(choose your own title)
for Myra and Sam Grossman, Susan and Wayne, Bob and Margie, Katie, Hannajane and Hudson, Suzanne, Robert Black, Malcolm Morley, Rosa and John, Yolanda, Dave Fitzgerald, Linda Hall, Linda Durkee, Marietta and David, June, Sylvia P., David H., Marion W., Carolyn and Patricia Corbett, Geraldine and Mario, Bobbi, Tom, Carol Betz, Sherry, Alice Marie and Ann, Richard Bull, Kryste, Robin, Sandy, Joan, B. Amore, Bill Ramage, Beth Thompson, Annie and Cruspi, Virgili and Guida Barbarà , Om and Marta, Nicolas R., Monte Jaffe, Dr. Fincher, Miss Hood, Murungi, Llorraine Neithardt, and Kryste A. living and dead, a constellation of bright souls—family, teachers, and friends whom I love and have loved, in this, my little long life.
Statement Poetry Kit The Dinner Party Unlike You Don Martindale Life in the Car Cliffs of Moher Last Days: N. Wild Turkeys Night Passage Conversation in a Strange Land 5&¾ Night Swimming Memento Mori Valentine Jessye Norman Reading Langston Hughes Biography Haying After Shock Weren’t We List of Works
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(inspired by La Poesía of Pablo Neruda, see note on page 114) This child was guided on her journey by a constellation of benevolent and terrifying beings. At seven, I scribbled monsters on my bedroom wall. By night, the moon found my jagged pencil lines: a horrid face, a leering grin shimmering in moonlight. My monster drawings sprang to life and scared me mightily, as if I hadn’t been the author of this mischief. Little green men, phosphorescent like the numbers on an old watch, cavorted in my backyard. ne became my friend. We met at my window, had whispered conversations until, suddenly terrified, I ran to my parents’ bed. My parents did not welcome my night visits, told me to be brave. Told me I was imagining things. There was nothing there. An old woman with a face like a walnut shell, She, too, came to me in the darkness. I named her Hillilah. She moved slowly across a meadow. Almost floating.
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As she drew closer I played dead. I did not know she had come with robes flapping like the wings of a blackbird to enfold and protect me. Years later, this truth was revealed. Her name means God in the dark. At eight, in the aftermath of World War II, I drew pictures while the teacher taught God knows what. I drew hundreds of pictures telling stories in my head. Some were erotic—I thought you had intercourse back to back, buttocks to buttocks. I drew these things. As a child artist I made a fortress against the night, postponed night, with graphite and colored wax. My people, the ones you see here, arrived unbidden I don’t know from where. They formed under my hands. They asked for eyes and hair and teeth. I laid them in beds, wrapped them in sheets like the mummified rulers of ancient Egypt. Draped them like Renaissance deities and the heroes of Classical Greece. I made couples, a baby, the goddess Flora. I took them as they came.
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I thought about my little long life, whom I have known, what I have learned. Mixed mediums.
S
haped by the child who still holds back the night with pictures that evoke a drama unfolding in the bedroom. Night is intimate. Night is full of secrets. Bed is sacrosanct. Bed is a place for betrayals and for the sealing of covenants. Bed is the holiest altar, the most profane rack. Bed is a stage set for a play improvised by fools. Yes, there is that gargoyle: he abandoned his post atop a building in Paris and took up residence in a nearby flat. He steals oranges, he gazes about. He rests after centuries. This child plays with mud and cloth and pigments. Flips the bed vertical to make a painting. Mixes mediums and categories. And catechisms. Builds a fortress, a walled garden to welcome the night and to protect and enfold a fragile world of beings ridiculously unreal and curiously alive. Shimmering like graphite drawings on a child’s wall, caught in moonlight. Now I lay me down to sleep.
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POETRY KIT A human being Walks into this conversation An angel can’t handle. You talking to an elephant. An animal!
Ask yourself the truth: May a failure to communicate You’ve gotten in Say hello to another fine mess? It means You got the wrong week.
Call it a mission from God.
