The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems

  them shed their dresses in apartments. See those

  steam pipes running along the ceiling. The rope.

  3

  I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up

  Dr. Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there

  with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and

  perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present

  all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are

  never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted

  so I picked up Dr. Zhivago again but the TV was on

  with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in

  the early history of Australia. But then the movie

  was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping

  and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with

  the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could

  not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin

  glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared

  as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is

  all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from

  the rope – We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota

  halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck

  will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted

  again and read the poems at the end of Dr. Zhivago and

  just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage

  away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red

  robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

  4

  I am four years older than you but scarcely an unwobbling

  pivot. It was no fun sitting around being famous, was it?

  I’ll never have to learn that lesson. You find a page torn

  out of a book and read it feeling that here you might find

  the mystery of print in such phrases as “summer was on the

  way” or “Gertrude regarded him somewhat quizzically.” Your

  Sagane was a fraud. Love poems to girls you never met living

  in a country you never visited. I’ve been everywhere to no

  particular purpose. And am well past love but not love poems.

  I wanted to fall in love on the coast of Ecuador but the girls

  were itsy-bitsy and showers are not prominent in that area.

  Unlike Killarney where I also didn’t fall in love the girls

  had good teeth. As in the movies the Latin girls proved to be

  spitfires with an endemic shanker problem. I didn’t fall in love

  in Palm Beach or Paris. Or London. Or Leningrad. I wanted to fall

  in love at the ballet but my seat was too far back to see faces

  clearly. At Sadko a pretty girl was sitting with a general

  and did not exchange my glance. In Normandy I fell in love but

  had colitis and couldn’t concentrate. She had a way of not paying

  any attention to me that could not be misunderstood. That is

  a year’s love story. Except Key West where absolutely nothing

  happened with romantic overtones. Now you might understand why

  I drink and grow fat. When I reach three hundred pounds there

  will be no more love problems, only fat problems. Then I will

  write reams of love poems. And if she pats my back a cubic yard

  of fat will jiggle. Last night I drank a hundred-proof quart

  and looked at a photo of my sister. Ten years dead. Show me a

  single wound on earth that love has healed. I fed my dying dog

  a pound of beef and buried her happy in the barnyard.

  5

  Lustra. Officially the cold comes from Manitoba;

  yesterday at sixty knots. So that the waves mounted

  the breakwater. The first snow. The farmers and carpenters

  in the tavern with red, windburned faces. I am in there

  playing the pinball machine watching all those delicious

  lights flutter, the bells ring. I am halfway through

  a bottle of vodka and am happy to hear Manitoba

  howling outside. Home for dinner I ask my baby daughter

  if she loves me but she is too young to talk. She cares

  most about eating as I care most about drinking. Our wants

  are simple as they say. Still when I wake from my nap

  the universe is dissolved in grief again. The baby is sleeping

  and I have no one to talk my language. My breath is shallow

  and my temples pound. Vodka. Last October in Moscow I taught

  a group of East Germans to sing “Fuck Nixon,” and we were

  quite happy until the bar closed. At the newsstand I saw a

  picture of Bella Akhmadulina and wept. Vodka. You would have

  liked her verses. The doorman drew near, alarmed. Outside

  the KGB floated through the snow like arctic bats.

  Maybe I belong there. They won’t let me print my verses. On the

  night train to Leningrad I will confess everything to someone.

  All my books are remaindered and out of print. My face in

  the mirror asks me who I am and says I don’t know. But stop

  this whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches

  around my house wave in the wind. They are women standing

  on their heads. Their leaves on the ground today are small

  saucers of snow from which I drink with endless thirst.

  6

  Fruit and butter. She smelled like the skin of an apple.

  The sun was hot and I felt an unbounded sickness with earth.

  A single October day began to last a year. You can’t fuck

  your life away, I thought. But you can! Listening in Nepal

  to those peahens scream in the evening. Then, through the glade,

  lordly he enters, his ass a ten-foot fan, a painting by a crazed

  old master. Look, they are human. Heads the size of two knuckles.

  But returning to her buttery appleness and autumn, my dead friend.

