Love, Life, Death
The Body Acts
The body acts, rests, speaks, sleeps in scenes.
Whatever tasks it trains its eyes and hands
To undertake, the body knows it means
Something. Scratched on slate of the mind, it scans.
Love draws desire from the indifferent eye,
Whose prehensile impulse turns to lust.
But love’s no more than this swift urge, by trust
Transformed into upsurging self-reply.
Two bodies, then, become one flesh when each
Gives freely what the other else would take
By force of eye, ideogram, or speech,
Seeking, on pleasure given, joy to stake.
Lust’s nets net the fisher beyond his reach.
Love, like poetry, is what we make.
Toys put Away
In your house, when we arrive,
the toys are put away in bins.
The floors are swept, the plants alive,
the oven cleansed of all its sins.
Unexpected spic and span
turn secular to sanctified.
Revisiting this antique land,
we, too, get tidy and tongue-tied.
The restoration so complete—
where are the ruins we recall?
Approaching storms of little feet
bring destruction down the hall.
Tired
1
Comes from nowhere, this swaybacking jar,
breaking cords. Tipped over puppet—you can
hear, murmuring, a voice that lives
in the house of intentions
and opens the front door to darkness,
stepping out and into it
to announce a never-will. Tired
of me, tired of me tired
of you—attired in urgency,
tires spinning.
2
When you stopped,
the world didn't.
If you steer yourself in the current,
perhaps you can ride
the vortices.
If you can't, get ready
to get
sucked down.
3
Silence in the house.
Outside the closed window, leaves
wheel and exchange words.
It Takes
--for Rosalee
It takes.
It takes her.
It takes you.
It takes us all.
We wanted another . . . what?
We don’t even know.
The words come out,
from somewhere:
another meal.
another pair of shoes.
another husband.
another moment with Cervantes.
An other life.
Worse when it lingers
there, in the doorway,
tearing our eyes away
from the window full of light.
Worst of all when it can’t get in,
busy signing papers
at the dispatcher’s desk.
By then we don’t want anything
except to leave.
It takes.
It takes us all.
It takes us all
to give enough to fill
the hole it leaves.
Will we ever be done giving?
Would we want to be?
William E. Hamilton, with Two Meditations
At the Hope, NJ, Christmas Fair,
along the wall at the back of the gym,
behind a velveteen-draped table displaying
twig-antlered ornaments and holly-print potholders, sat
a plump little woman in an oh-by-gosh-by-golly green sweater
with regimental snowflakes marching around her midriff.
She must have been sixty, perhaps older—near my age.
As soon as I broke the rim of sight, the eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses
caught mine, like a heat-seeking missile,
prompting the nod preceding polite questions,
touching and examining—all the preliminaries
to compliments in lieu of cash before the meandering holiday shopper moves on.
She had me figured out and stayed seated,
as if daring me to buy something.
They were about to drive me off, those defiant eyes,
and then I saw the flat open box of wooden pens.
There weren’t many—less than a dozen, sleek as icons,
nestled in gray plush and surrounded by recesses—
empty niches in a vandalized church
where statues of saints once offered intercession.
No two were alike—rosewood, ash, maple, oak-burl, some with laminated stripes
of ivory from a world before elephants began migrating over the horizon of extinction.
This one was made from a Martin guitar no longer playable, she told me,
and this yellow one—what was the name of that exotic wood? She couldn’t remember.
“My husband made them, on his lathe,” she said. “He died last June.”
A good story to sell pens with. I bought two.
As she took my money I asked his name, since I’d be living with them now
and making them speak. “William E. Hamilton,” she said.
I wanted to ask, was she was selling them all?
Wouldn’t she keep even one to remember him by?
But her eyes replied before I could ask.
“I remember him too well, and when the day comes that I don’t,
what’ll be the point of keeping these?”
First Meditation
Making it speak:
they knew how to use a lathe.
Their chisels gleamed from pegboard walls.
they swept up at the end of each day.
They saw the guitar hidden deep in the tree
and the grain in the broken guitar.
The dummy’s there to distract you
from the other pair of lips
that doesn’t move.
Second Meditation
If few are fit, it’s mostly those
close enough to touch,
and make suffer.
Relent.
