Another City

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Steven M. Coughlin

May 2013

© 2013 Steven M. Coughlin. All Rights Reserved.

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This dissertation titled

Another City

by

STEVEN M. COUGHLIN

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Mark Halliday

Professor of English

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

STEVENM. COUGHLIN, Ph.D., May 2013, English

Another City

Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday

The dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay titled “Stevens’ Ontology:

Struggles of the Mind” and a book manuscript titled Another City.

“Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind” presents an examination of the ontological vision Wallace Stevens presents in his poem “Sunday Morning” and then considers problems this vision encounters in subsequent poems. Among the issues

Stevens struggles with are the demands of his ego upon his imagination to elevate himself to the status of a deity, the pressures of personal grief and social unrest upon Stevens’ desire to remain a detached observer, and Stevens’ inability to produce a vision liberated from Christian rhetoric.

Another City is a collection of poetry that explores family trauma and the role of the imagination as an alternative to grim reality.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Part One: Stevens’ Ontology: Struggles of the Mind ...... 5 Works Cited ...... 26! Part Two: Another City ...... 27! Helen’s Barroom ...... 28 Bing Crosby Sings the Blues ...... 29! Boy at Night ...... 31! Did Not Speak ...... 33 Another Life ...... 48! A Small Sign ...... 50! 1993...... 51 The Small Routine ...... 52 What the Doctor Did Not Know ...... 54!

Rockland, 1995 ...... 57! Doogie’s House ...... 59! Matlock ...... 61! A Certain Kind of Light ...... 62! Getting It Right ...... 63! Adam’s Thirst ...... 64! The El Comino ...... 65

The Invented City ...... 67! A Job in California ...... 68! Special Recognition ...... 70! The History of Longing ...... 72 Winter Refrain ...... 78! Sacred Heart ...... 79! Another City ...... 81! 5

PART ONE: STEVENS’ ONTOLOGY: STRUGGLES OF THE MIND

Among the many issues confronting Western civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century was the struggle to achieve spiritual health in an age of lost faith. With

Christianity’s inability to adequately adapt to the complexities of Western Civilization in the modern age--from existential issues raised by Darwin’s theory of evolution to technological progress displacing people from community to the violent horrors unleashed by military advancement during World War I--many people, including several poets of this period, began to question, even rebel, against the idea of a Christian God as a saving spiritual figure and instead pursued alternate avenues for existential enlightenment and relief from spiritual angst.

D.H. Lawrence, for instance, placed an emphasis on sexuality and the primitive subconscious to access his own secular sublime. William Carlos Williams attempted objective representation of the physical world for spiritual fulfillment; as “The Red

Wheel Barrow” succinctly suggests, so much spiritual sustenance can be found by directly embracing the world around us. Both W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot sought mythology to provide spiritual salvation. Yeats, in provisionally embracing mythological systems, experienced multiple transcendent visions. Eliot, discouraged by the spiritual degradation of Western civilization, explored various myths from ancient and pre-modern cultures in an attempt to find a saving myth. Although Eliot later embraced Christianity as his preferred mythological vehicle, a poem like “The Waste Land,” written in 1922, provides a strong example of Eliot’s struggle to find a saving myth: in the fifth section alone Eliot searches for the smallest “fragments” from Christianity, Buddha’s Fire 6

Sermon, the ancient myth of the Fisher King, and the Upanishad to shore “against my ruins” (431).

These examples demonstrate the existential necessity many Modernists felt to fill the void of lost faith. Yet one Modernist in particular, Wallace Stevens--heavily influenced by the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Keats--turned toward the creative powers of the imagination to fill his own spiritual needs, and it is my goal in this essay to explore Stevens’ existential journey in greater depth. This comes not only from an inclination to better understand Stevens’ work but also because in several of my own poems I make imaginative attempts to rectify personal grief and trauma.

Although not as existential in nature, these poems, like Stevens’, reflect a desire to use the imagination to transcend the limitations of actual experience. Therefore, I now aim to provide an analysis of one of Stevens’ early poems, “Sunday Morning,” to establish the ontological vision Stevens pursues--albeit, with various amendments and changes in mood--for the rest of his writing life. After establishing the basic concepts of Stevens’ ontology I will consider some of the major issues he encounters: first, problems that occur from the demands of Stevens’ ego upon his imagination to elevate himself to the status of a deity; second, the pressures of personal grief and social unrest upon Stevens’ desire to remain a detached observer; and finally, Stevens’ inability to produce a vision liberated from Christian rhetoric. It is not my intent to argue against the quality or stature of Stevens’ poetry but to demonstrate the overwhelming complexities of his poetic task and the difficulties Modernists like Stevens encountered in trying to achieve spiritual health in an age of lost faith. 7

“Sunday Morning” is a poem in eight stanzas that argues for the imagination as a preferable alternative to the Christian concept of God. The poem begins with a woman who, instead of attending church on a Sunday morning--perhaps Easter--sits outside to enjoy the sensual pleasures of “late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” (1-2). Near her is a “cockatoo” busy in its own “green freedom” (3)--note the word “green,” which for

Stevens, along with other bright colors, often suggests the dynamism of the active imagination. In this leisurely state, the woman begins to daydream, but soon her thoughts are confronted by “the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe” (6-7), Jesus’ death.

For this woman such reflections are unwelcome. Indeed, unlike the cockatoo in its “green freedom,” this woman remains bound to the “procession of the dead” (10) as her daydream carries her “dreaming feet/ Over the seas” (9) not to a place of existential liberation but to “silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre” (14-15).

However, we should observe this early reference to the powers of the imagination: as

Jesus once walked on water so too do this woman’s “feet,” in her imaginative daydream, allow her to walk “Over the seas.” Regardless, as the first stanza concludes we see this woman confronting Jesus’ death as it fails to provide existential fulfillment.

The poem’s second stanza begins with the woman reflecting upon the limitations of such existential speculation. She asks, “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?”

(16). From this perspective, Jesus only exists in “silent shadows and in dreams” (18).

Unlike the potential existential insights experienced through interacting with the physical world, Christianity offers only an unhealthy obsession with death. This conveys a central tenet of Stevens’ rejection of Christianity--his firm belief that the “dead” have no 8

“bounty” to offer the living. In “A Pretext for Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning,’”

Sidney Feshbach states that the poem offers “an evolving of the ideas of the divine and an evolving of eschatological inventions in response to confrontations with death” (63).

Certainly we encounter the beginning of such evolutions when the woman questions the spiritual viability of fixating on thoughts of Palestine and the sepulcher of Jesus. Further,

Stevens claims that any “thought of heaven” (22) should stem from the sensual, physical world: “In pungent fruit and bright, green wings” (21). It is the word “thought” that seems most important. Yes, there exists an external, physical world, but any access to the divine this woman can experience, any way to achieve a sense of “Divinity” (23), must occur “within herself” (23). Therefore, the woman in “Sunday Morning” not only observes the external world but also has her own unique responses to it: “Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow” (24). Such imaginative responses, according to Stevens, are the only way to access the divine.

With the arrival of the third stanza Stevens makes a strange and somewhat confusing transition. Gone is the woman enjoying her late breakfast, and, instead, Stevens brings us into his own ruminations: “Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. /

No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave / Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind” (31-33). If the woman of the first two stanzas focuses on the Christian God,

Stevens here extends the argument back even further--before the birth of Jesus there was

Jove. Yet this option appears less appealing than Christianity. Stevens portrays Jove as being so far removed from humanity that even though “magnificent” (35), Jove is, nonetheless, no more than “a muttering king” (34); humanity can not achieve any 9 spiritual transcendence through such a removed figure. Later Stevens almost seems to appreciate the arrival of the Christ-myth when “our blood” at least begins to

“commingl[e] . . . / With heaven” (36-37). In this context Jesus’ virgin birth represents progress in humanity’s ability to imagine itself as divine. Yet Stevens proceeds to take his argument further: “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / the blood of paradise?

