Before We Had Words 9780773574366

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Before We Had Words

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The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Kerry McSweeney and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Jane Everett, and Carolyn Smart titles in the series Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Giving My Body To Science Rachel Rose Chess Pieces David Solway The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner

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B e f o r e We H a d Wo r d s S.P. Zitner

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2449-5 Legal deposit third quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Zitner, Sheldon P. Before we had words (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series; 11) isbn 0-7735-2449-5 I. Title. II. Series. ps8599.i67b44 2002 c811′.54 c2002-901171-x pr9199.3.z48b44 2002

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10.5/13 Minion.

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“The difference between the kind of poetry in which an ‘I’ tells about itself and a poetry which ‘sings gods and heroes’ is not great, since in both cases the object of description is mythologized. And yet …” – Milosz

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contents

one A Window Seat 3 Hide and Seek 4 Remembering Father and Son 5 Monologue for Two 6 Sizes 8 Words Across a Ouija Board 9 Before We Had Words 10 She 11 Visitation Rites 12 Question and Answer 13 The Departure 14 The Visit 15 two Love Among the Ruins 19 Saturday Matinees 20 The Kiss 21 Hearsay 22 A Second Chance 23 Sleeping Froggy 24 From Album Leaves 25 Egyptian Funerary Statue 30 Sweet and Wholesome as a Carrot

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three Sketches 35 Wes 36 The Parrot-Beau 37 By His Own Hand 39 A Minor Role 40 A Writer for the Forward Portrait in Ink 44 First Things in Leviathan Filippo’s Palace 47

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four February Letter 51 Dining Alone 52 Try Not to Say It 53 Triage 55 Western 56 Two Good-byes to Shirley 57 A Very Fine Cat 59 A Bad Few Weeks 60 The Ripples 61 Pushkin Insomniac: Two Translations Introduction and Allegro 64 Last Things 67 five Traffic 71 Late Nite Checkout 72 Howard’s Questions 73 viii

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The Night Garden 74 The Noodle-Eaters 75 Emigres’ Café 77 Expatriates’ Lunch 79 Children’s Massacre: 20.4.99 80 September 11, 2001 81 Black History 82 from The Sayings of Fabius Minimus 83 The Morning After the New Millennium 84 Recombinant DNB 86 West End 87 six On the Proposed End of Poetry 93 Poetry at Night 94 My Chary Muse Defended 95 Dropping Bricks 96 The Contortionist 97 Occidental Errors 99 Chardin: The Jar of Apricots 100 Naked Men Fighting 101 Tapio Wirkkala at the Design Exchange A Kind of Life 107 Sharing With Martin Luther 108 Epilogue: At David Mason’s 109 Acknowledgments

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one

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a w i n d o w s e at

Flying to Prague, I look down at central Europe. A cloud-rimmed radiance has spread over the wrinkled fields and gray-haired cities toward the horizons that foiled escape by sea. What are the secrets buried in that forest or floating in chimney smoke above that village? We ride the turbulence of murdered spirits; this is the graveyard of my people. Ich habe tote. I too have my dead, though the proprietary tone of Rilke’s phrase, suggests – if not intends – a restorative power in eloquence. I am not of a time that thinks so, nor would I diminish the Great Death with such a claim. Of them I am, but also other – as this sky, that earth; between us an irredeemable history: their shoah – my cosseted reflections.

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hide and seek

Half-waking, I see her, not as when she died, Crone-voiced and chattering, plucking at my tie to straighten the delusion that she chided, loving to crankiness the look I lost through fifty years, grown jowled and wary-eyed. I see that ghost-head and its lonely smile foiling age as in old photographs where fact sweetens into sepia, her curls once more in clusters, her eyes a brightness before mischance and the common creature-hurts. I hear her child-voice calling me to play. “Come hide and seek.” I wake, resigned to both.

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r e m e m b e r i n g fat h e r a n d s o n

Yours has been half my silence. Now I see the two of us as ever, both wearing suits and ties, (yours is my formality) hesitant, standing slightly apart (yours is my diffidence), greeting, but with little more to say. If this were a just memorial it would be made of pauses and omissions. Yet words, too, may be just, if only in metaphor and indirection (yours was the doubt, the hope is mine). Remembering us, I feel again how snug it was to be small and carried; to pause on my way, reluctantly, to bed at the lamplit solemnity of your desk, your back bent over rows of numbers, (yours are my scruples), even to wince at the bitter sip of beer you gave me when Prohibition ended. Unforgotten, although my daughter’s age exceeds by nearly half a life the age I was when I was still your child, before we had words.

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m o n o l o g u e f o r t wo

My answering machine greets callers in my daughter’s voice, indulging a father’s whim, lending a sly cachet to celibate age. My own voice I dislike: interrogatively high, with pedantic hesitations. Worse still, I’m told it sounds just like my brother’s. “Speak that I may know thee,” the poet says. I speak, and I am someone else. I rarely listen to my voice (do we ever truly hear ourselves?). But recently I reached the phone too late; the machine had begun to answer and record. Later, as I erased the conversation, I heard, not only the dauntingly familial sounds, but the startle of my voice speaking my brother’s words, words that had been the invariable prologue to his civil-servant logic of “however” and “perhaps,” “on the one hand … on the other.” How often had I put up with it when he lived – his perversely bland defense of all public and private acts, always beginning with a “maybe” or a “but”? Why couldn’t he live with necessities and conclusions? Or pick his books and papers off the floor? (I’d build the shelves.) Or get a suit that fit him? Or fire his hopeless cleaning woman? Or move uptown, away from the old neighborhood? My unspoken disapproval and his reasoned talk made for a meager brotherhood. We agreed that when I came to the city I need not stay at his place. Too far out; long lunches were enough.

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Yet now it was my voice speaking what I had deplored, surprised into dismay, the receiver tight in my hand, hearing a friend whose voice was breaking under calamity. I found no words, but spoke the words that came, shamelessly banal – my brother’s language of murmur and reassuring echo, and pauses that somehow filled with a steadfast presence. So had he spoken when my daughter was ill, when my wife died, when my project failed. From the tape came an exhalation, then it stopped. As a child my brother had reversed the syllables of unwieldy words: misfiech for mischief. It was not the world’s great wrongs against which he raised his short, plump arms, but the petty misfiech of landlord and tenant in a single city, balancing one claim against another, this violation against that, negotiating for our damaged civility, preserving more of it than I had with all my tardy understanding. “You know,” he once said, “next time you come, you might try that hotel near the station. You owe them one; you always use their checkroom.” Before we buried him, I spent a sleepless night in the luxury he valued less than the smallest scruple.

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sizes

She always bought us shirts too large. White, drip-dry, “practical.” Also “practical” the cart-horse collars, the sleeves for apes. “You’ll grow into them; these will last.” And so they did, until they almost fit, cuffs and collars frayed, stains, like Adam’s, past eradication. When we lowered her into Mount Zion, the grave could have held the four of us.

