Everyone else is in bed, it being, after all,
three in the morning, and you can hear
how quiet the house has become each time
you pause in the conversation you are having
with your close friend to take a bite
of your sandwich. Is it getting the wallpaper
around you in the kitchen up at last
that makes cucumbers and white bread, the only
things you could find to eat, taste so good,
or is it the satisfaction of having discovered
a project that could carry the two of you
into this moment made for nobody else?
Either way, you’re here in the pleasure
of the tongue, which continues after
you’ve finished your sandwich, for now
you are savoring the talk alone—how
by staring at the band of fluorescent light
over the sink or the pattern you hadn’t
noticed in the wallpaper, you can see
where the sentence you’ve started, line
by line, should go. Only love could lead you
to think this way, or to care so little
about how you speak, you end up saying
what you care most about exactly right,
each small allusion growing larger
in the light of your friend’s eye.
And when the light itself grows larger,
it’s not the next day coming through the windows
of that redone kitchen, but you,
changed by your hunger for the words
you listen to and speak, their taste
which you can never get enough of.
Never mind the coaches who try
to teach them the game,
and think of the pleasureof the large-faced boy
on second who raises hand and glove
straight up making the precise
shape of the ball, even though
the ball’s now over
the outfield. And think of the left
and right fielders going deeper
just to watch its roundness
materialize out of the sky
and drop at their feet. Both teams
are so in love with this moment
when the bat makes the ball jump
or fly that when it happens
everybody shouts, and the girl
with slanted eyes on first base
leaps off to let the batter by.
Forget the coaches shouting back
about the way the game is played
and consider the game
they’re already playing, or playing
perhaps elsewhere on some other field,
like the shortstop, who stands transfixed
all through the action, starting
at what appears to be nothing.
O feet, when they called me “Beanstalk”
at 14, meaning my body was what suddenly happened
after the planting of magic beans, my arms
startled branches, my head looking down from the sky,
I scarcely heard, stunned as I was by what magic
had done overnight to you. Bad enough I now owned a penis
so unpredictable I had to put books
on it walking down school halls. I had your long
arches and toes which, whatever I put on them, stuck out
all the more. Great pedicles, those first cordovans
were the worst, deep maroon dream shoes
that floated footless on their page in the catalogue
I ordered from, and arrived dead weights
in a huge box, so red and shiny
and durable, their names lasted through two years
of high school: Clodhoppers, Platters, Skis.
And years later, when I took you to dinner parties
where they were too polite to name you
and just stopped talking altogether—when I sat
with legs crossed holding my teacup in that parlor
in Chile and suddenly noticed the small people
seated around me were staring at how the pulse
lifted my big foot as it hung there in front of them,
was I any better off? How could I tell them
that I understood they had all they could do
not to begin crossing themselves right there,
that inside my foot and my outsized body,
I only wanted to be small, too? But peace,
old toe-lifters, if I couldn’t accept you then,
if just last month I stood barefoot before my family
and called you in jest my Oscar-Mayer five-packs
wiggling a big toe while singing, as in
the commercial, “I wish I were an Oscar-Mayer wiener,
forgive the bad joke and the accusations, this
has never been your fault. Uncovered with fitting in,
all you ever wanted was to take me in the direction
of my own choosing. Never mind the hands
getting all the attention as they wave to others
on the street, this is not their poem,
but only yours, steady vessels, who all along
have resisted my desire to be like everyone else,
who turn after the hands are done and carry me
with resolute steps into my separate life.
Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We’ll
be seeing you, or I’ll call, or Stop in,
somebody’s always at home? Meanwhile, our friends,
telling us the same things, go on disappearing
beyond the porch light into the space
which except for a moment here or there
is always between us, no matter what we do.
Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens
when the space gets too large
for words—a gesture so innocent
and lonely, it could make a person weep
for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown
voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel
patting and stroking the growing distance
between their nameless ship and the port
they are leaving, as if to promise I’ll always
remember, and just as urgently, Always
remember me. Is it loneliness, too,
that makes the neighbor down the road lift
two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes
day after day on his way to work in the hello
that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised
fingers do for him, locked in his masculine
purposes and speeding away inside the glass?
How can our waving wipe away the reflex
so deep in the woman next door to smile
and wave on her way into her house with the mail,
we’ll never know if she is happy
or sad or lost? It can’t. Yet in that moment
before she and all the others and we ourselves
turn back to our disparate lives, how
extraordinary it is that we make this small flag
with our hands to show the closeness we wish for
in spite of what pulls us apart again
and again: the porch light snapping off,
the car picking its way down the road through the dark.