And shall the earth / seem all of paradise that we shall know?” (39-41). By this point we should be able to anticipate Stevens’ answer. Although Jesus might represent a better option than Jove, Stevens ultimately wants our blood to be liberated from any metaphysical concept of heaven--for our blood to be the source of its own paradise. It is only then that “The sky will be much friendlier” (42) in that it will be understood in human terms and not by “this dividing and indifferent blue” (45).

With the beginning of the fourth stanza we return to the woman as she reflects upon a potential problem of turning toward the physical world for spiritual sustenance.

The woman concedes that she feels spiritually “‘content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields” (46-48) but then proceeds to question how she might continue to feel spiritually fulfilled “when the birds are gone” (49). Stevens answers by saying that fulfillment cannot be found by seeking “any haunt of prophecy”

(51), such as what one might hope to find in Christian doctrine, but by, once again, turning toward the imagination--for it is there that this woman’s “remembrance of awakened birds” (58) will “endure” (56); when her memories of the birds will continue to offer spiritual sustenance. Thus we have arrived at the end of the first half of the poem in which Stevens has managed to not only reject the idea of the transcendent myths of the 10 monotheistic Christ and the polytheistic Jove but to also insist upon the imagination’s interaction with the physical world as a preferable alternative.

The fifth stanza presents us with an idea of death that differs significantly from

Christianity’s portrayal of death. In the opening lines the woman says: “‘But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss’” (61-62). Although the imagination might provide convincing alternatives to what can be found in Christianity, the human mind remains finite, and unlike Christianity it cannot make assurances of an everlasting soul. Yet, for Stevens, death’s inevitability is not something to be denied or feared; for him, death functions as the force which compels us to actively engage with life: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams /And our desires” (63-65). Death will bring eventual oblivion, but it also provides the motivation to exist in both a physical and spiritual presence. In this sense

Stevens subverts the traditional Christian concept of death: instead of death acting as a gateway into a spiritual realm, we are forced to pursue a spiritual existence before death’s inevitable arrival.

Further, in the sixth stanza--clearly alluding to Keats’ urn--Stevens challenges the

Christian concept of heaven: “Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?” (76-77). Stevens’ answer to these questions is an obvious no: for paradise to be something worthy of enjoyment things need to change, or else there would be no reason to derive any pleasure from them. Therefore, according to Stevens, heaven

“should wear our colors” (85), and, just like here on Earth, fruit will inevitably have to ripen and time pass. 11

The strangest turn in “Sunday Morning” occurs in the seventh stanza when

Stevens, again drifting from the woman, describes “a ring of men . . . chanting in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun” (91-93). As the stanza progresses it becomes evident that what these men celebrate is not the Christian God but the spiritual essence of the physical world: “The windy lake wherein their lord delights, / The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills” (99-100). The sun, windy lake, trees, and echoing hills all suggest the divine potential of the natural world. As Robert Rehder observes: “Every important event in ‘Sunday Morning’ is an interaction between a person (or persons) and a landscape--even the Crucifixion is thought of as a vestigial landscape” (79); and this stanza seems like the climax of such an interaction. Yet the emphatic return to paganism

Stevens envisions seems problematic for two reasons: first, it denies the modern world where such primitive celebration appears oddly out of step with industrialization. In fact,

Stevens has pushed humanity’s interaction with nature to such an extreme that it becomes difficult not to read this stanza as satirical. Second, the diction Stevens uses to illustrate the divine potential of the natural world (“serafin” and “heavenly fellowship” [12]) invokes Christianity. Because I will address this problem in greater detail later, I will not reflect upon the issue too much at present. However, it does seem important to point out the contradiction of denouncing Christianity while at the same time making use of its rhetoric.

The concluding stanza fulfills the cyclical nature of the poem as we return to the woman again reflecting upon Christianity and Jesus’ death. The stanza begins with a voice calling out: “‘The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the 12 grave of Jesus, where he lay’” (107-109). This voice offers the woman a new ontological perspective: through the evolution of eight stanzas Palestine has been demystified, and no longer, presumably, will she have to confront the burden of the “old catastrophe” of

Jesus’ death. Stevens has recast Jesus from the stature of deity to simply being a man in his grave. What remains for this woman--a more realistic alternative to the previous stanza--are “sweet berries [which] ripen in the wilderness” (116). This subtler version of a spiritual reality offers “sweetness” but also, as “ripen” suggests, eventual physical decay. By the poem’s end the woman has been empowered to embrace this physical world--for her imagination to interact with it--in order to access a spiritual sublime, but

Stevens refuses to offer anything beyond death:

And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (117-120)

Certainly “isolation” implies a kind of existential loneliness; there exists no heaven in the sky to interact with--humanity, like the “pigeons,” must accept its solitary place in the universe. As Harold Bloom notes: “If we are isolated, so is the sky, in a cosmos where all power is ‘spontaneous’ and ‘casual.’ . . . There is just a premonitory, introjective gesture, downward and outward, in the darkness, appropriate to a world where no spirits linger”

(35). However, another metaphorical implication of these concluding lines functions as a realization of Stevens’ ontological perspective: “evening” representing that moment when day (physical awareness) meets night (transformative power of the imagination). In this sense, the merging of these two presents Stevens’ spiritual ideal. 13

There is much to admire regarding Stevens’ ontological vision outlined in

“Sunday Morning”--and certainly the poem’s final stanza is one of both intellectual and emotional force. Yet several poems within Stevens’ oeuvre demonstrate the problematic nature of trying to adhere to such a philosophy. For instance, in its greatest extreme the creative force of the imagination can elevate the self to the level of the deified (an appealing concept for a few minutes but, as we shall see, problematic over a longer period of time). A good illustration of this occurs in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” At the beginning of this poem Hoon--a representation of Stevens in his most relaxed, imaginative state--asserts: “Not less because in purple I descended / The western day through what you called / The loneliest air, not less was I myself” (1-3). This opening suggests Hoon is responding to an assertion made by the “you.” This response acts as a refutation of the “you” who believes Hoon has somehow diminished himself. The obvious question becomes just how the “you” believes Hoon has “lessen[ed]” himself, and later the poem offers clarity:

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself. (7-11)

These lines suggest that the physical world has been transformed by Hoon’s imagination and that nothing exists outside his ego. Such an experience appears wonderfully solipsistic and the tone of the poem clearly conveys Stevens’ enjoyment. However, such a spiritual existence comes with problems--in “Sunday Morning” Stevens argues for a merging of the physical world with the imagination, but in this poem the physical world 14 has been subsumed by the imagination. Hoon’s ego has asserted itself so much that it has turned Hoon into a self-creating God who, like Apollo, “descend[s]” from the “western” sky. The “you,” best understood as an anti-Romantic figure, challenges such solipsistic behavior--since entering into the “loneliest air” (a place where he will encounter neither

God nor man) alienates Hoon from the rest of humanity and, ultimately, from the actual physical world.

“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” provides a parallel experience to Hoon’s. In this poem Stevens imagines himself as a rabbit at nighttime exerting dominion--through imagination--over a “fat cat” with a “red tongue” (5). The nighttime, as suggested at the end of “Sunday Morning,” represents the transformative power of the imagination.

