The Afterlife by James Tate

The Afterlife

 

A man fell out of the tree in our backyard. I ran over

to help him. “Would you like some tea?” I said. “I think

I broke my back,” he said. “Perhaps some ice cream would

be just the thing,” I said. “Lend me your hand,” he said.

I gave him my hand and tried to pull him up. When he was

upright, he said, “Where am I?” “You’re in my backyard,” I

said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said.

“It’s just an ordinary yard, a small garden, a few flowers,”

I said. “Yes, it’s a sorry sight. How can you stand to live

here?” he said. “Oh, it’s my home,” I said. “Home? That’s

a curious word,” he said. “Where do you live?” I said. “Live?

Live? That’s a funny question,” he said. “I don’t live anywhere.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m a dead man. I just float

around,” he said. “Well, I’ve never met a dead man. I’m

pleased to meet you,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to

scream or something,” he said. “Oh no, I’m really pleased,”

I said. “It’s really kind of you to drop by.” “I didn’t

drop by. It was the wind,” he said. “And then the wind stopped

and I fell into the tree.” “How lucky for me,” I said. “You’ll

be going with me, of course, when I leave. You’ll never be

coming back,” he said. 

 

My Doubt by Jane Hirshfield

My Doubt

I wake, doubt, beside you,

like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,

like a cup 

undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,

work doubting,

go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,

as a herd of goats

sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,

nightly—

for what is the meaning of dreaming

if not that all we are while inside it

is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,

doubt, you are in me,

throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.

Left knee and right knee,

we run for a bus,

for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like

to grow content in you, doubt,

as a double-hung window

settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:

your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady

the open mouth of a window,

you hold me,

my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,

offering these furious praises

I can’t help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.

 

If See No End In Is by Frank Bidart

If  See No End In Is

What none knows is when, not if. 

Now that your life nears its end 

when you turn back what you see 

is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No, 

it is a vast resonating chamber in 

which each thing you say or do is 

new, but the same. What none knows is 

how to change. Each plateau you reach, if 

single, limited, only itself, in- 

cludes traces of  all the others, so that in the end 

limitation frees you, there is no 

end, if   you once see what is there to see. 

You cannot see what is there to see — 

not when she whose love you failed is 

standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know- 

ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if 

again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end 

achieved by the unappeased is burial within. 

Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within 

whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see 

by what necessity the double-bind is in the end 

the  figure  for human life, why what we love is 

precluded always by something else we love, as if 

each no we speak is yes, each yes no. 

The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no 

better. The eyrie where you perch in 

exhaustion has food and is out of  the wind, if 

cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea 

for movement, though the promise of  sex or food is 

the prospect that bewildered  you to this end. 

Something in you believes that it is not the end. 

When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know 

you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is 

what you should not love, which endless bullies in- 

tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see 

the end. What none knows is when, not if.

Letter To Al by Lee Sharkey

Letter To Al

It was all sound. The loons. My lunatic heart. The warblers’ variations.

It was the loon night leading me to damage, a reluctant knowledge

that to do for you is to do to you. Wild, erratic, the loon

sings out its night devotions, Monk of the bird kingdom,

trilling the high note past its measure till the heart’s thrilled open.

Is it fog you wander when you stare out of the house of yourself,

is a you small and distant gathering itself for your return - a penny

for your thoughts, but you do not speak them. Only when you draw your bow

across the cello strings do I hear the one who made my fierce heart

tremble. It was pure sound answering pure sound rising and subsiding

on a flood of memory and it had the power to unlock my grief.

Were there a hiding place in poems I would slip you into it; you could cling

to my back or a fiddler’s trousers, as Chagall wrote of his father, who worked

loading barrels of herring and died crushed by a car. Barrels of grief.

Do not forsake me. Who can know what is written on his back.

I return to the nights in Russia when we stripped off sweaters and shirts,

long johns and underthings, and dived for the narrow bed. A deep cold

had crystalized the city, trees of crystal, palaces of crystal sparkling

where families paraded on winter evenings in high fur hats

and long fur coats and boots made of caribou on sidewalks

layered with snow. Beneath thin covers we shivered as we stole

the fire of sex. This was the kingdom you carried me off to,

where everyone recited Pushkin and bested each other’s tales

of the gulag, the breath of the great bear of hunger on their lips.

I lay on the floor teaching my throat the sounds of a new language;

I called out for chalk and they gave me honey; you struggled to teach

in a language you learned in high school, the Cold War piquing

your interest, you with the gift of tongues. Do you have potatoes?

our colleagues repeated, concerned for the strangers recently arrived

in the closed zone, knowing nothing, but eager and alert.

To live a routine of catastrophe. Each day radically undetermined.

Will tomorrow be Sunday or Tuesday? Will the heart hold for one more hour?

Each day undermined. Darkly mirrored in the monitor.

Will I drop to the floor in the cereal aisle? Will you forget your pin?

The dish lies broken. This wasn’t what we anticipated.

The thing without a name goes with us. Labouring and uncertain.

Death’s imbecile cousin. Volatile. Childlike and self-absorbed.

Delights in your confusion. Will not be ignored. Sprawls in the bed

with its seductions. Swipes your keys and identification.|

What’s the game plan? Take each day as it metastasizes,

Lord, your humble servant, Shekhinah of the midnight hour.

In whose hands we place ourselves in medicated dreaming,

the voices calling each other’s names: Wake! Emergency!

I fumbling to you. You fumbling to me. What can I do?Just stay

with me. Till the end of shadows. Till the end of end.

It’s the if under every utterance. It’s the utterance over every if.

