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Making Love at Fifty-Five
Getting a hard on has been getting harder
--Catullus (tr. Charles Martin)
We read poetry to each other when
we lie
in bed each night, deep in warm covers, awake
to soft rhythms and the hum of central air,
or we talk of children, grown up, on their own,
or what we did at work, or the latest shows
that came to town and how the cost always goes
up and still we go. Nothing else comes up
of consequence. We hold hands and whisper
that warm flesh is quite enough for now,
but that tomorrow night, even Catullus
can't amuse enough to keep our tongues moving,
(enough of that!)--I meant making idle chat.
We'll leave the bed and find the kitchen table,
throw knives and forks, napkins, plates, whatever's there
onto the floor, and, then, we'll prove age is no
bar to pleasure of the old kind when we, young
and frenetic, made hot love all night and day.
And yet, it's cool; the phone's ring, a raging cold,
something intercedes; I can't be late to work;
tonight...be ready. No, not tonight, I'll be
tired, let's read a poem, cuddle under warm
blankets, flesh to soft flesh. That will be enough,
but tomorrow, love, wait!
The Collector
I knew a murderer, a long time ago, and eyeing for eyeing
toothing for toothing--oh, yes!--murdered, in time, by the State,
a time I kept the vigil. Damned nice guy when you got to know him,
went to Killeen with him and to Vietnam, all that training, yes,
he didn't kill anyone there, didn't call hardly anyone a Gook, just
read quietly, all day, every day, unless working, listening to dots
and dashes, ditty-bops, in the commo hut, Americal Division,
2/20th, Chu Lai, Vietnam, Republic of, Calley's group. He was
gentle, with a ring of scars, ridged, on his shaved smooth scalp.
Successful guy years later, car dealership, richer than
either you or I, married, big car, very quiet, head still sunk
in books except when selling cars or buying out other auto
dealerships. A quiet dealer, poetry in his soul, he fell
from love and one day, a normal day, the kind of day when
all things being equal he would have read or reread books,
he'd become a collector--Victoriana--Browning, Tennyson,
a little Clough, and, yes, Swinburne for his wilder moments,
all the Rossetti circle, a small Whistler hanging by his desk
though he did not own a single peacock feather--warm day,
hot Texas sun blazing overhead, not like a wafer, no moment
of communion, the kind of day, when, when he has fallen out
of love and does not want to divide his art, his Tennysons,
wants his Brownings safe at Baylor, his Christina to move in,
long white dress,-- perhaps he isn't thinking straight-- he's been
trained for this, not in subtlety. He'd stopped the day before,
bought an AK-47, a magazine, gold-tipped bullets, just enough,
to do the job. It's what he's dreamed about. The scene is fresh,
and when she wanders in, he smiles, the action moves easily.
A too large pattern, he thinks, should have zeroed in. He does not
see blood spatter on the wall, hardly hears her scream. He pulls
a copy of Oenone down, fingers the dark green cloth. He thinks
he'll read a while and then go back to work. He sits in his favorite
Queen Anne chair, the Whistler near. He doesn't even know he cries.
Sestina for a Nice Guy
(from the Point of View of an Ex-Head Varsity Cheerleader)
He was truly very nice, I'd always
thought,
like that time when we, uh, almost started
to almost do something, and he stopped
and said, "Only, of course, if you feel right,"
and that kind of made me think about where
we were and what I mostly wasn't wearing.
The whole ‘nice' thing had grown suddenly wearing
and with all the skin that I was baring, I thought
perhaps, oh, by the lake, in the woods, where
no one else could see, well, you see, I started
wondering if "nice" guys in the woods were really right
for the situation out of which my mood had almost stopped
and really, wouldn't ya know it, just last week I'd stopped
seeing that tailback with the great, um, well, jockstrap he was wearing
and when I wasn't sure and wanted to go slow, he said, "Yeh, right,"
and then we kept on going and he was oh so good. I thought,
he's the one, not nice, not a husband-type, ya know, but then he started
to touch me in this spot, it's so embarrassing, but, oh, where
no one hardly ever had before except Bob, my first husband, where-
ever he might be, and, where was I, oh, yes, this nice guy and I had stopped
what we were doing in the woods and half-naked never quite started
up again because his question showed me what I wasn't wearing
and who he was and his question got my thoughts
mixed up with the tailback's jock that seemed so right
even if he fit so tight and, yeh, dangerous guys aren't right
but maybe there's a reason nice guys finish where
they often do and my thoughts,
when we had stopped,
reflected on some muscled jock wearing
nothing, baring all, and we somehow never really started
up again. My mother would have started
doing handflips if she'd thought I thought he was Mr. Right
and if, instead of baring all I wore for superjock, was wearing
crinolines and lace at St. Griselda's where
she and dad had stopped
their lives and turned their thoughts
to wearing her body out with kids and started doing right
until all thoughts of sex stopped. Nowhere, in all
the nice guys that she knew, did my mother find desire.
