FROM
The Arrival of the Future
(1985)
The Woman at the Laundromat
Crying “Mercy”
And the glass eyes of dryers whirl
on either side, the roar just loud enough
to still the talk of women. Nothing
is said easily here. Below the screams
of two kids skateboarding in the aisles
thuds and rumbles smother everything,
even the woman crying mercy, mercy.
Torn slips of paper on a board swear
Jesus is the Lord, nude photo sessions
can help girls who want to learn, the price
for Sunshine Day School is affordable,
astrology can change your life, any
life. Long white rows of washers lead
straight as highways to a change machine
that turns dollars into dimes to keep
the dryers running. When they stop,
the women lift the dry things out and hold
the sheets between them, pressing corners
warm as babies to their breasts. In back,
the change machine has jammed and a woman
beats it with her fists, crying mercy, mercy.
As a kid sitting in a yellow-vinyl
booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern,
you watch the late-afternoon drunks
coming and going, sunlight breaking
through the smoky dark as the door
opens and closes, and it’s the future
flashing ahead like the taillights
of a semi as you drop over a rise
in the road on your way to Amarillo,
bright lights and blonde-haired women,
as Billy used to say, slumped over
his beer like a snail, make a real man
out of you, the smile bleak as the gaps
between his teeth, stay loose, son,
don’t die before you’re dead. Always
the warnings from men you worked with
before they broke, blue fingernails,
eyes red as fate. A different life
for me, you think, and outside later,
feeling young and strong enough to raise
the sun back up, you stare down Highway 54,
pushing everything—stars, sky, moon,
all but a thin line at the edge
of the world—behind you. Your headlights
sweep across the tavern window,
ripping the dark from the small, humped
shapes of men inside who turn and look,
like small animals caught in the glare
of your lights on the road to Amarillo.
from Kansas Avenue, a sequence of five poems
The windows form a sun in white squares.
Across the street
the Blue Bird Cafe leans into shadow and the cook
stands in the doorway.
Men from harvest crews step from the Robinson
in clean white shirts
and new jeans. They stroll beneath the awning,
smoking Camels,
considering the blue tattoos beneath their sleeves,
Friday nights
in San Diego years ago, a woman, pink neon lights
rippling in rainwater.
Tonight, chicken-fried steak and coffee alone
at the Bluebird,
a double feature at The Plaza: The Country Girl,
The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
The town’s night-soul, a marquee flashing orange
bulbs, stuns the windows
of the Robinson. The men will leave as heroes,
undiscovered.
Their deaths will be significant and beautiful
as bright aircraft,
sun glancing on silver wings, twisting, settling
into green seas.
In their room at night, they see Grace Kelly
bending at their bedsides.
They move their hands slowly over their chests
and raise their knees
against the sheets. The Plaza’s orange light
fills the curtains.
Cardboard suitcases lie open, white shirts folded
like pressed flowers.
In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream. . . . One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking back one sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return.
—GEORGE STEINER
Outside my window the wasps
are making their slow circle,
dizzy flights of forage and return,
hovering among azaleas
that bob in a sluggish breeze
this humid, sun-torn morning.
Yesterday my wife held me here
as I thrashed and moaned, her hand
in my foaming mouth, and my son
saw what he was warned he might.
Last night dreams stormed my brain
in thick swirls of shame and fear.
Behind a white garage a locked shed
full of wide-eyed dolls burned,
yellow smoke boiling up in huge clumps
as I watched, feet nailed to the ground.
In dining cars white tablecloths
unfolded wings and flew like gulls.
An old German in a green Homburg
sang lieder, Mein Herz ist müde.
In a garden in Pasadena my father
posed in Navy whites while overhead
silver dirigibles moved like great whales.
And in the narrowing tunnel
of the dream’s end I flew down
onto the iron red road
of my grandfather’s farm.
There was a white rail fence.
In the green meadow beyond,
a small boy walked toward me.
His smile was the moon’s rim.
Across his eggshell eyes
ran scenes from my future life,
and he embraced me like a son
or father or my lost brother.
Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college
one winter, hauling a load of Herefords
from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of
Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser
Elegien on the seat beside him, saw the ass-end
of his semi gliding around in the side mirror
as he hit ice and knew he would never live
to see graduation or the castle at Duino.
In the hospital, head wrapped like a gift
(the nurses had stuck a bow on top), he said
four flaming angels crouched on the hood, wings
spread so wide he couldn’t see, and then
the world collapsed. We smiled and passed a flask
around. Little Bill and I sang “Your Cheatin’
Heart” and laughed, and then a sudden quiet
put a hard edge on the morning and we left.
Siehe, ich lebe, Look, I’m alive, he said,
leaping down the hospital steps. The nurses
waved, white dresses puffed out like pigeons
in the morning breeze. We roared off in my Dodge,
Behold, I come like a thief! he shouted to the town
and gave his life to poetry. He lives, now,
in the south of France. His poems arrive
by mail, and we read them and do not understand.
A woman waits in line and reads
from a book of poems to kill time.
When her items come up to be counted,
the check-out girl greets the book
like a lost child: The House on Marshland!
she says, and they share certain lines:
“the late apples, red and gold, / like words
of another language.”
The black belt rolls on. Groceries flow,
coagulate, then begin to spill over: canned
corn, chicken pot pies, oatmeal, garden
gloves, apricots, sliced ham, frozen pizza,
loaves and loaves of bread, and then the eggs,
“the sun is shining, everywhere you turn is luck,”
they sing. Here comes the manager, breathless,
eyes like tangerines, hair in flames.
