Mingus in Shadow


What you see in his face in the last
photograph, when ALS had whittled
his body to fit a wheelchair, is how much
stark work it took to fend death off, and fail.
The famous rage got eaten cell by cell.

His eyes are drawn to slits against the glare
of the blanched landscape. The day he died,
the story goes, a swash of dead whales
washed up on the Baja beach. Great nature grieved
for him, the story means, but it was great

nature that skewed his cells and siphoned
his force and melted his fat like tallow
and beached him in a wheelchair under
a sombrero. It was human nature,
tiny nature, to take the photograph,

to fuss with the aperture and speed, to let
in the right blare of light just long enough
to etch pale Mingus to the negative.
In the small, memorial world of that
negative, he's all the light there is.


Morningside Heights, July

Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she'd need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach's whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuckin Farsi.
I'm sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs-there's a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner. How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon. A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.


The Place on the Corner

No mirror behind this bar: tiers of garish
fish drift back and forth. They too have routines.
The TV's on but not the sound. Dion
and the Belmonts ("I'm a Wanderer") gush
from the box. None here thinks a pink slip
("You're fired," with boilerplate apologies)
is underwear. None here says "lingerie"
or "as it were." We speak Demotic
because we're disguised as ordinary
folks. A shared culture offers camouflage
behind which we can tend the covert fires
we feed our shames to, those things we most fear
to say, our burled, unspoken, common language — the
only one, and we are many.


Rescue

To absolve me of my loneliness, and rather
than board her for the stint, I brought
my cat with me for two weeks in Vermont. Across
bare, borrowed floors she harried pingpong
balls, her claws like castanets, her blunt face rapt — she
kept a ball ahead of her
and between her paws as she chased it full tilt.

Then she'd amble over to where I sat reading
and stretch her utmost length against
my flank and let her heartbeat diminish until
she dozed. So long as she knew where
in that strange space I was, and up to what, she could
make it hers. When I stepped into
eclipse behind an opaque shower curtain, not

at all like the translucent booth she peers into
to watch the blur lather and rinse
himself at home, and when I turned a different
torrent loose, she must have leapt
to the lid of the toilet tank, and measured what next,
rocking back on her haunches,
then forward, and back again, and then the flying

hoyden launched herself at the rod the shower curtain's
strung along, landing, clank, only two
or three inches off, and hung there held up by her
forearms, if a cat has forearms,
like the least fit student in gym class quitting on
a chin-up. Her rear paws churned egg-beater
style. And then what? If I pulled her toward

me with wet, soapy hands, she'd thrash and slash herself
free, but free in a tub. Hung up
as she was, she had nothing to push off from, so
she'd have to let herself drop, clunk,
and turn to the torn curtain her I-meant-to-do-that
face, while, slick and pink, I called
out from the other side, "Sweet cat, are you OK?"


Truffle Pigs

None of these men, who all ran truffle pigs,
compares a truffle to itself. "Fossil
testicles," says one. And another: "No.
Inky, tiny brains, smart only about
money." They like to say, "You get yourself

a pig like this, you've got a live pension."
The dowsing sows sweep their flat snouts across
the scat and leaf rot, scurf and duff, the slow
fires of decay. They know what to ignore;
these pigs are innocent of metaphor.

Tumor, fetus, truffle-all God's creatures
jubilate to grow. Even the diffident truffle
gives off a faint sweat from the joyful work
of burgeoning, and by that spoor the pigs
have learned to know them and to root them out.


Rocas del Caribe, Isla Mujeres, 1967

Broke, we went when no one else would, July,
and got a corner room. "The wind," the desk
clerk grinned, spreading his arms full span, "will frisk
your room." I'm sure that's what I heard him say.
Breeze surged through the room like gossip. The fear-fueled
calf we shared the ferry with was on
the menu every night. We ate in town.
"Camarones?" "Shrimp." It can take a year
twice for a week's vacation: first you save
that long for it and then it lasts that long.
The stubborn surf broke into spume and lace
above the rocks. Bored silly face to face,
we told each other there was nothing wrong,
but filled with dread like a pair of sieves.


Manners

"Sweetypants," Martha Mitchell (wife of John
Mitchell, soon to be Nixon's attorney general)
cried, "fetch me a glass of bubbin,
won't you?" Out of office, Nixon
had been warehoused in Leonard Garment's
New York law firm and had begun to clamber

his way back toward Washington.
The scent of his enemies' blood rose
hotly from the drinks that night.
Why was I there? A college classmate's
mother had suggested he invite a few
friends; she called us "starving scholars."

