The Unraveling Strangeness Page 2

  bound with a wire.

  No one else in the car had seen the dog.

  I was driving too fast.

  It was sitting in the middle of the road.

  There was no chance for me to stop.

  I’ve played it over in my mind more than once, and

  there was no chance for me to stop.

  ONE OF THE WIVES OF GOD

  I know what distant sirens mean;

  already they have

  come and passed me for another.

  I know dismantlement.

  Up until the moment they come for you,

  it is always for another.

  Sister Mary Catherine

  taught me that in catechism

  Father held on Saturdays

  for kids who couldn’t pay

  for Catholic school,

  so learned the rites

  of beautiful suffering

  from a missal,

  and from Sister, sweet,

  who was my

  light of spirit and my Holy Ghost

  and who,

  in my unholy imaginings,

  lifted me

  above the ordinary

  into condemnation.

  In the pew I sat upright,

  but didn’t hear the Father’s

  words except their drone

  beyond the indeterminate

  boundaries of my stupor

  for Sister Mary, not yet twenty,

  her eyes

  the still blue pond of all of my longing;

  the way she

  smiled down on me

  a warmth that must have been the soul.

  So I found ways to see her when I could,

  pretending there was something

  that I hadn’t understood, and once

  in my swoon for her body

  that I could somehow feel,

  even through the habit’s shroud,

  I wandered, drowsy,

  into the house

  where the wives of Jesus slept

  and lived their secret lives,

  and I saw her,

  lit by a small lamp,

  through a crack

  in the wooden door.

  THE UNKNOWNS

  If only

  they had told us

  that it was all a metaphor,

  I might have learned;

  I might not have

  troubled so long tonight

  over equations

  my daughter

  had brought home from school; her mother

  gone somewhere, and me

  her only chance at the quantities.

  When I ask her

  if she thinks there are numbers

  to measure loss,

  or to measure grief,

  she wonders out loud

  what we would do with those sums,

  once we had untangled them

  from their drowsy abstractions.

  Mr. Brown

  was my teacher

  of the sums in the sixth grade

  and he saw the beautiful

  figures in everything,

  so he

  grieved over my unlearning,

  cudgeled me daffy

  with his slide rule,

  and took on as his fate

  my crummy well-being.

  I wanted to please him

  so I cheated more than once,

  although that was neither the new

  nor the old math,

  only a thing I had imagined

  I invented.

  I cheated, and I copied,

  and I asked some girls

  to do my work

  so I could watch the grief

  leave the face of Mr. Brown

  when I showed him my solutions

  that were mine only in abstraction,

  only because I possessed them.

  NOTHING ELSE SUTRA

  We were sleeping among the topiary

  in a foreign land

  I had come to love

  like my own mind.

  We were street-smart and jiving

  to the newest beats

  up Broadway in Queens

  where they finally made the sleeping beast

  arise that was the people’s voice.

  We were walking on water

  in the harbor

  where the ex-burning river

  emptied itself,

  making a crackling,

  lonely sound

  beyond the ore boats

  drifting past us,

  their tiny men on deck

  waving or warning us away,

  nothing else.

  TEACHING HANH THE BLUES

  Some things come

  simply for the sake of

  goodness. A little

  C, F, and G

  with the left hand

  and a C-minor

  scale with the right

  may take you

  back to the ages

  whose blood we are. Her

  fingers are strong and she’s

  eager to learn

  how to play

  in a way

  she already

  understands means

  outside of herself. My

  river,

  I called her

  first on the streets of Hanoi

  when the city’s

  lights had gone out

  and I’d

  lost our way back home

  until she pulled me

  shyly by my hand

  to our dark room.

  This is what I think about

  to play it like I feel,

  I tell her.

  HOME

  I didn’t know I was grateful

  for such late-autumn

  bent-up cornfields

  yellow in the after-harvest

  sun before the

  cold plow turns it all over

  into never.

