A CLOSER LOOK: David Lehman

Sonnet

No roof so poor it does not shelter
The memory of the death of at least one man
In at least one septic room,
No wind so light it dare not dislodge
From their neglected home beneath the house
The bones of a discarded belief.

Yet the buyer cannot bear to look, keeps
A lock on the cellar door, and prays
For the well-behaved past to stay in place
As if, like the date on the blackboard,
It existed only to be ignored and erased
But threatens nevertheless to endure
Beyond the hour of its chalk, suspected
If not seen, like the smudge of a star.

 

The Difference Between Pepsi and Coke

Can’t swim; uses credit cards and pills to combat

intolerable feelings of inadequacy;

Won’t admit his dread of boredom, chief impulse behind

numerous marital infidelities;

Looks fat in jeans, mouths clichés with confidence,

breaks mother’s plates in fights;

Buys when the market is too high, and panics during

the inevitable descent;

Still, Pop can always tell the subtle difference

between Pepsi and Coke,

Has defined the darkness of red at dawn, memorized

the splash of poppies along

Deserted railway tracks, and opposed the war in Vietnam

months before the students,

Years before the politicians and press; give him

a minute with a road map

And he will solve the mystery of bloodshot eyes;

transport him to mountaintop

And watch him calculate the heaviness and height

of the local heavens;

Needs no prompting to give money to his kids; speaks

French fluently, and tourist German;

Sings Schubert in the shower; plays pinball in Paris;

knows the new maid steals, and forgives her.

 

Fear

The boy hid under the house
With his dog, his red lunch box, and his fear
Thinking God is near
Thinking it’s time to leave the things that mean
Just one thing, though you can’t tell what that is,
Like God or death. The boy held his breath,
Closed his eyes and disappeared,
Thinking No one will find me here—

 

But only when his parents were watching.
When they weren’t, he slipped away
And hid under the house
And stayed there all night, and through the next day,
Until Father (who had died that December)
Agreed to come home, and Mother was twenty
Years younger again, and pregnant with her
Darling son. Hiding under the house,
He could see it all, past and future,
The deep blue past, the black and white future,
Until he closed his eyes and made it disappear,

 

And everyone was glad when he returned
To the dinner table, a grown man
With wire-rim glasses and neatly combed hair.
Fear was the name of his dog, a German shepherd.

 

Operation Memory

We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.

 

We’d been drinking since early afternoon. I was loaded.
The doctor made me recite my name, rank, and serial number when
I woke up, sweating, in my civvies. All my friends had jobs
As professional liars, and most had partners who were good in bed.
What did I have? Just this feeling of always being in the middle
Of things, and the luck of looking younger than fifty.

 

At dawn I returned to draft headquarters. I was eighteen
And counting backwards. The interviewer asked one loaded
Question after another, such as why I often read the middle
Of novels, ignoring their beginnings and their ends. When
Had I decided to volunteer for intelligence work? “In bed
With a broad,” I answered, with locker-room bravado. The truth was, jobs

Were scarce, and working on Operation Memory was better than no job
At all. Unamused, the judge looked at his watch. It was 1970
By the time he spoke. Recommending clemency, he ordered me to go to bed
At noon and practice my disappearing act. Someone must have loaded
The harmless gun on the wall in Act I when
I was asleep. And there I was, without an alibi, in the middle

 

Of a journey down nameless, snow-covered streets, in the middle
Of a mystery--or a muddle. These were the jobs
That saved men’s souls, or so I was told, but when
The orphans assembled for their annual reunion, ten
Years later, on the playing fields of Eton, each unloaded
A kit bag full of troubles, and smiled bravely, and went to bed.

Thanks to Operation Memory, each of us woke up in a different bed
Or coffin, with a different partner beside him, in the middle
Of a war that had never been declared. No one had time to load
His weapon or see to any of the dozen essential jobs
Preceding combat duty. And there I was, dodging bullets, merely one
In a million whose lucky number had come up. When

 

It happened, I was asleep in bed, and when I woke up,
It was over: I was thirty-eight, on the brink of middle age,
A succession of stupid jobs behind me, a loaded gun on my lap.

 

Rejection Slip

“Oh, how glad I am that she
Whom I wanted so badly to want me
Has rejected me! How pleased I am, too,
That my Fulbright to India fell through!

 

The job with the big salary and the perks
Went to a toad of my acquaintance, a loathsome jerk
Instead of me! I deserved it! Yet rather than resent
My fate, I praise it: heaven-sent

 

It is! For it has given me pain, prophetic pain,
Creative pain that giveth and that taketh away again!
Pain the premonition of death, mother of beauty,
Refinement of all pleasure, relief from duty!

 

Pain you swallow and nurture until it grows
Hard like a diamond or blooms like a rose!
Pain that redoubles desire! Pain that sharpens the sense!
Of thee I sing, to thee affirm my allegiance!”

