The Irresistible In-Between

T he Irresistible In-Between poems

David Sloan

deerbrook editions

publ i s h ed by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland ME 04021 207.829.5038 www.deerbrookeditions.com f i r st edit ion © 2013 by David Sloan all rights reserved Page 89 constitutes an extension of this copyright page I S BN: 978-0-9828100-7-1 Book design by Jeffrey Haste Cover: photo by Chris Darling

Table of Contents I Snakebites and Bricks 11 Scharansky’s Mantra 12 Hooks 14 Stunned 16 Attic Fan 17 The Way He Plays 19 Morning After Pancakes 20 Hardscrabble 22 Takedown 24 Proving Ground 25 On the Margins 27 Playing Tennis in the Rain 28 Our Town—Act III 29 April 5, 1968 31 Snake Legs 33 II Burning Love Splitting Wood Missing You Testing, Testing The Spaces Between A Marriage Living Too Long Dying Man in Barn Stained Glass The Modesty of Windows Scuffle at Lin Fa’s Off Damrak Square Dots The Fire Starter Resisting Gravity My Daughter’s Boyfriend

37 39 40 42 43 45 46 47 48 50 51 53 55 56 57

III Unfixable 61 Heartsick 62 Hamlet Dies Again 63 To the Director Who Butchered T he Tempest 65 3

Watch Out for Pedestrians 67 Ten Easy Steps 69 Barn Fall 71 Skipping into the Dark 72 Esopus River Ride 73 Maquoit Bay Blues 75 Lines in Algonquin 76 Sea Change 78 Hostage 80 Bad Math 82 The Last Spring Storm 83 Philemon and Baucis 84 Leaving 86 Acknowledgements 89

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for my family

T he Irresistible In-Between

Part I

Snakebites and Bricks Some words just sound hard.

Fist, stake, brick. Not pillow.

You’d never use a puff of air and lolling tongue to describe a brick. Now snakebite hisses its intent, the sudden negation of an upthrust tongue, fanged cave of opening jaws before the sharp break, curtain crash, sinking into bare flesh, the cry between sharpnesses, surprise of so little bloodspill from two tiny dots, then the e, silent witness, beginning of every end.

Or heartbreak—a small sigh cut short by the cruel art that turns ardor cold, the ache that follows, a lock with a lost key, an almost brick you must always lug around where your heart was.

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Scharansky’s Mantra My stick-figure father says It’s time. I’m tired. End it.

I want to snuff out the words, but once they’re loose, I cannot keep them from burrowing.

They lay a million eggs, hatch, gnaw at the ropes that keep me moored.

I think about Natan in the gulag, hearing footsteps echoing down the corridor, always clicking in unison, but hurried, as if they were the ones being pursued.

They stopped in front of his cell.

This time they didn’t hit him.

The shorter man screamed in his face, You will be shot, left him to picture how.

He knew he had to defuse the words.

Instead of trying to shut them out, he embraced each sound.

I hear him hissing You will be shot you will be shot you will be shot to himself a thousand times a day.

He intoned it like a prayer to the dripping stones, to every untouched tray slid through the food trap.

It rode on the rhythm of his breathing, became his birdsong, graffiti on the walls of his dreams.

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It worked: the words wore out, remained but were reduced to rubble, their meanings cauterized, charred lumps in ashes.

Is this my father’s strategy?

I’m tired. End it. End it.

But it never ends, all the refrains ending with End it are rivets driven into my chest, and I’m the one strapped to a chair.

I will tell them anything they want to hear, to please turn off the light, let me sleep, but I keep gagging on moths in my mouth, and the life that the voice in the room is pleading for is not my father’s at all.

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Hooks He eases downstairs, careful not to rouse my brothers, touches my shoulder to shake the darkness out of the room, but I’m awake already. I’ve slept in my new fishing shirt and sneakers.

We head down the coast between blacknesses, cocooned in dad’s Chevy, shadowed hills to our left, shore line the inky edge of the universe save for a passing trawler’s scudding light. We board El Capitan at sunup. It chugs out of the harbor.

Other fathers and sons prepare their lines.

I run to the bow for the salt spray and vee churned by the hull.

Later, he laughs when I drop the squirming anchovy. He cups his hand over mine, shows me how to hook the bait through the nose.

Then we wait. When it’s not too rough I like the quiet, the jumbled reek of fish and diesel fumes, gulls trailing the wake for chum.

Standing next to him, man-to-man, our lines like twin puppet strings, everything is still, as if we’re in a painting of ourselves, until my rod tip jerks down, almost jumps out of my hands. The line whirs out. Two rods slam down on either side of us. Everyone is shouting.

He tightens the drag, tucks the rod butt against my hip. I feel as if I’m trying to pull up the ocean. Let it run, he says, but I have no choice.