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wo r d s ac r o s s a o u i ja b oa r d

Memory is the mother of the Muses, said the Greeks. What we write are shadows of recollection, fictions growing out of other fictions. But now these words grow out of memory failing, as where and when blanch slowly to perhaps. The two who sheltered from the sudden downpour, hugging close, or woke to each other in the dark, or quarreled hatefully – were they snatches of old stories, or were you once my wife? Death veils you in the features of passers-by, and age makes yellow secrets of our letters, until the past is unalloyed with circumstance, and becomes pure moments of unearned deserving.

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b e f o r e w e h a d wo r d s for my daughter

Before we had words for thoughts and feelings we had looks and gestures, immediate, unclouded by context or connotation. Almost lost in words, that immediacy remains; too deep a glance, or a glance averted, can leave us speechless, coveting that unlanguaged clarity.

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she

Just look at her, homuncula superba, six, maybe seven, hip-high-and-a-bit to her Dad; proud to be keeping up, her two strides to his one; her hair an auburn tousle, her skin a vanilla shake with freckles for bits of malt, putting one sandaled foot before the other beneath a hem of flowers. Precocious mistress of the idiom of this anarchic language, she says – her serious face upturned, “I could hardly imagine it.” Imagine what? What was it could almost surpass her imagining? Already she could see through Is and Was into abstraction. Soon she would lengthen, widen, bleed, reshape and shape again, the auburn tangles grown in secret corners, the freckles turned to spells. Confess it, Jahweh, when You blessed the waters with the first cell, You hardly imagined her.

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vi s i tat i o n r i t e s

Saturdays, our Saturdays, if they were warm and clear, we city-picnicked on a bench, eating a Treasure Island lunch, Ben Gunn’s “bit of toasted cheese,” and – more than Ben had – apples. Then we set off down the ravine on our adventures. Through the shadowy tangle, we followed dirt paths into an arcadia of racoons and empties. Once, we were lucky and met a down-and-out, hardfaced but too old to be up to much. We were carrying our courage-sticks, so my daughter gave him an apple. And then we found a ruin – the remains of a small house, or rather a cabin, only the hearth and chimney standing, the roof and walls collapsed and rotting into the soil. We went back for the thrill of silence and desolation, hardly house enough for proper haunting, but so intimate in scale it was disturbing. Each time I wondered why it had been built there; she wondered why it had collapsed. At each visit she had a different theory. Maybe the family had a big fight and they broke the walls so the house fell down. Maybe they stopped paying attention and the house caught fire. Maybe they got divorced and there was no one to look after it. In due course the days turned crisp and she tired of the ruin, or outgrew it in the destined way she outgrew clothes. We ate big bowls of home-made soup at my place, and decided on the zoo. 12

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question and answer

Fair-skinned daughter of a fair-skinned mother, both with straight fair hair, gray-blue eyes and ready candor, has he no part in you, your father? Only where you cannot see it. I do not wear him on the outside any more than he wears me on his – inward and fanciful, we two.

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t h e d e pa r t u r e

“Never heard of it,” said the packer, marking the cartons for overseas. “A village,” I said, “another world.” Her wedding dress in a large, flat gift carton for champagne, boxes of childhood scraps my daughter favored, loaded now and wheeled away on a dolly. Wretched pun – how thin the disguise of resignation! I think of Kees van Dongen’s painting by that name: a child jaunty in coat and tam, hurrying across the frame to womanhood. It hung once with the Early Moderns. Now it is cradled in museum storage, safe from chance and other dangers, the worst of them humidity and light.

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t h e vi s i t

When she visits and we meet at restaurants, I turn up early just for the pleasure of watching her arrive. I sense her coming before she blooms out of the crowd, her nearness, like a miner’s light, going before her. “Let’s share a Caesar and the calamari and maybe a small carafe of white.” And then (she thinks) we can go on to share events and confidences, half-undoing months of absence. (I think) her Day Care teacher wrote, “Keeps hands and feet to self and learns to share.”

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t wo

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l ove a mo n g the ruin s for a second marriage

Among the ruins – what better scene for love lost and love reclaimed? Where better than the rubble of modern faiths and marriages? Virgil thought love a native of the rocks – cranny-flower, rooting in unlikeliness. I speak of love, not agape or “loving kindness,” but of eros, born in distress among the ruins of childhood’s enchanted castle, where we had hoped to live forever, our royal parents’ All-in-all.

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s at u r d ay m at i n e e s

That school was open weekends: lessons in the spellbound dark, no tests, no homework – constant snacks. I learned the words and business, all of us did, by heart, rehearsing them in schoolyards and in precocious dreams. But when the time came to be a Bogart or a Cagney, to love, to threaten, or to mock the odds, we blew our lines or dried as though we didn’t know the language. Only those who were pretending seemed to be native speakers.

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th e kiss

They kissed. Or rather he kissed her, she turning deftly, offering a cheek to suffer osculation. Was this the slight physical antipathy La Rochfoucald had thought essential to friendship across the genders that now denied him lip on lip? Or was it her calculation of future perils – “Zip it, sailor” – here cannily prepared for? Yet she had deplored her garlicky salad and his sniffles. Perhaps she feared giving offense or catching cold. Or was she a lady who extended favors in Victorian increments: come summer, tepid whispers, by autumn, fingertips, and full surrender when desire froze? Or was it modesty? This was a public place. Or something out of Freud? Or ... fool, enough; she’s waiting. But for what?

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h e a r s ay

They say you said we’d met, but en passant, so briefly that you’d hardly caught my name, confusing me with some ass who had the same bad French, bad manners and pretentious cant. They say you said it surely wasn’t you up-ended a manhattan on my head, shouting, “Piss off” – then charmed us into bed. You said that all the stories were untrue. Say what you will to whom, but every day is the anniversary of some indiscretion or worse that haunts our self-possession. Don’t fret. I’ll always second what you say; I won’t burlesque our bed-life or your pout or all the rest we’re both well off without.

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a second chance

Soon enough we’ll meet again in hell, where we spent the last of our long married life, and resume our travesty of man-and-wife: me hating the cigarette-and-liquor smell of your undoing, and the nightly “Nothing, never” in your stare; you, mock-meek, loathing my condescension and my casual dishonesty, my wielding language like a knife Or if death’s mindless pity should erase all that, we’d love again as at the start: even our silences the heart-to-heart of two made whole and one in each embrace – then lose that paradise of wasted breath, dying a third and just as painful death.

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sleeping froggy

She kissed him and he woke, but still a frog. “Pfui!,” she said, “it really is a frog.” “Kiss me,” he said, “I really am a prince.” “Been there,” said she, and hasn’t been there since. Old fairy tales and gender-roles have mixed; it’s starkly modern, i.e., can’t be fixed. No proper witch has had a client since a single kiss cannot un-frog a prince.

