Hooks

Possibly because she's already so striking - tall, well dressed, very clear, pure skin-
when the girl gets on the subway at Lafayette Street everyone notices her artificial hand
but we also manage, as we almost always do, not to be noticed noticing, except one sleeping woman,
who hasn't budged since Brooklyn but who lifts her head now, opens up, forgets herself,
and frankly stares at those intimidating twists of steel, the homely leather sock and laces,
so that the girl, as she comes through the door, has to do in turn now what is to be done,
which is to look down at it, too, a bit askance, with an air of tolerant, bemused annoyance,
the way someone would glance at their unruly, apparently ferocious but really quite friendly dog.


Nostalgia

In the dumbest movie they can play it on us with a sunrise and a passage of adagio Vivaldi -
all the reason more to love it and to loathe it, this always barely chocked-back luscious flood,
this turbulence in breast and breath that indicates a purity residing somewhere in us,
redeeming with its easy access the thousand lapses of memory shed in the most innocuous day
and canceling our rue for all the greater consciousness we didn't have for past, lost presents.
Its illusion is that we'll retain this new, however hammy past more thoroughly than all before,
its reality, that though we know by heart its shabby ruses, know we'll misplace it yet again,
it's what we have, a stage light flickering to flood, chintz and gaud, and we don't care.


First Desires

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew anything at all about the music,
what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of the orchestra each represented:
there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thinnings, the winding cries of change
that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of you adn then apart from you.
And even when you'd learned the grainy timbre of the single violin, the ardent arpeggios of the horn,
when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left, an ache, a sense of longing
that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the dominant's resolve into the tonic,
as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you knew it was more likely) you.


The Dirty Talker: D Line, Boston

Shabby, tweedy, academic, he was old enough to be her father and I thought he was her father,
then realized he was standing closer than a father would so I thought he was her older lover.
And I thought at first that she was laughing, then saw it was more serious, more strenuous:
her shoulders spasmed back and forth; he was leaning close, his mouth almost against her ear.
He's terminating the affair, I thought: wife ill, the kids... the girl won't let him go.
We were in a station now, he pulled back half a head from her the better to behold her,
then was out the hissing doors, she sobbing wholly now so that finally I had to understand -
her tears, his grinning broadly in - at me now though, as though I were a portion of the story.


Alzheimer's: The Husband
    for Jean Mauger

He'd been a clod, he knew, yes, always aiming toward his vision of the good life, always acting on it.
He knew he'd been unconscionably self-centered, had indulged himself with his undreamed-of good fortune,
but he also knew that the single-mindedness with which he'd attended to his passions, needs and whims,
and which must have seemed to others the grossest sort of egotism, was also what was really at the base
of how he'd almost offhandedly worked out the intuitions and moves which had brought him here,
and this wasn't all that different: to spend his long-anticipated retirement learning to cook,
clean house, dress her, even to apply her makeup, wasn't any sort of secular saintliness -
that would be belittling - it was just the next necessity he saw himself as being called to.


The Critic

In the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, where all the bums come in stinking from the cold,
there was one who had a battered loose-leaf book he used to scribble in for hours on end.
He wrote with no apparent hesitation, quickly, and with concentration; his inspiration was inspiring:
you had to look again to realize that he was writing over words that were already there -
blocks of cursive etched into the softened paper, interspersed with poems in print he'd pasted in.
I hated to think of the volumes he'd violated to construct his opus, but I liked him anyway,
especially the way he'd often reach the end, close his work with weary satisfaction, then open again
and start again: page one, chapter one, his blood-rimmed eyees as rapt as David's doing psalms.


Fat

The young girl jogging in mittens and skimpy gym shorts through a freezing rainstorm up our block
would have a perfect centerfold body except for the bulbs of grandmotherly fat on her thighs.
Who was it again I loved once... no, not loved truly, liked, somewhat, and slept with, a lot,
who when she'd brood on the I thought quite adorable blubber she had there would beat it on the wall?
Really: she'd post herself naked half a stide back, crouch like a skier, and swing her hips, bang!
onto the plaster, bang! ten times, a hundred: bang! the wall shook, bang! her poor body quivered.
I'd lie there aghast, I knew that mad pounding had to mean more than itself, of course I thought me.
For once I was right; soon after, she left me, and guess what, for all that, I missed her.


Souls

Bound with baling wire to the tubular jerry-built bumper of a beat-up old dump truck
are two of those gigantic teddy bears people win (usually shills) in cheap amusement parks.
It's pouring: dressed in real children's clothes, they are, our mothers would have said, drenched,
and they're also unrelentingly filthy, matted with the sticky, sickly, ghastly, dark gray sheen
you see on bums ambulating between drnking streets and on mongrels guarding junkyards.
Their stuffing hasn't been so crushed in them as to affect their jaunty, open-armed availability,
but, regarded more closely, they seem to manifest a fanatical expressionlessness, like soldiers
who, wounded, captured, waiting to be shipped away or shot, must submit now to their photograph.