by David Lehman
trying to understand my motive to enlighten
by desecration.
In one of its enormous feet, I imagine a gift shop
where tourists can buy replicas
of Responsibility for themselves and friends
they think might need it. And I’d want
bumper stickers selling for almost nothing:
Less talk of conscience, more of consciousness.
I can see my friend, the ex–altar boy,
for so long injured by memory, writing
near the statue’s eyes, See everything;
overlook a great deal; correct a little—
then scratching jagged lines through
that wisdom of Pope John Paul II,
clearly now irresponsible. And yet his words
remain ones I’d like to live by.
How to defend that? How to decide?
from The Georgia Review
DAISY FRIED
This Need Not Be a Comment on Death
There’s my three-year-old mom c. 1942 in the flickery movie digitized to video: Slippery blond hair, you can tell from the light of it though the film’s black and white, squiggling the little chunk of her in her tank suit, sand drizzling from her knees, her own handsome mom, dead of cancer 1949, co-author of “Direct Observation as a Research Method” and “Children and War,” smiling on a dock. This need not be a comment on death because after all my mother puts her fingers
through my hair when I’m in labor. Contractions are jagged spikes on the monitor screen: The nurse turned the Pitocin up. My daughter’s heart zigzags its own hectic graph, a cartoon mountain range scribbled in quick. “Your hair’s always full of knots,” my mother says. Never a caress without a complaint. Dry air of grimly clean birth suite saps my mind, skin. Needs more joy, I think, quite cold, but don’t feel pain when “fuck my hair,” I say, and my mother, a plotline, leaves to wait at the B&B for news of her granddaughter. If she never said it? If I imagined it? If she was being kind? You’ll want to remember every minute of your birth story, and every birth story’s a great one, the midwife said. After thirty hours labor even the epidural can’t keep me awake, even hanging on the squat bar with the extent of my upper body strength. A plotline, I stop trying to push my daughter fully, completely, desperately out, and she’s born. Here’s the refrigerator I dragged from the wall to see what’s buzzing: A tiny toy robot bug crawled back there when my rarely crying daughter set it, legs churning, on the floor. And here am I, plotline who gave birth to her, hauling fridge desperately backward by edges. “Happy tears!” she shouts, angrily smearing with slashing curve of arm the bumpy mound of her face. “I’m stoic!” A word I taught her by accident when “she’s stoic,” I told my husband the first time she fell
from the high slide and refused to cry. “Stoic” crawled its legs and body into the refrigerator of her brain and stuck. My arms as far around the fridge as they’ll go: I pull, pant, I groan, leave squalid grease tracks on our gouged linoleum. The plug extracts itself from the socket, rebounds clanging the coil; the bug driving its blind head forward won’t squiggle free. “It has to run down and get quiet that way.” I crouch to wipe my stoic’s face with my sweat-wet sweatshirt, her fingers in my hair, she bites at it, flops back on linoleum. “It’s talking and dead,” she says, fascinated. Me exasperated. “I’ll buy you a new one.” Here’s the debacle. I can’t push the fridge back. It sits, an abandoned barracks in the pale field of the kitchen. A sigh, trickle, a cracking sound. “Why does everything die?” Her anger. “Why do I have to die.” A spike of outrage as faint buzzing not all that furious under the refrigerator fails to finish, as, like a glacier calving, freezer ice falls free.
The poem’s narrow shape actually resembles an icebox . . .
Camille Paglia on William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”
from The American Poetry Review
AMY GERSTLER
Womanishness
The dissonance of women. The shrill frilly silly
drippy prissy pouty fuss of us. And all the while science
was the music of our minds. We fretted about god’s
difficulties with intimacy as we polished our breastplates,
darned our nighties, sprawled on front porches
waiting for the locksmith to come and change the locks.
Our ambitions glittered like tinsel. Our minds grabbed at
whatever rushed by, like sea anemones at high tide.
Hush, hush my love. All these things happened
a long time ago. You needn’t be afraid of them now.
from Court Green
LOUISE GLÜCK
Afterword
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Why did I stop? Did some instinct
discern a shape, the artist in me
intervening to stop traffic, as it were?
A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,
intuited in those few long ago hours—
I must have thought so once.
And yet I dislike the term
which seems to me a crutch, a phase,
the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—
Still, it was a term I used myself,
frequently to explain my failures.
Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings
now seem to me simply
local symmetries, metonymic
baubles within immense confusion—
Chaos was what I saw.
My brush froze—I could not paint it.
