Another City
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of
the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Steven M. Coughlin
May 2013
© 2013 Steven M. Coughlin. All Rights Reserved.
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This dissertation titled
Another City
by
STEVEN M. COUGHLIN
has been approved for
the Department of English
and the College of Arts and Sciences by
Mark Halliday
Professor of English
Robert Frank
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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ABSTRACT
STEVENM. COUGHLIN, Ph.D., May 2013, English
Another City
Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday
The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “Stevens’ Ontology:
Struggles of the Mind” and a book manuscript titled Another City.
“Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind” presents an examination of the
ontological vision Wallace Stevens presents in his poem “Sunday Morning” and then
considers problems this vision encounters in subsequent poems. Among the issues
Stevens struggles with are the demands of his ego upon his imagination to elevate himself
to the status of a deity, the pressures of personal grief and social unrest upon Stevens’
desire to remain a detached observer, and Stevens’ inability to produce a vision liberated
from Christian rhetoric.
Another City is a collection of poetry that explores family trauma and the role of
the imagination as an alternative to grim reality.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3
Part One: Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind ......................................................... 5
Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 26!
Part Two: Another City..................................................................................................... 27!
Helen’s Barroom ............................................................................................................ 28
Bing Crosby Sings the Blues ......................................................................................... 29!
Boy at Night ................................................................................................................... 31!
Did Not Speak ................................................................................................................ 33
Another Life ................................................................................................................... 48!
A Small Sign .................................................................................................................. 50!
1993................................................................................................................................ 51
The Small Routine ......................................................................................................... 52
What the Doctor Did Not Know .................................................................................... 54!
Rockland, 1995 .............................................................................................................. 57!
Doogie’s House.............................................................................................................. 59!
Matlock .......................................................................................................................... 61!
A Certain Kind of Light ................................................................................................. 62!
Getting It Right .............................................................................................................. 63!
Adam’s Thirst ................................................................................................................ 64!
The El Comino ............................................................................................................... 65
The Invented City .......................................................................................................... 67!
A Job in California ......................................................................................................... 68!
Special Recognition ....................................................................................................... 70!
The History of Longing ................................................................................................. 72
Winter Refrain ............................................................................................................... 78!
Sacred Heart ................................................................................................................... 79!
Another City................................................................................................................... 81!
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PART ONE: STEVENS’ ONTOLOGY: STRUGGLES OF THE MIND
Among the many issues confronting Western civilization at the beginning of the
twentieth century was the struggle to achieve spiritual health in an age of lost faith. With
Christianity’s inability to adequately adapt to the complexities of Western Civilization in
the modern age--from existential issues raised by Darwin’s theory of evolution to
technological progress displacing people from community to the violent horrors
unleashed by military advancement during World War I--many people, including several
poets of this period, began to question, even rebel, against the idea of a Christian God as
a saving spiritual figure and instead pursued alternate avenues for existential
enlightenment and relief from spiritual angst.
D.H. Lawrence, for instance, placed an emphasis on sexuality and the primitive
subconscious to access his own secular sublime. William Carlos Williams attempted
objective representation of the physical world for spiritual fulfillment; as “The Red
Wheel Barrow” succinctly suggests, so much spiritual sustenance can be found by
directly embracing the world around us. Both W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot sought
mythology to provide spiritual salvation. Yeats, in provisionally embracing mythological
systems, experienced multiple transcendent visions. Eliot, discouraged by the spiritual
degradation of Western civilization, explored various myths from ancient and pre-modern
cultures in an attempt to find a saving myth. Although Eliot later embraced Christianity
as his preferred mythological vehicle, a poem like “The Waste Land,” written in 1922,
provides a strong example of Eliot’s struggle to find a saving myth: in the fifth section
alone Eliot searches for the smallest “fragments” from Christianity, Buddha’s Fire
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Sermon, the ancient myth of the Fisher King, and the Upanishad to shore “against my
ruins” (431).
These examples demonstrate the existential necessity many Modernists felt to fill
the void of lost faith. Yet one Modernist in particular, Wallace Stevens--heavily
influenced by the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Keats--turned
toward the creative powers of the imagination to fill his own spiritual needs, and it is my
goal in this essay to explore Stevens’ existential journey in greater depth. This comes not
only from an inclination to better understand Stevens’ work but also because in several of
my own poems I make imaginative attempts to rectify personal grief and trauma.
Although not as existential in nature, these poems, like Stevens’, reflect a desire to use
the imagination to transcend the limitations of actual experience. Therefore, I now aim to
provide an analysis of one of Stevens’ early poems, “Sunday Morning,” to establish the
ontological vision Stevens pursues--albeit, with various amendments and changes in
mood--for the rest of his writing life. After establishing the basic concepts of Stevens’
ontology I will consider some of the major issues he encounters: first, problems that
occur from the demands of Stevens’ ego upon his imagination to elevate himself to the
status of a deity; second, the pressures of personal grief and social unrest upon Stevens’
desire to remain a detached observer; and finally, Stevens’ inability to produce a vision
liberated from Christian rhetoric. It is not my intent to argue against the quality or stature
of Stevens’ poetry but to demonstrate the overwhelming complexities of his poetic task
and the difficulties Modernists like Stevens encountered in trying to achieve spiritual
health in an age of lost faith.
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“Sunday Morning” is a poem in eight stanzas that argues for the imagination as a
preferable alternative to the Christian concept of God. The poem begins with a woman
who, instead of attending church on a Sunday morning--perhaps Easter--sits outside to
enjoy the sensual pleasures of “late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” (1-2). Near her
is a “cockatoo” busy in its own “green freedom” (3)--note the word “green,” which for
Stevens, along with other bright colors, often suggests the dynamism of the active
imagination. In this leisurely state, the woman begins to daydream, but soon her thoughts
are confronted by “the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe” (6-7), Jesus’ death.
For this woman such reflections are unwelcome. Indeed, unlike the cockatoo in its “green
freedom,” this woman remains bound to the “procession of the dead” (10) as her
daydream carries her “dreaming feet/ Over the seas” (9) not to a place of existential
liberation but to “silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre” (14-15).
However, we should observe this early reference to the powers of the imagination: as
Jesus once walked on water so too do this woman’s “feet,” in her imaginative daydream,
allow her to walk “Over the seas.” Regardless, as the first stanza concludes we see this
woman confronting Jesus’ death as it fails to provide existential fulfillment.
The poem’s second stanza begins with the woman reflecting upon the limitations
of such existential speculation. She asks, “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?”
(16). From this perspective, Jesus only exists in “silent shadows and in dreams” (18).
Unlike the potential existential insights experienced through interacting with the physical
world, Christianity offers only an unhealthy obsession with death. This conveys a central
tenet of Stevens’ rejection of Christianity--his firm belief that the “dead” have no
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“bounty” to offer the living. In “A Pretext for Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning,’”
Sidney Feshbach states that the poem offers “an evolving of the ideas of the divine and an
evolving of eschatological inventions in response to confrontations with death” (63).
Certainly we encounter the beginning of such evolutions when the woman questions the
spiritual viability of fixating on thoughts of Palestine and the sepulcher of Jesus. Further,
Stevens claims that any “thought of heaven” (22) should stem from the sensual, physical
world: “In pungent fruit and bright, green wings” (21). It is the word “thought” that
seems most important. Yes, there exists an external, physical world, but any access to the
divine this woman can experience, any way to achieve a sense of “Divinity” (23), must
occur “within herself” (23). Therefore, the woman in “Sunday Morning” not only
observes the external world but also has her own unique responses to it: “Passions of rain,
or moods in falling snow” (24). Such imaginative responses, according to Stevens, are the
only way to access the divine.
With the arrival of the third stanza Stevens makes a strange and somewhat
confusing transition. Gone is the woman enjoying her late breakfast, and, instead, Stevens
brings us into his own ruminations: “Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. /
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave / Large-mannered motions to his mythy
mind” (31-33). If the woman of the first two stanzas focuses on the Christian God,
Stevens here extends the argument back even further--before the birth of Jesus there was
Jove. Yet this option appears less appealing than Christianity. Stevens portrays Jove as
being so far removed from humanity that even though “magnificent” (35), Jove is,
nonetheless, no more than “a muttering king” (34); humanity can not achieve any
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spiritual transcendence through such a removed figure. Later Stevens almost seems to
appreciate the arrival of the Christ-myth when “our blood” at least begins to
“commingl[e] . . . / With heaven” (36-37). In this context Jesus’ virgin birth represents
progress in humanity’s ability to imagine itself as divine. Yet Stevens proceeds to take
his argument further: “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / the blood of paradise?
And shall the earth / seem all of paradise that we shall know?” (39-41). By this point we
should be able to anticipate Stevens’ answer. Although Jesus might represent a better
option than Jove, Stevens ultimately wants our blood to be liberated from any
metaphysical concept of heaven--for our blood to be the source of its own paradise. It is
only then that “The sky will be much friendlier” (42) in that it will be understood in
human terms and not by “this dividing and indifferent blue” (45).
With the beginning of the fourth stanza we return to the woman as she reflects
upon a potential problem of turning toward the physical world for spiritual sustenance.
The woman concedes that she feels spiritually “‘content when wakened birds, / Before
they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields” (46-48) but then proceeds to question how she
might continue to feel spiritually fulfilled “when the birds are gone” (49). Stevens
answers by saying that fulfillment cannot be found by seeking “any haunt of prophecy”
(51), such as what one might hope to find in Christian doctrine, but by, once again,
turning toward the imagination--for it is there that this woman’s “remembrance of
awakened birds” (58) will “endure” (56); when her memories of the birds will continue to
offer spiritual sustenance. Thus we have arrived at the end of the first half of the poem in
which Stevens has managed to not only reject the idea of the transcendent myths of the
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monotheistic Christ and the polytheistic Jove but to also insist upon the imagination’s
interaction with the physical world as a preferable alternative.
