The other half of the conversation
has flown off in a jetplane
to the country of her own tongue.
And maybe she’ll come back to me
or maybe not or maybe she was all a dream
I had in the blue garden in the dusk.
In the house the TV is watching itself
and the stereo listening to itself
and the fridge with its running commentary.
She’s out there. And I’m out here
among the moths and the last light,
the blackbird at her evensong.
In my other life in another country
on the world’s other side I get by, just.
A little fishing a little hunting perhaps.
Maybe I’m a professor of aluminum siding
at Pork Chop U, an aficionado
of the beauties of felt roofing.
Let’s say I drive a dusty brown pickup
with a roofrack and a rifle in the back.
What you’re up against here is decay,
that in the system that makes it break down.
Therefore I’m on my way to the Captain’s
to fill up the hole I’ve made in myself.
She’s bored with me, I tired of her long ago.
We get by with the kids and the payments.
All the radio stations sing the same song:
love goes away, it’s a sad tune
coming in over the airwaves and out
through the light years to the stars,
the same miserable message
to the whine of the same miserable guitar,
for forever or the next thing to it,
if anyone out there is listening.
On the one side my great great grandaddy
was Timuquana, chief in these parts.
A great hunter, woman chaser,
fighting man, joker, dreamer,
whose country was this where I work now
up and down the fairways and bunkers.
Look, here’s his picture on the matchbook
from the country club of the same name:
the leathery face in the braids
and the one feather that breaks
out of the ring round him like a seal
on a document, his motto underneath:
Old Red we call him to his red face,
Hey Mister Red, Yes Sir Mister Red,
you see the heat rise to his head,
and that’s what makes him crazy.
So then he’s writing inside his hat
like he thinks it’s New York,
Pay now pay later pay forever he says:
Gimme your name or I’ll break your face.
Seems I remember him in school,
snot running down his white trash face,
a pimpled adolescent chewing toothpicks,
beating his meat behind the bandstand.
Now he’s just a dirty cop in Meatville
writing my name down in his notebook
telling me I’m booked, hooked, cooked,
and I’m telling him this conversation cut.
Come down here this mornin Madson Wisconsin goin home Denver. Husban’s up there inna Vetrans Hospital Madson, s’real good hospital.
He got hit by a truck. Half his face smashed in, one eye hangin out. Couldn’t look at him.
Had to make myself. Asked me how I look Joy? I said OK Sonney. It was a goddamn lie. Looks like shit. No wonder I’m smokin like they goin outa style.
There’s only ever one argument: his,
bawling out whoever punctuates
the brief intervals his cussing
What you never get is silence,
always some groan on the horizon
out on the borders of attention
where would be quiet if they let it.
Always some conversation far away,
foreign, banal, dramatic, translated
it means my wife’s name is Judit.
I am an engineer from Spidertown.
What to reply? Your Majesty
my name is Smith. All lies anyway,
all we do is get drunk, the evening’s end
collapsing loosely into gutturals.
We drink to silence, where the stars think.
We drink to the music of rain on the roof.
We drink to mothers, brothers, lovers, kids,
to the candle burning down its length
till someone blows it out. Distance
makes no difference, the same want
for love and money, the numbers of the winning line
in the state lottery like a needle in the brain.
And then I’ve had enough. I want
to go home now, far away, plug myself
back into the sockets, the blackbird,
the evening humming stories to itself.
Everything in its place, the moths,
the mouse in the mousetrap. And
in the next street the same old argument.
He’s sure he’s right.
My mother. She was killed onna street. Had t’go home to Livpool England bury her. That’s where I come from, ways back. She was killed right onna street, hit by car. Knocked down hit an run. She was onna crossing. She was dead. She was inna right. But she was dead.
This music you’re listening to –
let me tell you why I don’t like it.
No.
You with your pretty little Doris Day wife.
She’s been buying and selling in cyberspace.
She’s looking at Jesus through the eyes of Bugs Bunny.
And yes. This could be me here among the glittering cities,
Eddie the Unsteady glimpsed travelling in the opposite direction
on an Amtrak out of Toledo, last heard from in a motel room
in Moon Township, old curmudgeon on a stick
limping aimless in America, through all the other zones
of time and distance and the self, beautifully lost
somewhere in the great riddle of nowhere, my double,
carbon copy, fax, living on my wits, conjuring
something out of nothing and taking that to the bank.
