Sinners Welcome: Poems Read online

  She knows what I know,

  or used to know, for in me sonnets fade.

  Homer erodes

  like sandstone worn by age.

  Each year I grow emptier, more obsolete,

  can barely grope

  to words that once hung iridescent in my skull.

  When, thirty years back, I asked my beloved tutor

  how I’d ever pay him back, he said, It’s not

  that linear. Only carry on this talk

  with someone else.

  All his thoughts on Western Civ

  would melt like ice without this kid—

  hair dyed torch red, painted flames on her lug-sole boots.

  She safety-pinned a plastic charm

  of Our Lady’s sacred heart to her sleeve.

  Last night, to plot her destiny

  she hurled at the world map a lopsided dart

  and hit a South Seas flyspeck. Call collect,

  I say, if you get stuck. Read

  thus-and-such translation of Rilke only.

  And though I sound like Polonius to myself,

  she scribbles down my platitudes.

  Without her like,

  I’d live in the dull smear

  of my own profession, each kid

  a repeat, indistinct from the vanishing instants

  that mark us made.

  The hand that holds this pen’s assembled by some force

  newly manifest

  in her face. She brought amazement for a spell,

  then tore loose into the labyrinth I’ve meandered in

  addled as a child, feeling along the string

  my teacher tied. My eyes stare out from ever deeper sockets, edged in mesh.

  I watch her cross the snow-swirled quad

  backpacked in hunter plaid, bent like an old scholar,

  moving with care across the slippery earth.

  Snow is falling

  over the quad, like rare pages

  shredded and dispersed by wind,

  that wild white filling every place we’ve stepped.

  (for Betsy Hogan)

  ENTERING THE KINGDOM

  As the boy’s bones lengthened,

  and his head and heart enlarged,

  his mother one day failed

  to see herself in him.

  He was a man then, radiating

  the innate loneliness of men.

  His expression was ever after

  beyond her. When near sleep

  his features eased towards childhood,

  it was brief.

  She could only squeeze

  his broad shoulder. What could

  she teach him

  of loss, who now inflicted it

  by entering the kingdom

  of his own will?

  DESCENDING THEOLOGY: THE GARDEN

  We know he was a man because, once doomed,

  he begged for reprieve. See him

  grieving on his rock under olive trees,

  his companions asleep

  on the hard ground around him

  wrapped in old hides.

  Not one stayed awake as he’d asked.

  That went through him like a sword.

  He wished with all his being to stay

  but gave up

  bargaining at the sky. He knew

  it was all mercy anyhow,

  unearned as breath. The Father couldn’t intervene,

  though that gaze was never

  not rapt, a mantle around him. This

  was our doing, our death.

  The dark prince had poured the vial of poison

  into the betrayer’s ear,

  and it was done. Around the oasis where Jesus wept,

  the cracked earth radiated out for miles.

  In the green center, Jesus prayed for the pardon

  of Judas, who was approaching

  with soldiers, glancing up—as Christ was—into

  the punctured sky till his neck bones

  ached. Here is his tear-riven face come

  to press a kiss on his brother.

  HURT HOSPITAL’S BEST SUICIDE JOKES

  In unfolded aluminum chairs the color of shit

  and set in a circle as if to corral some emptiness

  in this church basement deep in the dirt,

  strangers sit and tell stories.

  Case sipped wine in a hot tub. Janice

  threw back shots in a dive.

  Bob drew blinds to smoke blunts and ate nothing

  but cake frosting bought by the case.

  The first lady of someplace swiped her son’s meds

  to stay slim. Craig burst through bank doors,

  machine gun in hand. John geezed heroin:

  with a turkey baster, he says, into a neck vein.

  A cop shoved Mark’s face in the mud,

  put a shoe on his neck to cuff him and ask

  where his friends were. I had friends,

  he said, think I’d be here?

  Zola once wrote that the road from the shrine

  at Lourdes was impressively littered

  with crutches and canes but he noted

  not one wooden leg.

  In the garage, with your face through a noose,

  you kick out the ladder, but the green rope won’t give,

  and when your wife clicks the garage switch and the door

  tilts up, there you dangle on tiptoe.

  Alive, all of us, on this island where we sip only

  black liquids or clear water and face down the void

  we’ve shaped, and should our eyes meet

  what howls erupt—like jackals we bawl

  to find ourselves upright.

  (for Patti Macmillan)

  SINNERS WELCOME

  I opened up my shirt to show this man

  the flaming heart he lit in me, and I was scooped up

  like a lamb and carried to the dim warm.

  I who should have been kneeling

  was knelt to by one whose face

  should be emblazoned on every coin and diadem:

  no bare-chested boy, but Ulysses

  with arms thick from the hard-hauled ropes.