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f r o m a l b u m l e av e s

i When I was searching I could never find you for no one told me wit could stammer or tenderness be shy of touch, or beauty wear a crooked smile, but when I awoke from the curse of the Ideal, you were there, knowing, self-assured and without guile.

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ii Must I come sweating in a rented swan suit and commedia dell’arte beak? Isn’t it metamorphosis enough for our small story that night lasts half an hour and four hands are everywhere at once?

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iii The first time that you turned your back on me you stood there naked, all of your palaver on the other side. Dumbly I gaped at that dumb beauty, legs, buttocks, spinal ripple, shoulders, the eloquent half ofVenus.

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iv Flesh that last I knew in its resilience, I loved you dearly, but no more than I loved our troublesome go-between, her mind, tenacious, supple, and so fond of doubt it doubted each of us and all together. Perhaps if your blunt knowledge intercedes with memories of touch, she yet may doubt her disbelief.

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v On the drab wall of my insomnia I write one name the dunce’s hundred times to earn the laurel for my pointed cap.

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e g y p t i a n f u n e r a r y s tat u e : i a i - i b a n d k h uau t f o u r t h d y n a s t y, 2530–2480 b.c. for Mildred and Charles Nichols on their 50th wedding anniversary

Their stillness stops us, then their strangeness, this man and wife in stone. After almost four millennia all threads are broken. They are not our beginnings nor we their outcome. Yet unlike the declamatory Pharaoh and Queen nearby, here the sculptor has achieved a shock of human presence. We also are observed. Out of one block the two stand in hieratic poses, as if about to stride forward together, his body red-muscled, girdled in gray sandstone worn to the look of cloth, which also sheathes her breasts, her little belly and the mons in modest frankness: man and wife.

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The Pharaoh’s heroic arm gathers in his Queen as a possession; her fingers grasp his shoulder as if securing providence. Not so these two, so closely side by side. His upper arm barely impinges on her breast; her right arm reaches out behind him, index finger ever so gently touching his shoulder-blade – a gesture, intimate, unthought, that seals their self-enclosure, this man and wife, arrested in their brevity, whose solace persists in stone. But where are the tamed eyes of marriage without choice? the faces sorrowing for infant death? Where are the hateful stares averted when the two of them could just endure each other? The stone remembers only what endures.

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s w e e t a n d wh o l e s o m e a s a c a r r o t

Many years ago we lost the need to play at Cool and Ardent, acting on all the hey-day imperatives. Now the passions deepen to concern and lists of things we ‘ought’ to do. As we eat our Chicken Berri-style, so named for the carrots of the region, I look up from that vegetable gold across the dinner table, to you who also nourish my content, and line by line this poem, bite by bite, clings to our good fortune like a sauce.

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three

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sketches for Peter Kahn

Night riders on the Bloor Street subway, all shapes, all sizes, every class and color – how your fingers would have eyed such opulence, and in your sketchbook set down the deep particulars of a nostril, the springy fall of ringlets, the brutal glamour of a silver tooth. Features in their singularity you cherished for their own sake, and for keeping the secrets of the face. You were mad William Blake’s man not Sir Joshua’s, and distrusted ideas and instincts that impose convention on the retina, the canvas and the spirit. How you deplored the legal-tender faces and postage portraiture, the solemn proprietary looks of pols and magnates. I remember you pointing out an eyelid’s grace in a Raeburn painting, and telling me the art was meant to cherish not to awe. You trusted bit by bit in one by one.

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we s

“Too good for a one-horse town,” the visitors said, meaning Wes the butcher, taciturn, polite, his shop sweet-smelling, always bleached and swept by Wes and his assistant; in the bright case sirloins and T’s well-marbled, crown roasts elegantly presented. One each year, the assistants dropped from nowhere, burly, close-cropped lads in their early twenties, abstracted, as though they’d had a blow to the head, like one of the animals they soon would learn to cleave and portion. A year with Wes and the lads were gone, journeymen bound for other one-horse towns. It must have taken an unironic mind to teach those junior toughs and break-and-enters to say, “G’morning, missus,” and to care for steel. After Wes died, the coffee-talk went around he’d done hard time, been cleared and given something for his young manhood. For him to live with that must have taken perfect charity, the sort that broods at night on sin and retribution and, finding no difference, shrugs and falls asleep.

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t h e pa r r o t - b e au recalling Les Fleurs du Mal

He wears the heirloom nose that sniffed out mortality in the piss of Frankish princes; also the heirloom eyes, a-glitter with prognosis, and when to withhold it. (Simple humanity? waiting for a cracker? bluff?) He perches at all becks, composed on one foot then the other, seeming at rest, but all nerves, continually treading inside the glossy feathers, all dandy primaries and moire shimmer, like the flag of a banana republic – tres sportif. He squawks advice and compliments, making sense to himself, briefly amusing, easily controlled.

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A handkerchief over his cage and he quiets at once, benighted. The handkerchief needn’t be fresh.

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by his own hand

Desolate and unshaven, one of his favorite students told me the news in tears, slightly misquoting the Greek dirges for heroes in Homer his master had taught by heart. No need to avoid the man now, or his icy corrections, proclaimed in the tone of marriages failed; or avert our glances from his with their wordless lament of longing for distant sons. He had meant this act to atone for vows unfulfilled or broken, death as the wages of weakness, but he set too high a price on the life he had not led, and too low on the one he did.

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a minor role

Do you remember her a dozen years ago, in minor roles on off-off stages, a nine-week’s wonder once in a big revue? Directors made easy ironies of her face: a Grand Duke’s toy in feline velveteen, cat’s whiskers pencilled in across her innocence, a walk-on part not called for in the script. She had no elbows for the business, was cursed with manners and no marquee sense. Gossip had her in a celebrity love-match, then thinking better of it. Then we heard less and less. Lately I saw her after many years; she was singing Handel with a chorus, her darkening contralto redeeming younger voices. At the reception after the concert her recalling me at once was a compliment; her tone and gestures warmed our small talk and, as if a yes to answer unasked questions, her frank pleasure in the little cakes and tea, in all things as they came.

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Nowadays we are asked to deny aloneness and the body’s contest with gravity and time, especially in women, although from the beginning these have been “the subject of all verse.” Call them then a winnowing to the grain, a shrugging off of youth’s masquerade. How long it took us to see her for herself through the wrong art, the wrong roles – gallant, self-possessed, even enviable.

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a w r i t e r f o r t h e f o r wa r d

He came to the new country wearing a new suit, carrying the old country in with the old clothes that had let him seem of no official interest, the frayed cuffs of a modest wage, the undarned socks of a solitary life. He also carried in – ignored as ignorance by Immigration – the old language, which was dying out in the new country success by success – a language whose preference for contraries is clear from the first line, and whose holy alphabet, unlike the Roman, had the look of earthly things. He said, “I write two kinds of stories: A story about a shop that goes on strike because the boss pees in the basin of the workers’ bathroom. Another story about the thief who weeds an old man’s garden. Stories of high as low and low as high.” When I was young my aunt, who knew him, translated them for me from a Yiddish newspaper, recounting his well-known oddities with laughter, how he’d cross the street whenever he saw a dog: “A dog is a Nazi; go reason with him.”

