Night of the Republic

by Alan Shapiro

  That grew less round the heavier it grew,

  A tiny sack of water filled by water,

  Held by water trembling as it clung

  And dangled, swaying, till it snapped in two,

  And one part plummeted and the other sprung

  Back to the lip and grew all over again.

  I told myself if I could just remember

  The way the trembling surface tension full

  Of surface tension hung there till it didn't,

  Till it did again, somehow the house,

  And everything and everyone within it,

  The very moment of that day and year,

  All of it, every bit would return to me

  Exactly as it was. And I did. And it didn't.

  Bedroom Door

  The book informed you that the universe,

  Infinite though it was, was still expanding

  Though into where or what it didn't say.

  You didn't need it to, it didn't matter,

  Feeling space all around you moving off

  The longer you stood there in the hall to hear

  Their voices arguing behind the door,

  One moment shouting and the next imploring,

  Complaining, berating, don't take that tone with me,

  See what you've done, you happy now, you happy?

  Words flying beyond their meaning into sound

  That flew in turn beyond sound into echoes

  And after echoes you could feel, not hear.

  And feel more keenly the farther away they flew.

  The universe expanded to make room

  For all the outer space their voices were creating,

  Till even what was nearest moved away,

  Till there was nothing near, and everywhere

  In all directions all at once was rushing

  Forever from the shrinking dot of your

  Attention into who knew what or where.

  Solitaire

  The flip, flip, flip of card on tabletop,

  The flat hiss of the cards her hands were sliding

  From column to column as the columns grew

  And shrank, and shrank and grew, by suit and sequence,

  Her face unsmiling, fixed in its staring down

  At the unsmiling faces of the queen,

  The king, the jack that stared back up at her

  From the wrong column, or the wrong order,

  The royal family broken apart and scattered,

  Unable without her help to reunite.

  That's why she played for hours, sometimes all night,

  To prove to them how much they need her, how

  There'd be no family till she got it right.

  Would it kill them, for once, to thank her for this devotion,

  The slid cards hissing, the flip, flip, flip,

  While down the hall that wasn't a hall at all

  But a rope bridge over a gorge in the antipodes

  I huddled before the snowy screen where Ralph,

  The Honeymooner, shook his fist and said,

  One of these days, Alice, one of these days—

  Bang! Zoom! To the moon! And people laughed.

  Cellar

  They said the boy who lived here in my room

  Before I did came home one day from school

  And hanged himself from a hook in the cellar wall.

  They said he left no note. They said he showed no signs

  Of being blue—that's what they called it then—

  They said the day was just another day

  In just another week on a quiet street

  Where nothing ever happened, until this did

  And the family sold the house and moved away.

  They never said the cellar was to blame,

  The metal door slanted against the house

  That led by steep steps down into the black

  Of it that slowly as your eyes adjusted

  Became a pit of dark and darker shadows

  The darkest of which was the dead furnace

  In a far corner, a dank cold smell of ash

  Surrounding it as if to warn you off ,

  And there beside the furnace a chainless bike

  With fat flat tires, and above the bike

  The hook below a narrow window that

  The cut grass grew against and covered up.

  White Gloves

  Nothing as soft as the silk-lined leather gloves

  Kept in the top drawer of her dresser, the black ones

  And the cream ones, the slip-ons or the butt oned,

  Laced-up or ruched, the flared, the elbow-length,

  The heavy stifling odor of lilac and something

  Talcum-like that rose from the open drawer,

  Lustre of the red Dents, flat sheen of the Pitt ards,

  Day in day out, for high and low occasions,

  Until the last occasion, whatever it was,

  When none of them were ever worn again,

  Not even the white ones, the most expensive,

  The ones she buried at the bott om of the drawer

  That I would now and then dig out and look at,

  As if by looking at the pattern of

  The stitching or the textures of the grain,

  I'd understand the meaning of the pictures

  Of the president suddenly reaching for his throat,

  And the first lady turning to look at him,

  Turning to see what's wrong when the head explodes,

  And she's crawling out across the back of the car

  In a pink dress suit, pink hat and bright white gloves.

  Shed

  A cat jumped out of the shed when I opened it,

  And from far away inside a startled room

  Inside me that I didn't know was there,

  Somebody screamed, and it was only then

  I understood exactly what it meant,

  The science book that told me I was made

  Of cells, and the cells were made of molecules

  Made of atoms made of mostly space,

  And how within what wasn't space within them

  There were other spaces, smaller and vaster spaces,

  And somewhere within them all there was this room,

  And somebody inside the room was screaming.

  He screamed so far away across the outer

  Reaches of all that inner space, light-years

  Of emptiness between himself and me,

  That the scream itself was like the light

  Of stars that had vanished long before the light

  Had ever reached my eyes. So while the boy

  Screamed, and would not stop screaming, how could I tell him

  That it was just a cat that had jumped out

  From the shed, a cat, and now the cat was gone?

  Hallway

  You could stand in the hallway between rooms,

  Between belonging anywhere, and feel

  As if you were the wind harp of the house

  That the voices played, trembling inside you,

  If you were quiet enough, unseen enough,

  Your nerve ends, tuned to their very tips

  To every spoken and unspoken mood,

  Discordant mutterings and "the random gales"

  Of love cries, curses you could always feel,

  If not quite hear, above the laugh track or

  The gunfire or the talking talk-show host

  They turned up high to hide themselves behind.

  You were the wind harp of the listening house;

  You were the open instrument the voices

  Swept across, not knowing that they did,

  The taut strings of your attention trembling

  Long into what has long since disappeared

  From the dark hallway that is nowhere now

  But here in these lines where you feel the air

  Of every lost voice quickening again

  Across the mute harp they never knew was
there.

  The Doorbell

  The doorbell rang an eight-note melody,

  And if I didn't hurry down the stairs

  To the front door before the eighth note played,

  I told myself there'd be nobody there.

  The world impatient to be unaware

  Of me again would never bring them back.

  Why else would that eighth note linger in the stairwell,

  Drawing itself out to its last vibration

  Except to wait for me, keeping time away,

  Turning the present moment to a birth-

  Day present my every quick step down the stairs

  Brought nearer till the front door opened it?

  And even now I hear it, note after note

  Of the old melody whose last note pauses

  In the no time of my hurrying down

  To get to you, in time, whoever you were,

  You who I am now, whom I have become,

  The one the world's impatient to take back,

  The one behind the door who's pushed the butt on,

  And waits there listening for the sound

  Of anybody's footstep coming near.

  Notes

  "Dry Cleaner": the closing lines are by James Thomson.

  "Close to You": from "Close to You," a hit single by the Carpenters in the 1970s.

  "Amphitheater": the quotation is based on Pindar's fourth Pythian ode (lines 262–268).

  "Convention Hall": the second line is quoted from Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge (page 213); "in the midst of doubt..." is from Oliver Wendell Holmes's essay on the Civil War.

  "Hallway": the quoted phrase is from Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp."