We are cutting weeds and sunflowers on the shoulder,
the gray man and I, red dust coiling up around us,
muddying our sweat-smeared mugs, clogging our hair,
the iron heel of an August Kansas sun pushing down
on the scythes we raise against it and swing down
in an almost homicidal rage and drunken weariness.
And I keep my distance. He’s a new hire just off
the highway, a hitchhiker sick to death of hunger,
the cruelties of the road, and our boss hates
poverty just enough to hire it, even this old man,
a dead, leaden pall upon his skin so vile it makes you
pull away, the gray trousers and state-issue black
prison boots, the bloodless, grim, unmoving lips,
and the eyes set in concrete, dark hallways that lead
to darker rooms down somewhere in the basement
of the soul’s despair. Two weeks. He hasn’t said
a word. He’s a goddamned ghost, I tell my father.
Light flashes from his scythe as he decapitates
big clumps of yellow blooms, a flailing, brutal war
against the lords of labor, I suppose, against the state,
the world, himself, who knows. When we break,
I watch the canteen’s water bleed from the corners
of his mouth, a spreading wound across his shirt,
the way he spits into the swollen pile of bluestem
and rank bindweed as if he hates it and everything
that grows, a hatred that has roots and thickens,
twisting, snarled around itself. A lizard wanders
into sunlight, and he hacks at it, chopping clods
until dust clouds rise like mist around him, and then
he speaks in a kind of shattering of glass cutting
through the hot wind’s sigh, the fear: Love thine enemy.
He says it to the weeds or maybe what they stand for.
Then, knees buckling, with a rasping, gutted sob
as if drowning in that slough of dirty air, he begins,
trembling, to cry.
I was a boy. The plains’ wind
leaned against the uncut weeds. High wires hummed
with human voices in their travail. And the highway
I had worked but never traveled lay across the fields
and vanished in that distant gray where day meets night.
Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.
—ISAIAH 45:15
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen . . .
—HART CRANE, “TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE”
The “meters,” chandas, are the robes that the gods “wrapped around themselves,” acchadayan, so that they might come near to the fire without being disfigured as though by the blade of a razor.
—ROBERT CALASSO, LITERATURE AND THE GODS, COMMENTING ON THE SATAPUTHA BRAHMANA
“Little Frieda Pushnik, the Armless, Legless Girl Wonder,” who spent years as a touring attraction for Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey . . .
—“OBITUARIES,” LOS ANGELES TIMES
These are the faces I love. Adrift with wonder,
big-eyed as infants and famished for that strangeness
in the world they haven’t known since early childhood.
They are monsters of innocence who gladly shoulder
the burden of the blessed, the unbroken, the beautiful,
the lost. They should be walking on their lovely knees
like pilgrims to that shrine in Guadalupe, where
I failed to draw a crowd. I might even be their weird
little saint, though God knows I’ve wanted everything
they’ve wanted, and more, of course. When we toured Texas,
west from San Antonio, those tiny cow towns flung
like pearls from the broken necklace of the Rio Grande,
I looked out on a near-infinity of rangeland
and far blue mountains, avatars of emptiness,
minor gods of that vast and impossibly pure nothing
to whom I spoke my little stillborn, ritual prayer.
I’m not on those posters they paste all over town,
those silent orgies of secondary colors—jade,
burnt orange, purple—each one a shrieking anthem
to the exotic: Bengal tigers, ubiquitous
as alley cats, raw with not inhuman but
superhuman beauty, demonic spider monkeys,
absurdly buxom dancers clad in gossamer,
and spiritual gray elephants, trunks raised like arms
to Allah. Franciscan murals of plenitude,
brute vitality ripe with the fruit of eros,
the faint blush of sin, and I am not there. Rather,
my role is the unadvertised, secret, wholly
unexpected thrill you find within. A discovery.
Irresistible, like sex.
So here I am. The crowd
leaks in—halting, unsure, a bit like mourners
at a funeral but without the grief. And there is
always something damp, interior, and, well,
sticky about them, cotton-candy souls that smear
the bad air, funky, bleak. All, quite forgettable,
except for three. A woman, middle-aged, plain
and unwrinkled as her Salvation Army uniform,
bland as oatmeal but with this heavy, leaden sorrow
pulling at her eyelids and the corners of her mouth.
Front row four times, weeping, weeping constantly,
then looking up, lips moving in a silent prayer,
I think, and blotting tears with a kind of practiced,
automatic movement somehow suggesting that
the sorrow is her own and I’m her mirror now,
the little well of suffering from which she drinks.
A minister once told me to embrace my sorrow.
To hell with that, I said, embrace your own. And then
there was that nice young woman, Arbus, who came and talked,
talked brilliantly, took hours setting up the shot,
then said, I’m very sorry, and just walked away.
The way the sunlight plunges through the opening
at the top around the center tent pole like a spotlight
cutting through the smutty air, and it fell on him,
the third, a boy of maybe sixteen, hardly grown,
sitting in the fourth row, not too far but not too close,
red hair flaring numinous, ears big as hands,
gray eyes that nailed themselves to mine. My mother,
I remember, looked at me that way. And a smile
not quite a smile. He came twice. And that second time,
just before I thanked the crowd, I’m so glad you could
drop by, please tell your friends, his hand rose—floated,
really—to his chest. It was a wave. The slightest,
shyest wave good-bye, hello (and what’s the difference,
anyway) as if he knew me, truly knew me, as if,
someday, he might return. His eyes. His hair, as vivid
as the howdahs on those elephants. In the posters
where I’m not. That day the crowd seemed to slither out,
to ooze, I thought, like reptiles—sluggish, sleek, gut-hungry
for the pleasures of the world, the prize, the magic number,
the winning shot, the doll from the rifle booth, the girl
he gives it to, the snow cone dripping, the popcorn dyed
with all the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow, the sky
it crowns, and whatever lies beyond, the One, perhaps,
we’re told, enthroned there who in love or rage or spasm
of inscrutable desire made that teeming, oozing,
devouring throng borne now into the midway’s sunlight,
that vanished, forever silent God to whom I say
again my little prayer: let me be one of them.
1954, Nathan Gold, a student at Union Theological Seminary, working part-time at the Loews 83rd Street Theater, Manhattan
Dear Sollie,
Master of Kaballah, each cryptic point
of David’s star, now casting I Ching hexagrams
in hipster Berkeley. So this one’s in hexameters,
an undercurrent, roughly six feet under—no,
not death, but bad news, fear and failure, everywhere:
Robert Moses, goddamned Cross Bronx Expressway,
the parting of the Red Sea is what that fascist bastard
thinks, I’m betting, though the Golds were never Reds
except for Uncle Mike, and now where do they go,
exiled from their homeland and beloved Yankees.
