HE SPEAKS OF OLD AGE
Eighty, I’m up at eight, bathe
and trifle about until lunch. After,
I have a cup of bourbon and coffee,
It makes my mind race. I’m seeking
help. Do I get breathless when I exercise?
I’d hardly know. I have reached the age
now when my daughter can beat me
at croquet. It took me a long time
to become a human being. I can’t say
I have a lot of hope
for the whole thing. I procrastinate
by answering email. My neighbors
judge me now entirely on the cut
of my coat; but we’re all equally poor
so the verdict is softly given.
Beside my bed the radio plays; I read
Malone muert. My world is fairly floorboardish.
Outside, the drab reiteration
of brickwork, dahlias spring
from a moldering mattress, charred
timber litters the leaf-brindled rainwater.
My favorite room is the kitchen,
though I’ve given up on eating—
I’ve gotten to where I don’t like
to have food in my mouth, and heaven
is the moment after constipation.
I’ve grown not ugly, but entirely
unattractive. Bathing now, my eyes
are drawn to the wide-wrinkled, two-potato
sack at my crotch. Though, you’ll be
happy to know, even now my sex life could
fill more than one wet holiday weekend. Still,
passive as a toilet, I want my God back.
HIS DEMENTIA
Hands clapped flat between
knees I slept as the old man
shuffled through the French doors
and grabbed my shoulder—
rolling over, he slipped his hand
into mine — skin like black cabbage,
the skin of one badly burnt.
He leaned close — eyes green marbles
under ice, and I could see beside
the long darkness of his ear’s tunnel,
a blue sore like a decomposing berry,
and he said that he wanted Houdini
in the Hippodrome with Jennie
the elephant, and his black stack
of scratchy Red Seal albums
for the crank Victrola, and the dunes
and cut & pressed glass ruins
of a coastal town. I let him into bed,
and we listened a long time
to the furnace — I sang Caruso
into his good ear, until he began nodding
and I escaped from my skin leaving it
beside an old, deaf, nearly-blind man,
a palsied pile of nylons, a world of snow.
IN MOURNING
My father was inconsiderate enough
to die. A barrister, he loved
his wig. The criminals liked it too. No one wants
to be sent to prison by someone wearing
a t-shirt. They cut his carotid in autopsy
and asked if we had a scarf he might wear
for the funeral. So he lies in state
like Liberace. The rings won’t fit
the swollen fingers. On his sixtieth
he planted his face in the cake. When
the undertaker isn’t around I run him through
the range of motions — the pulleys
and cranes of his knees still creak. I’ve never
seen god in the face of a sleeping girl
or anywhere else. The old lovely bastard.
NOW AND FOREVER
I’m not wary of myself, or others,
but myself in the presence
of others. It might be safest
to stay home and read. Saturn’s rings
become the cast-iron balcony
of a house seen from everywhere,
on which inhabitants of the planet
take the air in the evening.
None of us is more alone
than another, and still no comfort
in it. I have never clutched anything…
at dusk deliriously. Sunlight
on stones is nothing like laughter
and still there is nearly enough.
FÅRÖ
After Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna
The snag of meeting new people
is that you’re asked to care about them—
nightmares, affairs, surgeries. Outside,
twenty-five sheepbells like wind chimes.
Nail bucket won’t stay on the roof. Boys hung
a small dog from a low branch — it’s cries covered
by gulls. Got the noose knot right. Took him
down live. That night I’m invited to dinner; tie
and black jacket. Swedish gin, discreet charm. Two
women with overbites god-talking, and a job
in a turtleneck. Shadowed interiors before snow-lit
casements. Leave a door ajar and there are
questions. Miss a fellow’s funeral, the bones’ll
never know. Frost-eaten pinecones. Muck-boots
in the green wetwhite goose shit, passing a butchers’
rack: lamb flanks, hog’s heads, a small shack humid
with horse piss and fish. If a rocks glass is thick
enough it makes a good sound when it breaks.
THE KINGHORSE BUTCHERTOWN BRAWL
Fifteen and scared, stabbing
a thick-necked skinhead
in Solovairs and a mule coat—
the quick resistance and crack,
sound like a hoof on gravel. He davened
back on his heels. The dumb, bird-shot
shock of his mouth
and the boggy slot, petering out
a bloody puddle. I rolled my tongue
around in my mouth a second,
then split. After twenty blocks
of cold I stopped
to wipe my hands and felt bad
but not sorry yet.
DAKOTA
They took him
in their car
to the 4400 block
of ____ Avenue,
near the airport,
where they left him
behind a utility
shed. The older
one driving. They
put a plastic bag
over his head
before they shot him
above the left ear. He
must have thought
they were going
to suffocate him.
A POLITE HISTORY
Walking through ice-seamed streets
to a theater, a streetcar full of talking
bodies passed a woman, before a column
of tanks rolling towards the town square
to confront a revolt. The woman
waved at the soldiers, and at that moment
she was tempted for the first time to join
them. It was not that the woman, with her
small breakable nose, tolerated the cruelty
of such a struggle in the hope
that it would bring a prosperous future:
the harshness of the violence was simply
endorsed as a sign of authenticity, three
or four times bigger than an opera.