New Names
- for Pat Valdata (Washington, Spring 1997)
1
Cherry blossoms blow along the ground
and green buds promise leaves to come,
closed walkways send us west and nothing's
mirrored in the murky pond.
She notes that the gulls soar much as she does
when the clouds build just this way.
She paces me, stride for stride, sees
mallards, heads buried in the slime.
She seems entranced with winged things.
2
Here, the cherries blossom still—a little
north and east of where we stand.
The path leads down beside a polished wall
that sprouts the names of one war's dead.
New faces blossom, new letters grow
from black wings struggling to rise, but
anchored in the hill and in our minds.
New names to link to old remains—men
and women who will not grow old.
The wings reflect, although the pond does not,
cherry blossoms in the April sun.
Pulling Ivy
I have been pulling vines from
off the trees, high labor,
climbing to the top, pruning—heavy green falls to the ground,
tangles of thick Italian ivy—a job that never ends.
Sun dapples falling leaves and one more branch
ripped from a persimmon tree catches on the ladder's rung,
whispers past my feet, cradles on the growing pile.
Lights blink on in the backyards along the alleys, floodlights
fighting back that dark, those fears that flow from house to house
in the minds of people grown old—young here not many years ago.
The ivy in the trees is like this: leached on to drooping limbs,
breaking the old growth off, yet holding it near the sky, quivering
as the wind blows, rotting, only a form of a form encircled by a thousand
legs of parasites digging into what is only the shadow of a limb.
Romeo Is Dead
-for Bob C.
I was Capulet, he Romeo,
my daughter the target of his lust.
Just fourteen, she simpered almost.
Her nurse, hands full, delighted
in her wish to rid herself of that
slight tissue that would make her
marriageable to a Parisian count.
Years later I read about him,
this Romeo, young handsome man
that I remembered from school,
romantic, love writ large upon his face.
His Juliet still lived, settled into
matronly mediocrity, two sons
in law school, a daughter married to
a teacher at the local college. Juliet
pickets abortion clinics in her spare time,
sells cosmetics for Mary Kaye, hosts
each year a tupperware party for
a highly select few dozen friends.
But Romeo had a brighter life,
strutted his hour upon the stage.
I read about him in the local paper:
"Actor, 42 years old, best known
for playing a crack addict on Hill
Street Blues, of AIDS, New York,
September 13, 1982." Romeo
is dead and Juliet doesn't care. She
reads the paper, smiles, thinks of him
beneath her balcony, dreams they married,
made love when she was just fourteen
and died together in the family tomb.
When the quilt came to our town,
I searched closely for his name and found it,
obscure, one among many, not at all
like the man who saw Juliet in the east
and thought he saw the sun.
Push Ups
-For Mosely wherever he might be (ca 1965)
(Sgt. Smith, as Mosely's push up count went
past 200: "Mosely's gonna set the fuckin' record for
the whole Basic Training battalion. He just needs 230.")
That night down on the floor
while we counted, your arms,
so fluid, pumped, stretched,
dropped your body an inch above
the tile, then lifted you so high
that something had to give--
the floor, the tiles, the sky--something
had to break. No sweat, just
repetitions, "100," "200," " 229!"
and then you stopped. I knew
why once, the time, the atmosphere,
the need to articulate something
that could not be grunted out
to prove something to yourself
and all of us. Goddamn but you
were cool when you held yourself so still,
looked up at all of us and laughed.
You lifted one hand from the floor, brushed
a drop of sweat from your lip, stood up
and walked away.
-from
the Periphery: poems and Essays
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