by David Lehman
As I headed home, past a new log dream house
I could see from our porch, and wished I could own.
I was married then and lived in my imagination,
Writing the poems I was sure would make my name
Eventually, and meanwhile waiting out the afternoons
Within the limits of a world that never changed,
The world of stories. I was almost thirty-eight,
With the compulsion to immortalize myself
That comes with middle age and disappointment.
I knew what I imagined and desired, yet didn’t know,
For even though desire can delineate the contours
Of a life, its true substance is beyond desire
And imagination, unrecognizable until it’s happened.
In seven years the substance of my future changed:
Instead of summers on the lake, I found myself alone
And free, not wanting what I’d wanted anymore,
And happy. Happiness, unhappy people say,
Comes in degrees, and yet it isn’t true. The same
Ambitions and desires, the same attachments
And designs can constitute two different worlds—
A world I’d lived in and a world I never knew
Until I entered it, and made it mine. I wrote a long,
Meandering poem on marriage and its aftermath
That argued (if a poem can argue) that it never ends,
But stays suspended in time, like an afternoon
In August in our small cabin, with the television on
And the lake still visible beyond the door.
It’s all still there, in that decade out of mind
I never think about anymore, until some moment
In a movie, or in a story I thought I’d read
And hadn’t, or read and can’t remember
Brings it back, and then I’m thirty-eight again,
The future still uncertain and there for the taking,
Which is what I did, though I didn’t know it—
Which doesn’t matter now, for though those wishes
Did come true, it wasn’t as I’d dreamed them.
“The Monkey’s Paw” is a story about three wishes—
The first one a disaster, the second one an unintended
Horror it takes the last wish to dissolve—that ends
On an empty street. My story is not so dramatic,
Yet the ending feels the same: I have the life
I wanted, people know my name, music fills the rooms
Each evening and each day renews the miracle,
And yet it’s not the same. The real world can never
Realize a fantasy lived in the imagination,
That only felt like heaven while it wasn’t there.
I thought I’d read “The Swimmer” sitting by the lake
Those thirty-something years ago, but when I looked at it
Last week I couldn’t remember reading it at all. It’s a story
Devastating on its face—an allegory of the dissolution
Of its hero, who on a beautiful suburban afternoon
Sets out for home by way of swimming pools and alcohol.
His quest begins in confidence and gladness, but as its course
Unfolds its tenor starts to change, as the watercolor
Light begins to fade, the air turns colder and he ages visibly,
Until it ends in autumn, darkness and an empty house.
The moral of the allegory is implicit, but it seems to me
More moving read another way—as a reimagining
Of a life from the perspective of disillusionment and age.
It still starts on a summer afternoon, but a remembered one.
Instead of youth and confidence and hope dissolving,
They’re already gone, and instead of a deteriorating world,
It’s an indifferent one. I feel at home in this amended parable:
It fits the way a story ought to fit, and it even feels true.
Sitting in my house in the country, there isn’t much to do
But stare at the trees through the patio doors open to the deck.
It’s not the dream house I remember, but at least it’s mine,
And at least I’m happy, though I’ve lately come to recognize
That happiness is not what it’s cracked up to be. As for poetry,
Poetry turned out fine, though nobody actually cares about it
In the old sense anymore. That’s the trouble with stories—
They need to come to a conclusion and to have a point,
Whereas the point of growing old is that it doesn’t have one:
Someone sets out on an afternoon, following his predetermined
Course as all around him summer darkens and the leaves turn sere,
And finally arrives at home, and finds there’s nothing there.
from The Paris Review
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
* * *
The Fool
C’mon, Your Majesty, her brother?
I know the scent of belladonna
can poison a mind, even a king’s,
but would you dare to behead
your own nightmares? Now,
I hope you are more than pewter
& pallor. Where is the early heart
I gladly remember from the days
I hailed as your father’s cutthroat?
I know hearsay can undo a kingdom.
I never cursed your tower guards
& I dare translate their foofaraw.
I double swear on the good book
though I could be our Shagspere
or William Kemp paying his tab
with a proud penny & a plug nickel.
Your Highness, only a horsewhip
could heal my unnatural tongue,
that is, if you consent to be the first
flogged up & down the castle steps.
After the guillotine & a coronation,
you would think a king too weak
to properly father a son & heir,
in the unholy days of the masque.