Or stay in the basement
after supper is cold,
building birdhouses
for others to disperse
and forget.
Old Boots
It was two o'clock, but the sun was already low
as we headed down a different way.
By now, a January thaw had turned
the breathless streams of our ascent
to brawling tenors,
and the snow dimpled
over ice-bridges full of melting tracks.
You halted us at the edge,
jabbed for rocks with your telescoping poles.
“Step here, and here,” you said, torsioning back
to point them out.
At the next crossing, I ventured first—
“If it holds me it will hold you.”
Fathers should lead.
When I went through the ice, a long time
passed before I heard the scrape
of snowshoes on rock and knew
I would stop sinking.
Miraculous fibers keep the water out,
even when it's up to your waist.
But my boots were old and cracked.
The water crept into them, pulling me down.
I heard you tell me not to move,
and then you dragged me out across the ice
by my shirt-collar.
This trek was your gift, snowshoeing
up to the ravine where every winter,
with friends, you skied the headwall,
while your mother and I imagined horrors.
At the trailhead lodge we’d had breakfast
with the wilderness medicine trainees.
They were learning to heal and save
in an uninhabitable world:
avalanche, fracture, frost-bite, hypothermia.
How to cross a snow-slope, or an icy stream.
We'd left them to their lessons
down in the Notch.
The ravine was empty, overcast.
The quiet cradled our voices before they went out.
You pointed uphill at the lid of clouds.
“The headwall’s up there.” I saw
gray nothing.
We ate under a house-sized rock
whose reflected heat had scooped out
seats from the snow-pack.
We saw the clouds lift.
The blue ice of the headwall floated out
showing crevices like staves of—Bruckner?
One of that destiny-
stricken generation.
I cannot think who, now.
Driving home we made up the delays.
Traffic was light. You let me drive.
Under our intermittent talk,
radio voices stumbled, disappeared,
and staticky melodies gave way
one to the next.
Leaving the Island
--“You will come back!”
On the island, there are rituals.
Three times a day,
people crowd the jetty and prophesy.
Three times the receding decks reply,
“We will come back!”
Some will not come back.
A few even know this,
shunning the rail for a windy foredeck,
or a convivial table indoors.
The disappointed will not come back,
the distant sojourners,
the dying.
We chant to make the moment repeat.
But a moment will come that does not repeat,
that opens up like a gift-box
lined with earth or water,
inside which is
nothing--
not even a box-shaped space.
Today the earth comes back
to where we left last year.
A time will come
when even it will not come
back.
A time will come
when you will not come
back,
when I will not come
back.
Come back.
Come back,
remember, and so keep
coming back,
to when we first stood on the jetty and watched
those crowded rails vanishing
over an open sea.
My Father
married my mother,
built his house,
mowed his lawn,
ran his store.
Was not ashamed of his faith or his grammar,
and never cared for beauty.
Beauty. Enough of that. No more.
He called no man boss.
And when his kids were grown and gone
and had forgotten duty,
he turned to his house,
beating the walls with his high hammer,
making one room into another,
looking for the one he lost.
De Rerum
On Commonwealth Avenue the trucks slow,
pause, idle, crowding snouts to backsides. Stacks
of new rail-line lie rusting. It’s raining.
Straight ahead I see three hours of telling
my placid class how to read rebelling
poets who died young. A case of training
ears, accustomed not to note a lack
of ragged rhythm, to hear deviation
into sense as meant, chance as vocation.
We talk of Keats’s odes and lines reframed
in correspondence, considering love,
a woman, “a tune of Mozart,” above
the steady hum of drops that fall straight down.
(Do you, I wonder, in another town,
book perhaps before blank eyes, hear raining,
too, random as a fistful of dropped tacks?)
“Mozart will do”—the notes yoked tight, lean, black,
that rivet rails to pitch and time and pace.
After class, I stand at the stop, in place;
the windless drops strike predestined puddles.
Old tracks have slowed the train. My mind begins
to drift along the rails—like a bow
wandering on unstopped strings, it skims
a tremulous discord. Some occasion
of serendipity, of the muddle,
first, rash, motiveless breath begets beauty—
all strictest order merely keeps the beat.
