and as usual in the wrong company.
Where the hell has Guy been keeping himself?
she wants to know. She sips her drink and looks at him
as if he’s brain-damaged. She spots a pimple
on his chin; it’s an ingrown hair but it’s filled
with pus, frightful, looks like hell. In front
of everyone she says, “Who have you been eating out
lately?” Staring hard at his pimple.
Being drunk myself, I don’t recall how he answered.
Maybe he said, “I don’t remember who it was;
I didn’t get her name.” Something smart.
Anyway, his wife has this kind of blistery rash,
maybe it’s cold sores, at the edge of her mouth,
so she shouldn’t be talking. Pretty soon,
it’s like always: they’re holding hands and laughing
like the rest of us, at little or nothing.
Later, in the living room,
thinking everyone had gone out for hamburgers,
she blew him in front of the TV. Then said,
“Happy birthday, you son of a bitch!” And slapped his
glasses off. The glasses he’d been wearing
while she made love to him. I walked into the room
and said, “Friends, don’t do this to each other.”
She didn’t flinch a muscle or wonder aloud
which rock I’d come out from under. All she said was
“Who asked you, hobo-urine?” Guy put his glasses on.
Pulled his trousers up. We all went out
to the kitchen and had a drink. Then another. Like that,
the world had gone from afternoon to night.
Bonnard’s Nudes
His wife. Forty years he painted her.
Again and again. The nude in the last painting
the same young nude as the first. His wife.
As he remembered her young. As she was young.
His wife in her bath. At her dressing table
in front of the mirror. Undressed.
His wife with her hands under her breasts
looking out on the garden.
The sun bestowing warmth and color.
Every living thing in bloom there.
She young and tremulous and most desirable.
When she died, he painted a while longer.
A few landscapes. Then died.
And was put down next to her.
His young wife.
Jean’s TV
My life’s on an even keel
these days. Though who’s to say
it’ll never waver again?
This morning I recalled
a girlfriend I had just after
my marriage broke up.
A sweet girl named Jean.
In the beginning, she had no idea
how bad things were. It took
a while. But she loved me
a bunch anyway, she said.
And I know that’s true.
She let me stay at her place
where I conducted
the shabby business of my life
over her phone. She bought
my booze, but told me
I wasn’t a drunk
like those others said.
Signed checks for me
and left them on her pillow
when she went off to work.
Gave me a Pendleton jacket
that Christmas, one I still wear.
For my part, I taught her to drink.
And how to fall asleep
with her clothes on.
How to wake up
weeping in the middle of the night.
When I left, she paid two months’
rent for me. And gave me
her black and white TV.
We talked on the phone once,
months later. She was drunk.
And, sure, I was drunk too.
The last thing she said to me was,
Will I ever see my TV again?
I looked around the room
as if the TV might suddenly
appear in its place
on the kitchen chair. Or else
come out of a cupboard
and declare itself. But that TV
had gone down the road
weeks before. The TV Jean gave me.
I didn’t tell her that.
I lied, of course. Soon, I said,
very soon now.
And put down the phone
after, or before, she hung up.
But those sleep-sounding words
of mine making me feel
I’d come to the end of a story.
And now, this one last falsehood
behind me,
I could rest.
Mesopotamia
Waking before sunrise, in a house not my own,
I hear a radio playing in the kitchen.
Mist drifts outside the window while
a woman’s voice gives the news, and then the weather.
I hear that, and the sound of meat
as it connects with hot grease in the pan.
I listen some more, half asleep. It’s like,
but not like, when I was a child and lay in bed,
in the dark, listening to a woman crying,
and a man’s voice raised in anger, or despair,
the radio playing all the while. Instead,
what I hear this morning is the man of the house
saying “How many summers do I have left?
Answer me that.” There’s no answer from the woman
that I can hear. But what could she answer,
given such a question? In a minute,
I hear his voice speaking of someone who I think
must be long gone: “That man could say,
‘O, Mesopotamia!’
and move his audience to tears.”
I get out of bed at once and draw on my pants.