Further, the time of year is summer, “August” (6), when, for Stevens, the world is most full of creative potential--the combination of these two, night and summer, makes for

“the peacefullest time” (7) possible for the imagination to flourish. In this state the rabbit can forget the problems of the physical world--”Without that monument of cat, / The cat forgotten in the moon” (8-9)--and fully indulge in its imagination: the rabbit becomes surrounded by its own “rabbit-light, / In which everything is meant for you” (10-11). This move toward solipsism, echoing the solipsism of Hoon, portrays the rabbit as the center of its own universe: “The trees around are for you, / The whole of the wideness of night is for you” (16-17). Again Stevens uses his imagination to become God-like. There exists no merging of the mind with nature but a complete domination of the imagination (“The whole of the wideness of night”) over its surroundings--its imaginative force “touches all edges” (18). 15

As with Hoon, the transformation of Stevens’ rabbit presents problems. First, as the “you” complains to Hoon, indulging completely in one’s own imaginative transcendence can be a lonely pursuit. Looking again at the concluding image of “Sunday

Morning,” we see “casual flocks of pigeons” flying “in the isolation of the sky.” While the “pigeons” might be flying in “isolation,” at least they are together. What we see in both “Hoon” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” is a complete rejection of the flock: their spiritual journeys, although temporarily fulfilling, are journeys of alienation. Also, we must consider the fact that such sublime experiences are completely unsustainable-- the mind might be a wonderful place to exist for a time but it cannot accommodate our basic physical, economic, and social needs. Moreover, the rabbit’s solipsism poses an even more alarming problem. By the poem’s end the rabbit’s imagination has allowed it to assume a massive stature: “You are humped higher and higher, black as stone-- / You sit with your head like a carving in space / And the little green cat is a bug in the grass”

(22-24). Again, such self-mythologizing is tempting. Yet just because the rabbit’s imagination creates this transcendent experience does not mean the rest of the world will share in such a claim. What happens when the cat next comes across this rabbit? Will the cat acknowledge the rabbit’s grandiose vision of itself? Unfortunately, using its imagination for self-realization will also result in the rabbit’s own annihilation.

While the imagination’s ego poses one hurdle for Stevens’ ontological vision, another problem resides with the complexity of human emotion. In “Another Weeping

Woman,” a woman grieves over the death of a man, and Stevens advises the woman to

“Pour the unhappiness out / From your too bitter heart” (1-2). Lamenting over the dead, 16 as Stevens makes clear in “Sunday Morning,” will not bring spiritual comfort--in fact, allowing one’s self to indulge in sorrow will only allow grief to grow like “Poison” (4).

Once again Stevens conveys his belief that the imagination can only interact with the physical, living world--not that of the dead. He says:

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world

Leaves you With him for whom no phantasy moves. (7-10)

If the woman focuses her thoughts on the dead man who no longer has imaginative thought, she too loses “The magnificent cause of being,” her imaginative responses, and

“Leaves” the world. On one level this argument seems convincing; and it certainly falls in line with what Stevens argues for in “Sunday Morning.” Yet Stevens’ response to the grieving woman also appears overly simplistic: it breaks her options down as either one grieves or one does not. However, human beings are more complicated than that--grief is not something that can just be turned off. Even the poem’s title--”Another Woman

Weeping”--sounds dangerously dismissive of what this woman is experiencing. While

Stevens’ philosophical insight might be persuasive, it in no way takes into account the emotional complexity of human suffering.

Of course, directly engaging with human suffering is not something Stevens particularly feels comfortable with, as several poems in his oeuvre make clear: consider, for instance, “Mozart, 1935,” written at the height of the Great Depression. Instead of addressing the problems of unemployment, starvation, and social unrest, the poem begins: 17

Poet, be seated at the piano Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, Its envious cachinnation. (1-4)

These lines seem paradoxical to the actual “present” experiences of the masses which the poet-pianist is instructed to “play”--human suffering should not produce loud laughter

(“cachinnation”); and the childlike gibberish of “hoo-hoo-hoo” and “shoo-shoo-shoo” seem wildly contradictory with the direness of the “present”; it appears as if Stevens wants the poet-pianist to portray the sound of human crying (“hoo-hoo-hoo”) in a musical, playful style, one that melds grief with happiness. This brings us to question why Stevens would choose such an approach, and the answer relates to his fondness of

Mozart whose “lucid souvenir of the past,” his “divertimento” (a piece of light classical music), makes for an “unclouded concerto” (10-13)--a fully realized, transcendent experience; one “unclouded” by the messy complications of human suffering. However, in the second stanza Stevens concedes that such an artistic indulgence might not be positively received:

If they throw stones upon the roof While you practice arpeggios, It is because they carry down the stairs A body in rags. (5-8)

As much as Stevens craves Mozart’s “divertimento,” he concedes that the passions of the people require something else from art--a new kind of expression. In a letter to Ronald

Lane Latimer Stevens acknowledges, along with his own conservative leanings, the inevitability of the real world: “I don’t believe in Communism; I do believe in up-to-date capitalism. It is an extraordinary experience for myself to deal with a thing like 18

Communism . . . . Nevertheless, one has to live and think in the actual world” (292). This candid concession by Stevens of having to live and think “in the actual world”-- something his poems often resist--explains the shift in advice Stevens offers the poet- pianist in the fourth stanza:

Be thou that wintry sound As of the great wind howling, By which sorrow is released, Dismissed, absolved. (20-23)

Although it takes half the poem, Stevens finally recognizes the need of the artist to represent the people’s pain, their “wintry sound.” He goes so far to as to dignify the poet- pianist’s artistic endeavor by referring to him not as “you” but as an elevated “thou”--a dignified artist helping guide the people through their pain. Yet such a representation does not seem to come from a strong belief in Stevens that human suffering should be depicted in art. Instead, such an approach simply presents for him the best way to move beyond “sorrow”--for “sorrow” to be “released, / Dismissed, absolved.”

Moreover, in “Mozart, 1935” Stevens demonstrates little desire to engage with actual human grief--it poses a complication that takes away from what he really desires: a

“return to Mozart” (25), art in its purest form. Consider how Stevens describes the “body in rags.” Such an abstract representation lacks much in the way of pathos. As in many of

Stevens’ poems, people are not presented in great physical detail. Stevens cannot deny that people are physical beings but, at the same time, he has little desire to actually portray their bodies. Why is this? Let us briefly return to the woman in “Sunday

Morning.” 19

According to Stevens, for the woman in this poem to achieve spiritual transcendence her imagination must engage with the physical world. However, consider this woman’s mood: she wears a loose fitting gown (a “peignoir” [1]) while enjoying

“late” morning “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” If “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” and

“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” represent Stevens at his most relaxed (in fact, as already discussed, Stevens’ imagination in these poems is dangerously too relaxed), the woman’s mood in “Sunday Morning” seems more appropriately balanced. Further, as much as Stevens might want to insist upon the need to engage with one’s environment, the truth remains that the woman in “Sunday Morning” simply observes the world around her. Stevens might recognize the need of interacting with our surroundings to inspire a transcendent response, but, at the same time, he does not want to address any of the messy complications of the physical world--and this, quite often, gets associated with the presence of human beings. Therefore, the person carried “down the stairs” in “Mozart,

1935” becomes nothing more than “a body in rags.” Notice also how Stevens downgrades human emotion: he instructs the poet-pianist to play the people’s “wintry sound” so that their “sorrow” might be “released . . . absolved.” This makes human “sorrow” something we need to be forgiven for. As with “Another Woman Weeping,” “Mozart, 1935” represents Stevens’ lack of comfort with human physicality and human suffering. The mellow mood of the woman in “Sunday Morning” is perfect for her to achieve a sublime experience; however, if it were complicated with the presence of another person such transcendence becomes difficult. Pushing this further it even becomes possible to reduce the woman’s actual physicality in “Sunday Morning.” Bloom observes: “What is the 20 dreaming woman there for in ‘Sunday Morning’ anyway? Like all muses she is invoked .

. . to be the voice of instruction and also the voice of pleasure” (28). Considered from this perspective, the woman becomes Stevens’ interior paramour: an idealized figure--not his attempt to depict a real human being, but an imagined person whose sole purpose is to provide inspiration and pleasure.