(Thus, chaos: empty air
or full of strict parallel strands of rain,
pummeling the blank slate of each brick’s brain.)
A dim light glimmers where the rails meet.
Nothing, or all things one--these are the same.
No thing to love, or no love among things.
We see the lover, hear the song where strings
touch, are touched, where strand tangles into snare,
and dereliction becomes our duty.
How could we love each other, love deserve,
how could we our pace measure, measure sing,
place or harmony observe,
did not Lucretius’ single atom swerve?
Talking about Death
When you talk about death you think of your own death.
You think of your own death the way
you imagine someone else’s.
It’s unimaginable any other way.
You’ve seen it darting across your path,
like a startled rabbit,
maybe even towards you, then veering away
toward someone else.
“There but for . . .” you think.
But for what?
Being here, not there.
Talking about death.
Talking about death
I don’t know what I’m talking about.
If I did, maybe I’d tell you
I heard a fly buzz.
Old as I am, coming nearer it,
wouldn’t you think
I’d see it more clearly?
But the years spread
like cataracts
across the line of sight.
The approaching light
turns everything dark.
The words come,
darting across my path,
or towards me, veering away
toward someone else.
family men
i'm descended from rascals and ward heelers on my mom's side and polish farmers on my dad's christmas was when i learned the difference made no difference because the damage was the same
christmas eve my mom's dad would pry himself out of his leather armchair rocker in the bedroom where the zenith black and white spoke unceasing sotto vocé he usually spared his gouty toe the grief of standing up except for adjusting the aluminum foil on the antenna and he'd put on the santa suit but only to get my grandmother to shut up already he'd done his forty years at dodgechrysler and lost a finger on the line and even if my mom was his favorite daughter can't a man be left alone to watch killer kowalski belly claw the sheik o mój Boże look the sheik bashed him over the head with a folding chair yes just now but that's only how I imagine him talking inside his head at least the beard hid the grim mouth he’d never dare to say it to her
face
and finally one year came and it was my grandmother wearing the santa suit we were never fooled no matter who wore it at least I wasn't but i was the oldest one time it was her brother the guy in with the guy in with the guy who drove the mayor around her brother limping with a cane because when he was a kid stealing coal in the rail yard to bring home to his dad he got his foot caught in a tie and a locomotive backing up cut his leg off above the knee my grandmother would tell that story as many times as we'd ask to hear it and i would remember it when we went to the rail yard to put pennies on the tracks he told everyone he went to u of m because he took an extension class there once another brother was in and out of jail a smart dresser he was her favorite
christmas afternoon we'd all five kids get in the station wagon for the drive down joseph campeau to the little triangle of streets where my dad's mom and dad lived and we'd sit in the living room with the bubbling electric candles on the tree and his dad who also worked for dodgechrysler but at a different plant looking portly and dignified in his three piece suit and delicate goldwirerimmed glasses trade the suit for overalls and ditch the glasses and he'd make half of a polish version of american gothic while the farmer's wife stayed in the kitchen where she was draining blood from a headless duck we weren't allowed to go there into an aluminum tub to make a gray soup that was a good portrait of their personalities and helped me understand later why he didn’t want to go back to poland with her to claim the land his brother had started plowing while they were making money in america even though he my grandfather promised it was just a few years well she went back and found the brother and waved the deeds at him all written in russian because of the partition and he ran her off with a pitchfork and she never stopped resenting him i mean my grandfather and never spoke to him
again
and don't get me started on how my uncle was born with a strawberry birthmark on his face which was the sign of the devil so he couldn't be the sacred secondborn son offered to god as a priest so my father who was third had to take his place but hated seminary so he enlisted and went to japan with the occupation where he met his first jew and learned what honeypots were and bought a crappy japanese rifle that he later kept in the attic with the firing pin sawed off and his old uniform he told us it was his superman suit but what i wanted to say was he went to college for a month on the g i bill but hated it as much as he hated seminary because here were all these kids two or three years younger making him look like the slow kid and met my mom and so no more priest and his mother never spoke to him again either not even when she was
dying
Through the reflections on the glass I watch the snow gusting sideways in the dark,
like the blizzard of sounds into which I was born,
the sounds becoming words that stick to each upright, leaning thing,
making it emerge.
