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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Journeys Close to Home GREG RAPPLEYE ________________________ Homer, Faulkner, Noir "Oh, you are odd, I see."How the modern noir resembles the ancient noir. The war is over. Odysseus, adrift since leaving Calypso, on his way home. Lost in a storm, he is visited by Ino, former mortal, now a minor goddess, who, like a Hollywood starlet, has changed her name, in this case because her husband was a murderer. Don't ask. The myths are so complex. Anyway, she lands on his raft in the form of a gannet. Odd enough, even in those ancient days when a seabird might land on a raft, sweet tangle in her beak (which becomes a magic cloak), and begin talking, like a smart-aleck waitress in a desert roadhouse. But Ino speaks the words so quietly, Homer barely writes them. Of every translation I've read, only Rouse nurses them from the text. Even Odysseus isn't sure what she says, hesitates, is seen by Poseidon before he can escape, and the poem goes on, dark and inexplicable, like the plot to The Big Sleep, Faulkner brought in by Howard Hawks to make some sense of it, to "punch it up," and Faulkner makes it better, but more confusing, until Hawks, watching the final cut, despairs, and tells Faulkner, who is on his way to Rowan Oak, to write one more scene and he'll bring back the stars (Bogart & Bacall) [283]
to film it. And he will, time and again, trying starlet after starlet in the scene's crucial role, until Patricia Clarke finally gets it right: It is night outside a shed in the desert. Marlowe fires his gun, the smoke licking the fender of his Ford coupe. Sapped from behind and cut, we see him, coming-to, captive of Eddie Mars' wife, who needs to know what Howard Hawks can't figure out: What has Eddie Mars done and what is his link to Sean Regan? So Marlowe tells her, Your husband is a murderer, and she slaps him, hard, and walks out of the room. She's all right, Marlowe says, rubbing his cheek, I like her. And so does Faulkner, who finishes the scene at 3 A.M., on the Missouri Pacific just west of Memphis. He takes a last sip of bourbon and branch water, kisses the script for luck, shoves it into an envelope, and shambles out to find the porter, a man, shiny and black, who slides around the club car like St. Elmo's fire. Faulkner tells him to mail the envelope at the next stop and hands him a silver dollar. Yes, sir, the porter says, and at Memphis steps off the train, drops the packet into the box, turns and flips the silver dollar, a coin so heavy and slow he counts the spins—five, six, seven, then snaps it from the air, the back of his black hand beginning to sweat, shining brighter than the coin it covers. Across the platform, a soldier lights a smoke and mumbles something vile, because he is drunk and because a black man can't have a silver dollar in the State of Tennessee. What did he say? The porter misses a step, his skin beginning to burn, then shakes it off, laughs and gets back on the train. It is 1946. The war is over. It is the cusp of the Postmodern Era. The porter knows it is all aboard this train that is leaving, all aboard this train that is going home. [284]
Terrible The man from room 8 is washing and waxing his car. It's a black Ford, with flames stenciled on the doors, and the word Terrible inscribed in an elegant cursive on the pillars of the roof. I think I know his life. I lived it at Red's Motel, on a stinky bayou near Hopedale, Louisiana. We called it "Hopeless," as in, "Maybe I'll call you, when I get back to Hopeless." It was a bad place, full of oil workers and helicopter pilots. I was driving the coast in a rental sedan, setting up deals to cut and pack fish. I carried a leather sample case, a book of account, and a 9 mm Glock with two fully loaded clips. No one believes the part about the gun. But there are things I did you wouldn't necessarily believe. The truth is, I only fired it once. I bought twelve honey rock melons and a six-pack of beer in Pascagoula, Mississippi. "I'm having a picnic," I told the clerk, and drove out to a swampy field near the Pascagoula River. A 9 mm Glock will flat play hell on a honey rock melon. Sometimes at night I'd lie in bed, insects tapping against the screens, drinking whiskey and cleaning the gun. I didn't mind Red's Motel, and I didn't mind carrying the Glock, and if a situation arose, I would have used it. [285]
So what happened? I can't say. Let's suppose a moment of clarity in a burning cane field outside New Iberia, where someone finally realized the man he worked for was a terrible man. I tossed the Glock off the ferry that crosses the Mississippi between Vacherie and Lutcher. And now I'm six doors down from room 8. So I remember what it's like, living in a bad place, cleaning and polishing the one thing you know will get you home. The allegiance you build to it, day after terrible day. [286] A Path Between Houses Where is the dwelling place of light? AndThe enigma of August. Season of dust and teenage arson. The nightly whine of pickup trucks bouncing through the sumac beneath the Co-Operative power lines, country & western booming from woofers carved into the doors. A trace of smoke when the wind shifts, spun gravel rattling the fenders of cars, the groan of clutch and transaxle, pickup trucks, arriving at a friction point, gunning from nowhere to nowhere. The duets begin. A compact disc, a single line of muted trumpet, plays against the sirens pursuing the smoke of grass fires. ‡ I love a painter. On a new canvas, she paints the neighbor's field. She paints it without trees, and paints the field beyond the field, the field that has no trees, and the upturned Jesus boat, made into a planter, "For God so loved the world . . ." a citation from John, chapter and verse, splattered across the bow. The boat spills roses into the weeds. What does the stray dog know, after a taste of what is holy? The sun pulls her shadow toward me, an undulant shape that shelters the grass, an unaimed thing. [287]
‡ In the gray house, the tiny house, in '52 there was a fire. The old woman, drunk and smoking cigarettes, fell asleep. The winter of the blizzard and her son not coming home from the Yalu. There are times I still smell smoke. There are days I know she set the fire and why. ‡ Last night, lightning to the south. Here, nothing, though along the river the wind upends a willow, a gorgon of leaves and bottom-up clod browning in the afternoon sun. In the museum we dispute the poet's epiphany call— white light or more warmth? And what is the Greek word for the flesh, and the body apart from the spirit, meaning even the body opposed to the spirit? I do not know this word. Dante claims there are pools of fire in the middle regions of hell, but the lowest circles are lakes of ice, offering the hope our greatest sins aren't the passions, but indifference. And the willow grew for years with no real hold upon the ground. ‡ How the accident occurred and how the sky got dark: Six miles from my house, a drunk leaves the Holiday Inn spins on 104 and smacks a utility pole. The power line sparks across the hood of his Ford and illuminates the crazed spider web of the windshield. His bloody tongue burns with a slurry gospel. Around me, [288]
the lights go down, the way death is described as armor crashing to the ground, the soul having already departed for another place. Was it his body I heard leaning against the horn, the body's final song, before the body slumped sideways in the seat? ‡ When I was a child, I would wake at night and imagine a field of asteroids, rolling across the walls of my room. In fact, I've seen them, like the last herd of buffalo, grazing against the background of fixed stars. Plate 420 shows the asteroid 433 Eros, the bright point of light, at its closest approach to light. I lose myself in Cygnus, ancient kamikaze swan, rising or diving to earth, Draco, snarling at the polestar, and Pegasus, stone horse of the gods, ecstatic, looking one last time at home. ‡ August and the enigma it is. Days when I move in crabbed circles, nights when I walk with Jesus through the fields. What finally stands between us and the world of flying things? Mobbed by jays, the Cooper's hawk drops the dead bird. It tumbles beneath the cedar tree, tiny acrobat of death, a dead bird released in a failed act of atonement. A nest of wasps buzzing beneath the shingles, flickers drilling the cottonwood, jays, sparrows, the insistent wrens, the language of birds, heads cocked, [289]
staring moon-eyed through the air. Sedge, asters, and fleabane, red tins of gasoline and glowing cigarettes, the midnight voice of a fourteen year-old girl wailing the word "blue" from the pickup's open doors, illuminated by the dome light, the sulphurous rasp of another struck match, red flowers of sheep sorrel, common mulleins and foxglove, goldenrod and chicory, the dry flowers of late summer, an exhaustion I no longer look at. ‡ Time passes. The authorities gather the wreckage, the whirr of cicadas, and light dissembles the sky. A wind shift, and the Cedar Creek fire snaps the backfire line and roars through the cemetery. In the morning, I walk a path between houses. I cross to the water and circle again, the redwings forcing me back from the marsh. Smoke rises from a fire still smoldering along the power lines, flaring and exhausting itself in the shape of something lost. Grass fires, fires through the scrub of the clear-cut, fires in the pulpwood, cemetery fires, the powder of ash still untracked beneath the enormous trees, fires that explode the seed cones on the pines, the smoke of set fires and every good intention gone wrong, scorching the monuments above the graves of the dead. [290]
Cause The first time I got sober, I went sixty days, which ended in Laredo, with a woman who sold law books. It was the day the Challenger smashed into the sea. We were sitting on a deck, watching an open field between the hotel and the river. Campesinos were wading the Rio Grande. I can't say why. It was easy enough to cross at the bridge. She asked, would you like to go across and eat roast goat? So we did, and drank mescal in a smoky bar where every shot came with a dead worm. It isn't good to break two months' sobriety with ten shots of mescal. Plus the beer it took to wash down the goat. Those bodies in the sea— they were something to drink about, I told her, though I didn't need a cause. Once we began, there was reason enough to drink. [291]
Dusk Sitting in the back yard, reading about the various untruths— the lie of extended consciousness, the lie of interpretation. Knowing there are others. Down the hill, the lake greens in the declining light, and those who have motorboats move in and out of the launching ramp. I remember the lines from another man's poem: When he touches you, it will be with my hands. In summer, the songbirds never know when to quiet themselves, singing on into the darkness. [292]
Wanted: Japanese Sword It's one of those lighted signs you tow behind a truck. For years, the man down the street has kept it in his yard— as if a retired samurai might wander by on his way to Lund's Hardware or the Whippi Dip. Tonight, I sit out in the moonlight. The neighbor is drunk, his stereo loud, You done me wrong, sung in a man's voice. The music seems familiar, but it's not. Moonlight has a strange effect. In 1856, under a full moon, James Jesse Strang, the self-styled Mormon prophet, ran a sword through his chief rival on Beaver Island, declared himself King of Michigan, and began a bloody rebellion that didn't end until a frigate was sent to put it down. And did you know the Japanese saber combines a European hilt with a Japanese blade? It's forty inches long and weighs three pounds. Of course, my neighbor may want a katana, long-sword of the samurai. "The human heart is unknowable," the poet Tsurayuki wrote, "but in my birthplace, the flowers smell the same as always." The wind moves through the roses that tangle in the fence, roses that are a delicate pink in any light. Did you ever want a different life? When I did, I went into the fish business and sold salmon roe to the Japanese. Ikura, it was called, tiny eggs that gushed from the razored salmon like translucent orange moons. I was going to be rich. You lost your ass! my father laughed, meaning I would never be the King of Michigan. [293]
The music stops. My neighbor comes into his yard and starts banging a stick against the ground. He begins a drunken dance, a dark figure backed by a glowing sign—whirling, jumping on one leg—he falls, rises, and falls again, twirling the stick around his head, groaning and shouting out. Finally, he stumbles and does not rise, his body lost in the cedared dark. What does it mean to want so badly you dance in the glow of your own desire? Sending a stick hissing through the sky, pounding the earth until you disappear, amazing no one but yourself? [294]
Morning at The Artist's House, Key West Below the tin roof and pewter sky, the Czech gardener gathers leaves from the sapodilla tree. He sweeps the bricks and trims the bougainvillea, the coral vine, the creeping fig. The haze clears, the sky blues, the traffic and ring ofmopeds pick up. I hear the gardener speaking to the maid, No, no, no, trying to be understood in a new language. Consider the Victorian geometry: gray clapboard and lavender shutters, the haphazard design—porch over porch, over added-on rooms—all this, topped by the octagon of a silver cupola. To my left, the tin roof glows. As if it might be the sky. As if the roof might be something new and separate from the sky. Past the fountain, an iron fence divides the courtyard from the walk. In the street, an orange panel truck, its paint softened to a dull patina. The words that once told its use are blackened out. The truck awaits some new direction, the words to say some new use. A fire truck races by. Then a police siren can be heard, approaching life or death from a different angle. Behind me, on this rooftop deck, a woman in a blue bathing suit. A cloud rolls through the parabolic curve of her sunglasses, green on green against each plastic lens. [295]