This provides a good opportunity to consider for a few moments a couple of the poems in my own manuscript because of their connection to this observation. Although

Stevens tries to create idealized representations of people, my poems often emphasize the opposite energy: the resistance of idealization in preference for authentic representation-- even in my imagination. For instance, in “Another Life” I create an alternate existence for my father; one in which he has not married my mother: “The man driving past our house, heater fiercely cranking in the winter blizzard, is not my father. His hair is buzzed into a flattop but has not faded to pepper-grey. There are no midnight-black circles under his eyes” (48). Yet even if this existence appears preferable to the one my father actually experiences, this man still does not escape my father’s flaws or his own inevitable loneliness--this other representation of my father still drives the streets alone in “a raw and endless winter.” The same is true in “Another City” where I imagine “the other story” of my brother’s life--the one where he has not been murdered at twenty-one, but again there appears no sense of idealization:

Evening after evening he wanders this city--past a parking lot half-filled with rusted cars, a motel whose few tenants shoot heroin behind locked doors. Here it is always December, my brother one of several 21

grim men walking the sidewalk. (23-29)

While I share Stevens’ desire to use the imagination to transcend the limitations of reality, my poems resist denying people’s fundamental nature in preference for the ideal.

Further, the worlds I invent are clearly fictional--they function as constructions of alternate realities; for instance, consider the first stanza of “Another City”:

In the other story of my brother’s life there will not be abandoned train tracks his shoulders fitted as if in a casket between the rails. (1-4)

The opening line conveys an acknowledgement that what I imagine for my brother is not possible in this world--it must happen “In the other story.” This reflects a sense of fantasy--a necessary escape from the “abandoned train tracks” to envision an alternate reality, even if that reality still accommodates some of the actualities of my real story.

Stevens, conversely, resists the concept of fantasy. His vision insists that the imagination can be used not to create a new reality but to perceive the physical world at a deeper, more transcendent level.

Returning again to issues Stevens confronts from the ontologically outlined in

“Sunday Morning” we encounter what can be called his “angel problem.” As previously noted, “Sunday Morning” rejects Christianity in preference for the spiritual potential offered by the imagination and the physical world. However, as discussed with the seventh stanza of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens often invokes Christian diction and mythology to describe the sublime moments of his spiritual experiences. This seems to undermine his very objective--how can he be liberated from Christianity if he continues to borrow its rhetoric? Let us consider “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” to illustrate my 22 point. The poem begins with the angel announcing himself to one of “the countrymen”

(1):

I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore And live without a tepid aureole. (4-7)

Stevens wants to deconstruct the Christian concept of an angel. Because his angel is not one of heaven but of “reality,” it does not have “wings” or a halo. Stevens’ angel goes so far as to assert: “I am one of you and being one of you / Is being and knowing what I am and know” (10-11). The angel in this sense is not an ethereal spirit but of the physical world. This brings us to one of the poem’s apparent contradictions: in one sense Stevens wants us to understand the angel as “one” of “the countrymen”--a physical being; however, the angel also can only be “Seen for a moment”--in this sense the angel lacks much in the way of physical substance. How can we reconcile this paradox? To answer this let us consider some of the other assertions the angel makes:

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set, And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings Like watery words awash. (13-18)

In Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” one of the arguments put forth is that the poet must attempt to get to the first idea—seeing the world with fresh eyes, as if for the first time. In the lines above the angel makes a similar claim—“the earth” has become

“stiff and stubborn” by our making use of old “man-locked” perceptions. Obviously it 23 becomes difficult to achieve spiritual transcendence if one is constrained by conventional perceptions. And that is the gift the “angel of earth” provides: through its brief presence the old “tragic drone” takes on an originality: it begins to “Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings.” Thus, what the angel accomplishes and the poet’s task in “Notes Toward a

Supreme Fiction” complement each other. And it is in this sense that we can reconcile the contradiction mentioned above--the angel is one of us as it exists in our own minds. It is synonymous with the first idea and functions as our highest level of consciousness by allowing us to “see the earth again.” This for Stevens represents the supreme objective of the imagination. Yet that is what makes the invocation of Christian rhetoric to describe this experience so puzzling. Why not provide a designation not bound by Christian theology? Looking again at Bloom, he says about “Sunday Morning” that it “offers a fresh beginning for the imagination” (24). However, the use of the angel in this poem suggests the grip of Christianity still lingers in Stevens’ mind.

Moreover, many critics have noted Stevens’ attempts to resignify Christian rhetoric in several of his poems. Angus J. Cleghorn writes: “Stevens is most effective at taking signifieds like [the angel in “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”] that are full of mysterious hocus-pocus, parodying them, and yet resignifying them as signifiers that still evoke bewilderment” (178); and certainly this appears true. However, Stevens’ need to resignify also suggests his inability to move beyond Christian rhetoric. Since his imagination cannot create anything better to convey the concept of an angel, resignifying it represents his best alternative. In this sense Stevens’ imagination has reached its limit-- he simply cannot escape Christian rhetoric. This applies to several other notions like 24 heaven (often referred to by Stevens) and the Christ-myth. Let us briefly consider “The

American Sublime.” In this poem Stevens admits to struggling “to behold the sublime”

(2) in the natural world: “One grows used to the weather, / The landscape and that” (12-

13). Stevens’ “spirit” feels “empty” and “In vacant space” (17-18). Stevens then invokes the Christ-myth--in particular the sacrament of the Eucharist--to convey his desire for his imagination to find spiritual sustenance in the physical world: “What wine does one drink? / What bread does one eat?” (19-20). “Sunday Morning” might anticipate a liberation from the chains of Christianity, a “fresh beginning”; however, throughout his career Stevens seems unable to move beyond Christianity as a reference point.

What we often encounter in Stevens is an attempt to recapture the equilibrium achieved in “Sunday Morning.” Yet Stevens’ own human complexity makes such a balance difficult: sometimes Stevens’ ego inflates his imagination to the stature of a self- creating force resulting in alienation and a flawed perception of reality (“Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”); at other times he struggles to negotiate the complexities of human suffering and social unrest making it problematic to remain a detached observer (“Another Woman Weeping” and “Mozart, 1935”); and finally, the limitations of Stevens’ own imagination impede him from complete liberation from

Christianity (“Angel Surrounded by Paysans” and “The American Sublime”). This, however, does not to diminish Stevens’ ontological aspirations. If anything, these struggles reflect the depth of Stevens’ ambition. Stevens, like many other Modernists, was confronted with the monumental task of filling the void left by the failures of 25

Christianity. His attempt to find an alternate path is as appealing as it is problematic. The drama of his struggles is perhaps the chief reason why his poems continue to intrigue.

26

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. London: Cornell U.P.,

1976.

Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York:

Palgrave, 2000.

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Orlando: Harcourt, 1963.

Feshbach, Sidney. “A Pretext for Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning.’” Journal of

Modern Literature 23.1 (1999): 59-78. Print.

Rehder, Robert. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: St. Martin’s P., 1988.

Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972.

Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1966.

27

PART TWO: ANOTHER CITY 28

Helen’s Barroom

My father explains how the woman whose mouth slacks open in a coma, whose hospital bed rests in the middle of our living room, was different in 1967 while dancing at Helen’s Barroom. An old man, he forks the final remnants of day-old crab rangoon and comments upon a car driving too fast outside. And this everyday observation is okay because more than anything I need to drift with that speeding car which fifty years ago would have been driving intently toward the town’s only bar. The quiet woman in the passenger’s seat, so this first date story goes, wore a green dress, and the driver, hair buzzed into a flattop, delighted in Patsy Cline on the radio.

The night must have promised a lifetime of such nights: a hundred years of that gravel barroom parking lot crunching under the excited steps of brown shoes, white heels. A beer-soaked wooden floor, the world was Eddie Arnold on the juke; her fingers promised to flutter forever on her beer bottle between songs. That young couple, for those few hours, the envy of each drunk shadow on a barstool-- and me now.

