Blessed as We Were Read online

  loyalty because someone misspelled a word

  or didn’t speak French or never had stood with his hand

  under his chin supporting the elbow with one

  middle finger in front of a gorgeous old

  Simone Martini painted on mountain pine;

  and this is what Amos taught, that you should rebuke

  all liars, straddlers, and accommodators,

  all paper rats, all priests with castanets,

  and all their scoffing, indifference and silence,

  that you should obstruct them and even intervene,

  and you should remove the wall and you should grow

  your own lilac and you should kiss on the mouth;

  dried-out marsh grass, dead lilies, August roses.

  Night

  If only the bell keeps him alive though that is

  an odd way of looking at his new life, then

  missing an hour because of sleep or guessing the

  time and being off sometimes for two hours

  won’t be his undoing, not that alone, though it is

  hard to attach yourself to a new lover

  and learn how she smooths her dress down or listens

  to some kind of voice there or to her own silence

  which he also listens to hour after hour,

  sometimes lying there so long he thinks the cat

  has got her tongue or that the electricity

  has stopped, as in a flood, though he says to

  himself there has to be another system, a

  backup generator slow to crank up, he can even

  hear the bell slurring, or dragging, a different sound

  but reassuring nonetheless, oh more than

  that, a gift in his six-hour crisis, a melodic

  stroking, it is new to him, and hearing it when

  it is dark and he is freezing, though pleasantly,

  but lying awake, and guessing, he sometimes gets it

  right on the hour, but sometimes night has just started,

  the drunks are only coming home and he has

  four or five more hours, the sound is brief,

  forbidding, harsh, indifferent, and he is surprised that

  he has guessed wrong, a voice has wounded him, wind

  has slammed his window shut or his door but he

  just lies on his back and even opens his eyes

  in the dark, for that is a life too, and he turns

  to one side or the other and hangs onto something,

  a chair, a windowsill, and waits for the next

  shocking stroke and sometimes he changes pillows.

  Drowning on the Pamet River

  Because of the pull I ended up swimming in the grasses

  a hundred yards from nowhere my beloveds

  ready to jump in after me a black willow

  rushing in to save me—my kind of dolphin—you

  think I struggled a yard at a time but I was

  nudged a little that’s why my lips were red

  instead of blue that’s why I had the words

  to “The Dipsy Doodle” still on my tongue and I was

  waltzing under your huge white towel your bathrobe

  over my head hot tea already burning

  my throat that’s why I loved the two Labradors

  so much that’s why I kissed you so desperately.

  Mexican

  for A.M.M.

  By holding the mirror above my head your face

  was tilted just enough so that the light

  came in between the window and the tree

  and half the clouds were shining and by twisting

  one way then the other first the rays,

  though beaten into the tin, half rose above

  the painted bricks as if they came from your eyes

  and not the other way around and second

  your hair changed color since there was red somewhere

  and light was the cause, although there were my wrinkles

  and there was my stubble since it was already morning,

  but when it came to that, by turning the mirror

  a little one way half my face was in shadow

  and there was a shadow under the tree, a classic

  tree shadow, perfect for robins tearing those

  living worms apart—if it was April and

  there was some air in the ground; and we were looking

  ravenous and whimsical, your right hand

  was on my shoulder and we were struggling a little

  to hold the mirror straight, for topping it off

  there was a vertical on either side and

  they were on hinges, we could close them like doors

  and cover up the center glass or we could

  move them back and forth and get a triple

  or even quadruple image, we could grieve

  three or four times at once and we could kiss

  for hours if we held the doors just so,

  and it was a kind of relief that we would miss

  the lavender rising over the city—you would

  call it purple anyhow, you would fight me

  on blues, I know—and it was almost a pleasure

  that we would miss the thaw, the river rising

  and fog and pneumonia and gardens turning red

  in the wrong season and ice melting and mud

  wherever we walked and lightning storms without

  the sound of thunder as if we were deaf and nights

  so warm the phoebes were terrified and titmice

  were starting to hunt for grasses while we made love.

