Added 11-18-06
Sometimes I regret having never raised children.
Then I have lunch with a friend, or afternoon coffee,
or sit next to a stranger in a smoky bar
and suddenly I’m listening to parental confessions
about how Helen called after midnight,
a black eye, broken tooth, the bleeding just stopped,
yes, her husband got drunk and hit her again
but she already has an appointment with a lawyer.
This was the last straw, this time
she will divorce him (her third).
Or Stu, after three years on the straight and narrow,
a job he loves, up for promotion,
relapsed and is back in rehab.
He would have called earlier but they don’t allow
phone calls out during the first week.
Or it’s a cry for money before the electricity
is turned off, or the rent overdo, or the taxes.
It’s always something.
Or the kids barge in unannounced
with their children at heel,
everybody yapping at once.
The babysitter is sick, they are desperate,
and so you cancel your own dinner plans
to watch the grandkids for the evening.
It’s always something.
And all the while the friend or stranger
assumes I’m a kindred soul, a parent,
and therefore understand how they feel.
But what I hear is something else entirely:
the sweet voice of Helen in the school musical,
high notes glittering off a golden crown,
standing now by the coffee pot.
She has the voice of an angel.
And Stu’s tether is not addiction
but a taut rope up the middle in the bottom of the ninth,
zipping right through the busboy’s legs,
a walkoff hit that wins the Little League game.
There’s so much cheering and applause,
I no longer hear the complaints and regrets and
self-doubts
for all the loud celebration—
Such wonder and awe and innocence
in this last gasp of childhood!
(Before the web of life
entangles them as it snared you
– and slowly, inevitably
begins to teach them
the rules of parenting.)
1
You said it was your first vaginal orgasm.
You said you were swept away
by the roar of the ocean outside the blue tent,
how suddenly your body took off in flight,
a gull riding the storm-winds—
and I believed you.
How could I not?
I watched you transform into someone savage,
from the usual pensive lady
balanced in pre-orgasmic fragility,
a lady who slipped into pleasure
as carefully as an overweight matron
eased onto a cushion, not wanting
the springs to squeal.
I saw you lose it.
I saw the old tension contorted into something
that looked like terror,
your mouth falling open,
the grimace, your eyes hard as marbles;
you looked like a prisoner facing the firing squad
in the moment before execution.
You lost it.
The gasp that finally emerged from the gaping
mouth was a horn of relief blaring
release, release, release!
I was there. I saw this. I saw you.
Then why, forty years later, must you pretend
this never happened?
2
We were camping on the Oregon coast.
The blue tent, picked up at a garage sale
and needing patches to reinforce fabric
rotten with mold, was cheap,
affordable to grad students like us,
young and in love,
still learning what it meant for us
to be a couple.
We were camping on the Oregon coast
in a dank blue tent
to recharge our batteries before finals.
We put up the tent in the wind-swept grass
at the edge of a stretch of sand, perhaps
fifty yards from the ocean at high tide,
a blue smudge on a vast landscape.
We were alone.
We owned the sand.
We owned the ocean.
We owned the universe.
3
I have no idea how many orgasms I’ve witnessed
in a life with four wives and too many girlfriends
and little that has lasted. But I most
remember yours in the blue tent.
I brought this up years after our divorce
and you pretended not to remember,
as if memory might compromise some kind of
freedom, or independence, or decision
you’d made about your past.
As if being swept away by the ocean
(if that’s what happened)
was a weakness.
I didn’t push the point
even though I can still, even now,
see the grimace, the marble eyes,
and hear the horn of release
like a gasp of exhaustion
after extraordinary effort.
I didn’t push it but I can’t forget it
and I wonder why it isn’t the same
for you.
4
I am haunted by your orgasm
not because it was a rare moment
(though it was)
but because you claim
to have forgotten it, as if
it never existed except in my mind,
which is the definition, I believe, of
hallucination.
But I was there. I was the one
into whose arms you collapsed,
exhausted, spent,
gasping for breath,
the one to whom you spoke,
trying to explain this special thing
that had happened to you
just now.
Just now—
this new wondrous experience that wrapped
around us like a damp fog
hiding everything farther distant than
this very moment, the same morning fog
that would greet us and push us closer
lest we lose sight of one another
at the day’s new beginning.
I would have thought such a moment
would change your life.
I would have thought such a moment
could never be forgotten.
I don’t think I am wrong here.
I think you’re hiding something
still
because if I hallucinated this,
I hallucinate everything.
5
I don’t want to relive your orgasm.
I don’t want you in my life again.
What I want is a postcard
of a blue smudge on a vast landscape
in which happened a miracle of sorts,
release release release!
so I might open the scrapbook of my life
and remember the blue tent
and remember the ocean’s roar
and remember the marble eyes
and remember the contorted face
and remember the exhaustive gasp,
the collapse into my arms—
watching this dance once again,
hearing the cosmic music once again
and thereby remembering
I was actually,
I was truly,
I was miraculously,
in some way
Connected—
to you
to the sand
to the ocean
to the stars
right then, right there.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
There was supposed to be a son in Seattle who
called to say he had tickets to the Seahawks game
and would I join him?
There was supposed to be a daughter
in labor and a nervous son-in-law
to comfort in the waiting room
before getting the good news, a boy, a girl, a baby
to toast with raised cigars and the best brandy.
There was supposed to be a legacy in flesh.
What I have instead are books.
They gather dust
on a few library shelves,
unread, abandoned, unfleshly,
forgotten by everyone but me.
What kind of family is this?
