Crush, Ada Limón

Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can’t
really eat them. Or you
wouldn’t want to. If you grab
the soft skin with your fist
it somehow feels funny,
like you’ve been here
before and uncomfortable,
too, like you’d rather
squish it between your teeth
impatiently, before spitting
the soft parts back up
to linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.

Naturally, I’m also flipping back and forth between his stories on the side and I’m just effervescent with the thrill of all this subcutaneous nuance. Earnestly. Though I’m never sure if it’s a good or bad thing to know the exact circumstances in a writer’s life that informs his work.

It’s so funny to me hearing about writers who didn’t hate every word they ever said. Cheever was one of those whose gift was simply fact. He wrote quickly and then sent it off to sea without too much terror, reasoning that a good story moved along like a brisk walk or something and it was his lack of preciousness which imparted that same quality in his work. f u.

Something dark in me says, “How nice that must be for you.” Of course, then I should understand how his self-loathing was just anatomically different than mine; I’ve got the brain and he’s got the crotch. And when I think about it that way, I even feel a drip of gratitude for my condition.

Did you catch that? How I just likened myself to Cheever? Normally I’d do anything to obscure that lack of humility, but it’s fun to try ‘writing like a man.’ Hopefully my hubris, should I really let it soak up some sunlight over this experiment, is more Cheevy and less Kerouac. Though I guess this is quite literally “typing, not writing.”

Anyway, Dotty and John. There is a lot of silence in their stories, the heavy kind, but they’re very different, these silences. Dot has this surging ache running just under the surface like little capillaries. The shape of her words makes me think of a fit man with a clean shave and a white undershirt, but the way they feel to read is like watching from across the street a man chase after a bus. He runs after it waving, frantic enough to manage only gestures and no shouting, abruptly losing his clip as the thing turns a corner up ahead. (That is Kartina’s ’saddest thing,’ and it is sooo good.)

Elsewhere, the Cheev exists in a universe where everyone must anesthetize themselves away from the yawning void of an aesthetic life lived mediocrely. The world ends when some consequence of their mechanized inattention comes to head. Bummers, all around.

Obviously, they both loved Flaubert. That’s something if you do not implicitly understand, I cannot explain to you why.

I was thinking about this because of the enormous similarities between Parker’s “Mr. Dumont” and Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight.” I have to admit to you that their central character, whatever kind of limpid, impassive devil this is, is not someone I think I’ve ever met in person. On the other hand, I’m the only person I know with health insurance and that’s because my parents pay for it out of love and terror. It’s possible that I’ve just never toured their natural habitat of adulthood. Or, alternately, he represents a stark coldness you will sometimes get startled by in some people, people who appear to be deeply loved by those around them. The kind of man who does not appreciate complexity.

I am exhausted by the incessant, noisy drunk-talk inside my own head, though. This is the sort of boring vanity that muscles all practical thought out of its way, so I am unhappy giving it any more space or time. The point is this: if Dorothy Parker had allowed herself the certainty which she envied in the men who surrounded her, would she have haunted us with her gravity the same way Cheever does?

Wouldn’t you like to know?

And then there’s poetry. I do this thing. I don’t especially like this thing I do, but I do it. I save poems. I keep the ones I love the most to myself and I give them away in secret. They’re reserved for deliberate moments and deliberate people. I’m sure it’s some sort of vanity. I guess it’s a particularly flattering light you catch when you’ve aided in the discovery of something great.

So, knowing that, this is my favorite(favoritefavorite) love poem. It’s not an obscure one, maybe you’ve read it before. It’ll kill you all over again. Keep it only half a secret.

Mon Semblable, Stephen Dunn

I like things my way
every chance I get.
A limit doesn’t exist

when it comes to that.
But please, don’t confuse
what I say with honesty.

Isn’t honesty the open yawn
the unimaginable love
more than truth?

Anonymous among strangers
I look for those
with hidden wings,

and for scars
that those who once had wings
can’t hide.

Though I know it’s unfair,
I reveal myself
one mask at a time.

Does this appeal to you,
such slow disclosures,
a lifetime perhaps

of almost knowing one another?
I would hope you, too,
would hold something back,

and that you’d always want
whatever unequal share
you had style enough to get.

Altruism is for those
who can’t endure their desires.
There’s a world

as ambiguous as a moan,
a pleasure moan
our earnest neighbors

might think a crime.
It’s where we could live.
I’ll say I love you,

which will lead, of course,
to disappointment,
but those words unsaid

poison every next moment.
I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone ever has.

My Father’s Wedding, Robert Bly

1924

Today, lonely for my father, I saw
a log, or branch,
long, bent, ragged, bark gone.
I felt lonely for my father when I saw it.
It was the log
that lay near my uncle’s old milk wagon.

Some men live with a limp they don’t hide,
stagger, or drag
a leg. Their sons often are angry.
Only recently I thought:
Doing what you want …
Is that like limping? Tracks of it show in sand.

Have you seen those giant bird-
men of Bhutan?
Men in bird masks, with pig noses, dancing,
teeth like a dog’s, sometimes
dancing on one bad leg!
They do what they want, the dog’s teeth say that.

