The Unraveling Strangeness Read online

  THE UNRAVELING STRANGENESS

  BOOKS BY BRUCE WEIGL

  POETRY

  Executioner

  A Sack Full of Old Quarrels

  A Romance

  The Monkey Wars

  Song of Napalm

  What Saves Us

  Sweet Lorain

  Archaeology of the Circle

  After the Others

  PROSE

  The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir

  CRITICISM

  The Giver of Morning: On Dave Smith

  The Imagination As Glory: On the Poetry of James Dickey (edited with T. R. Hummer)

  Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry

  ANTHOLOGY

  Between the Lines: Writing on War and Its Social Consequences (edited with Kevin Bowen)

  TRANSLATIONS

  Poems from Captured Documents (cotranslated from the Vietnamese with Nguyen Thanh)

  Mountain River: Poetry from the Vietnam Wars (cotranslated and coedited with Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung)

  Angel Riding a Beast: Poems for America, by Liliana Ursu (cotranslated from the Romanian with the author)

  THE UNRAVELING STRANGENESS

  POEMS BY BRUCE WEIGL

  Copyright © 2002 by Bruce Weigl

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weigl, Bruce, 1949–

  The unraveling strangeness : poems / by Bruce Weigl.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9516-6

  I. Title

  PS3573.E3835 U57 2002

  811′.54—dc21 2002021468

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  In memory of George Eichi Kondo

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Oh, Atonement

  Immorality of Beauty

  Folktale

  I Waited for the Spirit Soldiers

  I Put a Shotgun to My Mouth

  My Pants

  The Super

  Nixon

  Hinckley

  Baby Crying, 3 A.M.

  Black-and-Tan Dog

  One of the Wives of God

  The Unknowns

  Nothing Else Sutra

  Teaching Hanh the Blues

  Home

  Part Two

  Incident at Eagle’s Peak

  Part Three

  Time After Time

  Elegy for Myself

  The Thing (Part One)

  The Thing (Part Two)

  The Roads in Our Brain

  For A, at Fourteen

  My Autumn Leaves

  The Buddhas of the Bamiyan Valley

  That Towering Feeling

  The New Year Two Thousand

  After Horace (I, V)

  After Horace (II, V)

  Why Plato Left for Megara

  On the Event of My Untimely Death

  Finding Their Bodies at Home

  By the Suburban Swimming Pool

  Meeting Mr. Death

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment, along with my appreciation for their generous support, is due to the editors of the magazines in which these poems first appeared:

  The American Poetry Review: “I Waited for the Spirit Soldiers,” “Home,” “Why Plato Left for Megara,” “The Unknowns,” “Nixon,” “One of the Wives of God,” “The Roads in Our Brain,” “That Towering Feeling,” “The Thing (Part Two),” and “Oh, Atonement.”

  Field: “Home.”

  Gulf Coast: “Meeting Mr. Death,” “Time After Time,” and “Hinckley.”

  Poetry International: “Elegy for Myself” and “The Immorality of Beauty.”

  The Southern Review: “Folktale,” “The Unknowns,” and “After Horace (I, V).”

  I am grateful for the continued support of Morgan Entrekin, Eric Price, and Ellen Levine. I also want to acknowledge the support of Roy Church, Robert Dudash, and Robert Beckstrom, who made it possible for me to come home.

  It is the time of sundering …

  Beneath the green silk counterpane.

  Hart Crane

  PART ONE

  OH, ATONEMENT

  Through lonely motel walls

  I heard that human ah

  of pleasure from a woman

  with a man.

  I don’t remember who I was then,

  only that I was

  alive again somehow,

  so I sat up all that night,

  grateful for whatever

  noisy business they could give me,

  but there was never enough,

  so I entered the stream

  and moved then

  at my ease

  with the current

  and the dark

  shapes of my baggage

  through a winding

  journey of a life

  until some people

  murdered the truth.

  Yet this evening,

  along roads

  I have come home to

  after the many deaths

  and the many betrayals,

  I can watch a giant

  thunderhead

  grow and form itself

  like a living thing

  into one corner

  of our flat Ohio sky

  and I can say,

  This is where I’ll pray.

