All of Us: The Collected Poems Read online

between us. I took hold

  of the receiver as if

  it were my buddy’s arm.

  And I wished for us both

  I could put my arms

  around you, old friend.

  I love you too, Bro.

  I said that, and then we hung up.

  Our First House in Sacramento

  This much is clear to me now—even then

  our days were numbered. After our first week

  in the house that came furnished

  with somebody else’s things, a man appeared

  one night with a baseball bat. And raised it.

  I was not the man he thought I was.

  Finally, I got him to believe it.

  He wept from frustration after his anger

  left him. None of this had anything to do

  with Beatlemania. The next week these friends

  of ours from the bar where we all drank

  brought friends of theirs to our house —

  and we played poker. I lost the grocery money

  to a stranger. Who went on to quarrel

  with his wife. In his frustration

  he drove his fist through the kitchen wall.

  Then he, too, disappeared from my life forever.

  When we left that house where nothing worked

  any longer, we left at midnight

  with a U-Haul trailer and a lantern.

  Who knows what passed through the neighbors’ minds

  when they saw a family leaving their house

  in the middle of the night?

  The lantern moving behind the curtainless

  windows. The shadows going from room to room,

  gathering their things into boxes.

  I saw firsthand

  what frustration can do to a man.

  Make him weep, make him throw his fist

  through a wall. Set him to dreaming

  of the house that’s his

  at the end of the long road. A house

  filled with music, ease, and generosity.

  A house that hasn’t been lived in yet.

  Next Year

  That first week in Santa Barbara wasn’t the worst thing

  to happen. The second week he fell on his head

  while drinking, just before he had to lecture.

  In the lounge, that second week, she took the microphone

  from the singer’s hands and crooned her own

  torch song. Then danced. And then passed out

  on the table. That’s not the worst, either. They

  went to jail that second week. He wasn’t driving

  so they booked him, dressed him in pajamas

  and stuck him in Detox. Told him to get some sleep.

  Told him he could see about his wife in the morning.

  But how could he sleep when they wouldn’t let him

  close the door to his room?

  The corridor’s green light entered,

  and the sound of a man weeping.

  His wife had been called upon to give the alphabet

  beside the road, in the middle of the night.

  This is strange enough. But the cops had her

  stand on one leg, close her eyes,

  and try to touch her nose with her index finger.

  All of which she failed to do.

  She went to jail for resisting arrest.

  He bailed her out when he got out of Detox.

  They drove home in ruins.

  This is not the worst. Their daughter had picked that night

  to run away from home. She left a note:

  “You’re both crazy. Give me a break, PLEASE.

  Don’t come after me.”

  That’s still not the worst. They went on

  thinking they were the people they said they were.

  Answering to those names.

  Making love to the people with those names.

  Nights without beginning that had no end.

  Talking about a past as if it’d really happened.

  Telling themselves that this time next year,

  this time next year

  things were going to be different.

  To My Daughter

  Everything I see will outlive me.

  — ANNA AKHMATOVA

  It’s too late now to put a curse on you—wish you

  plain, say, as Yeats did his daughter. And when

  we met her in Sligo, selling her paintings, it’d worked —

  she was the plainest, oldest woman in Ireland.

  But she was safe.

  For the longest time, his reasoning

  escaped me. Anyway, it’s too late for you,

  as I said. You’re grownup now, and lovely.

  You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter.

  But you’re a drunk. I can’t say you’re breaking

  my heart. I don’t have a heart when it comes

  to this booze thing. Sad, yes, Christ alone knows.

  Your old man, the one they call Shiloh, is back

  in town, and the drink has started to flow again.

  You’ve been drunk for three days, you tell me,

  when you know goddamn well drinking is like poison

  to our family. Didn’t your mother and I set you

  example enough? Two people

  who loved each other knocking each other around,

  knocking back the love we felt, glass by empty glass,

  curses and blows and betrayals?

  You must be crazy! Wasn’t all that enough for you?

  You want to die? Maybe that’s it. Maybe

  I think I know you, and I don’t.

  I’m not kidding, kiddo. Who are you kidding?

  Daughter, you can’t drink.

  The last few times I saw you, you were out of it.

  A cast on your collarbone, or else

  a splint on your finger, dark glasses to hide

  your beautiful bruised eyes. A lip

  that a man should kiss instead of split.

  Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ!

  You’ve got to take hold now.

