Sweet Spot: Poems

Us

29 US DANIELLE Dozens of boring finals and I come across one in the hand of a girl not even in the class— Danielle, a beautiful coked-out dyslexic who couldn’t spell, at age sixteen wrote eighth-grade prose, had little common sense but owned every corridor she entered and left the hearts of the boys blown out around her like votive candles. Danny the dyslexic, of the choker, painted toes, and long fingers who yelled at me once over a beautiful shoulder Why should I always spell the same words the same way? Life is short, I’m in a hurry, and anyway you only have one life and walked out of mine to live hers. I last saw her a couple of years later leaning on that night’s Guido at the bar of the Trump Tower, nodding into the toot, the booze, and the noise and once when her gold head rose to check out the room, 30 imagine sunrise over a dump or what I just saw in this blue book— a sweet mirage among so much oafish fact, so much ugly accuracy. 31 MARY JO KOPECHNE He had no idea whose name it was but it erupted into his thinking as he steered and looked for the signage and the access to I-95. Maybe someone I did something with once, down the shore, moist held hands and ballroom prom punch and stellar spring assembled, or limo idling, or something so awful suppressed it? Who lives now coarsely in some vulgar Miami, or north with bulbs in pots green-speckled railings her 24/7 moonwalk of the born blue-collar, or packing away the Wedgwood and staring ahead where stars swim in their cold black borscht and shopping run-down malls? If kissing, who? The glancing kiss of the endless married or the kiss of passion obscure and the guilty hotel? Thumbs interlaced over pews? Scotch-taped temples with pin hinges? Eczema on elbows, heartbreaks of bitten-off tenses, unfinished verbs, nouns shrugging off modifiers? Did I know her ever? What glitters for her in the gloom of years, Social Security, forced retirement? I-95 rose over the name like the waters off Chappaquiddick lifting the fishing boats, the kilos, the contraband, the butts snapped up in the waves. 32 QuEEN DOMINIC whom I hadn’t thought about until this morning, one of those highly nuanced pre-Stonewall gays, with very bad skin, overdeodorized, ex-seminarian Dominic, who would seek me out at the caf, engage me in q&a about the play we were doing that year, Henry V, in which I did three roles including the bishop at the end (enter coughing) who intercepts the king and Catherine mid-kiss, Dom, who would coolly study my nervous costume changes and who cracked up and tried to hide it when my lines came out sounding all Twenty-Second and Passyunk at dress rehearsal, my throat raw as it entered the Death Valley registers of Scroop and Brother John Bates. Later that awful year, following Ronald Reagan’s speech before the Republican convention, I was Judas in Calvary and the Boy in Purgatory and watched Bobby B get lost in his lines suddenly, scarily, addressing a fake tree’s fat greasy life for the whole world had become a prop to his schizoid stage, me unworlded beside him, blue footlit, as he knifed me and my fake life flowed out in red theatrical handkerchiefs while Dominic stared intensely from row one, stunned (at my acting, I thought) at Bobby’s tears, at my limping hunchbacked entrance as Judas (lifted right out of Richard III) and Bobby bawling in the dressing room later on saying it’s not your fault, it’s God’s and later still my father asleep on the couch and still out of work, Humphrey about to blow the election 33 Dominic with his fence-slat grin and pocked neck and cheeks settling himself by me in the caf, And how’s your morning? then drifting on to Reagan, I’m not a politico but why not vote for Ronnie, and me He’s not even running for anything! that rictus ringing his cup O but he’s so good-looking ain’t that enough whaddabout looks and me how many weeks later lining up for my physical one...