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the man who built my house has become a friend it is not unusual for us to have dinner we go to fancy places at times or just down to the local joint
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we talk about houses and we gossip about the few people we know in common he is a heavy man whose weakness seems to be desserts he likes to start a meal with Glenlivet Scotch then proceed to the wine flushing slightly but otherwise maintaining an evenness and giving the impression of having many things under control one day he asked me to dinner at his house he lives there with a young woman and her son how this arrangement came to be I do not know but they live as a family even though there are no blood relations among them
I drove to his house across the road in a blinding rainstorm eager for the promised lamb in a curry sauce and the warm pie
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the house is his masterpiece new and rustic, red and green wrapped in verandas with big, flat stones underfoot I stood waiting at the door soon the man, the mother, the son, the dog crowded the doorway with smiles hello’s and come on in four of us at a table set with candles and linen close by the back door, left open bugs come and go the rain has stopped, and now a million beads of water lie scattered about like glistening lenses on trees and grass reflecting the sunset over and over and I spotted a pond out back that was laid on the ground like a jade amulet four we were, three live in this house the mother, with her long Native-American hair her adopted son and the man—not husband, nor lover, nor father, nor grandfather and I, the neighbor, rattling a Scotch as present as ever I am anywhere
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the man has made dinner after a long day of work lamb curry with yellow rice and we drink red wine, I eat the flavors and colors with a big appetite I eat everything tapping my lips occasionally with a cloth napkin the boy sits with his dinosaur books at the table poking at a child’s meal of franks and beans he is, they say, slow at reading but he loves dinosaurs, beaming as he peruses pages filled with Tyrannosauruses and other terrible lizards with beady eyes, horns, and scales stroking the paper as if to caress to life the ancient reptiles the mother tells us about her fight with the school to have the boy kept back so he would finally learn to read unlike herself
the boy announces in his eleven-year-old voice a shade rough that he hates school but wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up the word flies at me from across the table like a paper airplane and I wonder if space aliens have come in the night and implanted this thought into his brain I stare hard into his bright foolish face searching for the soul of the future paleontologist
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the mother tells me she comes from the worst family in town all drunks and ne’er-do-wells she has to spend her life living it down, ashamed to speak her name I’m not one of them, is her phrase the man watches, serving from the kitchen more a mother than a father I tell the boy I hope he grows up to be a paleontologist such an heroic dream for one born with cancer in his chest and taken from his real mother who in her crack stupor couldn’t see that her baby was very ill these things were told to me the mother’s mother is W. (I know W.—a cheery woman with a voice so loud in another incarnation she’d be onstage at the Metropolitan Opera) W.’s ex-husband wants to live with her again in her pretty new house bought by her daughter with the wages of very hard work over many years the daughter is infuriated she tells me about this ex-husband a man of dark deeds and shabby character I picture them all in that house on the day he comes back the shouts, the fighting and now he’s walking stiff-legged down the road charging towards his pick-up truck comic book sweat beads flying off his hair leaving
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you must clear the table if you want dessert the man tells the boy in a half-serious voice and the young body in plaid shirt and corduroys jumps up and swipes the china thoughts of pie glowing on his face in the candlelight it comes now, with ice cream warm and cold together I ask the man half-jokingly if he made the pie it tastes homemade he says something cryptic, which could mean the lady up the road made it or the supermarket the boy is in his glory, happy with his reward I pray over my dish silently for the paleontologist
the man remembers aloud how he had to carry his mother up to bed as a six-year-old in Yankee country in a great house she was under the influence most of the time and humiliated him in the drug store with her slurred ranting he was appointed man of the house early on by a seldom-home father proponent of the Puritan work ethic now at sixty-five the man knows only work he says this with dispassion like you’d say that car is a Ford the man tells the boy it is time for bed more with a look than words the boy leaves to brush his teeth his tender shoulders angling around the wall and down the corridor I watch him disappear
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darkness has filled the open doorway the candles burn, we sit our skin glowing amber like a painting by Georges de La Tour a composition with a table and three figures we go on about other days how the man ended his long, painful marriage with the words I’m not happy how he felt during the marriage, after the divorce how life changed for the man when he got cancer I put in about my dad who at ninety-two says, in his growly voice that the golden years are anything but golden dad’s line gets a laugh a persistent melancholy hangs about no matter the fire-lit room the colorful walls and the oil paintings the chairs of leather and brocade the fire that heats the cookstove
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no matter the curry of lamb the jade pond the cherry pie a la mode and all the dinosaurs that ever were no matter God’s radiant heaven and earth throbbing softly just outside the open door
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