You Are Here

There is no name for the 'dread' in my 'heart' -which

both

sound hopelessly wrong, formed in an old armature

for a valveless horn that nobody plays anymore

except to make composers like Bach sound strange.

Too strange already, I'd have thought, outdoing

the best of us, helped by something broken

past repair, if not dissolved entirely away:

Cruder instruments then, but finer music.

For us, no mighty fortress, its walls a limit

we could live in, not yet paralyzed with yearning.

Only the sun, that leaves us alone at nightfall,

the sky above us filling up with stars.

On one of my T-shirts, a spiral galaxy with an arrow

pointing to one of its outermost arms, and the words:

"You are here." And you are if you think so.

I wear it to the gym, where four times a week

I run in circles and strain against machines

to strengthen this heart, where the dread is,

and postpone its end. On my other shirts,

defiant boasts ("As I got older, I got better"),

jock celebrations ("Chicago Bulls: World Champions,

1991")

that don't console. They scarcely address

what I see when, unable to sleep,

I get up and walk about in my house:

the light from streetlamps

working unwearied through the blinds,

my wife's face, known at a glance from all others,

profiled on the pillow.

To the cat, wound in a ball,

nothing matters beyond that sphere.

On my T-shirt, it scarcely matters: house, city,

nation,

planet, solar system, Proxima Centauri,

honed to an arrow's point, all 'here.' What, scaled so

large,

is absence? My father, dead these thirty years,

has just stopped speaking, his voice hangs in the air.

My daughter, nine hundred miles away at college,

is down the hall, no further than her room.

No need of this picture, where she looks pensively

into the camera that stands in for me and her mother

who look with it into her eyes and wish her home.

To see on that scale is possible

a moment, but we're too small to sustain it.

e

Still at a loss to improve on 'dread,'

I know it's not in the 'heart,' having stood exhausted

and sleepless in this diffused light. It's in the nerves,

a namelessness that can't be worn

on any shirt. It circulates,

as blood does, through the smallest capillary.

I feel it as itching on my eyelids when they close,

as noise from the apartment opposite

that startles me bolt upright. As runaway thought-

trains

gathering speed all night, derailed toward morning.

In the lit windows across the street live others

sneaking a look at lit windows and singing,

with Schubert's jilted wanderer,

"du fändest Ruhe dort" -

our lack of anything in common is the last

poor thing we clutch together: my disconnection

an uncommonly virulent case of flu

that's nonetheless the kind that's going around.

No wonder our poems cling with an urgency

that drives everybody away in the end.

"Komm her zu mir, Geselle.. ."

Schon sind wir hergekommen.

I pull from my shelf Cantata 80, Ein' feste Burg,

and play it, front door open, into the street:

the singers belt it like Verdi,

the trumpets and drums dubbed in by Wilhelm

Friedemann

ring out their purely inauthentic joy.

But the street keeps answering: cars like pulsars

drifting in from deep space (back wheels

jacked up, bazooka speakers,

amplifiers that would fill a stadium)

shiver the joists of the house.

Having trained for a duel

with some presence fit to kill or be killed by,

I'm helpless against this absence -

or worse, this night filled with passing voices

from all directions at once.

Had neither succeeded in killing the other,

we might still have agreed to circle

around each other, defining a single axis.

Too late for that gyroscope now, when I'm shaken

by everything,

sure that each voice, while I hear it, ought to be

followed,

backed with violence against all enemies.

Even a ghost needs blood to finish its job:

Unquiet spirit, it seems we both want to kill.

Shall I offer the use of my hands?

Well, Dad: smoking two packs a day didn't do it.

The bourbon poured on the ulcer didn't,

or going stark mad and turning your hair, what was

left of it,

white in a year; not the strange foods-

the potted iguana, fried grasshoppers, anything tref on

offer;

not two wrenching divorces, or months of lassitude

punctured by fitful tennis. Not the demands of your

patients,

spilling their guts till you didn't know theirs from

your own,

letting them call at all hours; not even the furious

whipsaw of downers and uppers, hauling you in and

out of sleep.

Accidentally-on-purpose waits on accident;

impatient,

you took an enormous dose of the nearest way.

Nonetheless, it is morning. Time to put the monsters

to bed

and vote. Posters hang on the lampposts,

either side of my walk to the newsstand,

urging this one or that; I read in the paper

what each alleges against the other-

but how to vote when you've spent your life till now

in a badly miscarried quest to make of your pluribus

something sufficiently unum to make any binary

choice, .

let alone constructing candidates a and b as votable

entities?

(An inner Israel, almost, where Likud and Labor

hang in a tottering balance, so that the crazies

who think Elijah has solved the Palestinian

Question can dictate to both.)

As I start for home with my nose in the paper,

one of the beggars who loiters beside the newsstand

on Sunday mornings asks, in her monotone, for

change.

Last week I gave it, this week I withhold,

capricious as the weather-which at least is warm.

The light pours like a flash flood, filling Main Street,

where inmates of the old hotel turned stopping-place

for the cracked past mending or congenitally

miswired

stroll in bleached-out primary colors; pointing or

muttering

to no one visible, they take the air.

With breakfast cleared, the faces of interned Haitians,

buildings on fire in Los Angeles, shelled flat in

Sarajevo,

go on the pile for recycling. Like the coffee

we sipped while taking them into awareness,

they begin to wear off, till nothing is left

but a thin haze of unease one feels almost at home in.

I escape to the comics, the number-heaven of sports... .

the light, now perceptibly slanted, at rest in the garden.

e

Two among many dangers set for the devious survivor

of seafaring and war:

rocks that converge and smite

the enemy's otherness flat, to the monomolecular

plane of the same;

also the whirlpool

that pulls you toward the rocking sleep of ocean,

until the two-note ground bass, wave/trough, wave/trough,

accompanies only itself, having swallowed

all sentient voices, and you and the sea are one.

But rock-like vigilance is a form of sleep,

unconscious of what shatters on its wall;

the sleep at the end of the whirlpool

a form of vigilance, the unstillable

swing of the sea's hammer, rising and falling.