And Sivan in her condition. And their turncoat son
leading goyim and Manhattan’s great unwashed
down dark aisles to pray before the gleaming gods
of Hollywood, returning each day to the classrooms
of German theologians for whom God is a puzzle,
a conundrum made darker yet by that Danish Rabbi,
Kierkegaard. So here I wait, lean on gilded,
faux-Moroccan walls, and stare worshipfully
at plaster masks of tragedy and big-mouthed
comedy hung overhead, blue-green bulbs
for eyes that blindly gaze not at but over us,
lost in their abstractions and detached as always
from the laity, their stench and squalor, floors pocked
with Dubble Bubble and the stale, mingled smells
of soda, buttered popcorn, licorice, and ammonia.
Mr. Hinkle, our gin-head manager, has passed out
in the upstairs office once again, and Brownie,
the homunculus projectionist, is no doubt reading
fuck books and sucking Jujubes and Milk Duds
while I wait, armed with flashlight and Kierkegaard,
that monster, Either/Or, because my paper’s overdue
(though useless, really, after yesterday’s debacle).
Are those made happy by A Star Is Born, warmed
by love’s ruin and resurrection in The Country Girl
really in despair? Churchyard, that joy killer,
thinks so. I say, let them wallow in the shallows
of the silver screen, the smart-assed repartee of Tracy
and brainy Hepburn, the lurid Technicolor charms
of Vista Vision, Gene Kelly dancing in the rain,
Gary Cooper’s quick-draw Jesus in High Noon.
Tillich just won’t stop with his ultimate concern,
ground of being, courage of despair, his God
above God, and in between, illusions: movies, yes,
but more, the life that copies them. Crossing Eighth,
I saw a woman, hair swept across one eye
like Rita Hayworth, walk into a bus-stop bench.
Blind humanity. Niebuhr would have loved it,
Tillich, too, the grandeur and the misery, New York,
the world, everything’s a metaphor to them.
But misery like Sivan’s, glioblastoma multiforme,
do they know that, those Graeco-Latin syllables
baroque and swollen as the thing itself, fat tumor
feeding on the brain, burning from the center
out, and those prick doctors without the balls to give
one cc more Dilaudid than the law allows.
So there I am, just another addict trafficking
in horse among the freaks of Hubert’s Dime Museum
and scoring D from the trembling future surgeon
who uses it to pay tuition. God, the crap
we do to make a life. Sin? The world is sin.
We go down, oh, I mean down, into that basement:
Jesus, those little stages dim with burnt-out bulbs,
the curtains jerk back, lo, and there is lovely Olga
and her beard, Sealo the Seal Boy, The Armless Wonder,
Albert-Alberta in his/her hermaphroditic glory.
Baudelaire’s “floating lives,” or as Sivan said,
“Disneyland in hell.” But, of course, they’re us,
we’re them, and we pay the price, cheap as it is, to see
ourselves.
Ah, New York when she was well: Al Flosso’s
magic shop on 34th, my God, late Saturday
one afternoon strolling down from Central Park,
bronze leaves spilled like coins along Eighth Avenue,
and there’s Al himself pulling quarters from the ears
of little kids who spend them all on props, Zombies,
Imp Bottles, Crazy Cubes, tricks for turning water
into wine, if happiness is wine made holy,
and I think it is, or was. Later, fine dining
at the Automat to save a buck, Eucharist
at Smokey Mary’s, then all those jazz clubs lining
52nd Street, and that’s the night at Birdland
the great Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis went toe-to-toe
with Sonny Stitt. Pure heaven. Jimmy Ryan’s, Five Spot,
The Famous Door, Three Deuces, Sivan’s long auburn
hair now gone but brilliant then, bathed in neon,
big riffs streaming out of every door, a kind
of aural exegesis of forbidden texts:
“Love for Sale,” “Strange Fruit,” “Ornithology.”
Long time passing. Then yesterday in systematics
Tillich demolishing Parmenides by way
of Plato’s Sophist: Any image is a blending:
Nonbeing closed in Being (my loose translation).
And so the movies, the technology of film:
the image held before our flawed, half-blind gaze,
black ribs separating every frame, that darkness
never seen but always there: in On the Waterfront,
Saint and Brando in the fulcrum of their fates,
Manhattan floating in the thinning, pearl-gray light
behind them, and that cinematic night surrounding
every second of their ticking lives, unseen,
ubiquitous: Nonbeing, nothingness, the ontic
absence at the center, or between the frames,
of the waking life. “I could have been a contender
instead of . . . what I am,” pleads Brando to his brother:
who he’s not held forever in the embrace of who he is.
“Persistence of vision,” I tell Tillich, that’s what it’s called,
the fantasy of life in motion while in fact
a little death, NONBEING, separates each frame,
each moment in the shadow play of happiness,
and God in all His wisdom is the projectionist!
THAT’S OUR METAPHOR! Wrong God, he says. The God
that can be known cannot be God. Well, that finished it.
I swear, the man’s a neo-Gnostic, a magician.
Imagine, the greatest theologian in America,
a Bronx Jew shouting at him: THEN WHO THE FUCK
IS GOD? So, THE END. Alpha and Omega. Sivan
said from the beginning it would end this way.
I’m an usher, Sol. That’s all. Light in hand, I take
them down, or up, the Heraclitean way, into
that little night, into—no, not Plato’s cave, Lascaux,
or Rheims—but the purest form of K’s aesthetic life,
and there they sit with the passivity of angels,
God’s children in their ontic moment, looking on,
amused, uplifted, frightened, haunted, grieved, lost
in the deceptions of the beautiful, the real unreal,
and they are for those ninety stolen minutes saved:
Pavlic, from the corner newsstand, shutting down
for matinees—war films, westerns; Mrs. Kriegan,
who cleans bathrooms at St. Bart’s and weeps through all
the love scenes; Sivan, too—turbaned, thin—at every
bargain twilight show for Singin’ in the Rain,
she knew all the tunes and sang them sotto voce
on the subway home; that sad, small man who wore
Hawaiian ties, a Dodgers cap, and tennis shoes,
saying, every time, the rosary on his way out.
All of them, the drunks, bums, lovers, priests, housewives,
cops, street punks shooting up, whores giving blowjobs
in the balcony. I usher. I take them there.
Remember Colmar, the Isenheim, when we were high
on weed, big brass gong of the risen sun, His hands
pushing outward from within, and you, my brother,
in your reefer madness, cactus, and who knows what
shouting “Fire” till I could bring you down? Today
in Country Girl, Grace Kelly at the ironing board,
and Brownie upstairs falls asleep at the projector, film
sticking, flap, flap, then stuck, no one to turn the lamp off,
small ghosts of smoke, a black hole starting in the center
of the frame, (the Big Bang must have looked like that),
flame eating outward at the curling edges, spreading,
Grace swallowed slowly by the widening fire, then gone,
the film snaps, bringing down an avalanche of light,
the sun’s flood a billion years from now, earth sucked
into the flames, lurid, omnivorous, the whole room
stunned and silvered with it, shadows peeled away,
each gray scarf, each shawl of darkness lifted, the audience
revealed in all their nakedness, their uncoveredness
and soiled humanity, among the candy wrappers,
condoms, butts, crushed Dixie cups, as we wait for Grace
to reappear, the iron to move, the mouth to speak,
for love, Sol, the movie of our lives, and for Sivan.
