Model of a City in Civil War Read online

  several years before, though, in life, he despised

  the lower classes—as we despise ourselves—making him

  one of us. How could he not be—

  writing Engels for ten pounds here, twenty pounds

  there. Boils, jaundice, grippe; three children

  dead of poverty; bread and potatoes

  for days; and not an unbroken piece of furniture

  in the house. He writes a friend, “I was so depressed

  last night that I would have put my head

  in the oven, if I wasn’t too frightened of the children

  to go into the kitchen. After the anarchists

  and communists lose to Franco the lights

  come up, stout is served in the student annex,

  where I talk with two Argentine friends about anything

  but politics or exile, the añoranza: soccer mostly, and the black

  girl across the room, Elizabeth, who is looking

  at me, and away, and back again. Outside, she tells me

  about her professor-parents, her home in Sussex

  where sweet William pins itself to the slats of the front porch,

  where she walks out to horse-stables in the morning

  in jodhpurs and a tank-top. Then, scattershot

  of car horns—a hand suddenly unpocketed, the hairs

  on our arms touching—even at night, the riot

  of poppies in spring. Beside our confused feet

  a lung-sore bum with his Guardian tent and cardboard mat

  is sleeping, as I push her breasts up beneath her sweater.

  Months like this passed before I left for Stockholm

  carrying the anonymous thing that we’ve always

  known without having learned,

  that we’ll lose, that speaking into silence, our gods,

  parent-ghosts, and lovers will not

  hear us. Still, call after him. Awkwardly call this man,

  “Bear,” of all things, as his family did, through hob

  and tobacco smoke—just up from bed, he’s still sitting

  in his study on the Isle of Wight, where he has put

  his head down, the blue capillaries under skin

  as thin as rice paper, with the hard-focused eyes

  of a man one week at the bottom of a lake—

  and what is the vocabulary for that, how

  can words deliver affection; I say it is raining

  over the mountains and mean I am rolling onto my side

  to fall asleep next to you.

  SLEEPING WITH UNCLE LESTER

  We walked from town to her land

  through clotted darkness

  and frozen pastures, heads brushing

  bottles hung on low branches. The old

  kitchen, cut by a line of ragged shirts

  and socks, smelled like wet bark. Jars

  of fruit salts and redcurrants, tins

  of dried onions and parsnips rattled

  when we walked. We went to bed,

  that’s all. I woke with her uncle Lester

  beside me, slack-chinned and thin, face

  and neck a wash of white stubble

  and the high turpentine of fetid sweat.

  Lester’s wife died when their Chrysler

  broke down as she hemorrhaged

  from miscarriage. I got up

  on my elbows; out the window

  was the background of an otherwise dull

  family photo: blue skies and egg shells

  blown across a bald yard, rain pattering

  the stinking fine dust, and steam billowing

  up from somewhere—a tree

  of backlit breath, and Lester’s grindy voice

  like the cold of close metal, “Hey, dunghill.

  Lookit—you’re blockin’ the view.”

  THE LEAVING

  There is the rain on the copper

  roofs, there is the click-shuff

  of red heels on concrete, the voice

  of a ruddy-faced neighbor

  above, calling after her husband.

  In their apartment, the pillows

  still sleep-dented and sour

  with breath. The headless straws

  of aster stalks hang above

  the credenza, beside the battered

  front door. There are the bridge’s

  rust-water icicles, its bands

  of moss seaming a forgotten

  cobblestone sidewalk. There is

  the river in thistle-gray cowlicks,

  and the husband above it, deciding.