It's hard to do good and not advertise
yourself, and not to need the needy
even if they don't need you. I'd grown used
to being accused of being somewhere else.
I plied my nose, that shrewd scout, into book
after book at home, and clattered downstairs

for dinner not late but tardy. I dwelt
as much as I could at that remove
from the needs of others we call "the self,"
that desert isle, that Alcatraz from which
none has escaped. I made a happy lifer.
There is no frigate like a book.

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's
best friend," said Groucho Marx. "Inside of a dog,
it's too dark to read." So what if my friend's
mother was a fool. So what if Martha
Mitchell would later rat on her rat
of a husband when Nixon's paranoid

domain collapsed under its own venal
weight and it took Nixon all his gloomy
charisma to load his riven heart
onto a helicopter and yaw upward
from the White House lawn. He might have turned
to Pat and asked, like a child on a first

flight, "Are we getting smaller yet?"
I was too young to know how much I was,
simply by being born, a hostage
to history. My hostess's chill,
insulting grace I fended off with the same
bland good manners I used to stay upstairs

in my head until time had come for food.
A well-fed scholar, I sought out and brought
back a tall bubbin for the nice lady.
Yes, there's a cure for youth, but it's fatal.
And a cure for grace: you say what you mean,
but of course you have to know what that is.


The Shooting

It be the usual at first.
This one be bad, that one be worse.

They do this in slow commotion.
They strut, they fuss, something they done

or never done be what they set
fire to and slow turn into fast

because a gun come out and then
gun two, gun three, guns all
around

like walls. That mean we be the room.


Prescience

Bloated and mesmerized by raspberries,
the possum wobbled into the open
as you or I might blink into the sun
from an afternoon movie, and because
remembered time is instantaneous,
I hear the rifle slash the silence now,
and smell the nitrate and shattered bowels
and spangled berries, and hear, next, a hiss — the
exhaust of a possum's life and a tithe,
a levy of breath from each who stood there
with nothing better to say than "Got it."
How old was I that stark day? Seven? Eight?
That hiss? I could hear me growing older,
rueful, guarded and sullen for dear life.


Vermin

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
What child cries out, "An exterminator!"?
One diligent student in Mrs. Taylor's
class will get an ant farm for Christmas, but
he'll not see industry; he'll see dither.
"The ant sets an example for us all,"
wrote Max Beerbohm, a master of dawdle,
"but it is not a good one." These children
don't hope to outlast the doldrums of school
only to heft great weights and work in squads
and die for their queen. Well, neither did we.
And we knew what we didn't want to be:
the ones we looked down on, the lambs of God,
blander than snow and slow to be cruel.


Memory

We're not born knowing how to love the world,
but squalling. The first two years of our lives
crucially form our psyches, but we have
no memory of them. Well, a few shards

perhaps: a ladybug, the gray underside
of a bright leaf, a pixeled mother
murmuring from inside a screen door.
When all we have are fragments, they suffice.

On the debris of rock, on sand, we build
our church, the Little Chapel of the Dunes.
Soon enough it's harder to forget than
to keep track. How steadily the past fills

with what the present could or would not use.
Our silos teem with corn and avid rats.
How will we love the world? We can't forget
what we never knew; we'd better improvise.

"The farther we go, the more we give up,"
we could complain, but there's always more
to lose. The vacuum that dearth abhors
is dearth. We all drink from a leaking cup.


Promiscuous

"Mixes easily," dictionaries
used to say, a straight shot from the Latin.
Chemists applied the term to matter's
amiability.

But the Random House Dictionary
(1980) gives as its prime meaning:
"characterized
by frequent and indiscriminate
changes of one's sexual partners." Sounds
like a long way
to say "slut," that glob of blame we once threw
equally at men and women, all who slurred,

slavered, slobbered,
slumped, slept or lapsed, slunk or relapsed, slackened
(loose lips sink ships) or slubbed, or slovened. But soon
a slut was female. A much-bedded male

got called a ladies' man; he never slept
with sluts. How sluts
got to be sluts is thus a mystery,
except the language knows what we may

have forgot. "Depression" began its career
in English in 1656, says
the OED,
and meant (science jargon) the opposite

of elevation — a hole or a rut,
perhaps, or, later, "the angular
distance of a celestial object
below the horizon,"

as Webster's Third (1963)
has it. There's ample record of our selfdeceit:
language,
that furious river, carries on its foamed

and sinewed back all we thought we'd shucked off.
Of course it's all
pell-mell, head over heels, snickers and grief,
love notes and libel, fire and ice. In short:

promiscuous.