Clearwater The ocean was on fire when the divers went out, and The beach was wide, and there was no hard line where shore ended and the Gulf began. I was there for the disaster conference: Lectures and workshops about the lost plane. You spent mornings at the pool, reading Newton's Optics, sitting behind a screen that kept you from the wind. It was late summer, and storms rumbled across the island, the arrival and exit of the waves, flattened and prolonged. Pelicans rose and the terns, insistent and sharp, dove toward the blind spot of the skull, no sweet note among them. The hotel ballroom was dark, and the special agent held the lectern, clicking through the slides. The front section blew away, he said, and the body continued to fly. In the warehouse they are restoring it— charred skin to a frame. The charts show the parabola of a descent, and the isobars of a low, that gathered and sank into difficult weather. And yes, there was the work of recovering the dead. After dinner, we left the hotel and drove past the royal palms, the stink of rotting mangroves heavy in the air. Behind us, a storm swept in, and beyond the squall line, the sun went flaming into the Gulf. In the rear-view mirror, I saw it clearly: [296]
The clouds were incandescent, like walls of fire, rising around a biblical city, swirling past the old and new hotels, a camera lucida of rain and fire, projecting an image from which a vision might be traced. An optical illusion, you said, the saturation of water-in-air, something about perspective and a vanishing point. I choose to believe in what was seen— to place a finger against the sky and trace the descent. Where the finger touches water, the wreckage enters the sea. I've never gone to the bottom of the sea. That night we walked the beach and on your dare, stripped and ran into the surf. Unfamiliar stars descended in the sky, and the Gulf was a caldron, still spinning out clouds. Beyond the bar, there was an undertow. In the water, a phosphorescence, a hand drawn through dragging tracers in its wake, then the waves washed over and pulled us from our feet. Our hands parted and our bodies disappeared. I should have foreseen this, how after the storm, the waves would rise against us. It was the end of summer, or it was the beginning of fall, the cusp of something, the epicycle to a larger loss. The bodies of the dead had been restored to the living, and there was no hard line where shore ended and the Gulf began. [297]
After Three-and-a-Half Years with Calypso, Odysseus Says, To Hell with It, I'm Not Going Home It's the story no one talks about— how he came to love the nymph— her tangled braids and open thighs, the aroma of partridge, roasting over sweetwood. Ten years against Troy and the endless journey home. His men consumed by monsters and the sea. Then Calypso's island—the grapes ambered by a noble rot, and goats bleating on the hillside. Day after day, the sea rises and falls. Calypso trills her little song and Ithaca seems more distant. Until Homer must go to him, meet Odysseus on the beach and explain the narrative— that he, as author, is the god who must be obeyed. It's why the plot stalls out at the start of Book 5. Calypso's change of heart is Homer strumming and chanting for time, until Odysseus picks up his ax and walks toward the trees, cursing the poet's blindness. [298]
Walking Toward the Village It is the best part, he decides— their walk after the work is finished, snow falling and the moon behind the clouds, full for no particular reason. For a long while, nothing more than the sound of two bodies walking, until she begins a child's verse: "Here is the church, here is the steeple," but moves her hands into a gesture of supplication, of a priest saying "Oremus," as the snow goes on with its task, all ornament and silence. [299]
A Recipe In Which My Ex-Wife No Longer Appears Because rosemary is the herb of remembrance, I remember making roast chicken with rosemary, garlic, and carrots. It's pointless to ask for the recipe. I've lost the directions and can write them now in only a simple way. I took a roaster rubbed with lemon, put two pats of butter under the skin of the breasts, cut the carrots on the bias, tossed them around the bird, with whole cloves of garlic, salt, and freshly picked rosemary, lightly scored with the edge of a sharp knife. I added more butter for the carrots, drizzled olive oil over the skin, then tumbled the butter and oil through the carrots, rosemary, and garlic. The rest of dinner? Perhaps the flowers, the last of the gladiolas, pink, red, and a peachy orange, are a detail borrowed from another time, though I remember arranging the stems in an empty blue vase, one of the few things I kept when the marriage ended. I would put on a string quintet, the liner notes to which read the brightness of the music is greater for its knowledge of the dark, as I circled the room and the redwood deck beyond. I set the table, put out wine glasses, forks, plates, the knives, a loaf of French bread, made a salad of escarole and green leaf lettuce, then mixed a vinaigrette, as the house filled with roasty smells, the garlic and carrots just beginning to caramelize. [300]
