ON THE SURFACE

Things aren’t always what they seem to be.
Recall that morning long ago when we
Were eating in an empty Maine café
Three hundred miles from home, back in the day
Before a half a tablet could erase
Migraine in half an hour. I saw your face
Crumple and puff and suddenly turn red
As a flash ache exploded in your head.
I’d watched it happen many times. I knew
There wasn’t half a thing that I could do
But wait it out. I had to carbo-load
To fill my tank for the remorseless road.
I gobbled my whole breakfast and then most
Of yours—I may have left one piece of toast—
And while you dripped hot tears onto your plate
I sat and wiped my greasy lips and ate.
With no one else to serve, a huddled knot
Of waiters muttered at the soulless snot
Who fattened, having uttered who knows what
Heart-shredding things to you. They stared at me
With looks much sharper than their cutlery
And called the grizzled cook out to observe
This swilling filth who even had the nerve
To want more coffee. Brimming with disdain,
Throttling all cringing urges to explain,
I paid the check and led you out of there
Into the anonymity of the air.
I feared to play, once we were in the car,
Even a tinkling Schubert tape to mar
The silence that you needed to restore
You to yourself. You slept from door to door,
The whole five hours of the drive, thereby
Recovering your joy and grace, while I,
Who’d served the righteous crew at the café
A dish of drama, went the entire way
Thinking how often I had hastened to
A set of smug assumptions when I knew
Nothing about the situation or
People that I had never seen before,
Pole-vaulting to conclusions, desperate
To tell myself that I was not like that.
Yet with a lifetime’s worth of evidence,
Even with that insight I could sense
That I’d learn nothing from experience.

LANDS AWAY

Medieval maidens, unicorns optional,
Gaze down upon our bed from gilded frames
Tacked up above your bookcases, shelves full
Of Freud and Jung, of British history,
And row on row of Tolkien and like names,
Makers of magic, flights of fantasy,
Frigates you board to bear you far away
From the bare seacoast of reality,
The disappointments of the everyday,
Into a realm where good and evil dwell
With witches, water spirits, dwarves, and elves,
Wizards who wave a wand or speak a spell
To free us from the burden of ourselves,
A burden that you carry off as well
As anybody could, continually
Meeting the madness with an arsenal
Of wit and work and wanting, even when
You feel yourself sucked down into a sea
Of weariness, defeat, and villainous age
And find yourself still wishing there might be
A little bit of magic now and then,
And though I am no sorcerer off the page
I strive to play my part in the grand tale,
To summon up such spirits as I can,
Our huddled hearts, our sympathies of skin,
To charm you from the chasm of despair
As your devotion spins a hunkering man
Into a hero riding forth to win
All of life’s treasures for his lady fair,
Hoping this mundane magic may prevail.

NUTS AND BOLTS

In the middle of an ordinary day
You ask me, “Why do men like sex so much?”
I look at you, not knowing what to say
Beyond the obvious happiness of touch,
Of urge and stimulation and release,
Not certain what the question really means,
Not certain I should even try to guess,
Committed as I am to the increase
Of tranquility in our domestic scenes.
Is it to say that women like it less,
That it is something only men pursue
(A sentiment more suited to the age
Of that other, somewhat better-known Victoria,
Although I too have lived there: as a boy
I fattened on the lessons I was fed
Along with mother’s milk and father’s bread,
That women must endure what men enjoy),
Something that women give themselves up to,
Manipulating animal euphoria
To lure the prey into the baited cage,
Strap on the saddle for a lifelong ride,
And harvest him at last for steaks and hide;
That men cannot observe a plug and socket
Without a set of synapses being wired
And a heat-seeking missile being fired,
Aimed at its own or any other pocket;
That, as the stories (at least two or three
In each one of those monthly magazines
Whose covers, right beside seductively
Posed models, promise all the answers to
What men want/need/fear/secretly desire
In bed or out) would have you think, it’s true
That it is in our genes, and in our jeans;
That we are a degraded species who,
Sullen and base, all strive to smirch the higher
Nurturing complex creature, that because
An unexpected glimpse of (better not
To specify just here, just now, just what)
An unknown woman in the street we know
We’ll never see again can engineer
Suspension for a second of all laws
Except the law of naked need that feasts
On what it calls its freedom but must go
Where it must go—for all of this, my dear,
Shall I assume that we are all the beasts
That you would have us be? It would seem so.
And yet when I consider where the power
Has always lain, I think that I might say
You sound like a bewildered billionaire
Peering through the thick windows of his tower
And asking, “Why are all those folks down there
So damned obsessed with money anyway?”
Not much more than a moment has gone by
Since your words carved a tunnel in the space
Between us in our separate chairs, while I,
Your chosen beast, have entertained this race
Of rash responses I won’t even try
To put in words, not in an atmosphere
Where to explain may be to justify.
The question waits for me. The time draws near
To tame that undulating organism,
My brain (which you would relocate, I fear),
To seek to heal the chromosomal schism,
Allay your vaunted vestal skepticism,
With an answer that may render less complex
The mystery of why men relish sex.
What can I tell you? Shall I say that we
Are crawling grubworms all compelled to come
Back blindly to the place we started from,
Either to try to hide there or to see
If we might start again, do differently
(Although we know that from the moment when
Eden expels us it is far too late)
The things that have ensnared us in a mesh
Of our own making? Now I look to see
Your turned mouth and raised eyebrows as you wait,
And guess the answer that you want from me,
That we are creatures of our needs and seeds
Staking our claim on anything that bleeds,
That we have always waved our club of flesh
In an insane demand to dominate
Born of innate inferiority.
If this is so, if I am such a beast,
Then I am far too brutish to begin
To own to it, or even comprehend
That it is so. I would prefer (pretend?)
To give the matter a much gentler spin,
To tell you that for us, for me at least,
This being taken up and taken in
By the most splendid creature on the earth
Is the most certain way I know to win
A glimmer of my own uncertain worth.
Your eyes, your hands, your legs: why it should be
That contemplation of your symmetry
Triggers an excitation of the nerves
That bears the brain’s propulsive leaps and swerves
To southern strains, remains a mystery.
Such beauty, all the poets say, deserves
Its tribute, and my tribute, paid when due,
Crawls through the paths of beastliness to you.
Yes, I was made a creature, I confess,
Whose apparatus happily salutes
Any appealing set of attributes,
But grant me that I am a human, too,
Who takes the promptings of the sacks that groan
With stuff enough to fill the world again
And makes them all exclusively your own,
For use at such times as your beastliness
Comes upon you. And let me wonder when
I was picked out to answer for all men,
Who categorically have always fought
Against all categories, disinclined
To see myself as even the least fraction
Of any multibillion-part abstraction.
And suddenly there leap into my mind
The words that all at once I feel I ought
To say to you: “Speaking for me, I find
There are a slew of reasons why I do,
But most of all because it is with you.”
Now thirty seconds have elapsed, so I’ll
Assume you think that I have thought, and may
Bestow on you what I know I will say,
For it is true, and it will make you smile,
And fix your feelings elsewhere for a while,
And save this subject for another day.

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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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