  Do you hear me? Wake up! You’ve got to knock it off

  and get straight. Clean up your act. I’m asking you.

  Okay, telling you. Sure, our family was made

  to squander, not collect. But turn this around now.

  You simply must—that’s all!

  Daughter, you can’t drink.

  It will kill you. Like it did your mother, and me.

  Like it did.

  Anathema

  The entire household suffered.

  My wife, myself, the two children, and the dog

  whose puppies were born dead.

  Our affairs, such as they were, withered.

  My wife was dropped by her lover,

  the one-armed teacher of music who was

  her only contact with the outside world

  and the things of the mind.

  My own girlfriend said she couldn’t stand it

  anymore, and went back to her husband.

  The water was shut off.

  All that summer the house baked.

  The peach trees were blasted.

  Our little flower bed lay trampled.

  The brakes went out on the car, and the battery

  failed. The neighbors quit speaking

  to us and closed their doors in our faces.

  Checks flew back at us from merchants —

  and then mail stopped being delivered

  altogether. Only the sheriff got through

  from time to time—with one or the other

  of our children in the back seat,

  pleading to be taken anywhere but here.

  And then mice entered the house in droves.

  Followed by a bull snake. My wife

  found it sunning itself in the living room

  next to the dead TV. How she dealt with it

  is another matter. Chopped its head off

  rig
ht there on the floor.

  And then chopped it in two when it continued

  to writhe. We saw we couldn’t hold out

  any longer. We were beaten.

  We wanted to get down on our knees

  and say forgive us our sins, forgive us

  our lives. But it was too late.

  Too late. No one around would listen.

  We had to watch as the house was pulled down,

  the ground plowed up, and then

  we were dispersed in four directions.

  Energy

  Last night at my daughter’s, near Blaine,

  she did her best to tell me

  what went wrong

  between her mother and me.

  “Energy. You two’s energy was all wrong.”

  She looks like her mother

  when her mother was young.

  Laughs like her.

  Moves the drift of hair

  from her forehead, like her mother.

  Can take a cigarette down

  to the filter in three draws,

  just like her mother. I thought

  this visit would be easy. Wrong.

  This is hard, brother. Those years

  spilling over into my sleep when I try

  to sleep. To wake to find a thousand

  cigarettes in the ashtray and every

  light in the house burning. I can’t

  pretend to understand anything:

  today I’ll be carried

  three thousand miles away into

  the loving arms of another woman, not

  her mother. No. She’s caught

  in the flywheel of a new love.

  I turn off the last light

  and close the door.

  Moving toward whatever ancient thing

  it is that works the chains

  and pulls us so relentlessly on.

  Locking Yourself Out,

  Then Trying to Get Back In

  You simply go out and shut the door

  without thinking. And when you look back

  at what you’ve done

  it’s too late. If this sounds

  like the story of a life, okay.

  It was raining. The neighbors who had

  a key were away. I tried and tried

  the lower windows. Stared

  inside at the sofa, plants, the table

  and chairs, the stereo set-up.

  My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me

  on the glass-topped table, and my heart

  went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,

  or something like that. After all,

  this wasn’t so bad.

  Worse things had happened. This

  was even a little funny. I found the ladder.

  Took that and leaned it against the house.

  Then climbed in the rain to the deck,

  swung myself over the railing

  and tried the door. Which was locked,

  of course. But I looked in just the same

  at my desk, some papers, and my chair.

  This was the window on the other side

  of the desk where I’d raise my eyes

  and stare out when I sat at that desk.

  This is not like downstairs, I thought.

  This is something else.

  And it was something to look in like that, unseen,

  from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.

  I don’t even think I can talk about it.

  I brought my face close to the glass

  and imagined myself inside,

  sitting at the desk. Looking up

  from my work now and again.

  Thinking about some other place

  and some other time.

  The people I had loved then.

  I stood there for a minute in the rain.

  Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.

  Even though a wave of grief passed through me.

  Even though I felt violently ashamed

  of the injury I’d done back then.

  I bashed that beautiful window.

  And stepped back in.

  Medicine

  All I know about medicine I picked up

  from my doctor friend in El Paso

  who drank and took drugs. We were buddies

  until I moved East. I’m saying

  I was never sick a day in my life.

  But something has appeared

  on my shoulder and continues to grow.

  A wen, I think, and love the word

  but not the thing itself, whatever

  it is. Late at night my teeth ache

  and the phone rings. I’m ill,

  unhappy and alone. Lord!

