Maybe you
need to write a poem about grace.
When
everything broken is broken,
and
everything dead is dead,
and the
hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the
heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly,
and the pain they thought might,
as a token
of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost
its novelty and not released them,
and they
have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching
the others go about their days—
likes and
dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that
self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every
human blossoming, and understood,
therefore,
why they had been, all their lives,
in such a
fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some
almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty
and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s
companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music
under things, a hovering like grace appears.
As in the
story a friend told once about the time
he tried to
kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the
heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed
onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay
side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the
salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”
that there
was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said
“landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled
in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like
polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the
coast—and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs,
or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the
restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,
and when he
woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up
on the
girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt
a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he’d used
for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully,
and drove home to an empty house.
There was a
pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on
a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint
russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage
and grief. He knew more or less
where she
was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They’d have
just finished making love. She’d have tears
in her eyes
and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”
she’d say,
“you are so good for me.” Winking lights,
a foggy
view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
“You’re
sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”
“Yes,”
she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,
“I really
tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—
Guatemalan
weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—
and then
they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to
sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only,
once and a half, and tell himself
that he was
going to carry it for a very long time
and that
there was nothing he could do
but carry
it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the
forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking
and curling as the cold came up.
It’s not the
story though, not the friend
leaning
toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is
the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the
idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must
sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that
the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an
ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