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He clicks the spool, wants me to arch the rod up, but my arms ache, and the line begins to veer toward the bow.

The man straining on my left curses me as lines snarl. My fish criscrosses sternward, dragging me with it. More lines tangle. Then dad is screaming. He grabs my rod, but it snaps up.

The line goes limp.

On the way home, we stop at Heyward’s for cherry phosphates. Model planes dangle from the ceiling on nearly invisible lines. He asks me if I had a good time, if I would like to go again. I picture my fish, broken line fluttering behind him, the hook in his mouth, the hook in mine, and I lie.

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Stunned At ten, nothing beat holding my breath to bursting. In bed with eyes shut, ears plugged, I’d vanish, sink like a diver into bottomless inky waters, and listen below the silence— long pause of a sea god’s breathing— for that surging thrum, shh-dum shh-dum shh-dum shh-dum those fingers drumming on a hidden hull, steady as a string of bubbles. Later I loped along mountain roads loose-limbed, aqua-lunged, Olympian.

At times, when breath and blood converged and beat in perfect two/four time, I floated out of my shoes, sh-dum, sh-dum, made the stretched skin of the sky my ocean.

Now I can’t hold a long note without gasping.

My tangled heart flops like a fish reeled out of the sea, stunned into stillness between thrashings, bewildered by its sudden weight and a hard bottom.

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Attic Fan Three young men, shirtless in the attic. Two snap chalk lines, one cuts boards to size.

Their hands are almost musical: Crescendo, de-crescendo of the skill saw, compressed, rhythmic retort of the nail gun, contrapuntal hammering, trombone sliding of their banter.

They are aware of their beauty.

Sawdust sticks to their glistening; their bodies move like water rippling over stones. They pose and push one another. One grabs a water bottle, takes a long swig, sprays the others.

They kick blocks of waste wood towards his nimble feet. I do what I can to be near the commotion, the danger, I bring them more water, but I’m in the way, avoid one plank headed for a corner cut, trip over a tangle of cords, nearly upset the floor fan. I pretend it was intentional. The father with mute hands, I grab the fan’s throat, dip low as if we are dancing a tango. At least they laugh, appreciate the angle I can still make, crooked bowing before all that straightness, 17

the casual exactitude of lines measured out like music.

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T he Way He Plays Even as I chide him for speeding, I can’t help envying my son: all his flares and taperings, the music his brass body swings, fluted ankles and saxophone thighs, bass strings buzzing just under the skin, that bronze liquidity, the tension of a coiled discus thrower who lives for the being seen, the spin, the fling.

He leans back after he eats, oozing well-being and obliviousness, strums his belly, leaves the dishes undone.

I’d love that pocket-rocket thrust— The lift-off, the heat, little ohs in the dark he coaxes out of his honey’s cornet, and the way he courts future regret so unflinchingly, a tap dancer clacking over stones mid-stream, the faith that no matter how extreme the tempo, how careless his fingers, they will always land on the right keys, his belief in sweat, in outracing dreams of men in dark suits, the music muted, of tires still spinning slowly in a ravine.

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Morning-after Pancakes Humming some Brazilian samba number, I mix the batter.

As you bend for the placemats your fleece brushes my pajamas, contact unnoticed by the children, yawning at the counter and sized like organ pipes.

While they squabble over the comics, you slice strawberries, pop one in my mouth, your fingertip lingering between my lips.

Ben tries to pry the paper out of Zach’s hand, who retaliates with his teeth.

You break up the fray, but below the counter your other hand tugs at the elastic around my waist.

I take orders for the creatures my children want poured into pancakes. Josh likes elephants; Cait, rabbits; Ben favors jaguars; Zach, sharks. They don’t mind the blobs that end up on their plates.

When I ask you what you want, you say, Something with horns.

You empty the last of the syrup into the green-glazed pitcher; my elbow slides across your 20

left breast. This is the sly game we dare to play, when the animal shapes we make at night still stalk each other in daylight.

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Hardscrabble That last game they ever played —he’d tell you right off that he won— began so promisingly. He’d bought her a rose, thorns still thoughtfully intact.

Supper was succulent. She made his favorite: blackened swordfish, in a tangy tomato sauce, with asparagus spears, Lancers’ rosé, and ended with Heath Bar Crunch, in a cone, of course, not a dish.

He whisked the table clean, whistled a few bars of Ravel, while she set up the board and flipped over the letters. Through the chit-chat He admired her blouse’s sheen.

He chose his seven wooden squares cagily, as if his fingers could feel the letters’ contours. She, more capricious, picked a bouquet, two from each corner, unaware, until he told her pointedly, that she had taken not seven, but eight.

Smarting, nicked, but smiling still, she discarded one, nibbled on a mint and opened the board with tea.