It’s the memory arriving of my mother in a slatted lawn chair,

eyes closed (I have closed them), smelling the salted sea grass,

a black and white memory I am painting red. Tonight she will leave

her diaphragm in the drawer. Don’t tell my father. I want to be.

To be out in it, making memories of my mother, head thrown back,

letting the breeze touch her. She and I painting the lawn chair red.

To be about it. Desire, the little engine that keeps on pulling,

in every box car a generation re-membering its lost stories

over the clatter of the rails. To make, to shape it. To see every word

flown from the mouth as a catbird’s feather loosed in wind,

tipping the scales of a future. As in: my father has throttled his words

once too often and lost the power to speak. He has brought

the house down around him and sits staring from the rubble.

I write this feather to touch him not to impeach.

It is enough some hours simply to be together, within our walls

among our familiar objects—refrigerator, toaster, pencil, stepladder,

jacket, glove—or walking hand in hand. We rest when we’re tired.

We eat when we’re hungry. The locusts, the frogs, the death of the firstborn—

we have escaped them. Against us, not a dog shall move his tongue.

Some hours it seems perfected, the cycle of passion and caring,

striving and settling, everything come down to love. The marvel

of devotion, the osmotic comfort of skin on skin. We quiet,

old lovers who have no need to speak. Outside, the plagues continue:

the pestilence, the grievous hail, the stinking fish, extinctions.

Pharaoh doubles down on his intransigence. But our ambitions

have grown modest. I stop for a flower’s deliquescence, recite

the sequence: crocus, daffodil, tulip, peony, rose.

You fill your pillbox, watch Space X rockets land on water.

A hand held, a kiss soft on the lips—there is no future to speak of.

 

The School Play by James Merrill

The School Play

"Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby,

Stands here for God, his country, and . . ." And what?

"Stands here for God, his Sovereign, and himself,"

Growls Captain Fry who had the play by heart.

I was the First Herald, "a small part"

--I was small too--"but an important one."

What was not important to the self 

At nine or ten? Already I had crushes

On Mowbray, Bushy, and the Duke of York.

Handsome Donald Niemann (now himself,

According to the Bulletin, headmaster

Of his own school somewhere out West) awoke

Too many self-indulgent mouthings in

The dummy mirror before smashing it,

For me to set my scuffed school cap at him.

Another year I'd play that part myself,

Or Puck, or Goneril, or Prosepero. 

Later, in adolescence, it was thought

Clever to speak of having found oneself,

With a smile and rueful headshake for those who hadn't.

People still do. Only the other day

A woman my age told us that her son

"Hadn't found himself"--at thirty-one!

I heard in the mind's ear an amused hum

Of mothers and fathers from beyond the curtain,

And that flushed, far-reaching hour came back

Months of rehearsal in the gymnasium

Had led to: when the skinny nobodies

Who'd memorized the verse and learned to speak it

Emerged in beards and hose (or gowns and rouge)

Vivid with character, having put themselves

All unsuspecting into the master's hands.

 

Why Some Girls Love Horses by Paisley Rekdal

Why Some Girls Love Horses

And then I thought, Can I have more

of this, would it be possible

for every day to be a greater awakening: more light,

more light, your face on the pillow

with the sleep creases rudely

fragmenting it, hair so stiff

from paint and sheet rock it feels

like the dirty short hank

of mane I used to grab on Dandy’s neck

before he hauled me up and forward,

white flanks flecked green

with shit and the satin of his dander,

the livingness, the warmth

of all that blood just under the skin

and in the long, thick muscle of the neck—

He was smarter than most of the children

I went to school with. He knew

how to stand with just the crescent

of his hoof along a boot toe and press,

incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain

so surprising when it came,

its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive

sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof

pinned one’s foot completely to the ground,

we’d have to beat and beat him with a brush

to push him off, that hot

insistence with its large horse eye trained

deliberately on us, to watch—

Like us, he knew how to announce through violence

how he didn’t hunger, didn’t want

despite our practiced ministrations: too young

not to try to empathize

with this cunning: this thing

that was and was not human we must respect

for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because

I could not love him anymore

in the ways I’d taught myself,

watching the slim bodies of teenagers

guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring

as if they were one body, one fluid motion

of electric understanding I would never feel

working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing

had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed

an indifference that gave me

logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting

the hand placed on back or shoulder

and never feel the desired response.

I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine

and inflict on me, the sudden jerking

of head away from halter, the tentative nose

inspecting first before it might decide

to relent and eat. I loved

what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me

it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure

might be blended, one warmth

bleeding into another as the future

bleeds into the past, more light, more light,

your hand against my shoulder, the image

of the one who taught me disobedience

is the first right of being alive.

 

Mergers and Acquisitions by Edward Hirsch

Mergers and Acquisitions

Beyond junk bonds and oil spills,

beyond the collapse of Savings and Loans,

beyond liquidations and options on futures,

beyond basket trading and expanding foreign markets,

the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard

& Poor's stock index, mutual funds, commodities,

beyond the rising tide of debits and credits,

opinion polls, falling currencies, the signs

for L. A. Gear and Coca Cola Classic, 

the signs for U.S. Steel and General Motors,

hi-grade copper, municipal bonds, domestic sugar,

beyond fax it and collateral buildups,

beyond mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts,

hostile takeovers, beyond the official policy

on inflation and the consensus on happiness,

beyond the national trends in buying and selling,

getting and spending, the market stalled

and the cost passed on to consumers,

beyond the statistical charts on prices,

there is something else that drives us, some

rage or hunger, some absence smoldering

like a childhood fever vaguely remembered

or half-perceived, some unprotected desire,

greed that is both wound and knife,

a failed grief, a lost radiance.