Andrew Feld

Andrew Feld was born in 1961 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his BA from the University of Massachusetts and his MFA from the University of Houston, where he was awarded a James Michener Fellowship. His other honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and a poem in The Best American Poetry 2005. His work has appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His first book, Citizen: Poems (HarperCollins, 2004), was a National Poetry Series Selection. Feld is Associate Professor and Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College. He lives in Racine, Wisconsin, with his wife, the poet Pimone Triplett, and their baby, Lukas.

On Fire

Having been taught by fools, how else could I have ended up

but as I am? a man who panics at the sound of his own voice,

a blusterer, afraid that within the five-pointed maple leaf there lies

another name he never knew; ready, always, to be found wrong.

Listen: in my tenth year they put me in a room where one plane

watched another plane fly over a city. It was morning in both

places. In black & white at first the explosion looked like water

rising. Captured, they say, on film, as in: pulled out of time

so we can rewind it and watch it happen again, as in a memory,

as in: this is a memory we all have, these are our family pictures.

There was that kind of shame. As if the fire really had been stolen.

And sitting on the floor there was one boy who even earlier

that year came home to find his mother hanging from a rope

in the kitchen. What didn’t he know that he needed this film

to teach him? Already what he knew was enough to terrify

the teachers, so that they couldn’t look at him. But they also

couldn’t not look at him. As if he was an obscene pleasure.

And he was beautiful. Complete. But what he carried in him

seeped out as hate for anyone of the same sex as his mother.

It was that simple: even a fourth-grade mind could understand.

So the girls stayed away. And from the other side of the common

room, where the books full of numbers being added, subtracted

and divided were kept, our new teacher watched, helpless, knowing

he also needed this knowledge, but she couldn’t give it to him.

Which might be why she let me touch her. Because she couldn’t

get near him and my head against the antique white lace of her

dress was a good enough almost. Her hair was light brown, if I

remember correctly. Innocent is supposed to mean free from hurt

but it can also mean you don’t know what you’re doing. As when

I felt that touching her wasn’t enough and I wanted to press closer,

until someone felt pain, or until I passed through her dress and found

myself inside her. It didn’t matter if she was an adult and I was ten:

what I wanted wasn’t sex. Or not what I have learned to think sex

is. Her dress was made of a material called vintage, which meant

that although it had managed to avoid all the minor catastrophes

of red wine stain and hook snag, along with the major disasters

of history, no one had treated the cloth with chemicals, to make it

flame retardant. And on the whole length of the hand-sewn inner seam

that started at her wrist and ran all the way down to her ankle,

no one had remembered to place even one small label warning:

if you touch the sleeve of this garment to the still-hot coils

of an electric stove, it will explode. Which is what happened.

There’s the kind of scream you hear in movies. What I heard

twenty-seven years ago didn’t sound anything like that. It was

sharper and can’t be recorded. No matter how many times

you rewind the film. You keep going back and each time

there’s a little less there. Until the memory has become

the event. And how you feel about the memory. The materials

have burnt away. There was so much fabric and all of it on fire.

Her hair too, which was long, as I remember. She came running

from the faculty kitchen, as if she could escape what she was

turning into. But all she did was excite and encourage the flames.

The Boxers

Here, in the middle of all this Houston heat, the two

sixteen-year-old feather-weights step-by-stepping around

a center which should be large enough to hold them both

are working out, with painful, close attention, a number

of terrible ideas. The heat in here is an idea: it has a purpose

and a taste: it tastes like mile after mile of train passing

by the chicken-wired windows, the endless linked cars

full of what you don’t know. The idea is that suffering

teaches you to suffer well, as though the end result

of dehydration isn’t the skin & kidneys closing up

until what the body holds turns toxic, but the appearance

of something new willed into the blood, made of pain,

which you can then direct at the only person in the building

as beautiful as you are. Although of course there’s nothing

sexual about this, the brief embrace of two boys, wet

with the same water you’d find at the bottom of any ocean.

And from the benches their plain-faced girlfriends watch, deep

in their impenetrable adolescence. As if all this was on TV,

as normal as the newsman saying a train carrying industrial

waste has derailed and is burning outside the city, and the simple

precautions: Stay indoors. Close your windows. Don’t breathe.

But these two boys are in it, the sweat washing down

their stomachs and backs rinsing the black air off their skin,

turning the absurd abstractions of last night’s news

into visible concentric rings around the waistbands

of their nylon Everlast shorts, as if all this was designed

to be a further test of their endurance, or show us

how even while you sleep your body can be making

serious mistakes, taking in lungful after lungful

of other people’s errors. The soaked fabric sticks

to their thighs so closely you can see the hairs

underneath and the moving weave of muscle and almost

the tight string stitched through the overlapping plates

of stomach muscle and cinched tight between them,

drawing them closer until the old men outside the ring

begin to shout they didn’t come here to see lovers

and another man comes in to pull them apart.

Intermission

As always, the music was divided	into two unequal
halves: first three new pieces	making their dissonant
debuts, and then the Brahms	symphony the evening
was advertised as. In the fifteen	minutes between,
as jarring notes resolved into	familiar tones of talk,
I watched a woman walk	across the lobby, spot-lit
by her local celebrity. To be	blunt: I stared at her
breasts, two loaves of blue-white	skin pushed up by
a green gown, with a stone	in the cleft. I followed
the angle of everyone’s attention	and there she was,
the bad press of her break-up	unrolling a few steps
of carpet in front of her. It was	a good story, if you
weren’t her. There were estates	on three continents
and an island, injuries measured in	the long numbers
banks use, and an element someone	wanted to own
all of. Fire, or air. Of course	I’m exaggerating. All
they wanted was the silver	she kept liquid inside her
veins. I mean her story was	personal, like history,
and public, like good gossip.	A ship set free from its
scaffolding, she glided through	the room, carrying a
small blue pool over the emerald	carpet, liquid and
spilling its light the infant’s	fist-sized brilliant she
carried away between	her breasts when she put her
old name on the papers	and the decision was final.
To make a diamond like this,	she told the press on
the courthouse steps, you	take two hundred and fifty
pounds of dirty money	and squeeze it between your
legs. But the diamond	was so clean light blinked
passing through and her	return to the name she had
grown up in was like a baptism	in its waters. Or so
I hope. It’s easy to hate the	indecently rich. And
the name she renounced means	blood-sport, which
means a stag trying to out-run	an arrow in its neck.
Of course I might have been	misinformed about who
she was and the stone spilling	its eaux-de-vie inside
the square neckline of her	green gown, glass, not a
brilliant example of the damages	she was entitled to.
But the line of fire flicking	from facet to facet inside
the pear-shaped pendant seemed real,	a gem-cutter’s
art turning our common glances	into an ecstatic light
counter-pointing itself, our	looking made visible as
sparks on her skin. The suits	and dresses crowded
around the bar stared star-struck	at the stone in her
cleavage as she walked by,	lifting their glasses up as
the current which carried her	toward the now-open
double-doors rose over their waists	and the recessed
ceiling lights blinked in three sets	of three, to signal
that the music would continue	with, or without us.