“Six,” she calculated, pleased to be almost in double figures. “Heady start,” he said, and grimaced before his letters.

He shuffled them twice, then, with a whoop, turned tea into striptease.

So it went. She followed with gas, 22

and he with undulate. Her fan set up his fallacy.

After five rounds she sighed, picked up Parade instead of new letters and thumbed idly through it, yawning, “I pass.”

“No, you fail,” he said, and all in a lather, face flushed and eyes fevered, he flung down unzipped.

“Two hundred and ten to eighteen.

Your turn. Or would you rather play. . .something else?” Suddenly flushed herself, she replied, “Something else?

Why, yes.” Deliberately she laid the magazine down and gently shook her hair.

Then, careful so as not to muss her chemise, she grasped the rim of the oak table from below and yanked upward as she sprang to her feet.

Surprised by the ease of the move, she watched it topple, pinning him beneath its weight—hands, legs and loins— as the back of his head bounced twice on the floor. The board flipped over onto his chest; an F settled on his throat.

The rest scattered like wishing well coins.

She picked up the rose, still full of thorns, and knelt by his motionless side.

As if in prayer, she gently put the stem sideways in his mouth, whispered, “You win,” and then pulled.

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Takedown I want to be left alone, to read, to wage war only against the garden weeds, fade into late middle-age without a fuss, but my nearly-grown son wants to wrestle, claims this mild June morning—French toast browning on the griddle—to fulfill some ancient covenant going back five thousand years, when two figures—god-man and animal-man— locked arms, heedless of the midday heat, raucous crowd, unnerved dogs, and felt each other’s strength swell like a sea-surge, break without being broken, until their struggle turned dance, and they collapsed laughing, intoxicated with recognition.

We both know this match cannot end in a draw. Our former selves lay hold of us in the ferocity of sons: same taunting tone, defiant strut, a not-so-playful push.

When my father shoved back, he showed me how to accept the moment of eclipse by not succumbing easily, nor clinging to the crown through supplication. Then I was the reckless aggressor, my father the wary feinter, waiting for my charge: leg shoot, upthrust, takedown.

Now my son darts beneath my defenses, crafty as a disguised god, and suddenly I am the one lying pinned, squirming, startled by the salt taste of surrender, too breathless to comfort the victor, whose eyes begin to brim with that uneasy mingling—elation, dread.

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Proving Ground One son trots in with a walk-off home run smirk, spoils of the latest battle in their daily wiffle ball war.

The younger one looks away morosely, groping for a word to reverse this stinging moment, smacks down his cap and stomps off, hurling You’re the Loser at his brother’s left temple, that tender spot where pitchers take aim out of equal parts malice and dread.

The gloating son cannot let it go. Winning is never enough. Double Lame Loser! he flings back, the ricochet landing just as the door to the bedroom slams shut.

They know of no malediction worse, the combative affliction inherited from a father who, rather than cry Uncle, once passed out from a brother’s chokehold.

My wife wants me to play peacemaker, undo the damage. She cannot know how lamed I am, every summer of my youth a proving ground, where the hike up from the dock escalated into a foolhardy dash across the highway. Ambushes erupted like geysers; one pegged pine cone triggered a free-for-all, no-head-hunting rules ditched when someone got nailed in the face.

We raced past the Sacketts’ chained

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and snapping Doberman, back to the cabin to claim the leather chair, to breathe deeply the intoxicating draught of firstness.

Even now, in the makeup game, last of the day’s backyard tripleheader, I squint towards the plate in the gathering twilight, one small figure coiled in a Manny crouch, waggling his plastic bat, the other spitting invisible tobacco juice in the on-deck circle and heckling the impassive pitcher. I pivot into my Luis Tiant windup, the sellout crowd suddenly hushed, then let fly a slider that hangs in the air between the mound and the batter’s box, two patches worn bare in the grass, like wounds I never want to lose.

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On the Margins It starts when honey-hipped women, bangled and sashaying down a gardenia lane for all the gawkers, no longer smolder back. Spangled air on summer nights at the lake fails to disquiet your dreams; effervescent chatter around the table bypasses you. You rage, but being incensed doesn’t make you matter, or stop you from losing ground; one nudge leads to another. Soon you’re on the margins of a thronged beach, watching watchers awed by beauties tracing tan lines. This dream ends without you: sleek, sand-spattered gods launch themselves in ecstatic dives, care for nothing more than to keep a ball in the air.

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Playing Tennis in the Rain

Thirty years and a weathered net stand between them, but something else hangs

in the air, their rally

punctuated by the shuffle squeak of their shoes, and the thwup of the ball that speaks

for the father lacking farewell

words to say to his college-bound son.