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Almost as many in Buenos Aires read his stories as in New York. A woman from Argentina sent him a remembrance card in Spanish. Her father, a great admirer, had died, the last in the family able to read Yiddish. The note was signed Rachel Richter Salvador, with no return address. He said, “My readers are dying with the language, Yid by Yid. Soon they will have to read me like papyrus.”

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po r t r a i t i n i n k

“Weekend Books,” an inside page and “above the fold,” no less, with a photo of the week-end’s minor poet, aetat. seventy-five. Picasso baldness, but lacking its seductiveness or brilliance, beard the thin ash of fire banked or out, eyes clouded agate gazing upward as does the respectful camera angle. Behind him, an arc of African masks – fertility and death, command and worship in between – wooden finalities none even suggesting the sweet gray fictions of the poet’s life in prose below. Yet the photographer has found his metaphor. Despite the actuality of crease and sag the photo is a mask among the others, perhaps less truthful if we credit it with likeness. The camera does not lie, but wanting less the third dimension than the fourth, the shutter’s wink has caught no more of this old face than makes a Saturday’s vignette.

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f i r s t t h i n g s i n l e v i at h a n

“Me metumque simul”: fear and I were born together, twins. So wrote Thomas Hobbes in the caste privacy of Latin. So might any one of us, brooding in some dark moment on our howling entrance. But who would be moved to say it when the shadows of our noon seem there only to tread on? In the plainer English of Leviathan where he became mankind writ large, Hobbes thought life from its beginning was “the continual fear of danger and of death,” since any mother – the first of many Powers that demand submission as the price of safety – could, without bias, choose either to suckle or to strangle the new babe in her arms.

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Now picture Hobbes the man, arising, dressing, leaving his study and going out of doors to shout, to shout great vowels at the sky, shouting for his health upon advice (the term then was “vociferation”), shouting as though he were cheering on Whitehall and the Exchange and a thousand dreary hearths, all the deaf, arbitrary Powers who neither heard nor needed a philosopher’s approval.

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f i l i p p o ’s pa l a c e

Oxen and wagons – at Filippo’s command – groaning beneath the great stone slabs; the squawk of cranes and whinnying of pulleys, workmen and foremen shouting – for the cinquecento a very modern clamour, seven years and 35,000 gold florins of it. The Palladian windows’ stately height, the courses of rusticated stone that bulge as if squeezed outward by the weight above – all of it Filippo’s ponderous stratagem to outbrave the Medici under their famous noses and raise a Strozzi presence in the city loftier than his would-be masters’. How chill its ancient shadow, remnant of winter, still begrudging spring.

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fe brua ry l et ter for Christy

John has returned with news of you ten snowbent forests, ten huddled cities east: health, the praise of colleagues, domestic calm, all that all who know you wish. And yet he says you want advice. I can’t oblige. My judgment is clouded by this heavy winter and the bad news of old age. My memory opens on clear distances but sees the present as almost unfamiliar, a photograph of half-forgotten faces in someone else’s album. A tot of Irish and short naps are my response to household crises and great ‘issues’. I trust you will forgive me and accept what a comfort it is to run out of advice.

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dining alone

So all of you decided not to appear for our usual at the usual time and place. No doubt you had good reasons: Richard, swimming the Hellespont to Port Colbourn? Howard, in extremis with some deadline? Kildare? I must ask his travel agent, Don, in the boondocks at a robin’s twitter? – leaving me to face four empty chairs and dine alone in the best of company. The waiter was polite, the management grave, just short of suggesting that I order enough for five, since I had claimed our large round table. After waiting the canonical fifteen minutes for savants and artistes, I ordered in revenge what you all like best, then craned my neck, hoping for a breathless, last-minute entrance. None. A stigma, dining alone, though most of us will end so – pray not through tubes – and yet, what better than raising chopsticks to one’s lips with the choice bits of every dish that pleases, and without the distraction of half-chewed talk, thinking fondly of our absent friends, yet not missing them too much, supposing they are at other pleasures.

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tr y n o t to s ay i t for Howard Gruber

Just like a mugging. A left hand from behind against your mouth, a right at your Adam’s apple; Parkinson’s has found your voice box. When last I had the courage to phone you, we both heard helplessness at the other end – a call that was wholly call, unanswerable; you trying to say something, the least thing, me, stunned by the obvious, trying not to say it. Do you remember the evening I’d provoked you by reaching once too often for a near, if not the nearest irony, shaping my words for play, not, as you did, for truth. “Just for once,” you said, “as a scientific experiment, try not to say it.” This appeal to the work in which you earned such honors, and the suggestion of something to be learned, were your forbearance, the trying not to say it, owed our long years since school. 53

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I, in return, tried not to say – and for once succeeded – that my metier was constant practice, wit, truth as practice, for the never-perfect phrase. With us there was no thought of the Keatsian equation, nor any need. Our bonds were war and causes shared, and simple affection. Small comfort that a useless irony from which we can learn nothing has left us with everything we cannot try to say.

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tr i a g e

“and he stoppeth one of three” Coming to my senses one by one under the hospital coverlet, hands mine again relearn their body – the sternum laced up like a boot, the hipbone sharp beneath the gown, this body still mine, this one of two untaken, but soon another third will leave, and then another, the loaded gurneys circling to no sound.

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we s t e r n

Under the yellow blister scarecrow cacti guard a trailer ruin and desert kill. Buzzards float by in parties on the updrafts, professionally curious. They dip and elevate and funnel down in decreasing circles, swooping, observing, waiting for the first to find the moment for the feathery settling, the hunchback amble, the beak.

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two g o o d - b y e s to s h i r l e y

i The drugs they gave you to extinguish your awareness cannot dim it, your painter’s eyes still bird-bright. Across your cheek-bones, high as a Cherokee’s, the skin has thinned to opal. We must say nothing of the past, how swift it was, how wound about with incident. Nor of the future, which is the present widened by small exhilarations. Lying there, how light you seem, and always were, to dream of, dance with, hold. The intravenous lines that someone thought a prudence to tether you to earth, now hang slack. You will not rise save for the small journey down.

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ii The corners of your eyes forget their luminous welcomes. What is devouring you has at last eaten your appetite. Not a crumb, not even from the feast of fruit and shortbread that we took hiking long ago, when the first kiss tasted of mackintosh. Now only water, but not from the brook we sipped in handfuls as its chill shocked inside us, declaring elemental clarities you can’t remember.

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a v e r y f i n e c at

You fetch your grace from Pangur-ban, your pomp from Bast, a god, but you’re not welcome in the house or the yard. I’ve no taste for kidlit cuteness, no tenderness for small size; they’re pesky, fertile and unclean, but I’m for mice. They don’t seem daunted by your claws, which look a painful lot to me. What scares us is how you indulge your inexhaustible ennui. Two-foot, four-foot, we all falter; finally we’re caught. Dying’s nasty and it’s brutish; we want it short.