The fifth stanza presents us with an idea of death that differs significantly from
Christianity’s portrayal of death. In the opening lines the woman says: “‘But in
contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss’” (61-62). Although the
imagination might provide convincing alternatives to what can be found in Christianity,
the human mind remains finite, and unlike Christianity it cannot make assurances of an
everlasting soul. Yet, for Stevens, death’s inevitability is not something to be denied or
feared; for him, death functions as the force which compels us to actively engage with
life: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to
our dreams /And our desires” (63-65). Death will bring eventual oblivion, but it also
provides the motivation to exist in both a physical and spiritual presence. In this sense
Stevens subverts the traditional Christian concept of death: instead of death acting as a
gateway into a spiritual realm, we are forced to pursue a spiritual existence before death’s
inevitable arrival.
Further, in the sixth stanza--clearly alluding to Keats’ urn--Stevens challenges the
Christian concept of heaven: “Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit
never fall?” (76-77). Stevens’ answer to these questions is an obvious no: for paradise to
be something worthy of enjoyment things need to change, or else there would be no
reason to derive any pleasure from them. Therefore, according to Stevens, heaven
“should wear our colors” (85), and, just like here on Earth, fruit will inevitably have to
ripen and time pass.
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The strangest turn in “Sunday Morning” occurs in the seventh stanza when
Stevens, again drifting from the woman, describes “a ring of men . . . chanting in orgy on
a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun” (91-93). As the stanza progresses
it becomes evident that what these men celebrate is not the Christian God but the spiritual
essence of the physical world: “The windy lake wherein their lord delights, / The trees,
like serafin, and echoing hills” (99-100). The sun, windy lake, trees, and echoing hills all
suggest the divine potential of the natural world. As Robert Rehder observes: “Every
important event in ‘Sunday Morning’ is an interaction between a person (or persons) and
a landscape--even the Crucifixion is thought of as a vestigial landscape” (79); and this
stanza seems like the climax of such an interaction. Yet the emphatic return to paganism
Stevens envisions seems problematic for two reasons: first, it denies the modern world
where such primitive celebration appears oddly out of step with industrialization. In fact,
Stevens has pushed humanity’s interaction with nature to such an extreme that it becomes
difficult not to read this stanza as satirical. Second, the diction Stevens uses to illustrate
the divine potential of the natural world (“serafin” and “heavenly fellowship” [12])
invokes Christianity. Because I will address this problem in greater detail later, I will not
reflect upon the issue too much at present. However, it does seem important to point out
the contradiction of denouncing Christianity while at the same time making use of its
rhetoric.
The concluding stanza fulfills the cyclical nature of the poem as we return to the
woman again reflecting upon Christianity and Jesus’ death. The stanza begins with a
voice calling out: “‘The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the
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grave of Jesus, where he lay’” (107-109). This voice offers the woman a new ontological
perspective: through the evolution of eight stanzas Palestine has been demystified, and no
longer, presumably, will she have to confront the burden of the “old catastrophe” of
Jesus’ death. Stevens has recast Jesus from the stature of deity to simply being a man in
his grave. What remains for this woman--a more realistic alternative to the previous
stanza--are “sweet berries [which] ripen in the wilderness” (116). This subtler version of
a spiritual reality offers “sweetness” but also, as “ripen” suggests, eventual physical
decay. By the poem’s end the woman has been empowered to embrace this physical
world--for her imagination to interact with it--in order to access a spiritual sublime, but
Stevens refuses to offer anything beyond death:
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (117-120)
Certainly “isolation” implies a kind of existential loneliness; there exists no heaven in the
sky to interact with--humanity, like the “pigeons,” must accept its solitary place in the
universe. As Harold Bloom notes: “If we are isolated, so is the sky, in a cosmos where all
power is ‘spontaneous’ and ‘casual.’ . . . There is just a premonitory, introjective gesture,
downward and outward, in the darkness, appropriate to a world where no spirits linger”
(35). However, another metaphorical implication of these concluding lines functions as a
realization of Stevens’ ontological perspective: “evening” representing that moment
when day (physical awareness) meets night (transformative power of the imagination). In
this sense, the merging of these two presents Stevens’ spiritual ideal.
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There is much to admire regarding Stevens’ ontological vision outlined in
“Sunday Morning”--and certainly the poem’s final stanza is one of both intellectual and
emotional force. Yet several poems within Stevens’ oeuvre demonstrate the problematic
nature of trying to adhere to such a philosophy. For instance, in its greatest extreme the
creative force of the imagination can elevate the self to the level of the deified (an
appealing concept for a few minutes but, as we shall see, problematic over a longer
period of time). A good illustration of this occurs in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” At the
beginning of this poem Hoon--a representation of Stevens in his most relaxed,
imaginative state--asserts: “Not less because in purple I descended / The western day
through what you called / The loneliest air, not less was I myself” (1-3). This opening
suggests Hoon is responding to an assertion made by the “you.” This response acts as a
refutation of the “you” who believes Hoon has somehow diminished himself. The
obvious question becomes just how the “you” believes Hoon has “lessen[ed]” himself,
and later the poem offers clarity:
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself. (7-11)
These lines suggest that the physical world has been transformed by Hoon’s imagination
and that nothing exists outside his ego. Such an experience appears wonderfully
solipsistic and the tone of the poem clearly conveys Stevens’ enjoyment. However, such
a spiritual existence comes with problems--in “Sunday Morning” Stevens argues for a
merging of the physical world with the imagination, but in this poem the physical world
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has been subsumed by the imagination. Hoon’s ego has asserted itself so much that it has
turned Hoon into a self-creating God who, like Apollo, “descend[s]” from the “western”
sky. The “you,” best understood as an anti-Romantic figure, challenges such solipsistic
behavior--since entering into the “loneliest air” (a place where he will encounter neither
God nor man) alienates Hoon from the rest of humanity and, ultimately, from the actual
physical world.
“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” provides a parallel experience to Hoon’s. In this
poem Stevens imagines himself as a rabbit at nighttime exerting dominion--through
imagination--over a “fat cat” with a “red tongue” (5). The nighttime, as suggested at the
end of “Sunday Morning,” represents the transformative power of the imagination.
Further, the time of year is summer, “August” (6), when, for Stevens, the world is most
full of creative potential--the combination of these two, night and summer, makes for
“the peacefullest time” (7) possible for the imagination to flourish. In this state the rabbit
can forget the problems of the physical world--”Without that monument of cat, / The cat
forgotten in the moon” (8-9)--and fully indulge in its imagination: the rabbit becomes
surrounded by its own “rabbit-light, / In which everything is meant for you” (10-11). This
move toward solipsism, echoing the solipsism of Hoon, portrays the rabbit as the center
of its own universe: “The trees around are for you, / The whole of the wideness of night
is for you” (16-17). Again Stevens uses his imagination to become God-like. There exists
no merging of the mind with nature but a complete domination of the imagination (“The
whole of the wideness of night”) over its surroundings--its imaginative force “touches all
edges” (18).
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As with Hoon, the transformation of Stevens’ rabbit presents problems. First, as
the “you” complains to Hoon, indulging completely in one’s own imaginative
transcendence can be a lonely pursuit. Looking again at the concluding image of “Sunday
Morning,” we see “casual flocks of pigeons” flying “in the isolation of the sky.” While
the “pigeons” might be flying in “isolation,” at least they are together. What we see in
both “Hoon” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” is a complete rejection of the flock:
their spiritual journeys, although temporarily fulfilling, are journeys of alienation. Also,
we must consider the fact that such sublime experiences are completely unsustainable-the mind might be a wonderful place to exist for a time but it cannot accommodate our
basic physical, economic, and social needs. Moreover, the rabbit’s solipsism poses an
even more alarming problem. By the poem’s end the rabbit’s imagination has allowed it
to assume a massive stature: “You are humped higher and higher, black as stone-- / You
sit with your head like a carving in space / And the little green cat is a bug in the grass”
(22-24). Again, such self-mythologizing is tempting. Yet just because the rabbit’s
imagination creates this transcendent experience does not mean the rest of the world will
share in such a claim. What happens when the cat next comes across this rabbit? Will the
cat acknowledge the rabbit’s grandiose vision of itself? Unfortunately, using its
imagination for self-realization will also result in the rabbit’s own annihilation.
While the imagination’s ego poses one hurdle for Stevens’ ontological vision,
another problem resides with the complexity of human emotion. In “Another Weeping
Woman,” a woman grieves over the death of a man, and Stevens advises the woman to
“Pour the unhappiness out / From your too bitter heart” (1-2). Lamenting over the dead,
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as Stevens makes clear in “Sunday Morning,” will not bring spiritual comfort--in fact,
allowing one’s self to indulge in sorrow will only allow grief to grow like “Poison” (4).
Once again Stevens conveys his belief that the imagination can only interact with the
physical, living world--not that of the dead. He says:
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves. (7-10)
If the woman focuses her thoughts on the dead man who no longer has imaginative
thought, she too loses “The magnificent cause of being,” her imaginative responses, and
“Leaves” the world. On one level this argument seems convincing; and it certainly falls
in line with what Stevens argues for in “Sunday Morning.” Yet Stevens’ response to the
grieving woman also appears overly simplistic: it breaks her options down as either one
grieves or one does not. However, human beings are more complicated than that--grief is
not something that can just be turned off. Even the poem’s title--”Another Woman
Weeping”--sounds dangerously dismissive of what this woman is experiencing. While
Stevens’ philosophical insight might be persuasive, it in no way takes into account the
emotional complexity of human suffering.