I’m sorry sir, we’re not connected to that service.
Your call cannot be completed as dialled.
Eddie’s on the hoof,
Eddie’s off the bone,
Eddie’s getting drunk
and won’t come to the phone.
Here he comes again my man Eddie,
making his way downtown on some cross street,
the rain and the cold wind in his face
down past Jerry’s barber shop and shoe shine
on his way to the invisible liquor store.
Like me he is of the brotherhood of men
with sticks. East Wacker to West Wacker
six times a day and back again, I was
a messenger then my foot got sick.
It collapsed goddammit. Eddie on the edge
of everything, Eddie on a freight train
to a heart attack. He can say
you’re the one who was here, always will be.
He can say only time I refused a drink
I misunderstood the question. Oh he can talk,
he’s the epicentre of any conversation,
it runs all round him but he’s not here
and tomorrow won’t remember. Any of it.
And through it all the dead music
of the buildings, airshafts and ventilators
and the electrics, the sirens hunting down
the streets of the trashed neighbourhoods
along the lake shore, scruffy trees
standing in black water, then just the gleam
of cities shining in the night, blur
of conversations over the Earth’s rim.
This is a fugue that is a dream of the world
that’s a bad dream anyway. Fool:
what’s this fist for, this automatic
in your guts, this knife? Fact is
in this bar he’s come in from the rain to,
waiting for a train or a bus or a plane,
fact is there’s not one not two not three
but four talking TV screens competing
for his anxieties. All this infests his brain.
Name’s Joy, an that’s my nature. But I swear to God it gets harder. Don’t much get on with Sonney’s two boys from first marriage, 16 and 18 years old, both of them crazy, crazy as lunes, out half the night raisin hell, come home, switch on TV stereo high as it’ll go.
Sonney wants me to move up there with them, thinks he’ll be there a while. Says he wants me with him but I don’t know, sella house, move our stuff, get those boys to help an I don’t know they will.
When I married my first husban Elliot I was a GI bride. Those days I was an entertainer, I was a stripper, clubs inna north, Leeds, Manchester. I thought he was the sweetest thing. We didn’t last. People don’t I guess. His business went broke an he took off, took a farm up in South Dakota, took the boy. I said I wouldn go, said I didn come here to be no farmer’s wife out inna wilderness, so we split.
It all happens so fast, in the long grass
looking up, or staring from the bus
going West: the stately kingdoms of the clouds
collapsing into violent republics, empires
forming and fading on fast forward.
The cartographers never catch up,
the mapmakers turn broody and suicidal,
the subtitles in an unknown tongue,
white on white and all too fast.
In a half an afternoon the history of Russia,
in an hour the discovery and conquest of the New World,
in minutes the development of moveable type.
The late bloom is on the sedge
reads the soundtrack. And the blossom
no sooner flowers than it falls.
the days are the great flatlands,
long arc of the earth’s curve
falling away on all points of the compass.
And what the light presents: barn, tree,
girl in an orchard, an old woman
The nights are the mountains,
to be got through in the headlights
east of the river or west of the watershed:
the same: speech that makes sense
only of essential things: bread and salt
in greeting, a glass of wine, farewell,
some place to lay me down to sleep
to the tick of the same bedside clock,
the battery wearing itself away.
Some dream or other, the moon wash
through the window blinds, the night city
with its night sounds. I’m on the road again
in my other life, the lights glittering
in the late distance, the wind
broken out of Canada and laced with sleet.
So here I am in this little town
between ocean and ocean with my bag
and my out of state cheques and no cash.
I’m rich in bad paper and dead currency
and they say money never lies idle
but what do they know of it?
It’s always this aching hour of the night
in some place called French Lick
or Mud City Indiana, the connection
half a day away to some unhappy town
where the furniture is made of neon
and sings in praise of K-Mart and the 7-11.