  Give me your unsteady knife,

  doc. Give me your hand, friend.

  Wenas Ridge

  The seasons turning. Memory flaring.

  Three of us that fall. Young hoodlums —

  shoplifters, stealers of hubcaps.

  Bozos. Dick Miller, dead now.

  Lyle Rousseau, son of the Ford dealer.

  And I, who’d just made a girl pregnant.

  Hunting late into that golden afternoon

  for grouse. Following deer paths,

  pushing through undergrowth, stepping over

  blow-downs. Reaching out for something to hold onto.

  At the top of Wenas Ridge

  we walked out of pine trees and could see

  down deep ravines, where the wind roared, to the river.

  More alive then, I thought, than I’d ever be.

  But my whole life, in switchbacks, ahead of me.

  Hawks, deer, coons we looked at and let go.

  Killed six grouse and should have stopped.

  Didn’t, though we had limits.

  Lyle and I climbing fifty feet or so

  above Dick Miller. Who screamed—“Yaaaah!”

  Then swore and swore. Legs numbing as I saw what.

  That fat, dark snake rising up. Beginning to sing.

  And how it sang! A timber rattler thick as my wrist.

  It’d struck at Miller, but missed. No other way

  to say it—he was paralyzed. Could scream, and swear,

  not shoot. Then the snake lowered itself from sight

  and went in under rocks. We understood

  we’d have to get down. In the same way we’d got up.

  Blindly crawling through brush, stepping over blow-downs,

  pushing into undergrowth. Shadows falling from trees now

  onto flat rocks that held the day’s heat. And snakes.

  My heart stopped, and then started again.

  My hair stood on end. This was the moment

  my life had prepared me for. And I wasn’t ready.

  We started down anyway. Jesus, please help me

  out of this, I prayed. I’ll believe in you again

  and honor you always. But Jesus was crowded out

  of my head by the vision of that rearing snake.

  That singing. Keep believing in me, snake said,

  for I will return. I made an obscure, criminal pact

  that day. Praying to Jesus in one breath.

  To snake in the other. Snake finally more real

  to me. The memory of that day

  like a blow to the calf now.

  I got out, didn’t I? But something happened.

  I married the girl I loved, yet poisoned her life.

  Lies began to coil in my heart and call it home.

  Got used to darkness and its crooked ways.

  Since then I’ve always feared rattlesnakes.

  Been ambivalent about Jesus.

  But someone, something’s responsible for this.

  Now, as then.

  Reading

  Every man’s life is a mystery, even as

  yours is, and mine. Imagine

  a château with a window opening

  onto Lake Geneva. There in the window

&n
bsp; on warm and sunny days is a man

  so engrossed in reading he doesn’t look

  up. Or if he does he marks his place

  with a finger, raises his eyes, and peers

  across the water to Mont Blanc,

  and beyond, to Selah, Washington,

  where he is with a girl

  and getting drunk for the first time.

  The last thing he remembers, before

  he passes out, is that she spit on him.

  He keeps on drinking

  and getting spit on for years.

  But some people will tell you

  that suffering is good for the character.

  You’re free to believe anything.

  In any case, he goes

  back to reading and will not

  feel guilty about his mother

  drifting in her boat of sadness,

  or consider his children

  and their troubles that go on and on.

  Nor does he intend to think about

  the clear-eyed woman he once loved

  and her defeat at the hands of eastern religion.

  Her grief has no beginning, and no end.

  Let anyone in the château, or Selah,

  come forward who might claim kin with the man

  who sits all day in the window reading,

  like a picture of a man reading.

  Let the sun come forward.

  Let the man himself come forward.

  What in Hell can he be reading?

  Rain

  Woke up this morning with

  a terrific urge to lie in bed all day

  and read. Fought against it for a minute.

  Then looked out the window at the rain.

  And gave over. Put myself entirely

  in the keep of this rainy morning.

  Would I live my life over again?

  Make the same unforgivable mistakes?

  Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

  Money

  In order to be able to live

  on the right side of the law.

  To always use his own name

  and phone number. To go bail

  for a friend and not give

  a damn if the friend skips town.

  Hope, in fact, she does.

  To give some money

  to his mother. And to his

  children and their mother.

  Not save it. He wants

  to use it up before it’s gone.

  Buy clothes with it.

  Pay the rent and utilities.