Of course, directly engaging with human suffering is not something Stevens
particularly feels comfortable with, as several poems in his oeuvre make clear: consider,
for instance, “Mozart, 1935,” written at the height of the Great Depression. Instead of
addressing the problems of unemployment, starvation, and social unrest, the poem
begins:
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Poet, be seated at the piano
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation. (1-4)
These lines seem paradoxical to the actual “present” experiences of the masses which the
poet-pianist is instructed to “play”--human suffering should not produce loud laughter
(“cachinnation”); and the childlike gibberish of “hoo-hoo-hoo” and “shoo-shoo-shoo”
seem wildly contradictory with the direness of the “present”; it appears as if Stevens
wants the poet-pianist to portray the sound of human crying (“hoo-hoo-hoo”) in a
musical, playful style, one that melds grief with happiness. This brings us to question
why Stevens would choose such an approach, and the answer relates to his fondness of
Mozart whose “lucid souvenir of the past,” his “divertimento” (a piece of light classical
music), makes for an “unclouded concerto” (10-13)--a fully realized, transcendent
experience; one “unclouded” by the messy complications of human suffering. However,
in the second stanza Stevens concedes that such an artistic indulgence might not be
positively received:
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags. (5-8)
As much as Stevens craves Mozart’s “divertimento,” he concedes that the passions of the
people require something else from art--a new kind of expression. In a letter to Ronald
Lane Latimer Stevens acknowledges, along with his own conservative leanings, the
inevitability of the real world: “I don’t believe in Communism; I do believe in up-to-date
capitalism. It is an extraordinary experience for myself to deal with a thing like
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Communism . . . . Nevertheless, one has to live and think in the actual world” (292). This
candid concession by Stevens of having to live and think “in the actual world”-something his poems often resist--explains the shift in advice Stevens offers the poetpianist in the fourth stanza:
Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved. (20-23)
Although it takes half the poem, Stevens finally recognizes the need of the artist to
represent the people’s pain, their “wintry sound.” He goes so far to as to dignify the poetpianist’s artistic endeavor by referring to him not as “you” but as an elevated “thou”--a
dignified artist helping guide the people through their pain. Yet such a representation
does not seem to come from a strong belief in Stevens that human suffering should be
depicted in art. Instead, such an approach simply presents for him the best way to move
beyond “sorrow”--for “sorrow” to be “released, / Dismissed, absolved.”
Moreover, in “Mozart, 1935” Stevens demonstrates little desire to engage with
actual human grief--it poses a complication that takes away from what he really desires: a
“return to Mozart” (25), art in its purest form. Consider how Stevens describes the “body
in rags.” Such an abstract representation lacks much in the way of pathos. As in many of
Stevens’ poems, people are not presented in great physical detail. Stevens cannot deny
that people are physical beings but, at the same time, he has little desire to actually
portray their bodies. Why is this? Let us briefly return to the woman in “Sunday
Morning.”
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According to Stevens, for the woman in this poem to achieve spiritual
transcendence her imagination must engage with the physical world. However, consider
this woman’s mood: she wears a loose fitting gown (a “peignoir” [1]) while enjoying
“late” morning “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” If “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” and
“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” represent Stevens at his most relaxed (in fact, as
already discussed, Stevens’ imagination in these poems is dangerously too relaxed), the
woman’s mood in “Sunday Morning” seems more appropriately balanced. Further, as
much as Stevens might want to insist upon the need to engage with one’s environment,
the truth remains that the woman in “Sunday Morning” simply observes the world around
her. Stevens might recognize the need of interacting with our surroundings to inspire a
transcendent response, but, at the same time, he does not want to address any of the
messy complications of the physical world--and this, quite often, gets associated with the
presence of human beings. Therefore, the person carried “down the stairs” in “Mozart,
1935” becomes nothing more than “a body in rags.” Notice also how Stevens downgrades
human emotion: he instructs the poet-pianist to play the people’s “wintry sound” so that
their “sorrow” might be “released . . . absolved.” This makes human “sorrow” something
we need to be forgiven for. As with “Another Woman Weeping,” “Mozart, 1935”
represents Stevens’ lack of comfort with human physicality and human suffering. The
mellow mood of the woman in “Sunday Morning” is perfect for her to achieve a sublime
experience; however, if it were complicated with the presence of another person such
transcendence becomes difficult. Pushing this further it even becomes possible to reduce
the woman’s actual physicality in “Sunday Morning.” Bloom observes: “What is the
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dreaming woman there for in ‘Sunday Morning’ anyway? Like all muses she is invoked .
. . to be the voice of instruction and also the voice of pleasure” (28). Considered from this
perspective, the woman becomes Stevens’ interior paramour: an idealized figure--not his
attempt to depict a real human being, but an imagined person whose sole purpose is to
provide inspiration and pleasure.
This provides a good opportunity to consider for a few moments a couple of the
poems in my own manuscript because of their connection to this observation. Although
Stevens tries to create idealized representations of people, my poems often emphasize the
opposite energy: the resistance of idealization in preference for authentic representation-even in my imagination. For instance, in “Another Life” I create an alternate existence for
my father; one in which he has not married my mother: “The man driving past our house,
heater fiercely cranking in the winter blizzard, is not my father. His hair is buzzed into a
flattop but has not faded to pepper-grey. There are no midnight-black circles under his
eyes” (48). Yet even if this existence appears preferable to the one my father actually
experiences, this man still does not escape my father’s flaws or his own inevitable
loneliness--this other representation of my father still drives the streets alone in “a raw
and endless winter.” The same is true in “Another City” where I imagine “the other
story” of my brother’s life--the one where he has not been murdered at twenty-one, but
again there appears no sense of idealization:
Evening after evening he wanders
this city--past a parking lot half-filled
with rusted cars, a motel whose few tenants
shoot heroin behind locked doors.
Here it is always December,
my brother one of several
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grim men walking the sidewalk. (23-29)
While I share Stevens’ desire to use the imagination to transcend the limitations of
reality, my poems resist denying people’s fundamental nature in preference for the ideal.
Further, the worlds I invent are clearly fictional--they function as constructions of
alternate realities; for instance, consider the first stanza of “Another City”:
In the other story of my brother’s life
there will not be abandoned train tracks
his shoulders fitted as if in a casket
between the rails. (1-4)
The opening line conveys an acknowledgement that what I imagine for my brother is not
possible in this world--it must happen “In the other story.” This reflects a sense of
fantasy--a necessary escape from the “abandoned train tracks” to envision an alternate
reality, even if that reality still accommodates some of the actualities of my real story.
Stevens, conversely, resists the concept of fantasy. His vision insists that the imagination
can be used not to create a new reality but to perceive the physical world at a deeper,
more transcendent level.
Returning again to issues Stevens confronts from the ontologically outlined in
“Sunday Morning” we encounter what can be called his “angel problem.” As previously
noted, “Sunday Morning” rejects Christianity in preference for the spiritual potential
offered by the imagination and the physical world. However, as discussed with the
seventh stanza of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens often invokes Christian diction and
mythology to describe the sublime moments of his spiritual experiences. This seems to
undermine his very objective--how can he be liberated from Christianity if he continues
to borrow its rhetoric? Let us consider “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” to illustrate my
22
point. The poem begins with the angel announcing himself to one of “the countrymen”
(1):
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole. (4-7)
Stevens wants to deconstruct the Christian concept of an angel. Because his angel is not
one of heaven but of “reality,” it does not have “wings” or a halo. Stevens’ angel goes so
far as to assert: “I am one of you and being one of you / Is being and knowing what I am
and know” (10-11). The angel in this sense is not an ethereal spirit but of the physical
world. This brings us to one of the poem’s apparent contradictions: in one sense Stevens
wants us to understand the angel as “one” of “the countrymen”--a physical being;
however, the angel also can only be “Seen for a moment”--in this sense the angel lacks
much in the way of physical substance. How can we reconcile this paradox? To answer
this let us consider some of the other assertions the angel makes:
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash. (13-18)
In Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” one of the arguments put forth is that the
poet must attempt to get to the first idea—seeing the world with fresh eyes, as if for the
first time. In the lines above the angel makes a similar claim—“the earth” has become
“stiff and stubborn” by our making use of old “man-locked” perceptions. Obviously it
23
becomes difficult to achieve spiritual transcendence if one is constrained by conventional
perceptions. And that is the gift the “angel of earth” provides: through its brief presence
the old “tragic drone” takes on an originality: it begins to “Rise liquidly in liquid
lingerings.” Thus, what the angel accomplishes and the poet’s task in “Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction” complement each other. And it is in this sense that we can reconcile the
contradiction mentioned above--the angel is one of us as it exists in our own minds. It is
synonymous with the first idea and functions as our highest level of consciousness by
allowing us to “see the earth again.” This for Stevens represents the supreme objective of
the imagination. Yet that is what makes the invocation of Christian rhetoric to describe
this experience so puzzling. Why not provide a designation not bound by Christian
theology? Looking again at Bloom, he says about “Sunday Morning” that it “offers a
fresh beginning for the imagination” (24). However, the use of the angel in this poem
suggests the grip of Christianity still lingers in Stevens’ mind.