  IMMORALITY OF BEAUTY

  The river where Faith drowned.

  The marks her desperate fingers

  gouged into the muddy bank.

  Her pale hair

  swept back in the cold current.

  The heavy vines she tangled in

  she hadn’t known were there.

  One sutra teaches

  that beauty should never be possessed,

  only encountered

  so briefly

  you are left with a kind of sorrow

  and then let go

  into nothing.

  FOLKTALE

  Nineteen fifty-seven: you

  remember the fins,

  don’t you,

  on the baby-

  blue-and-white Bel Air?

  Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,

  beyond the

  many-colored rabbits

  penned for the evening

  by the tap-tap

  of the old man’s cane, you can see

  another man

  through the muslin of time

  throw his baby

  high into the air. Women

  scream from the porch, laughing.

  Oh, the night is thick with blossoms

  from the blue plum tree,

  and this man is full of liquor

  and of his own young life,

  so he throws his baby boy

  high into the sky

  as it is taken by evening

  irrevocably away from them

  so that it seemed

  that I would not come down.

  I WAITED FOR THE SPIRIT SOLDIERS

  I waited for the spirit soldiers

  in the mist-torn

 
nineteen sixty-seven

  year of our lord of the nothing,

  while on the other side,

  my friend James Holmes

  held a shotgun

  on a guard in a bank.

  It was summer

  and he trembled, someone said,

  as he stood there,

  stunned in his own plans.

  He was not a dangerous or

  a cruel man, James Holmes,

  but he needed the money

  to feed the many people

  and their children

  of his family

  who had come into his sweet care.

  He could have gotten twenty years,

  but his story saved him:

  the taped-up heartbroken

  shotgun that fell to pieces in his hands

  saved him;

  how he had borrowed it

  from his cousin

  on a desperate

  whim; how

  no shell was chambered

  or loaded there. Someone said

  his whole large body

  shook through the telling.

  I PUT A SHOTGUN TO MY MOUTH

  I put a shotgun to my mouth before:

  a warmer feeling came, an end to nights

  that never seemed to end, but opens a door

  you may not want to step inside. The light’s

  not all we think it is; the black a place

  that’s more inviting every day, where

  you may find yourself alone with grace,

  with how it felt before the deaths. I can’t abide

  by words that simply decorate, or ask

  that beauty only be the things inside of us,

  apart from humanness, removed and pure, a mask

  to cover who we are, as if the heart

  exposed would be too much to bear. We hide

  so many fears inside, so many lives.

  MY PANTS

  I lost some weight

  until one day my pants fell down

  and I felt like a little boy,

  only my heart was old,

  and my bloody soul

  was older yet

  because it had remembered,

  mercifully, what the body could forget,

  and because of the ghostly

  company that it kept.

  What are you going to do?

  You lose some weight

  and your pants won’t stay up,

  and now, and now,

  I find some happiness and pleasure

  just mowing my lawn

  in the twilight.

  I love to make the lines

  straight, and breathe in

  the musty sexual smell

  of new-mowed grass.

  I don’t know

  where the little boy

  whose pants fell down

  lives now, but it must be

  somewhere in my skull,

  rattling around

  like a bullet, or like a scream.

  THE SUPER

  I met the super

  on the battleship-

  gray-painted

  stoop

  of the five-floor walk-up,

  MacDougal Street, back

  when it was neighborhood

  and I’d

  hooked up with a woman

  who had money

  from her folks and a job

  that paid good

  and who told me,

  Come stay with me, honey, that

  nearly forgotten summer

  in the postwar

  black grief and loss, and

  all I had to do was

  sleep up there

  on the fifth floor with her and

  love her some nights.

  We ate dinner together in restaurants.