Raised during the Depression, my stepfather responded to the economic opportunity of the 1950s by buying more and more cheap, secondhand things meant to transform his life. “I got this for a hundred bucks,” he said, patting the tractor that listed to one side, or the dump truck that started with a roar and wouldn’t dump. Spreading the parts out on his tarp, he’d make the strange whistle he said he learned from the birds for a whole morning before the silence set in. Who knows where he picked up the complete A-Z encyclopedias, embossed in gold and published in 1921? “They were going to take these tot the dump,” he said. Night after night he sat up, determined to understand everything under the sun worth knowing, and falling asleep over the book of A. Meanwhile, as the weeks, then the months passed, the moon went on rising over the junk machines in the tall grass of the only world my stepfather ever knew, and nobody wrote to classify his odd, beautiful whistle, formed, somehow, in the back of his throat when a new thing seemed just about to happen and no words he could say expressed his hope.
Driving beyond a turn in the mist
of a certain morning, you’ll find them
beside a men at work sign,
standing around with their caps on
like penguins, all bellies and bulls.
They’ll be watching what the yellow truck
is doing and how. Old guys know trucks,
having spent days on their backs under them
or cars. You’ve seen the gray face
of the garage mechanic lying on his pallet, old
before his time, and the gray, as he turns
his wrench looking up through the smoke
of his cigarette, around the pupil
of his eye. This comes from concentrating
on things the rest of us refuse
to be bothered with, like the thickening
line of dirt in front of the janitor’s
push broom as he goes down the hall, or the same
ten eyelets inspector number four checks
on the shoe, or the box after box
the newspaper man brings to a stop
in the morning dark outside the window
of his car. Becoming expert in such details
is what has made the retired old guy
behind the shopping cart at the discount store
appear so lost. Beside him his large wife,
who’s come through poverty and starvation
of feeling, hungry for promises of more
for less, knows just where she is,
and where and who she is sitting by his side
a year or so later in the hospital
as he lies stunned by the failure of his heart
or lung. “Your father” is what she calls him,
wearing her permanent expression
of sadness, and the daughter, obese
and starved herself, calls him “Daddy,”
a child’s word, crying for a tenderness
the two of them never knew. Nearby, her husband,
who resembles his father-in-law in spite
of his Elvis sideburns, doesn’t say
even to himself what’s going on inside him,
only grunts and stares as if the conversation
they were having concerned a missing bolt
or some extra job the higher-ups just gave him
because this is what you do when you’re bound,
after an interminable, short life to be an old guy.
If some afternoon you
should pass by there,
and the woman comes out swooping
her blue bathrobe back
from her path and crying, “Baby, oh my
sweet baby,” it won’t be you
she means, nor you
the hubby wearing motorcycles
on his T-shirt and jumping
down from the stairless
sliding galss door
says he wants to kill, so just
stand still. It the dog
they’ll be after, the shadow
under the not-quite sunk pink
Chevy, ratcheting itself
with a slow, almost inaudible
growl into the biggest, ugliest
shepherd-Labrador-huskey
cross West Central maine
has ever seen. It won’t matter
if the two shirtless fat kids
come from around back with
hubcaps on their heads and shout
even louder than their father does,
“Queenie!” By then Queenie,
less a queen than a chain-
saw lunging at the potential
cordwood of your legs,
won’t know or care what
humans have named her. There’ll be
no hope for you, Pal, unless
that is, the teenage daughter,
who comes across the front lawn’s
dandelions in her tank top
every so often to set me free,
releases you, too—shaking her head
as if only you and she
could see how impossible
her stupid parents and this uncool
dog really are, and lifting it,
like that, by the collar
to create a bug-eyed
sausage that gasps
so loud her mother gasps—not
that the daughter will care. “Mother,”
she’ll say, eyeing the sorry choice
of afternoon attire, “you should see
how you look.” /Then, flicking
Dad out of the way
and renaming the creature
she’s created “Peckerwood,”
she’ll march as if she
herself ere now queen
back through that kingdom
of Californian raisins and tires
and Christmas lights decing the front
porch in July, and past the screen door
with the sign saying This
Is Not A Door, to disappear,
rump by rump with a bump
and a grind to you
through the real screen door.
One would hardly recognize him like this
the high-school shop teacher, glasses off,
bent over the kitchen sink. Nearby,
house dresses and underpants flutter
in the window of the Maytag he bought
for his mother. Its groaning is the only
sound while she washes his hair,
lifting the trembling water in her hands
as she has always done, working foam up
from his gray locks like the lightest
batter she ever made. Soon enough,
glasses back on, he will stand
before students who mock his dullness;
soon, putting up clothes, she’ll feel
the ache of a body surrendering to age.
A little longer let him close his eyes
against soap by her apron, let her move
her fingers slowly, slowly in his way
the two of them have found to be together,
this transfiguring moment in the world’s
old work of making things clean.
