Ballistics (6 page)

If this were a novel,

it would begin with a character,

a man alone on a southbound train

or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told

that it was morning or the dead of night,

and I, the narrator, would describe

for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train

right down to his red tartan scarf,

and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,

as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually—one can only read so fast—

you would learn either that the train was bearing

the man back to the place of his birth

or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this

as you waited patiently for shots to ring out

in a ravine where the man was hiding

or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem, not a novel,

and the only characters here are you and I,

alone in an imaginary room

which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another

or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.

I ask you: who needs the man on the train

and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence

lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.

I mean the sound that we will hear

as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it

to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat

or, more faintly, just the wind

over that field stirring things that we will never see.

A fine thing, or so it sounds

on the radio in the summer

with all the windows rolled down.

Yet it pierces not only the heart

but the eyeball and the scrotum

and the little target of the nipple with arrows.

It turns everything into a symbol

like a storm that breaks loose

in the final chapter of a long novel.

And it may add sparkle to a morning,

or deepen a night

when the bed is ringed with fire.

It teaches you new joys

and new maneuvers—

the takedown, the reversal, the escape.

But mostly it comes and goes,

a bee visiting the center

of one flower, then another.

Even as the ink is drying

on her name, it is off

to visit someone in another city,

a city with two steeples,

rows of brick chimney pots,

and a school with a tree-lined entrance.

It will travel through the night to get there,

and it will arrive like an archangel

through an iron gate no one ever seemed to notice before.

Once, two spoons in bed,

now tined forks

across a granite table

and the knives they have hired.

This poet of the Sung dynasty is so miserable.

The wind sighs around the trees,

a single swan passes overhead,

and he is alone on the water in his skiff.

If only he appreciated life

in eleventh-century China as much as I do—

no loud cartoons on television,

no music from the ice cream truck,

just the calls of elated birds

and the steady flow of the water clock.

is the usual thing to say when you begin

pulling on the toes of a small child,

and I have never had a problem with that.

I could easily picture the piggy with his basket

and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.

What always stopped me in my tracks was

the middle toe—this little piggy ate roast beef.

I mean I enjoy a roast beef sandwich

with lettuce and tomato and a dollop of horseradish,

but I cannot see a pig ordering that in a delicatessen.

I am probably being too literal-minded here—

I am even wondering why it’s called “horseradish.”

I should just go along with the beautiful nonsense

of the nursery, float downstream on its waters.

After all, Little Jack Horner speaks to me deeply.

I don’t want to be the one to ruin the children’s party

by asking unnecessary questions about Puss in Boots

or, again, the implications of a pig eating beef.

By the way, I am completely down with going

“Wee wee wee” all the way home,

having done that many times and knowing exactly how it feels.

I am glad I resisted the temptation,

if it was a temptation when I was young,

to write a poem about an old man

eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

I would have gotten it all wrong

thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world

and with only a book for a companion.

He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.

So glad I waited all these decades

to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is

here at Chang’s this afternoon

and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

And my book—José Saramago’s
Blindness

as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up

from its escalating horrors only

when I am stunned by one of his arresting sentences.

And I should mention the light

which falls through the big windows this time of day

italicizing everything it touches—

the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,

as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress

in the white blouse and short black skirt,

the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice

and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

Just as in the horror movies

when someone discovers that the phone calls

are coming from inside the house

so, too, I realized

that our tender overlapping

has been taking place only inside me.

All that sweetness, the love and desire—

it’s just been me dialing myself

then following the ringing to another room

to find no one on the line,

well, sometimes a little breathing

but more often than not, nothing.

To think that all this time—

which would include the boat rides,

the airport embraces, and all the drinks—

it’s been only me and the two telephones,

the one on the wall in the kitchen

and the extension in the darkened guestroom upstairs.

Not only in church

and nightly by their bedsides

do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,

prayer is woven into their talk

like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall

outbursts of praise

spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

One minute you are playing the fool,

strumming a tennis racquet as if it were a guitar

for the amusement of a few ladies

and the next minute you are lying on your deathbed,

arms stiff under the covers,

the counterpane tucked tight across your chest.

Or so seemed the progress of life

as I was flipping through the photographs

in
Proust: The Later Years
by George Painter.

Here he is at a tennis party, larking for the camera,

and 150 pages later, nothing but rictus on a pillow,

and in between, a confection dipped

into a cup of lime tea and brought to the mouth.

Which is why, instead of waiting

for our date this coming weekend,

I am now speeding to your house at 7:45 in the morning

where I hope to catch you half dressed—

and I am wondering which half

as I change lanes without looking—

with the result that we will be lifted

by the urgent pull of the flesh

into a state of ecstatic fusion, and you will be late for work.

And as we lie there

in the early, latticed light,

I will suggest that you take George Painter’s

biography of Proust

to the office so you can show your boss

the pictures that caused you to arrive shortly before lunch

and he will understand perfectly,

for I imagine him to be a man of letters,

maybe even a devoted Proustian,

but at the very least a fellow creature,

ensnared with the rest of us in the same mortal coil,

or so it would appear from the wishful

vantage point of your warm and rumpled bed.

When I finally arrive there—

and it will take many days and nights—

I would like to believe others will be waiting

and might even want to know how it was.

So I will reminisce about a particular sky

or a woman in a white bathrobe

or the time I visited a narrow strait

where a famous naval battle had taken place.

Then I will spread out on a table

a large map of my world

and explain to the people of the future

in their pale garments what it was like—

how mountains rose between the valleys

and this was called geography,

how boats loaded with cargo plied the rivers

and this was known as commerce,

how the people from this pink area

crossed over into this light-green area

and set fires and killed whoever they found

and this was called history—

and they will listen, mild-eyed and silent,

as more of them arrive to join the circle,

like ripples moving toward,

not away from, a stone tossed into a pond.

Go, little book,

out of this house and into the world,

carriage made of paper rolling toward town

bearing a single passenger

beyond the reach of this jittery pen,

far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp.

It is time to decamp,

put on a jacket and venture outside,

time to be regarded by other eyes,

bound to be held in foreign hands.

So off you go, infants of the brain,

with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:

stay out as late as you like,

don’t bother to call or write,

and talk to as many strangers as you can.

Alehouse:
“China,” “Divorce”

The Atlantic:
“Searching”

Bat City Review:
“Carpe Diem”

The Cortland Review:
“The Golden Years”

Crazyhorse:
“Aubade,” “(detail)”

Five Points:
“Ballistics,” “High,” “What Love Does”

The Florida Review:
“The First Night”

Fulcrum:
“Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles,” “Le Chien”

The Gettysburg Review:
“New Year’s Day,” “Vermont, Early November”

London Review of Books:
“Looking Forward,” “The Poems of Others”

The Massachusetts Review:
“On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor”

Mid-American Review:
“Ornithography”

New Ohio Review:
“Bathtub Families”

The New York Review of Books:
“Greek and Roman Statuary”

The New York Times Magazine:
“The Fish”

The New Yorker:
“The Future”

The Paris Review:
“Tension”

Pleiades:
“Addendum”

Poetry:
“The Breather,” “Evasive Maneuvers,” “January in Paris,” “Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant,” “Pornography”

A Public Space:
“The Lamps Unlit,” “Scenes of Hell”

The Recorder:
“Liu Yung”

The Southampton Review:
“The Four-Moon Planet”

Subtropics:
“No Things”

TriQuarterly:
“Adage”

The Virginia Quarterly Review:
“August,” “The Great American Poem”

West 10th:
“Oh, My God”