  But that first morning

  I got there ahead of her

  and met the super

  on the stoop

  on MacDougal Street. I

  was twenty. I

  had already seen

  inside the storm of shit,

  and this woman

  said with a nasal screech

  that she was the super and

  that I couldn’t get in

  nohow, as it wasn’t my place,

  and she called some Puerto Rican

  young men to her aid

  when I barely resisted

  in defense of my

  stupid rights

  and of the rights

  of the not-yet-arrived

  woman who expected me, she

  expected things of me if

  I were to get this walk-up

  room to write in or

  no, I never wrote, I couldn’t

  write when I heard her

  breathe at night so close,

  although there was some

  loveliness there too, I recall.

  The tough guys said

  they’d cut my fucking

  heart out if I didn’t

  leave the super alone and

  get the hell back

  to wherever

  I was supposed to be,

  a question, I believe,

  they had no idea

  how to answer. I know

  that I didn’t. Later,

  when the would-be

  keeper of me

  finally showed up,

  the super relented, and

  later still,

  once summer

  had become something

  we could both bear,

  we got to talking

  one evening on the stoop.

  August nighttime traffic and

  lovers I watched, unworthy,

  and in the middle

  of the super’s

  winter story about

  how the heat went off

  one night in the place

  so she nearly froze and

  so dragged her chair

  to the gas stove’s

  open door, propped

  her tired feet there, and

  fell hard to sleep, she

  lifted her dress

  to show me. Like you

  I could hardly believe the

  scars on her legs from

  where they’d caught fire,

  open sores still oozing

  that human acid, and this

  eight months after the fact.

  Give us back our lives, I say.

  NIXON

  Everyone hated him,

  and that

  brought us all together

  at the loins and

  philosophically.

  One couple among us

  kept a wolf

  penned in their backyard

  that paced fitfully

  every time I saw it,

  and that never looked at you

  in the eyes, although

  that’s not important

  except for the way

  that the maddening penned-up

  wolf is a detail,

  as in a painting,

  of the lives we imagined

  those nights

  we would come together

  to smoke

  and to talk about

  Nixon,

  whom we had seen

  in all of his flesh,

  standing

  on the White House balcony,

  Apollonian

  above the half-million

  citizens who had come

  to stop his killing; he

  even waved to us, or

  maybe it wasn’t him, maybe

  it was a stand-in look-alike or

  one of those

  cutout presidents

  with a mechanical arm

  that waves. Anymore

  the anniversaries of the deaths

  are so many

  that there is little time

  for anything else.

  HINCKLEY

  People wait for vultures,

/>   who arrive

  all spring morning long,

  singularly

  and then in pairs

  and then in small groups

  like black V’s against the white sky,

  or like lilies

  opening in that

  pond I can’t bloody remember,

  as if our lives

  had some kind of wings.

  Take this hand, stranger,

  outstretched to you;

  take these lilies;

  take this vulture’s air.

  BABY CRYING, 3 A.M.

  I’ve heard that hungry cry before. I know

  it’s hard to take sometimes, an aching, deep

  abiding need to fill that human hole,

  our birth and strange inheritance, the leap

  into a space expanding as we breathe

  it in. The mother’s up. I see her through

  the lamp-lit window’s glare, her silhouette received

  by other people’s rooms and arms, those ghosts who fool

  themselves and won’t let go. The baby cries

  until the humid black-lit street is changed.

  We’ll never be the same again. Our eyes

  won’t close as easily, our nights arranged

  around the hungry cry that comes in waves.

  BLACK-AND-TAN DOG

  I hit a black-and-tan dog

  with my car,

  at night on a windy road

  at 50 mph.

  Thump, thump

  was all that it said, sitting

  strangely in the middle of my lane

  like a suicide,

  and it saw my eyes

  in a moment

  that I didn’t want to

  have with him,

  so the next morning I drove back

  to find who owned the dog,

  and to say my grief

  under gray autumn clouds

  that hung so low

  they seemed to want me. We

  shift around from thing to thing

  inside our minds. The geese

  have come to rest

  all over these cornfields.

  There are so many,

  like a blanket, but

  no one home at the farmhouse,

  where there’s a bloodstain

  in the road near the driveway

  where the dog must have landed,

  or where they had dragged it

  earlier in the morning, and

  stuck in the weedy ditch nearby

  a homemade wreath of wildflowers