The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems Read online

  say I’ll take that foot and that breast and that thigh and those lips

  you have become so denatured and particular. They float and merge

  their parts trying to come up with something that will please you.

  Selecting the finest belly you write your name with a long thin

  line of cocaine but she is perspiring and you can’t properly snort

  it off. Disappointments. The belly weeps but you dismiss her, sad

  and frightened that your dreams have come to no end. Why cast Robert

  Redford in your life story if all that he’s going to do is sit there

  and piss and moan at the typewriter for two hours in expensive

  Eastman color? Not much will happen if you don’t like to drink

  champagne out of shoes. And sated with a half-dozen French meals a day

  you long for those simple boiled potatoes your estranged wife made

  so perfectly. The letters from your children are defiled in a stack

  of fan mail and obscene photos. Your old dog and horse have been

  given to kindly people and your wife will soon marry a jolly farmer.

  No matter that your million-selling books are cast in bronze. On a

  whim you fly to Palm Beach, jump on your yacht and set the automatic.

  You fit a nylon hawser around your neck, hurl overboard, and after

  the sharks have lunch your head skips in the noose like a marlin bait.

  21

  To answer some of the questions you might ask were you alive and

  had we become friends but what do poets ask one another after long

  absence? How have you been other than dead and how have I been

  dying on earth without naming the average string of complaints which

  is only worrying aloud, naming the dreaded motes that float around

  the brain, those pink balloons calling themselves poverty, failure,

  sickness, lust, and envy. To mention a very few. But you want part-

  iculars, not the human condition or a letter to the editor on why

  when I’m at my worst I think I’ve been fucked over. So here’s this

  Spring’s news: now that the grass is taller I walk in some fear of

  snakes. Feeling melancholy I watched my wife plant the garden row

  on row while the baby tried to catch frogs. It’s hard not to eat too

  much when you deeply love food but I’ve limited myself to a half

  gallon of Burgundy a day. On long walks my eyes are so sunk back

  in my brain they see nothing, then move forward again toward the light

  and see a high meadow turning pale green and swimming in the fog

  with crows tracing perceptible and geometrical paths just above

  the fog but audible. At the shore I cast for fish, some of them

  large with deliquescing smelt and alewives in their bellies. Other

  than marriage I haven’t been in love for years; close calls over

  the world I mentioned to you before, but it’s not love if it isn’t

  a surprise. I look at women and know deeply they are from another

  planet and sometimes even lightly touching a girl’s arm I know

  I am touching a lovely though alien creature. We don’t get back

  those days we don’t caress, don’t make love. If I could get you out

  in the backcountry down in Key West and get some psilocybin into

  you you would cut your legendary vodka consumption. Naturally I

  still believe in miracles and the holy fate of the imagination. How

  is it being dead and would I like it and should I put it off for a while?

  22

  These last few notes to you have been a bit somber like biographies

  of artists written by joyless people so that the whole book is

  a record of agony at thirty rather than thirty-three and a third.

  You know the sound – Keeeaaattts wuzzz verrry unhappppppy abouttt

  dyinnnng. So here are some of those off-the-wall extravagancies.

  Dawn in Ecuador with mariachi music, dawn at Ngorongoro with elephant

  far below in the crater swaggering through the marsh grass, dawn in

  Moscow and snowing with gold minarets shouting that you have at last

  reached Asia, dawn in Addis Ababa with a Muslim waver in the cool

  air smelling of ginger and a lion roaring on the lawn, dawn in

  bleary Paris with a roll tasting like zinc and a girl in a cellophane

  blouse staring at you with four miraculous eyes, dawn in Normandy

  with a conceivable princess breathing in the next room and horses

  wandering across the moat beneath my window, dawn in Montana with

  herons calling from the swamp, dawn in Key West wondering if it was

  a woman or tarpon that left your bed before cockcrow, dawn at home

  when your eyes are molten and the ghost of your dog chases the fox

  across the pasture, dawn on the Escanaba with trout dimpling the

  mist and the water with a dulcet roar, dawn in London when the party-

  girl leaves your taxi to go home to Shakespeare, dawn in Leningrad

  with the last linden leaves falling and you knocking at the door

  for a drunken talk but I am asleep. Not to speak of the endless and

  nearly unconscious water walks after midnight when even the stars

  might descend another foot to get closer to earth. Heat. The wetness

  of air. Couplings. Even the mosquitoes are lovely and seem to imitate

  miniature birds. And a lion’s cough is followed rhythmically by a

  hyena’s laugh to prove that nature loves symmetry. The black girl

  leaves the grand hotel for her implausibly shabby home. The poet

  had dropped five sorts of drugs in his belly swill of alcohol and

  has imagined his deathless lines commemorating your last Leningrad night.

