Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (7 page)

PART FOUR

PINIONED HEART IN THE HEAT OF IT

Because he paid me union scale, I loved Christ

Schuler and monkeyed iron and copper water pipes

with his daughter, Katie O’Hare—KO, he called her,

and she was that, although she also liked to fight.

Not wrestle—which, when I could get ahold of her,

we would—but punch, kick, gouge, and bite. I mooned

over her teeth marks on my right shoulder for hours

one night, but no matter how I contrived

to contort my neck and stretch out my tongue,

I could not lick them as I wished. Nor her,

neither pugilistically speaking or otherwise.

“You keep that pipe of yours away from my daughter

or I’ll torque the thing clean off with this wrench,”

Christ said, brandishing a fourteen-inch quick fit

my way. Then he laughed. “She’s a sweet dumplin’,

ain’t she?” On the door of his truck, “Christ’s Plumbing:

Just Like Jesus Would Do,” the tailgate and bumper

festooned with stickers extolling the wisdom of Eugene V. Debs,

Norman Thomas, Albert Einstein, and Woody Guthrie.

“KO’s hair’s as red as America’ll be someday,” he said.

In every crawl space or basement, in some hidden spot

no owner or landlord would ever be likely to see,

he scrawled with a greasepaint pen the same slogan:

When the people shall have nothing more to eat,

they will eat the rich
. And though I knew

he meant the moneyed ones whose places we worked on,

I confess the line’s Rousseauian prognostication

was lost on me. All I wanted was to eat his sweet dumplin’ up.

She taunted me, as we hefted eight-foot iron

sewer pipes, debating the vileness of capitalist shit,

and as she was indoctrinated by Christ, so by she was I.

Come July I’d have made an incision in the gut

of any plutocrat she’d aimed me toward, pulled loose

a loop of intestine, and fed it to a hungry dog for her.

And if she believed my conversion was not quite true,

it was Christ himself who convinced her otherwise,

saying over lunch his admiration for my grandfather,

an International Worker of the World and doomed

unionless coal miner dying even then of black lung.

In the face of his praise I looked at KO and she was smiling.

Which was how it came to be we came to be

naked in the crawl space of a seedy complex

of subsidized housing some shyster city father

was paying us to plumb on the cheap. The freckles

on her chest ended where the sun never shined,

but I counted every one like a vote and felt

as though it were not only Christ I was betraying

but somehow my grandfather too,

believing the things she’d told me for reasons

having little to do with the downtrodden masses

but, rather, that right before my eyes was her pale,

unfreckled, and delectable ass, as she fed

a length of second-rate copper water pipe up a hole

between the floor joists and wiggled at me,

then giggled. She’d be almost as old as I am today,

if she had not vanished one morning on the way to school.

They found her stripped, bound in baling twine,

face up in a pond on the outskirts of town.

Christ retired then and died a few years later,

my grandmother insisted, of a broken heart.

Katie O’Hare of the red, red hair, of the wedge

of neckline and shoulder freckles, daughter of Christ,

I loved you too, girl. The general theory was, you were

too beautiful for an unknown monster to resist.

The lesser thought was fascists, or some midwestern,

right-wing, anticommunist, self-appointed death squad

come to avenge your father’s un-American tailgate philosophy.

Forgive me, if I find this latter take unlikely.

But you should also know, that among the pipes and faucets,

the toilets and showers of my hanging-by-its-fingertips

middle-class, mostly mortgaged American home,

I do not see or hear the water issue forth or vanish

without some thought of you and of your father.

He would not recognize the nation of your birth.

You fought hard, I’m sure, but your father

had no country to fight for. Only the earth.

He was, as you were, as I may be myself,

someday, a citizen of the world.

The intelligence of the birds had always pleased him.

Magpies and ravens, mostly—how they flew

along with the tractor, or lined the way

to the boneyard like watchers at a parade,

the tractor rocking under its bucket-load.

But the old mule was too big for the bucket;

so big, in fact, that he was sure, were he to fall it

where it stood, the tractor could not

drag the beast in chains all the way there.

So he haltered it and led it, three or four steps

at a time, over much of an autumn afternoon,

to the half-filled ravine’s lip. And he understood

that it must have been the tractor that drew the birds,

for none were there, as he stroked

the lathered neck and withers, and whispered

his gratitude and consolation,

then nestled the muzzle of the .45 behind an ear

and turned his face away and tumbled it—

he never called it anything but mule—into a gash in the earth.

Smell of cordite then. Smell of dust. The mule

came to rest among the years-woven nest of bones

exactly on its back, a posture he knew

the coyotes would appreciate. He also knew their howls

as early as this evening might be heard,

and as with the already arriving magpies and ravens,

passing overhead as he walked back to the farm,

this too, in his sadness, pleased him.

“Disensouled,” he said, and a chill

came over me, until I realized

he meant only that the wreck I’d been inspecting

had already been purchased. They were all

wrecks. It was a junkyard, after all.

I was looking for one the transmission,

transfer case, and rear differential

might be removed from and transplanted,

although what drew me to this one

was the shape of its wreckage: bashed

perpendicularly by a tree, U-shaped down

to the frame. But what had caught my eye

and held it was the flattened bench of the seat

stained almost entirely a deep ocherous brown.