  I didn’t know

  I would enter this music

  that translates the world

  back into dirt fields

  that have always called to me

  as if I were a thing

  come from the dirt,

  like a tuber,

  or like a needful boy. End

  lonely days, I believe. End the exiled

  and unraveling strangeness.

  PART TWO

  INCIDENT AT EAGLE’S PEAK

  All morning long in the rain,

  I drove through the streets of my boyhood

  past the falling-down houses,

  with my friend from my boyhood

  who is a man now, like me, or

  who lives inside of a man’s body.

  And after the rain stopped

  we parked the car

  at the edge of a woods

  that had been our

  secret place,

  but where now

  the county had constructed

  an asphalt trail,

  wound like a scar

  through what had been our perfect world,

  undisturbed by adults,

  ordered peacefully by a code

  that children had made up

  through all the years of children.

  We walked down the asphalt trail

  no longer sure of our way

  until it curved toward the river

  and crossed an old path

  still visible in the tangle of years,

  and without speaking

  we climbed under the fence

  and followed the path to the river,

  that’s called the Black River,

  where we swam without our clothes

  in the long summers of our spirit bodies,

  and not out of nowhere exactly,

  but more out of the river,

  I heard my friend’s voice

  rise up above the wind

  and say that his life had come to nothing.

  His sad
ness filled the air around us.

  It rose up and moved the branches.

  It floated along the river like a mist,

  so I wanted to find a way

  to tell him that he was wrong.

  I wanted to make a story for him

  that could be alive in the place

  he had come to imagine was nothing,

  but there was no use for words there,

  and when he had finished

  telling his long sadness,

  he breathed deeply,

  and he shook his head

  no to the river,

  or to the wind in the trees

  that makes a sound like all of memory,

  or to the life he felt strangled by.

  In the distance that our eyes found together,

  just at a bend in the river,

  two great blue herons

  lifted and then settled again,

  like silk scarves

  among the rocks in fast water.

  I wanted to believe that the beauty

  meant something to my friend

  in a way that could

  ease the sharp hurt of his knowing.

  I wanted to believe

  that he had not wasted his life,

  that there was something

  just in the living of it,

  hard and with some

  simple human grace

  that had to make it matter,

  but I didn’t know

  if the moment meant anything at all,

  and I had to stand very still

  to try to gain my balance,

  to find the rope of words that,

  real or not,

  binds us to the world

  and blesses us

  with that sense of being

  we may imagine is a life.

  And then we were walking away,

  in the rain that had started again.

  We could still hear the water

  rush over rocks

  that had been big enough once

  to lay our bodies out across

  those years ago in the sun,

  and the sound the water made for us

  as we turned off the path for home

  was like a promise

  I remembered from before.

  You can tear the life out of a man

  with only a few wrong words.

  You can break a man’s life down

  as if it were nothing,

  just by turning away.

  PART THREE

  TIME AFTER TIME

  You may cradle my honey whimper

  in your fresh bite.

  You may shoo away the dogs

  and hush the howling

  in your brain,

  but you may not forget

  the boys we had been,

  and how we

  promised ourselves

  to each other

  in the timeless

  green place by the river

  that day the one boy,

  who was you as the girl,

  was called through a portal

  to vistas troubled

  ungreen by some voices

  of the old kind,

  and how the me,

  who was the other boy,

  turned away and then

  turned back to find you,

  my brother lover,

  gone behind the time

  after time gauzy veil

  don’t tell me will lift;

  don’t throw me a spar

  or bring me the fresh cut

  flowers of the dead.

  ELEGY FOR MYSELF

  When they said,

  You with the stars in your eyes,

  I didn’t know they were talking to me.

  I thought it was just

  voices I was hearing

  in the slag heaps and

  down the ethnic alleys

  of stolen plums and black cherries

  of late summer.

  I thought it was something

  wrong in my head

  when someone died back then,

  waiting for the flowers to blossom.

  THE THING

  (Part One)

  I’ve stayed up nights

  waiting for that

  thing I could hear

  pacing in the thicket

  of cruel thorns

  until the black sky

  tells it that it’s time

  to come and get me.

