from Nostalgia’s Thread: Ten Poems On Norman Rockwell Paintings:
The Runaway (1958)
In the restaurant, a man excuses himself
from his wife, his friends, his rack
of lamb, the drinks that have finally begun
to plane smooth the day’s splintered edges.
In the lavatory, while his lame, diminished
stream delays its advent, he stares as he has
for years at the framed print hanging
above the urinal. How many times,
the man wonders, has he pissed brooding
beneath this same picture? Recalling
its steadfast presence through the deaths
of two friends, the near collapse of his marriage,
the slow-to-heal estrangement of one
of three children, he knows this simple
framed image has been one of the few constants
in a score of persistently shifting years.
He knew whose painting it was
and he also knew he was not supposed
to like it. Such sentimental looking back
to a past mostly mythologized, such a varnished
view of America: this is what so galled true
connoisseurs of beauty. But he was moved
nevertheless, as if a neurosurgeon’s probe
had stumbled upon some uncharted declivity
in his brain, one that contained all his pleasures,
real or imagined, from childhood.
Now, looking again at the picture’s fixed
moment, the man feels at once both exiled
from and pulled into the story: a towheaded boy
and a cop sitting together in a diner,
talking, while the cook behind the counter
leans close, smiling, listening to what
the boy and cop have to say. At the boy’s feet,
what little a runaway needs wrapped in a red
bandanna and tied to a stick. The narrative
line, the man guesses, is supposed to be clear,
reassuring, but it leaves him feeling vaguely unsettled.
Most of his life he's dreamed
about running. From family, from friends,
from the angina-like press of routine
that often wakes him at night and leaves him
frightened and barely able to breathe.
There in the dark he wonders what of value
he might fit into a bindle. What destination
would set him free of his own querulous
soliloquies, his mind’s non-stop interrogations?
As a child he had come to the end of books
that made him want to fade away
from his own constrained life and enter
plots he knew must continue somewhere after the last
turned page. His bladder empty, he continues
to stare at the wistful little vignette
in front of him. One voice urges him to go
back to his wife, his friends, and his now-cold
meal, and a second cajoles him to trade places
with the boy in the painting, to be young again,
to ride his thumb toward every selfish whim.
But a third, the one he knows best, asks
the kinds of questions that freeze a failed Romantic
like him in his tracks, as if he himself
were nothing but a static image captured in paint
as he stands before this urinal. Would the wedge
of apple pie that must lie on the counter in front
of the boy taste sweet or bitter? Would the glass
of milk before him be half full and cold, or warm
and half empty? Would the cop’s eyes be distilled
with kindness or shifting and distant?
Who but himself will miss him if he chooses
to run away? Who but himself will love
him if he decides to stay?
from Plato’s Breath:
Plato’s Breath
The first law is the conservation law.... It says that while energy can never be created or destroyed it can be transformed from one form to another....We’ve all heard it said that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun.’ You can prove it to yourself with the next breath you take. You have just inhaled about 50 million molecules that were once inhaled by Plato.—
—Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: A New World View
High above the Agora, a woman stares through intractabilities
of time and distance while her husband reads aloud
from his Foder’s. Her legs still burn from the long climb
up the slick marble steps to the Parthenon, her pulse a timpani
of vague omens in the white and blinding heat. Pointing to the place
where the guidebook says Socrates died, her husband recounts
the famed teacher’s final hours, he who taught us all to steer
clear of the unexamined life, how he offered proofs for the eternal
life of the soul even as the quaffed poison crept toward his heart.
The woman tries to imagine such philosophic poise,
but her mind scrolls madly to the drum of her own toiling heart,
as if her accustomed picture of the world had suddenly lost
its vertical hold. Last night, on the verandah of their hotel,
unstrung by jet lag and too much ouzo, they had danced
for the first time in years, raising their arms like Zorba
and humming what they could recall of the movie’s score
while mythologized constellations spun above them
and the floodlit Acropolis towered behind with all the glamour
of a Hollywood set. Later, after the worn-out tape
of their sex had finally rewound and her husband slept,
she listened to the pitch of the singing city rise until
she thought her armature of glass might break. She remembered
a professor long ago in college who had asked
his students to bring a response to the Kazantzakis novel,
and when she and the others brought back nothing
but facile academic prose he had grown sad and walked out
of the room because no one had been moved simply
to come to class and dance. A month later he was found
hanging from a lamppost somewhere off campus.
Socrates, her husband now tells her, gave his final lesson
in the absence of Plato, his favored pupil, who stayed away
stricken with a sudden fever. Breathing this same molecular sea
in which antiquity drifts like motes of spectral dust, the woman
gazes through the haze and slowly dissipating heat of Athens
to that point on the horizon where lines converge and all
things vanish. She frames it in the lens of her Nikon, focuses
on infinity, and trips the shutter, half thinking she might
trap the immensities of a moment. She closes her eyes
and rests them against the camera’s box, as if to divine
what lay inside the sealed blackness, unexposed: a room,
dimly lit, a single window open to the famed light of Attica
in late afternoon. On a bed, two lovers of beauty, two bodies
riding each other away from that terrible chasm between
the many and the one, their every labored breath another rung
on the long slow climb toward a perfect deathless abstraction.
