All of Us: The Collected Poems

  and as usual in the wrong company.

  Where the hell has Guy been keeping himself?

  she wants to know. She sips her drink and looks at him

  as if he’s brain-damaged. She spots a pimple

  on his chin; it’s an ingrown hair but it’s filled

  with pus, frightful, looks like hell. In front

  of everyone she says, “Who have you been eating out

  lately?” Staring hard at his pimple.

  Being drunk myself, I don’t recall how he answered.

  Maybe he said, “I don’t remember who it was;

  I didn’t get her name.” Something smart.

  Anyway, his wife has this kind of blistery rash,

  maybe it’s cold sores, at the edge of her mouth,

  so she shouldn’t be talking. Pretty soon,

  it’s like always: they’re holding hands and laughing

  like the rest of us, at little or nothing.

  Later, in the living room,

  thinking everyone had gone out for hamburgers,

  she blew him in front of the TV. Then said,

  “Happy birthday, you son of a bitch!” And slapped his

  glasses off. The glasses he’d been wearing

  while she made love to him. I walked into the room

  and said, “Friends, don’t do this to each other.”

  She didn’t flinch a muscle or wonder aloud

  which rock I’d come out from under. All she said was

  “Who asked you, hobo-urine?” Guy put his glasses on.

  Pulled his trousers up. We all went out

  to the kitchen and had a drink. Then another. Like that,

  the world had gone from afternoon to night.

  Bonnard’s Nudes

  His wife. Forty years he painted her.

  Again and again. The nude in the last painting

  the same young nude as the first. His wife.

  As he remembered her young. As she was young.

  His wife in her bath. At her dressing table

  in front of the mirror. Undressed.

  His wife with her hands under her breasts

  looking out on the garden.

  The sun bestowing warmth and color.

  Every living thing in bloom there.

  She young and tremulous and most desirable.

  When she died, he painted a while longer.

  A few landscapes. Then died.

  And was put down next to her.

  His young wife.

  Jean’s TV

  My life’s on an even keel

  these days. Though who’s to say

  it’ll never waver again?

  This morning I recalled

  a girlfriend I had just after

  my marriage broke up.

  A sweet girl named Jean.

  In the beginning, she had no idea

  how bad things were. It took

  a while. But she loved me

  a bunch anyway, she said.

  And I know that’s true.

  She let me stay at her place

  where I conducted

  the shabby business of my life

  over her phone. She bought

  my booze, but told me

  I wasn’t a drunk

  like those others said.

  Signed checks for me

  and left them on her pillow

  when she went off to work.

  Gave me a Pendleton jacket

  that Christmas, one I still wear.

  For my part, I taught her to drink.

  And how to fall asleep

  with her clothes on.

  How to wake up

  weeping in the middle of the night.

  When I left, she paid two months’

  rent for me. And gave me

  her black and white TV.

  We talked on the phone once,

  months later. She was drunk.

  And, sure, I was drunk too.

  The last thing she said to me was,

  Will I ever see my TV again?

  I looked around the room

  as if the TV might suddenly

  appear in its place

  on the kitchen chair. Or else

  come out of a cupboard

  and declare itself. But that TV

  had gone down the road

  weeks before. The TV Jean gave me.

  I didn’t tell her that.

  I lied, of course. Soon, I said,

  very soon now.

  And put down the phone

  after, or before, she hung up.

  But those sleep-sounding words

  of mine making me feel

  I’d come to the end of a story.

  And now, this one last falsehood

  behind me,

  I could rest.

  Mesopotamia

  Waking before sunrise, in a house not my own,

  I hear a radio playing in the kitchen.

  Mist drifts outside the window while

  a woman’s voice gives the news, and then the weather.

  I hear that, and the sound of meat

  as it connects with hot grease in the pan.

  I listen some more, half asleep. It’s like,

  but not like, when I was a child and lay in bed,

  in the dark, listening to a woman crying,

  and a man’s voice raised in anger, or despair,

  the radio playing all the while. Instead,

  what I hear this morning is the man of the house

  saying “How many summers do I have left?

  Answer me that.” There’s no answer from the woman

  that I can hear. But what could she answer,

  given such a question? In a minute,

  I hear his voice speaking of someone who I think

  must be long gone: “That man could say,

  ‘O, Mesopotamia!’

  and move his audience to tears.”

  I get out of bed at once and draw on my pants.