Le Quatre Saisons, Montreal, 1979

East from Vancouver I'd rattled across
Canada by train, sitting up all night
to watch the moon-limed Rockies. The wheat
provinces I slept through. I read Bleak House
a third time, slowly, fondly. The early
summer sun, "subdued to what it works in,
like the dyer's hand," glinted greenly from
leaves, needles, lakes and regiments of baby
crops. Then, finally, Montreal. I rushed
my mouth out for relief from rail cuisine.
Then in my tasteful room the regrets came
out like chummy ghosts. This far from home
I 'd dragged my glum retinue — venal, mean-spirited,
restless and subdued to dust.


No Return

I like divorce. I love to compose
letters of resignation; now and then
I send one in and leave in a lemon-hued
Huff or a Snit with four on the floor.
Do you like the scent of a hollyhock?
To each his own. I love a burning bridge.

I like to watch the small boat go over
the falls — it swirls in a circle
like a dog coiling for sleep, and its frail bow
pokes blindly out over the falls' lip
a little and a little more and then
too much, and then the boat's nose dives and butt

flips up so that the boat points doomily
down and the screams of the soon-to-be-dead
last longer by echo than the screamers do.
Let's go to the videotape, the news-caster
intones, and the control room goes,
and the boat explodes again and again.


Sooey Generous

Saint Anthony, patron of sausage makers,
guide my pen and unkink my tongue. Of swine
I sing, and of those who tend and slaughter them,
of slops and wallows and fodder, of piglets
doddering on their stilty legs, and sows
splayed to offer burgeoned teats to sucklers,
and the four to five tons of manure
a pig (that ambling buffet) reinvests
in the soil each year; of truffle dowsers
and crunchers of chestnuts and acorns I sing.

In medieval Naples, each household
kept a pig on a twenty-four-foot tether,
rope enough that the hooved Hoover could
scour the domain, whereas in Rome
pigs foraged the streets haunted today by
rat-thin cats, tendons with fur. In Paris
in those years the langueyers, the "tonguers,"
or meat inspectors, lifted a pig's tongue
to look for white ulcers, since the comely
pig in spoiled condition could poison

a family. Indeed the Buddha died
from eating spoiled pork, vegetarians
I know like to insist, raising the stakes
from wrong to fatal, gleefully. Perhaps
you've read the bumper sticker too: A Heart
Attack Is God's Revenge for Eating His
Little Friends. Two major religions
prohibit eating pork. Both creeds were forged
in deserts, and the site-specific pig,
who detests dry mud, has never mixed well

with nomads or vice versa. Since a pig
eats everything, just as the cuisines that
sanctify the pig discard no fragment
of it, it makes sense to eat it whole hog
or shun it altogether, since to eat
or not to eat is sacral, if there's a choice
in the matter. To fast is not to starve.
The thirteen ravenous, sea-queasy pigs
Hernando de Soto loosed near Tampa
in 1542 ate whatever

they liked. How glad they must have been to hoove
some soil after skidding in the slick hold
week after dark week: a pig without sun
on its sullied back grows skittish and glum.
Pigs and pioneers would build America.
Cincinnati was called Porkopolis
in the 1830s; the hogs arrived,
as the hunger for them had, by river,
from which a short forced march led to slaughter.
A new country travels on its belly,

and manufacture starts in the barnyard:
hide for leather and stomach for pepsin.
In France, a farm family calls its pig
"Monsieur." According to a CIA
tally early in 1978,
the Chinese kept 280 million
of the world's 400 million pigs;
perhaps all of them were called "The Chairman."
Emmaeus, swineherd to Odysseus,
guarded 600 sows and their litters

(the males slept outside), and no doubt each sow
and piglet had its own name in that rich
matriarchal mire. And I like to think
that in that mild hospice future pork roasts
fattened toward oblivion with all
the love and dignity that husbandry
has given up to be an industry,
and that the meat of Emmaeus's coddled
porkers tasted a little sweeter for
the graces of affection and a name.