 

The audience watched in grim anticipation
Which turned into evil fascination
And then a standing ovation, which mesmerized the nation,
As he flew like a moth into the flames of his elation.

 

Dutch Interior

He liked the late afternoon light as it dimmed
In the living room, and wouldn’t switch on
The electric lights until past eight o’clock.
His wife complained, called him cheerless, but
It wasn't a case of melancholy; he just liked
The way things looked in air growing darker
So gradually and imperceptibly that it seemed
The very element in which we live. Every man
And woman deserves one true moment of greatness
And this was his, this Dutch interior, entered
And possessed, so tranquil and yet so busy
With details: the couple’s shed clothes scattered
On the backs of armchairs, the dog chasing a shoe,
The wide open window, the late afternoon light.

 

Who She Was

She loved jumping on the trampoline.
Her nickname was Monkey.
She slipped her tongue in his mouth when they kissed.

 

She had a job in publishing. It was what
she most wanted after she got out of Vassar. The first
manuscript she acquired was The Heidegger Cookbook,
so you can imagine how her career took off from there.

 

She started liking sex soon after her husband left her.
He came back weekends and complied
with her bedtime wishes. A lawyer.
What did you expect? A Peace Corps
volunteer who went on to become
the editor of Envy: The Magazine for You?

 

Where did her anger come from? He wasn’t sure
but it was how he knew she loved him.

 

It was heartbreaking to learn that they
had both married other people. “What is the most
heartbreaking thing you can think of?”
he asked. Her list included the dawn,
Vassar graduation, and the city
of Paris, which she described in vivid prose
before she set foot in France. It was
the one infallible rule she used
to write her acclaimed series of travel guidebooks.

 

He realized why he married her:
so he wouldn’t have to think about her,
or about sex, or about other women: the hours
they consumed like crossword puzzles
and chocolate-covered cherries.

 

She said the most obvious things
but she said them well.

 

She tried to impress people but kept blundering
as when she attributed the phrase “Make It New”
to William Carlos Williams.

 

She had the soul of a stranger.
There were things that she loved besides herself—
flowers, poems.

 

She was obsessed with the difficulty
of finding good nectarines in New York City.
They cost an arm and a leg and were mealy.

 

She said something critical
He flew off the handle
She asked, “Are you saying it's over?”
He said Fuck you
She said Fuck you and told him to leave
All right, he said, I’m leaving
if that’s the way you want it
and if you want to know
where I am, I’m in Palm Springs
fucking Lana Turner
as Frank Sinatra put it to Ava Gardner
who was in her bathtub at the time
it was 1952

 

She got so depressed she stayed in her room
all day. At least that way she would stay
out of trouble. Her job kept her sedentary.
The only exercise she got was fixing a sandwich
and writing dialogue for a man and a woman
while one is packing a suitcase: “What are you
doing?” “What does it look like I'm doing?”

 

It rained all day, converting a September morning
into a November afternoon. The speed
of thinking was faster than the speed of light.
“How's your ex-wife?”
“She's divorced, too,” he replied.
“That's what we have in common.”

 

He had the odd habit of smiling when he was tense.
This made him a lousy poker player but won her sympathy.
She liked his bohemian life. Or didn't really
but said she did. The joy went out of his eyes
but the smile stayed on his face
having nowhere else to go. God’s image
was shaving in the mirror, feeling like hell,
missing her, wondering who she was.

 

Tax Day (April 15)

What a sweet guy I am
when one of my enemies dies
I don’t Xerox the obit and mail it
to the others saying “Let
this be a lesson to you,” no
I’m more likely to recall
the person’s virtues to which I
was blind until the news of mortality
opened my mind as you would
open a vial of Tylenol noticing
it spells lonely backwards with
only the initial T added, signifying
taxes no doubt, and now my headache
has gone the way of leaves in fall
am I happy I certainly am
as you would be, my friend, if
the Queen of Sheba returned your calls
as she does mine

 

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
“After You’ve Gone”
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark

 

Dante Lucked Out

T. S. Eliot held that Dante was lucky
to live in the Middle Ages
because life then was more logically organized
and society more coherent. The rest of us however
can’t be as sure that if we’d had the fortune
to walk along the Arno and look at the pretty girls
walking with their mothers in the fourteenth century,
then we, too, would have composed La Vita Nuova
and the Divine Comedy. It is on the contrary
far more likely that we, transported
to medieval Florence, would have died miserably
in a skirmish between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines
without the benefit of anesthesia
or would have been beaten, taunted,
cheated, and cursed as usurers
two centuries before the charging of interest
became an accepted part of Calvinist creed
and other reasons needed to be produced
to justify the persecution of the Jews.

 

Anna K.

1.

Anna believed.
Couldn’t delay.
Every Friday
grew heroic
infidelity just
knowing love
might never
otherwise present
queenly resplendent
satisfaction trapped
under Vronsky’s
wild X-rated
young zap.

2.

