baloney sandwich.
Maybe he stepped over the rolled-up tag-sale carpet and drew the shades.
By late evening, he might have jotted down notes about God,
obedient as he was to the twelve steps of AA.
He might have written in his tightly looped feminine penmanship,
informed by the Palmer Method,
and later repeated a phrase or two to me over the phone.
Or maybe he read from his Twenty-Four Hours a Day book
to find a rule maybe, or to search for a sanctuary.
Or maybe he listened to the Reverend Peter Gomes on the radio,
The Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard,
for he often mentioned how he loved the preacher’s parallel constructions,
yes, maybe he did that, maybe, possibly, he did that.
