Poems 1959-2009 (39 page)

Of vaginismus, Pauli—

Except for the one bridge

To the next island. I'm free—

Dayley's first once Jewish,

Nonpracticing analyst:

Old, but she has no helper;

Station wagon, but

She's not a tourist; poor for

An island Venus or matron.

The man who sells me fish

Says he fought my Nazis,

The captured ones talked

Just like me—I'm somebody.

Last week—March-cold

In the middle of August,

Snow-blue, high, thin skies—

I drove the hour to Brunswick

To drop my suits at

Maine's Only Chinese Laundry,

A down-easter's,

With a Negro presser.

The man was just then off

For Hagard to shoot rabbits

For the reward,

Three miles off Dayley's east shore.

Years before,

A mainlander

Had loosed two white rabbits

There; now it was theirs.

Frail, pink-veined, pale ears,

And pink as perfect gums,

Pink eyes, rose noses, as if

Diseased—I'd been there.

The lead-gray Yankee owner,

After the shotgun blast,

Strode forward, gathered the bunch,

And one by one, grabbed each

By its hind legs while it sobbed,

And swinging it against

The bare lawn, slapped it dead,

And swung it to the shrubs.

I left the cleaners wanting

So to tell you. The sun's

Well up now. Our blue carpet's

Fading evergreen, Pauli.

 

I was the only child,

And a first boyfriend's brother,

Dead—in a shell-shocked truck

Crash, I think—in Sweden,

Couldn't make the war matter.

We wore parachute

Synthetic silk ball gowns

That year, at the Assemblies,

Which, looking back, all seem

A shifting, newsreel gray.

All I remember is, no one

Liked Truman, that there was

No gas for cars to speak of,

That the good things, my mother

Said, were rare-red and rationed.

The boy who would be my husband

Lived six blocks away,

And I didn't know him. Where

I lived, and where he lived,

And where we live now, you

Can see the bay apartments

And the crumbling prewar pier

And wharves—there, unused,

Before we could see that far.

One year, a new police

Patrol boat docked there, later

A small yawl. But the red iron

Pier understructure, resoldered

And buttressed, rusted and fell through

That year, and no one walks there.

There's a small park near the wharves,

And a playground—

But no lovers, never children.

A few old folks sunned there.

Some see the gangs, some hear.

On summer vacations from Ann Arbor

We used to walk there.

The one water fountain

Was a lush affair

Between two angels, fat as Paradise,

Nubile, and male and female,

Holding winged hands around

A base of rose stone,

While from heaven above, an aquiline

Brass bird, a green dove,

Gargled up, it seemed,

All the city's water,

Year after year.

It was never turned off,

And stood a foot deep

In pond-green watery refuse,

And was never used.

We'd thought of getting married there.

The warped, smutted kitchen window

Ripples the blue fume of November

Over the shore apartments and the wharves.

The window wavers in the oven's heat.

The street flows like lava, and the playground.

My baby stirs. Time to eat for it.

Cuddled in me—lovely! It will

Die in me, I know it will.

My child is breathing in my life,

Its heart is pressing on my heart.

You won't be here if you die on me

Before I have your child.

It's why I'm here.

To spoon the drugs up to your lips,

Be near your sleep,

Make you live an extra week.

What we have to bear

Will take two months, no more.

It can't feel you at all:

It rots the stitches and the lymph strings,

And gums you … dressing;

You go down rich, changed, sea-green

As tomalley. Cancer.

Balls of your groin, heart of your heart.

I feel you. The oven bell

Dings, and you call—the front door bell;

And in the hall, Papa and your mother

Gabble about our unborn daughter or son.

A perfect bird. Fatty sweat

Gleams on its bursting goosepimpled breast.

 

(In A.D. 9 Q. Varus marched three legions into an ambush in Teutoburg Forest. “From ancient times onward the circumstances surrounding the end of Roman rule in Germany have been an occasion for prejudice and rhetoric. Varus was made the scapegoat for the miscalculations of Roman policy; the contrast between the inertia or benevolence of Varus and the energy or perfidy of Arminius, between the Roman governor and the native prince, was drawn in vivid colours, and artfully employed to personify the opposition between civilization and freedom.”)

Holding his breath, he watched the whole wing flex

And flex and saw the bouncing jet pods stream

With condensation as they plowed through clouds.

He saw the stewardess back down the aisle

Smiling at seat belts. His lap was headlines—now

Another Electra had burst in two and still

No planes were grounded. Down there somewhere crowds

Hushed in the bars: the un-trust-busted Yankees

Were squeezing a World Series in the till—

Millions puffed and stared, the beer suds spilled.

The diplomatic pilot dipped a wing,

Lufthansa's bow to the United States …

His Volkswagen was waiting. If he drove

On through the night, by dawn he could salute

The Arch of Titus with his German plates.

Cologne he knew—Jew-baiting mothers who

Just couldn't get enough and chewed their hair.

Roman Agrippina had been born there.

Nineteen and weeping for perfection, he'd

Been lost each morning. He would wake with a start

Pacing along a lot that faced the Dom.

Powdered bricks had made the ground lip-red,

Electric bells bonged in the shaved-off belfry.

He'd watch the pigeons rise and settle, rise

And settle, gobbling, then he'd go buy bread.

Cologne to Wolfsburg for the People's Car,

Through Lippe,
Saltus Teutoburgiensis
.