April 26, 1932: They breakfasted on board before making their way into Havana, and after Hart had pointed out the café where they were to meet, . . . he slipped down a street in the white, gold, and azure Cuban capital and for one of the few times in his life disappeared entirely. He wrote postcards . . .
—CLIVE FISHER, HART CRANE: A LIFE
And saw thee dive to kiss that destiny Like one white meteor, sacrosanct and blent At last with all that’s consummate and free There, where the first and last gods keep thy tent.
—THE BRIDGE
Dear Wilbur,
In Havana, Hotel Ambos Mundos,
Orizaba docked six hours, and I’m drinking
Sazeracs (absinthe and bourbon), sans ami
though recall Ramón Novarro in L.A? Second
only to the Hoover in the cupola Grace
caught me with. No adventures here, home soon
if I can face it—empty-handed, Guggenheim
exhausted. View from absinthe-land: blue and gold
like the Maxfield Parrish prints my father used
to decorate his candy boxes.
As ever, Hart
Dear Sambo,
Je ne suis pas Rimbaud! Though once I was.
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends. Such lines
extinct now. Prescription: iodine followed by
a bottle of Mercurochrome, slashing Siqueiros’s
portrait with a razor blade. When Lawrence talks of
“going down to the dark gods,” he means sex of course
rather than its sister, death. Remember Hartley’s tale
of Albert Ryder, standing just outside his hostess’s
window watching Christmas dinner? Thank you so much
for inviting me. A freak, Sam, is what I am. So praise
to you and Otto Kahn,
the uninvited heart
Dear Bill,
Hotel Ambos Mundos (Both Worlds): Art
and Life? Hemingway, Room 511, just checked out
(of which, art or life?) My third Sazerac, memories
of Minsky’s, while legs awaken salads in the brain,
and mine’s a Waldorf now, Ouspensky’s New Model
where time’s a motion on some higher spatial plane
(cinema, still photos moving in a dream of time),
and time’s running out, compañero, a broken motion,
Icarus in flight. Love to Susan and bambino,
Hart
Dear Lotte,
Holed up in a hotel bar, I think
Cleveland Charlotte knows me well as anyone,
and when I wrote to you, “The true idea of God
is the only road to happiness,” or something close
to that, please tell me what I meant. One morning,
drunk, Cathedral Santa Prisca, I climbed the tower,
rang the bell-rope that gathers God at dawn, though
no God, no waking pilgrims, just the local Law
and, I confess, a music, triple-tongued, vowels
inside of vowels, a kind of happiness. Love. Hart.
Dear Allen,
“Le Bateau ivre” is prophetic, so now
why not The Bridge? Sometimes I fear it’s just some sort
of spiritual boosterism for empire America.
And then there’s Winters with his aesthetique morale:
form, meter as the reins to hold in check the wild horse
of the poem. But damn it, METER IS THE HORSE,
the very heartbeat of the horse, so drop the reins—
OK, I’m drunk, but word is more than word in that
or any poem, Jesus, I stood there, 3 a.m.,
on Roebling’s cabled god, its welded, sculpted iron
embrace, staring at Manhattan, tears runneling
my face, the magnitude, the awful holiness
and pride of it, waves beating on the piers below,
Dear Grace,
borne back ceaselessly into the past,
childhood poems you read to me each night and it
was language, diving down into the language, fall
through consonant and vowel, wash and wave of it,
etymology’s dense, green growth, labyrinthine
mouths of history, one arc synoptic of all tides
below. O what lies deepest, meter of the sea,
surge and buffet of what’s always underneath
and untranslatable, crucial, crux of everything,
unresurrected Christ, word, in the beginning
now endeth
I, too, dislike notes—much less a “key”—to poems, but in the case of a realistic imagining of Hart Crane’s postcards, written the day before he leaped from the Orizaba to his death, such is unavoidable. In his letters it was natural for him, as for anyone writing to friends and relatives, to refer to shared knowledge, names, experiences that would be unknown to most outsiders. Therefore, for those who haven’t read Paul Mariani’s or Clive Fisher’s very fine biographies of Crane, his correspondents as well as some of his allusions need to be identified. All the quoted lines in my poem are from Crane’s poems, except for “borne back ceaselessly . . . ,” which is taken from the famous final sentence of The Great Gatsby.
Wilbur: Wilbur Underwood, poet and government clerk in Washington, DC. He was an older, longtime friend and gay mentor to Crane.
Orizaba: The ship on which Crane and Peggy Cowley were returning to the USA.
Ramón Novarro, Hoover: Fisher reveals in his biography what while living in Pasadena, Crane received the sexual services of the film star, Ramón Novarro, as he had as an adolescent from the Hoover vacuum cleaner his mother, Grace, discovered him with.
Sambo: Sam Loveman, poet and publisher whom Crane met in his early twenties. Loveman was Crane’s literary executor and published Brom Weber’s Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study.
iodine, Mercurochrome, Siqueiros: During his last days in Mexico, Crane made at least two suicide attempts and slashed his portrait by David Siqueiros with a razor blade.
Lawrence: D. H. Lawrence.
Hartley’s tale, Albert Ryder: Crane’s friend, the artist and poet, Marsden Hartley, tells this story of the painter, Albert Pinkham Ryder. Ryder’s hostess asked him why he hadn’t come to her Christmas dinner as he had promised, and he explained that he had indeed been there but had been standing outside the window, observing it.
Otto Kahn: Financier who generously underwrote Crane’s expenses during the composition of The Bridge.
Bill: William Slater Brown. Novelist and translator, he and his wife were old friends of Crane, who had been a guest at their farmhouse in Dutchess County. New York, on several occasions.
Minsky’s: The famous Manhattan burlesque theater that Crane and William Slater Brown frequented together and which was probably an influence on Crane’s “National Winter Garden.”
Ouspensky: Colleague of Gurdjieff and author of Tertium Organum, much read and discussed by Crane and his circle.
Lotte: Charlotte Rychtarik, a musician and painter, whom Crane had known since his early twenties in Cleveland.
Allen: Allen Tate, American literary critic and poet and a central member of the Fugitive group of southern poets. He was an early admirer of Crane’s work.
“Le Bateau ivre”: Rimbaud’s famous poem is sometimes interpreted as prophesying the later events of his life.
Winters: Yvor Winters. Prominent literary critic who taught at Stanford University and like Allen Tate was an enthusiastic admirer and advocate of Crane’s poetry.
Roebling: Both John Augustus Roebling, architect and builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, and his son, Washington Roebling, who continued his father’s work and lived in the same apartment where Crane later wrote The Bridge.
