The Pit

I wanted to fess up about The Missing "J" and just
burned my fore and middle fingers on a coffee mug left too close to
the teakettle — coffee cups shouldn't mingle with teakettles —

is that the message?  I don't even think mug and kettle were touching;
but maybe they were squeezed too close together because I’d dropped
my middle name and initial, J and Joseph;

not in a hall of records sort of way, but instinctively, in antiquity, in rural
Illinois; for some reason the Joseph made me flush with embarrassment,
made my inner life transparent to others, the two

masculine names imbued no one with identifying marks
I’d done nothing to earn, no different, I thought,
as I was being tossed into a pit (even if not, as an only child,

by brothers) by a concatenation of relatives related
and unrelated from here, there, and — I’ve forgotten where;
sound bytes; voices ran together in the din;

they didn't want me out of the way but amidst the bickering I had no support,
there was no one counting heads and I was still a child —
at least for another five months twenty-three days twenty one hundred hours;

scarcely more self-possessed than my son when at six
he crossed the highway running through Manchester, Vermont
alone while I was hung up in a line, waiting for the specialist

to weigh the coffee, before I lost track … ;
I had one thing I wanted to hold on to and now the language
I was born into traps me in an unintentional if not

unavoidable pun I am not going to finesse, run around;
that's all I could think of in the timeless time between being tossed
and hitting bottom; and if I hadn't had my Rawlings mitt

hooked to my belt and tucked a Spalding rubber ball in my left back pocket
boredom might have threatened; but now there was no chance
I could ever be bored; not with the suspense inherent in a thousand seventeen

inning games to invent; then to fall asleep,
become the conduit for color-drenched dreams
with my body eager to cooperate after six to sixteen hard

hours where there was no one else to take up every position in circumstances less
than propitious; the pit — wider than they had figured
in their hurry to be rid of me, probably intended

at first for large four-footed horizontal animals, wild and alert,
now wary of their “market value” by hunters — human only in name;
but they had dug deep enough so that the tiger — even he

with the greatest spring in his haunches —
could still never manage the leap out … of it … it … the pit … ;
and I, I hadn’t yet taken in my luck to that point;

if I had landed on wooden spear tips I would not be here
to give this account — though I almost rejoiced when I hit dirt safely,
I blessed the bruises that told me I was alive, when in real life

it was all reversed, and I could begin again,
the slightest of disguises would suffice; the team who disposed of me took
little interest in my frame and features and my future

which was past; I would come to the issues for which I am known in my own time;
I had no idea why having put aside my middle name and initial
I bought, at the age of twelve years six months seven days,

a rough cotton button-down short-sleeved striped shirt with many colors
that bled into one another; and at the time I had no reason to name
the dark turquoise, burnt sienna, and cool red

as in the rare cases where crayon can carry more charm than oil
paint on canvas as in comic books, given character
by the flimsy cheapened impermanent paper

and I wore it to a party where no relative or relation could appear
and the Jews that Friday night were otherwise sequestered and under
my rabbi stepfather’s spell, for all I know he wove

this selfsame story in the small town in Illinois
where his congregants called me who I was not
while the friends I was about to visit used my name;

I not only could be myself I was myself and in no time at all
underwent, as dark fell, a metamorphosis the instant
Karen’s kiss landed on my cheek her eye on my shirt and her smile

foretold that she and I were going to be friends now;
it wasn’t that she saw me for the first time —
as I had seen her always for the first time

many times a day for the two hundred and something days
I was allowed to inhabit this domain, times three years —
it was that I was myself for the first time in her … her

presence…her absence … forever … after … absence …
in a town south of Chicago I would never return to,
my keepers so preoccupied they had no ears

no matter how loud my protestations,
my reasons, my laid-out plans no one could object to
on any terms other than the ones … :

no grounds were there for dismissal except one
and we don’t want to go back down.
I mourn the loss I have recovered …

Room Service in Voronezh

                                    In memory of S.B.                                                
                                                E o fim do caminho
                                                                        Antonio Carlos Jobim

                                                                        “la vuota scorza
                                                di chi cantana sars presto polvere
                                                di vitro sotto i piedi, l’ombro i livida … Addio.“
                                                                                              —Eugenio Montale
                                                 

Dear Sandrine,

Carlyle, Carlyle, I see the words and hear
Charles, Charles, and concoct a bitter
amalgam in memory of how they all
talked about him, Charleslyed, Charleslyer.

There was so little my father wasn’t accused of
and how even I ripped in anger this day
(twenty years and twenty eight days)
after his plunge from a cliff like Aegeus

my dad             who the children of his closest friends
called “Uncle” Charlie (their daughter Bambi — out of whose
nickname he made a demonic fetish of calling by her given
name of Barbara after her Bat Mitzvah––didn’t know
he wasn’t her “real” Uncle until she didn’t appear, having moved
to Israel, at his gravesite where my kness (can’t spill
it right this — mourning))            knocked, gave
way and forced me to lean against my
even leaner wife, stunned that my patterns after my parents’ deaths

mimicked everything everyone predicted.