Moreover, many critics have noted Stevens’ attempts to resignify Christian
rhetoric in several of his poems. Angus J. Cleghorn writes: “Stevens is most effective at
taking signifieds like [the angel in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”] that are full of
mysterious hocus-pocus, parodying them, and yet resignifying them as signifiers that still
evoke bewilderment” (178); and certainly this appears true. However, Stevens’ need to
resignify also suggests his inability to move beyond Christian rhetoric. Since his
imagination cannot create anything better to convey the concept of an angel, resignifying
it represents his best alternative. In this sense Stevens’ imagination has reached its limit-he simply cannot escape Christian rhetoric. This applies to several other notions like
24
heaven (often referred to by Stevens) and the Christ-myth. Let us briefly consider “The
American Sublime.” In this poem Stevens admits to struggling “to behold the sublime”
(2) in the natural world: “One grows used to the weather, / The landscape and that” (1213). Stevens’ “spirit” feels “empty” and “In vacant space” (17-18). Stevens then invokes
the Christ-myth--in particular the sacrament of the Eucharist--to convey his desire for his
imagination to find spiritual sustenance in the physical world: “What wine does one
drink? / What bread does one eat?” (19-20). “Sunday Morning” might anticipate a
liberation from the chains of Christianity, a “fresh beginning”; however, throughout his
career Stevens seems unable to move beyond Christianity as a reference point.
What we often encounter in Stevens is an attempt to recapture the equilibrium
achieved in “Sunday Morning.” Yet Stevens’ own human complexity makes such a
balance difficult: sometimes Stevens’ ego inflates his imagination to the stature of a selfcreating force resulting in alienation and a flawed perception of reality (“Tea at the Palaz
of Hoon” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”); at other times he struggles to negotiate
the complexities of human suffering and social unrest making it problematic to remain a
detached observer (“Another Woman Weeping” and “Mozart, 1935”); and finally, the
limitations of Stevens’ own imagination impede him from complete liberation from
Christianity (“Angel Surrounded by Paysans” and “The American Sublime”). This,
however, does not to diminish Stevens’ ontological aspirations. If anything, these
struggles reflect the depth of Stevens’ ambition. Stevens, like many other Modernists,
was confronted with the monumental task of filling the void left by the failures of
25
Christianity. His attempt to find an alternate path is as appealing as it is problematic. The
drama of his struggles is perhaps the chief reason why his poems continue to intrigue.
26
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. London: Cornell U.P.,
1976.
Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York:
Palgrave, 2000.
Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Orlando: Harcourt, 1963.
Feshbach, Sidney. “A Pretext for Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning.’” Journal of
Modern Literature 23.1 (1999): 59-78. Print.
Rehder, Robert. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: St. Martin’s P., 1988.
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York:
Vintage Books, 1972.
Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1966.
27
PART TWO: ANOTHER CITY
28
Helen’s Barroom
My father explains how the woman whose mouth
slacks open in a coma, whose hospital bed rests
in the middle of our living room, was different
in 1967 while dancing at Helen’s Barroom.
An old man, he forks the final remnants
of day-old crab rangoon and comments
upon a car driving too fast outside.
And this everyday observation is okay
because more than anything I need to drift
with that speeding car which fifty years ago
would have been driving intently
toward the town’s only bar. The quiet woman
in the passenger’s seat, so this first date
story goes, wore a green dress,
and the driver, hair buzzed into a flattop,
delighted in Patsy Cline on the radio.
The night must have promised a lifetime
of such nights: a hundred years
of that gravel barroom parking lot crunching
under the excited steps of brown shoes,
white heels. A beer-soaked wooden floor,
the world was Eddie Arnold
on the juke; her fingers promised
to flutter forever on her beer bottle
between songs. That young couple,
for those few hours, the envy
of each drunk shadow on a barstool-and me now.
But my father, grown weary
of conversation, finishes his paper plate
of microwaved food and retreats
to the silence of his bedroom.
And my mother, with a machine pumping air
into her lungs, keeps drifting
further from us along with those nights
she still rode through town, windows down,
brown hair blowing, the darkness ahead of them
lost in neon glow.
29
Bing Crosby Sings the Blues
Long gone, those nights, my father on the couch after work. He’d dangle
his winter boots over the side--ignoring my mother as she ignored him-and, for twenty minutes, would listen to songs in the dark: I watched from the hallway
as Sinatra waltzed up the stairs. Not father-son time, not All in the Family time,
not a shot-of-whisky-before-taking-a-walk time, it was simply the soft swing
of jazz, the prairie twang of Buck Owens. And at least once a week, as my mother
cooked dinner in the kitchen, my father played Bing Crosby Sings the Blues:
the album cover dark as a Memphis nightclub, Crosby donning a blue fedora,
his lips wrapped tight around a brown pipe. Twenty-five years later
and no record store can find it. Still the album plays
in the living room of my memory like the month of December
which never seemed to end--an unyielding blizzard of white blowing
even in the summer. I’d shovel three inches of snow from the driveway
while my mother sat in the kitchen chilled by lonely drafts cold
as the Bering Strait. Unlike the other albums, it was Crosby’s polished voice
which offered dignity to the silence of my parents’ marriage. It was his blues,
and his blues only, which harmonized with the frustration of their failed love;
his sad warmth expressed the months they went without touching,
the years they buried themselves under separate heaps of blankets.
And now it’s gone, not a trace among my father’s albums as proof
that Bing Crosby sang my parents’ winter storm. But it happened.
Even without evidence, it wanders in the past: my mother in the kitchen
secretly listening--not wanting my father to know--to “St. Louis Blues”
(That woman’s got a heart like a rock in the sea), finding a bit of company
during the sadness of her days; me, trapped in that giant snow globe,
comforted by the Floridian breeze of Crosby’s voice, the icicles melting,
if only briefly, in our front yard; and my father, tired man,
alone in the living room, boots forever dangling, playing that album
30
week after week--“Five Long Years,” “It’s Raining
in my Heart”--his purple-blue lips, so often silent, singing right along.
31
Boy at Night
In the final hours of daylight he refuses to stop throwing his football against the chain
link fence. His arm aches from the relentless throwing and the fence rattles as if the boy
could drive a football-sized hole through it if he only threw hard enough.
But the boy will never throw hard enough.
His older brother, fourteen years older, has been dead two years. The boy tries not to
sleep because in his dreams his brother wants to return home.
Let me in, his brother calls from the street in front of the boy’s white house. His brother
knocks his cold fist against the boy’s front door.
A year after his brother died the boy’s mother moved him into his brother’s room.
There’s a record player covered in dust that the boy has never played. His brother’s
hockey stick still leans against the wall.
He will not open the closet filled with his brother’s clothes.
The boy wants his arm to be strong enough to scare his dead brother away.
He keeps throwing the football against the fence because he wants to knock the fence
over and run behind the neighbor’s brown house. After he knocks the fence down the
boy’s mother will call his name but the boy will not come home.
Emphysema has sprouted like a weed in his mother’s lungs.
She is fat and smokes all day. The boy’s mother does not have the strength to protect him
and his father, with circles under his eyes, works through the night.
The boy’s mother did not help when he was six years old watching a basketball game on
television: Larry Bird backed his defender down and the crowd cheered loud as he
released a shot from the tips of his fingers which spun smoothly through the air. The
brother was in a heavy rocking chair, the boy on the floor, but his mother never came
running in, her face a storm of anger, after his brother rocked the chair down on his leg-the boy was screaming.
He has thrown so much his shoulder is strained. It hurts to lift a glass of water before bed.
In his dream the boy’s brother wants his room back. He shakes the locked bulkhead door.
He stands in the backyard looking up at the boy’s second-story window.
There is no moon when the boy wakes.
32
He cannot see his brother’s red baseball cap or the stuffed panda bear his brother won at
the fair two months before his murder.
The boy’s shoulder aches but he refuses to ask his mother for help. Her body smells of
cigarettes, cancer reaches down her spine like an icicle.
The boy remembers his brother, alive, skating around the hockey rink.
Games started in the evening. He drank warm cocoa from a thermos. His mother, arms
raised high, cheered whenever his brother collided into an opponent.
33
Did Not Speak
I wanted my brother to die,
or I wanted the wires stuck into his arms
to wrap around his twenty-one year old body
and never let go, the white hospital sheets
enough to finally make him good.
My father took me outside. We waited together
while my mother and sister stayed behind
in the hospital room. My brother had been unconscious
for a couple days. The doctors told us
to keep saying his name.
My father bought a Kit-Kat. He gave three wafers to me
and kept one for himself. He leaned against a concrete wall
while seagulls flew overhead. I know it was April,
I was seven, and I am almost certain
the sun was shining on my father’s graying hair.
Before being led out of the room, I saw a white cloth
wrapped around my brother’s head. I remember his body
was swollen. And there was a machine beside his bed.
I watched as it pumped air into my brother’s chest.
Then took it back.
*
34
At seven I did not understand my brother’s injuries. I knew nothing of hematomas, of
contusions, the brain swelling and pushing against bone. I did not understand my trip to
the hospital.
I knew nothing of drug deals gone wrong, of unidentified assailants, the force it takes to
crack a skull.
I only knew my brother was the reason my mother stopped cooking family dinners, why
she refused to leave the house for days at a time. My brother was the reason my father
always worked, and would not stop working.
I blamed him for most any bruise I suffered. He was the monster roaming our hallways at
night, his footsteps always creaking, his hand about to turn the knob to my door.
My brother was the one looking through my second floor window. I could see the moon
casting his shadow. I could hear him tapping against the glass.
*
35
My childhood has a thousand spaces. My thoughts return to the hospital--a seven-yearold son sharing a Kit-Kat with his dad. But I can’t find the moment when my father
kneels in the jeans he has been wearing for days and pulls me toward him.
When my father, his lips cold and dry in early April, kisses my forehead.
I know my father walked with me out of the hospital. He leaned against a concrete wall.
And my father’s lips were certainly moving.
But no matter how I try, there isn’t any sound. So I keep looking for something that
means more than seagulls, April sunlight, a candy bar.
*
36
“We were young,” my sister says. “You were real young.”
I am a freshman in college and the two of us
have been comparing memories for the last couple hours.
“He had a moustache,” my sister says.
“Dark brown,” I say.
We discuss an Eagles poster above his bed.