Poems from manuscript in progress:
Cursing the Deaf (Recipient of 2007 New Letters Readers Choice Award)
Thou shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block
before the blind, but shall fear thy God.
—Leviticus 19
When they shipped them to our school,
at first it was good for the class
cut-ups, who could mimic the shrill,
almost hysterical pitch of their voices
when, excited, they forsook the language
of hands for the fuller register of the human
tongue. We would stagger with laughter
at recess, our mock castrato improvisations
leaving our friends doubled over, shrieking
with delight. It was midway through
the 1950s, and we were pure, flawless
products of the American century.
These sudden intruders seemed normal
enough until their talking hands betrayed
them or a skein of inarticulate sounds
escaped their mouths and marked them
as clearly as the Negro cleaning women
blue-black as used oil who shuffled tiredly
up and down the sidewalks of our segregated
neighborhood. When the deaf boys began
to move in on our girlfriends we fought
them after school, their fists to our surprise
articulate, their hatred eloquent.
Our teachers tried to help us torture
our fingers into meaningful figures
of truce, but in our lexicon it was treason
to speak to the enemy so we pressed on
and finally succeeded in driving them back
to wherever the deaf belonged.
At home, on another front, war lingered.
Some nights that year I’d stuff wads of cotton
deep into my ears to keep from hearing
the ack-ack of bitter words below,
or I’d muffle the sounds of ambush, hiding
beneath the headset of my crystal radio
and listening to rock n’ roll on a station
in distant Del Rio, Texas, which advertised
autographed pictures of Jesus Christ.
On such nights I sometimes wished
I could be like one of those kids
we had vanquished, adrift on a stream of
silence, free of the collateral damage
of words. Before sleep, when I prayed
my rote mechanical Now I Lay Me, part
of my heart already believed in a God
who must be deaf, or too far removed
to read the world’s lips, or just
too stubborn to give us a sign.
My Father’s Hands
My father’s hands, both of them, lacked
fingertips and nails. The fingers were elliptic,
pink, and smooth, no telltale prints
for him to leave as clues at crime scenes
for prying forensic eyes. I used to lie
awake nights and try to imagine the moment:
his hands, masculine and whole, holding
the dynamite caps out an open window to show
his friends below. Those hands,
about to explode and leave him exposed
mimosa-like to the world, unable to learn
the simplest alphabet of touch, unable to play
a game of catch with his sons. Is that why
he turned to tools, the feel of cold, hard,
unreciprocating steel, the pliant, undemanding
attitude of wood? How often I tracked him
down to his basement shop and saw his tapered
stumps bleeding, his eyes fierce slits through squall
clouds of cigarette smoke, his lathe
raving like a crazed evangelist coercing
miracles from crippled and knotted planks
of pine. When the stroke routed language
from his brain, we could always find him
on trips to Wal-mart pacing the aisles in Tools,
his pared fingers in silent conversation
with sets of chisels and drill bits and clamps.
In his casket, no longer able to hide with sleights
of hand his scarred fingers now dovetailed together,
he smiled. That smile, wired and screwed
into place, bore the slightest trace of pride.
As if, like Noah, he rode the rising waters of his death
in a fine ark of his own making, all gopher wood
and sealed with the purest pitch of darkness.
—Published in New Letters
Alien Sex
I stood on the porch that night,
the lights from a parent's car just vanishing
at the end of the street. My friend and I
had been to a movie, It Came From
Outer Space. Above me, the stars
had lost their innocence. My block
throbbed with threats from distant galaxies.
Because I was late, I entered the house
quietly, hoping to sneak unnoticed upstairs.
All seemed normal enough for the usual
Saturday night of too much drinking—
My parents, asleep, he in his chair
in front of the guttering television screen,
she splayed out on the studio couch
in a nearby room. How quickly
the known world can turn strange.
I knew what it was when I saw it
on the living room floor. I had swiped
them from Crown Drugs and filled them
with water to ambush passing cars. This one,
viscous, lay damply coiled on the rug
like the sloughed husk of a newborn alien
that must have streaked from deepest space
even as my friend and I hunkered down
in the Southtown Theater's three-dimensional
darkness. My brain, agitated,
could come to only two conclusions,
one so fantastic my mind refused
the gross picture it posed. The only credible
way to explain it: Extraterrestrials.
Either way, I had no choice but to destroy
the evidence, picking the sticky chrysalis
skin up with a thick wad of Kleenex
and shoving it deep in the kitchen trash
right alongside my own astonishment.
Upstairs, I tried hard to distract myself
with prayer, but that wet rubber
crackled in my mind's air like static
and there was no getting through
that night to the starry kingdom of God.
Next morning at breakfast, I studied them
carefully through my new 3-D glasses,
my father in profile with his coffee
and Sunday paper, Mother a bit
groggy at the stove, tending
pans of bacon and eggs. Nothing
amiss: no telltale scales on his hands,
no saw-toothed tail switching beneath
her gossamer robe. All through breakfast
I stayed vigilant, my eyes as sharp
as Flash Gordon's, my mind hyper
with the ammo of fight or flight.
After breakfast I planned to search
in our backyard for the crater, the mother ship
I knew it would contain.
I would bravely destroy the invaders.
Then it would be my most solemn duty
to inform the world: From now on
here, on Planet Earth, things would never,
ever again be the same.
—Published in Sugar House Review