Elegy for a Broken Machine (2 page)

after a gloved hand

had burst

through the clods and pale roots

and fastened the harness,

and tugged

for the lift to begin;

when he’d flashed

his thumbs-up

and heard the men roar;

when he’d answered

all the EMT’s questions,

and laid his head back

and sobbed, and thanked God,

and then felt his heart

finally, violently seize—

only then,

in the dark, sleeping house

before dawn,

looking up from the paper

as the last stars

faintly shined

in the skeletal arms

of the trees,

did I get a fleeting,

unspoken, yet

suddenly clear

sense of our real situation.

The house is dark

but the body glows.

It’s not the way it seems:

how what he was

is
him
again

each time the red clock blinks.

Soon the undertaker’s sons

will come and lift this

strangest of all strange things:

a palimpsest

of what we loved,

a nest in the brittle leaves.

It’s late, I know,

and the whole world waits

there, where you stopped to read,

and found us here,

and stared respectfully

out the window at the trees.

With nothing but time

and the light of the Singer,

and no one to come now forever

and rattle the bell

at the backdoor and scatter

black mud on the stoop,

and make that small moan

as he heaves off his boots—

with no one to fill

the big kettle and set it,

and fall asleep talking

to the back of her neck

as the treadle belt hums—

with nobody, nowhere

in need of such things,

she unbuckles his belt

for the last time

and cuts up his pant legs

and rips out the double-stitched seams,

making patches of plackets

and oil-stained pockets,

of kerchiefs, and collars, and sleeves,

her thin fingers setting the bobbin

and clamping the foot

until she’s joined every

scrap she can salvage,

no matter how brown

with his sweat, or stiff with his blisters,

or blooming his roses

of pine sap, and gear grease, and blood—

                                        until,

as the wedding clock chimes

and his buried bones freeze,

as frost gleams

at sunrise in the window,

she stands by the bed

and breathes his last scent,

then wraps herself

in it and sleeps.

His little Lego

arms outstretched,

Aeneas stares

across the Styx,

watching his

clay father fade

into the glued-on

cotton mist.

What is there

to say?
I love it.

I touch my son’s

soft neck,

and peer with him

into the depths

until his teacher

bellows
Parents!—

which means it’s time

It’s time kiddo

for her to take

by his small wrist

the boy who clings

to me like death,

as if he knows:

it is no myth.

Like two wrestlers etched

around some ancient urn

we’d lace our hands,

then wrench

each other’s wrists back

until the muscles ached

and the tendons burned,

and one brother

or the other grunted
Mercy
—

a game we played

so many times

I finally taught my sons,

not knowing what it was,

until too late, I’d done:

when the oldest rose

like my brother’s ghost,

grappling the little

ghost I was at ten—

who cried out
Mercy!

in my own voice
Mercy!

as I watched from deep

inside my father’s skin.

Back when Miss Heidrich still

    called up my mother

               and asked for a turn in the carpool,

even when it meant stopping

    by the school after chemo,

               even when, some days, I’d heave open the door

and find my friend Jim,

    with his veiny blue skull,

               half-asleep on the sticky brown vinyl

that always reeked of his vomit

    or the bleach that had cleaned it—

               back when no one I knew ever died,

I used to just sit there

    and laugh with my sister

               and watch the powerlines race past the farms,

because nobody’d told us,

    and I hadn’t yet even imagined

               how soon, as we sat in a pew looking on,

she’d lean down and kiss him

    just like in the driveway, I remember:

               when he used to wake and climb into her arms.

I can hear her through

the thin wall, singing,

up before the sun:

two notes, a kind

of hushed half-breathing,

each time the baby

makes that little moan—

can hear her trying

not to sing, then singing

anyway, a thing so old

it might as well

be Hittite or Minoan,

and so soft no one

would ever guess

that I myself once

sang that very song:

back when my son

and then his brother

used to cry all night

or half the morning,

though nothing in all

the world was wrong.

And now how strange:

to be the man from next door,

listening, as the baby cries

then quiets, cries and quiets

each time she sings

their secret song,

that would sound the same ten

thousand years ago,

and has no

meaning but to calm.