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A Bad Few Weeks

Death of a first love, death of a learned friend, of a colleague’s husband, of another’s child – a bad few weeks. Over and over, sorrow, loss, condolence, hope and sympathy – written, spoken until they mean the same, then lose their meaning. Mourning needs more – deliberate, private rituals that show the gratitude of use for gifts so soon surrendered. I will turn off the newscast and ignore the phone; eat some turbot poached in wine and drink what’s left; avoid the subway with its triumphant ads and withheld faces; then walk through modest back-streets lined with maples to an evening of early Handel just discovered.

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the ripples

If this were the Middle Ages and the fastness of Sylvania, I would die with a stake through my heart after a public exhibition and memorable torture. Surgery has obliterated my navel, thus declaring me not of Adam’s seed; but some devil’s misbegotten, outside the human and the sacramental. Yet all is merely as it will be, and my little time is racing through the ordinary traffic toward the lull of empty public gardens, where events are the hush of insects. I am in the Japanese Garden, on the slender wooden arc over the reflecting pond, now viscous with the dark of fir trees. Deliberately, I pitch my thoughts into the liquid forest. They splash upward to the dragon-flies, and plunge to the soft bottom. They become the center of circles wrinkling outward through the water. Soon the ripples reach all sides of the pond, but they do not return to the center, neither canceling nor doubling one another. They stand motionless, as if interrupted at their creation. This is just, I say, this is right. It is now too late for more complexity. Not a shudder. The ripples are unmoving, silent – as if in a photo, as if fused in glass, as if a chime had stopped.

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p u s h k i n i n s o m n i a c : t w o tr a n s l at i o n s

1 Remembrance The clamors of the day are still and rest rewards our mortal cares. Night’s translucent shadows fill the quiet of deserted squares. Now my hours of torment come: hour after sleepless hour of dumb anguish. In the oppressive night remorse burns like an adder’s bite. Wild images seethe through my mind as blotted scrolls unwind the loathsome story of my years. I curse, I weep, still unresigned, but the words cannot be cleansed by tears.

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2 Insomnia Awake still. Nowhere any light. Around me, irksome sleep, black night and always the monotonous lockstep ticking of a solemn clock – like fate, of which the old wives mumble. Lost in sleep, the shadows tremble. Somewhere, mouse-like, life still scurries. Why does it crowd my mind with worries? What do the tedious mumblers say: reproaches for my wasted day? Insomnia, what do you want of me? Are you a summons? a prophecy? Tell me, what is it you command? Tell me, I must understand.

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introduction and allegro

i A musical evening. Very European. I’d rather have heard jazz in the Village, but he was my only relative left from the other side – it was ‘41. The faded ritz of a flat on Riverside Drive; foliage hedging the salon windows enclosing rows of folding chairs. The audience sparse and comfortably gray, seven young performers about my age, (one the rescued cousin), two of them girls – all Hitler refugees, all guttural and fearlessly articulate – wunderkinder. The musicians make their shallow bows. The music is household Elizabethan, new to me, country jigs and allemands and hornpipes, the girls play viols, the young men wooden flutes, cheeks flaring like the winds on ancient maps. Then airs and madrigals. A plumpish girl sings “Lachrymae,” and my lucky cousin, unselfconsciously, “Fortune My Foe.”

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I’d never heard this sort of ‘serious’ music – no formal distance or the chill of grandeur – joy needing no occasion but itself. I could have stayed with either girl forever, and chosen my cousin or any of the others for my life’s confidant, but after tea I left, tongue-tied with praise and envy.

ii It is nearing the end of the year, if only of that, and a lifetime later I lie awake in the cardiac ward of Toronto General, looking out across the asphalt darkness of the kingdom of disease, hearing the endless brake and gun below entering or leaving the Emerge. I wear the standard vein-blue gown, and round my neck a cardiac monitor, the size of a deck of cards (now mostly spades), hangs in its charitably-knitted pouch. On the screen at the nurses’ station fibrillations like figures for the lute glow green and then return to sinus rhythm. At once they bustle toward me, nurses carrying wooden flutes and viols, one resident a lute, one a theorbo, two students trundle out a virginal.

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They settle print-outs of the ecg on their music stands. A surgeon nods. Up, shawms; up, sackbuts. Vanish, miles and years!

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last things

Even the dead grow hair and fingernails, hair to be holy, kites’ claws for the diet of hell and a hard countenance against surprises. But they tire of rigor mortis. The torso lolls bored with the longest Sunday; but the curious soul sighs itself free and goes whistling out of doors, shedding flesh and bone to the amazement in a sunflower’s eye. No fancy, this – a child spat gristle from the seeds. Among these stones, who lies? Only the stones, declaiming finalities in upper case, but the remnants of those gilt-edged years go wandering. Out of their oaken cells they leach at night, and if a spouse is not near, they have something to do with a cousin long removed, with fossils, strangers. Of our joining in one another, there is no end. Here lie changelings, collectors of identities.

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tr a f f i c

Halted on red, a smile is peering out of the shark’s body of a taxi: pug nose, chin cleft and pointed; eyes bulbous, elfin blue beneath the powerful forehead, smooth and delicately too large. Seventeenth-century Spanish masters painted such heads as charms against high birth and office, the small composure denying the fealty and hire and subjection of painter and dwarf to prince, of anyone to one. Green light. The smile floats off, a member of the circulating city.

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l at e n i t e c h e c k o u t

How dreary the repetitions: the shapes and labels of soups, the squat tablets of sardines, the unwieldy heft of juices, the boxes of crackers and legumes. How peremptory the questions: additives? shelf life? cost? fat? salt? How awkward the wire tumbrels loaded with denatured plenty that briefly stays a tiresome hunger.

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h o wa r d ’s q u e s t i o n s for Howard Gruber, social psychologist, on his 80th birthday

At the far end of the supermarket aisle, the gray lethargy of hunger; in entryways and over iron gratings, sleep pilfered from the tepid waste of comfort: disparate images that come to you unbidden, forcing the homely, nagging questions. Over long and fruitful years the images and questions have not changed; after the research and the experiments, the books and honors, your measure of idea and action still is toward what good? for whom?

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th e ni g ht garden for Gwen

Is it perverse, this gardening in the dark, nurturing the creatures of the sun by the fluorescence of a kitchen window? Not a first choice. The gardener is overtaken by daylight obligations, then by darkness. Yet after the first time it is hers to choose, to plant in darkness, free of day’s otherness, and more alone than in the house alone. The little clamors of the neighborhood fade to the back-fence talk of insects. Darkness overgrows the day’s defects; the sagging post, the canted flagstone. become as care would have them. Her fingers probe to recollect the earth as rain does, parting, entering, nurturing. Weary, she stands and stretches and looks up. All of them are out, the bloom-by-nights, fields beyond fields, once planted in the dark.