I remember making a fire, uncorking the wine, a Zinfandel, and yes, pouring a glass of it, pulling the pan from the oven, the balsamic, sweet-and-bitter aroma of rosemary swelling the room, letting the bird set and slightly cool, the moment the knife broke the skin. Say what you will about me in that marriage: Faithless, drunk, spendthrift. My only claims are that I cooked for her. That's what I knew of love. And I gave her what she wanted when she chose a different life. [301]
Domestic Architecture My house is gray and foursquare, with a room for books that faces the water. I can see the south shore, and a concrete bridge crossing the narrows. My house is the caretaker's house on the drive to the old resort. The hotel burned and wasn't rebuilt. There are two benches in back and three Mexican fireplaces. When the power goes out, I can see the northern lights. A trial inventory: 2,000 books, give or take. A collection of masks, a desk and bed, framed letters and photographs, two fly rods. One hornets' nest each year in the eaves. Also a bee hive beneath the shingles in the back. I saw the crows mob a barred owl. The owl flew three times within my sight, uttering a long, hoarse call—an almost human cry of exasperation and complaint. There are Chinese fortunes taped to the walls, quotes from St. Paul and Theodore Roethke. The cats run wild, and the dogs want a walk across the bridge or to the place where, years ago, weedy channels were dug into the lake, breaking the close. In the field next door—a rusty barrel, and a pile of mussel shells scraped from the hull of a fishing boat. I found a dead bird on the doorstep— a mourning dove, breast open to the heart. [302]
At the old hotel, Edgar Lee Masters decided to quit lawyering and write poems. "Whenever I look at a law book," he said, "I have to lie down." A year later, he built the house beyond the hill and wrote Spoon River. I have music. I'm going to walk circles around the yard, Sonny Rollins, Volume 1, playing on the stereo. I buried a dead cat under the hemlock. Another cat, brother of the deceased, sleeps atop the grave. During storms, I stand out in the wind and stare at the house from various angles. The house is wrapped in cedar shingles, the finest thing against the weather. Three kegs of nails in the basement, left when the caretaker died. I think he meant to build a larger life. [303]
Fidelity I woke up when the rain began. The hot August night and a storm blowing in across the lake. The lightning started, and the wild hosannas of the trees. I went to close the windows on the porch, then opened the door to watch the rain, ponding in the yard and the street beyond. The lightning lit up and lit up the air, brilliant and incendiary. Then the shock of thunder, answering and rolling away. Had anyone been looking, it might have startled them— the body of a man, suddenly framed in an open doorway. But I wanted the mist and the cooling breeze of the storm. I walked back to the bedroom and found you awake in the dark. "Where did you go?" you asked, fright and sleep searching for balance in your voice. And lightning lit up our room where I stood leaning against the frame of the door, while the rain went on, falling and falling in the dark of the yard. [304]
During National Poetry Month In the Chicago Public Library, a man is reading a poem about leeks. Over his left shoulder, in a third-floor window of the building across the street, a light is glowing. The light is large and shaped like a 7, as if I see the lintel and one jamb of a glowing doorway. I decide the light is the color of a leek, where the white of the head merges with the green of the stem. The light wavers in the window-glass. When Edward Hopper was old, there were days he had trouble painting a straight line, and on those shakier days he mixed more white into his colors, blurring his line, softening the light he worked into the canvas. The window has that effect. And something strange: Through the wavery frame a woman in black begins circling, seeming to step through the pale green doorway again and again, the warped glass distorting her body differently each time. The poet finishes reading, looks up, and begins another poem, this one about pears, just as the woman stops circling, steps to the window and, hands on her hips, looks down and across, into the second-floor window of the Chicago Public Library. And yes, the light of the doorway is the light of a pear's skin, and the light flooding the street—, the brandied light of Calvados, and the woman could be one of Hopper's women, beautiful and imperfect, the breasts too large or an arm too thick, as he sometimes caught them: Stepping toward the frame, leaning out into the world. [305]
