The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early-blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.
July. Central California. The heat comes on
and on and on until I think I can’t bear
even another day of it, but of course I can.
Dust rises and falls on the dry paths, the air
is a dense yellow one moment, and then the wind
swirls the dark columns of dirt away and lifts
the lower boughs of the alder. When I close
my eyes I can hear a music, perhaps tunes
recalled from long-gone summers in Detroit.
I begin to sing, and my cracked voice goes out
over the bowed heads of onions and the rising ones
of the giant sunflowers whose seeds arrived
last autumn from Amsterdam, sent by a friend
now dead. I see a bird, a wren I think,
a quick and delicate gray creature who darts
into a plum tree and turns her back on me
to swell out her feathers. When we both freeze
the music comes back so softly at first I hear
only the muted conversations of dry dull sheaves,
the breath released from runners of squash,
the breath taken back, and then the old themes
restated until the garden is dense with song.
“Lejan Kwint,” I hum the name of my lost friend
who clung to his life until he could not cling.
The great heads of the sunflowers fall and rise
in the winds they make. The bird dares the noon light
to pick from bloom to bloom, and now I see
the tiny puffed-out breast is smeared with rose.
A finch, I think, a finch for Lejan Kwint,
whose seeds beget more seeds through the long days
until the brutal air itself groans with his praise.
After the storm of his dying,
after the phone calls and letters
stopped, after the sudden outbursts
of tears, seizures that came on me
without warning and left me ashamed,
after those passed, he entered my dreams
one June morning, young and slender
again, in leather jacket and jeans.
Yes, of course he was dead! He waved
it away, smiling. It was nothing
to worry about, it was just life,
he said, laughing now at the joke.
Restless, he paced the room, raising
his arms in a gesture of disgust
or surrender, and shook his head
back and forth. We were in a place
I didn’t know, a second-floor
apartment somewhere in Brooklyn
or Detroit. A row of poplars
lashed with rain was keening, wind
bowed, outside the high rear windows
before which like a dancer he
slowly sank to the bare wood floor,
head downcast. All my life I’ve been
waiting for them, those I needed,
to come back, and now I could feel
him slipping away. I could hear
the day breaking in on our lives
just as he placed one hand in mine
and looked up, his dark eyes open
wide, accepting. Yes, it had stormed.
When I rose to open the shutters
the street was black with rain, the sky
above the trees a perfect blue,
the city still. All day I searched
shopwindows, record bins, bookstores,
even a Greek bakery for a hint
of what I can’t say. Late afternoon
I gave up and crossed the great bridge
toward home, the traffic groaning
below me. Ahead the city spread
out, my neighborhood thick with trees,
below them wharves and warehouses
solid and brooding. And above
the same sky, blue, expressionless
as always, without the least sign
of the arched rainbow of his faith.
Early Sunday morning he’d drive the black Packard
to the “island”—as he called it—a public park
in the Detroit River, and walk slowly
along the horse paths, both hands clasped
together behind his back. He always wore the good gray suit,
white shirt stiffly starched, black polished wing tips.
Why the horse paths, I wondered, that led us away
from the river, the broad view of the skyline,
the ore boats headed toward unknown, exotic ports,
why into the silent darkened woods, fringed
with nettled scrub and echoing with crow calls.
The September he came back from prison, penniless,
and took a murderous night job in the forge room
at Cadillac, he’d rise before dawn to waken me
in the still house. Whatever he was looking for
he never said, and I was too young to ask.
Eleven then, a growing boy, I believed
there were answers. I believed one morning
he’d turn suddenly to tell me why men and boys
went into such forbidding places or pacing
beside him, I would see some transformation
up ahead where the sky, faceless and gray, hung
above the pin oaks, and know for once the world
was not the world, that the breath battering
my ears and catching in my chest was more
than only my breath. I’d know all this was
something else, something unnamable
that included me.
That first Sunday no one entered
my room in the December dark to touch me
on the shoulder, I slept till almost noon.