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t h e n o o d l e e at e r s

i He bloats her now, my grandson who will inherit the round eyes and the pallor of his roundeye mother. My precious son has thinned our blood with milk, and cleft my heart, just as his son will cleave it with his brave first cry. There are two sides to every story, except our own.

ii Old, half-mad, he sulks and grows impatient, mumbles feral speech that no one hears, whispering worse to some imagined insult, as if cooling noodles – melancholy dish for those who have made their choice of follies, but antic for the young, who ravenously mouth the hundred strands, the long, forthcoming savor.

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iii Lucky eight at table – six from the same village, two who had married into it; two of them married to cousins of a third, three who worked for the uncle of a fourth whose nephews courted another’s nieces. How succulent now the entwined alongsidedness of mein, the strands drawn in like kisses.

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e m i g r e ’s c a f é

Around it the city builds and unbuilds itself, yet in thirty years the café has not changed, its rainbow of liqueurs re-shelved against the enormous mirror, its walls repainted once again in colors the sunlight clings to. Here lunch-hour acquaintances lapse into the forsaken languages. The satirical journalist with his dashing scarf, his bottle lenses and frog mouth, convulses two large vests – “Not for your wives” – and then in boulevard Viennese – “not for your popsies either.” Then his enormous eyes grow more remote. Tailored, hatted, gloved and nobly wrinkled, a matriarch assumes her usual table. Her granddaughter, tall and carelessly in fashion, arrives, just on the hour – “the politeness of kings.” Then ritual questions: parents? studies? beaux? (a proprietary interest in posterity). At last it is the granddaughter’s turn for questions. The answers come in crumbs: old family gossip, glimpses of villas, grand occasions, faraway.

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Her parents dislike the place – unhealthy menu. Her mother thinks the Claras who wait on tables seem “right off the boat.” Her father prefers his club for business, for anniversaries La Colombe. But the café is Gran’s favorite, now hers: its pastry the palate’s forget-me-not, its coffee a potion to summon lives forgone.

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e x pat r i at e s ’ l u n c h

Driving between those secretive stone walls, merely to be and see enthrals. The wintry vineyards that they pass unnerve, bare poles from which beheaded gestures rave. They climb seicento stairs to the chill cafe, order what they think they read and say, take gray bread with gray salt, take black wine, enjoy the novel beast, and feign an intimacy in their failures to understand, but less than friendship – they left that behind. Outside, the photo sky hangs blue as stone. The square is full, and mincing doves complain. Mind says: When spring comes take us anywhere. Body answers: we must not die here.

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c h i l d re n’s m a s s ac re : 2 0 . 4 . 9 9

Loved and cared for, at least indulged; middle-class, till recently with options, twelve children lie, gunned down in mimic war declared in the cliches of borrowed evil it commemorates. Two killer-boys in film-noir costume win at last the brief concern of coverage. Fitter for asking questions than making statements, their unlived faces have not earned their deed, only our angry pity for their like, who leave for school on a particular morning toting doomsdays that they bought like pop.

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september 11, 2001

Waking to sunlight, sweet air, the pulses coursing, a household, love nearby, all these were sacred once – gods or the gift of gods – before we had words that sucked the holiness from things to feed abstractions. Creatures of such words believed their paradise led through desolation, from which they came and which they intended here. Facing this ruin, to be at a loss for words consecrates again the waking.

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b l ac k h i s to ry an incantation for R. L.

For once not drink, but death leaves you there to doze, turns sour on your breath, sleeps all night in your clothes, forgoes the wake-up glass and skips the morning class in which each year you told of the capture, chains and hold, of the auction and the brand; of “darky,” “nigra,” “coon” betrayed into a land unforgiving as the moon, and then your whisky voice laid out the hearer’s choice, labor steadfast or strike soon – Booker T. or Dubois. No more hallucinate the runaway’s fate, the posse and the pack closing at your back; no more stumbling on through fog. This is the last hair of the dog.

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f r o m t h e s ay i n g s o f fa b i u s m i n i m u s

If you should see the person, place or thing that makes you stateless in your native land, do not frown. Look up at clouds or down in thought. If you hear marching boots and gunfire, turn up the radio or sing. If you must weep, sneeze, fake an allergy. If you must pray, fall to one knee and tie a shoelace. If you must act, consider marriage or divorce. Do not flinch at mirrors, but look to see what face will best accommodate the heart’s ease and rewards of prudence.

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th e morning after the new millennium

We woke, and there they were: men in Norfolk jackets and pantaloons, women in stays and a hint of bustle, child-laborers in ragged pinafores – Victorians resurrected – all of them with a fixed pallor, like extras in a gaslight horror film. The women spoke first, intent on recalling for us the easy freedom of their courting days, their equality in marriage and their tolerance in child-rearing. Coal-pit lads told of their hardships, insisting they missed the comradeship and adventure of the mines, and their pride in being men so soon. A colonel shrugged off Balaklava, saying that a horse had bolted, and the rest had followed after. A gentleman from Whitehall told us discreetly that since the death of the Consort, the Queen had been imperfectly solicitous of the impression made by certain of her associations. A Viscountess in Turkish trousers insisted that Jack the Ripper was a hoax to keep women in the home. After they had made their case, the Victorians tried to answer all our questions, but they asked none. Perhaps out of politeness or omniscience. Or perhaps they had no curiosity because they had no future.

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At last the shadows lengthened and they prepared to leave – but reluctantly, as though their mission had not been accomplished. An affable cleric in gaiters said: We have met here strangers like ourselves, all of us in need of grace and correction. Correction indeed, said a professional gentleman in a frock coat. But thus goes the world: I extract a molar. Along comes your historian, looks at the hole, and writes me a treatise on teeth. The frock coat would have said more, but he faded with the rest.

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re combi nant dnb

Imagine a village: you need a village Idiot, and if an Idiot, a Yob to tease and taunt, a Fauntleroy to wish he only could, a Grundy to carp, a Do-Good to protest, a Drunk to goggle, the Law to move them on, and other persons to villages appertaining. If the village grows, each one acts all by turns, Harlequin uptown, downtown Pantaloon – every new address a new charade. If the village shrinks, the Yob takes all the parts. In either case, a village needs Beliefs, thus Us-and-Them, and thus another village.

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

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we s t e n d for Doris and Howard

Precarious sleep of the elderly, a chemical drowsiness, the blankand-startle of waking at the lip of a crevasse; or being pried from sleep as if from wreckage. I am staying with close friends, not lying warily in my flat alone, yet I have slept fitfully tonight, waking at my hated five o’clock to fine percale, a down coverlet, Freud and Stendhal on the shelves, and news or music if I want them. I am well looked after here. Across the hallway, my hosts, and at the door the water spaniel snoring securely. Restless, I go to the window. Dusty snow is sifting down on burly houses with stepped gables, on the palisades of apartment blocks, once stylish, and on the old Collegiate Church, that imitates (wholly without irony) the Haarlem Butcher’s Market with its terra cotta ornaments.