“Them people never knew what hit ’em,”

he said. “Tree come down on the highway.”

He shuffled his toothpick from the left

side of his mouth to the right. “Act of God.”

There was a rig down the way a bit

he said I ought to see. “Other way around,

this one,” he said. “Truck hit the tree.”

The impact, far to the right, blew the engine

due left and broke the bellhousing off,

but the drivetrain looked solid and sound.

“Lookit there,” he said. A perfect half-orb

blasted into the safety glass of the windshield.

“Fella’s head,” he said, working around it,

as he wrote on the windshield, “Sold.”

Sarah Vaughan, 1959

As I listen, I like to imagine her

at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago,

every man in the place aware

no one’s ever sung the song so,

nor so perfectly. And by that perfection

is the wound at the source of it

turned salt within the wound it inflicts back,

the long-held vibratos felt

in the tongue and every other elsewhere

another tongue might have been.

Look at her. She’s up there

in the lights and smoke. Sweets Edison’s

indeeding and amening
chumps

and true
fools
through the mute

of his I-am-right-next-to-her trumpet

and tells them all she don’t give a hoot

if she ever hears your name again.

There is no part of her body not

singing now, not a single blessed thing

among the tenderest and most powerful parts

of who she is inside it, inside the skin,

under the dress and the lights, in the building

on Rush Street, under Chicago’s wind

and a few city stars hardly showing.

It’s also me she’s singing to, I imagine.

The recording’s fifty years old, but oh, how

she sings, there in Mister Kelly’s establishment,

although the building is a steakhouse now.

They’re from southern California or Texas,

a couple from actual Dixie-like places

with good barbecue, cockroaches, and humidity.

They’re almost used to snow, come February.

Today, however, is a whiteout.

We gather at the tall windows and cannot see

the familiar secretary across the way, rolling a rock of type

up the mountain of her screen, nor the courtyard, its picnic table

resembling a snow-covered car. And still

the sun not only beams down through it all,

it’s also made an arc of light across the sky above us,

a snowbow—shimmering, electric, and magnificent.

I can hardly get them to return to their desks

and the task at hand, a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson,

who, being from Maine, knew a few things about snow,

and to whom the last soul standing at the window bears,

though he does not know it, a remarkable resemblance:

hair slicked from a part down the middle of his head,

gold-rimmed glasses, and a mustache

the size of a bratwurst waxed into points

on either side of his pale, bereaved-looking face.

They’ve never seen anything like it, the snowbow, I mean,

and mustachioed Corey—the student at the window,

from Baton Rouge—is still standing there

when Margo—she of the blue hair and tattoos,

a girl from the Montana Hi-Line—turns to him.

She’s intense, her fairly new tongue stud sometimes clicks

against the back of her teeth when she’s excited.

She takes his right hand in both of hers

and startles him from his reverie. And there they are,

silhouetted against the blowing snow, Corey

looking down and seeing in Margo’s eyes

the same amazing thing he could not turn away from,

until he does and returns to his chair. We would tell you,

if we knew, the story that will unfold from them,

the many ways we cannot see, of which this

is the least, having to do not with the snow

or the light but what even they themselves could not know,

that he would break her heart repeatedly.

Sometimes the woods at night are so still

the sound of your own breath

abashes you, to say nothing

of the racket as you walk.

Sometimes talking helps, saying

a poem, or even, if you’re going downhill,

singing. Other times there’s nothing

to do but stop and listen, or even sit

and close your eyes in the name

of attentiveness. In daylight,

there are birds, and for some reason

the wind too is always awake,

delivering weather or dust.

At night, you concentrate,

your listening is enhanced,

and sooner or later you will hear

a scale of bark let loose from a tree

or a needle tick from limb to limb

on its enormous journey to the earth.

And sometimes, having resumed

your walk, you will stop at the top

of the ridge above your house.

Its window lights will illumine the ground

around it, and you will listen again

and hear the faint hum of it—

the buzz of its lightbulbs, the industry

of its clocks. And sometimes

you will approach it as would a thief

and peer through the windows,

in order that you might covet,

being part of the world’s greater silence,

everything that is already yours.

I wish the month had one more day, or even two,

or that, in truth, I might live it again, if only

so that Lola might be with me a little while longer.

Not that the month has been anything special

in regards to her. Most of it I spent

away, and even the time with her,

in the light of her devastating, sultry gaze,

the fabulous black teddy, the sheer pink

negligee, the one visible garter snap,

the black hose, the carmine garter belt itself,

and the high-heeled pink mules, to say nothing

of the way she is seated on the golden

sheen of the love seat, or the way the right

cup of the teddy creates the most perfect

ripple of flesh at the side of the breast

it lifts just enough to cast a slender shadow

between it and the other one, nor even

the way her left leg is tucked under the right

thigh or the way she holds the heel of that mule

in her right hand as though bracing herself

against herself. Even in all this glory,

the time I spent with her consisted of nothing

more than the occasional glance

until today. Tomorrow I’ll move on

to the beauty of next month, which, like every one

but this one, is nameless in a special way.

Four weeks ago, Firebelle; tomorrow, A Warm Welcome.

But today, dark already at four-thirty in the afternoon,

a snowstorm blowing in, it is Wednesday,

the thirtieth of Lola, 2011.