  WINTER INVENTORY

  I look out at the river in cakes of ice

  sliding violently over one another,

  speaking a language remembered

  from another of earth’s ages, and almost

  understand that speech as human, some

  body of absence struggling with itself

  under bridge lights. And remember

  a winter spent driving a heatless car

  with a patchwork quilt thrown over my legs

  until more than a ghost of warmth existed

  and I was alone on a country road under

  a nothing sky with stubbled fields

  and telephone poles flashing past

  and the sense that if I closed my eyes

  I might remain sitting, speeding along,

  no car, and soon no road, and perhaps

  the trees evaporate and the telephone polls

  sink deep into hard earth and nothing

  then but myself, and a river far off, and the name

  of someone, and still no better understanding.

  WATER FROM THE SAME SOURCE

  Knuckles stripped

  to a skinned goat’s head—

  the nearly vacant fingers

  of barge workers; when you left

  I was wire-jawed

  and shut-in from surgery.

  Going back out, sinking

  into subway tunnels, I was reminded

  how easy it is to forget the world

  is inhabited mostly by others.

  I’ve got three joints

  in my shirt pocket, and we’re kicking ash

  from our shoes in the pointless

  heat, smashing a ditch’s discarded bottles

  in the night, so that their wreck

  spreads in cinders over the blacktop

  like silage spilled into moonlight, like

  something you might want.

  ELEBADE

  When I woke

  I felt fine for a minute.

  Set the table, saw myself

  rise and go. First rise

  and stand, holding

  the table. Then sit

  again. Then go. Start

  to go.

  Motionless pines

  we’d built, stirred.

  Blind October

  inching up. No wife

  raising hell

  when she came. Empty

  or almost empty beast.

  Bull down. Bad heart.

  BLIND ATTIS

  Her lover was a black bear

  whose empty eye-sockets rattled

  with pebbles. And though

  he should not have existed, she believed

  as she believed in stones that fell

  from high places. She knew

  when he had been with others

  because he loped through the pines

  and lindens smelling like a mudbound

  whale. One night under

  the stars strung out behind a haze

  of brushfire, he slept clutching

  a claw-scratched rosary.

  And she climbed, brushing

  her stark nakedness along his coarse

  length, to the soil-rimmed holes

  in his head and found no manic

  bestial glow, but the dark

  behind cracked lantern slides. And he rose

  and like a husband he cut
her—

  “I will love you more when I am older . . .

  if I let you live,” she breathed

  into his pricked ears. Each night

  she took a bit more blood

  from him, until he woke

  under a crooked moon

  and reached to maul her crouching

  black figure. But she had taken

  his paws, and biting, she whispered

  into the folds and long darkness

  of his ear, “If you return again it will be

  through the eyeholes of birds,” for whom

  she left the pink jigsaw of his hatcheted

  remains steaming in the morning.

  SMOKE

  I dreamt your childhood wound, softened

  in bathwater, had reappeared,

  an ochre-blue puncture at the heel—

  dimpled star spreading to uneven

  points. It held in its shadow

  a leaf stem, beetle-brown. I pulled it

  from your foot and it brought more leaves

  littering the bath. Soon you were

  a tub of dogwoods and blackthorns

  I gathered and carried out

  to the grass between the crocuses

  where I stood over you, bit of earth fleeing

  into smoke, spelling nothing above the yard.

  TIME AWAY

  A female cardinal has taken up a limned branch

  but her prey has flown inside, with me. Tonight, on the phone

  I fought again with my son’s mother. She has become

  so used to my cruelty that it is simply questioned

  and assessed. I used to surprise myself. A friend reads

  a story I’ve written, finding the main character “deplorable.”

  There are a lot of things I don’t tell him. Earlier,

  I passed the ostensibly intelligent woman with pock-marked

  cheeks, who works at the bookstore down the block, who

  has lived here her whole life, so whose only remaining

  chances are those who move here, or return after

  years away. Out back, sheaves of silverweed and Indian pipe

  sink and buckle into mud. During grad school there was a string

  of suicides in the school library. One jumper from the atrium

  fell silently to land at the feet of my student. She told me

  about his breathing, was nervous about taking some time away

  from classes, and came to ask if that might be okay. “Yeah,”

  I said, “that would be okay.” I’ve moved and come back so many

  times. By December the backyard will be a moist cushion

  of decay, bits of spider, robin, and mouse carcasses. One day,

  I’ll pack up what little I own that’s unbroken and move

  to Montana. For now, I put off going home—there is

  nothing but empty conversation, and the historical moment.