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On the screen of snow and lamplight a timescape unreels: the land in primal woods and meadows; the dispossessions and the settlements; the gangs of greenhorn labor building a city not yet theirs; 100,000 queuing up to ogle Valentino’s body one last time; white fists and rougher whisky harrying the ‘cullids’ off San Juan Hill, the land booms and the panics; the refugees from politics and hunger; the colonies of intellectuals. Once this was Bloemendael, Washington Irving’s vale of flowers “refreshed by many a pure streamlet, and enlivened here and there by a delectable Dutch cottage.” Moneyed East Side Anglophiles thought the Dutch inbred to oddity, their lives an empty round of planting and begetting: snowy cart trails to a barn, a neighbor’s house, a mill, a church – the diary of stultifying days, each page serenely like the page before.

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Illusions of order, both of them – Irving’s bucolic Bloemendael and the Park Commission’s grid of avenues where early traffic is darkening slush with tire ruts in the undecipherable scrawl of hurried, disassembled lives perhaps no more profound and no less subject to brute need than the lives of Bloemendael. Soon my friends will wake and the dog renew acquaintance. We will sit an hour over breakfast, righting the past with talk and coffee. Soon, but not yet. My thoughts keep something of sleeplessness burdened with the scene below, hardly now the paradise it seemed when I could sleep through the night. Beliefs fail, projects, decades, lives; not hours and minutes, this one. Through the foliage of the old estate the river hangs in sequins on the trees, and windows on the Jersey heights ignite with morning like the golden stones in the mosaics of the saints.

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o n t h e p ro p o s e d e n d o f po e t ry “After Auschwitz the writing of poetry is barbaric.” – Adorno

After the destruction of the Temple, we cast out Architecture. When the Red Sea waters parted we gave up Civil Engineering. (Who needed hydraulics?) We honoured every crisis with painful sacrifice – science after science, art after art. By the time of the pogroms we were tongue-tied as Moses, but after Auschwitz, a guilty silence the silence of ein berühmte Rektor – ein Meister aus Deutschland – a silence even to the grave, reminded us that silence too can be barbaric.

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p o e t r y at n i g h t

They are nothing if not remembered word for word, the nagging phrases too brief for tune or syntax. They will not stay till morning, bright fugitives from what depths, like glimmers in a well. Grateful and peevish, I stir from too little sleep and turn on the lamp. I am old, and it grows hard to bear youth returned as scraps of language, waking, pen and pad beside me, and nothing else but words.

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my c hary m us e d efen de d

And what should I expect after such long neglect – honors at a feast for those who served her least? Small wonder she insists on these rare trysts, and harrows all my days with mean self-praise.

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dropping bricks for Florence

Mindless insistence of the body: the lover’s bladder, the diva’s sneeze, respecting no occasions but their own. Or deliberate malice – like the clever put-down praises by a Queen of Snide. Between them, what the English call “dropping bricks,” an unintended wounding. John Gielgud was notorious for off-hand remarks so tactless they could be forgiven only as the vengeance garble took for his speaking so much to perfection. The rest of us get no such pardon for blurt and inadvertence which can rankle in the minds of both offended and offender years after, still fresh paper-cuts. Sometimes candor builds its walls so high they fail beneath their weight and topple inward, dropping bricks.

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th e contorti oni st for some contemporaries

He begins with honored cliches of gymnastics, hand-stands, cartwheels, but performed as comic take-offs of Olympic nymphs. Then, as treats for the children, vulgar surprises: tongue, dog-like, up to nose and down to chin. We all applaud. He pauses, assumes the lotus position to solemnize his art, and then begins: back bends, chest stands, wheels; arms and legs improbably strained around his neck, eradicating posture; the body as hoop, as ball, as knot protesting its hidden powers as he extorts them. His joints forget their syntax; his muscles stammer, their vocabulary of act and gesture scrambled in an aphasia of the body. What had evolved for movement and for gesture, he wrenches into stasis, forming specters of regression – of fossil and embryo.

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To loud applause and bravoes of relief the contortionist takes his bows, bending almost double. As for us, to rise, to stand, to turn, to walk away, is to reclaim our part in nature.

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o c c i d e n ta l e r r o r s : seascape, song dy nast y

This arching of the sea reveals the force of tide, the shapes of surf, and the particular aspect of the moon that tugs them. Such truths, as the painter saw them, now move few, but where the lines collapse crest into spray into spume, and the ink turns water into dust, the round-eye halts at such particulars, which dissolve to deny ideas.

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chardin: the jar of apricots for Rachel, with thanks

After the galleries are cleared, the doors are locked and guarded, the windows, even the gratings, on alarm. Yet someone keeps getting in, changing things ever so carefully while leaving them in place. Madame, of course, by habit, renews the half-filled jar of apricots before they mold. The greengrocer is vain enough to bring new lemons daily. The packet of tea, the biscuit, the cheeses, the sliced baguette all tell a business eye to keep them looking fresh. If not for conscience, then for tipple the vintner comes each night to drink the wine and fill the glass again. Only the cups and stemware are unchanged for nothing is lost or broken in that house. Behind the centuries of varnish tea is just ready for this afternoon.

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n a k e d m e n f i g h t i n g : a d r aw i n g at t r i bu t e d to r a ph a e l

A dozen standing, half as many fallen; eighteen heads and what, in the dense intimacy of limbs on the crowded page, seems more than nature’s allotment of arms and legs, performing all that bone and muscle can – launching arrows, thrusting javelins, raising shields, extending, bracing, grasping, pushing, the full lexicon of gross motor behavior, exquisite on the page.

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A classical theme, yet more like a Turkish bath than Attic wars for which the hoplites donned heavy armor. Naked battle was for paint and stone. Roman and Greek example had reopened all the issues as though they were new – for painters the flesh as flesh, our unearned glory, not the Church’s food for worms. How freshly seen, how noble these figures are, but to what end? Surely Raphael’s delight and ours. But that achieved, did he turn away, lay down his pencil and ignore these thought-encumbered images? He had drawn no war of Centaurs against Lapiths, Greeks against Persians; showed no differences in color, dress, in height, in bearing, only the same silent howls of rage and pain gaping in self-same mouths. No friend, no enemy, no war, but a commemoration of the flesh in the fratricide of strangers – for which we mock and mourn our history.

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From the museum wall the drawing beckons, strong and graceful as its subjects, teasing attention with the slow turmoil of a reversing optical illusion – now the dark urn, and now on either side the human face.