I ask if he looked like our father.
“I’m not sure.”
We can’t remember any pictures our parents have saved
of him. We can’t remember posing next to our brother
for a family photograph. For a few minutes we even consider
our parents might not have saved any pictures of us.
*
37
When I was nine, my parents moved me
into my dead brother’s room. At night I slept
in the same bed one morning my brother rose from
and never returned to.
I lived among his belongings:
a Marlboro trash can; a stuffed panda bear
won at a carnival; a record player
with a stack of records beside it-AC/DC and Black Sabbath.
My mother told me not to touch anything,
and so the room remained covered in dust.
I didn’t even look at his journals
hidden in a drawer. I did not want to know
what they said. I was certain
my brother’s words were still breathing.
*
38
Silence eating fast food for dinner, a Happy Meal
with a small Star Wars toy. Silence sent to school
each day in unwashed clothes. A letter from the principal
requesting my mother wash her children’s greasy hair.
My father waking at four in the morning.
My father driving to his first job
without the radio working, without the heater working.
The television screaming in the hours
before bed. The basement where my brother
used to smoke pot. My father driving to his second job
in a rattling car. My mother in her bedroom,
her head resting on a dirty pillow case,
her face, without expression, lost in the silence of sleep.
*
39
“There was a fire,” I say.
“Yes,” my sister says.
I am twenty-four. We have been comparing memories
for over six years.
“In the kitchen?” I ask.
“His cigarette caught in the trash,” my sister says,
“but it was small.”
I ask if our father put it out.
“I can’t remember.”
I ask if she remembers our brother stealing
quarters and dimes from our parents’ dirty clothes.
If she remembers our brother’s friends,
how they never had names, how their hair
was always long, their eyes heavy-lidded,
how their grins set off car alarms.
I ask if our father ever threatened him, if our father
ever changed the locks during one of those weeks
our brother disappeared.
“I remember Mom crying,” my sister says.
*
40
I wanted my father to be a hero. I wanted him to make sure my brother would never rise
from his hospital bed. I wanted my father to kiss my forehead, to convince my mother to
cook again.
I wanted him to make sure no one would tap against my window.
Whenever my father was home, during those hours between jobs, I would follow him. I
would watch him eat reheated pasta at the table. I would watch the reflection in the
mirror of my father’s upturned face as he shaved stubble from his neck. I would watch
him watch television.
And always he was talking to himself. At the kitchen table, in the backyard while
struggling to start the lawnmower, even when walking out the porch door.
My father’s lips were moving; there were things he could not stop thinking.
Things that needed to be said.
*
41
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“About what?” my sister asks.
My sister has been married for two years.
We’re sitting in the living room of her newly purchased house.
“The rocking chair,” I say.
“What rocking chair?”
“The one in the den,” I say. “My leg was underneath.”
“I don’t think so,” she says.
“He rocked down.”
“No,” my sister says.
“He wanted to hurt me. I’m sure I screamed.”
“It’s something I’d remember,” she says.
“Dad was working, and Mom kept saying it didn’t happen.”
“I don’t know,” my sister says.
“But I see it,” I say. “I really do.”
*
42
When I was fifteen, my father started
to come into my room when he had trouble
falling asleep. He would lie next to me
in my dead brother’s twin bed. The two of us
did not speak. We would close our eyes
and rest. Our shoulders and legs touched,
and I could feel my father breathe.
We stayed like this for hours,
never sleeping. The bed not big enough
for either of us to move.
*
43
And still this memory I keep returning to. The one whose details I am never certain of.
How many different ways can I approach the day my brother died?
My father walked out of the hospital. He wore a windbreaker, or maybe a denim jacket. I
think there were seagulls above us.
I know my father slept next to me. I know he ate reheated pasta.
But I still don’t know what he was saying.
Not while he tried to start the lawnmower, not while he shaved stubble from his neck,
not even while I secretly wished for the death of his oldest son.
*
44
“I was in the backseat,” I say.
I am talking with my sister on the phone. I am thirty-two years old
and have moved two thousand miles away from home.
“But he didn’t even have a license,” my sister says
“Dad insisted,” I say. “They switched seats.
Dad wanted him to drive the last mile home.”
“And he drove into the porch?”
“He drove through it.”
“Are you sure?” my sister asks.
“We almost made it to the backyard.”
“Where was I? Where was Mom?”
“I wasn’t buckled,” I say.
“We were never buckled.”
“I remember picking up speed in the driveway.”
“I don’t know,” my sister says.
“It happened. And there wasn’t any sound.
None of us screamed. Dad didn’t even say,
‘Slow down.’”
*
45
Silence driving to the hospital. My family walking
disinfected halls, following brown arrows
to a silent intensive care. My father drinking
a cup of cold coffee. My brother’s head wrapped
in a white cloth. A tube pushed down my brother’s throat.
My mother beside his swollen body. The long hours
before my brother’s death. His chest rising
as a machine pumped silent air.
*
46
The wind was blowing. An early April sun was shining
on my father’s graying hair. I ate three wafers
of a Kit-Kat while my father chewed reheated pasta.
I ate a Kit-Kat while my father climbed
into my dead brother’s bed. There was a fire
in the kitchen. His records covered in dust on the floor.
I wanted my brother to die as he stole
quarters and dimes from my parents’ dirty clothes.
He tapped against my window.
*
47
And through these memories my father’s lips move though my sister says my brother
never rocked down on my leg, that he never drove a car through our porch.
My father’s lips move though my mother sent me to school in unwashed clothes. I can
see my father’s lips as he holds a glass of water, as he rises to go to work at four in the
morning.
My father’s lips move as he leans against a concrete wall--his youngest son eats three
wafers of a candy bar, his oldest son hours from death. They move each day I wake in my
bedroom two thousand miles away from home. They’ll never stop.
48
Another Life
The man driving past our house, heater cranking in the winter blizzard, is not my father.
His hair buzzed into a flattop has not faded to pepper-grey. There are no midnight-black
circles under his eyes.
This man does not wear my father’s old jacket heavy as frozen snow.
Unlike my father, if this man opened our front door, walked in upon the chilled silence at
the kitchen table, our faces would not turn from him as if he were a villain.
Because this is only two weeks after my brother’s murder, the man who is my father pulls
his ‘78 Mercury, its frame rusting to nothing, into the gas station and grasps the metal
pump, its handle burning cold, preferring these extra minutes away from his family.
He even decides after getting back in the car, turning the ignition, to drive around for
another hour which is exactly what the man who is not my father--the one I have
constructed to live the only other life I can imagine for my father--does every night.
This man still owns the blue convertible my father bought at eighteen, roof closed in the
arctic wind. Even though he is my father’s age, fifty-two, this man wears the clothes my
father wore at twenty-one--white t-shirt, jeans, polished black boots.
Because this man never met my mother when he was twenty-four, she does not sit beside
him in the passenger’s seat, smoke from her cigarette rushing through the window slit.
This man never denied my brother’s schizophrenia.
He never offered excuses of overtime to avoid doctor’s appointments, meetings with the
school psychologist. He never passed out drunk on the bathroom floor, his face fuming
crimson-red from grief as my sister and I hid in our bedrooms.
My mother does not resent him for offering little comfort after the police pulled into the
driveway to inform her my brother’s head had been cracked open.
In the cold darkness the man who is my father enters a motel room, neon streaming in.
He watches hours of basketball deciding that this night--if only this night--he will not
come home.
As my father drifts to sleep at 2 a.m., television blaring, my sister does not sneak past
him, like she does every other night, as if crossing dangerous ice to turn the volume
down. She does not offer silence to every question my father asks.
49
But for my father there will be the next day when he must once again confront the weight
of his family’s needs, the overwhelming anger of my mother’s complaints, my relentless
questions about why he did not come home.
Unlike this other man who gets to keep driving grey streets day after day, snow falling in
a raw and endless winter, but at least the heater cranks, still the radio plays songs that this
man loves.
And each time he passes a house with white shingles, driveway not shoveled, a broken
front porch light, this man does not look through the window at the woman sitting with
her children at the kitchen table, plates untouched. He has no need to wonder what it is
they are waiting for.
50
A Small Sign
Still in a canyon of grief my mother worked with a hand spade
in the backyard six weeks after my brother’s death
frantic for company. The house was loud with silence;
her closest friends visited less each afternoon
and my father, arguing a need for money, had disappeared
behind the grey fog of work.
My mother was digging up dirt for a tomato garden
she would never plant.
It makes sense when the bird flew by a third time,
placing itself on the lowest branch of the only tree in our backyard,
she considered it a small sign: she was desperate
for another round of Scrabble with my brother at the kitchen table,
his fingers delicately picking up the small wooden pieces,
counting off points for each letter; his forehead
without a hint of blue from the tire iron that cracked his skull.
In this way the bird’s reappearance, its exact positioning
five feet from my mother, was filled with meaning--the shifting
of its head from side to side, like jagged movements in a flip-book,
suggested to her the universe was not simply an ocean of darkness.
My mother held to it tight--on knees bruised with dirt
she stared at the bird, its grey feathers unremarkable, convinced
the void in its black eyes, as if looking at nothing,
understood sorrow after all the other birds had moved on.
51
1993
Year my sister sat in front of an oval mirror covering traces
of my mother’s face in her own. Year of the pea-green winter jacket,
Pete Condon clotheslining me off my bicycle,
three houses left on my paper route, my cheekbone freefalling
to the pavement. The cat’s body ached with tumors,
its stomach a concrete block of suffering. My father drank Riuniti
watching endless episodes of Matlock.
Eight years after my brother’s murder,
fourteen years after my brother rescued the cat
abandoned behind Little Peach, and still my mother waited
for her older son to return home--29 in 1993.
Year of cat shit in every hidden corner of the house.