But my father, grown weary of conversation, finishes his paper plate of microwaved food and retreats to the silence of his bedroom. And my mother, with a machine pumping air into her lungs, keeps drifting further from us along with those nights she still rode through town, windows down, brown hair blowing, the darkness ahead of them lost in neon glow. 29

Bing Crosby Sings the Blues

Long gone, those nights, my father on the couch after work. He’d dangle his winter boots over the side--ignoring my mother as she ignored him-- and, for twenty minutes, would listen to songs in the dark: I watched from the hallway as Sinatra waltzed up the stairs. Not father-son time, not All in the Family time, not a shot-of-whisky-before-taking-a-walk time, it was simply the soft swing of jazz, the prairie twang of Buck Owens. And at least once a week, as my mother cooked dinner in the kitchen, my father played Bing Crosby Sings the Blues: the album cover dark as a Memphis nightclub, Crosby donning a blue fedora, his lips wrapped tight around a brown pipe. Twenty-five years later and no record store can find it. Still the album plays in the living room of my memory like the month of December which never seemed to end--an unyielding blizzard of white blowing even in the summer. I’d shovel three inches of snow from the driveway while my mother sat in the kitchen chilled by lonely drafts cold as the Bering Strait. Unlike the other albums, it was Crosby’s polished voice which offered dignity to the silence of my parents’ marriage. It was his blues, and his blues only, which harmonized with the frustration of their failed love; his sad warmth expressed the months they went without touching, the years they buried themselves under separate heaps of blankets. And now it’s gone, not a trace among my father’s albums as proof that Bing Crosby sang my parents’ winter storm. But it happened. Even without evidence, it wanders in the past: my mother in the kitchen secretly listening--not wanting my father to know--to “St. Louis Blues” (That woman’s got a heart like a rock in the sea), finding a bit of company during the sadness of her days; me, trapped in that giant snow globe, comforted by the Floridian breeze of Crosby’s voice, the icicles melting, if only briefly, in our front yard; and my father, tired man, alone in the living room, boots forever dangling, playing that album

30 week after week--“Five Long Years,” “It’s Raining in my Heart”--his purple-blue lips, so often silent, singing right along. 31

Boy at Night

In the final hours of daylight he refuses to stop throwing his football against the chain link fence. His arm aches from the relentless throwing and the fence rattles as if the boy could drive a football-sized hole through it if he only threw hard enough.

But the boy will never throw hard enough.

His older brother, fourteen years older, has been dead two years. The boy tries not to sleep because in his dreams his brother wants to return home.

Let me in, his brother calls from the street in front of the boy’s white house. His brother knocks his cold fist against the boy’s front door.

A year after his brother died the boy’s mother moved him into his brother’s room. There’s a record player covered in dust that the boy has never played. His brother’s hockey stick still leans against the wall.

He will not open the closet filled with his brother’s clothes.

The boy wants his arm to be strong enough to scare his dead brother away.

He keeps throwing the football against the fence because he wants to knock the fence over and run behind the neighbor’s brown house. After he knocks the fence down the boy’s mother will call his name but the boy will not come home.

Emphysema has sprouted like a weed in his mother’s lungs.

She is fat and smokes all day. The boy’s mother does not have the strength to protect him and his father, with circles under his eyes, works through the night.

The boy’s mother did not help when he was six years old watching a basketball game on television: Larry Bird backed his defender down and the crowd cheered loud as he released a shot from the tips of his fingers which spun smoothly through the air. The brother was in a heavy rocking chair, the boy on the floor, but his mother never came running in, her face a storm of anger, after his brother rocked the chair down on his leg-- the boy was screaming.

He has thrown so much his shoulder is strained. It hurts to lift a glass of water before bed.

In his dream the boy’s brother wants his room back. He shakes the locked bulkhead door. He stands in the backyard looking up at the boy’s second-story window.

There is no moon when the boy wakes. 32

He cannot see his brother’s red baseball cap or the stuffed panda bear his brother won at the fair two months before his murder.

The boy’s shoulder aches but he refuses to ask his mother for help. Her body smells of cigarettes, cancer reaches down her spine like an icicle.

The boy remembers his brother, alive, skating around the hockey rink.

Games started in the evening. He drank warm cocoa from a thermos. His mother, arms raised high, cheered whenever his brother collided into an opponent. 33

Did Not Speak

I wanted my brother to die, or I wanted the wires stuck into his arms to wrap around his twenty-one year old body and never let go, the white hospital sheets enough to finally make him good.

My father took me outside. We waited together while my mother and sister stayed behind in the hospital room. My brother had been unconscious for a couple days. The doctors told us to keep saying his name.

My father bought a Kit-Kat. He gave three wafers to me and kept one for himself. He leaned against a concrete wall while seagulls flew overhead. I know it was April, I was seven, and I am almost certain the sun was shining on my father’s graying hair.

Before being led out of the room, I saw a white cloth wrapped around my brother’s head. I remember his body was swollen. And there was a machine beside his bed. I watched as it pumped air into my brother’s chest. Then took it back.

* 34

At seven I did not understand my brother’s injuries. I knew nothing of hematomas, of contusions, the brain swelling and pushing against bone. I did not understand my trip to the hospital.

I knew nothing of drug deals gone wrong, of unidentified assailants, the force it takes to crack a skull.

I only knew my brother was the reason my mother stopped cooking family dinners, why she refused to leave the house for days at a time. My brother was the reason my father always worked, and would not stop working.

I blamed him for most any bruise I suffered. He was the monster roaming our hallways at night, his footsteps always creaking, his hand about to turn the knob to my door.

My brother was the one looking through my second floor window. I could see the moon casting his shadow. I could hear him tapping against the glass.

* 35

My childhood has a thousand spaces. My thoughts return to the hospital--a seven-year- old son sharing a Kit-Kat with his dad. But I can’t find the moment when my father kneels in the jeans he has been wearing for days and pulls me toward him.

When my father, his lips cold and dry in early April, kisses my forehead.

I know my father walked with me out of the hospital. He leaned against a concrete wall. And my father’s lips were certainly moving.

But no matter how I try, there isn’t any sound. So I keep looking for something that means more than seagulls, April sunlight, a candy bar.

* 36

“We were young,” my sister says. “You were real young.”

I am a freshman in college and the two of us have been comparing memories for the last couple hours.

“He had a moustache,” my sister says.

“Dark brown,” I say.

We discuss an Eagles poster above his bed.

I ask if he looked like our father.

“I’m not sure.”

We can’t remember any pictures our parents have saved of him. We can’t remember posing next to our brother for a family photograph. For a few minutes we even consider our parents might not have saved any pictures of us.

* 37

When I was nine, my parents moved me into my dead brother’s room. At night I slept in the same bed one morning my brother rose from and never returned to.

I lived among his belongings:

a Marlboro trash can; a stuffed panda bear won at a carnival; a record player with a stack of records beside it-- AC/DC and Black Sabbath.

My mother told me not to touch anything, and so the room remained covered in dust. I didn’t even look at his journals hidden in a drawer. I did not want to know what they said. I was certain my brother’s words were still breathing.

* 38

Silence eating fast food for dinner, a Happy Meal with a small Star Wars toy. Silence sent to school each day in unwashed clothes. A letter from the principal requesting my mother wash her children’s greasy hair. My father waking at four in the morning. My father driving to his first job without the radio working, without the heater working. The television screaming in the hours before bed. The basement where my brother used to smoke pot. My father driving to his second job in a rattling car. My mother in her bedroom, her head resting on a dirty pillow case, her face, without expression, lost in the silence of sleep.

* 39

“There was a fire,” I say.

“Yes,” my sister says.

I am twenty-four. We have been comparing memories for over six years.

“In the kitchen?” I ask.

“His cigarette caught in the trash,” my sister says, “but it was small.”

I ask if our father put it out.

“I can’t remember.”

I ask if she remembers our brother stealing quarters and dimes from our parents’ dirty clothes. If she remembers our brother’s friends, how they never had names, how their hair was always long, their eyes heavy-lidded, how their grins set off car alarms.

I ask if our father ever threatened him, if our father ever changed the locks during one of those weeks our brother disappeared.

“I remember Mom crying,” my sister says.

* 40

I wanted my father to be a hero. I wanted him to make sure my brother would never rise from his hospital bed. I wanted my father to kiss my forehead, to convince my mother to cook again.