Though it was Varus who when Herod died

Crunched up Judaea, from Teutoburg Forest he

Would bear the Eagles of Varus back to Rome:

History's straight-man, ambushed by his aide,

His trusted German, into suicide,

Bald, civilized, delicious—never praised,

But chosen by Augustus. Rome gawked, amazed …

The NATO general salutes the prizes.

His Holiness stops at
et credo
, and rises

To touch the braid and tatters. Washington

And Bonn have flown the long-lost Eagles home.

The place is crushed! the packed, cowed faces hushed,

Underdeveloped stomachs aching to cheer.

He heard the engines screaming for more air.

He pushed and drifted—waking smelled like steam.

Below him were the blank and linked-up roofs

Of suburbs … showers, crematoria …

The john tiles where his father's soft eyes worked

The crossword puzzle jackpots, poetry

Of Jews, ten thousand dollars for first prize.

Red bullets to the brain, the Seconal …

The world was turning into dawn, just as

The jet plane's sixteen landing wheels set down.

 

Waving
News of the World
, the other customer

Whines in his bib with laughter:

“‘The Nazi bombers still

Drop stink-bombs through the window,

But lobotomized now, she doesn't mind the smell!'”

The barber grabs me by the nose;

The blade flashes around my lips.

Leaving the Ritz, I watch the sun

Volley between the windows of the place Vendôme;

The column points the hour. My
Le Monde

Is covered with bombs

Stuck like gum to café chairs and station lockers

Exploding in Paris, Oran, Le Havre.

I sit down in the Tuileries.

Kennedy banquet at Versailles.

A Russian, Gagarin, in space.

No one is here—a day

As bleak as Boston, despite the sun. I remember

My father saying, “What should we do?”

I was fifteen, my mother forty-three.

“This will be our decision.”

Tumbling gold whorls of hair shaved back for the incision;

The skin, as always, Madonna-smooth,

Without a care, below the bandages;

Greener than ever, her eyes are open—

“How are you?” she asks, “how
are
you?”

And starts to smile, and is wheeled past.

My father's grief-stunned eyes clung to his face like starfish.

I recross the street: the zoot-suited Arab

Flashes his butter-blond Rubenses,

In black and white, sold by the pack,

As two more Black Marias

Bray through the rue de Rivoli

Toward place de la Concorde.

The column's shadow points the hour.

The plans for the place Vendôme

Called for a statue less than half its height.

Twelve hundred cannons seized at Austerlitz

Napoleon melted and wrapped around the stone

In a spiral of bronze. On the top he sits,

Surveying the City of Light,

Weighing the American flags brought out,

Those enormous banners, with outsize stars,

Stripes brighter than life, worth thousands of dollars.

They wave magnificence! Guarding the president,

There'll be the horsemen of the Garde républicaine!

Golden helmets afire, on chestnut stallions!

The West has bombed and bombed. Absinthe

Is now on Thorazine, the breaker of obsessions.

 

Itching from Kotex pads, from green, polluted perch,

The Seine scratches itself lovingly along the quais—

Itching from the new spring!

Hot prickly yellow wool covers the evening.

The Eiffel Tower is full of hot air, full to bursting

Hearing the countdown

Start and stop again, then again.

Brains, thoughts swell,

Like bulls snorting out

Passionate red roses from black nostrils.

While passersby's eyes lock with theirs in various grips,

Young Americans

Are swigging French beer on benches by the river.

He is there. This is Lucifer's palace

For his angels' vices. At midnight, when Paris

Looks at her face in the mirror, she sees a buttocks,

And straps on a device. Green

Is rumbling. Like a cat's sharpening claws,

The cracks in the sidewalks

Stretch out and dig in.

All startling legs and eventful spirit—

Corsaged handlebar, spring straw hat—

Bicycling on the flat through the snow

To Sever Hall, to recite her Sappho.

On hair like Hera's, black swansdown,

She wore white ribbons freshly ironed.

Unmarriageable Minoan eyes,

All intuition, delicately lidded.

The way she walked,

You'd have thought her body talked.

Those Harvard years

His ego hovered like a hummingbird,

Wingless, songless—halfway

Between his knees and shoulders.

Perhaps it wanted to embrace the universe.

Closing his eyes to caress

This girl or that, he saw stars.

Time the leukotome!

Softly slicing

The frontal lobes. That girl,

Bashed in by his love,

Happily married now … ?

He tries to remember what was happening:

The taste of zinc—the sight, without the sound,

Of thousands of hands clapping.

The empty beer bottle slaps the water

And sinks, hiccuping whitecaps.

Along the row of square, snow-white igloos

The white chestnut tree blossom clusters

Sift through each other

In the damp light and few breaths of air

Like the slow shuffling of a tambourine.

Even ugly new buildings here are rare.

Compared to French windows, these are loopholes.

The tight, washed rooms are small enough for nuns—

Small for maid's rooms! There are no closets.

Room after room is stained and pervaded

By traditionally ugly, self-absorbed,

Talmudic-brown armoires.

One shelf of each supports one kepi, at least—

A son's or father's—a beaked pillbox

Banded with gold or silver, police or army,

To keep the armoire company

With the nineteenth, the last French century.

There are no shutters. Everywhere,

Even just across the street,

Faded shutters are drawn.

Orange rungs climb the Persian carpets,

Scale
sujets religieux
and mount the sideboards.

The family, if it's home, is in the bedrooms.

The maid has turned the kitchen light out, it is so hot.

She cuts up cucumbers with the butcher knife

In thick, crude slices, a folded soaked zero

Under each arm, her neck shining.

Her old buttocks and vagina contract.

She has a vicious, weakly mind—