Collected Poems (16 page)

I reformulated her — them — forgave them, held them fondly, with a heavy lick of condescension, in my system.

But for now, there we are, Moira and I, down that hall again, in her room again, both with nothing on.

I can’t say what she looked like. I remember that I thought her somewhat too robust, her chest too thick,

but I was young, and terrified, and quibbled everything: now, no doubt, I’d find her perfect.

In my mind now, naked, she’s almost too much so, too blond, too gold, her pubic hair, her arm and leg fur,

all of it is brushed with light, so much glare she seems to singe the very tissue of remembrance,

but there are — I can see them now and didn’t then — promises of dimness, vaults and hidden banks of coolness.

If I couldn’t, though, appreciate the subtleties, it wasn’t going to hold me back, no, it was
she
who held me back,

always, as we struggled on that narrow bed, twisted on each other, mauling one another like demented athletes.

So fierce it was, so strenuous, aggressive: my thigh
here,
my hand
here,
lips
here, here,

hers
here
and
here
but never
there
or
there …
before it ended, she’d have even gone into the sounds of love,

groans and whispered shrieks, glottal stops, gutturals I couldn’t catch or understand,

and all this while
nothing would be happening,
nothing, that is, in the way I’d mean it now.

We’d lie back (this is where I see her sweating, gleaming with it, drenched) and she’d smile.

She is satisfied somehow. This is what she wanted somehow. Only this? Yes, only this,

and we’d be back, that quickly, in my recollection anyway, with the mother in the other room,

the three of us in place, the conversation that seemed sometimes like a ritual, eternally recurring.

How long we were to wait like this was never clear to me; my desperation, though, was slow in gathering.

I must have liked the role, or the pretense of the role, of beast, primed, about to pounce,

and besides, her hesitations, her fendings-off, were so warm and so bewildering,

I was so engrossed in them, that when at last, once and for all, she let me go,

the dismissal was so adroitly managed that I never realized until perhaps right now

that what had happened wasn’t my own coming to the conclusion that this wasn’t worth the bother.

It’s strange now, doing it again, the business of the camps and slaughters, the quick flicker of outrage

that hardly does its work anymore, all the carnage, all our own omissions interposed,

then those two, in their chambers, correct, aristocratic, even with the old one’s calcifying feet

and the younger one’s intensities — those eyes that pierce me still from that far back with jolts of longing.

I frame the image: the two women, the young man, they, poised, gracious, he smoldering with impatience,

and I realize I’ve never really asked myself what could she, or they, possibly have wanted of me?

What am I doing in that room, a teacup trembling on my knee, that odd, barbed name mangled in my mouth?

If she felt a real affinity or anything resembling it for me, it must have been as something quaint —

young poet, brutish, or trying to be brutish — but no, I wasn’t even that, I was just a boy, harmless, awkward,

mildly appealing in some ways, I suppose, but certainly with not a thing about me one could call compelling,

not compared to what, given her beauty and her means, she could have had and very well may have, for all I knew.

What I come to now, running over it again, I think I want to keep as undramatic as I can.

These revisions of the past are probably even less trustworthy than our random, everyday assemblages

and have most likely even more to do with present unknowables, so I offer this almost in passing,

with nothing, no moral distillation, no headily pressing imperatives meant to be lurking beneath it.

I wonder, putting it most simply, leaving out humiliation, anything like that, if I might have been their Jew?

I wonder, I mean, if I might have been an implement for them, not of atonement — I’d have nosed that out —

but of absolution, what they’d have used to get them shed of something rankling — history, it would be:

they’d have wanted to be categorically and finally shriven of it, or of that part of it at least

which so befouled the rest, which so acutely contradicted it with glory and debasement.

The mother, what I felt from her, that bulk of silence, that withholding that I read as sorrow:

might it have been instead the heroic containment of a probably reflexive loathing of me?

How much, no matter what their good intentions (of which from her I had no evidence at all)

and even with the liberal husband (although the generals’ reasons weren’t that pure and got there very late),

how much must they have inevitably absorbed, that Nazi generation, those Aryan epochs?

And if the mother shuddered, what would Moira have gone through with me spinning at her nipple,

her own juices and the inept emissions I’d splatter on her gluing her to me?

The purifying Jew. It’s almost funny. She was taking just enough of me to lave her conscience,

and I, so earnest in my wants, blindly labored for her, dismantling guilt or racial squeamishness

or whatever it was the refined tablet of her consciousness deemed it needed to be stricken of.

All the indignities I let be perpetrated on me while I lolled in that luxurious detention:

could I really have believed they only had to do with virtue, maidenhood, or even with, I remember thinking —

I came this close — some intricate attempt Moira might be making to redeem a slight on the part of the mother?

Or might inklings have arisen and might I, in my infatuation, have gone along with them anyway?

I knew something, surely: I’d have had to. What I really knew, of course, I’ll never know again.

Beautiful memory, most precious and most treacherous sister: what temples must we build for you.

And even then, how belatedly you open to us; even then, with what exuberance you cross us.

Floor

A dirty picture, a photograph, possibly a tintype, from the turn of the century, even before:

the woman is obese, gigantic; a broad, black corset cuts from under her breasts to the tops of her hips,

her hair is crimped, wiry, fastened demurely back with a bow one incongruous wing of which shows.

Her eyebrows are straight and heavy, emphasizing her frank, unintro-spective plainness,

and she looks directly, easily into the camera, her expression somewhere between play and scorn,

as though the activities of the photographer were ridiculous or beneath her contempt, or,

rather, as though the unfamiliar camera were actually the much more interesting presence here

and how absurd it is that the lens be turned toward her and her partner and not back on itself.