  We cannot give our lives over to women. Kneeling there under that

  vulgar sugar maple tree I couldn’t breathe and with a hundred

  variations of red above me and against my mouth. She said I’m

  going away to Oregon perhaps. I said that I’m going myself to

  California where I hear they sleep out every night. So that

  ended that and the fan was tucked neatly and the peahens’ screams

  were heard no more in the land and old ladies and old men slept

  soundly again and threw away their cotton earplugs and the earth

  of course was soaked with salt and August passed without a single

  ear of corn. Of course this was only one neighborhood. Universality

  is disgusting. But you had your own truly insurmountable horrors

  with that dancer, lacking all wisdom as you did. Your critic said

  you were “often revolted by your sensuality.” He means

  all of that endless fucking of course. Tsk tsk. Put one measure

  against another and how rarely they fuse, and how almost never is

  there any fire and how often there is only boredom and a craving

  for cigarettes, a sandwich, or a drink. Particularly a drink.

  I am drunk because I no longer can love. I make love and I’m

  writing on a blackboard. Once it was a toteboard, a gun handle

  until I myself became a notch. And a notch, to be obvious, is a

  nothing. This all must pass as a monk’s tale, a future lie.

  7

  Death thou comest when I had thee least in mind, said Everyman

  years ago in England. Can’t get around much anymore. So it’s

  really a terrible surprise unless like you we commit suicide.

  I
worry some that the rope didn’t break your neck, but that

  you dangled there strangling from your body’s weight. Such

  physics can mean a rather important matter of three or four

  minutes. Then I would guess there was a moment of black peacefulness

  then you were hurtling in space like a mortar. Who can say

  if a carcass smiles, if the baggage is happy at full rest. The

  child drowns in a predictable puddle or inside the plastic bag

  from which you just took your tuxedo. The evening is certainly

  ruined and we can go on from there but that too is predictable.

  I want to know. I have no explanations for myself but if someone

  told me that my sister wasn’t with Jesus they would get an

  ass-kicking. There’s a fascinating tumor called a melanoma

  that apparently draws pigment from surrounding tissue until

  it’s black as coal. That fatal lump of coal tucked against the

  spine. And of all things on earth a bullet can hit human

  flesh is one of the least resistant. It’s late autumn and this

  is an official autumnal mood, a fully sanctioned event in which

  one may feel the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. But

  as poets we would prefer to have a star fall on us, (that meteor

  got me in the gizzard!), or lightning strike us and not while we’re

  playing golf but perhaps in a wheat field while we’re making

  love in a thunderstorm, or a tornado take us away outside of

  Mingo, Kansas, like Judy Garland unfortunately. Or a rainbow

  suffocate us. Or skewered dueling that mighty forces of anti-

  art. Maybe in sleep as a Gray Eminence. A painless sleep of course.

  Or saving a girl from drowning who turns out to be a mermaid.

  8

  I cleaned the granary dust off your photo with my shirtsleeve.

  Now that we are tidy we can wait for the host to descend

  presumably from the sky as that seems to exhaust the alternatives.

  You had a nice summer in the granary. I was out there with you

  every day in June and July writing one of my six-week wonders,

  another novel. Loud country music on the phonograph, wasps

  and bees and birds and mice. The horses looked in the window

  every hour or so, curious and rather stupid. Chief Joseph stared

  down from the wall at both of us, a far nobler man than

  we ever thought possible. We can’t lead ourselves and he led

  a thousand with a thousand horses a thousand miles. He was a god

  and had three wives when one is usually more than enough for

  a human. These past weeks I have been organizing myself into

  my separate pieces. I have the limberness of a man twice my age

  and this is as good a time as any to turn around. Joseph was

  very understanding, incidentally, when the Cavalry shot so many

  of the women and children. It was to be expected. Earth is

  full of precedents. They hang around like underground trees

  waiting for their chance. The fish swam around four years solid

  in preparation for August the seventh, 1972, when I took his life

  and ate his body. Just as we may see our own ghosts next to

  us whose shapes we will someday flesh out. All of this suffering

  to become a ghost. Yours held a rope, manila, straight from

  the tropics. But we don’t reduce such glories to a mudbath.

  The ghost giggles at genuflections. You can’t buy him a drink.

  Out in a clearing in the woods the other day I got up on a

  stump and did a little dance for mine. We know the most fright-

  ening time is noon. The evidence says I’m halfway there, such

  wealth I can’t give away, thirty-four years of seconds.

  9

  What if I own more paper clips than I’ll ever use in this

  lifetime? My other possessions are shabby: the house half-

  painted, the car without a muffler, one dog with bad eyes

  and the other dog a horny moron. Even the baby has a rash on

  her neck but then we don’t own humans. My good books were

  stolen at parties long ago and two of the barn windows are

  broken and the furnace is unreliable and field mice daily

  feed on the wiring. But the new foal appears healthy though

  unmanageable, crawling under the fence and chased by my wife

  who is stricken by the flu, not to speak of my own body which

  has long suffered the ravages of drink and various nervous

  disorders that make me laugh and weep and caress my shotguns.