Darkness, silence: that was the feeling.
What did we call it then?
A “crisis of vision” corresponding, I believed,
to the tree that confronted my parents,
but whereas they were forced
forward into the obstacle,
I retreated or fled—
Mist covered the stage (my life).
Characters came and went, costumes were changed,
my brush hand moved side to side
far from the canvas,
side to side, like a windshield wiper.
Surely this was the desert, the dark night.
(In reality, a crowded street in London,
the tourists waving their colored maps.)
One speaks a word: I.
Out of this stream
the great forms—
I took a deep breath. And it came to me
the person who drew that breath
was not the person in my story, his childish hand
confidently wielding the crayon—
Had I been that person? A child but also
an explorer to whom the path is suddenly clear, for whom
the vegetation parts—
And beyond, no longer screened from view, that exalted
solitude Kant perhaps experienced
on his way to the bridges—
(We share a birthday.)
Outside, the festive streets
were strung, in late January, with exhausted Christmas lights.
A woman leaned against her lover’s shoulder
singing Jacques Brel in her thin soprano—
Bravo! the door is shut.
Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—
I hadn’t moved. I felt the desert
stretching ahead, stretching (it now seems)
on all sides, shifting as I speak,
so that I was constantly
face to face with blankness, that
stepchild of the sublime,
which, it turns out,
has been both my subject and my medium.
What would my twin have said, had my thoughts
reached him?
Perhaps
he would have said
in my case there was no obstacle (for the sake of argument)
after which I would have been
referred to religion, the cemetery where
questions of faith are answered.
The mist had cleared. The empty canvases
were turned inward against the wall.
The little cat is dead (so the song went).
Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.
And the sun says yes.
And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.
from Poetry
BECKIAN FRITZ GOLDBERG
Henry’s Song
for Nancy and Bill
Sometimes sitting in a friend’s backyard on a fall evening
a thing comes to you. But then you second-guess yourself.
You second-guess yourself, and your grace is gone.
The cat dish is there by the step, overturned in the dry leaves,
the trees here taller than any trees in your dreams. You’re afraid
if you stay here they might talk. And these nights
you only want to hear someone say, Yes,
I think of these things, too . . . Nine o’clock, cold,
I couldn’t see the stars for the trees, only the yellow light
of the back window doubled over on the ground. In it,
leaves laid with the kitchen. Then a figure passed:
My friend reaching up into the cupboard and looking lost
a little while. His wife bringing in a cup and dish. Both of them
standing by the sink talking maybe about buying apples tomorrow
or what movie or the jacket no one can find. Her hair
was still damp from the shower and haloed in the kitchen light
as he crossed into the next room blue with the blink of the TV.
That afternoon my friend had thought his cat was lost and we
searched for an hour but the cat had sunk into a deep pile of leaves,
lay half-covered and asleep. The cat who was not lost was named
Henry and he was dead a few weeks later of old age. At night
he’d come in the room where I slept, and sit
staring down at the heating vent and, hours later, if I rose to pee,
he’d still be there as if waiting for something specific to rise
through the floor. But life inside the house that night was golden,
though then the kitchen was lonely, the cereal boxes misaligned
on the shelf, a nest of white bowls, mugs upside down in a row.
I thought someone will be left to open the cupboards after
we are dead and there see everything has stayed the way
we left it. Say yes, you think of these things, too. And that’s
when the thing that came to me came to me and when I
second-guessed myself I lost what the thing was. Sometime
it might return, but for now I’ll say it was nothing. It was nothing.
Inside the house someone was asking, Did you take Avantix
and suffer heart failure? Do you live alone? Are you tired of carpet stains?
Do you need a loan fast? Yes. And yes and yes and yes.
I’ve thought of these things, too—standing at the window while skeletons
on TV marched toward a cartoon cowboy. It was even stranger
in the silence of early November, away from home. But life was gorgeous
in the house. The glazed red sugar bowl gleamed. Months
later, my friend told me sometimes he’d still mistake
the shadow, the wool scarf bunched on the chair, and think
it’s Henry. As if the mind believed absence is a trick. For it
can still see everything. But the world asks, Do you have crow’s-feet?
Do you have enough to cover your funeral costs? Ever feel irregular?
Do you have trouble sleeping? That night the wind blowing
dead leaves sounded like a distant ocean, my fingertips
numbed with cold & the lit window held everything sacred
in its church. I saw that light the next day slanting as we walked
through an apple orchard and stopped at the mill for cider.