Afraid. Betrayed.
Can’t divorce.
Envy follows
grim heroine,
inks judgment,
kills lust.
Mercy nowhere.
Opulent pink
quintessence radiates
suicide trip—
unique vacation—
worst Xmas,
yesterday’s zero.

 

After Auschwitz

In the yeshiva playground they were marching
chanting marching around in circles bearing pickets
bearing scrolls saying “No poems after Auschwitz! No poems

 

about Auschwitz!” while in the back row
the poet sat dreamily and stared out the window, hungry.
Could there be lunch after Auschwitz?

 

His mother did everything she could have done
but there wasn’t money enough for the necessary bribes
and her parents were deported to Riga and shot.

 

A woman he met at a writer’s conference
told him she was working on The Holocaust and Memory
at Yale. The question she had was this:

 

Are American Jews making a fetish out of the Holocaust?
Has the Holocaust become the whole of Jewish experience?
“You go to shul on Yom Kippur or Passover

 

and everything is the Holocaust.” I shut my eyes and hear
the old prayers made new: “Shame is real,” said Ida Noise.
Hear, O Israel. The Lord is One. I, an American, naturally preferred

 

a temple carved out of water and stone: the rage of a waterfall,
the melody of a brook. But back-to-nature as a strategy failed
when the phones started ringing in the woods,

 

and only a child would think of collecting dead leaves
and trying to paste them back on the trees. So I returned
to the city, married, settled down, had a child of my own,

 

pretended that I was just like anybody else.
Yet I feel as if my real life is somewhere else, I left it
back in 1938, it happened already and yet it’s still going on,

 

only it’s going on without me, I’m merely an observer
in a trench coat, and if there were some way I could enter
the newsreel of rain that is Europe, some way I could return

 

to the year where I left my life behind,
it would be dear enough to me, danger and all. To him,
an emissary of a foreign war, London was unreal. He wondered

 

which of his fellow passengers would make the attempt.
He knew now that they would try to kill him,
tomorrow if not today. How could he have been such a fool?

 

Herr Endlich said: “We have our ways of making a man talk.”
In the last forty-eight hours he had learned two things:
That you couldn’t escape the danger, it was all around you,

 

and that the person who betrays you is the one you trusted most.
The strategists in Washington couldn’t figure it out. Why in hell
were the Germans wasting fuel on trains to camps in Poland?.

 

Ever the Stranger

Man has the will
to grieve
a week and no longer.

 

Ever the stranger
he will kill
with righteous anger.

 

What does he believe?
In his right to trade
a season of greed

 

for an hour
of love in an unlit corner.
Such is love’s power,

 

though it last no longer.
And such is his need
than which nothing is stronger.

 

Mother Died Today

Mother died today. That's how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today. She laughed and said you sure know how to cheer me up. The telegram came. It said, Mother dead Stop Funeral tomorrow Stop. Mother read it in the hospital and laughed at her college boy son. Or maybe yesterday, I don't remember. Mama died yesterday. The telegram arrived a day too late. I had already left. Europe is going down, the euro is finished, and what does it matter? My mother served plum cake and I read the page aloud. Mother died today or yesterday and I can't be sure and it doesn't matter. Germany can lose two world wars and still rule all of Europe, and does it matter whether you die at thirty or seventy? Mother died today. It was Mother's Day, the day she died, the year she died. In 1940 it was the day the Germans marched into Belgium and France and Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister. The telegram came from the asylum, the home, the hospital, the “assisted living” facility, the hospice, the clinic. Your mother passed away. Heartfelt condolences. The price of rice is going up, and what does it matter? I’ll tell you what I told the nurse and anyone that asks. Mother died today.

It Could Happen To You

It’s June 15, 2017, a Thursday,
fortieth anniversary of the infamous day
the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati
and they're still losing

 

I mean we are

 

7 to 1 to the Washington Nationals
a team that didn’t exist in 1977
the summer of a little tour in France
with Henry James
in a yellow Renault douze

 

the light a lovely gray
the rain a violin
concerto (Prokofiev’s no. 2 in D major)
and I had books to read
Huxley Woolf Forster and their enemy F. R. Leavis

Empson a little dull for my taste
also Freud on errors, Norman Mailer on orgasms,
James Baldwin in Paris
Dostoyevski’s Notes from Underground part 1

 

and John Ashbery tells me he is reading The Possessed
translated as The Demons in the newfangled translation
while Ron and I stay faithful to Constance Garnett

I went upstairs stood on the terrace ate some cherries
admired the outline of trees in the dark

and Rosemary Clooney
sang “It Could Happen to You”

and I was a healthy human being, not a sick man
for the first summer in three years.

 

A Toast

“When the doctor breaks the news,

will you cry or sing the blues?”

“No way. I’ll raise my glass,

take a sip, get off my ass,
and bounce my red rubber ball
against the rubble of the ghetto wall,
and catch it, feeling good,
catching it as a centerfielder would,
while a skirt walks by hoping I’ll notice,

and five decades pass as swiftly as a kiss.”