And there is always racket, machinery
that bleeps to say your dinner’s done,
your laundy’s dry, horns, talking trucks,
the chatter of the video arcades
and the low murmur of the soaps
Alarms no one ever answers, bells
that ring till the electricity runs out,
and then a door opens on a sudden blast
of heartbreak music, betrayal’s beat,
the same old blues of separation,
men’s inconsistencies and women’s.
Don’t know what I can do in Madson. Waitressin I guess. Just when I was thinking to live and die in Denver now I have to do the same for Wisconsin. I don’t know.
Sonney was driving to Canada, got hit up there by Green Bay. Hit by truck. He looked awful, don’t know how he’s gonna look when it’s over.
Kept askin me How do I look Joy, how do I look? It’s real good hosptal.
He was smashed up before. Photographer. In Veetnam got a grenade in his back, thirty seconds get it out with a fish hook. Goddamm Veetcong.
Now America is one whirled fire,
one babble of speech, the captions loosed
from the cartoons, the sentences
issuing out of the wrong mouths:
fuck you says Chief Joseph,
throwing down his spanner, fired
within six months of his pension
from the Milwaukee Cutout Corporation.
One more nightshift, leaves the bar
and torches the factory. Out in the wind
that picks at the stone face of the city
Schroeder stomps to his pickup:
from where the sun now stands,
punching the radio to country,
I will fight no more forever.
Now where we are we will always be,
the moon high on second hand light,
her dark weight lugging the tides
between ebb line and nepe.
We never got there, driving through Ohio
when the brakes failed, someone
pulled a gun, or in the airspace
of the wide Atlantic some instrument
gave in to entropy and heaved us seaward.
We are the names on the lists.
This is our baggage floating in the sea.
We are the percentage of the reckoning.
And the moon up there is our crazy sister
who just never got started, and we
are on our way to join the angels
in their interminable barbershop quartets.
Old trousers that were best once, now
they never go anywhere, mooching round the house
doing odd jobs, paint and varnish stains,
urine and spilt coffee where once was beer,
whisky, the faint aroma of sex on the hoof.
So the centuries flash by: all those handsome women
in pretty dresses that turn suddenly black.
And the impossible jobs: making a whole
of the hole in yourself, slamming the door
You’re on hold, in the queue, listening
to the Nessun dorma song on the line
and the sorry-to-keep-you-waiting voice,
faint electronics at the world’s rim.
Please speak after the tone.
Please leave your name and number. Speak.
Get it all off your chest: love and love’s
bereavement and how short a term of office.
Make your confessions, all the bloody times
you were a bloody fool. So speak.
To nobody out there.
I am a thief and this my thiefwork,
here in the rare book room in Toledo
rummaging the works of the dead professors,
examining their boxes of effects.
It comes to this: a stout carton
in which the late dean’s ashtray, gown,
seal of office, rotary inscription,
pipe, golf trophy and cigar-cutter.
Amen.
I guess I’ll do it all just like he says. My friend Marlene, she waitresses with me, real good friend, she’ll help me I know.
When my mother got killed onna crossing she said she’d come with me, help out, I said no. Strange goin back there. Hadn’t been in 40 years, hadn’t seen my mother since don’t know. But she was dead, so I just buried her, came away, nothing else to do but come on home.
she says, breathless, home again
from the long corridors of air and traffic
over the ocean’s curve, where I have prayed
to all the gods of wind and water
for her safe return, keeping the stillness
still for her. The stories tumble
over each other, interrupt each other,
all she’s met, ate, heard, trembled at
in the country of endless explanations
and too many sudden noises, the freeways
and the announcements yelling in her skull
from the continent of her own tongue.
All falling away, almost in her grasp,
a word forming in the ear of her hearing,
glimpsed in the moment that’s gone now,
the stray bullet snug in its target.
In the year of the comet, with vodka,
phenobarb and plastic bags on their heads
39 grownups went off to board the UFO,
each with a roll of quarters for the shuttle.
The telephone is in C. And the dryer,
that’s just a basso profundo klaxon
that won’t quit, that and the microwave,
that and the cuckoo clock and the planes.
Sleep is what she needs, and a dream
through which geese on the inlet,
near and then distant, fading south
beyond the night swamps into summer.
The rustle of magnolia in the wind
and the stars over all, a nightbird
calling over water, the oncoming
of the great trains’ wild concertos.