But I write not of my father.  I write of my time
at the Carlyle Hotel, doing something close (I wish
it was to you) to what you’ve been doing,

working on your “Costaguena” screenplay at the Chateau Marmont,
as I too was the guest of — someone —
ok: a beautiful woman, a rather
profoundly beautiful woman as her looks
were enhanced by her other gifts and what was
inside. 

There it is, the past tense line ending “tell.”

She’s gone. The woman voted least likely to die
before antiquity is gone. For all her contradictions,
like her notorious fads and affairs and compulsion to manage
other people’s lives––like the actress
in the role of the sister who played opposite
Susan’s real sister, Ann Heche, in Proof––
I still can’t deny above all, when she called me on her cell
from the ski slopes of Aspen, her passion for life, as she broke
into a quick light imitation of Suzanna McCorkle’s of “The Waters of March”:

A stick a stone it’s the end of the road it’s feeling alone it’s the weight of your load it’s night it’s death it’s the curve of the slope
. 
Notorious. That was Hitchcock’s second favorite pre
Rear Window Vertigo film after Shadow
of a Doubt, where a teenaged Teresa Wright plays the psychic
or at least prescient — that’s the third time I’ve scratched out
the word “N I E C E” on a silent appalled witness,
the hotel’s sheer and “to an airy thinness beat” stationery
intolerant of too many mistakes as
my pen moves to the beat of the Coltrane and Monk Live At —
recordings the Carlyle allows free access to,
and helps me remember when I’d prefer to forget
Suzanna McCorkle’s suicide whose act at the Plaza
Susan liked to catch.  The singer’s Brazilian escapade,
brings forth another image of Susan,
as does the title of movie Charade,
which opens with Audrey Hepburn on the slopes of Switzerland
in a time before cell phones or she would have had one
the nimble Stanley Donen would have worked into the scene:

it’s the end of despair it’s the joy in your heart

“Free!” Charles would chide me, the key
element in his scornful, embittered “you know what ya get for nothing don’t ya”
recitative, “yeah Mark [you dumb ass] it’s free,”
like the free towels everyone takes for souvenirs only to find
they’ve been added to their bill.

Susan would not switch to a suite to accommodate her
 [lover hireling contributor to her anthology, due
“yesterday,” Martyrs], relative or friend,

who lounged in air conditioned heaven on the tawny leather sofa
and sipped an $8 cappuccino (with one lousy shot of espresso
lukewarm to boot) plus room service fee and tip;
my hand shook as I added it even though
Susan had said to order anything but on a comic note,
to keep our spouses unaffected by the long hours
we spent in these close quarters…

Her jewelry distracted and she liked to
yank her wrist free from my grasp in half-mock exasperation
as I’d pretend to remove her gold bracelet
made of thin strands of tiny hollow balls:
“You think it’s the gold strands you like
but it is the song the balls make as they slide along the bands.”

Supine, I wrote and wrote, prompted to exceed myself by the plush
environment, and the Carlyle stationery —
which I purloined for just this purpose —
and its bizarre intolerance to my fountain
pen when I let it rest for a few minutes without the cap on,
and the paper’s resistance when I went to tear a sheet in half
in a half-witted attempt to regain the key: concentration —
not the key Susan left so I wouldn’t be too shy to…what?

You asked — the exact number of years Susan lived — forty eight? 
Maybe.  Three children before she reached thirty: no question. 
And the fourth announced its presence in my presence before it showed
the afternoon we met that May in Lake Forest
where I had gone to recapture the scent of my Illinois childhood.

In her jeans, crisp white oxford shirt and Harris tweed
sports jacket with leather buttons she looked like she just stepped off a horse.
She was too glamorous for the words coming out of her mouth.
We exchanged Anonymity and Rider.
It was clear she was not what she appeared.
And were it not for your question: where is the catharsis?
I might have lacked an ending.

On a four hour walk in around and about
the woods meadows and streets with white one story houses,
screened in porches, cats blinking at eye-level,
we, no she, no, we spotted the tall flames,
smoke rising from an abandoned boxcar,
scattered sparks igniting dry leaves like a fuse aimed toward the woods beyond.
and how weird that it had started and then spread in the hour or so
since our last tour.  Susan grabbed my arm
and we ran, ran as hard and long as the actors and stunt men
the age we were when our newly
kindled friendship kept time with the blossoming.