My mother insisted we not touch
my brother’s yellow lamp on the porch, a crack down its side,
terrified it would break.
Always my mother stranded in the house.
Always my mother, lungs clouded with nicotine, refusing to get out of bed
before nine. My father backed out of the driveway each morning;
my sister, school over, drove with friends to Dairy Queen.
Day my mother, alone, cat laboring to breathe, unable to stand,
finally carried it out of the house in a brown box.
Afternoon the veterinarian stuck a six-inch needle into its back.
We ate takeout pizza for dinner, my mother silent,
as the family failed to notice the cat’s absence.
Morning I waited for the school bus on the sidewalk, still not aware,
preferring cold morning air to the heated house.
Afternoon my sister stayed late for softball practice. Day my mother,
always in a blue bathrobe, always with a cigarette,
sat at the kitchen table even more alone than she was before.
52
The Small Routine
During the heart attack my mother survived
on the living room couch she did not make any attempt
to call for help--my father in his bedroom
one wall away; me, upstairs,
fan cranking to drown out every sound from below.
It was an average Tuesday night,
the eleven o’clock news on television,
the anchorman wearing an ash-grey suit;
my mother was not prepared
to confront the overwhelming reality
of her own failing body (the years without exercise,
her daily pack of cigarettes, the jelly doughnut
she ate each afternoon for lunch)
as she took occasional sips from a glass of water
and flipped through the stations.
In the middle of her heart attack
my mother was not thinking of the same breakfast order
she had given at Millie’s each weekday morning
her entire adult life (two dropped eggs on white,
double side of bacon) or the same booth she sat in
by the window, her car always parked
in one of three spaces, the waitress
with the Midwestern accent sincerely pleased
to see my mother walk in;
but the safety of these small routines--the evening drive
to the pier by Weymouth Landing,
the five dollar scratch ticket each night before bed,
her daily soap operas--offered comfort
if she could get only get through this unwanted experience.
Just as denial allowed her to attempt to regulate
her breathing by insisting her heart attack was nothing
but indigestion. There was a plant on the coffee table
and she focused on the television’s familiar blue-green glow
reflecting off its pot until the pain lessened
to discomfort and she could sit at the kitchen table
waiting for her chest to feel normal again.
In his bedroom my father slept
through her trauma in the same unwashed jeans
53
he wore throughout the week; and upstairs,
lost in the lonely dysfunction of my own routines, wanting only
to be in the safety of my room,
I sat with a can of Coke by my side
reading Cannery Row, Springsteen playing soft,
fan blowing high, so far from my mother
that even if she did call I never would have heard.
54
What The Doctor Did Not Know
Of the ride to his office.
My mother, too weak to cup her hands, vomiting onto the dashboard.
The doctor did not know of the paper towel I dragged across my mother’s lips afraid of
the incriminating truth.
He did not know, even after declining my mother’s request for another round of radiation,
how this woman slouching in a wheel chair was less than seven days from a dark-tunnel
coma. The purple blouse she wore was from Filene’s, her white shoes, barely seven
months old, purchased at Payless--the doctor was not aware of these.
He could not hear my mother calling for me in the terror-black of night, her body a
hurricane of pain, legs dripping piss, to help my father heave her onto the commode.
The doctor was not present in 1985 when I was seven and a swarm of hornets hovered by
our wooden fence. He never thought about the poison running thick through my veins as
my mother carried me into the safety of the emergency room. The doctor then smelling of
aftershave.
He did not sit next to me when I drove to Walgreens three weeks before my mother died
to buy her a new make-up case and a small carton of milk.
I did not confide how each morning my mother, back flat on the faded blue couch, tried
to cover the pale white of her skin. The doctor did not watch me tilt a mirror underneath
my mother’s chin as she lifted a small brush to paint her cheeks.
He did not consider how the white of his jacket was stitched with terrible honesty.
His rimmed glasses, his professional grey eyes, failed to observe my mother in 1957, a
young girl swimming in a yellow bathing suit, my father five miles away, ten years from
her life, riding a brown bicycle.
The doctor was not present for their first date.
He did not witness the silence that their marriage became. The doctor did not assist with
the ten milliliters of morphine in the morning, with the five milliliters of Ativan before
bed.
There was a picture in his office of a green house. He wore brown shoes and tapped a
blue pen on his desk, but there was no help, no gentle suggestion, when an hour before
the appointment I tried to wash my mother’s brown hair, its lingering stench of sweat.
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There was no moment to discuss the desperate mess of dirty soap I abandoned on the rug.
We had pulled over by the side of the road, twenty minutes late for my mother’s final
appointment. The doctor did not know my father was in the backseat praying a slow Hail
Mary. My mother, well beyond the protection of a seatbelt, could not stop shaking. It was
winter and no one was in the car but us.
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*
57
Rockland, 1995
Fly balls traveled with beautiful urgency. For entire afternoons
I tossed batting practice to Ryan LeBlanc whose drives to deep center echoed
with metallic authority through our empty high school stadium. The Red Sox
were still failures, seventy-six seasons without a title, but at various moments that year
everything made sense. Ace of Base rocked the radio as I folded boxes
in the dingy backroom of Themis Pizza for a much needed
twenty dollar bill. At the South Shore Plaza Rene Ambrose
took off my baseball cap and placed it upon her perfectly combed brown hair.
We wandered from store to store sharing a soft pretzel dripping honey mustard
on the checkered tile floor. It didn’t matter that Ryan’s brother, local amateur boxer,
spent the summer in jail for assaulting a cop in the Burger King parking lot
because on his family’s mantelpiece was a Golden Gloves trophy
which served as proof not everything turns wrong. At The Candlepin bowling alley
a pin setting machine caught fire as Rene and I tied our swirling
red-brown bowling shoes. I still do not know what I meant
when I said At least we still have each other, but as we waited for the fire truck
such words seemed to capture an incredible truth even though
a year later Rene started to date high school pole vaulting star Tony McSherry.
Ryan passed his driver’s test on the second try. We felt liberated
in his mother’s Ford Escort which coughed out smoke every time
he shifted into third gear. In late September the girl’s varsity soccer team
formed a wonderfully long line at Dairy Queen. I imagined Rene wearing
blue soccer shorts, her flawless white legs with goose bumps
in the early autumn chill. Ryan drove to Reid’s Pond so we could eat our sundaes
by dark water and listen to the Red Sox who trailed the entire season
by three in the ninth. Six months before the Rockland baseball stadium
would be bulldozed into a parking lot, two years before Ryan’s brother
was shoved into a police car for selling drugs to minors,
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we stared at the lights of our town off in the distance--unable to see
the Episcopalian church which had burned down in May
or the dark shadows of the abandoned shoe factory on Liberty-seduced by the glow of each passing moment.
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Doogie’s House
I watched each Thursday night, 9:30,
on the twenty-five pound television I rescued
from the basement when I was twelve,
its twisted rabbit ears barely capable
of capturing the distant signal of Doogie Howser, M.D..
This was the half-hour I hid myself in my bedroom
away from my mother sitting at the kitchen table
blankly staring at the unwashed floor.
Doogie’s parents--Katherine and David--might have quarreled
with Doogie over his purchasing a ‘57 Chevy convertible,
but in the end problems dissolved-of course Doogie would return the very-red convertible
and make instead a thoughtful donation
to the Lackmore Institute for Childhood Leukemia Research.
And then there was Doogie’s genius:
perfect SAT score at six, Princeton graduate at ten,
licensed physician by the age of fourteen.
Not that I identified with Doogie--who could?
But in each episode there was Vinnie Delpino,
Doogie’s best friend, who--like me--struggled
to distinguish himself. And even if Vinnie’s mother wasn’t lost
in a black fog depression, both of us wanted to be included
in the annual Howser family camping getaway.
When Vinnie entered Doogie’s house I sensed his relief
at the living room’s cleanliness: no lopsided pile
of newspapers, months old, no broken lamp,
no dinner-plate size wine stain on the dirty couch.
And then there were those invented episodes
of me taking Vinnie’s place. Each afternoon
I walked from school imagining
I was headed toward the safety net of Doogie’s house.
Even though Doogie had no interest in sports,
his father would still be my basketball coach-it would be Mr. Howser who would insist
my ball-handling skills were better
than anyone else on the team.
It didn’t matter if my own father, drunk,
walked angrily past my room. The door was locked
and once again I had successfully contorted
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the television’s rabbit ears to produce
an only slightly-blurry signal. Hours after the episode ended
it was Doogie’s mother I heard
carrying the Howser family laundry down our hallway.
It was her dress that brushed against my door.
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Matlock
In those thin hours between jobs
my father indulged in his Matlock obsession.
Consistent as the family ignoring his presence,
weekday afternoons were dedicated to the sanctuary
of another syndicated episode of Matlock, lawyer extraordinaire,
defending clients lesser lawyers deemed guilty.
These were the years after my brother’s murder
when my father’s life had become its own hostile courtroom.
He’d arrive home from work--his lips so often moving-as if searching for words to offer my mother
whose silence assaulted him with evidence:
the dark maze of my brother’s schizophrenia
that my father never acknowledged,
the night my father refused to leave work to offer comfort
as doctors pumped from my brother’s stomach
a small pile of half-dissolved pills.
But during that solitary hour my father’s lips were still
as he watched the paternal lawyer with silver hair
uncover the real culprit: he’d make certain
the innocent gardener living in the pool house
behind the mansion did not suffer
for the billionaire’s violent crime; nor the lonely trucker
who may have made some bad choices
but was certainly not the villain
who dumped a dying body by the train tracks.
Finally here was a man who never failed
to uncover the hidden glove or call forth
with his calm, confident voice a secret witness to testify
to a truth no one else wanted to consider.
