Your Name Here: Poems (10 page)

Well, I’ll be paying my respects to your missus,

who, no offense, knows me better than she may have let on.

But who cares? Life is a carnival,

I think. Besides, it’s elsewhere.

Night started to shrivel as he departed.

We were wondering what on earth we were doing here, and how

to extricate ourselves, should we ever really want to.

You always leave me where we left off.

You bring me every little thing,

which is probably a mistake.

You shaved my canary once.

I am anxious to be out by the speedway.

At least, almost nothing happens there.

I was drugged by a cat once

on the edge of Lake Lucerne. Woke

feeling like a businessman without portfolio.

Wait, here goes a new one. He’ll examine the fork

to see if it’s rooted. Well, it is. In danger.

In the past, which is much the same thing.

So we dance the bolero in times like these.

I believe I am slimmer than my last bathing suit.

Tommy sat on the step, looking so cute. It was

run for your lives, now or never. Now

I don’t feel so much better. I had dropped off the letter

at the office, thinking it would be quicker.

Perhaps the editor never got it. I enjoy playing

the glass harmonica, am slender and look half my age.

Catcher in the Rye
is my all-time favorite book.

And how about you? Do you, too, come out here

with your family on Saturday afternoons, hoping

for a little rest and relaxation, far

from the city and its desks? Here they have daffodils.

Look, there is one over there by the city.

They have a name for it. “Detroit.”

And all the time I thought I was being a pest

someone was desperately in love with me.

The person sickened and apparently died

in a hospital far away. Now I have no one,

no friends to gripe with or call coaxing names to.

I was definitely born at the wrong time

or in the wrong city. Pot-luck dinners were shared.

I thought I had gone to hell. Too bad I woke up in time.

A few things came to observe me:

a terrible explosion,

flowers, dustiness in the boroughs,

planners plagued by increasingly goofy proposals.

I could have pretended not to be in.

Instead I came to the door in shirtsleeves,

extending a hand to the vexed guests. “What about those Orioles,

this terribly warm weather we’ve been having?” Truthfully,

I was suffering from the heat and didn’t know it.

It was enough just then to perceive life as a sandbar,

or a mirage of one, that the tide is frantically

trying to erase so as to cover its tracks.

Broken discoveries invaded my short-term memory,

but not so you’d notice. Continuing the polite

palaver I asked after the health of this one and that one,

how little Lois was doing in school, what Howie was up to

in his treehouse. It was as though no one cared.

Or had seen me. They shuffled aimlessly away

to come alive later no doubt in some sex sequence,

while here leaves are browning before the end of summer

and the groundskeeper waits.

What about your immortal soul?

I may have lost it, just this once, but other chapters

will arrive, bright as a child’s watercolor,

and you’d want to be around me.

Small city where I lived for some years in total darkness,

whose pale terminology took over

my varied instincts for right and wrong.

Sometimes in the long evenings one would stop talking,

then, if the topic was, say, shoes

the others would mouth their assent. I cannot go in or out

of doors to this day without recalling your vocabulary

of dirty words that no longer count. I mean they are clean now.

The working dead pitch in at seven.

A new table had taken your hands.

You should move into it, dining space,

letting the wine of your spit wander over and muzzle

the hollow square of guards out in the square.

One was always missing, or so it seemed,

but they had ingenious ways of disguising it,

like a pretty girl in a shawl was sent to the doctor’s

to reclaim some suds, and nobody noticed her by the

time we’d realized she was gone. The antlers over the vitrine

however grew clammy and trembled—

no doubt at the thought of some sport

infinitely postponed, or curtailed.

Yet we followed where her eyes led dancing, wild topic.

Find hordes! Or else it was all over in the suburbs

whose furious light beat like an ornery orrery.

The band marched in and played the doctor symphony

while we were talking amongst ourselves. What to do next?

There was bread in the breadbox

but all the shoe stores were closed.

We like our pixillated selves

in that tertiary period, yet always

a vague dissatisfaction gnawed at our tripes.

There was mewing between the thunderclaps.

We were sure we wouldn’t get out alive,

yet we always did, somehow. Someone must have told on us, though,

for we were made to stand in the basement

as the hours oozed through the window grill.

We knew we could catch up

someday when foam would caress the weir

and black-eyed susans stumbled.