  23

  I want to bother you with some recent nonsense; a classmate dropped

  dead, his heart was attacked at thirty-three. At the crematory

  they lowered his body by fire-resistant titanium cables reminding

  one of the steak on a neglected barbecue grill, only more so. We’re

  not supposed to believe that the vase of ashes is the real him.

  You can imagine the mighty roar of the gas jets, a train coming

  closer, the soul of thunder. But this is only old hat, or old death,

  whichever. “Pause here, son of sorrow, remember death,” someone once

  said. “We can’t have all things here to please us, our little Sue Ann

  is gone to Jesus” reads an Alabama gravestone. But maybe even Robert

  Frost or Charles Olson don’t know they are dead. That would include

  you of course. It is no quantity, absolute zero, the air in a hole

  minus its airiness, the vacuum from the passing bird or bullet, the

  end of the stem where the peach was, the place above the ground

  where the barn burned with such energy we plugged our ears. If not,

  show yourself in ten minutes. Let’s settle this issue because I feel

  badly today: a sense that my teeth and body are rotting on the hoof.

  I could avoid the whole thing with a few drinks – it’s been over

  eight hours – but I want to face it like Simon Magus or poor Faustus.

  Nothing, however, presents itself other than that fading picture of

  my sister with an engine in her lap, not a very encouraging item

  to be sure. I took Anna who is two for her first swim today. We didn’t

  know we were going swimming so she wore a pink dress, standing in

  the lake up to her waist in wonderment. The gaucheries of children,

  the way they love birds and neon lights, kill snakes and eat sand.


  But I decided I wanted to go swimming for the first time and wanted

  to make love for the first time again. These thoughts can make you

  unhappy. Perhaps if your old dog had been in the apartment that night

  you wouldn’t have done it. Everything’s so fragile except ropes.

  24

  Dear friend. It rained long and hard after a hot week and when I

  awoke the world was green and leafy again, or as J.D. says, everything

  was new like a warm rain after a movie. And I said enough of death

  and its obvious health hazards, it’s a white-on-white jigsaw puzzle

  in one piece. An hour with the doctor yesterday when he said my

  blood pressure was so high I might explode as if I had just swallowed

  an especially tasty grenade. I must warn my friends not to stand

  too close. Blood can be poisonous; the Kikuyu in Kenya are often

  infected when they burrow hacking away in the gut of an elephant.

  Some don’t come back. But doctors don’t say such things, except

  W.C. Williams. Just like your doctor when you were going batty, mine

  said, “You must be distressed, you eat and drink and smoke far too

  much. Cut out these things. The lab found lilacs and part of the

  backbone of a garter snake or garter in your stool sample, and the

  remnants of a hair ball. Do you chew your comb? We are checking to

  see if it’s your hair as there are possible criminal questions here.

  Meanwhile get this thatch of expensive prescriptions filled and I

  advise extensive psychiatric care. I heard your barking when I left

  the room. How did you manage gout at your age?” My eyes misted

  and I heard fiddle music and I looked up from page 86 in the June

  Vogue where my old nemesis Lauren Hutton was staring at me in a

  doctor’s office in northern Michigan. This is Paul Bunyan country

  Lauren. And how did I get gout? All of that fried salt and side

  pork as a child. Humble fare. Quintuple heaps of caviar and decanters

  of vodka at the Hotel Europa in Leningrad. Tête de veau, the brains,

  tongue and cheeks of a calf. Side orders of tripe à la mode de Caen

  sweetbreads with morels. Stewed kidneys and heart. Three-pound steaks

  as snacks, five dozen oysters and three lobsters in Boston. A barrel

  of nice gravy. Wild boar. Venison. Duck. Partridge. Pig’s feet. But

  you know, Sergei, I must eat these magical trifles to keep from

  getting brainy and sad, to avoid leaving this physical world.

  25

  An afterthought to my previous note; we must closely watch any self-

  pity and whining. It simply isn’t manly. Better by far to be a cow-

  boy drinking rusty water, surviving on the maggots that unwittingly

  ate the pemmican in the saddlebags. I would be the Lone and I don’t

  need no one said the cowpoke. Just a man and his horse against

  everything else on earth and horses are so dumb they run all day

  from flies never learning that flies are everywhere. Though in their

  violent motion they avoid the flies for a few moments. It’s time

  again not to push a metaphor too far. But back again to the success-

  ful farmer who has his original hoe bronzed like baby shoes above

  the Formica mantelpiece – I earned what I got, nobody give me nothing

  he says. Pasternak said you probably didn’t think death was the end

  of it all. Maybe you were only checking it out for something new

  to write about. We thieves of fire are capable of such arrogance

  when not otherwise occupied as real people pretending to be poet

  farmers, important writers, capable lovers, sports fops, regular guys,

  rock stars with tiny nonetheless appreciative audiences. But the

  self-pity and whining must stop. I forgot to add that at the doctor’s

  an old woman called in to say that her legs had turned blue and she

  couldn’t walk or hold her urine and she was alone. Try that one on.