  But paper clips. Rich in paper clips to sort my writings which

  fill so many cartons under the bed. When I attach them I say

  it’s your job after all to keep this whole thing together. And

  I used them once with a rubber band to fire holes into the

  face of the president hanging on the office wall. We have freedom.

  You couldn’t do that to Brezhnev much less Stalin on whose

  grave Mandelstam sits proudly in the form of the ultimate

  crow, a peerless crow, a crow without comparison on earth.

  But the paper clips are a small comfort like meeting someone

  fatter than myself and we both wordlessly recognize the fact

  or meeting someone my age who is more of a drunk, more savaged

  and hag-ridden until they are no longer human and seeing

  them on the street I wonder how their heads which are only

  wounds balance on the top of their bodies. A manuscript of

  a novel sits in front of me held together with twenty clips.

  It is the paper equivalent of a duck and a company far away

  has bought this perhaps beautiful duck and my time is free again.

  10

  It would surely be known for years after as the day I shot

  a cow. Walking out of the house before dawn with the sky an icy

  blackness and not one star or cockcrow or shiver of breeze, the rifle

  barrel black and icy to the touch. I walked a mile in the dark

  and a flushed grouse rose louder than any thunderclap. I entered

  a neck of a woodlot I’d scouted and sat on a stump waiting for

  a deer I intended to kill. But then I was dressed too warmly

  and had a formidable hangover with maybe three hours of sleep so

  I slept again seeing a tin open-fronted café in Anconcito down

  on the coast of Ecuador and the eyes of a piglet staring at me as

  I drank my mineral water dazed with the opium I had taken for

  la turista. Crippled syphilitic children begging, one little boy

  with a tooth as long as a forefinger, an ivory tusk which would

  be pulled on maturity and threaded as an amulet ending up finally

  in Moscow in a diplomatic pouch. The boy would explore with his

  tongue the gum hole for this Russian gift. What did he know about

  Russia. Then carrying a naked girl in the water on my shoulders

  and her short hairs tickled the back of my neck with just the suggestion

  of a firm grip behind them so if I had been stupid enough to turn

  around I might have suffocated at eighteen and not written you

  any letters. There were bristles against my neck and hot breath

  in my hair. It must be a deer smelling my hair so I wheeled and shot.

  But it was a cow and the muzzle blast was blue in the gray light.

  She bawled horribly and ran in zigzags. I put her away with a shot

  to the head. What will I do with this cow? It’s a guernsey and she

  won’t be milked this morning. I knelt
and stared into her huge eyeball,

  her iris making a mirror so I combed my hair and thought about the

  whole dreary mess. Then I walked backward through a muddy orchard

  so I wouldn’t be trailed, got in my car and drove to New York nonstop.

  11

  for Diane W.

  No tranquil pills this year wanting to live peeled as they

  described the nine throats of Cerberus. Those old greek names

  keep popping up. You can tell we went to college and our sleep

  is troubled. There are geographical equivalents for exotic tropes

  of mind; living peeled was the Desert Inn in Tucson talking with D.W.

  about love and art with so much pain my ears rung and the breath

  came short. And outside the fine desert air wasn’t fine anymore:

  the indians became kachina dolls and a girl was tortured daily

  for particular reasons. This other is our Akhmatova and often we want

  to hide from her – seasoned as she is in so many hells. But why paint

  her for one of the dead who knew her pungency of love, the unforgivable

  low-tide smell of it, how few of us bear it for long before reducing

  it to a civil act. You were odd for a poet attaching yourself

  to a woman no less a poet than yourself. It still starts with

  the dance. In the end she probably strangled you and maybe back

  in Ryazan there was a far better bird with less extravagant plumage.

  But to say I’m going to spend the day thinking wisely about

  women is to say I’m going to write an indomitably great poem before

  lunch or maybe rule the world by tomorrow dawn. And I couldn’t

  love one of those great SHES – it’s far too late and they are far

  too few to find anyway though that’s a driveling excuse. I saw one

  in a tree and on a roof. I saw one in a hammock and thigh-deep

  in a pond. I saw one out in the desert and sitting under a willow

  by the river. All past tense you notice and past haunting but not

  past caring. What did she do to you and did you think of her when

  your terrible shadow fell down the wall. I see that creature sitting

  on the lawn in Louveciennes, the mistress of a superior secret. We