Grace: Grace Hart Crane, the poet’s mother, divorced from his father in 1917.
It must follow that every infinity is, in a way we cannot express, made finite to God.
—ST. AUGUSTINE, DE CIVITATE DEI
Four boys drinking tomato juice and beer
for God knows why, smoke from Pall Malls
guttering in the floor’s red sawdust, the talk
the kind of mindless yak that foams up
when summer is wearing down, and Campbell
is already deep into Cantor and won’t shut up,
lining up Coronas to the table’s edge
to indicate “infinite progression, just imagine
they go on forever,” but Travis, the sad one,
the maniac, who flunked out of A&M playing
bass in pickup bands and chasing girls, just
isn’t having it, and says, “But the edge, Campbell,
is there and always will be,” and Ira says,
“Please, asshole, just imagine,” and so it goes,
integers, sets, transfinite sets, Coronas filling
the table because “with infinitely small Coronas
this table becomes, my friends, an infinite space
within finite limits,” and Travis lip-synching
the Doors’ “Break on Through” has carved
IRA CAMPBELL IS A DICK into the soft
lacquered tabletop, and time, illusion though it
may be, argues Ira, is walking past the table
in the form of Samantha Dobbins, all big hair
and legs and brown eyes like storms coming on
who I would date that summer and leave behind
and regret it even now, for time in its linear
progression, real or not, is, I fear, terribly finite,
as it is for God, who, looking down or up
or from some omnidirectional quantum point
in this one universe among many suffers
the idiocies of four beer-stunned boys stumbling
in the long confusion of their lives toward
what one might call the edge that is there
and always will be, for three have already found it,
and the one who has not ponders the mathematics
of the spirit, and Ira Campbell, who found God there.
the arcades . . . are residues of a dream world.
—WALTER BENJAMIN
The piano player at Nordstrom’s was crying,
and no one knew what to do. His hands were thin
and pale as the starched cuffs that seemed to hold
his wrists above the keyboard until they collapsed
and lay there among the ache of his sobs and awful
silences and the tapping of cash registers, the ocean
of small voices, the hum and click of commerce.
We all stood there, looking at him, then away,
fine linen trousers hanging from our arms,
or scent of cologne we could not afford thickening
the air, or right foot half-slipped into the new blue shoe
we would not buy, not now, not ever, and those stiff
little cries kept coming, kept tumbling across
that immense, gleaming floor into the change rooms
where men and women were gazing into mirrors
far from this strange sadness that fell clumsily
into a day rushing like all days on earth to fulfill itself,
to complete like the good postman its mission, and so
we paused in the crumbling silence until the fragile,
cautious tones of “Autumn Leaves” began to drift
through the aisles and around the glittering display cases
as if a dream, a great dream, were being dreamed again,
and the cries of an infant rose now from the other end
of the mall, cries bursting into screams and then one long
scream that spread its wings and lifted, soaring,
and we grew thoughtful and began to move about again,
searching our pockets, wallets, purses, tooled leather
handbags for something that would stop that scream.
Someone who, dreaming, says, “I am dreaming,” even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream, “it is raining,” while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.
—ON CERTAINTY, NO. 676, WRITTEN ON HIS DEATHBED
The way a sentence is a story. It is raining.
Something happens, as the case may be, to something
of a certain kind and in a certain way.
Im Aufang war die Tat. In the beginning was
the act. So I tell a story: it is raining.
Grammar as a mirror of the world. Poor Trakl,
without a world except the world of words beyond
mere speech, drenched with dreams I never understood.
War, the nightmare of the earth, while in my backpack
Tolstoy’s Gospel preached belief’s old dream. I said,
once, The sense of the world must lie outside the world.
If that sense is “God,” we might stand in His rain,
in “belief” of Him, but cannot quite get wet from it.
It is raining. In this room, the fire is blackening
the hearth’s old stones, the now of my observing it
the only heaven of the mind. I said in my dream,
it is raining, but I dreamed the words themselves
and even that the words have meaning. Nonsense, then,
though now the rain is spattering the sixteen panes,
four by four, of my window. Keats, dying, looked out
a window at the Spanish Steps, Rome dimming in
the rain to gauzy nothing that must have seemed a dream,
like Madeline in his poem on St. Agnes’ Eve.
Porphyro lying next to her spoke himself into
her dream, the voice she heard as known as the hand
of Moore showing the other one exists: “Here is one hand.”
Because all certainty at least begins with the body’s
certainty. My brother, Paul, playing Brahms,
feels his amputated arm, his hand, still moving.
Can the body know? Can, therefore, the mind?
Thought is the mind minding, poetry the mind
embodied, what cannot be spoken, that is, explained:
these curtains—Burano lace, I think—that sift
the April light, walls papered with lurid rose designs,
a bird in the window’s lower panes resting on
a branch. In Ireland, chaffinches feeding
from my hand. With what certainty! “Here is one
hand.” It is raining. And if I say, I am dying,
within this finite life enclosed at either end
by the unknowable, what are my words—
not a knowing, surely, but a kind of wonder
bodied forth here where the Cambridge rain comes down
on Storeys Way in a house called Storeys End.
The barber shaves all and only men who do not shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?
—BERTRAND RUSSELL’S PARADOX
I have been waiting so long . . . little pocks
of rust freckle the shanks of my best blades.
Who, after all, would be shaved by a barber
boasting foliage of such grotesque proportions,
dragging its damp, heavy life along sidewalks
and alleyways, doomed to this eternal algebra
of existence, these parallel universes
of paradox where bearded and beardless
coexist simultaneously and separately
and my twin in his timeless moment stands
mirrored in the lather of despair, blade
scraping flesh forever barren. Between us:
nothing, a space infinite and infinitesimal,
the sunless, silent arctic zone of contradiction.
On my side Cretans always lie; on his,
the lies are always true. On my side, particles;
on his, waves. A life unimaginable, but a life.
My wife—anguished, disgusted—long since done
with making love to Sherwood Forest, amused
herself with knitting it into increasingly
bizarre shapes, single rope ladders at first,
then interconnected hair suits for a trio
of monkeys. She lives in Alexandria now
with a Greek financier, a balding man of pink,
pampered countenance who offered me thousands
to shave. He sympathized. He saw in me the fate
of the common world lugging its debts and losses
through the streets like a black beard of shame,
the clean face of prosperity ever disappearing
until the man disappears, a walking shadow,
a beard bearing a man, a man engulfed
in the chaos of his own flesh, his own hair.
The razor strops of fate hang uselessly
beside their cruel mirrors. Among the dazzle
of chrome embellishments, bottles of Wildroot
and cans of Rose Pomade cry Traitor!
to my lank tresses, and old customers,
victims themselves of cut-rate solitudes
in downtown hotels, wander by with lowered eyes
and trembling hands. Shaggy children gawk
and scatter when they spy in the shop’s
deep shadows a chair of hair, a breathing mound
multiplied infinitely in mirrors facing mirrors.