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A Certain Kind of Light
Attached itself to Anna Valley for much of my adolescence.
Not like the painful glow from the halogen lamp in the basement
of Anna’s parents’ house illuminating the half-empty soda bottle on the table,
but the type of light that clung to the neckline of Anna’s yellow dress
desperate for me to recognize the angular perfection of her collarbone.
It insisted I take notice of how Anna folded her long legs
on the old torn couch smooth as closing the loose flap of a book of matches.
The leaves continued to offer their own pleasant greenness,
the ocean-blue sky was still refreshing, but each paled next to the immensity
of this light which accentuated Anna’s silver baton as it lingered in the air
during the color guard’s halftime show like the slow motion pillow fight
bright in my imagination between Anna and her friends,
each girl dressed in suggestive lingerie. In the cafeteria the light sometimes
became unstable shifting from the delicate splendor of Anna’s fingers wrapped
around her carton of apple juice to the pretty foreign exchange student
who taught me several curse words in Dutch, the arc of her lips suddenly
luminous and appealing. 93 million miles away the sun continued
to work diligently, but on a Saturday afternoon--junior year-I failed to take interest in the Rockland carnival, its rides flashing furiously
in the June heat, only able to focus on the pale-white arms of the neighbor girl
eating fried dough. By mid-summer, the light dragged me helplessly to K-Mart
to behold the magnificence of college girls stocking shelves in spaghetti strap
tank tops during summer break. It enticed me to skip baseball practice,
my weekly appointment with the math tutor, to wander the streets
by my house--Anna four miles away until September--searching
for the slightest shine of any girl in tight shorts. That unyielding light
even pierced my thoughts during the hours I could not sleep,
my eyes lost in a dark, exhausting brightness.
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Getting It Right
What could it hurt to rewrite my adolescence-for instance, this time Anna arrives at my sixteenth birthday party
in a swimsuit. It wouldn’t change the course of known events
for me to say we retired to the bedroom where I touched parts
of Anna’s body which called to me like distant church bells.
The Globe can offer a correction: due to an editorial error
my tennis-ball-crazed-dog, Rambo, never collided with the fender
of that cruising Toyota. At eighteen, family eating dinner, let’s say my father
no longer informs us he has throat cancer, there’s no surgery
that steals his voice. And this time no one moves out: my brother still lives
in the basement, spinning a record twenty years long, an Eagles poster,
“Live at the Garden,” nailed above his bed; my sister spends eternity
in the bathroom perfecting the art of mascara.
Let Rambo catch the tennis ball at the corner of our driveway.
Let my father’s voice call me to dinner.
The Herald can publish a new story: my parents purchase that ‘89 mini-van,
its tank big enough to hold thirty years of gasoline--hands on the wheel,
everyone buckled, my father leads us in song, “The Long Road Home,”
and Anna too sits in the back, her voice joining ours
as she reaches for me, her red bikini brighter than any brake light.
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Adam’s Thirst
How each day ends with silence.
Adam and Eve washing dishes, like us now. How she, like you,
wore size nine slippers. How he searched for words
to describe the way she scrubbed each spoon.
Tonight you’re reading National Geographic,
and I find myself, like Adam,
without a definition for this thirst.
In the bathroom you brush your hair,
stroke after stroke, and I search for a phrase
that goes beyond burning-chestnut-blond.
How Eve, like you, walked light as a ghost.
How each night she ate seven cherries on the couch.
How Adam climbed into bed unable to explain
the softness of her exhalations.
How I watch you sleep. How in this darkness I lean over you,
as he did her when words were young,
to watch your shoulder rise, now fall.
And from the time when history was small enough for two
Adam’s voice reaches me:
What is this, he asks. What is this, God?
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The El Camino
For my father polishing her each Sunday morning-an Old Milwaukee in one hand, a yellow sponge
in the other. For him singing along with Sam Cooke
crooning from the tape deck. For Christina’s pink
and white miniskirt and the way her skin looked
smoother than any Larry Bird jump shot.
For that Saturday night in September when my father
dangled the El Camino’s keys before me
demanding I repeat each of his instructions-how the resentment I felt for my father
who bestowed on that brown behemoth the affection
he denied my mother disappeared.
For each Circuit City stockholder whose investments
resulted in the construction of an unlit parking lot.
For the El Camino’s six-foot bed
where my inexperienced fingers tore off Christina’s
black bra buckle. How we delighted
in the El Camino’s absorbent springs,
Christina calling my name as if each letter
had great significance. For Sam Cooke
filling the awkward silence of our ride home-Christina not kissing me goodnight that night
or any night after. For my father, the next morning,
discovering Christina’s torn bra buckle.
I watched from the kitchen window
as he ceased his duet with Sam Cooke and considered
the small black clasp. For my father,
who I had learned to ignore whenever he was home,
tossing the evidence to the wind and sidewalk.
For my father dipping his yellow sponge
in a cracked bucket, rivulets of grime dripping
down its sides. For my father, nursing his last
Old Milwaukee, working into that Sunday afternoon,
re-cleaning each inch of the El Camino.
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*
67
The Invented City
Morning traffic is noticeably lighter-the coffee in my super size mug never cools.
When I pick my father up at the city airport
(where the head attendant pays me twenty dollars
for each half hour my car resides in the parking garage)
the voice my father lost from cancer has returned;
as we ride past the numerous skyscrapers
under an eternally bright sky
my father once more sings "Mack the Knife"
in his smooth baritone; but in the awkward silence that follows
when we have nothing else to say
I begin to remember his colon is covered with polyps,
that his doctor wants to discuss realistic expectations.
In the city I invent my apartment offers
an appealing view of the statehouse's golden dome,
of the cobblestone street below;
each time I ride the subway a freshly ironed copy
of The Daily Gazette rests on my seat-by the emergency exit a napping cot
with clean sheets waits for me;
but no matter how I strain I cannot imagine
my brother--a storm of confusion in his mind-as a kind man. As I ride the blue line
to the Museum of Essential Art
with its permanent exhibit of Vermeer's collected paintings
I still think of his cold face
as the train speeds past a block of abandoned warehouses.
Even my mother who is young again-who sits with me in a crowded restaurant
in the recently renovated waterfront district
and wears the same purple sweater she bought
at TJ Max when I was ten-even as she flips her hair from her shoulders
as Eddie Arnold plays non-stop on the radio
and takes another sip
of her steaming bowl of seafood chowder-I still cannot forget she is dead.
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A Job in California
I’ve been told that there’s a job in California.
A job for someone with a history of a poor work ethic.
For someone who’s walked out of previous jobs without notice
at least a half-dozen times.
One with three-month vacations, four-day weekends, and excellent health benefits.
Nora’s by the counter refilling our glasses and I’m going on about this job in Sonoma
looking for someone who wants to do nothing but drink Sauvignon Blanc
for eight hours a day. Sure, she says, not buying a word of it;
and when I tell her about the incredible opportunities for advancement,
that within six months I could possibly become Case Manager
of the whole Sauvignon Blanc division, she doesn’t even respond.
But this is a job with a five-hour lunch.
Where women come and sit by your side in the vineyards.
Where those same women inch up their dresses and let you look at their legs.
It’s a job for someone who’s willing to sell cheap Mexican imports
from a wooden shack in Mendota.
Where country music strikes like a rattlesnake from a small radio beside the register
as fat truckers wearing overalls come in to buy Carlos Torano cigars
and walk out with Hank Williams in their veins.
Billy leans toward the campfire and spits his whiskey into the flame--Tomorrow,
he says, we’ll ride past Furnace Creek, over Funeral Mountain, and ‘cross them
canyons. And we’ll make it, he says, as frozen rain beats against his leathery
face--we’ll make it outta Devil’s Hole by sundown.
It’s a job just outside of Tahoe.
One that requires its employees to spend their summers at a nudist resort
at Laguna Beach.
Where Gilbert, the Resort Manager, makes the observation that it’s ok to be naked,
that it’s ok too to wear clothes, but that it’s not ok for a man’s private parts
to be sticking out of his clothes.
Fine, Nora says, let’s just say this job’s for real. You still don’t know anything
about it. What’s the money like? Do you have any idea where you’re going
to stay? Really, she says, it’s not like California is right down the street.
But this is a job with winters that kill.
Where men disappear for weeks, even months, only to return with beards thick and wild.
Where an infant sucks milk from its mother’s breast as the wagon they’re riding in
moves slowly along the Santa Fe Trail.
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Christ, Billy yells, riding his horse hard against the wind, Jesus God-damned Christ.
And now the sound of gunfire splits the sky as a group of riders appear
on the distant plain. Keep pushin’, Billy urges, as his horse kicks up
a long plume of dust--And pay them sons-a-bitches no mind.
It’s a job for someone who’s willing to pan for gold in the Sacramento Valley and listen
to a one-legged man with a scar across his cheek pluck “Oh! Susanna” on a banjo.
Where nights are spent drinking whiskey in the Flapjack Saloon.
Where the local undertaker has a handle-bar mustache and poses next to an up-right
coffin for a picture with a gunslinger who has thirty-seven holes in his body.
This is getting ridiculous, Nora says, getting up from the table. She’s walking around
the kitchen slamming everything--the cabinet, the door, she even slams
the window shut. I don’t get it, she says, stopping for a moment, things aren’t
any different there. Where are you going with this? What do you think
you’re going to find in California?
And as light continues to fade, dark pockets cover the valley floor. Puffing his cigar
down to its butt Billy flicks it over the cliff. They’re climbing that ridge below,
he says--It’s best we get movin’. In the sky a vulture circles as it glides
on the howling wind. After leading his horse through the pass Billy begins
to ride toward the burning sun setting before him and spreading
like blood across the Western horizon.