Farther on, we came to a large pond where pike and recluse sturgeon
lurked beneath the surface. On the bridge was a machine you’d put
a quarter in for a handful of food for the fish. I watched my friend
toss some in the water and the pond became alive with thrashing
bodies, the surface almost writhing with their gleams, the sound
of water laughing all around, and then they disappeared again,
the water like a shadow, deep, blue-green. And quiet. There was
a small breeze, an open field, a white clapboard building
on one side. Things are simple, that’s what we forget.
When I slept that night I left the door ajar for Henry
who would come upstairs late for his vigil, the warm air
floating above the vent from some underworld
benevolent beyond his dreams. And when I woke later in the dark
as sometimes you do in a strange bed away from home
in a strange town with a moon and trees, I could feel he was there
long before I could distinguish his shape, before I could remember
exactly where I was. It came to me this loneliness is something we take
with us anywhere and not that we aren’t loved, but that we aren’t
loved forever. Life demands much less. The fish is purely
fish and that’s enough. An apple wholly apple. Maybe it’s enough
to be human, leave the door open, wait for a soul—which, if it comes, comes
like the half of the conversation we imagined because we
can’t imagine that speaking is only speaking, even to the night,
the way we can’t believe death is only death, the way we can’t
stand outside a window on a fall evening in a pile of leaves in Kalamazoo
and not count ourselves among the missing. Are you single and looking
for your soul mate? Are you drowning in credit card debt?
Do you want more hair? Do you have trouble sleeping? Yes,
I have trouble sleeping. But, when it was my turn, I cupped my hand
and the machine filled it with food for the fish I scattered
over the water and they came like the rush of fat rain up
from the deep, glittering, swarming over nothing. It made me happy.
Then the green silence closing over them again. The little cat
waiting faithfully in the dark for his death and not complaining.
And us, knowing it is already a world without us, already a pond,
a cat, an orchard stuck with swords of light—
but the heart needs no reason for the belovéd.
from Plume
TERRANCE HAYES
New Jersey Poem
after Willie Cole’s Malcolm’s Chicken I
One of the many Willies I know wants me to know
there are still bits of hopefulness being made
in certain quarters of New Jersey. It’s happening
elsewhere too, obviously, this Willie would say,
but have you seen the pants sagging like the skin
on a famished elephant and the glassy stupor
of counselors in the consultation rooms, the trash
bins of vendettas and prescriptions, have you seen
the riot gear, what beyond hope could be a weapon
against all that? The summer I drove six hours and
some change to Willie’s place I found him building
a huge chicken out of brooms, wax, marbles (for eyes),
Styrofoam, and hundreds of matchsticks, but what
I remember is the vague sorrow creasing his face.
Like it wasn’t a
chicken at all at hand, like he’d never
even seen a chicken in New Jersey, or a feather
or drumstick—which I know to be untrue. A man can be
so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being,
a flavor indistinguishable from spit. He hadn’t done shit
with the letters and poems his wife left behind
when she killed herself. I think she was running,
I think she was being chased. She is almost floating
below ground now. The grave is filled with floodwater,
the roots of trees men planted after destroying the trees
shoot through her hips. Nowadays when I want saltwater
taffy or some of those flimsy plastic hooks good for hanging
almost nothing, I do not go to New Jersey. And I’m sure
no one there misses me with all the afflictions they have
to attend. Grief will boil your eyeballs if you let it.
It is possible to figure too much, to look too much,
to be too verbal, so pigheaded nothing gets done.
In those days, that particular Willie denied he was
ever lonely in New Jersey. His head, he said, was flushed
with snowfall, a blacksmith’s hand-crafted tools,
and a button that, pressed the right way, played a song,
a kind of chain gang doo-wop. To which I said Bullshit.
Willie, that’s bullshit, you stink like a heartbroken man.
I wanted to ask if he’d read the letters his wife left.
Somehow we made it from Atlantic City to the VFW bar
in Trenton without losing ourselves. I drove us through
a pre-storm breeze and a sickish streetlamp twilight
until there was rain on the windshield and voices
dispensing threefold news of what might happen,
what does happen and why whatever happened did,
the soul’s traffic. Somehow we weathered all that.
The chicken is in a museum somewhere now, worth
more than God, I bet, and so much time has passed
I can’t be sure which Willie made it. That night we had
some of its smell on our fingers. But the men we found
in the bar’s humiliating darkness still invited us in.
from The Los Angeles Review
REBECCA HAZELTON