My only solace is a dream, a tonsorial fantasy
that more and more possesses me, of a world
in which the calculus of being demands that
barbers shave only men who shave themselves.
In it my twin and I stand handsomely behind
our chairs, he sporting a small goatee,
my nude visage chaste as an egg, immaculately
conceived, saintly in its pure nakedness,
and an entire cosmos of the newly shaven,
redolent with lotions but somehow needing
our final caresses and fleshly blessings,
lines the boulevard. The sun is shining.
The brick streets glow richly. And beside me
my wife prepares the secret oils of anointment
and reaches up to stroke my silken chin.
for Peter Caws
. . . experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable.
—DAVID HUME, AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
Philosophia: declining Kansas light
lifting dust motes from the shadows, scars
along the prewar plaster walls of Fraser Hall.
Professor Caws, left hand raised against the sun,
right hand mapping on the board each turn
and pivot in Hume’s argument against
causality. Hume’s game, like mine,
is pool: one ball strikes another, and between
the two, says Caws, nada, nothing but
coincidence. And forget the thousand times
it happens, that little sad inductive leap.
I’m stunned. A, then B. And between them, what,
some vast, flat plain of pure event where things
just happen—a bird falling from the sky,
a distant shout, a cow wandering along
the highway’s shoulder, the sun here, then there,
the moon full or empty, a white boat floating
on a sea of wheat.
That’s it: a sea between
two countries: the land of Cause, like Iceland,
clean, uncluttered, a kind of purple mist
hanging in the air, a few cold souls caught
in midstride on a frozen lake, the awful silence,
trees that fall without a sound, and across the bay,
Effect, marching bands in every street,
unruly crowds, that balmy island climate,
and the thick, melodic accents of its citizens
that make you think of Istanbul, or wine,
or tile floors in geometrical designs—
and in between, the sea, soundless but for
the crash of waves, since nothing happens there
except the constant passage, back and forth,
of the little boat called the Logic of Induction
that never reaches shore. And there it is
in the distance—listing, it seems to me—
its pilot, nameless and alone, slumped
across the wheel.
Walking out of class,
breathing in the cold, salt air of Hume,
I turn to Anderson, our point guard:
“You no-talent hack, you’re just a servant
of coincidence. Take that to the NBA.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he says, and so we head
for Duck’s, a game of pool, and look across
that flat green field, listening to the click
and thump of billiard balls, studying
the angles, as our ignorant young lives
pass slowly like the evening sun, unmoved,
unmoving, that sinks below the Kansas plain.
So here is Campbell, murky, shadow-blotched
beneath the backroom table lamp at Duck’s,
first one of us to dig past proposition 4.2
in the Tractactus, Dante’s true disciple,
unfurling long verbal tapestries by heart
from Purgatorio (the dullest parts,
perversely), Cutty Sark in hand, always,
it seemed to me, in darkened rooms—scarred,
name-carved booths in downtown college bars,
jazz joints in Kansas City where after Reed
and the Sorbonne he played lounge piano
at the Muehlbach, claimed to know the mob
(“ ‘double-entry bookkeeping,’ Lansky said,
‘was Western culture’s breakthrough’ ”), argued
Plotinus held the key to quantum mystery,
Gödel’s madness proved the end of thought.
The end of thought! And then the cosmic sweep
of hands, smile’s exploding nova, eyes two moons
across that smoke-burdened, blue neon room—
a kind of storm, or far, Cartesian weather.
Shapeless forms balloon inside a lava lamp
above the Wurlitzer’s warped, ancient Coltrane,
“Body and Soul”—“the music of becoming,”
Campbell says, “Plato’s spiral of ascent
toward the Forms, the unattainable,
the way those chords unravel, then take flight . . .”
His voice wobbles, trails off, vanishes
beneath the gathering cloud of his cigar,
then floats back up, “Gödel, you see, had proved
no system is complete or closed, no life
contains its own clear validation.” Arms
waving, he heads back into the kitchen
where he washes dishes now and lives
behind the Texaco across the street, among
his books, and thinks about the end of thought.
FROM
The Beauty of
Abandoned Towns
In memory of O.T. and Nellie Swearingen
. . . labor omnia vicit
improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas.
—VIRGIL, GEORGICS
1. The Beauty of Abandoned Towns
Finally we sold out—you know, the big farm eats the small farm.
—EDNA PFORR, NORTH DAKOTA
. . . ruins do not speak; we speak for them.
—CHRISTOPHER WOODWARD, IN RUINS
Jefferson, Marx, and Jesus. Looking back, you can hardly believe it.
Bindweed and crabgrass shouldering through asphalt cracks, rats scuttling down drainpipes, undergrowth seething with grasshoppers.
The bumper crop in 1929. I stood on the front porch, dawn rolling over me like a river baptism because I was a new man in a new world, a stand of gold and green stretching from my hands to the sun coming up. In a way, a mirage. We bought a house in town. There it is. Or was.
The water tower, taller than the copper domes of Sacred Heart in Leoville, silhouette flooding the football field, missing boards of the scavenged bleachers, minor prophecies: Bobby + Pam forever, Panthers rule, PEACE NOW.
Presence is absence, says the philosopher. The future devours the past. Look at the goatgrass and ragweed claiming the feed store.
Sunflowers banging their heads on a conclusion of brick, the wind’s last argument lost in a yellow cloud.
Eugene Debs set up The People’s College in Fort Scott. Meridel Le Sueur grew up there. It lasted three years. Imagine: Comrade Debs, Comrade Sheppard, Comrade Le Sueur. In Kansas.
The open windows of the high school no longer surprise, pigeons flying in and out, the dumb cry of blackboards, wooden desks hauled away with the carved names of the long absent, the lost, the dead, the escaped.
The Farmer’s Alliance tried. Socialist farm policy was for them a straight road to Jefferson’s democracy. But they were always blocked by the big landowners. The deal breaker was profits, not politics. The harvest was topsoil, not wheat.
The last hitching post. The last horse, I suppose. Like Sunday morning, the last hymn, the last person to hear the last hymn. May the circle be unbroken. The circle is broken.
We subscribed to the Haldeman-Julius Appeal to Reason, published out of little Girard, Kansas. Our children grew up on his Little Blue Books. The Federalist Papers, Thoreau, Emerson, Marx, Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair.
The clapboard stores, slats long ago sand-blasted in dust storms, bleached or ochre now, gray, the faint green and yellow of a Lipton Tea ad on red brick. Broken windows flashing the setting sun in a little apocalypse of light, blind men in shades staring at the horizon, waiting for a sign. Stillness everywhere.
You know, you’re wasting your time. No one gives a shit about this. None of it. No one.
Dearth of cars, motion, grind of gears, noise of commerce, chatter and cry of farm kids dangling from the beds of rusted-out pickups, murmur and guffaw of old men outside the Savings and Loan, stories, jokes. Quiet as a first snow. Somewhere a dog barks. A wire gate slams shut.