It’s 1:43 pm on Saturday, December 9 –– two days from my birthday,
three weeks before the anniversary of her death, January 1, 2006.
To meet Madelaine at 2 I have to leave 9th Avenue now to reach 7th.
I’m out of time and I haven’t begun.
Is there a chance the Carlyle story does not want
to be written?  My task had been done, to make
a case for Osip Mandelstam as martyr for it to
fit — fit — in the heaven of men and women
when they fit and become almost as one
for it to fit the format.  If you’d asked if I believed Osip
Mandelstam was a martyr I’d reply: everything but.
Just because he was last seen rummaging trash bins
in Russian’s own camp for undesirables doesn’t mean
what people assume it does.  His presumed
hunger isn’t proof that food was the object of his last known
to someone — quest?  It is only the Carlyle’s
stationery that makes this letter possible.  Now
I am sad.  I love you.

                                    Goodbye.
                                    Mark

The Recognition

Just this afternoon, during the ashtanga practice, the subject
came up; that a woman we hadn't seen
for a while had crept back; I only knew because I glimpsed her on her way in
or out, because yoga is contraindicated when nerves are roused...when
trapped by herniated disks garnished (garishly) with bone chips and sadly
not the kind they serve, cover your plate with in Baltimore.
Crabs, that must be it, the kind that Hamlet alluded to in Hamlet.
I must have been in a mischievous mood.  Brought on by.  Difficulty.

In breathing.  This week. The others commented that Johanna seemed
nervous.  That can happen when you're on sabbatical.  What
is her project, our tattooed sage inquired.  The laugh
I felt rising lightened my mood.  Coleridge.  What about Coleridge,
a Lacanian shrink queried.  Coleridge's lectures.  Something
spinning around that unstill centerless center.  I saw her tackling
Coleridge’s wayward infinite loosely yclept “lectures” and visibly holding back
panic.  Where to begin or end when the material is all loose ends?

And then there were the gems, waiting for J to bring them out,
glittering; comprehensible but beyond comprehension with the thought left
incomplete.  Always.  From the brink of revelation to the abrupt
end and the fee pocketed and an immense thirst about
to be quenched, quenched, and quenched, until water was called for
to rid Samuel’s hoarse throat of a sudden dryness which the chorus of nods
around the table found only natural after such exertion of the vocal chords.
Coleridge's lectures.  I remember best the ones reported by Hazlitt De

Quincey and Keats.  The committee was thumbs up when she presented
her subject.  When several years back she mentioned the angle she’d chosen
to approach her notorious subject, as we let the sweat congeal
after a heated hour and a half doing Ashtanga I said: terrific.
Not long after, it was summer; and I had time to read Darker
Reflections, the Richard Holmes' bio which she, I think, liked
better than other specialists who I happened to know in other contexts
entirely.  Just to visualize how Coleridge thrilled to that new-fangled swimming

apparatus was enough to make me love him all the more.  A man.
All too human.  And burdened by something no one could see, weigh, or wear:
other people's expectations which began the moment he began to speak.
He never knew where to go.  And yet when it came to rocky steep
uncharted fens he rigged his inkwell and quill so he could walk
and take notes at the same time with an intrepid flair that Boone
would have marveled at. A century and a half before ballpoint.
J’s angle would be the one — at long last — to bring the gist

to where we could see it and grasp his mission's meaning.
And then it came: her first sabbatical; her first chance
to grapple, unimpeded, with the blunt wishes and great expectations
her mentors bestowed with high and higher
intentions and absently when her name was raised to afford
watchful and attentive men a common ground
and led them to let out thoughts — that couldn’t be taken back —
on the matter of her looks, which all consented were good

and, rephrased, went something like: that in addition
to the quality of her mind and worth of her work when still
their student, that she was also — and it was the also
that stuck — a fine
looking woman; and from there their discourse
had nowhere to go, except to trail off as one by one
the scholars disappeared, for an hour or forever,
it didn’t matter; all that mattered was something

there was no need to say
aloud, much less repeat every time they convened
at this crossroads when their schedules or office
hours or — let’s not go there — coincided;
and other than the subject of her future they had nothing
more to say to one another; and no change in the thought
they’d labored to hold in check since it first consumed
their waking hours, and while J flailed

herself for the impending failure of their hopes for her,
they were pleased at how she had developed from a girl
to a woman, yet needed prompts whenever she reappeared
desperate for further guidance, or direction, and left
confused, bewildered, by what she sensed
was inattention; disinterest; which by miracle she found
a way to fuse with everything her subject put in his own
path to keep him from the connections that just
might have brought his ingenious, crowd-
pleasing gambits to the insights he broached
right in time for time to run out.  And after she asked
herself why no one on record left the hall unsatisfied,
she knew she’d hit upon the question that could
have eluded her as it had her former
teachers who had washed up on dry land from too much
information when something else was called for.
Ashtanga stands for the eight-limbed carrier the body,

in continuous motion until you’re sprung, becomes.
Sweat-soaked and motionless in the corpse pose,
she couldn’t take in it had taken her however long to get
that it wasn’t a solution she was after, only to live
in the uncertainty of the question. And to give up
the embedded wish that she could share the joy
she now saw she had no need to share;
as long as it was there.