  Few are as faithful as I am

  in their waiting.

  Sometimes,

  I even imagine

  I can see the thing

  standing in the dim

  streetlight wash

  in the shape of one of the lost,

  one of the unloved,

  forced to wander the lonely dark.

  I have waited up

  all night so many times for him

  that I have blurred the boundaries

  of good sense,

  and still the thing never comes;

  it always never comes.

  THE THING

  (Part Two)

  I was

  waxing nostalgic, remembering

  the days of Freud,

  when we still had

  hope that we could drive the bad cells

  out with clever talk and good intentions,

  all for a c-note an hour. We believed

  we could fix a bad thing

  inside of a man those days;

  we hadn’t yet

  run out of others to blame

  for the mad blood we left in our wake

  like a twisted offering

  through the thousand years,

  the pious self in us

  curled up in fear

  away from the unforgiving.

  I was dozing and dreaming on the

  rented veranda’s rented

  sofa in the cross-fire troubled sun.

  THE ROADS IN OUR BRAIN

  I believe that most folks

  hide inside of a private place

  where it feels like

  no one can see you,

  where you can shape

  a small center of a thing

  around yourself,

  and though it isn’t the real life,

  we have rivers here

  that run hard and cold in the spring

  over limestone rocks

  old as God.

  I believe

  that most folks

  can at least imagine how it feels

  to practice goodness,

  if only inside of that

  center that we shape around us

  and imagine it’s a thing

  others can see.

  You could

  hold yourself up

  against the starry sky there

  and not feel a thing.

  FOR A, AT FOURTEEN

  You think your life is hard right now; so cold

  the world seems, without much understanding.

  You hurt enough to let the hard words go.

  I know enough to let them ride. The thing

  you have inside of you I had inside

  me too. It’s like you’re pulled by every heart,

  by every weary, needful stranger’s eyes.

  There isn’t time enough for me. The dark

  won’t let me hold you, as I know I could.

  We need at last a life without the grief

  we’ve brought into the house. A life that would

  allow us both our tenderness, our pain released,

  the manliness for once at rest; at rest

  those spirits lost, those spirits now are blessed.

  MY AUTUMN LEAVES

  I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.

  I watch the woods for deer who never come.

  I know the hes and shes in autumn

  rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen

  apples’ scent. I drive my car
this way to work

  so I may let the crows in corn believe

  it’s me their caws are meant to warn,

  and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves

  they know me too. They know the boy

  who lives inside me still won’t go away.

  The deer are ghosts who slip between the light

  through trees, so you may only hear the snap

  of branches in the thicket beyond hope.

  I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.

  THE BUDDHAS OF THE BAMIYAN VALLEY

  I do not grieve the Buddhas

  blown to pieces in Bamiyan.

  It does not matter

  that fifteen hundred years before,

  people lived in caves

  and carved the Buddhas

  into the face

  of the unimaginable mountain

  with such exquisite care

  it hurt to see.

  I do not grieve for the Buddhas

  blown to smithereens, pieces

  smaller than your hand.

  Someone thought that it would matter,

  but if you blow the Buddha

  into tiny pieces,

  you blow nothing into pieces.

  This is what they did not understand.

  THAT TOWERING FEELING

  I know a man

  who believes he deserves to be loved

  in this

  loveless little village of a world.

  Tonight, snow is general

  all across this

  new spring evening

  as he tells me

  on the phone

  of this theory.

  He is alone again

  among his

  money and his things.

  Even those who

  ruined him as a child

  with their big hands and their

  unspeakable preschool games

  have crossed over.

  We believed once

  that the places

  they had torn inside him,

  like bat-wing

  razor marks against the sky,

  would grow back in the light.

  THE NEW YEAR TWO THOUSAND

  O holy snow,

  the dogs have pissed upon you;

  you are the snow

  we have waited for so long.

  Fast may the ice

  stay far beyond our doorway,

  light where we leave

  and where we come.

  God bless these dogs

  who trot across our borders,

  wild in the moon

  under windows where we sleep.