It is not a happy place to be

until after the rain has ended.

That article I’d meant to read—

you saw it first, a while ago, in some magazine,

perused it and forgot its major tenets.

Only the ghost of its prose rhythms served you,

like water at the base of a log

some minnow undermines.

So they never came for us in the suburbs

of what city we were living in at that time.

We lived undisturbed, in the manner of the great dead writers:

metallic coffee in the morning, then work until almost noon

with a couple of poached eggs on rye toast then, then more

of the same till afternoon shadows lengthened, and it was time

to go for a long walk and play ambush. Stealthily we’d return,

sampling the largesse of unknown ancestors,

admiring the way those rocks look on business trips,

blush that suffuses the whole earth. Tell me,

can you remember any of this? I, who put it all down,

I cannot, and so let the living choose my books

at the rental library, evening’s salad from the greengrocer’s.

If there is more to remember, I gift you with it

because of the eternal person you were sometimes, and the loveliness

of your being, shaken clear of you like duck feathers.

Many couldn’t stop being in love with you,

and that in a decade. In the pileup every noble

impulse is disgraced, every overture rebuffed,

no matter how insincere. A wall of plums towers

over the effort at tilling. Usually they paint it up

so you can see it in the haze. Not today.

A freckled girl misunderstands me and laughs,

as though I were part of her explanation.

“You see, the boys drive right through you.

And I thought
I
was invisible.” Hon, it’s your hat,

not your fault, that evening headlines tilt at.

Everywhere is a great fuss, though there were parishes

of tranquillity only last week. They decided to change things

just because things ought to change, or else because they do, anyway.

Peace in the distance is merely a metallic whine,

the fruit concurs. And now very seldom.

I cannot recommend your curls too highly—

that is, I cannot recommend them. Sometimes

I wish I could, whenas in silks

you go, past the cat’s dish

and on into the living room. I wish

there was some way to add a story-line, or patter,

melody, whatever you want to call it,

but there just isn’t. Something greater

than us approaches, calls down to us:

Has he left the building? Is the theater empty,

really empty, its rows of red velvet seats

devoid of a single guest, or ghost?

There was a party last night but I didn’t go,

couldn’t stand the ruckus, the questions

people put to you: How do you like living

in your new house? Fine. I moved there twenty-five

years ago, but it all still seems new to me,

the sink especially. Then you spend a lot of time

in the bathroom? No, it was my books I was talking about,

my treasured library. I don’t see how anyone can read

too many books, do you? Am I delusional? Is it a forest

that’s approaching, with its format of shadows,

wind among its grasses? And all this time

I thought you were asleep. I took a long walk.

Ended up next door. Ed had been hitting the sneaky pete

again. And I have things to do, walks to shovel,

before the next train, and the grain

that is sure to follow in its wake.

Having escaped the first box,

I wandered into a fenced-off arena

from which the distance, peach-blue, could be ascertained:

convenient for my adventures

at this period of my life. Yet I wriggled farther into an indeterminate space

that was actually a mood, or many moods, one overlaying another

like gift wrap.

This is actually what was supposed to take place:

a duet of duelling cuckoos, at the close of which the winner

gets to stand next to me for the photo-op.

Alas, things went terribly wrong.

For I can now claim no space as rightfully mine

and must stand at the edge of the crowd like a ghost

for an unforeseeable length of time.

All this because I meant to be polite to someone.

We had met in the desert, you see, and he wished for a warm place

that wasn’t the desert, and I said, “Why not try my hometown?

It’s warm in winter. Sometimes.”

Days later at the hotel bar I learned his real name

and his reason for wanting to trail me to my so-called hometown,

where I had never felt at home, yet never dreamed

of wishing for another. He said our great-great-grandmothers had been friends

in France, in the time of Marie de Médicis. “In any case

you can’t let me down now, now that I’ve tracked you here

and seen how you actually live.”

Was that meant to be a compliment? I suppose not,

yet something in his bright-eyed delivery made me imagine

I’d found a new long-lost friend. “Let’s go visit the post office,”

I proposed, and he eagerly assented. Walking the narrow streets

I would never again recognize, I got this wistful feeling,

like a long, slow song sung from the tip of a distant tower.

I’d been rejected again, yet how? Nothing had really happened.

My friend was looking straight ahead, not saying anything.