The Packard gone, I thought, and Uncle Nate—
as I’d taken to calling him—gone as well.
I found him in shirtsleeves shoveling last night’s snow
off the front steps and singing hillbilly songs.
The house is still there, one of those ghost houses
from another era with mock turrets and steep eaves
the tourists photograph. It sits on a block
of rubble and nothing waiting for JFK
to come back from Dallas and declare a new
New Frontier. The last time I saw Uncle Nate
was seventeen years ago in a bar on Linwood
with a woman anxious to leave. I had to
tell him who I was, “Phil from the old house
on Riopelle.” He put his head down on the bar,
closed his eyes, and said, “Oh my God, oh my God,”
and nothing more. Yesterday morning my brother
drove me out to the island. It was raining
and he waited with coffee and the Free Press
in the echoing rotunda while I walked
the old trails, rutted now by tire tracks, the ground
spongy and alive in April. I felt foolish
under a huge black umbrella, but no one else
was out to see me, so I went on into a stand
of new spruce and hemlock gleaming in the rain
that drummed softly into last year’s dead needles.
Up ahead what little I could see of sky
lightened as though urging me toward something
waiting for me more than half a century, some
great truth to live by now that it was too late
to live in the world other than I do.
Down sat Bud, raised his hands,
the Deuces silenced, the lights
lowered, and breath gathered
for the coming storm. Then nothing,
not a single note. Outside starlight
from heaven fell unseen, a quarter-
moon, promised, was no show,
ditto the rain. Late August of ’50,
NYC, the long summer of abundance
and our new war. In the mirror behind
the bar, the spirits—imitating us—
stared at themselves. At the bar
the tenor player up from Philly shut
his eyes and whispered to no one,
“Same thing last night.” Everyone
been coming all week long
to hear this. The big brown bass
sighed and slumped against
the piano, the cymbals held
their dry cheeks and stopped
chicking and chucking. We went
back to drinking and ignored
the unignorable. When the door
swung open, it was Pettiford
in work clothes, midnight suit,
starched shirt, narrow black tie,
spit-shined shoes, as ready
as he’d ever be. Eyebrows
raised, the Irish bartender
shook his head, so Pettiford eased
himself down at an empty table,
closed up his Herald Tribune,
and shook his head. Did the TV
come on, did the jukebox bring us
Dinah Washington, did the stars
keep their appointments, did the moon
show, quartered or full, sprinkling
its soft light down? The night’s
still there, just where it was, just
where it’ll always be without
its music. You’re still there too,
holding your breath. Bud walked out.
He is not an apparition. After midnight,
coming home from the job at Chevy,
he materializes out of the darkness.
Yes, I’m weary, but I’m also sober,
and I know he’s beside me matching
me stride for stride. I wait for words
which never come. Some men don’t
live by words no matter how much
they know, and he knows it all. Dressed
in the same dark pin-striped suit
he wore to our engineering class years
before, wearing also that downward cast
of his eyes, the slight flush of blood along
the shaved cheekbones. Never did we
call him Johnny; even at sixteen
he was John, a man waiting to enter
a man’s world, the one that would kill him.
Had he seen me when I was young?
He sat stoically at his desk beside me
staring off into nothing or perhaps
the future while quaint Mr. Kostick,
our drawing teacher, went from student
to student to mark our progress, always
avoiding John. After the Christmas break
of ’43 his desk sat empty and the word
was the Marine Corps or the paratroopers
on some secret Pacific venture. No one
really knew until his name appeared
in a long list in the Free Press. Where were
the Marianas? I had to take the big atlas
down from the shelf, sit it in my lap,
sweating, and pore over that expanse
to find the small white dots swimming
in a great sea of deep blue, while outside
our little study window the October night
came on one light after another
in the street’s closed houses. Somewhere
there must be a yellowing photograph
of a black-haired boy in shorts, shy, smiling,
already looking away, there must be
a pile of letters to someone, useless words
that said what every boy has to say or,
if they’re gone, a sister who recalls
his early needs, those breathless cries
each of us stifles. He can’t just be me,
smaller now than I, his damp hands empty,
his breath my breath, his silence also mine
in the face of our life, he just can’t be.