Charon in August —for Jack Ridl The languid afternoon. Insects, droning on into the night. Charon lies at the bottom of his rowboat, thinking about his life. No classes this summer. No deliveries to the other side. That's fine with him. And if he's no longer wraith-like, he can handle that. He's grown a little bald, a touch of gray in the beard now, yes, but still cuts a romantic figure. Past the golden light of dusk, into the growing darkness, he listens to the river push against the gunwales. How many poets, he wonders, have I ferried across this river? Vergil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan. Dante himself, who passed out after too many "drinkies" at the airport, and had to be loaded by hand into Charon's boat. Then the endless stream of acolytes, showing up after the readings for the parties at his house. Eating Charon's nacho chips, drinking all his beer, Cerberus yowling apoplectically in the yard. And the local bards! My God, their egos! He's tired of hearing about so-and-so's grant application, and the terrific contract that one got with Graywolf or Knopf. He thinks about Jesus though and smiles despite himself. There was a poet! He showed up late, weird story about the trip, stigmata leaking all over the boat. Spent three days in bed with delerium tremens, then flew off to collect a genius grant. "In the middle of my life, in the middle of my life . . ." Isn't that what Dante kept muttering, nursing a glass of pinot noir, after speaking to Charon's seminar [306]
on disembodied poetics? Charon mouths these same words, touches his hand gently to his forehead, snuggles back against the bottom of the boat. Feeling kind of hungry, he thinks. Wonder if Mrs. Charon wants to step out for a bite. Maybe some ribs. He knows this all night barbecue near the bridge to Circle 6. He feels a twitch, and shifts his weight against the keel. What did his chiropractor say? A swollen disk, amid the lower lumbar vertebrae. Not going to pole so hard he decides, lays his head back and closes his eyes. Just resting. Perhaps the tiniest cat nap. Slowly, his breathing slows. Above him the stars, not yet fixed, twist into funny animal shapes, like a clown's balloons, testing their myths across the sky. [307]
In The Great Field at Mount Holyoke, Under a Dome of Stars I said, Lord, let me speak. I am wearied by their honeysuckle words, their kamikaze advice. To the south are the lights of Springfield. North stands the house of Emily, your difficult servant. Save me as I travel north. Let me stand watch under Dead Tom's plum-colored sky and disappear again as I vanished tonight, into Eamon's gather-dark. And the Lord said Keep silent. And the Lord said Dance as a child dances, so I dizzied myself in the field. And the Lord said On this star-hammered night slap neither the mosquito nor the gnat, for it is me, come at last to whisper in your ear. [308]
Caller, What is your Question? —The Diane Rehm Show I'm driving. Diane's with an expert on the birds of Costa Rica. She goes to Nick in Bayonne who drones on about his parakeet, dead these forty-odd years. I imagine her staring at the second hand— the long weary sweep of it. Poor Nick! But what about Diane, out there on the baby bird legs of her voice? She can hardly talk—has spasmodic dysphonia, and every six weeks goes off the air to have Botox injected directly into her larynx—100 cc's of death, straight, no chaser—what about her pain, Mr. Hoo-zit from Bayonne? So I punch the accelerator and switch to the passing lane, then push the button for the AM side, where every voice is my father's voice and no one cares about your question, moron, —the ball is dead, the rims are dead, the salary cap is killing the game, no way Tiger can handle the quick greens, the slick new fairways, —oh, I am too stupid to live! Locked-and-loaded, I flip back, loathing the trumpet that volleys against the piano in Diane's theme, and hating the man still buzzing like a gnat around his insipid, self-referential little point, until I'm shouting, What do you want, you needy, dim-witted bastard— what is your question? And yes, Diane, yes, I'll hang up and take my answer off the air. [309]