  Thirty years ago I remember my mother singing Hello Central, give

  me heaven, I think my daddy is there about the usual little boy in

  a wartime situation. We forget about those actual people, certainly

  our ancestors and neighbors, who die in earnest. They called my dad,

  the county agent, and his friend a poor farmer was swinging like you

  only from a rafter in the barn from a hay rope. What to do with his

  strange children – their thin bodies, low brows and narrow eyes –

  who were my schoolmates. They’re working in auto factories now and

  still voiceless. We are different in that we suffer and love, are bored,

  with our mouths open and must speak on occasion for those others.

  26

  Going in the bar last Sunday night I noticed that they were having

  high-school graduation down the street. Caps and gowns. June and

  mayflies fresh from the channel fluttering in the warm still air.

  After a few drinks I felt jealous and wanted someone to say, “Best of

  luck in your chosen field” or, “The road of life is ahead of you.”

  Remember your first trip to Moscow at nineteen? Everything was pos-

  sible. You watched those noblewomen at the riding academy who would

  soon be permanently unhorsed, something you were to have mixed

  feelings about, what with the way poets suck up to and are attracted

  to the aristocracy however gimcrack. And though the great Blok

  welcomed you, you felt tentative, an unknown quantity, and remained

  so for several years. But how quickly one goes from being unknown

  and embarrassed to bored and arrogant, from being ignored to expecting

  deference. From fleabag rooms to at least the Plaza. And the daydreams

  and hustling, the fantasies and endless work that get you from one

  to the other, only to discover that you really want to go home. Start

  over with a new deck. But back home all the animals are dead, the

  friends have disappeared and the fields gone to weed. The fish

  have flown from the creeks and ponds and the birds have all drowned

  or gone to China. No one knows you – they have little time for poetry

  in the country, or in the city for that matter except for the minis-

  trations of a few friends. Your name bobs up like a Halloween

  apple and literature people have the vague feeling that they should read

  you if they ever “catch up” on their reading. Once on a train I saw

  a girl reading a book of mine but she was homely and I had a toothache

  so I let the moment pass. What delicious notoriety. The journalist

  said I looked like a bricklayer or beer salesman, not being fashion-

  ably slender. But lately the sun shines through, the sweet release

  of flinging these lines at the dead, almost like my baby Anna throw-

  ing grain to the horses a mile away, in the far corner of the pasture.

  27

  I won my wings! I got all A’s! We bought fresh fruit! The toilet

  broke! Thus my life draws fuel ineluctably from triumph. Manic,

  rainy June slides into July and I am carefully dressing myself in

  primary colors for happiness. When the summer solstice has passed

  you know you’re finally safe again. That midnight surely dates

  the year. “Look to your romantic interests and business investments,”

  says the star hack in the newspapers. But what if you have neither?

  Millions will be up to nothing. One of those pure
empty days with

  all the presence of a hole in the ground. The stars have stolen

  twenty-four hours and vengeance is out of the question. But I’m

  a three-peckered purple goat if you were tied to any planet by your

  cord. That is mischief, an inferior magic; pulling the lining out

  of a top hat. You merely rolled on the ground moaning trying to pull

  that mask off but it had grown into your face. “Such a price the

  gods exact for song to become what we sing,” said someone. If it

  aches that badly you have to take the head off, narrow the neck to

  a third its normal size, a practice known as hanging by gift of the

  state or as a do-it-yourself project. But what I wonder about is your

  velocity: ten years from Ryazan to Leningrad. A little more than

  a decade, two years into your fifth seven and on out like a proton

  in an accelerator. You simply fell off the edge of the world while

  most of us are given circles or, hopefully, spirals. The new

  territory had a wall which you went over and on the other side there

  was something we weren’t permitted to see. Everyone suspects it’s

  nothing. Time will tell. But how you preyed on, longed for, those

  first ten years. We’ll have to refuse that, however its freshness

  in your hands. Romantic. Fatal. We learn to see with the child’s

  delight again or perish. We hope it was your vision you lost,

  that before those final minutes you didn’t find out something new.

  28

  to Robert Duncan

  O to use the word wingéd as in bird or victory or airplane for

  the first time. Not for spirit though, yours or anyone else’s

  or the bird that flew errantly into the car radiator. Or for poems

  that sink heavily to our stomachs like fried foods, the powerful

  ones, visceral, as impure as the bodies they flaunt. Curious what

  you paid for your cocaine to get wingéd. We know the price of

  the poems, one body and soul net, one brain already tethered to the

  dark, one ingenious leash never to hold a dog, two midwinter eyes

  that lost their technicolor. Think what you missed. Mayakovsky’s