My queen, today, my lovely queen
singing wildly behind an iron door,
her head ready for your oak block,
holds now her lame bird in a box
of twigs, a toy against eternity.
from Tin House
KEETJE KUIPERS
* * *
We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,
the dart of fish faint at our ankles, each
shuttered BBQ shack a kudzu flash
in my side mirror. Pleasure has become
the itch of a mosquito bite between
my shoulders, and your rough thumb on my thigh
a tickle gentle as turtles bobbing
in Sea-Doo oil slick and cellophane scraps.
How many years did I suffer the loves
that gave too much freedom and not enough
tenderness? Let me be like the man we
saw outside of Notasulga, hands cuffed
behind his back, cigarette in his mouth,
and you be the sheriff, leaning in close,
cupping the sweet flame to my waiting face.
from Gulf Coast
DEBORAH LANDAU
* * *
Solitaire
That summer there was no girl left in me.
It gradually became clear.
It suddenly became.
In the pool, I was more heavy than light. Pockmarked and
flabby in a floppy hat.
What will my body be
when parked all night in the earth?
Midsummer. Breathe in. Breathe out.
I am not on the oxygen tank.
Twice a week we have sex.
The lithe girls poolside I see them
at their weddings I see them with babies their hips
thickening I see them middle-aged.
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I can’t see past the point where I am.
Like you, I’m just passing through.
I want to hold on awhile.
Don’t want to naught
or forsake, don’t want
to be laid gently or racked raw.
If I retinol. If I marathon.
If I Vitamin C. If I crimson
my lips and streakish my hair.
If I wax. Exfoliate. Copulate
beside the fish-slicked sea.
Fill me I’m cold. Fill me I’m halfway gone.
Would you crush me in the stairwell?
Could we just lie down?
If the brakes don’t work.
If the pesticides won’t wash off.
If the seventh floor pushes a brick
out the window and it lands on my head.
If a tremor, menopause. Cancer. ALS.
These are the ABCs of my fear.
The doctor says
I don’t have a pill for that, dear.
Well, what would be a cure-all, ladies,
gin-and-tonics on a summer night?
See you in the immortalities! O blurred.
O tumble-rush of days we cannot catch.
from The New Yorker
LI-YOUNG LEE
* * *
Folding a Five-Cornered Star So the Corners Meet
This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness.
Maybe it’s my father’s.
For having never been prized by his father.
For having never profited by his son.
This loneliness is Nobody’s. Nobody’s lonely
because Nobody was never born
and will never die.
This gloom is Someone Else’s.
Someone Else is gloomy
because he’s always someone else.
For so many years, I answered to a name,
and I can’t say who answered.
Mister Know Nothing? Brother Inconsolable?
Sister Every Secret Thing? Anybody? Somebody?
Somebody thinks:
With death for a bedfellow,
how could thinking be anything but restless?
Somebody thinks: God, I turn my hand face down
and You are You and I am me.
I turn my hand face up
and You are the I
and I am your Thee.
What happens when you turn your hand?
Lord, remember me.
I was born in the City of Victory,
on a street called Jalan Industri, where
each morning, the man selling rice cakes went by
pushing his cart, its little steamer whistling,
while at his waist, at the end of a red string,
a little brass bell
shivered into a fine, steady seizure.
This sleeplessness is not my sleeplessness.
It must be the stars’ insomnia.
And I am their earthbound descendant.
Someone, Anyone, No one, me, and Someone Else.
Five in a bed, and none of us can sleep.
Five in one body, begotten, not made.
And the sorrow we bear together is none of ours.
Maybe it’s Yours, God.
For living so near to your creatures.
For suffering so many incarnations unknown to Yourself.
For remaining strange to lovers and friends,
and then outliving them and all of their names for You.
For living sometimes for years without a name.
And all of Your spring times disheveled.
And all of Your winters one winter.
from Image
PHILIP LEVINE
* * *
More Than You Gave
We have the town we call home wakening for dawn
which isn’t yet here but is promised, we have
our tired neighbors rising in ones and twos, we have
the sky slowly separating itself from the houses
to become the sky while the stars blink a last time
and vanish to make way for us to enter the great stage
of an ordinary Tuesday in ordinary time. We have
our curses, our gripes, our lies all on the stale breath
of 6:37 A.M. in the city no one dreams, the Tuesday city
in which we shall live for this day or not at all.