  He’d sailed past then clay gods

  and the singing girls who might have made of him

  a swine. That the world could arrive at me

  with him in it, after so much longing—

  impossible. He enters me and joy

  sprouts from us as from a split seed.

  THE FIRST STEP

  From your first step toward me

  I sprang to life, though stood

  stock still. Our gazes locked.

  You ambled up, I couldn’t move.

  My swagger stopped.

  My breezy bravura

  went windswept plain. I stood

  and let you come. For months we talked,

  but the chair you occupied sat

  so far, you were an island oasis

  I couldn’t reach. I barely heard the words

  your lush mouth shaped, just thirsted

  for your breath to come

  easing down my lungs. Each time

  that mouth politely said goodnight

  and turned so I could throw the bolt—

  upon that door, I’d softly bang my head.

  Until you asked (at

  last at last) if you could browse my face,

  as if it were page or sacred tome.

  From then, the crosswalks told us go,

  the maitre d’s right now. From that first step,

  I had to stop the turning world

  to breathe you in,

  and now some nights

  tend toward you whom

  I never was intended for.

  (for Peter Straus)

  A TAPESTRY FIGURE ESCAPES FOR OCCUPANCY IN THE REAL WORLD, WHICH INCLUDES THE DEATH OF HER MOTHER

  You’d like the unseeable shuttle to stop

  tocking off the ticked seconds
<
br />   drawing tight strands of wind around you,

  blue smoke, ether, wants. You’d like

  the tapestry pattern to stop growing

  around your minor figure.

  Such a large green pasture already

  and so much of which

  you’re not kept abreast, must only guess

  from the trees’ chord changes.

  When you escape the tapestry and plop out,

  you’re on a street corner pondering left or right

  when a loud whoosh from behind

  whirls you around to find glowing

  speed lines of some sudden absence.

  Seraphim or incubus? Guardian or assassin?

  Later, you slumber in the night boat

  and wake feeling a neck-tug

  like a noose or a shepherd’s hook,

  but it’s only your own veined hands

  trying to cut off that shriek

  that got choked back

  in childhood, but which now

  boils up at certain instants like bile.

  Say the lover you’re about to leave intones

  a soliloquy on your hair. Say your mother’s ashes

  come in a Ziploc bag, on which you find writ

  in some felt-tip, “Mom

  one-half.” You dip your right hand

  in that gray flour, and its gravity

  in your palm’s scale is nothing. Love

  is so rare, any such handful of ash

  holds the whole world’s weight.

  unless, unless…

  In your plunge through the gibbet door

  the thread that darned you here

  gets tied in a love knot and bitten free.

  MISTER COGITO POSTHUMOUS

  You were born inside barbed wire,

  black lines whose intervals of spiked stars

  were all you could steer by within

  the vectors of that slaughterhouse. Poland otherwise starless.

  The stomp of jackboots down your block

  implanted the two-step iamb.

  Then the sickle swung, a fine-honed moon

  at neck level, and the invaders’ helmets toppled

  along with the listless or uncharged.

  Many names in the gulag logbooks

  were printed in vanishing ink.

  You posed as scarecrow and birds

  alit your arms. You posed as clerk, and no one

  was fooled. You went alone over a white steppe

  of snowy paper. Nightly your pen nib

  traced the old gods’ impotence.

  Here in the alleged first world,

  things cost a lot.

  We suffer the luxury of disbelief,

  endure grim comfort. Our men are fat,

  our women spider thin.

  Our scholars seek to cancel any history

  they find unsavory, or to untether words

  from referents till they sink

  like sad balloons. Please send help.

  You may have crossed the checkpoint

  to the impalpable, but we hear across

  those barricades what radar

  can’t detect, nor censors blacken:

  your words, which pin our shoulders back,

  drumbeats for the war that never passes.

  (for Zbigniew Herbert)

  FOR A DYING TOMCAT WHO’S RELINQUISHED HIS FORMER HISSING AND PREDATORY NATURE

  I remember the long orange carp you once scooped

  from the neighbor’s pond, bounding beyond

  her swung broom, across summer lawns

  to lay the fish on my stoop. Thanks

  for that. I’m not one to whom offerings

  often get made. You let me feel

  how Christ might when I kneel,

  weeping in the dark

  over the usual maladies: love and its lack.

  Only in tears do I speak

  directly to him and with such

  conviction. And only once you grew frail

  did you finally slacken into me,

  dozing against my ribs like a child.

  You gave up the predatory flinch

  that snapped the necks of so many

  birds and slow-moving rodents.

  Now your once powerful jaw

  is malformed by black malignancies.

  It hurts to eat. So you surrender in the way