I’m so goddamned old I still tense up when an afternoon sky darkens. A roller would come in, dust up to eight thousand feet. If you were in the field, you were lost until it cleared. Or dead from suffocation. Where was your family? Where were your children?
Houses with tin roofs, wrap-around porches for watching thunderstorms, most vacant but here and there pickup windows flaming in sunset, trimmed lawn, history in forty years of license plates nailed to the garage wall. Cellar door. Swing set, that little violin screech of rusted chains, hush of evening, choir of cicadas. The living among the dead.
It started when agriculture professors began to teach farming as a business rather than a vocation. And then the big ones over the years ate the little ones. But in this country vocations are exploited. Ask the public school teachers.
The lords of grain: two cats fat on field mice lounge beneath the elevator steps where dust from a caliche road powders them white—wraiths, or white surrender flags.
On the other hand, subsidies can kill small farms these days. Back then we were desperate. Our children were hungry. FDR kept us alive. Then something went wrong. Big got bigger, small died. Still dying, hanging on but bedridden. The Ogallala Aquifer’s almost tapped out. I mean, for God’s sake.
Between the boarded bank and the welding shop husks drift like molted feathers or the sloughed scales of cottonmouths. Weeds waist-high shade the odd shoe still laced, a Coke carton bleeding into bluestem, dulled scraps of newsprint that say who died in Ashland or Sublette or Medicine Lodge.
It goes back to the oikos, the Greek family farm. Some ethic, some code of honor, kept them small. Big was vulgar, immoral. The Romans, too. Cato the Elder, rich as Joe Kennedy, taught his son agronomy, not commerce.
They are not haunted. They are not the “ghosts of themselves.” They are cousin to vanishing, to disappearance. They are the highway that runs through them.
The picture show shut down decades ago. That’s where we saw the world, the world our children and grandchildren ran off to. What happens when a nation loses its agrarian populace? My grandson worked as an usher there. He’s a poet now. We have more poets than farmers. I don’t think that’s what Jefferson had in mind.
Not even decline, but the dawn of absence. Architecture of the dead. The lives they housed are dust, the wind never stops.
A disproportionate percentage of the American soldiers killed in Iraq were from small rural towns. The farmer/soldier, foundation of the Greek polis. Fodder for war. Blood harvest.
The wind never stops. Our children were hungry. The highway’s long blade under the sun. Something went wrong. The towns are empty. The circle is broken.
In 1936 dust storms would clot
the mortar of its bricks, but now the wind
sweeps clean its crumbling, fluted columns
and pollinates a field of bluestem
and sunflowers tall as high school kids.
Nothing is everywhere: doorless doorways,
dirt-filled foundations, and weed-pocked
sidewalks leading to a sky that blued
the eyes of bored students stupefied
by geometry and Caesar’s Latin.
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
Who cared how Gaul’s past was divvied up?
Every radio in every car in Bloom
cried Now, and now was an eternity
except at graduation when the future
was invented by the Baptist minister.
The stars that evening fell on Main Street
and sank into our laminated hoods
streaked with downtown lights, and heaven
once more rolled across our rolling lives.
My wife and I made love here last night.
I manage kitchenware at Walmart,
and sometimes the future rides my back the way
I rode my rented combine years ago.
So Ann and I will come here evenings when
a fat moon floats in absent hallways, their lost,
remembered voices rising through the stillness,
and in other rooms students struggle over
Euclid’s arcs and circles and bend to translate
the vanished past into another tongue.
The bank so buried under hungry shrubs,
snakeweed, and creeper reaching even
to the carved stone BANK ESTABLISHED 1910
that its octagonal rust brick seems to shirk
a street long gone.
Where is he now,
Mr. Spivey, the only teller, who lived
above STATE FARM and had a wife in Blue Creek
he never saw? What led him there?
What kept her in a darkness we could
only wonder at? Men lived with wives,
we thought, the new moon rose, snow fell,
and familiar as a thumb each Sunday
Mr. Spivey sang the solo parts in choir,
angelically, our mothers said.
Fridays,
staying late, he cashed our paychecks,
small hands counting out and pushing
stacks of new bills crisp as corn sheaves
beneath the cage. Smiling through the bars,
he called us mister, as I, oddly, call him now.
Good evening, Mr. Elwood. Good day, Mr. Smith,
the words thin and lyrical as the paper
whispering in our ears.
Coming from the PALACE
those nights, we would sometimes see his shadow
in the risen window on the square, the streets
of Edward Hopper dimly lit below where
people walked and laughed and talked
about new money earned and saved or spent.
All across America there must have been
such streets and such men who touched
the people’s hands with money and lived alone.
For in the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread.
In Clyde, Missouri, the Benedictine Sisters
of Perpetual Adoration cut unleavened bread
into communion wafers and gather them
in plastic bags folded, stapled, and later packed
in boxes. After compline the sisters rise again
from prayers, lie down upon their narrow beds,
and wait for sleep’s wide wings to fold around them.
Their hands still give the light sweet smell of bread,
and loaves like little clouds drift through their dreams,
wafers raining down to make a blizzard
of the Word made flesh, Corpus Christi,
of God’s own Son. On evening break at Walmart
Doris Miller spreads ketchup on her Big Mac
and salts her fries, time and wages swallowed
like a sacrament, eternity the dregs
that throng and cluster in the shallows
of her complimentary Styrofoam cup.
At the Exxon next door, Walter Miller
lifts his pickup’s hood, then turns to stare
at the acreage he used to own across the road.
Was his wheat, he wonders, even the smallest grain
in its long ascent to final form, ever changed into
the body of our Lord? The Benedictine Sisters
of Perpetual Adoration wake to matins, prayers
that rise like crane migrations over feedlots,
packing houses, hog farms, the abandoned small
stores of Leeton, the Dixon Community Center,
the Good Samaritan Thrift Shop in Tarkio.
A gravel road veers toward the Open Door Cafe,
windows boarded up and painted powder blue
and lemon Day-Glo, perpetual sunrise on
a town silent as the absent cry of starlings
or idle irrigation pumps rusting in the dust
of August, where the plundered, corporate earth
yields the bread placed in the outstretched palms,
take and eat, of the citizens of Clyde, Missouri.
Madonna and Child, Perryton, Texas, 1967
A litter of pickups nose into Sancho’s Market
south of town late Friday night rinsed in waves
of pink neon and samba music from some station
in Del Rio spilling out across the highway.