I wanted him to make sure no one would tap against my window.

Whenever my father was home, during those hours between jobs, I would follow him. I would watch him eat reheated pasta at the table. I would watch the reflection in the mirror of my father’s upturned face as he shaved stubble from his neck. I would watch him watch television.

And always he was talking to himself. At the kitchen table, in the backyard while struggling to start the lawnmower, even when walking out the porch door.

My father’s lips were moving; there were things he could not stop thinking.

Things that needed to be said.

* 41

“I’m not sure,” I say.

“About what?” my sister asks.

My sister has been married for two years. We’re sitting in the living room of her newly purchased house.

“The rocking chair,” I say.

“What rocking chair?”

“The one in the den,” I say. “My leg was underneath.”

“I don’t think so,” she says.

“He rocked down.”

“No,” my sister says.

“He wanted to hurt me. I’m sure I screamed.”

“It’s something I’d remember,” she says.

“Dad was working, and Mom kept saying it didn’t happen.”

“I don’t know,” my sister says.

“But I see it,” I say. “I really do.”

* 42

When I was fifteen, my father started to come into my room when he had trouble falling asleep. He would lie next to me in my dead brother’s twin bed. The two of us did not speak. We would close our eyes and rest. Our shoulders and legs touched, and I could feel my father breathe. We stayed like this for hours, never sleeping. The bed not big enough for either of us to move.

* 43

And still this memory I keep returning to. The one whose details I am never certain of. How many different ways can I approach the day my brother died?

My father walked out of the hospital. He wore a windbreaker, or maybe a denim jacket. I think there were seagulls above us.

I know my father slept next to me. I know he ate reheated pasta.

But I still don’t know what he was saying.

Not while he tried to start the lawnmower, not while he shaved stubble from his neck, not even while I secretly wished for the death of his oldest son.

* 44

“I was in the backseat,” I say.

I am talking with my sister on the phone. I am thirty-two years old and have moved two thousand miles away from home.

“But he didn’t even have a license,” my sister says

“Dad insisted,” I say. “They switched seats. Dad wanted him to drive the last mile home.”

“And he drove into the porch?”

“He drove through it.”

“Are you sure?” my sister asks.

“We almost made it to the backyard.”

“Where was I? Where was Mom?”

“I wasn’t buckled,” I say.

“We were never buckled.”

“I remember picking up speed in the driveway.”

“I don’t know,” my sister says.

“It happened. And there wasn’t any sound. None of us screamed. Dad didn’t even say, ‘Slow down.’”

* 45

Silence driving to the hospital. My family walking disinfected halls, following brown arrows to a silent intensive care. My father drinking a cup of cold coffee. My brother’s head wrapped in a white cloth. A tube pushed down my brother’s throat. My mother beside his swollen body. The long hours before my brother’s death. His chest rising as a machine pumped silent air.

* 46

The wind was blowing. An early April sun was shining on my father’s graying hair. I ate three wafers of a Kit-Kat while my father chewed reheated pasta. I ate a Kit-Kat while my father climbed into my dead brother’s bed. There was a fire in the kitchen. His records covered in dust on the floor. I wanted my brother to die as he stole quarters and dimes from my parents’ dirty clothes. He tapped against my window.

* 47

And through these memories my father’s lips move though my sister says my brother never rocked down on my leg, that he never drove a car through our porch.

My father’s lips move though my mother sent me to school in unwashed clothes. I can see my father’s lips as he holds a glass of water, as he rises to go to work at four in the morning.

My father’s lips move as he leans against a concrete wall--his youngest son eats three wafers of a candy bar, his oldest son hours from death. They move each day I wake in my bedroom two thousand miles away from home. They’ll never stop.

48

Another Life

The man driving past our house, heater cranking in the winter blizzard, is not my father. His hair buzzed into a flattop has not faded to pepper-grey. There are no midnight-black circles under his eyes.

This man does not wear my father’s old jacket heavy as frozen snow.

Unlike my father, if this man opened our front door, walked in upon the chilled silence at the kitchen table, our faces would not turn from him as if he were a villain.

Because this is only two weeks after my brother’s murder, the man who is my father pulls his ‘78 Mercury, its frame rusting to nothing, into the gas station and grasps the metal pump, its handle burning cold, preferring these extra minutes away from his family.

He even decides after getting back in the car, turning the ignition, to drive around for another hour which is exactly what the man who is not my father--the one I have constructed to live the only other life I can imagine for my father--does every night.

This man still owns the blue convertible my father bought at eighteen, roof closed in the arctic wind. Even though he is my father’s age, fifty-two, this man wears the clothes my father wore at twenty-one--white t-shirt, jeans, polished black boots.

Because this man never met my mother when he was twenty-four, she does not sit beside him in the passenger’s seat, smoke from her cigarette rushing through the window slit.

This man never denied my brother’s schizophrenia.

He never offered excuses of overtime to avoid doctor’s appointments, meetings with the school psychologist. He never passed out drunk on the bathroom floor, his face fuming crimson-red from grief as my sister and I hid in our bedrooms.

My mother does not resent him for offering little comfort after the police pulled into the driveway to inform her my brother’s head had been cracked open.

In the cold darkness the man who is my father enters a motel room, neon streaming in. He watches hours of basketball deciding that this night--if only this night--he will not come home.

As my father drifts to sleep at 2 a.m., television blaring, my sister does not sneak past him, like she does every other night, as if crossing dangerous ice to turn the volume down. She does not offer silence to every question my father asks.

49

But for my father there will be the next day when he must once again confront the weight of his family’s needs, the overwhelming anger of my mother’s complaints, my relentless questions about why he did not come home.

Unlike this other man who gets to keep driving grey streets day after day, snow falling in a raw and endless winter, but at least the heater cranks, still the radio plays songs that this man loves.

And each time he passes a house with white shingles, driveway not shoveled, a broken front porch light, this man does not look through the window at the woman sitting with her children at the kitchen table, plates untouched. He has no need to wonder what it is they are waiting for. 50

A Small Sign

Still in a canyon of grief my mother worked with a hand spade in the backyard six weeks after my brother’s death frantic for company. The house was loud with silence; her closest friends visited less each afternoon and my father, arguing a need for money, had disappeared behind the grey fog of work.

My mother was digging up dirt for a tomato garden she would never plant.

It makes sense when the bird flew by a third time, placing itself on the lowest branch of the only tree in our backyard, she considered it a small sign: she was desperate for another round of Scrabble with my brother at the kitchen table, his fingers delicately picking up the small wooden pieces, counting off points for each letter; his forehead without a hint of blue from the tire iron that cracked his skull.

In this way the bird’s reappearance, its exact positioning five feet from my mother, was filled with meaning--the shifting of its head from side to side, like jagged movements in a flip-book, suggested to her the universe was not simply an ocean of darkness.

My mother held to it tight--on knees bruised with dirt she stared at the bird, its grey feathers unremarkable, convinced the void in its black eyes, as if looking at nothing, understood sorrow after all the other birds had moved on. 51

1993

Year my sister sat in front of an oval mirror covering traces of my mother’s face in her own. Year of the pea-green winter jacket, Pete Condon clotheslining me off my bicycle, three houses left on my paper route, my cheekbone freefalling to the pavement. The cat’s body ached with tumors, its stomach a concrete block of suffering. My father drank Riuniti watching endless episodes of Matlock.

Eight years after my brother’s murder, fourteen years after my brother rescued the cat abandoned behind Little Peach, and still my mother waited for her older son to return home--29 in 1993.

Year of cat shit in every hidden corner of the house. My mother insisted we not touch my brother’s yellow lamp on the porch, a crack down its side, terrified it would break.

Always my mother stranded in the house. Always my mother, lungs clouded with nicotine, refusing to get out of bed before nine. My father backed out of the driveway each morning; my sister, school over, drove with friends to Dairy Queen.

