You Must Remember This Read online

The quiet of the porcelain

  cup in the cupboard.

  The one with the chipped lip

  that never speaks.

  The blue-green stillness

  of the robin’s egg

  discarded from the nest.

  The silence

  of the loaded gun.

  The silence of stone

  differing, quietly, from the silence of iron.

  The cello groaning

  into the tuned calm

  that precedes the song.

  Beneath the pines

  a single needle falls. It

  ticks into the duff.

  What about the slender

  nothing between the next

  two words.

  Or the endless inhalation

  before the piercing air-horn

  scream of the wounded child?

  Then there is the silence

  of truth unspoken. The muteness

  of rust on barbed wire. Or the general quiet

  of you

  reading this: the silence of the birdbath

  waiting for rain.

  Unspoken

  Given the unspeakable nature of their differences,

  they decided to settle their divorce in mime court.

  It was a pale imitation of justice, but all in all

  we agreed the testimony rang true. Outside,

  the shadows of the houses swallowed

  the shadows of the pigeons without flinching.

  Some things are easier to absorb than others,

  said the judge, using white gloves and what

  we finally understood to be an invisible rope.

  Before that he’d been trapped in a glass box

  which most likely represented the transparent

  vows they’d first spoken on that rainy June day,

  back when we were so concerned with our finery

  we missed the nerves wired under the words.

  From Chaos

  I.

  Listen and tinsel wrestled,

  and silent inlets were born.

  Still water opened before us,

  there, off the coast of Bologna.

  The hourglass held falling snow

  and gentle was the root of genital.

  This Latin mispronunciation

  stemmed from the ancient decree:

  Tenderly touch what is tender,

  and often you will feel better.

  A fork of geese dragged the sky

  with hoarse and rasping wings.

  The sound was a lone thing

  in the blank and open air.

  II.

  And suddenly it seemed you wanted to be a part from my collection

  and apart from me. I could not tell if you meant this

  in an underhanded way, and thus became utterly whelmed.

  Calm down, you said. Render seizures unto Caesar.

  If only such things were aloud, said the mime offhandedly.

  He’d wandered in searching for conclusions,

  and his gesture was little more than a white-gloved shiver.

  How lovely, you motioned back, with a nearly silent

  murmur. Listen. It ends as it begins.

  What Might

  It all begins with might, the word

  and its power, which might make

  right unless it’s the muscular sort

  and then we’re talking otherwise.

  We might begin again, I think,

  without losing one another,

  given these current arrangements,

  given that we’re talking

  about possibilities, about mights,

  about one poem with two beginnings

  and the many dozen doorways

  that we don’t walk through each day

  opening up a permanent and shadowy

  elsewhere, a space where one man

  can spend his entire life beside himself,

  inhabiting two houses on the same street,

  happily eating an orange in one room,

  weeping softly to himself in another,

  breathing soundly in both places at once,

  and of course it is the weeping man

  who might be happy, pushed toward it

  by Casals coaxing something eternal

  from the emptiness of his cello,

  while the man eating the orange might

  be ticking toward some sort of pain,

  carefully separating peel from fruit,

  one sweet section after another,

  oblivious to what could be happening

  to a wife and daughter elsewhere:

  a small indignity perhaps, a rudeness,

  or maybe something darker. But as it is,

  his pleasure multiplies with each

  bursting bite, Oranges are miracles,

  he thinks, envisioning himself

  a contented monk in a sunlit cell

  which in the way of cells soon divides

  again and again, until he’s imagined

  an entire monastery of robed brethren

  chanting vespers and stooping in the fields

  each one of them wearing a rough garment

  and wondering how it came to be

  that he found himself so far from home

  filling his basket with tender lavender

  in the mind of a man he’s never met.

  September Picnic

  Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

  —JOHN LYDON

  It was a September picnic

  and in the splintered basket

  purchased cheap

  as trucks and tents were being loaded and packed

  the fruit spotty, ready for wasps

  but wonderfully fragrant

  were pears.

  Pears from the open-air market

  overripe in a damp brown bag.

  The fragile leather of their skin

  spiraled from the horn-handled

  knife in grandfather’s hands

  knotted and working

  with the thoughtless

  efficiency of six decades

  twirling out damp garlands

  to drape our fingers.

  We were on the train, crossing the St. Lawrence,

  heading into the sunburnt fields beyond Montreal.

  We were eating pears. Slices lifted wetly from the blade.