Enough light in the room that I can see
where I am, finally. I’m a grown man, after all,
and these people are my friends. Things
are not going well for them just now. Or else
they’re going better than ever
because they’re up early and talking
about such things of consequence
as death and Mesopotamia. In any case,
I feel myself being drawn to the kitchen.
So much that is mysterious and important
is happening out there this morning.
The Jungle
“I only have two hands,”
the beautiful flight attendant
says. She continues
up the aisle with her tray and
out of his life forever,
he thinks. Off to his left,
far below, some lights
from a village high
on a hill in the jungle.
So many impossible things
have happened,
he isn’t surprised when she
returns to sit in the
empty seat across from his.
“Are you getting off
in Rio, or going on to Buenos Aires?”
Once more she exposes
her beautiful hands.
The heavy silver rings that hold
her fingers, the gold bracelet
encircling her wrist.
They are somewhere in the air
over the steaming Mato Grosso.
It is very late.
He goes on considering her hands.
Looking at her clasped fingers.
It’s months afterwards, and
hard to talk about.
Hope
“My wife,” said Pinnegar, “expects to see me go to the dogs
when she leaves me. It is her last hope.”
— D. H. LAWRENCE,
“JIMMY AND THE DESPERATE WOMAN”
She gave me the c
ar and two
hundred dollars. Said, So long, baby.
Take it easy, hear? So much
for twenty years of marriage.
She knows, or thinks she knows,
I’ll go through the dough
in a day or two, and eventually
wreck the car—which was
in my name and needed work anyway.
When I drove off, she and her boy-
friend were changing the lock
on the front door. They waved.
I waved back to let them know
I didn’t think any the less
of them. Then sped toward
the state line. I was hell-bent.
She was right to think so.
I went to the dogs, and we
became good friends.
But I kept going. Went
a long way without stopping.
Left the dogs, my friends, behind.
Nevertheless, when I did show
my face at that house again,
months, or years, later, driving
a different car, she wept
when she saw me at the door.
Sober. Dressed in a clean shirt,
pants, and boots. Her last hope
blasted.
She didn’t have a thing
to hope for anymore.
The House behind This One
The afternoon was already dark and unnatural.
When this old woman appeared in the field,
in the rain, carrying a bridle.
She came up the road to the house.
The house behind this one. Somehow
she knew Antonio Ríos had entered
the hour of his final combat.
Somehow, don’t ask me how, she knew.
The doctor and some other people were with him.
But nothing more could be done. And so
the old woman carried the bridle into the room,
and hung it across the foot of his bed.
The bed where he writhed and lay dying.
She went away without a word.
This woman who’d once been young and beautiful.
When Antonio was young and beautiful.
Limits
All that day we banged at geese
from a blind at the top
of the bluff. Busted one flock
after the other, until our gun barrels
grew hot to the touch. Geese
filled the cold, grey air. But we still
didn’t kill our limits.
The wind driving our shot
every whichway. Late afternoon,
and we had four. Two shy
of our limits. Thirst drove us
off the bluff and down a dirt road
alongside the river.
To an evil-looking farm
surrounded by dead fields of
barley. Where, almost evening,
a man with patches of skin
gone from his hands let us dip water
from a bucket on his porch.
Then asked if we wanted to see
something—a Canada goose he kept
alive in a barrel beside
the barn. The barrel covered over
with screen wire, rigged inside
like a little cell. He’d broken
the bird’s wing with a long shot,
he said, then chased it down
and stuffed it in the barrel.
He’d had a brainstorm!
He’d use that goose as a live decoy.
In time it turned out to be
the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.
It would bring other geese
right down on your head.
So close you could almost touch them
before you killed them.
This man, he never wanted for geese.
And for this his goose was given
all the corn and barley
it could eat, and a barrel
to live in, and shit in.
I took a good long look and,
unmoving, the goose looked back.
Only its eyes telling me
it was alive. Then we left,
my friend and I. Still
willing to kill anything
that moved, anything that rose
over our sights. I don’t
recall if we got anything else
that day. I doubt it.
It was almost dark anyhow.