Day my mother, alone, cat laboring to breathe, unable to stand, finally carried it out of the house in a brown box. Afternoon the veterinarian stuck a six-inch needle into its back.

We ate takeout pizza for dinner, my mother silent, as the family failed to notice the cat’s absence.

Morning I waited for the school bus on the sidewalk, still not aware, preferring cold morning air to the heated house. Afternoon my sister stayed late for softball practice. Day my mother, always in a blue bathrobe, always with a cigarette, sat at the kitchen table even more alone than she was before.

52

The Small Routine

During the heart attack my mother survived on the living room couch she did not make any attempt to call for help--my father in his bedroom one wall away; me, upstairs, fan cranking to drown out every sound from below.

It was an average Tuesday night, the eleven o’clock news on television, the anchorman wearing an ash-grey suit; my mother was not prepared to confront the overwhelming reality of her own failing body (the years without exercise, her daily pack of cigarettes, the jelly doughnut she ate each afternoon for lunch) as she took occasional sips from a glass of water and flipped through the stations.

In the middle of her heart attack my mother was not thinking of the same breakfast order she had given at Millie’s each weekday morning her entire adult life (two dropped eggs on white, double side of bacon) or the same booth she sat in by the window, her car always parked in one of three spaces, the waitress with the Midwestern accent sincerely pleased to see my mother walk in; but the safety of these small routines--the evening drive to the pier by Weymouth Landing, the five dollar scratch ticket each night before bed, her daily soap operas--offered comfort if she could get only get through this unwanted experience.

Just as denial allowed her to attempt to regulate her breathing by insisting her heart attack was nothing but indigestion. There was a plant on the coffee table and she focused on the television’s familiar blue-green glow reflecting off its pot until the pain lessened to discomfort and she could sit at the kitchen table waiting for her chest to feel normal again.

In his bedroom my father slept through her trauma in the same unwashed jeans 53 he wore throughout the week; and upstairs, lost in the lonely dysfunction of my own routines, wanting only to be in the safety of my room, I sat with a can of Coke by my side reading Cannery Row, Springsteen playing soft, fan blowing high, so far from my mother that even if she did call I never would have heard. 54

What The Doctor Did Not Know

Of the ride to his office.

My mother, too weak to cup her hands, vomiting onto the dashboard.

The doctor did not know of the paper towel I dragged across my mother’s lips afraid of the incriminating truth.

He did not know, even after declining my mother’s request for another round of radiation, how this woman slouching in a wheel chair was less than seven days from a dark-tunnel coma. The purple blouse she wore was from Filene’s, her white shoes, barely seven months old, purchased at Payless--the doctor was not aware of these.

He could not hear my mother calling for me in the terror-black of night, her body a hurricane of pain, legs dripping piss, to help my father heave her onto the commode.

The doctor was not present in 1985 when I was seven and a swarm of hornets hovered by our wooden fence. He never thought about the poison running thick through my veins as my mother carried me into the safety of the emergency room. The doctor then smelling of aftershave.

He did not sit next to me when I drove to Walgreens three weeks before my mother died to buy her a new make-up case and a small carton of milk.

I did not confide how each morning my mother, back flat on the faded blue couch, tried to cover the pale white of her skin. The doctor did not watch me tilt a mirror underneath my mother’s chin as she lifted a small brush to paint her cheeks.

He did not consider how the white of his jacket was stitched with terrible honesty.

His rimmed glasses, his professional grey eyes, failed to observe my mother in 1957, a young girl swimming in a yellow bathing suit, my father five miles away, ten years from her life, riding a brown bicycle.

The doctor was not present for their first date.

He did not witness the silence that their marriage became. The doctor did not assist with the ten milliliters of morphine in the morning, with the five milliliters of Ativan before bed.

There was a picture in his office of a green house. He wore brown shoes and tapped a blue pen on his desk, but there was no help, no gentle suggestion, when an hour before the appointment I tried to wash my mother’s brown hair, its lingering stench of sweat. 55

There was no moment to discuss the desperate mess of dirty soap I abandoned on the rug.

We had pulled over by the side of the road, twenty minutes late for my mother’s final appointment. The doctor did not know my father was in the backseat praying a slow Hail Mary. My mother, well beyond the protection of a seatbelt, could not stop shaking. It was winter and no one was in the car but us. 56

* 57

Rockland, 1995

Fly balls traveled with beautiful urgency. For entire afternoons I tossed batting practice to Ryan LeBlanc whose drives to deep center echoed with metallic authority through our empty high school stadium. The Red Sox were still failures, seventy-six seasons without a title, but at various moments that year everything made sense. Ace of Base rocked the radio as I folded boxes in the dingy backroom of Themis Pizza for a much needed twenty dollar bill. At the South Shore Plaza Rene Ambrose took off my baseball cap and placed it upon her perfectly combed brown hair.

We wandered from store to store sharing a soft pretzel dripping honey mustard on the checkered tile floor. It didn’t matter that Ryan’s brother, local amateur boxer, spent the summer in jail for assaulting a cop in the Burger King parking lot because on his family’s mantelpiece was a Golden Gloves trophy which served as proof not everything turns wrong. At The Candlepin bowling alley a pin setting machine caught fire as Rene and I tied our swirling red-brown bowling shoes. I still do not know what I meant when I said At least we still have each other, but as we waited for the fire truck such words seemed to capture an incredible truth even though a year later Rene started to date high school pole vaulting star Tony McSherry.

Ryan passed his driver’s test on the second try. We felt liberated in his mother’s Ford Escort which coughed out smoke every time he shifted into third gear. In late September the girl’s varsity soccer team formed a wonderfully long line at Dairy Queen. I imagined Rene wearing blue soccer shorts, her flawless white legs with goose bumps in the early autumn chill. Ryan drove to Reid’s Pond so we could eat our sundaes by dark water and listen to the Red Sox who trailed the entire season by three in the ninth. Six months before the Rockland baseball stadium would be bulldozed into a parking lot, two years before Ryan’s brother was shoved into a police car for selling drugs to minors,

58 we stared at the lights of our town off in the distance--unable to see the Episcopalian church which had burned down in May or the dark shadows of the abandoned shoe factory on Liberty-- seduced by the glow of each passing moment. 59

Doogie’s House

I watched each Thursday night, 9:30, on the twenty-five pound television I rescued from the basement when I was twelve, its twisted rabbit ears barely capable of capturing the distant signal of Doogie Howser, M.D.. This was the half-hour I hid myself in my bedroom away from my mother sitting at the kitchen table blankly staring at the unwashed floor. Doogie’s parents--Katherine and David--might have quarreled with Doogie over his purchasing a ‘57 Chevy convertible, but in the end problems dissolved-- of course Doogie would return the very-red convertible and make instead a thoughtful donation to the Lackmore Institute for Childhood Leukemia Research. And then there was Doogie’s genius: perfect SAT score at six, Princeton graduate at ten, licensed physician by the age of fourteen.

Not that I identified with Doogie--who could? But in each episode there was Vinnie Delpino, Doogie’s best friend, who--like me--struggled to distinguish himself. And even if Vinnie’s mother wasn’t lost in a black fog depression, both of us wanted to be included in the annual Howser family camping getaway. When Vinnie entered Doogie’s house I sensed his relief at the living room’s cleanliness: no lopsided pile of newspapers, months old, no broken lamp, no dinner-plate size wine stain on the dirty couch.

And then there were those invented episodes of me taking Vinnie’s place. Each afternoon I walked from school imagining I was headed toward the safety net of Doogie’s house. Even though Doogie had no interest in sports, his father would still be my basketball coach-- it would be Mr. Howser who would insist my ball-handling skills were better than anyone else on the team.