  Paris

  As I recall the meal I ate was liver

  with mashed potatoes, and out of simple courtesy

  I kept what I could in my briefcase or half hidden

  under the table; I think an Underwood brought me

  two months’ free living and the Polish architect

  I sold it to whose teeth the Germans had smashed

  at Auschwitz it gave him seven months at least,

  depending on other forces. The whole thing

  lasted maybe a year for by my reckoning

  when I was ready to leave the stores were already

  full of new things and they were cleaning the bridges

  and polishing the squares. My own time

  was somewhere between the Ordeal and the Recovery,

  but there was food enough. The one thing

  I remember about him we had the same

  name in Hebrew though I don’t know what he was called

  in Polish—I hope not Gerald—we always walked

  after lunch and stopped for coffee. By my

  reckoning he was in his forties. I went

  to Italy on that money, it was my first

  grant, a little hopeless by later standards,

  but that only made it easier to practice

  deprivation—in one or two years—ketchup

  with beans, seven pounds of lamb for a dollar,

  bread eight cents a loaf. It was

  more loyal that way, I was so stubborn I did it

  ten years too long, maybe twenty, it was

  my only belief, what I went there for.

  Already April

  The second day in a row I watched the same

  untrimmed drooping woody forsythia

  for I was thinking of getting ready, though this time

  I couldn’t find the shirt I wanted or even

  one dry chair to sit on though I found

  a violet for my hair for I was lucky,

  counting the first ten houses south of the creek,

  and no one had a stump that huge and yellow

  poison frothing like that and white moths drowning

  in what they thought was soup, and no one studied

  the obituaries like that or scattered petals

  when he walked through the geese and calmed them down

  by talking to the bowleg
ged guards and whispering

  something from before the war half almost

  joyous half ironic given the fact that

  it was already April and no one I loved had

  died since early November and this year the bush

  turned yellow much too soon, it was so hot

  so early, I almost felt cheated, the zone I’m in,

  north of Trenton and south of Allentown,

  I had been so ashamed and outmaneuvered.

  March 27

  The hat he bought in 1949 for

  fifty cents, he knew it for sure, the scarf

  in 1950, for fourteen cents, he planted

  his beans three inches apart, two inches deep,

  and put a worm in every two holes for he was

  giving back and for this purpose he carried

  a twenty-ounce can without a label though it had

  probably housed asparagus tips or even

  French-cut beans itself, and that should be coming

  full cycle, and he would get on his knees for that and

  let the water take him where it had to, he

  was where he wanted to be, his shirt cost a quarter,

  his pants cost eighty cents, but that was before

  the legs were covered with mud; the can was rusty

  and both of his hands were red, he was on a hill

  down from the cheap mulberry, the birch

  was in a corner by itself, his shoulder

  was getting tender but he had fifty more worms

  to go—or a hundred—he used a stick and he would

  stay there at least an hour—swelling or no swelling—

  and he would finish his scraping, God or no God.

  August 20–21

  In the age of loosestrife

  a man walked down then up on the waterway

  overwhelmed by the basic weeds in August which

  having their last chance they stopped disguising

  and flowered one more time he thought though he

  may just as well have been thinking of the briefcase,

  the first time in six or seven years,

  and what it had inside as well as the smoothness

  since it was calfskin and a gift from his son

  to boot, which broke his heart, and past two small

  roses of Sharon, one of the plants which gave him

  endless pleasure, ridiculously on the bank of

  the waterways as if they somehow were wild,

  and weeds to boot, though he knew where they came from and

  where the mother was planted, he had walked there so

  much and by the color of the flower he

  could identify it too exactly the same as

  the one up north, exactly the same as the one

  behind his outhouse in central Pennsylvania, though

  they came in purple too, they must have been planted

  to hold the soil down, to give some color, for

  now he realized how far what he called the mother was

  planted, near some locusts, near an iron fence,

  and one of the locusts was eighty feet high, the trunk

  was covered with poison ivy almost as far as

  the first fork, and on his way back he stopped

  by the dusty cornflowers for he was beleaguered and only

  blue could help him though they were almost dead,

  the way they get, and he was worn out and had to

  force himself a little when he got up

  from his chair, he found himself rocking for leverage,

  it was a kind of joke, and it was funny, the

  flag next door, a striped green and brown disc,

  and next to that, two houses down, a faded

  American, with fifty states, all those who

  live near rivers display their flags, it is

  the jauntiness, not the patriotism, he has

  lost so many things, now he is losing

  souls, the New York Times keeps track of that,

  here is the carrot, here is the snowflake ragweed

  he hung on another fork, it is weird that

  one day it’s in the business section, one day

  it’s in the Metro, here he is strewing his sage

  and here he is strewing his coneflower, there’s a daisy

  and he doesn’t know what it stands for though he strews it

  more than he does the others, everyone has

  his own water, sore decayer, he stands

  above the spillway and he walks back as he did

  a thousand times, the pain is in his knee,

  he loves the wetness, he hates the violent sneezing.

