Poetry 365

In our obscure life, for instance, how easy
it is to turn from the masters falling into the sea.
No doubt they were amazing—
the whiteness of their legs in the green water!—
but it is not an important failure.
The living eat a cold peach
delicious from the refrigerator or
cleanse the intricate joints of an engine
in pure gasoline, and its vapors rise
like barely visible snakes
finally lost in the sun.
It is also good
to teach a child to sing
with words or without,
to love and afterwards
go slowly hand in hand
for a swim in the astringent ocean.

The sun rises above the Expressway East;
follow that until noon.
At the fork in the road by the overturned semi,
go left, north by northwest.
A young woman with a lantern
will be seen walking along Route 156.
Follow her past a barn
with a broken reaper.
At a springhouse, go right
as the moon rises and past
an abandoned mineshaft.
Where the arrow for old Route 210
points left, go straight up the hill
past the man with the shotgun
obliterating roadsigns.
At the top of the hill
there is an abandoned schoolhouse.
Inside is an elderly man in the dark,
cataloguing antiques.
Be sure to approach him with a gift.
He has never met us but knows
we are here.

His casket is fumed oak.
Cheeks rouged, mustache and nails
still growing, his thin lips
rest in set mockery;
as always, silence
is his last word.
My mother floats
like the ash of a burnt note
along the banks of flowers.
Distant relatives
whisper politely about money.
Two attendants laugh
to kill time in the afternoon.

At last I understand his stillness.
Now his nails curl into my palms,
his snarl grows in my throat.
Buried all his life in his body
was a lost mine that explodes in the fire.

Richard Farina drove off a bridge at night in Ithica
and six years later broke his neck by driving his
bike into a tree in California.

When my father died I remembered that one day in
a Chinese restaurant above the Ridgewood Theater
he sneezed chow mein.

I have been crying for six years about Farina.

I am about to buy a schoolhouse built in 1879. On
the foundation is scratched “DK.” Bob step, who will
sell it for $600, went to school there. Now he can’t
get into it because of the bees.

I don’t believe anything that Farina said. The Cuban
story, they peyote milkshake from the dark man. I think
Kristin was either the daughter of the Swedish am-
bassador or the girl from Alexandria with the mole
on her upper lip.

When he saw asparagus growing he said, “They look
like green pricks coming out of the earth.” Farina
said, “The dead are trying to tell us something.”

Outside the schoolhouse the pokeweed is growing.
In the fall their berries are dark as drops of old blood.
Poisonous. The old plant contains phytolaccin, caus-
ing paralysis, but also long used as a medicinal herb.

When they arise in the spring they look and taste like
asparagus.

The Elizabethans ripened apricots in dung and be-
lieved asparagus was an aphrodisiac, undoubtedly
because of the phallic suggestions.

The night Farina returned I got to make it with the girl
from Alexandria but, being drunk, couldn’t get one
up. “Poor thing, poor thing, it’s all right, I under-
stand,” yawning.

My grandmother said, “You have to understand your
father.” I’ve given it all up. When my mother found
him on the lawn he was serious as always. Cause of
death: digging weeds.

When I die I would like to be in that schoolhouse
among the poke plants, children and friends around
me, bees overhead, everybody laughing. I would like
to read them this and go underground laughing.

So, back to the lost paradise
after the neglect of fourteen years.
On the porch, at fourteen, I told my father
our condition resides within ourselves.
I had a red and white motorboat
to sail across the green-glazed patio
in autumn toward the wall of maples,
each golden on the edge of death.
Cousin Gunther sat on the patio,
telling us secrets and drinking
at noon; he knew the names of stars
and the proper names of toads,
and he is still alive somewhere,
a drunk repeating words on the green walls.
He was best at building giant snowmen
with basketball fists, and we
children, with round smoking mouths,
stood watching the old deciduous world,
innocently in love with snowmen,
and never thought
that fourteen years away,
we would still be standing,
arguing with prices in our mouths.
Little has changed,
except for the dead.
The trees offer up their golden leaves,
and a fat garden snake
squeezes into the dissolving wall.

I have had faulty ducktwork for years.
When I vacation, neighbors wire
DUCTWORK FAILING
WATER EVERYWHERE.
There have been three attempts at arson.
Invisible rowdies
throw stones at my mother.
The bats have vacated my house.
I have a burning sensation
when I urinate, and I am no longer
allowed to vote.
My oldest boy shoots up nurses,
and deer have deserted the meadow.
The specialists give estimates endlessly,
but there is never enough money
for repair.

In the world more real,
the goosegirl is dropped to the ashes,
the crystal valley is bombed and its shards
rebombed by invisible planes,
the adorable kittens are drowned
along with their friend,
the crazy nice useless old lady.

In their dreams of life, children
arrive at the reasons
like the beanstalk seemingly fated
to meet the bloodthirsty giant.
Meanwhile, they keep their books
because the stories tell them
what to do if
the Japanese princess
with twelve golden bears
shyly knocks at their door.

Of course she’s happy
in the kitchen
whose stone and metal
have been worn out by her flesh.
She’s smoothed the clean linen
for fifty years;
in fall she laughs like a slice of moon
as she peels warm apples
into the battered colander in the sink.
The heavy cloth, the scent of fruit,
are comfortable things.
She is no appendix to her daughter’s world.

Unless you escape in time,
she reviews forever the ancient pennants
on boats vanished from the river,
her first man’s name,
the umbrella trees she saw one time in Kingston.
Seemingly content with chores,
with trees beyond the window
spinning familiar cycles,
she unfurls the wash like banners.
Surely her work is useful.
She earns her keep.
She tells her daughter’s world as it runs
straight tracks toward its future,
“I am useful,
I am still here.”

I climbed the stairs
to your apartment and
met your old lover and
his friend on the way
out laughing.

I brought you a book
of poems that I love;
you have cooked
a simplified coq con vin.

The evening I decided to love you
you told me you loved me.

Passion declared.
Steak burned.

There is no future for us.
You have discovered the secret
that will bind me to you for life.

I returned.
You laughed.
When I answer my telephone
you are crying.

When I lived with you,
you spend your evenings
memorizing irregular
German verbs; now
that I spend my nights
investigating bamboo taxonomy,
you write that
I have ruined your life.

I’m sorry that I have misjudged you.
Your slaughter of the innocents
led me astray. An old professor
put the worst possible interpretation on it.

Forgive me for the time
I said you were mistake
when you bombed the infants’ hospital.
I see now that you have averted war.

When you machine-gunned the five thousand cripples
I questioned the wisdom of your action,
but now I find it was to protect my job.

I was a fool to suggest you misled us
in the campaign against mental defectives.
It was preserved our way of life.

Now that I understand you
I wonder about nothing,
except where the next threat
is to come from.