  Enough light in the room that I can see

  where I am, finally. I’m a grown man, after all,

  and these people are my friends. Things

  are not going well for them just now. Or else

  they’re going better than ever

  because they’re up early and talking

  about such things of consequence

  as death and Mesopotamia. In any case,

  I feel myself being drawn to the kitchen.

  So much that is mysterious and important

  is happening out there this morning.

  The Jungle

  “I only have two hands,”

  the beautiful flight attendant

  says. She continues

  up the aisle with her tray and

  out of his life forever,

  he thinks. Off to his left,

  far below, some lights

  from a village high

  on a hill in the jungle.

  So many impossible things

  have happened,

  he isn’t surprised when she

  returns to sit in the

  empty seat across from his.

  “Are you getting off

  in Rio, or going on to Buenos Aires?”

  Once more she exposes

  her beautiful hands.

  The heavy silver rings that hold

  her fingers, the gold bracelet

  encircling her wrist.

  They are somewhere in the air

  over the steaming Mato Grosso.

  It is very late.

  He goes on considering her hands.

  Looking at her clasped fingers.

  It’s months afterwards, and

  hard to talk about.

  Hope

  “My wife,” said Pinnegar, “expects to see me go to the dogs

  when she leaves me. It is her last hope.”

  — D. H. LAWRENCE,

  “JIMMY AND THE DESPERATE WOMAN”

  She gave me the c
ar and two

  hundred dollars. Said, So long, baby.

  Take it easy, hear? So much

  for twenty years of marriage.

  She knows, or thinks she knows,

  I’ll go through the dough

  in a day or two, and eventually

  wreck the car—which was

  in my name and needed work anyway.

  When I drove off, she and her boy-

  friend were changing the lock

  on the front door. They waved.

  I waved back to let them know

  I didn’t think any the less

  of them. Then sped toward

  the state line. I was hell-bent.

  She was right to think so.

  I went to the dogs, and we

  became good friends.

  But I kept going. Went

  a long way without stopping.

  Left the dogs, my friends, behind.

  Nevertheless, when I did show

  my face at that house again,

  months, or years, later, driving

  a different car, she wept

  when she saw me at the door.

  Sober. Dressed in a clean shirt,

  pants, and boots. Her last hope

  blasted.

  She didn’t have a thing

  to hope for anymore.

  The House behind This One

  The afternoon was already dark and unnatural.

  When this old woman appeared in the field,

  in the rain, carrying a bridle.

  She came up the road to the house.

  The house behind this one. Somehow

  she knew Antonio Ríos had entered

  the hour of his final combat.

  Somehow, don’t ask me how, she knew.

  The doctor and some other people were with him.

  But nothing more could be done. And so

  the old woman carried the bridle into the room,

  and hung it across the foot of his bed.

  The bed where he writhed and lay dying.

  She went away without a word.

  This woman who’d once been young and beautiful.

  When Antonio was young and beautiful.

  Limits

  All that day we banged at geese

  from a blind at the top

  of the bluff. Busted one flock

  after the other, until our gun barrels

  grew hot to the touch. Geese

  filled the cold, grey air. But we still

  didn’t kill our limits.

  The wind driving our shot

  every whichway. Late afternoon,

  and we had four. Two shy

  of our limits. Thirst drove us

  off the bluff and down a dirt road

  alongside the river.

  To an evil-looking farm

  surrounded by dead fields of

  barley. Where, almost evening,

  a man with patches of skin

  gone from his hands let us dip water

  from a bucket on his porch.

  Then asked if we wanted to see

  something—a Canada goose he kept

  alive in a barrel beside

  the barn. The barrel covered over

  with screen wire, rigged inside

  like a little cell. He’d broken

  the bird’s wing with a long shot,

  he said, then chased it down

  and stuffed it in the barrel.

  He’d had a brainstorm!

  He’d use that goose as a live decoy.

  In time it turned out to be

  the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.

  It would bring other geese

  right down on your head.

  So close you could almost touch them

  before you killed them.

  This man, he never wanted for geese.

  And for this his goose was given

  all the corn and barley

  it could eat, and a barrel

  to live in, and shit in.

  I took a good long look and,

  unmoving, the goose looked back.

  Only its eyes telling me

  it was alive. Then we left,

  my friend and I. Still

  willing to kill anything

  that moved, anything that rose

  over our sights. I don’t

  recall if we got anything else

  that day. I doubt it.