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Special Recognition
Driving the streets of Boston, I keep telling Nora this city hasn’t earned our love.
I’m insisting Boston has not adequately considered how dollar bills
would dance out of wallets, parade out of purses, if we were only hired
to make weekly public appearances. And even as Nora refuses to respond, I complain
that economists have never fully researched how cities might flourish
from our presence—how our love could renovate the dilapidated houses of Little Rock,
our kisses rebuild the abandoned warehouses of Boise. I’m suggesting Savannah
would be more than willing to supply us with an antebellum mansion
if we only allowed local residents to watch us slow dance each Sunday
on the village green. I want Nora to appreciate, as she cruises the radio dial,
as she lights another Marlboro Menthol, how within days of our arrival Grand Forks
would become the passion-pulsing-Paris of North Dakota. Let economists write
their books, they’re simply men who have never been kissed by lips
which burn everything they touch. Let them go on cable TV to explain theories
overlooking the obvious: whenever Nora’s morning-grey eyes gaze upon me,
whenever the tips of her fingers touch the yearning follicles on my neck,
companies within a ten-mile radius rise twenty points on the stock exchange.
Nora needs to know, even as she covers her ears with her hands, that our kind of love
deserves special recognition: a free hazelnut coffee or low-fat cranberry muffin
from every Dunkin’ Donuts in the greater Boston area. Stopped at a downtown
traffic light, I tell Nora it’s time for Santa Fe to consider the mystery of us, for our love
to be viewed by each inhabitant from the fiery peaks of the Sangre de Christo Mountains.
And even as Nora unbuckles her seatbelt, as she places her hand
on the door handle, I insist she understand how any couple on any street
in any other city in all of America would provide her and me with countless
signed checks simply to watch us share a bowl of Cherry Garcia ice cream
on the living room couch. I’m saying the time has arrived, she needs to say yes.
I’m begging Nora to stay in the car because in only moments, I’m more than convinced,
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this feverish red light before us will turn, the break I’ve been waiting for,
into an unstoppable, ATM-withdrawable, river-flowing green.
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The History of Longing
I. Evolution
The world began in darkness with a cluster
of microbes arguing, telling each other
where to shove things, until almost by accident
there was a touch. Out of hunger came the arm,
the hand, the lips--the tongue.
In the late Cambrian era a not-quite-human thing
crawled from the water and looked upon a woman.
She slept in a mango tree, and even though its lips
couldn’t form the word desire, nothing could stop
this creature from wanting to climb the branches
and sleep beside her.
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II. The Middle Ages
War covered the globe like a king-size blanket.
Everyone was overwhelmed with despair except
for a lady in black who listened to classical jazz.
Every night Lord Trollope wrote letters
to which she’d never respond. During the battle
of Ludford Bridge a sword ripped a hole
the size of London in his chest. Most soldiers agreed
that the cry Lord Trollope gave while falling to the ground
was not one of pain but of relief.
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III. Astronomy
Every Tuesday Galileo would drink
at Downtown Joe’s and talk
about the planet he loved. He said she owned
a blue dress which twice a week
she’d have laundered at Kip’s Dry Cleaners.
He said she bathed by the light of her two moons;
that she’d slip out of her bathrobe and climb
into water so hot it would burn
anyone but her. After finishing his last drink
Galileo would stare into his empty glass,
frozen in thought, wondering why
she’d always let him watch but never
would come close enough to touch.
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IV. Georgia
General Sherman torched Atlanta because
a man shouldn’t have to be 6’1 just to get a date.
He watched mothers flee the city carrying
their children like grocery bags. He listened
to the pleas of the mayor and then hanged him
from a telegraph pole. The only building Sherman
left standing was a house in the Prescott district.
It rested on a hill with a woman inside
reading a book by Milton. At no point
did she seem concerned with the cries from below
which rose past her chimney
to climb like curses toward heaven.
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V. Realism
For over twenty years Thomas Eakins painted
the same face. In the summer he’d stand
before the canvas and understand everything
about her lips; on Thursday mornings he could always
catch the right shade of her eyes. But Eakins
could never paint her hair which flowed
like an ocean he’d never seen; and somehow
her skin had a tone which ran outside
the realm of color. During his days
of retirement Eakins denied everything
about it. The paintings had long been destroyed
and he only wanted the world to forget
that once there was a face he knew so well
but could never fully capture.
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VI. Myth
Every day he followed as she’d pick oranges
in the orange grove and eat cherries underneath
the unnamed stars. Adam tried to tell her
she was doing it wrong, but still she ate bananas
for breakfast and kiwi for lunch.
One Sunday in late May he met with the serpent
and together they agreed something should be done.
But the next morning Adam woke after the sun
only to see her slipping out the garden gate.
Even with an unknown world before her
she didn’t slow when he called out her name,
when Adam pleaded for her to return
as he stood alone under the apple tree.
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Winter Refrain
Let’s be honest, it snowed every day. 8:07 a.m., and you scraping ice
from your windshield, that thankless circle you stared through all winter,
when the same flake touched your shoulder like a secret.
Each day you drove to work, wind from the west,
while she packed her lilac bathrobe and took The Collected Poems
of W. B. Yeats. That same sunset-purple Trans-Am passed you
on the inside lane, and when you finally sat at your desk,
walls the color of rain, you listened, always, to “Sloop John B.” Let me
go home, you sang, Let me go home. But each day
she took the bottle of late harvest Riesling, that framed photograph
of Elvis with lamb-chop sideburns, every fire-browned brick in the fireplace.
During break you ate a tuna fish sandwich and carrot sticks while she took
the black table lamp you bought together at Pier One.
5:32 p.m., and you driving through eight inches of snow singing
Hoist up the John B.’s sail, See how the main sail sets.
But each day the front door was gone from its frame,
the frame gone from your blue-shingled house. She had taken
that first date to Olive Garden, the Butter Pecan ice cream cone
you shared in Paragon Park. Let’s be honest, it was a blizzard,
even if no one else noticed. And each night you walked the yard searching
for the kitchen, for her rain-cloud colored sneakers in the hallway.
There was nothing. Just your voice lost in the furious snow.
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Sacred Heart
I miss praying a Hail Mary with my father as we rode in his El Camino
whenever an ambulance sounded in the distance. I miss my mother knocking
on my door each Sunday morning, 8 a.m., insisting it was an insult to Jesus Himself
if I did not get out of bed. There was the white cassock I wore as an altar boy.
The Feast of the Ascension when Tom Carter, yawning wide,
dropped the thirty pound wooden cross. I miss Father Barry’s horrified gasp.
Everyone was Irish-Catholic; everyone pretended not to know each other’s secrets:
Mr. O’Shea, in a green blazer each Sunday, who walked out on a wife
and seven children to a start a new life with a twenty-three-year-old florist.
The girl sitting beside me in eighth grade had hair so fiercely red
I couldn’t ignore the crude thoughts intense as sun flares. I miss Sister O’Connor,
eighty years old, blind in one eye, explaining the function of each bead on the rosary
as David Henry drew stick figures engaged in sexual acts none of us quite understood.
I will never miss walking to school in ninth grade terrified the distant sky
judged my every thought, or kneeling before my bed praying obsessively,
working myself to tears--three Our Fathers for each person I knew who had died.
I still do not forgive Monsignor O’Neil for instructing me to say the Act of Contrition
as penance for kissing Sara Lyons in the backyard while her parents watched television.
But there was the annual church bazaar where my father, so often angry,
ran a ping-pong shooting booth looking foolishly kind in a torn felt hat.
And in eleventh grade Father Hickey called our house--my mother answering
the black rotary telephone--to ask if I’d come out of altar-boy-retirement
to serve Sacred Heart’s centennial celebration. There was the red cardigan
my mother bought, her hair done proudly, and me ringing the chimes
one final time as Father Hickey raised the Holy Eucharist.
I miss the familiarity of the uncomfortable wooden pews, Father Kearns’ sermons
which oversimplified all human behavior to right and wrong.
And when my mother was dying, Father Hickey--
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who I had not seen in fifteen years, his back now hunched with age-drove to my parents’ house. There was the dignity of my mother’s Last Rites.
How we formed a circle around her, my father’s cheeks red with grief,
as Father Hickey recited the 23rd Psalm. I miss holding my mother’s
still-living hand those minutes before her lungs stopped,
that long hour we waited for the undertaker as her forehead cooled,
and how in the empty silence beside my mother’s body I allowed myself-once again--to repeat every useless prayer she taught me as a boy.
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Another City
In the other story of my brother’s life
there will not be abandoned train tracks
his shoulders fitted as if in a casket
between the rails.
The city where he had lived--its sidewalks
of trash and second-hand stores-will no longer be the place
where my brother wanders
beyond street lamps for a dime bag of dope
only to be assaulted by the purple force
of a tire iron.
In another city waits the arthritis
which will haunt my brother’s knees
at sixty. It’s a cold city where wind
travels hard through the streets and his lungs
struggle from nicotine ache.
Above a twenty-four hour
dry cleaner is a small apartment
where my brother, pepper-grey moustache,
watches television, his cigarette smoke
with each slow year
paints the ceiling yellow.
Evening after evening he wanders
this city--past a parking lot half-filled
with rusted cars, a motel whose few tenants
shoot heroin behind locked doors.
Here it is always December,
my brother one of several
grim men walking the sidewalk.
And because he has no money
and the drunks at the bar
seldom remember his name, my brother
dials my house at a blurry hour
on one of those curbside payphones
that has survived
well beyond its real end.
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Tired, I will not consider
how good it is to hear his voice
or how fortunate I am
he wants to joke about the Red Sox
last place finish--his fingers grasping
the metal cord tight--but will only
feel bothered, pulled once again
from my welcomed rest
by the burden of his needs.
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