  The train clacking and the picnic not yet begun and this

  is nonetheless all that I can recall. I remember only the pears.

  We could draw conclusions about anticipation, or about joy.

  Or that possibly only sweetness persists

  but this would trouble me all the more because

  this memory is not mine. It belongs to Moses Herzog

  who in turn owes it to Saul Bellow who wrote him

  into life and placed him in a book that I read and never forgot

  and now, yes, I remember the pears. I can taste them,

  even, after all these years that never passed

  between me and that honeyed moment.

  Interrogation

  What utensil would you use to eat a bowl of rain?

  How many policemen does it take to make a candle?

  Where is the pelvic bone of a centaur located?

  How many policemen does it take in general? Nine?

  Doesn’t that strike you as more than enough? What if

  one of them is named Wick and the other Tallow?

  Could their marriage be called a candle? Does that

  complicate the uniform? If one were the front

  of the centaur would the hind end dream of goats?

  When I mentioned a bowl of rain earlier was it clear

  that I meant a bowl constructed solely out of raindrops

  and not a conventional bowl holding collected rainwater?

  Now when I mention a bowl of rain is it perfectly clear?

  Clear as the fallen rain? Rain settled in a puddle th
at holds

  pale drowned earthworms because for one fatal moment

  they mistook that clear panel of water for a long deep drink

  and did not recognize it as the vessel of their demise?

  Why does drink hold the demise of so many? Are we

  there yet? Will we ever be there? How can we truly know?

  What would the earthworm tell us with its pale tiny mouth?

  Lions

  If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.

  —WITTGENSTEIN

  the problem would not be those beautiful

  teeth or the dark purse

  of his mouth muffling consonants

  or the complete absence of adjectives

  but rather how his tense

  always slides through time

  loose as a brushstroke

  shading every action into now

  and there would be the arrival of one word

  for blood riding the wind

  and another for the shuddering

  twitch of the hindquarters that presages the burst

  before sudden fangs make meat go slack

  also that volatile purr

  coughing and guttering

  like candle flame in the breeze

  as well as the unnerving jokes ending in splinters

  of marrow and cracked bone

  and the confusion of sixty-two

  different words for hunger

  each one opening

  into the same fearful roar

  but only the one

  telling silence

  for sleep

  A Woman Stands in a Field

  The scene is so clear it might be a memory.

  But no. It is too clear for that. This is something happening right now.

  A woman stands in a field near the only stand of trees for a long way

  round. She is looking down, scanning the ground. Perhaps she is

  searching for acorns.

  But she is beyond the tree-shadow, and she has no basket in which to

  gather, and besides, upon closer inspection, it turns out the trees are

  not even oaks. She parts the grass with her hands, gently, as a mother

  might push the hair from her child’s forehead. She steps gingerly

  over the rooms and tunnels filled with tiny animals. A wind comes. It

  shakes the tree and runs its hand across the field, flattening the grass.

  This evening, she will still be here. It will be hard to see the lesser

  darkness of her dress bobbing above the greater darkness of the field.

  Days from now, when she finds it, we will no longer be watching.

  She will draw it gently from the thatch, glinting like a baby snake, a

  thin gold chain.

  There you are, she will say matter-of-factly. She will examine the

  clasp carefully and then refasten the chain around her neck and begin

  walking through the fields toward home. It is just as well that we will

  no longer be observing the scene. Her faith in the clasp seems almost

  perverse, and it would be all you could do not to cry out.

  The Crisis

  The financier walked into a roomful of women, scantily clad in lacy

  underthings. They were all quite heavyset, and their amplitude ap-

  pealed to him. He became aroused.

  “What is it that you want from us?” they murmured, as he walked

  among them. “It seems we were summoned here specifically for you.”

  “How do you know this to be the case?” he asked, gently brushing

  the hair from one woman’s shoulder.

  “Because none of us remember anything other than this room.”

  He paused and looked around him. Many of the women appeared to

  be just coming awake, blinking lazily on their velvet couches. One

  smiled at him and arched her back, stretching. “So you remember

  nothing at all?”

  “Nothing. It’s as if we were born five minutes ago. Or five hours.

  There are no clocks here. All we know is this room, and waiting.”

  “For me,” he said.

  There was no reply. The women exchanged glances. There was not

  one among them that could tell him they had no navels, no scars.

  Their bodies were like those of dolls, a smooth pink flatness round-

  ing down the belly and around, unbroken.