  The first time my father got in my face, and for once

  I came closer, I turned away only to throw

  an antique dresser across the bedroom, before inviting him

  to hit me—all he could do was threaten to call the cops, the brittle

  embarrassing admonishment of middle-age. I feel sure I won’t

  find anyone, now. I’ve settled into that a bit. And I find myself

  attracted more and more to pregnant women—I’m familiar

  with their bodies—the solid, outsized stomachs, and darkened

  nipples, and maybe I think this time I could get it right.

  THE CHILDREN, THE GRASS

  Here are the children, tall as knee-high grass,

  who will climb the mornings into bed with you

  to make the day loose and foolish, and the sea

  not so far away. They are soft as warts of moss.

  And still they are ignorable, which suits.

  It is not easy to know how best

  to move yourself from one place

  to another but they will help.

  They rinse your arms, feet and face

  with seawater, provide a pocketful of almonds.

  UNDERCOVER

  The train to Trieste—Schiele, fifteen,

  hoisting his sister’s

  suitcase onto the rack, a wash

  of cold light flushing her face like breath

  traveling across

  glass. Lost in fog, the windows

  would not give their faces back. Her sleeping feet

  brush the skin above

  his socks, and outside, the honeysuckle

  like a pattern of blood repeating itself

  around a fence.

  Lincoln, depressed, flickering

  about the edges of the woods for weeks—

  his eyes’ snow-lashed

  halo, and his gun—like his uncle Mordecai,

  a hermit who kept a dog named Grampus

  and hundreds

  of pigeons—here are their elaborate houses

  with gables and columns, far from the double-bed

  above a general store

  where Joshua Speed and long Ishmael lie

  for four years like brothers. Far from what will swell

  and blacken

  at Gettysburg. In the glow of low fire on charred brick

  sweat-pale Adolf Schiele is laid out,

  in a railway

  official’s dress uniform, syphilitic, a dagger

  at his side. Not burning the family’s stocks

  and bonds. Not storming.

  Not breaking down the door to a lightless room

  that hides Egon and his sister, his first and best

  model, simply

  developing film. Plaster cast brains, hydrocephalic

  skulls, and weight scales—Alphonse Bertillon comes

  every workday

  to the Laboratoire Anthropologie, to his

  father’s skeleton hanging from the wall

  like some mobile

  of the Pleiades, as if the bones’ equilibrium

  could keep him from slipping beyond reach. Young

  urchins, three sisters,

  sit in Schiele’s studio. They sleep, comb hair,

  pick their ears, pull at dresses—the raw mottled

  flesh of inconvenient

  limbs, bruising, impassive, the vent of ribs beneath

  thin skin. John Brown had the eyes of a goat,

  and beating

  his sons, forced them to strike back

  as often as he struck. Brown called his killing

  “work,” watching

  in the late moonlight while his sons

  and others knocked as lost travelers on the nightdoors

  of anti-abolition families

  and cut their men to pieces—like opening

  a seed-bag—while the women slept, the ground alive

  where bodies fell, black

  scars on dark grass, and when it rained the smell

  came into the houses. A child

  with the shambling

  gait of a circus bear, Clyfford Still’s family

  in South Dakota was digging a well and they needed

  someone to go down

  to see the condition of the pit. It smelled like

  the faint decay of overripe almonds—

  the way his father

  smelled in from the rain, the deep creases of his hands

  and coveralls traced with night-crawler soil. “They put

  a rope around my ankle,

  tied a simple knot, and dropped me down head first.”

  APPREHENDED AT A DISTANCE

  The colorless lake—buoy bells