He reads my latest attempt at a poem and is silent for a long time, until it feels like that night we waited for Apollo, my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking, Haven't they landed yet? At last Dugan throws it on the table and says, This reads like a cheap detective novel and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits, naked and white, with everyone's eyes running over it. The week before he'd said I had a problem with time, that in my poems everything kept happening at once. In 1969, the voice of Mission Control told a man named Buzz that there was a bunch of guys turning blue down here on Earth, and now I can understand it was with anticipation, not sickness. Next, Dugan says, Let's move on. The attempted poem was about butterflies and my recurring desire to return to a place I've never been. It was inspired by reading this in a National Geographic: monarchs stream northward from winter roosts in Mexico, laying their eggs atop milkweed to foster new generations along the way. With the old monarchs gone (I took this line as the title) and all ties to the past ostensibly cut the unimaginable happens--butterflies that have never been to that plateau in Mexico roost there the next winter. . . .I saw this as a metaphor for a childhood I never had, until Dugan pointed out that metaphor has been dead for a hundred years. A woman, new to the workshop, leans behind his back and whispers, I like it, but the silence is seamless, as deep as outer space. That night in 1969 I could turn my head from the television and see the moon filling the one pane over the bed completely as we waited for Neil Armstrong to leave his footprints all over it.
la colera de pobre tiene dos rios contra muchos mares. — César Vallejo
Vallejo wrote that with God we are all orphans. I send $22 a month to a kid in Ecuador so starvation keeps moving on its bony burro past his door—no cars, computers, basketball shoes—not a bottle cap of hope for the life ahead . . . just enough to keep hunger shuffling by in a low cloud of flies. It’s the least I can do, and so I do it.
I have followed the dry length of Mission Creek to the sea and forgotten to pray for the creosote, the blue salvia, let alone for pork bellies, soy bean futures. Listen. There are 900 thousand Avon Ladies in Brazil. Billions are spent each year on beauty products world-wide—28 billion on hair care, 14 on skin conditioners, despite children digging on the dumps, selling their kidneys, anything that is briefly theirs. 9 billion a month for war in Iraq, a chicken bone for foreign aid. I am the prince of small potatoes, I deny them nothing who come to me beseeching the crusts I have to give. I have no grounds for complaint, though deep down, where it’s anyone’s guess, I covet everything that goes along with the illustrious— creased pants as I stroll down the glittering boulevard, a little aperitif beneath Italian pines. But who cares what I wear, or drink? The rain? No, the rain is something we share—it devours the beginning and the end.
The old stars tumble out of their bleak rooms like dice— Box Cars, Snake Eyes, And-The-Horse-You-Rode-In-On . . . not one metaphorical bread crumb in tow. Not a single Saludo! from the patronizers of the working class—Pharaoh Oil, Congress, or The Commissioner of Baseball—all who will eventually take the same trolley car to hell, or a slag heap on the outskirts of Cleveland. I have an ATM card, AAA Plus card. I can get cash from machines, be towed 20 miles to a service station. Where do I get off penciling in disillusionment? My bones are as worthless as the next guy’s against the stars, against the time it takes light to expend its currency across the cosmic vault. I have what everyone has— the over-drawn statement of the air, my blood newly rich with oxygen before the inescapable proscenium of the dark, my breath going out equally with any atom of weariness or joy, each one of which is closer to God than I.
I was in the barber’s chair in the basement of Carnegie Hall hanging with Tchaikovsky, the evening’s guest conductor and a solid cat.
He was telling me Montezuma “quaffed” a hot mix of chocolate and chili peppers from a gold chalice fifty times daily.
I told him I was embarrassed by the women at the supermarket who gave out free food samples, who wore the fear that I would stop and speak to them like an apron.
Peter Ilyich told me that lightning strikes generated heat greater than the sun’s.
I told him, from the side of my pinched lathery mouth, that I felt the desire of the boys bagging groceries to be anywhere else like a hairnet about my temples.
He told me that in remote China relatives buried things imagined as useful to the corpse in the afterlife with their beloved, and so dead unmarried women commanded high dowries.
“What if these grave-mates knew each other in life and bristled,” he said, “what if they would have loved this?”
I told him about the guy at the end of the conveyor belt who called me, called everybody, hotrod.
I told him, Tchaikovsky, that he, the bagger and car enthusiast, told me, the ringleader, he worried about me.
I said that can’t be true, can it?
The conductor strode to the high window, pointed south. “There at the cloudy top,” he said, “of the tallest edifices, men will build dirigible stations, and men,” he said, “will ride in wheelhouses to work, guy ropes whipping beneath the gangway in the breeze. ”
I told him that when I was in the supermarket my new sobriety fit like a wool suit in summer, that while looking at cans it hit me that what I’ve lost, what I’ve given away, are the same.
The horoscope says disaster is coming. The weatherman
Says rain. Garbage trucks go about their dirty business
Not caring either way. What message did you want
To leave? Who did you say was calling?
There are traditions for such things. One of them says
There is no tradition; it's been saying so forever.
Another says the form repeats itself; just stick around.
Music needs no subject, but one always turns up
Unexpectedly, dragging its trashy story,
A human figure, a woman, her dress black under streetlights.
Look at her: she just got off a bus from nowhere,
Her face shining with sweat. Or has the storm rolled in?
You'll need a bone saw, and a skull chisel, a scalpel and scissors. You'll need toothed forceps, a basin of water— you'll need time. But even with the tools, even with a silvery light flickering on all that metal, it will be difficult to detach the eggs from the branches, the fiery dreams from your sleep.
It's love that knuckles down, that struggles to tell the tumor from the bright idea, paring memory to bone and turning truth into something better than monument. There will be months and years when you can't see, a gauzy past in the air and no light. Then one day the flock lifts.
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