  Elpenor

  There was a man, Elpenor, the youngest in our ranks, none too brave in battle, none too sound in mind.

  —BOOK 10, THE ODYSSEY

  There he is, standing on the granite shingle, watching

  a sail recede across the bright water, no larger than a swan.

  The shouts that laced his dreams were preparations for departure.

  He nuzzled into sleep, forgotten. Useless to raise his voice now,

  yet the cries of the gulls cut sharply. He feels the morning breeze

  blow through him like a ladder. He does not yet know that he is

  dead, having run so hurriedly out of his broken-necked body.

  But when he wanders back and sees the spine angled like a

  snapped twig, the earth around soaked dark, he turns and runs

  toward the glinting water and across the heaving waves, leaving

  no tracks on their rolling hills, crying, Wait! I’m here. I’m still here!

  Look, Overlook

  The wing

  of a moth: fine ridges, dusty translucence, powdery

  crumbling as it feathers between two

  fingers: you

  are made of such soft stuff, crumbling

  beneath breath;

  the dust on your things, your bookshelves and shoes, was once

  skin, and your day of long walking is

  done, not done

  through wet grass, shadows, and

  sight: the starling-spangled elm, the hinges of your hand, clouds

  sledding on the wind.

  III

  The Dark Thing

  It used to come into the light,

  so deeply creased it seemed to be scarred,

  bristling with hairs like a baby elephant.

  Its hunger was slow and stolid but also

  always there, tusks clicking above its steady

  jaws as it moved among the trees.

  Seeing the limit of its skin lessened it—

  the way it lightened into pinkness near the lips

  unnerved us. We hurled rocks and broken

  concrete, even poked it with sticks

  we’d blackened in the fire. When the first blade

  cut and drew a startling thread of blood,

  it moaned so quietly we backed away.

  It sounds like my grandmother in her sleep,

  someone whispered. We looked

  at one another. The thing was barely

  moving. Then the boy who’d spoken

  unstrapped the knife from the stick, wiped it

  clean on the grass and folded it

  shut with a sharp click. That’s enough,

  he said. It had been so much

  easier than we’d imagined.

  This is what we would have said,

  if we had spoken of it again.

  The Book of _______________

  First, there is the consideration of my appearance which even those

  who care for me say is troublesome. It is not simply the coarseness

  of hair coming from where one does not anticipate hair, but also

  things beneath the surface that stretch the skin and hinges that work

  differently, so I am both more and less mobile than your kind and though

  I’ve learned to walk upright as a man, when I’m alone I scuttle sideways.

  I am quite fast. I hope I can say this without boasting. I am told

  I appear more liquid than solid when I wend acr
oss a room, feathering

  over couches, tables and other obstructions rather than walking round.

  Uneven surfaces disturb me no more than trees disturb the wind.

  People do not tell me these things in admiration but as explanation

  for the fear that glitters in their eyes. I try to speak softly but my voice

  breaks like glass. When they found me, I was feeding on venison. A doe,

  toppled on the roadside and risen in the afternoon sun. I kept my vigil

  until dusk, then scissored slowly up the bank and started in. I was young.

  Headlights astonished me. I was docile, easily taken. The whole escapade

  leaves me with a feeling of vague shame and chagrin, especially now

  that I’ve learned to read and can place the incident on the shelf of context.

  I have a window in my room overlooking the garden from which I see

  the crowns of trees, and in the evening the sunset gilds the rooftops then

  stretches a blanket of shadow across them until darkness eats the world.

  They were kind enough to tint the window for me so that I can see

  out but no one can see in which might sound like a lonely thing to say

  but I understand. I have foresworn using my pincers to sever the cordage

  of my meals though knife and fork feel dull as cold toes. Yet the fear

  remains in others’ eyes and is there always, so much so that I wonder

  if it is not unfounded. I have dreams. Some I am not inclined to share,

  but there is one that continues to return and seems innocent enough.

  It seems to spring from your world more than mine and I wonder if you

  might be willing to interpret its signs. I cannot tell it with words but must

  write the dream upon the world with my body. I have been waiting

  to do this for a long time. My joints ache to unfurl. You were kind

  to listen. Let me offer my dream in return. Open the door. Let me out.

  Nuns

  Have you heard the one about the nun and the penguin

  in the bathtub and the nun drops the soap

  and says to the penguin, Do you think you could

  fish that out? And the penguin says, What do you think I am,