On the down side
of the night shift:
the wind’s tense sigh,
the heavy swivel
turning, turning.
Pulling out of the hole
from four thousand feet
straight down,
we change bits, the moon
catching in the old one
a yellow gleam wedged
in mud, a shark’s tooth.
The drawworks rumbles
like a flood rushing over
flat stubble fields
that stretch for miles,
all surface, no depth
until now, swept under
ocean, the moon wavering
behind clouds
like a floating body
seen from underwater.
I see small eyes,
feel the hard gray skin
slipping past, and think
of origins, the distances
of time, the absence
of this rig, these men.
On the long drive home
I’ll head into a sun
that stared the sea away,
that saw a dried tooth
sink into the darkness
I return to.
At the 23rd Street Barber Shop
hair is falling across the arms of men,
across white cotton cloths
that drape their bodies like little nightgowns.
How like well-behaved children they seem—
silent, sleepy—sheets tucked
neatly beneath their chins,
legs too short to touch the floor.
Each in his secret life sinks
easily into the fat plastic cushion
and feels the strange lightness of falling hair,
the child’s comfort of soft hands
caressing his brow and temples.
Each sighs inwardly to the constant
whisper of scissors about his head,
the razor humming small hymns along his neck.
They’ve been here a hundred times,
gazed upon mirrors within mirrors,
clusters of slim-necked bottles labeled WILDROOT
and VITALIS, and below the shoeshine stand,
rows of flat gold cans. They’ve heard
the sudden intimacies, the warmth
of men seduced by grooming: the veteran
confessing an abandoned child in Rome,
men discussing palm-sized pistols,
small enough to snuggle against your stomach.
As children they were told, after you’re dead
it keeps on growing, and they’ve seen themselves
lying in hair long as a young girl’s.
Two of them rise and walk slowly out.
Their round heads blaze in the doorway.
They creep into what is left of day, fingertips
touching the short, stiff hairs across their necks.
To my friend they all look like movie stars.
“Here comes Herbert Lom,” he’ll say, and a guy
in a low-angle shot looms over us, bulging
forehead shouting treason to pedestrians.
This history of personalities repeats itself each day.
“Take a look at ZaSu Pitts behind the pineapples”
or “Jesus, Zachary Scott sacking groceries!”
He collects them like old stills, hunts for them
in every bar, smoke-curls and clicking glasses
whispering sly promises of Sidney Greenstreet.
Or at traffic lights: Ginger Rogers in a Dodge,
Errol Flynn on a blue Suzuki. The glamour
of appearances. The way montage erases vast
ontological gaps. A wino as Quasimodo as Anthony
Quinn explains the brunette cheerleader, who is
really Gina Lollobrigida. Life connects this way,
but huge sympathies are lost in a single shot.
Sitting here in the Knox Street Tavern, I see what
he means: the inevitable crowd scene, brick street
lifted into light, flat faces rounding into possibility.
Behind the bar Eric von Stroheim smokes a Gauloise,
merciless and cool, contemplating so many frames
per second, the small darknesses we never see.
The Limits of My Language: English 85B
Nouns normally serve to identify things in space, verbs to release them in time.
—JOHN FELSTINER
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
The black shawl falls from your shoulders
as you rise against your daughter’s tugs
and whispers, and your withered mouth
opens in a dry quaver like voices
heard across a windblown field, Rock of Ages,
cleft for me, and my students wake to listen.
On that first day she whispered, warning me:
She thinks she’s in church. She’s my mother
and I’ll have to bring her every day.
Your eyes wandered like fish behind a glass
and your crooked hand jerked back from mine.
So I’ve become a minister to you,
some fundamental backwoods screamer,
redeemer of Oklahoma souls, surrounded
by a choir of distant kinfolk robed
in flecks of stained-glass light and shade.
“The Old Rugged Cross” or “Bringing in the Sheaves”
lifts you right out of your seat at times,
and we wait while your daughter puts you
back in place: Be quiet now, Momma.
There’s no time for that. In her voice
I hear your own among hymns hovering
on an Oklahoma Sunday years ago
inside a white frame church let me hide
myself in thee and in your shaken glance
and palsied hands I see you kneeling there
beneath dim memories of burnt-out fields
and black locust clouds looming down
wailing with God’s own sorrow let the water
and the blood creek floods crawling
across gray moonlit ground, black hours
in storm cellars between dank earth walls
from thy riven side which flowed your mother
crying, the same hymns hanging in the air
like dust as you knelt there that Sunday,
clump of cinquefoil in your fist, big ribboned
Easter hat pulled back, as the preacher man
laid hands on you and promised everything:
hope, happiness, the heaven of eternal Being.
And so, through a dustbowl girlhood, a husband
headed for hell, and one daughter who turned out
right, you saved your best for last. Now
you come into my room and take your place
and stare into some space beyond these walls.
Every time I take a stick of chalk,
you see the wafer in my hand.
Every time I write a word across the board,
you see me beckon to the choir.
Every time I ask is this a verb or noun,
you turn the pages of your book.
And when I spread my arms for answers,
you rise slowly to sing, Amazing grace,
how sweet the sound, out of time and place.
for Paul
If this is soccer,
the moon’s up for grabs.
It floats low over the goalee,
whose father waits downfield
measuring the distance,
several white lines
that flame then fade
like breaking waves.
The players pull night
behind them.
Luminous uniforms
move the white ball
quietly here, there.
Then out of these blurred
frail bodies
the ball looms.
His son’s arms flash
against the moon,
catching it,
and one pale cry leaps
toward the stars.