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ta p i o w i r k k a l a at t h e d e s i g n e x c h a n g e

1 The Table Setting The sheen of Marimekko linen, sleek steel cutlery, Tapio’s glass and Ruska’s “Arabia” dinner plates, dark and vigorous as coffee, answer the mild light from the sconces. More than gin and greetings, the first sight of the table is the welcome to the feast. No Meissen pomp or parade of forks, but an uncloying elegance that evokes post-war well-being and unease, wanting ceremony but distrusting show, an elegance that has not forgotten wooden trenchers, earthen porringers – beginnings and their frugal joys.

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2 Tapio’s Glass Spirals of etched glass enclose astonished silence: Tapio’s small vase. Breath-born corolla, immune to shears and seasons, both vase and flower. Self-chosen exile: the Northern Lights now shimmer in Venetian glass.

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3 The Great Knives The wounded rabbit leaps toward the warren, the dog’s fangs clamp to the fox’s neck deer and elk topple like monuments, skinned for food, clothing, shelter. Sharks and alligators are hauled out for shagreen and armored leather. It is not only the thought of prey, but the hankering for absolute possession – to kneel beside a thing, know where to cut, what to eat now and what to hang, what to throw the ocean or the dogs – that draws us to this cabinet of knives more than to Tapio’s bowls and goblets: the manly haft seducing fists to harden around it, the mind to heft its balance, then swoop with the blade’s curve to the point, entering like an X-ray into the violated insides that must spill their secrets. Pelt and hide deny our ordinariness, not in the killing but in the flaying, the god-euphoria, Apollo skinning Marsyas, the nightmare lampshades.

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a kind of life

For two months that winter the market had only brussels sprouts and tangerines, the sprouts with a rich, mineral taste – grapes for a Queen of the Underworld; and crescents of tangerine that were noon on the palate. We wanted nothing else. Farewell to that. A neighbor’s great-aunt once came in from the country and baked the old-time testing-bread with finger-holes in the dough that showed when the oven reached the right temperature. We ate it with salty cheese. Farewell to that. And farewell to the wine that came in old bottles stoppered with hempen wads, and to the stews, made with every kind of fowl raised or hunted for miles around, even larks. Wicked, but right for the wine. Farewell to that. Farewell to all of it: to places and to seasons, to those who loved us or kept our pace by chance. Banish them from recollection as they flicker and lose savor amid the ready surfeits and estrangements of old age. Snatch it from recollection, and fix in language what still remains, where it will lapse from currency and begin a kind of life.

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shar ing w i th martin lu th er Why did I spend my life in theological dispute and all that Devil’s-dropping when I could have been studying folklore and music and other good things? – Martin Luther

Lutherans, of course, but the rest of us share something, too, with Martin Luther, perhaps not constipation or marrying ex-nuns, but a head full of tunes from among the Devil’s best, leaping unbidden to mind, to mouth, to feet: personal medleys of folk, blues, show tunes, bluegrass, doo wah, hip-hop, plainsong and Later Brahms; and the soloists and the combos: Art Tatum, Stompin’ Tom and Lily Pons, the Lionel Hampton Trio, the Budapest; and all the venues: dad’s garage, the Met, Birdland, Carnegie Hall, the Top ‘o the Senator; and the great performances – who was on sax, on speed, on when, and on what label. Maybe if we cleared our heads of the blues and the biz news, of who od’d, who made it big and who sold shoes, and separated all that jazz from How Things Are, and just got rid of it, we could fill our minds with everything Luther gave his days and nights to – the “Teufelsdreck” we could update with arbitrage and Personal Motivation, then maybe we could still make something of ourselves – like Martin Luther.

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e p i l o g u e : a t d av i d m a s o n ’ s

No casual passer by would guess this hush one floor above the chatter of sidewalk bistros and the siren rock that booms from chic boutiques. From the street below, as nondescript as a crack house, and as well known to addicts – the shadowy entry, the alpine stairwell to the buzz-in door, the shafts of sunlight through the indoor dusk. Crowded book stacks parallel the walls; at the window, a spinner with wonders in half-morocco; in cases, bagatelles: a Mutt and Jeff original – old news of the known world it was once thought possible to know, and now as precarious. Should the morning mail bring even one more “slender book of verse” … But it does. The overburdened floorboards groan, splinter and give way; the plumbing bursts; the bookshelves topple, spilling out a maelstrom of -ologies and -ana, classics out of print, the famously illustrated, the fatuously signed, early drafts with author’s blot-and-jot, rare firsts to tempt commissioned break-and-enter – all now a soggy ruin, isbn has-beens for the dustbin.

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Yet no one is hurt in this apocalypse. Bookman and mate, as well-loved as their stock, straddle the beam-ends, waiting for the insurance. Frightened shoppers bolt from the boutiques and turn to gape; enthralled, the diners linger at sidewalk tables where waitpersons counsel margaritas. This is not the sack of the great library at Alexandria. Perhaps it is the midnight vision of one old crank with all his own shelves and his gorge filled up; his eyesight blurring – small comfort for not liking what he sees – facing his own apocalypse. Or perhaps it’s a fast-forward through recent years, when reading declined to looking, and collections followed their wooden catalogues into memories from which the look and heft are irretrievable. We boast of bookless libraries, and – sad omen – Centers for the Study of the Book, for book read Dodo. Were there also nostalgic complaints when the ancient scrolls gave way to the merchant’s handy codex, incunabula to folio and quarto, leather to boards, boards to paperbacks? Or is this change worse, an abandoning of instruments of discourse, a retreat in the struggle for a written language to before the scrolls themselves? Without the book the written word is spectral, flimsy, as fragmented and as casual as speech, and, now, reducible to yesnos without affect 110

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implying a bland fragility, which books, language reified and humanized by touch, deny. Passed hand to hand with passages recalled by bookmarks, tickets, letters, books take on the ambient life, and offer intimacy to solitude, timelessness to travel, civility to homes and authority to public places. Neither the jump of line-by-line, nor print-outs (merely plaster casts of books), nor vast holdings asleep inside a dot will do. We will read books and write them, buy, steal and borrow, house and protect them. Though writers commit their words to keyboards and welcome the challenge of a lidless Cyclops, always demanding excitation, even admire the electric nimbleness that makes ideas seem stragglers – their destination is not some hard drive, but with luck, a volume, fat or slender, not to set off an apocalypse, but rather, a stillness in the hand that holds it, a tremor in the mind that reads.

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acknowled gments

“A Very Fine Cat” appears in Garm Lu; “At David Mason’s” in Ex Libris, the journal of the Friends of the Trinity College Library; “Hearsay” and “A Second Chance” in The Dalhousie Review; and “Howard’s Questions” in The Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless. My greatest obligation is due two fine poets, Al Moritz and Susan Glickman, who saved me from weariness and error, and to the Sisson/Burwash Gang; also to Brian Parker, Annette and Fred Tromly, and Nancy and Ralph Lindheim, especially for help with Pushkin. I owe a special debt to Professor Kerry McSweeney and his associates for their useful response to an earlier version of this book and, at the Press, to Margaret Levey, Joan McGilvray, and Susanne McAdam.

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