The tape is fraying, and a weed-choked crack jags across

the court like a fault line.

On any other day when drops first fall from a whale-gray sky, they would stop,

to save the balls

and protect themselves. The son may be eighteen and agile, but once he broke his wrist

just by falling out of a hammock.

Even as the drizzle on the campus court turns to a downpour, they decide to play on. The surface

slickens, they mince their steps.

Suddenly, the ball is a water wheel, spirals spray with every bounce, then accelerates in a blur

past their baffled rackets.

The rain drips from their hat brims, they wipe their eyes, and when the son’s shot knocks the racket

clean out of his father’s hands

like a young gunslinger’s merciful bullet, he twirls his racket, blows imaginary smoke

from the handle, and they break up,

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water shaking from their sides.

Our Town—Act III It’s sprinkling at the cemetery on the hill as they gather in a dark knot. The mourners stand in muddied shoes, their black umbrellas shield the dead girl from Grovers Corners hovering among them. Suddenly she appears all in white, glides stage-right alone, her eyes soft, distant, unblinking, her feet bare.

Our only consolation? She’s beyond pain, takes her place among the spirits who stare at stars we can’t see. She does feel a strange sense of being both there and here, still breathing the fumes of her life. The rain has stopped. She knows she can go back, refill her heart, but all the voices insist it’s a bad idea. You’ll know—but can’t say—how it all turns out. Of course she doesn’t listen. Instead, she returns; she’s twelve, tries to be carefree, sits for breakfast, but it’s too much. She pleads with her mother to stop bustling, to really see her, as if every moment could be a miracle.

But the dead don’t speak our language, or we don’t listen if they do. Her death’s too full of life. She starts to leave, turns back to say goodbye—to coffee and clocks ticking, wool hats and sunflowers, ironed dresses, waking and sleeping—and every time we watch this part we lose our grip, feel a familiar ache

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just here. In silence we drive home, guard against this moment ending. On our terrace, stars obscured, we look at each other hard.

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April 5, 1968 Drove twelve hours through cherry blossom clouds to win back Valerie Tisch, pedestaled, Blue-Deviled cheerleader, liquid lips always slightly parted, rehearsed the speech that would win her back, eradicate all rivals.

We’d met as seventeen-year-olds on a Mexican beach, worn sandals for fear scorpions would nestle in shoes while we slept, stayed up to see Orion drown three nights in a row, perched at the edge of aching possibilities, watched swaying silhouettes of palms, phosphorescent waves, listened to pulsing jungle gibberish, dream-drift of sleepers, so aware of bare thighs nearly touching.

Afraid of ruining it all with some desperate grope, I settled for the unspoken and unconsummated.

The drive to Duke ended badly. My speech drifted into a whine; she was grownup in her glacial remove, wore her wound like a blouse unbuttoned to the waist, or a mouth that won’t stop bleeding.

My punishment was to be perpetual, first suffocation by civility, then banishment to the floor of a friend of a friend.

At two a.m. I was jolted awake. Three frat boys sloshing flasks burst in whooping, The Coon is dead! The Coon is dead!

Long live the Coon. . .in hell!

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A bottle shattered against the wall, shards spraying my sleeping bag.

I heard a jumble: motel, Martin, sharp-shooting sumbitch, Memphis, Burnlet’em burnburn.

Through it all I played sleeping dwarf of myself, bellowed no outrage, lodged not even the palest protest, stunned by the sheer tonnage of my gutlessness.

I left before sunrise, goodbyes already exchanged without my knowing, missed the Beltway exit, drove through D.C. neighborhoods too quiet, coiled, sullen.

It dawned on me gradually; no one else was on the road.

I turned down Pennsylvania. Eight blocks away, the White House stood like a cake decoration. I had the urge to ram the gate, shake up the plantation, all clipped and columned, but behind me three tanks rumbled, unintended escort for my rusty Karman Ghia.

I made a hard left onto a treeless side street, floored it to get out of a place where big dreams were gunned down, and my own small ones kept getting smaller.

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Snake Legs Our gardener wore black and drank red.

Sayings spilled out of his mouth like used tires flying off a flatbed, bouncy but all mixed up. Every path has a muddle, he’d say, spading up the dead mums. But his words were a balm applied before wounds. I was just a lad when he pointed to the rosebush: Beware the calm before the thorns. Later, when all I dreamed about were curves of nipple, belly and thigh he warned, Never change whores in midstream, while he sowed the beds in clover and rye.

Still later, after betraying curves with a kiss I found him in the shed. Honing his blade he said, without looking up, Snakes in the grass walk on thin ice. The passing years played us out. I sat by his side with dread and prayed for some light. A long minute passed. My failing eyes strayed to his headstone—and there was his answer in granite: You’ve buttered your bread, now lie in it.

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