Rainy Afternoon at The Gotham Book Mart The sign reads "Wise Men Fish Here" and away from the slanting rain is a miraculous draught of books: old novels, first editions, an entire wall of poetry. The center table spills over, as if a trawler has just dropped a thousand titles onto a raised deck. I find Alien Tate's Collected, an anthology of Czech poets in face-to-face translations, and a print of the famous photograph, "A Collection of Poets"—the reception in 1948, for Edith and Osbert Sitwell. They are posed center-left at the rear of this narrow room, for what Elizabeth Bishop called, "a party in a subway train," circled by Stephen Spender, Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, the famous and the now-neglected others. To the right, that's Bishop and Randall Jarrell, in the foreground, Delmore Schwartz, all in the shadow of Auden, who has draped himself, Christ-like, across a black stepladder. I've seen the article from Life, with its gushy Sitwell headlines: "They Sprang From a Fabulous Family," "They Brave New York," six pages spread among the adverts for Minit Rub and Studebaker, for Lucky Strikes and Apple Pyequick. This print is one exposure after the one in Life. See for yourself—this head turned, a poet's arm raised. Jarrell and Bishop, who've been discussing Rilke, now look stage-left and out of the frame, as if already seeking an exit. Schwartz, who interrupted them to press some obscurity with Jarrell, has gone slack-jawed, as if he's just foreseen the years to come. I go back to the shelves, where I find Delmore Schwartz: Life of an American Poet, [310]
with its 1961 photo: Schwartz, seated in Washington Square— destitute, averting his eyes, his cigarette cupped in the familiar style, a newspaper, headline screaming HEIRESS KEEPS HER MILLIONS tossed beneath the bench. I pay for the books, the famous print, and for an extra dollar, buy a plastic sleeve to keep it safe, then step through the jangle-bell door into the rain on West 47th—The rain that slants from the crowded light, The rain of pour and pouring down, —a storm that Bishop told us Will roar all night. [311]
Archie Babcock Explains the Accident to John Berryman's Biographer "Trouble," Berryman had written in his poem,He should've never gone to sleep so near the road. My brother Gordon thought dead animal, or a package fallen off the REA truck that ran from Detroit to Mackinaw. This was 1939, years before the bridge. He steers close and something pops a lamp. Whap! Still didn't know what it was, so we go back to look. A bloody mess and that boy, blowing bubbles out his nose. Put a dent the size of a melon in Gordon's '35 Ford. You should've seen that kid— name was Bob Berryman?— spitting porcelain, like he'd eaten Aunt Ad's tea cups. I remember thinking, That fella's gonna want a new mouth. We tossed him in the rumble seat and scooted back up north. ‡ He moaned through Topinabee, his face like a chewed plum, all twenty-three miles to the State Police. The desk sergeant said, "What'm I s'posed to do with him? Haul his ass to General." Gordon and I lugged him between us, the kid's head waggling 'round, blood purpling the linoleum floor. "Lord, have mercy!" the orderly said, when that boy fell into bed. [312]
A trooper'd tailed us from the post so we told him what we knew. You say that kid was somebody? He looked like nobody. This was the Depression— bums along the road were common as skunks. Sure, we'd been drinking, but we'd driven that boy all the way to Cheboygan. The cop took our names and let us go. ‡ Three days later, that kid's brother, your John Berryman, is drunk at the Pinehurst. Who amongst you knows the Babcocks? Well, ever-body knows the Babcocks, though it was the waitress, Elsie Hollipeter, let slip we lived near Wolverine. Aunt Ad says, "You boys better hightail it." So we grab two sleeping bags and head for Wildwood. Hell, I could go there now and no city boy could find me. Brush thick as a lawyer's file and trails the Chippewas don't know! The next day, John Berryman shows at Uncle Les and Aunt Ad's. He's wearing a business suit, wire glasses, carrying a book of poems, talking Troy and Agamemnon. Aunt Ad thought it so strange, she made him write it down. Well, she don't know where Gordon is and she ain't heard from Archie, "Prob'ly fishing; could be gone for weeks. Too bad about your brother's teeth, but Lester don't know nothing and Russell's only 3." Berryman posed by the mantle, finger marking a place in his book, then sat at the kitchen table, mumbling Agamemnon. Then he walked to the iron bridge and stared for the longest time into the Sturgeon River. [313]