Sancho’s wife dances alone behind the cash box
while her daughter, Rosa, tries to quiet her baby
whose squalls rip through the store like a weed cutter
shredding the souls of the carnal, the appetitious,
indeed the truly depraved as we in our grievous
late-night stupor and post-marijuana hunger
curse the cookie selection and all its brethren
and Al yells at Leno lost among the chips,
beef jerky, string cheese, bananas for Chrissakes,
that if he doesn’t stop now and forever telling
Okie jokes he will shoot his dog who can’t hunt
anyway so what the hell, but the kid is unreal,
a cry ascending to a shriek, then a kind
of rasping roar, the harangue of the gods,
sirens cleaving the air, gangs of crazed locusts
or gigantic wasps that whine and ding our ears
until the air begins to throb around us
and a six-pack of longnecks rattles like snakes
in my hand. And then poor Rosa is kissing
its forehead, baby riding her knee like a little boat
lost at sea, and old Sancho can’t take it either,
hands over his ears, Dios mio, ya basta! Dios mio,
so Rosa opens her blouse, though we don’t look,
and then we do, the baby sucking away, plump cheeks
pumping, billowing sails of the Santa Maria
in a high wind, the great suck of the infinite
making that little nick, nick sound, Rosa
smiling down, then Sancho turns off the radio
and we all just stand there in the light and shadow
of a flickering fluorescent bulb, holding
our sad little plastic baskets full of crap,
speechless and dying a little inside as Rosa
whispers no llores, no llores, mija, mijita,
no llores, and the child falls asleep, lips
on breast, drops of milk trickling down,
we can even hear it breathing, hear ourselves
breathing, the hush all around and that hammer
in our chests so that forty years later
this scene still hangs in my mind, a later work,
unfinished, from the workshop of Zurbarán.
When Candi Baumeister announced to us all
that J.D. was in love with Brigitte Bardot,
drawing those two syllables out like some kid
stretching pink strands of Dubble Bubble
from between her teeth, J.D. chose not
to duck his head in the unjust shame
of the truly innocent but rather lifted it
in the way of his father scanning the sky
in silent prayer for the grace of rain abundant
upon his doomed soybeans or St. Francis
blessing sparrows or the air itself, eyes radiant
with Truth and Jesus, and said, Babydoll,
I would walk on my tongue from here to Amarillo
just to wash her dishes.
There is a time
in the long affliction of our spoken lives when,
among all the verbal bungling, stupidity,
and general disorder that burden us
like the ragged garment of the flesh itself, when,
beneath the vast and articulate shadows
of the saints of language, the white dove of genius
with its quick, wild wings has entered our souls,
our immaculate ignorance, and we are,
at last, redeemed. And so is conceived and born
the thing said, finally, well—nay, perfectly—
as it might be said by that unknowable Being
for whom we have in our mortal linguistic
incapacity no adequate name except the one
Candi Baumeister bore in her own virginal
moment of absolute poetry: My God, J.D.
FROM
Five Prose Poems
from the Journals
of Roy Eldridge Garcia
Blaise, Maria, and I were walking toward the Seine from his apartment on the rue Montaigne, and he was speaking of Apollinaire, Captain Lacroix, Abel Gance, and others, his planned biography of Mary Magdalene, his beloved son, Remy, whose plane was shot down in WWII, Blaise’s experience in WWI, the loss of his right arm. And he mentioned the phantom limb sensation, the pain of it, as if the arm were still there, that it is like memory, the memory that will not quite go away, that it is in effect the body’s memory, but more, that is like poetry, the phantom life: not there in any material way, yet intensely there to the reader, the amputee who has lost some nameless yet essential limb of existence, probably on the long, dark path out of childhood. Teary-eyed with excitement, the reader can say of the poem, yes, this is life, or better, this is the life within life, but try to convince the passerby, the onlooker, who will simply observe the empty sleeve flapping in the wind and shake his head sadly. Then he returned to his favorite subject, the levitation of saints, much as he had spoken of it in Le Lotissement du ciel years before, and Paris rose around us as if for the first time—the sun like the oranges of the surrealists plunging into the Seine, the wild applause of the chestnut trees, the truncated towers of Notre Dame—and Maria looked at me and smiled that odd, worried smile that is still with me. Whose pain will not leave. A plane falling out of the sky. That phantom smile.
Aix-en-Provence, 1952
The blind piano tuner had come to the wrong address. I said, “I’m very sorry. You must have the wrong address.” He insisted on seeing the piano, though I have none. I showed him the living room, which was being recarpeted. “A Bösendorfer! Wonderful! One of the finest! What an opportunity!” He was overjoyed, talking at length about its virtues, second to none—the crisp, clean tone, silken touch, huge bass, marvelous sustain, and so forth. He took out his tuning kit and began immediately. He claimed to have heard Schnabel play the entire Beethoven sonata cycle on one in Royal Albert Hall in London. After a short time, he played a chord. “Hear that? Wonderful. So rich.” I told him I could hear nothing, and he nodded sympathetically, even sadly, saying that to lose one’s sense of hearing was to lose a portion of one’s soul. “In his last days, Beethoven heard with his fingertips, I truly believe that,” he muttered to himself. To hear him soliloquize rhapsodically about the piano and the great performers he had heard—“Hoffman with his small hands would have loved this light action, like angel wings,” or “Perfect for Lipatti and his Chopin, so fluid and transparent”—was almost to hear the music itself, to be seated in the concert hall, center of the third row, to feel the tremble of the young woman’s shoulder in the adjacent seat, her barely repressed sighs in the crescendos of the Appassionata, that unearthly, mystical moment between the dying of the last note and the avalanche of applause. His devotion to the Bösendorfer, the obsessive attention to every detail of the tuning process, preoccupied him for most of the afternoon, and I served him coffee, then afterward offered him a martini in celebration of a job well done. “You’re a lucky man, such a fine instrument,” he said, as if to the piano itself, as he left. Yes I am, I thought, and looked back at the living room the way Beethoven must have looked at that young woman in the third row, her tear-filled eyes, the slightly parted lips, her hands pressed together as if in prayer.
Los Angeles, 1957
A moth devoured words.
—THE EXETER BOOK
A larval tunneling between pages.
Gorged on print,
wallowing in pulp, it falls into the long
sleep that later breaks and frays as wings
sluggish as oars
begin to bludgeon the heavy air,
baffled by walls of dusk and lugging
the soft body
toward a squall of light. Dun wings
flail, ribbed like Gothic vaults and
camouflaged with moons
large as owl eyes. Lurching through
the light’s rain, it veers, collides,
hugs the bulb
and falls away. And the singed antennae
recall in something like a mezzotint
the larval dark passage,
the hunger, the gray dream of with, and, the.
Triptych:
Nathan Gold, Maria,
On the Waterfront
9/14/01. So, Sollie, here I am again, an old man,
zeyde, now. You’re gone ten years, but it’s your birthday
and I’m standing here as always on Brooklyn Bridge
and staring at that skyline, writing it all down.
The longest journey in this country, Uncle Mike
would say, stretches from the Lower East Side to
the Upper East, and weekends you would see them there,
the rich, the big shots, strolling to the Met, say,
or Guggenheim to see the Rembrandts or Chagalls,
gold flecks of light drifting down through leafy branches
to settle on the shoulders of their silk, tailored suits.