“Where are the angels?” I ask. This is a visionary moment
in the history of time, incomplete without angels,
without at least Argente of the tarnished wings,
or the mangled half-assed Incondante who speaks
only in riddles, or one-winged Sylvania who glows
in the dark. All off in eternity doing their sacred numbers.
Instead at 6:43 A.M. we have Vartan Baghosian with a face
seamed like a softball and Minky Schantz who pitched
three games for the Toledo Mud Hens in ’39 and lost
them all, we have the Volpe sisters who married
the attic on Brush Street and won’t come down,
we have me, fresh as last week, bitching about my back,
my bad ankle, we have psoriasis, heartburn, the four-day
hangover, prostatitis, Jewish mothers, Catholic guilt,
we have the teenage Woodward Ave. whores going
to bed alone at last, hugging no one for that long moment
before the young Madonnas rise from separate beds
to open their shutters on whatever the day presents,
to pledge their virtue and their twitching, incomparable bodies
to Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Tupperware. All this
in rooms where even in the gray dishwater dawn
the chrome grill on an Admiral black-and-white TV
gleams like the chalice of Abraham. And from his corner
the genius of this time and place, Uncle Nate, chomping
his first White Owl of the day, calls out for a doughnut
and sweetened milky coffee to dunk it in and laces up
his high-tops and swears by the vision of his blind right eye
he will have strange young pussy before the sun sets
on his miserable balding dome. Today we shall paint,
for Nate is a true artist trained in the eight-hour day
to master the necessary and not the strung-out martyrs
of El Greco or the brooding landscapes of an awful century.
No, today we paint the walls, the lintels, the ceilings,
the dadoes, and the doodads of Mrs. Victoria Settle
formerly of Lake Park, Illinois, now come to grace
our city with the myth of her late husband, her terriers,
her fake accent, her Victorian brooches, her perfect posture,
and especially her money. Ask the gray windows
that look out on the remnants of winter a grand question:
“Have I come all the way through the fires of hell,
the torture of the dark night of the etc., so that I might inhale
the leaden fumes of Giddens Golden Gate as the dogsbody
of Nathaniel Hawthorne Glenner, the autodidact of Twelfth Street?”
It could be worse. It could be life without mortadella sandwiches,
twenty-five-cent pineapple pies, and quarts of Pilsner
at noon out on a manicured lawn in Grosse Pointe
under a sun that never before caressed an Armenian or a Jew.
We could be flogging Fuller brushes down the deadbeat streets
of Paradise Valley or delivering trunks to the dormitories
of the Episcopal ladies where no one tips or offers
a pastry and a schnapps for the longed-for trip
back to Sicily or Salonika; it could be the forge room
at Ford Rouge where the young get old fast or die trying.
So savor the hours as Nate recounts the day he hitchhiked
to Toledo only to arrive too late
to see the young Dempsey
flatten Willard and claim the lily-white championship
of the world. “Story of my life,” says Nate, “the last to arrive,
the first to leave.” Not even Aesop could outdo our Nate,
our fabulist, whose name even is pure invention,
a confabulation of his prison reading and his twelve-year
formal education in the hobo camps of his long boyhood.
Wanderlust, he tells us, hit him at age fifteen and not
a moment too soon for Mr. Wilson was taking boys
off to die in Europe and that was just about the time
women discovered Nate or Nate discovered women,
and they were something he wouldn’t care to go without.
Call it a long day if you want and a hard one, too,
but remember we got more than we gave: we got myth,
we got music, we got underpaid work, a cheap lunch
with more to follow. On the long walk to the bus stop
and the ride home we hear the birds gathering
in the elms and maples thickening with summer finery,
and no one cares if we sing to the orange sun
that also seeks its rest, no one cares that our voices
are harsh from cigarettes and our ears worthless,
our timing off, and we’ve got the wrong words
in the wrong places. Let’s just give it what we have
and when that’s done give it a second time, one
for us and one for Nate, and even a third wouldn’t hurt.
from The New Yorker
LARRY LEVIS
* * *
If He Came & Diminished Me & Mapped My Way
Who was there in the uncountable stars, in the distance,
And in the cold glittering?
Who leaned with the wind against the trees all day,
And who slept in the swing’s empty stillness under them?
Who was present in the pattern of the snake fading
Into the pattern of the leaves again?
And who presided over the empty clarity of water falling,
Water spreading into a thin, white veil
Glimpsed just once in a moment clear & empty as a heaven—
Once heaven has been swept clean of any meaning?