  It was almost dark anyhow.

  No matter, now. But for years

  and years afterwards, living

  on a staple of bitterness, I

  didn’t forget that goose.

  I set it apart from all the others,

  living and dead. Came to understand

  one can get used to anything,

  and become a stranger to nothing.

  Saw that betrayal is just another word

  for loss, for hunger.

  The Sensitive Girl

  This is the fourth day I’ve been here.

  But, no joke, there’s a spider

  on this pane of glass

  that’s been around even longer. It doesn’t

  move, but I know it’s alive.

  Fine with me that lights are coming on

  in the valleys. It’s pretty here,

  and quiet. Cattle are being driven home.

  If I listen, I can hear cowbells

  and then the slap-slap of the driver’s

  stick. There’s haze

  over these lumpy Swiss hills. Below the house,

  a race of water through the alders.

  Jets of water tossed up,

  sweet and hopeful.

  There was a time

  I would’ve died for love.

  No more. That center wouldn’t hold.

  It collapsed. It gives off

  no light. Its orbit

  an orbit of weariness. But I worry

  that time and wish I knew why.

  Who wants to remember

  when poverty and disgrace pushed

  through the door, followed by a cop

  to invest the scene

  with horrible authority?

  The latch was fastened, but

  that never stopped anybody back then.

  Hey, no one breathed in those days.

  Ask her, if you don’t believe me!

  Assuming you could find her and

  make her talk. That girl who dreamed

  and sang. Who sometimes hummed

  when she made love. The sensitive girl.

  The one who cracked.

  I’m a grown man now, and then some.

  So how much longer do I have?

  How much longer for that spider?

  Where will he go, two days into fall,

  the leaves dropping?

  The cattle have entered their pen.

  The man with the stick raises his arm.

  Then closes and fastens the gate.

  I find myself, at last, in perfect silence.

  Knowing the little that is left.

  Knowing I have to love it.

  Wanting to love it. For both our sake.

  II

  The Minuet

  Bright mornings.

  Days when I want so much I want nothing.

  Just this life, and no more. Still,

  I hope no one comes along.

  But if someone does, I hope it’s her.

  The one with the little diamond stars

  at the toes of her shoes.

  The girl I saw dance the minuet.

  That antique dance.

  The minuet. She danced that

  the way it should be danced.

  And the way she wanted.

  Egress

  I opened the old spiral notebook to see what I’d been

  thinking in those days. There was one entry,

  in a hand I didn’t recognize as mine, but was mine.

  All that paper I’d let go to waste back then!

  R
emoving the door for Dr Kurbitz.

  What on earth could that possibly mean to me,

  or anyone, today? Then I went back

  to that time. To just after being married. How I earned

  our daily bread delivering for Al Kurbitz,

  the pharmacist. Whose brother Ken—Dr Kurbitz

  to me, the ear-nose-and-throat man—fell dead

  one night after dinner, after

  talking over some business deal. He died in the bathroom,

  his body wedged between the door and toilet stool.

  Blocking the way. First the whump

  of a body hitting the floor, and then Mr Kurbitz

  and his snazzy sister-in-law shouting “Ken! Ken!”

  and pushing on the bathroom door.

  Mr Kurbitz had to take the door off its hinges

  with a screwdriver. It saved the ambulance drivers

  a minute, maybe. He said his brother never knew

  what hit him. Dead before he hit the floor.

  Since then, I’ve seen doors removed from their hinges

  many times, with and without the aid of screwdrivers.

  But I’d forgotten about Dr Kurbitz, and so much else

  from that time. Never, until today, did I connect

  this act with dying.

  In those days, death,

  if it happened, happened to others. Old people

  belonging to my parents. Or else people of consequence.

  People in a different income bracket, whose death

  and removal had nothing to do with me, or mine.

  We were living in Dr Coglon’s basement

  apartment, and I was in love for the first time

  ever. My wife was pregnant. We were thrilled

  beyond measure or accounting for, given our mean

  surroundings. And that, I’m saying, may be why

  I never wrote more about Dr Kurbitz,

  his brother Al, or doors that had to be taken off

  their hinges for the sake of dead people.

  What the hell! Who needed death and notebooks? We

  were young and happy. Death was coming, sure.

  But for the old and worn-out. Or else people in books.

  And, once in a while, the well-heeled professionals

  I trembled before and said “Yes, Sir” to.