So I’m halfway: a three-room near the Chelsea, not bad,
considering what might have been. Some years ago
I ran into Reznikoff at Dubrow’s on Seventh Ave.
when he was writing Holocaust, and he blurts out,
Eichmann said his entire life was founded on
one moral principle: Kant’s categorical imperative,
later modified for the “small man’s household use.”
My God, can you believe it? Food spewed from his mouth,
his hands were shaking. Thousands murdered everyday.
He read Kant and yet. . . . Language rendered useless.
Thought turned inside out. Rez wrote his poems true to fact
but often with a sense of failure. Three days ago
I knew this sense, words failing, as the towers drowned
in smoke, as the Malach HaMavet spread its wings
across the city. Rabbi Stern, a good man, a holy man,
prayed in its shadow, bewildered as the rest of us.
And so, Crane’s poem, Under thy shadow by the piers
I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear . . .
but lend a myth to God? No, I don’t think so. The wings
are spread too wide this time and stain the river gray
the way that Kansas dust storm turned the sky death-gray
when we were boys on our trip out west, hitchhiking.
All that space, all that American space Crane’s bridge
embraced, and not just Brooklyn to Manhattan, but coast
to coast, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod.
And he should be here now as I am, groping for
the words, the true ones, for a country and a city
like none anywhere whose streets are shrouded gray
(some days, Mike said, near Lublin it came down
like snow, like snow), whose skies are ruined with ash.
Maria Rasputin, b. 1899, Siberia; d. 1977, Los Angeles, California
They say the fortress has been taken; it is evening, it is dark, rebelling horseguards just went past with music. Autos race along Zagródny without cease; they are met with shouts of “Hurrah!” Soldiers and workers shoot into the air, there are few people out, it is noisy and dark; soldiers roam around in groups, smoke, and shoot aimlessly. The revolution has taken the form of a military uprising. . . . Chaos, forces of the century.
—THE DIARIES OF NIKOLAY PUNIN, 1917
A circus. Circles. Everything comes round, Pyotr.
May I call you Pyotr? I knew so many then.
Look up there, the freeway, cars trunk to tail like
circus elephants. Feed them or they’ll trample you.
I know. Ringling Brothers. I trained animals,
but lions mostly. Yes. Almost killed once, a bear
in Indiana. Russia, Budapest. And Paris,
where I danced in cabarets, then New York, later
Florida, now L.A. A riveter in Long Beach,
but too old now, I babysit for the bourgeois rich,
and when they ask for my credentials, I say,
I babysat the daughters of the Czar of Russia.
That shuts them up. You’re too polite, of course, to ask
about my father. “Mad Monk,” indeed. I don’t know,
the women, that crazy cult. And God knows I’m no saint
myself. But all past. Long time. Vodka under the bridge.
He was my father, and he loved me. History
judges him, nothing I can do. Listen: history
is a mess, just one damned thing and then another.
Believe me, I know. I was there. The door of history
closes, opens. It opened, I went through. Czar,
Czarina, children, gone. Varya, Mitia, gone.
All gone. And I survive. Two husbands, five countries,
two wars, and look, I’m here talking to Blake scholar,
yes? Blake, the one with visions, angels, yes? You come
to study in the mansion of the Railroad King.
The bourgeois rich. My father had a vision and told
Czar Nicholas, Don’t go to war. It’s Serbia,
not our affair. Everything comes round. Pyotr,
you say your father fought in World War Two. The mess
of history being what it is, does it not amaze you,
but for a little man named Wilhelm with a withered arm,
a tiny brain, and a Germany to play with,
there might not have been a First World War, a vengeful peace,
an Adolf, another war, and you, like thousands more,
without a father? They murdered mine. Mad, maybe,
but he told him twice. Or that if the Archduke’s idiot
driver had turned right instead of left, then no
assassination, no Great War, and decades later,
no absent fathers. Maybe. But he had a vision!
He knew! History is a mess: whatever we do now,
a hundred years from now they’re burying the victims.
Bozhe moi. In Paris, just before I left, there was
a man named Kojève whose idea was the end
of history, and desire, the little engine running it.
Intellectuals in the cabarets would speak of it.
(What did I know? Like you, I come from peasants.
I just listened.) And in Ringling Brothers, something
called a freak show, was a little girl named Frieda Pushnik
with only half a body. Intelligent, so brave,
a soul, no arms to push against the world, no legs
to run away from it. Well, I’m a freak of history,
I thought. She can do it, so can I. And so I did.
So, Pyotr, look again. Up there. The freeway, trunk
to tail like circus elephants. And who will feed them?
Who will they trample to get more? There’s your desire,
your want, and trust me, it is endless. But the end
of history? Oh no, Pyotr. It’s only just begun.
know thyself
Flashlight in hand, I stand just inside the door
in my starched white shirt, red jacket nailed shut
by six gold buttons, and a plastic black bowtie,
a sort of smaller movie screen reflecting back
the larger one. Is that really you? says Mrs. Pierce,
my Latin teacher, as I lead her to her seat
between the Neiderlands, our neighbors, and Mickey Breen,
who owns the liquor store. Walking back, I see
their faces bright and childlike in the mirrored glare
of a tragic winter New York sky. I know them all,
these small-town worried faces, these natives of the known,
the real, a highway and brown fields, and New York
is a foreign land—the waterfront, unions, priests,
the tugboat’s moan—exotic as Siam or Casablanca.
I have seen this movie seven times, memorized the lines:
Edie, raised by nuns, pleading—praying, really—
Isn’t everybody a part of everybody else?
and Terry, angry, stunned with guilt, Quit worrying
about the truth. Worry about yourself, while I,
in this one-movie Kansas town where everyone
is a part of everybody else, am waiting darkly
for a self to worry over, a name, a place,
New York, on 52nd Street between the Five Spot
and Jimmy Ryan’s where bebop and blue neon lights
would fill my room and I would wear a porkpie hat
and play tenor saxophone like Lester Young, but now,
however, I am lost, and Edie, too, and Charlie,
Father Barry, Pop, even Terry because he worried
more about the truth than he did about himself,
and I scan the little mounds of bodies now lost even
to themselves as the movie rushes to its end,
car lights winging down an alley, quick shadows
fluttering across this East River of familiar faces
like storm clouds cluttering a wheat field or geese
in autumn plowing through the sun, that honking,
that moan of a boat in fog. I walk outside
to cop a smoke, I could have been a contender,
I could have been somebody instead of . . . what I am,
and look across the street at the Army-Navy store
where we would try on gas masks, and Elmer Fox
would let us hold the Purple Hearts, but it’s over now,
and they are leaving, Goodnight, Mr. Neiderland,
Goodnight, Mrs. Neiderland, Goodnight, Mick, Goodnight,
Mrs. Pierce, as she, a woman who has lived alone
for forty years and for two of those has suffered through
my botched translations from the Latin tongue, smiles,
Nosce te ipsum, and I have no idea what she means.