No matter, now. But for years
and years afterwards, living
on a staple of bitterness, I
didn’t forget that goose.
I set it apart from all the others,
living and dead. Came to understand
one can get used to anything,
and become a stranger to nothing.
Saw that betrayal is just another word
for loss, for hunger.
The Sensitive Girl
This is the fourth day I’ve been here.
But, no joke, there’s a spider
on this pane of glass
that’s been around even longer. It doesn’t
move, but I know it’s alive.
Fine with me that lights are coming on
in the valleys. It’s pretty here,
and quiet. Cattle are being driven home.
If I listen, I can hear cowbells
and then the slap-slap of the driver’s
stick. There’s haze
over these lumpy Swiss hills. Below the house,
a race of water through the alders.
Jets of water tossed up,
sweet and hopeful.
There was a time
I would’ve died for love.
No more. That center wouldn’t hold.
It collapsed. It gives off
no light. Its orbit
an orbit of weariness. But I worry
that time and wish I knew why.
Who wants to remember
when poverty and disgrace pushed
through the door, followed by a cop
to invest the scene
with horrible authority?
The latch was fastened, but
that never stopped anybody back then.
Hey, no one breathed in those days.
Ask her, if you don’t believe me!
Assuming you could find her and
make her talk. That girl who dreamed
and sang. Who sometimes hummed
when she made love. The sensitive girl.
The one who cracked.
I’m a grown man now, and then some.
So how much longer do I have?
How much longer for that spider?
Where will he go, two days into fall,
the leaves dropping?
The cattle have entered their pen.
The man with the stick raises his arm.
Then closes and fastens the gate.
I find myself, at last, in perfect silence.
Knowing the little that is left.
Knowing I have to love it.
Wanting to love it. For both our sake.
II
The Minuet
Bright mornings.
Days when I want so much I want nothing.
Just this life, and no more. Still,
I hope no one comes along.
But if someone does, I hope it’s her.
The one with the little diamond stars
at the toes of her shoes.
The girl I saw dance the minuet.
That antique dance.
The minuet. She danced that
the way it should be danced.
And the way she wanted.
Egress
I opened the old spiral notebook to see what I’d been
thinking in those days. There was one entry,
in a hand I didn’t recognize as mine, but was mine.
All that paper I’d let go to waste back then!
R
emoving the door for Dr Kurbitz.
What on earth could that possibly mean to me,
or anyone, today? Then I went back
to that time. To just after being married. How I earned
our daily bread delivering for Al Kurbitz,
the pharmacist. Whose brother Ken—Dr Kurbitz
to me, the ear-nose-and-throat man—fell dead
one night after dinner, after
talking over some business deal. He died in the bathroom,
his body wedged between the door and toilet stool.
Blocking the way. First the whump
of a body hitting the floor, and then Mr Kurbitz
and his snazzy sister-in-law shouting “Ken! Ken!”
and pushing on the bathroom door.
Mr Kurbitz had to take the door off its hinges
with a screwdriver. It saved the ambulance drivers
a minute, maybe. He said his brother never knew
what hit him. Dead before he hit the floor.
Since then, I’ve seen doors removed from their hinges
many times, with and without the aid of screwdrivers.
But I’d forgotten about Dr Kurbitz, and so much else
from that time. Never, until today, did I connect
this act with dying.
In those days, death,
if it happened, happened to others. Old people
belonging to my parents. Or else people of consequence.
People in a different income bracket, whose death
and removal had nothing to do with me, or mine.
We were living in Dr Coglon’s basement
apartment, and I was in love for the first time
ever. My wife was pregnant. We were thrilled
beyond measure or accounting for, given our mean
surroundings. And that, I’m saying, may be why
I never wrote more about Dr Kurbitz,
his brother Al, or doors that had to be taken off
their hinges for the sake of dead people.
What the hell! Who needed death and notebooks? We
were young and happy. Death was coming, sure.
But for the old and worn-out. Or else people in books.
And, once in a while, the well-heeled professionals
I trembled before and said “Yes, Sir” to.