When the winter wind
moves through the ash trees
in my yard I hear
the past years calling
in the pale voices
of the air. The words,
caught in the branches,
echo a moment
before they fade out.
The wind calms, the trees
go back to being
merely trees and not
seven messengers
from another world,
if that’s what they were.
The alder, older,
harbors a few leaves
from last fall, black, curled,
a silent chorus
for all those we’ve left
behind. Suddenly
at my back I feel
a new wind come on,
chilling, relentless,
with all the power
of loss, the meaning
unmistakable.
The wisteria has come and gone, the plum trees
have burned like candles in the cup of earth,
the almond has shed its pure blossoms
in a soft ring around the trunk. Iris,
rose, tulip, hillsides of poppy and lupine,
gorse, wild mustard, California is blazing
in the foolish winds of April. I have been
reading Keats—the poems, the letters, the life—
for the first time in my 70th year, and I
have been watching television after dinner
as though it could bring me some obscure,
distant sign of hope. This morning I rose
late to the soft light off the eucalyptus
and the overbearing odor of orange blossoms.
The trees will give another year. They are giving.
The few, petty clouds will blow away
before noon, and we will have sunshine
without fault, china-blue skies, and the bees
gathering to splatter their little honey dots
on my windshield. If I drive to the foothills
I can see fields of wildflowers on fire until
I have to look away from so much life.
I could ask myself, Have I made a Soul
today, have I sucked at the teat of the Heart
flooded with the experience of a world like ours?
Have I become a man one more time? At twenty
it made sense. I put down The Collected Poems,
left the reserve room of the Wayne library
to wander the streets of Detroit under a gray
soiled sky. It was spring there too, and the bells
rang at noon. The outpatients from Harper
waited timidly under the great stone cross
of the Presbyterian church for the trolley
on Woodward Avenue, their pinched faces flushed
with terror. The black tower tilted in the wind
as though it too were coming down. It made sense.
Before dark I’ll feel the lassitude enter
first my arms and legs and spread like water
toward the deep organs. I’ll lie on my bed
hearing the quail bark as they scurry
from cover to cover in their restless searching
after sustenance. This place can break your heart.
The job is over. We stand under the trees
waiting to be told what to do,
but the job is over.
The darkness pours between the branches above,
but the moon’s not yet
on its walk
through the night sky trailed by stars.
Suddenly a match flares, I see
there are only us two,
you and me, alone together in the great room
of the night world, two laborers
with nothing to do,
so I lean to the little flame and light my Lucky
and thank you, comrade, and again
we are in the dark.
Let me now predict the future. Two thousand years
from now we two will be older,
wiser, having escaped
the fleeting incarnations of workingmen.
We will have risen from the earth
of southern Michigan
through the tangled roots of Chinese elms
or ancient rosebushes to take
the tainted air
into our leaves and send it back, purified,
down the same trail we took
to escape the dark.
when you and I were lost kids, more scared than
now, but warm, useless, with names
and different faces.
When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He’s tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upward at the sky, which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn’t decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, “Would you like to eat?”
she hears a jumble of words that means nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
“wooden Jew” and “lucky meat.” He’s been up
late, she thinks, he’s tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but then he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to see if “their booth” is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one-liner, “We keep you clean
in Muscatine,” on the woman emptying
his wastebasket. Fitzgerald never wrote
with someone present, except for this woman
in a gray uniform whose comings and goings
went unnoticed even on those December evenings
she worked late while the snow fell silently
on the windowsills and the new fluorescent lights
blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.
Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered
only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon
with the other, but what became of the two
when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,
who first said “I love you” and truly meant it,
and who misunderstood the words, so longed
for and yet still so unexpected, and began
suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress
asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed
years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned
to the ground in ’67, two years before my oldest son
fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.
“And the lovers?” you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confusions?