One sees the same look — pride, for some reason, is in it, and a surprisingly sophisticated self-distancing —

in the snaps anthropologists took in backwaters during those first, politically preconscious,

golden days of culture-hopping, and, as Goffman notes, in certain advertisements, now.

The man is younger than the woman. Standing, he wears what looks like a bathing costume,

black and white tank top, heavy trousers bunched in an ungainly heap over his shoes, which are still on.

He has an immigrant’s mustache he’s a year or two too callow for, but, thick and dark, it will fit him.

He doesn’t, like the woman, watch the camera, but stares ahead, not at the woman but slightly over and past,

and there’s a kind of withdrawn, almost vulnerable thoughtfulness or preoccupation about him

despite the gross thighs cast on his waist and the awkward, surely bothersome twist

his body has been forced to assume to more clearly exhibit the genital penetration.

He seems, in fact, abstracted — oblivious wouldn’t be too strong a word — as though, possibly,

as unlikely as it would seem, he had been a virgin until now and was trying amid all this unholy confusion —

the hooded figure, the black box with its eye — trying and from the looks of it even succeeding

in obliterating everything from his consciousness but the thing itself, the act itself,

so as, one would hope, to redeem the doubtlessly endless nights of the long Victorian adolescence.

The background is a painted screen: ivy, columns, clouds; some muse or grace or other,

heavy-buttocked, whory, flaunts her gauze and clodhops with a half-demented leer.

The whole thing’s oddly poignant somehow, almost, like an antique wedding picture, comforting —

the past is sending out a tendril to us: poses, attitudes of stillness we’ve lost or given back.

Also, there’s no shame in watching them, in being in the tacit commerce of having, like it or not,

received the business in one’s hand, no titillation either, not a tangle, not a throb,

probably because the woman offers none of the normal symptoms, even if minimal, even if contrived —

the tongue, say, wandering from the corner of the mouth, a glint of extra brilliance at the lash —

we associate with even the most innocuous, undramatic, parental sorts of passion, and the boy,

well, dragged in out of history, off Broome or South Street, all he is is grandpa:

he’ll go back into whatever hole he’s found to camp in, those higher-contrast tenements

with their rows of rank, forbidding beds, or not even beds, rags on a floor, or floor.

On the way there, there’ll be policemen breaking strikers’ heads, or micks’, or sheenies’,

there’ll be war somewhere, in the sweatshops girls will turn to stone over their Singers.

Here, at least peace. Here, one might imagine, after he withdraws, a kind of manly focus taking him —

the glance he shoots to her is hard and sure — and, to her, a tenderness might come,

she might reach a hand — Sweet Prince — to touch his cheek, or might — who can understand these things? —

avert her face and pull him to her for a time before she squats to flush him out.

Waking Jed

Deep asleep, perfect immobility, no apparent evidence of consciousness or of dream.

Elbow cocked, fist on pillow lightly curled to the tension of the partially relaxing sinew.

Head angled off, just so: the jaw’s projection exaggerated slightly, almost to prognathous: why?

The features express nothing whatsoever and seem to call up no response in me.

Though I say nothing, don’t move, gradually, far down within, he, or rather not
he
yet,

something, a presence, an element of being, becomes aware of me: there begins a subtle,

very gentle alteration in the structure of the face, or maybe less than that, more elusive,

as though the soft distortions of sleep-warmth radiating from his face and flesh,

those essentially unreal mirages in the air between us, were modifying, dissipating.

The face is now more his, Jed’s — its participation in the almost Romanesque generality

I wouldn’t a moment ago have been quite able to specify, not having its contrary, diminishes.

Particularly on the cheekbones and chin, the skin is thinning, growing denser, harder,

the molecules on the points of bone coming to attention, the eyelids finer, brighter, foil-like:

capillaries, veins; though nothing moves, there are goings to and fro behind now.

One hand opens, closes down more tightly, the arm extends suddenly full length,

jerks once at the end, again, holds: there’s a more pronounced elongation of the skull —

the infant pudginess, whatever atavism it represented, or reversion, has been called back.

Now I sense, although I can’t say how, his awareness of me: I can feel him begin to
think,

I even know that he’s thinking — or thinking in a dream perhaps — of me here watching him.

Now I’m aware — again, with no notion how, nothing indicates it — that if there was a dream,

it’s gone, and, yes, his eyes abruptly open although his gaze, straight before him,

seems not to register just yet, the mental operations still independent of his vision.

I say his name, the way we do it, softly, calling one another from a cove or cave,

as though something else were there with us, not to be disturbed, to be crept along beside.

The lids come down again, he yawns, widely, very consciously manifesting intentionality.

Great, if rudimentary, pleasure now: a sort of primitive, peculiarly mammalian luxury —

to know, to know wonderfully that lying here, warm, protected, eyes closed, one can,

for a moment anyway, a precious instant, put off the lower specie onsets, duties, debts.

Sleeker, somehow, slyer, more aggressive now, he is suddenly more awake, all awake,

already plotting, scheming, fending off: nothing said but there’s mild rebellion, conflict:

I insist, he resists, and then, with abrupt, wriggling grace, he otters down from sight,

just his brow and crown, his shining rumpled hair, left ineptly showing from the sheet.

Which I pull back to find him in what he must believe a parody of sleep, himself asleep:

fetal, rigid, his arms clamped to his sides, eyes screwed shut, mouth clenched, grinning.

Neglect

An old hill town in northern Pennsylvania, a missed connection for a bus, an hour to kill.

For all intents and purposes, the place was uninhabited; the mines had closed years before —

anthracite too dear to dig, the companies went west to strip, the miners to the cities —

and now, although the four-lane truck route still went through — eighteen-wheelers pounding past —

that was almost all: a shuttered Buick dealer, a grocery, not even a McDonald’s,