The Punchbowl: An Elegy

 

Always be closing.

Vortex: a radiant node or cluster.

                        —LIAM RECTOR (1949–2007)
                           BLACKBOARD WRITINGS AT BENNINGTON COLLEGE

 

When I saw the punchbowl in the antique shop—

            Nothing fancy, midcentury, machine-cut, plain

Clear glass—a set of plastic s-hooks clipped to the side

            So you could hang the matching goblets from its lipped rim—

I wanted to break it without knowing why until my mind flashed

            Two decades back, to my old friend, Liam, and how,

In a flare-up once, in snowy Bennington, he called me, striking out,

             “A turd in a punchbowl.” Afterward, he leaned into me,

Just like a boxer—but I never thought of stepping back . . .

 

That was the sort of friendship we had—one of us stepping in,

            Aggressive, to provoke. The other, refusing to retreat.

Jealous and bellicose, pugilistic, something sibling-like,

            In the way we reared up and clashed. Lessons learned

In the homes we’d left, walking out on poverty and trash when poetry

            Caught our ear, and turned us on, and helped us flee.

 

Liam was angry about something when he called me that.

            And nearly drunk. Well, who wasn’t back then? That

Was how we shouldered through winter nights of child-size icicles

            Clenched to the steep slate roofs of the college dorms . . .

So it must have been one of those lung-hurting Vermont evenings

            When breathing, itself, was an existential act—

 

It was awful running home across the campus in the dark,

            With all those jagged borders of crusted frozen snow.

They frilled the edges of the plowed walkways, threatening

            As thick shards of broken glass. One inattentive step

Would body-slam you on the sidewalk’s icy slick. We all did it—

            Fell down, rushing home, drunk or stoned. Frightened

Of the cold. Laid out, corpselike, flat, on a steel-slicked sheet of icy snow.

            Sometimes, in our poems or prose, we’d share the visions

That arose from that position, looking up, stunned and frozen, too

            Horrified to look away from the cold infinity of the punchbowl, upside

Down, filled with winter sky, hovering above us like a giant’s centrifuge,

            Its inverted motor whirling, upwards, all the contents

Of the universe. Better to freeze. Better to bleed, and go on lying there

            And freeze to death than ponder what we thought we saw.

 

Well. Liam took things into his own hands, and died

            Early, while I went on living—still go on living, in fact,

With my dreary spans of rutted thoughts and stalled images

             (Like turds in punchbowls, Liam might roar) that snag me

In despair, and drag my loved ones along in my sorrowing wake.

            They know I won’t do what Liam did—still, my sadness

Gives them pause, and mucks up life for them, and me.

 

My old friend’s finished with all that now—no more dishes to wash,

            Or meals to make. No spills to wipe. No more carting around

The aging body’s decrepit bulk. (Pre-corpse, he called it once.) No more

            Struggling with assholes who never had a clue. He doesn’t

Give a shit anymore (if he ever did). He doesn’t give a turd . . . Deal him

            Out. He’s done. Dispersed. Shotgunned in a starry spray

Across the sky if that’s a metaphor that satisfies . . . It does, in fact,

            Please me to place him in a register higher than he ever thought

He’d reach where his parts are jazzed with buzzing energies—

            A brilliant vortex emptied of the longing we call life, permanently

Removed from the misery some of us he left behind still struggle with.