Figured Dark: Poems

Letter to the Chairwoman of the ReunionCommittee

Letter to the Chairwoman of the Reunion Committee It is enough if I manage to be a poet among the savages. —Ovid, Letter to Rome from exile among the Getae. Letters From Pontus, Book I, 5.65 I knew you as cheerleader–– hands clapping, the cold smoke of your breath, the year the Centurions went 10-and-0, your eyes enslaving my heart, high in the student section. In World Lit, in Latin, or the night you took the throne as Homecoming Queen, the night Mike Hurd loped sixty yards to thrash the Gaels. Now you letter arrives, calling me home. The truth is, I’ve lost our yearbook, and must add thirty years to a memory to find you in a suburban study, reading my response. Julie, I was married and divorced and left a woman not unlike yourself with a bitter heart. I am married again, to a painter of nudes and human forms, who found me speaking tongues among the wallet makers. Her palette is deep green and cobalt, rose madder and the colors of the body. 72 I’ve lost touch with everyone––Randy and Tom, Mike, Laura, and Diane. I know that beautiful Lynn, whom I loved, is dead, that two boys I didn’t know well were killed in the war. I milled at the barricades, threw a rock from a cloud of tear gas, a single palm-sized rock. I can’t say where it landed. But Julie, the dead were finally dead. It came to nothing. Now my dog waits at the door, regards me with that mix of need and pathos that is the way of Labradors. So we walk into another starred night, spring again but too far north, the trees not knowing what to say, though if years tell us anything, leaves will come. I could say Orion watches the Dragon, who stares at the fussy cloud of the Crow, that the moon is a silver hanger–– what our parents called The old moon in the new moon’s arms, though it probably isn’t true. I can’t remember the stars, vague shapes confuse me now, don’t know what to call the moon. Regardless, my dog arcs his leg, steam rising from the mighty work of marking his range. Hard to believe this sweet dog relates so closely to wolves, differing only in his desire for comfort, by the passage of time. Do you remember Mr. Murphy, who made us read The Brothers Karamazov? 73 That good man, dripping with sweat on the coldest days, shaky hand ascending to his forehead, when asked to explain what Dmitri says at page 163: “What seems disgraceful to the mind, is beauty, and nothing else, to the heart.” What to make, then, of the party at Danny Hansen’s, when Diane went off with the boy from Jackson High? You found me in the dark, a car-length from his yellow Firebird, watching as they made love, bodies thrown so recklessly across the bucket seats, that with each thrust Diane’s head banged a half-opened door free, igniting the dome light, again and again. I did not look away. When I saw you watching me, I looked at you with embarrassment and desire. What could you have known? How could you run for the porch, leaving me, for thirty years, unable to explain, to make a better response than “It’s not what you think,” though it surely was? Under siege, beset by ramping device, the heart tries to account for itself. And in truth, I have watched the troika go over the cliff with more than passing interest. No, I won’t be there in October. I can’t ride atop the Class Float, like those Roman generals Mr. Smith droned on about in Latin III. But I ran the mile, remember? and longer, further, in cross country. No speed even then, but I could go a distance. Perhaps I could jog along beside you 74 like a conquered slave, dragged back from war along the Danube, arrayed in my animal skins, uncouth, but chastened by events, too stunned to speak of my simple life, my true life––among the wolves, among the Getae. 75 ...