Let the leftovers rot.

Let the last candle burn.

Let the clocks think

whatever they want.

This is the night,

says the night, you were given.

The hour, each hour,

you’ve lost.

So lean into me, love.

Kiss the blue children.

Come cast our brief

shadows together.

Let the wet branches lash

the black windows like death.

Let me lie down

beside you forever.

We wrapped it in plastic

and strapped it with duct tape;

we wrestled it out to the curb

where, dusted with snow,

it slumped like a body

the garbagemen fed

through the maw

of a truck that they drove

out the tunnel, to Jersey—

to the dump where a thousand gulls keened,

hovering over that map of old stains

where we’d dreamt, and read, and made love—

where we sweated out fevers

and fought, and gave up,

and once gazed at our blinking

three-day-old babies,

never thinking it would end

full of maggots and fleas,

full of suckling rats and blind moles—

or whatever out there

sleeps where we slept,

as it sloughs its guts into the dirt.

The mirror-reflected

mirror casts

my son’s grandsons

into infinity before me.

My father’s fathers

stretch behind.

When I turn,

they turn.

When I blink,

they blink

their pale green eyes—

as the old man

tightens a paper

band around my neck,

and whets his blade,

and sighs.

I picture you leaving

your coat on the hood.

Wallet and keys.

The crisp envelope.

We all know what it’s like

to imagine the thing—

how glaring

and suddenly close

the tools are

if you need them:

a stoplight, a prescription.

A few feet of rope.

Or that joke of a pistol

you chose at the pawnshop

and loaded, and unloaded,

and cleaned,

then tucked in your belt,

like when you were seven,

as you crossed

a hayfield by the road,

where a sudden breeze lifted

the endless gray finches

and lit the bright

backs of the leaves—

your face the stunned face

of a prisoner then,

at the gateway

through which he’s released.

All I can do

to keep from believing

where, in truth, your last steps led,

is think of the story

you told us, of Procne,

and how she was saved

by the merciful gods:

my vision of you

on the shimmering ledge

turning, in midair, to a sparrow,

your voice to its soft vesper call,

as you left the meaningless

body below you,

falling its meaningless fall.

You, lovely beyond

all lovely, who

I’ve loved since I

first looked into

your blue

beyond blue eyes,

are no longer

anywhere on earth

the girl these words

call out to,

though never, since,

have I not been

a darkening wood

she walks through.

sip Natural Light

and make these little grunts

as they unwind

the ACE bandages

and braces from

their elaborately

wrapped legs,

while a waitress

at The 19th Hole

recites the specials

for the second time

since we came in,

half-yelling at the group

of cranky,

stooped old men

who every year

give less and less a shit

what anybody says:

their menus out

at full arm’s length

as Tom Barnett, the doctor,

frowns and squints

through whatever’s left

of his torn retina;

as Wunder grimaces

and orders nothing;

as Gary, the ex-pilot, lets

a loud, horrendous fart

that no one even

seems to hear but me:

“the kid” at forty,

still awkward

and self-conscious in their midst,

like some scientist

in a herd

of big bull walruses,

watching as they chuff

and graze the last SunChips,

debating which

funeral was best

and which a sham,

and which dead friend

was, let’s be honest,

rolling over in

his fucking grave—

which is when

the conversation always fades

and they stare off

at a screen so far

across the room

that no one even sees

the hit, or pitch,

or photo finish

I keep going on and on about,

though out of courtesy to me,

and to my father,

they just smile and pretend—

so exhausted are they

by my cheerfulness,

and my quick wit,

and my long, bright future’s

plain, goddamned

irrelevance.

squints at the attendant

with his white foam tray

and waves him off like a starlet

as she tells me
Someday

you’ll understand, darling.

Everyone will just—vanish!

blue smoke exploding

around her head when she laughs

then stares at her fingers in silence,

flicking the ash.

It’s not the drug I miss

but all those minutes

we used to steal

outside the library,

under restaurant awnings,

out on porches, by the quiet fields.