  This Life

  for A.M.M.

  Mostly I opened my napkin with a flair

  and held my two hands neatly in my lap

  or tapped the spoon as if I were deep in thought,

  and once or twice I worked on a small fish

  until the bones were free of almost everything

  resembling this life for I was against corruption

  of any kind and I ate pears and apples

  until I almost exploded, and on my way

  to Sarah Lawrence College in early September,

  1997, I broke a white cloud in

  half, through one of my open windows and watched

  it change two times before I was over the bridge,

  struggling to see in my mirror, and I would have given

  you your half except it was gone in a minute,

  just like the phlox I gave you and the rose

  that turned to dust when I touched it; mostly I drove

  close to the side of the road for I was careful

  of all the exits and I turned at the last

  second or I would have drifted through God knows what

  blocks of pure Spanish with my Italian lips

  looking for north and slowing down my guess is

  at every corner and breathing a little since water

  was gone from my life—or would have been gone—if I hadn’t

  found my exit, and I could concentrate now

  on whether the petals were evenly dispersed

  and whether the leaves were shiny or not and what

  loves acid and what is hairy and what is lacy

  and when it is good for eating and should you drink it

  and if it was streaked with green or spotted with purple

  and if it was sweet and vernal, the cloud I gave you.

  Snowdrop

  There had to be more than one day of rain

  and temperatures in the fifties, but even more

  there had to be a letup for us to go out

  with one umbrella between the four of us

  and give up our argument for a minute

  for one of us even to notice; and since she

  came from one zone north of us and there was

  a catch in her voice when she bent down we stopped

  short in the rain to see the green unlacing

  the white, of all places in zone six,

  where half our ideas come from and umbrellas

  are used with a vengeance; though as I remember

  it was more like a cry and so loving that

  I was a little jealous, and when she touched me,

  and her way is a hand on the back, loverly

  the way she gets, I coughed for comfort and even

  the purple stones were a comfort, the way they bulge

  like buttresses, and since the mournful Chow,

  of all the dogs that ruined our walk, only stared

  and if he barked it was almost silent we had

  time in between to look at the white sycamores

  and balance wood with water and hate umbrellas.

  Last Blue

  You want to get the color blue right,

  just drink some blue milk from a blue cup;

  wait for the blue light of morning

  or evening
with its blue aftermath.

  You want to understand,

  look at the parking lines outside my window,

  the neon moon outside Jabberwocky’s.

  And funk! You have to know funk.

  A touch of blue at the base of the spine;

  long threads going into your heart;

  a steaming fountain you pour into your own bowl.

  My dead sister’s eyes!

  Those of her porcelain twin at the Lambertville Flea,

  twenty dollars a day for the small table,

  all the merde you need to get you across the river.

  And one kind of blue for a robin’s egg;

  and one kind of blue for a bottle of ink.

  Two minds to fathom the difference.

  Your earrings which as far as I can see

  are there as much to play with as to look at.

  Your blue pencil

  which makes your eyes Egyptian. Bluebells, bluebirds,

  from Austin, Texas, the dead hackster

  who drank potassium, Governor Bush

  who drank milk of magnesia; a chorus of saints

  from Wylie Avenue and one kind of blue

  for my first prayer shawl and one kind of blue for the robe

  Fra Lippo gave to Mary. Blue from Mexico

  and blue from Greece, that’s where the difference lay

  between them, in the blues; a roomful of scholars,

  in Montreal one year, in New York another,

  that is blue, blue was their speech, blue

  were their male and female neckties, their food was blue,

  their cars were rented, Christmas lights

  were in the lobby, one of the bars had peanuts

  in all the urns and on the upper floors

  the hospitality rooms were crowded with livid

  sapphire cobalt faces—I was blue

  going into the tunnel, I am blue every night

  at three or four o’clock; our herring was blue,

  we ate it with Russian rye and boiled potatoes,

  and in the summer fresh tomatoes, and coffee

  mixed with sugar and milk; I sat in a chair

  so close to Sonny Terry I could hear

  him mumble, the criticism he made

  of his own sorrow, but I was that close to Pablo

  Casals in 1950, talk about blue, and

  though I left it a thousand times I stood—

  since I didn’t have a seat—in front of an open

  window of Beth Israel in Philadelphia