But I grew up without dog’s teeth,
showed a whole body,
left only clear tracks in sand.
I learned to walk swiftly, easily,
no trace of a limp.
I even leaped a little. Guess where my defect is!

Then what? If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
somebody has to limp it. Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

On my father’s wedding day,
no one was there
to hold him. Noble loneliness
held him. Since he never asked for pity
his friends thought he
was whole. Walking alone he could carry it.

He came in limping. It was a simple
wedding, three
or four people. The man in black,
lifting the book, called for order.
And the invisible bride
stepped forward, before his own bride.

He married the invisible bride, not his own.
In her left
breast she carried the three drops
that wound and kill. He already had
his bark-like skin then,
made rough especially to repel the sympathy

he longed for, didn’t need, and wouldn’t accept.
So the Bible’s
words are read. The man in black
speaks the sentence. When the service
is over, I hold him
in my arms for the first time and the last.

After that he was alone
and I was alone.
Few friends came; he invited few.
His two-story house he turned
into a forest,
where both he and I are the hunters.

Addiction to perfection, as Marian Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation. Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden. Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective or soiled.

What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers? That is a good question for garden makers.

No matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
           -Rilke

(from Iron John, by Robert Bly)

– from here

It’s a matter of timing, really. And of restraint. Art that cares for slowness feels like the intake of breath.

Sometimes, it is literally just that. One of the most memorable, iconic American punch-lines of all time was in a Jack Benny radio broadcast from the 40’s, when a thug corners Jack, a notorious skinflint, in a dark alley on his walk home. The thug says, “Your money or your life,” and you hear nothing but the shifting of the studio audience until they erupt in laughter. He says it again. “Look bud, I said your money or your life!” Jack finally responds, unslaked and gruff, as if rudely interrupted mid-thought: “I’m thinking it over!”  To risk playing with silence inside a joke is also to risk being received by it, so not many people dare.

Sometimes silence is more understated. Comedy is easier, it gives a nod to its own anxiety, but not everything does. Hardly anybody seems to believe they have the patience for it, not in what they create or take in, but I think it just takes a minute to readjust. Sit and be slow with something. I think of silence as kind of this admission of failure; what can communicate the whole of this thing? For me, great art does not feel the need to or that it even can. It doesn’t want to micro-manage the imagination. Space, a silence where you may pour yourself inside a work ,unfolds for not just the actor, but the witness. It transcends ego. It becomes something you share. “Poor tools require better skills.”

I mean, how many stories can you really tell?

my sweet old etcetera, e.e. cummings

my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting

for,
my sister

Isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds)of socks not to
mention fleaproof earwarmers
etcetera wristers etcetera, my
mother hoped that

i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)

Download: Luciano Berio, Dieter Mack & George Crumb’s Music For a Summer Evening

Body, Marilyn Krysl

My body is too many children, they are all hungry at once.  As I write this one of them bangs my thigh with a doll.  I say, Stop that! But my body is headstrong.  When it doesn’t get its way it throws a tantrum.  Once it kicked a wall and broke three toes.  In winter it sulks because it can’t fly.  And some days it won’t put on its clothes no matter where we’re going.  It gets oily and sweats and sits in its mess, breathing, and I have to wash and comb it patiently and sing it little songs, and then it goes to the party

without me.  I come later, alone.  I tell it it’s going to regret all that beaujolais.  But my body is defiant, has another glass, and another, gets roaring.  The next afternoon I have to phone and apologize.  I say, Please excuse my body.  There is no excuse for its conduct, but now it regrets the greedy gobbling of hors d’oeuvres, those lies about your gracious wife.  Then I march it to the mirror in the bathroom and I make myself stern and say sharply, I’m ashamed of you!  When are you going to grow up? And my body hangs its head.  But I’m suspicious.  Should I trust it?

When we have a dentist appointment my body hangs back.  I am cheery.  Be brave, I tell it.  But my body is nervous, makes excuses.  Then I have to say, Act your age!  This is disgraceful! It starts to sniffle, to grovel, to beg, If only, it says.  In the end I drag it to the car.  Slam the door and rev the motor.  Some day I’ll wash my hands of you, I say.

Then one night it sits down on the bed, strokes the cat.  Is anything wrong?  The cat jumps off, my body lies down, stares at the ceiling.  And now I understand that it is sad.  The other body it wants to be loved by has flown off to Bermuda with the redhaired stewardess, and now my body says it wants to die.  So I sit down beside it.  Wouldn’t you like to go for a walk? I ask.  Shall I get you a glass of cold water?  Want me to brush your hair? But it turns away.  Is it weeping?

It is weeping.  Now its eyes are red, its face splotched, it is ugly.  What can I say—it gives me pleasure and grief, and now it is weary, so heavy, its face sags, it doesn’t care about the mirror anymore.  It doesn’t care about the public or about politics.  It doesn’t love music or admire the plastic arts.  It is tired, it has stopped pretending.  I will go out quietly and let it sleep.

Touch Me, Stanley Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
     and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Poetry is anything but impenetrable.  Isn’t that amazing?

I Go Back to May 1937, Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

(see Sharon Olds read this poem)