A PERSON OF INTEREST

The headiness and the discovery
Of those first days of ours come back to me.
You talked of astronomy and medicine,
Of Cynthia Gregory and Mendelssohn,
Of David Lean and even his cameramen,
And things I’d never cared about before
Were fascinating now because of you,
Who’d been in the same room with all four Beatles,
Who’d loudly told a Frenchman off in Paris,
Who in the years to come would clinically
Carve up a body—thankfully, not mine.
You told me how at fourteen you had asked
Your father about Lolita and been told
“That’s not for you,” so of course you went ahead
And bought it the next day, less for a thrill
Than just because he didn’t want you to.
But late that night, when everybody else
Was sleeping, by the time that you had read
The second paragraph you were entranced—
“I didn’t know that anybody could
Use words that way”—in your headlong fascination
Forgetting any hope of titillation.
And you described a scene in Amadeus,
Salieri reading Mozart’s scores, his face
Showing how he’d been pierced by the sublime.
I listened to you and I watched your face
And the light swooping gestures of your wrist
And felt my insides melting the whole time.

MORNING

She finds her father’s body in the morning
Hunched in his bedroom, head against the wall,
Cheek flattened to the floor and turning purple
With the pooled blood. So then, it was no dream,
The outcry and the thud at three a.m.
She feels nothing. She had always known
That one day she would find him. Since the day
He’d left the hospital with a twisted mouth,
An arm set at an angle, a leg that dragged
Like a dead weight, he had spoiled ten years
Hiding inside, certain the sly neighbors
Would snicker at the marks a scornful God
Had put upon a bitter, sinful man.
In preparation, she had pared her time
Of everything resembling a real life,
Of boyfriends, friends, vacations, down to this,
Going to work and coming home to him
Through years constricted as the ones her mother
Was crumpled by, her mother who had been
Bent to his every whim, holding her breath
Around the house even when he was smiling,
Clenching herself especially when he smiled,
Till she had slipped into a welcome grave.
She dresses slowly and then makes her calls,
Uncertain how to answer when her boss
Shares his memories of his father’s death
And says he knows how terrible she feels.
While the men from the ambulance are busy
Taking the body, the policeman lingers,
Looking at labels on prescription bottles
Spread like a skyline on her father’s bureau,
Till she assures him the old man was still
The Catholic schoolboy terrified of hell,
Adding, but not for the policeman’s ears,
That he’d preferred the sneakier suicide
Of medicating astronomical
Blood pressure with a quart of scotch each night.
And then, when everyone has gone away,
She pulls the curtains back and opens windows,
Stacks dishes in the sink, and walks outside,
Blinking, into the middle of the day.
 

CLUB CAR

I’d see him coming home on the evening train,
But never in the morning. Did he ride in
To the city at first light? Might he have been
Already at his desk when the first plane
Came out of nowhere, bringing down the rain
Of fire and death? I never saw him again,
Though I looked for years. I didn't know his name,
But I stared at all the pictures of the dead
And never found him there. Was he my claim
To a small share in the horrors of that day?
Or did he grow afraid and move away?
I think that I’ll imagine that instead.

LEGACY

When I was small, when I was not so small,
My father stood before me strong and tall.
In side streets, in the thoroughfare
I stepped on his shadow everywhere.
When he was here, much more when he was dead,
A frozen monument in my head,
I strained and suffered, desperate to be
A fraction of the man who’d fashioned me.

My tiny son would crumple up his face
At any hint or whisper, every trace
Of death, and I ached to provide
A world where cats and grandmas never died.
Suddenly he’s thirteen, and we
Are at a movie that he wants to see.
Without a flicker of dismay he sits
To watch men shot and stabbed and blown to bits.

My brother and my sister and I have met
To sift through every cabinet,
To come to terms with all we find
Of the hoarded life our mother left behind:
Hidden for decades in one of the drawers,
Harsh letters from my father’s creditors.
I take them as a secret shared.
My father stands before me, small and scared.

Let my son, sooner than I ever did,
Find out the weakness that his father hid,
Let him contend as best he can
With nothing larger than this mortal man
Who breathes into the midnight air
What passes with me for a prayer,
Hopeful, worried, and alone.
And no voice comes to comfort but my own.

IN A LITTLE ROOM

          This is the ware wherein consists my wealth…
          Infinite riches in a little room.

You’ve got to watch the ball, I’ve always said,
It takes some funny bounces, usually
To places that I thought I’d never see
And wish I hadn’t. Now and then it’s led
To a wild and unimagined bliss instead.
Who could predict the serendipity
That the most exciting girl on earth would be
A woman in her fifties, here with me
All night, and every night, in my own bed?

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