The only family I have.
A legacy
from choices made so many years ago I can’t
remember making them.
No one told me there’d be so much
to miss later, no one
told me the flesh
of literature – this was the attempt! –
would grow wrinkled so soon,
as neglected as an old man
stretched out on his final bed.
If anyone told me about regrets,
I didn’t listen.
I was the last to learn that the Muse
is a seductive, manipulative whore
who swells from creative seed, delivering
the carnal corpse of
Failure.
I was the last to learn.
By all the measures
of his profession
he was a failure.
Only when he looked
in the mirror
did he see
how much he'd accomplished
against adversity.
Life is short
Time is swift
Adrift, whoever
Courts death
Without paradigm
For afterlife
No time
For breath
Rain soaked lawn
Bloated earth
Sputtering puddles
Like afterbirth
Youth is wasted
On the young
Old age is squandered
On the dead
Better to lust
In the mind's bed
Where sheets cling hot
And dreams get fed
Yellow gold red brown
Fallen leaves adorn the ground
One three seven ten
Counting gravestones never ends
An old man
Is a young man
Whose skin doesn't fit
An old man
Is a young man
Who talks to himself
An old man
Is a young man
Who takes naps
An old man
Is a young man
Whose eyes get sore
An old man
Is a young man
Whose smiles are sad
An old man
Is a young man
Whose old man
Was right
I know enough
To know
How little
I know
Regrets are cancers
In the brain
That fester inward
Toward the heart
The vanguard
Against pain
Fled long ago
What remains
Is no match
For waves
Of self-doubt
The usual latch
Against content
What is meant
By regret
Is knowledge
Of Wrong
Things done
What's won
In experience
Is lost
In torment
It's not that
You can't change
The past
It's that
You can't change
Anything
Why not be a poet in old age?
It’s too late to get rich
And poets never do.
A novel takes so many words.
A poem is brooded so.
What I think I need
Is not what I will get.
None will care or heed
Desire's old regret.
What I think I need
Is clear only to me,
As potent as a seed--
Profound simplicity!
What I think I need
Is not what I have known.
I will not succeed
To harness flesh and bone.
Yet I've come close as skin,
A night accompanied
By rapture in a spin--
Almost grasping what I need.
But that was long ago.
What I think I need
Today is moving slow--
And silence as my creed.
I stand as still as a corpse and stare at photos,
Playbills, cast lists of forgotten plays
On abandoned stages. If the wages of death is love,
Then love fills this room. But in the corner,
Lurking like a naughty child, is more sadness
Than I want to feel. All the years of the past,
Dripping memories like rank fruit, rot
And fertilize the heart of this place.
So much has changed.
So much has been forgotten.
A lesson earned is not a lesson learned:
Those times were good -- and never can return.
I have a leak in my soul
And through it my character flows
Drip by drip. The Yellow Pages
Do not list Plumbers
For the Soul. The sages
At church have much to say
On this matter but nothing
They know makes sense to me.
I have a crack in my heart
Through which my spirit wants
To go. The wages of sleep
Do not pay the rent. Dreams
Without spirit do not spend.
A spirit lost is a spirit gone.
I have a leak in my soul
And through it my character flows.
I have a rent in my mind
And everything unwinds.
I don’t know where I’ve been.
I don’t know where I go.
I have a leak in my soul
And through it my character flows
Into the vast unknown
Far, so far, from home.
He sits alone at the bar:
A beer, a shot, a smoke.
Body bent from hard work,
Face flushed from hard drink,
He’s younger than he looks.
He bothers no one – yet.
We watch him all the same;
We’re waiting for the change.
Sometimes it happens early,
Sometimes it happens late.
We wager when and how change comes—
A dollar gets you in.
Tonight it takes four beers, three shots.
Slouched over the bar, he straightens up,
He looks around, a sparkle in his eye.
He clears his throat. He coughs.
His chin tilts up, he glances high,
And all the bar is his.
No one knows why it begins.
Does he listen in to loud harangues
Up and down the bar, where
Every politician is an ass
And every crook a star?
He’s like the wolf who in deep sleep
Scents danger down the way
And rises up with snarling teeth
To find the moon – and bay.
What moon hangs from the ceiling now?
What does he see and serve
With all this howling he begins:
“Do you really knooooooooooooow?”
Who is he talking to?
“Do you really knooooooooooooow?”
Is it moon or God he sees,
“Do you really knooooooooooooow?”
The howling stops.
He who had the center stage
Gets up and slowly walks away
Unsteadily and out the door.
Just this – and then the moment’s gone.
At the juke I play a song.
Whoever won collects the bets,
It’s whiskey all around.
What just happened?
I don’t know.
The fact is, no one knows.
Maybe that’s the point.
In the bar an echo howls,
“Do you really knooooooooow?”
A cold sharp light
Cuts up the gray sky
Until it bleeds blue.
The birds get confused.
Their loud chattering
Sounds like panic.
On the wet grass
A shadow settles in
Like a dazed snake.
So much light
Makes me squint
Through my depression.
My mood craves gray,
Not this damn
Blue blood.
When she
stretches on the bed,
I can’t
look elsewhere instead.
The subtle
turning of her lip
Suggests
the curve below her hip.
No
vocabulary tells
The
special way her bosom swells.
All the
length of limb and leg
Seem
designed to make me beg.
In her
navel’s hollow lies
A secret
far beyond the skies,
And what
her mons veneris spells
Has
mystery in decibels.
Oh, I
could go on and on—
But
there she lies, and now she yawns…