Fog Tropes

AUGUST 1988

J. D. MCCLATCHY

FOG TROPES

A sheet of water turned over.

Sedge script. River erasure.

The smoke out of the factory

Stacks drifts to the title page-

Words too big to read, too quickly

Gone to say what they are.

The water machine is stalled

And sighs. There go last night's

Now forgotten dreams, airborne,

Homebound, on their way to work.

Again this morning: five-storey elm spoons

Stirring the wheylight, fur on the knobby

Melon rind left in the sink, the china egg

Under the laying hen, the quilt's missing

Patch, and now the full moon's steamed-up

Shaving mirror leaning against the blue.

When my daughter died, from the bottom

Of every pleasure something bitter

Rose up, a sour taste of nausea,

The certain sense of having failed

Not to save her but in the end to know

I could not keep her from passing

As through the last, faintest intake

Of breath to somewhere unsure of itself,

The dim landscape that grief supposes.

I remember how, in the hospital,

Without a word she put her glasses on

And stared ahead, just before she died.

I take mine off these days, to see

More of my solitude, its incidental

Humiliations. Nothing satisfies

Its demand that she appear in order

To leave my life over and over again.

If, from my car, I should glimpse her

In a doorway, bright against the dark

Inside, and ston and squint at the glare-

It's a rag on a barbed-wire fence.

Or I spot her in a sidewalk crowd,

But almost at once she disappears

The way one day slips behind the next.

I've come to think of her now, in fact,

Or of her ghost I guess you'd have to say,

As the tear that rides and overrides

My eye, so that the edges of things go

Soft, a girl is there and not there.

Even in the dark

The long shadow of the stars

Drifts beneath the pines.

J. D. MC CLATCHY

Snagged on a stalk: fresh tufts of rabbit down,

Thistle silk, a thumbnail's lot of spittle spawn.

Fidgeting among the goateed professors

And parlor radicals at the Pension Russe,

The girls whispered to themselves

About the tubercular young Reinhard,

Alone at a corner table, smoking,

Who had introduced them to immortality

By burning a cigarette paper

And as the ash plummeted upward

Exclaiming "Die Seele fliegt!"

It's the first breath of the dead

That rises from the firing squad

While the anarchist who squealed

Gets drunk and argues with God.

It's Shelley's lung in the lake

And his hand in the ashes on shore.

It's the finespun shirt he ordered

And the winding sheet he wore.

When the two famous novelists discovered

Each the other in the same dress-

A shot-silk "creation" of orris-dust

Laid on blanched silver, like the irony

That is the conscience of style, obscuring

To clarify, bickering to be forgiven-

One retired with her pale young admirers,

Disdain for whom creamed up in her tea,

To a folly by the buckled apple tree.

She sat and pretended to listen to herself

Being praised, picking at grizzled lichen

On the bench, like drops of blistered enamel.

The other tugged at her pearls and stayed

Near the smiles, her dress insinuated

Among the lead crystal teardrops

On the chandelier above her, each one

The size, and now the color, of a blossom

On an apple bough outside, and herself

Inside, tiny and helplessly upside-down.

The first month of the first marriage.

The second year of the second marriage.

The third betrayal of the third marriage.

And love. Love. Always love.

a deep winter yawn

the wind caught drowsing

static on the news

charred ozone glaze

dead-petal weather

the air's loose skin

the albino's birthmark

the vinegar mother

a bubble in the artery

the pebble in Demosthenes' mouth

love asleep at the wheel

childhood stunned and dumped

the philosopher's divorce

the psychopomp's coin

self-pity's last tissue

the blister on the burn

the emptiness added daily

the abstract's hive

quarry of doubts

earthrise from the dark side

the holy sleeve

the beatific blindness

white root of heaven

J. D. MC CLATCHY

The sound of it? A silence

Understood as all the noise

Ignored or stifled, nods

Exchanged on the trading floor,

Or sex in the next room,

His hand over her mouth,

Her belt, the overcast leather,

Clenched between his teeth.

Where the needle stuck,

Its hiss and hard swallow

Halfway into the heart

Of the nocturne, two notes

Fell further apart, the space

Between them a darkness

Clotting, the moon

Having passed behind

A black key, then risen

Higher across the record's

Rutted, familiar road.

Suddenly, lengths of storm gauze

Drawn across the clearing.

We must not want too much

To know. Uncertainty

Condenses on the windshield,

Then runs down the cheek,

A single waxen tear.

When last night's grief

Is pulled back from,

Who will be the brighter?

Hush. Be careful. Turn

Those headlights down, low

As a curtained candle flame

Shivering in the dark dispelled.

First, the diagnosis: those night sweats

And thrush, the breathing that misplaces air,

The clouds gathering on a horizon of lung. . .

Translated as pneumocystis, the word from a dead

Language meant to sound like a swab

On a wound open but everywhere unseen.

Then, the options. There were options,

Left like food trays outside your door.

Protocols, support groups, diets,

A promising treatment.

But three months later

You began to forget the doctor's appointments,

And the next week no longer cared that you forgot.

The friends who failed to visit, even their letters

Grew hard to parse. It was not as if their "real"

Feelings lay between the lines, but that the lines

Themselves would break apart: the fight so long

All your work the circumstances remember when.

But remember was precisely what you couldn't do,

And to pay attention more than you could afford.

The books you'd read now looked back at you

With blank pages memories might fill in

With makeshift, events haphazardly recalled-

Snow swarming on the canal that Christmas

In Venice with Claudio who cried to see it,

Or globes of watery sunlight in your Chelsea flat,

White lilacs at their lips last May, no one there

For a change but just you two.

And here you are

Still, propped up in the halflight, my shadow,

My likeness, your hand wandering to the arm

Of the chair, as if your fingers might trace

The chalkdust of whole years erased.

Is this, then, what it means to lose your life?

But the question is forgotten before it can be

Answered. I take your hand, and give it back

To you, and watch you then look up, giving in,