‡ The war came and I saw worse on Tarawa and Saipan. You say that poem's famous? Read it for me again. And let that young man rise. In the flowing dark The pines consumed the moon and the moon of blood. Well, he's right about the moon. Gordon'n me were in Wildwood, camped on Nine Mile Hill, where you could see the valley and trouble along the road. Gordon stood at the fire, the moon, blood-red the way it says, simmering along his shoulder. Must've been that same moon. Gordon? Dead these thirty-eight years. Caught a Mauser through the heart at Bastogne. That Berryman kid—he was passing through. Shouldn't have slept on the goddamn road, but we were country people and no one meant him any harm. [314]
Making a Path to the Blackberries Wild, deeper than I've been, variously lensed as the eyes of a wasp, bodies that will purple my lips, stinging them with sweetness. Each day I hack at the thicket while the thorns of a thousand brambles stipple and rip my skin. At dusk I stare at what I've done, beeswax and menthol rubbed in against the blistering. I'm making a new path— tired of the scumble of weeds, sick of nightshade and understory. I hear the crows clatter and preen, already claiming their range. Ragged wings, ragged wings, the world is easy for them, I think. They are magicians palming a dark coin. Better I should build a fence, plant an orchard, perhaps a northern peach. Or make—What?—a pointless beauty— the roses I promised that would climb the new fence like a small lyric. But I say Blackberries. The crows are feasting in the trees. And the machete loves its work, the dead pitched at the living green. [315]
Letter to the Chairwoman of the Reunion Committee It is enough if I manage to be a poetI knew you as cheerleader— hands clapping, the cold smoke of your breath, the year the Centurions went 10-and-O, 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 your 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. 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. [316]
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? 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, [317]
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 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. [318]
In a Snow Squall on the South Shore of Lake Superior, At the Ojibway Cemetery Near L'anse, After Being Excluded From a Special Issue on Exile on the Grounds that, As an American-born Poet, My Experience is Insufficiently Authentic I walk out among these cedar-shingled houses of the dead, close my eyes against the cold and dream of another country. [319]
Greg Rappleye lives near Grand Haven, Michigan. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The Southern Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and The Pushcart Prize 2001 XXV: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2001). His work has also appeared on the web at "Poetry Daily" and on the National Poetry Month Website of the Academy of American Poets. His first book of poems, Holding Down the Earth, was published by SkyBooks in 1995. His second collection, A Path Between Houses, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, appeared in 2000. He was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow in Poetry at the 2002 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Rappleye is a graduate of Albion College (1974), the University of Michigan Law School (1976), and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (2000). He is currently Corporation Counsel for Ottawa County, Michigan, and teaches in the English Department at Hope College. He has four children, three dogs, two cats, and is married to the painter, Marcia Kennedy. The following poems, some in slightly different form, originally appeared in literary publications: "Homer, Faulkner, Noir" (Mississippi Review); "Terrible," "Cause" and "Wanted: Japanese Sword," (Southern Review); "A Path Between Houses" (Spillway); "Dusk" (Sou'Wester); "Morning at the Artist's House, Keywest" (Watershed); "Walking Toward the Village" (Prairie Schooner); "Charon in August" (Sycamore Review). These poems, along with "Clearwater," "After Three-and-a-Half Years with Calypso, Odysseus Says, To Hell With It, I'm Not Going Home," "A Recipe in Which My Ex-Wife No Longer Appears," "Domestic Architecture," "Fidelity," and "During National Poetry Month" are from Greg Rappleye's A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). "Caller What is your Question?" and "Rainy Afternoon at The Gotham Book Mart" were first published in Margie: The American Journal of Poetry; "Archie Babcock Explains the Accident to John Berryman's Biographer" in River City; "Making a Path to the Blackberries" in Poem; and "Letter to the Chairwoman of the Reunion Committee" in Southeast Review. |