It didn’t matter if my own father, drunk, walked angrily past my room. The door was locked and once again I had successfully contorted 60 the television’s rabbit ears to produce an only slightly-blurry signal. Hours after the episode ended it was Doogie’s mother I heard carrying the Howser family laundry down our hallway. It was her dress that brushed against my door. 61

Matlock

In those thin hours between jobs my father indulged in his Matlock obsession. Consistent as the family ignoring his presence, weekday afternoons were dedicated to the sanctuary of another syndicated episode of Matlock, lawyer extraordinaire, defending clients lesser lawyers deemed guilty. These were the years after my brother’s murder when my father’s life had become its own hostile courtroom. He’d arrive home from work--his lips so often moving-- as if searching for words to offer my mother whose silence assaulted him with evidence: the dark maze of my brother’s schizophrenia that my father never acknowledged, the night my father refused to leave work to offer comfort as doctors pumped from my brother’s stomach a small pile of half-dissolved pills. But during that solitary hour my father’s lips were still as he watched the paternal lawyer with silver hair uncover the real culprit: he’d make certain the innocent gardener living in the pool house behind the mansion did not suffer for the billionaire’s violent crime; nor the lonely trucker who may have made some bad choices but was certainly not the villain who dumped a dying body by the train tracks. Finally here was a man who never failed to uncover the hidden glove or call forth with his calm, confident voice a secret witness to testify to a truth no one else wanted to consider.

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A Certain Kind of Light

Attached itself to Anna Valley for much of my adolescence. Not like the painful glow from the halogen lamp in the basement of Anna’s parents’ house illuminating the half-empty soda bottle on the table, but the type of light that clung to the neckline of Anna’s yellow dress desperate for me to recognize the angular perfection of her collarbone. It insisted I take notice of how Anna folded her long legs on the old torn couch smooth as closing the loose flap of a book of matches. The leaves continued to offer their own pleasant greenness, the ocean-blue sky was still refreshing, but each paled next to the immensity of this light which accentuated Anna’s silver baton as it lingered in the air during the color guard’s halftime show like the slow motion pillow fight bright in my imagination between Anna and her friends, each girl dressed in suggestive lingerie. In the cafeteria the light sometimes became unstable shifting from the delicate splendor of Anna’s fingers wrapped around her carton of apple juice to the pretty foreign exchange student who taught me several curse words in Dutch, the arc of her lips suddenly luminous and appealing. 93 million miles away the sun continued to work diligently, but on a Saturday afternoon--junior year--

I failed to take interest in the Rockland carnival, its rides flashing furiously in the June heat, only able to focus on the pale-white arms of the neighbor girl eating fried dough. By mid-summer, the light dragged me helplessly to K-Mart to behold the magnificence of college girls stocking shelves in spaghetti strap tank tops during summer break. It enticed me to skip baseball practice, my weekly appointment with the math tutor, to wander the streets by my house--Anna four miles away until September--searching for the slightest shine of any girl in tight shorts. That unyielding light even pierced my thoughts during the hours I could not sleep, my eyes lost in a dark, exhausting brightness. 63

Getting It Right

What could it hurt to rewrite my adolescence-- for instance, this time Anna arrives at my sixteenth birthday party in a swimsuit. It wouldn’t change the course of known events for me to say we retired to the bedroom where I touched parts of Anna’s body which called to me like distant church bells. The Globe can offer a correction: due to an editorial error my tennis-ball-crazed-dog, Rambo, never collided with the fender of that cruising Toyota. At eighteen, family eating dinner, let’s say my father no longer informs us he has throat cancer, there’s no surgery that steals his voice. And this time no one moves out: my brother still lives in the basement, spinning a record twenty years long, an Eagles poster, “Live at the Garden,” nailed above his bed; my sister spends eternity in the bathroom perfecting the art of mascara. Let Rambo catch the tennis ball at the corner of our driveway.

Let my father’s voice call me to dinner. The Herald can publish a new story: my parents purchase that ‘89 mini-van, its tank big enough to hold thirty years of gasoline--hands on the wheel, everyone buckled, my father leads us in song, “The Long Road Home,” and Anna too sits in the back, her voice joining ours as she reaches for me, her red bikini brighter than any brake light. 64

Adam’s Thirst

How each day ends with silence. Adam and Eve washing dishes, like us now. How she, like you, wore size nine slippers. How he searched for words to describe the way she scrubbed each spoon. Tonight you’re reading National Geographic, and I find myself, like Adam, without a definition for this thirst.

In the bathroom you brush your hair, stroke after stroke, and I search for a phrase that goes beyond burning-chestnut-blond. How Eve, like you, walked light as a ghost. How each night she ate seven cherries on the couch. How Adam climbed into bed unable to explain the softness of her exhalations.

How I watch you sleep. How in this darkness I lean over you, as he did her when words were young, to watch your shoulder rise, now fall. And from the time when history was small enough for two Adam’s voice reaches me: What is this, he asks. What is this, God? 65

The El Camino

For my father polishing her each Sunday morning-- an Old Milwaukee in one hand, a yellow sponge in the other. For him singing along with Sam Cooke crooning from the tape deck. For Christina’s pink and white miniskirt and the way her skin looked smoother than any Larry Bird jump shot. For that Saturday night in September when my father dangled the El Camino’s keys before me demanding I repeat each of his instructions-- how the resentment I felt for my father who bestowed on that brown behemoth the affection he denied my mother disappeared. For each Circuit City stockholder whose investments resulted in the construction of an unlit parking lot. For the El Camino’s six-foot bed where my inexperienced fingers tore off Christina’s black bra buckle. How we delighted in the El Camino’s absorbent springs, Christina calling my name as if each letter had great significance. For Sam Cooke filling the awkward silence of our ride home-- Christina not kissing me goodnight that night or any night after. For my father, the next morning, discovering Christina’s torn bra buckle. I watched from the kitchen window as he ceased his duet with Sam Cooke and considered the small black clasp. For my father, who I had learned to ignore whenever he was home, tossing the evidence to the wind and sidewalk. For my father dipping his yellow sponge in a cracked bucket, rivulets of grime dripping down its sides. For my father, nursing his last Old Milwaukee, working into that Sunday afternoon, re-cleaning each inch of the El Camino. 66

* 67

The Invented City

Morning traffic is noticeably lighter-- the coffee in my super size mug never cools. When I pick my father up at the city airport (where the head attendant pays me twenty dollars for each half hour my car resides in the parking garage) the voice my father lost from cancer has returned; as we ride past the numerous skyscrapers under an eternally bright sky my father once more sings "Mack the Knife" in his smooth baritone; but in the awkward silence that follows when we have nothing else to say I begin to remember his colon is covered with polyps, that his doctor wants to discuss realistic expectations.

In the city I invent my apartment offers an appealing view of the statehouse's golden dome, of the cobblestone street below; each time I ride the subway a freshly ironed copy of The Daily Gazette rests on my seat-- by the emergency exit a napping cot with clean sheets waits for me; but no matter how I strain I cannot imagine my brother--a storm of confusion in his mind-- as a kind man. As I ride the blue line to the Museum of Essential Art with its permanent exhibit of Vermeer's collected paintings I still think of his cold face as the train speeds past a block of abandoned warehouses.

Even my mother who is young again-- who sits with me in a crowded restaurant in the recently renovated waterfront district and wears the same purple sweater she bought at TJ Max when I was ten-- even as she flips her hair from her shoulders as Eddie Arnold plays non-stop on the radio and takes another sip of her steaming bowl of seafood chowder-- I still cannot forget she is dead.

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A Job in California

I’ve been told that there’s a job in California. A job for someone with a history of a poor work ethic. For someone who’s walked out of previous jobs without notice at least a half-dozen times. One with three-month vacations, four-day weekends, and excellent health benefits.

Nora’s by the counter refilling our glasses and I’m going on about this job in Sonoma looking for someone who wants to do nothing but drink Sauvignon Blanc for eight hours a day. Sure, she says, not buying a word of it; and when I tell her about the incredible opportunities for advancement, that within six months I could possibly become Case Manager of the whole Sauvignon Blanc division, she doesn’t even respond.

But this is a job with a five-hour lunch. Where women come and sit by your side in the vineyards. Where those same women inch up their dresses and let you look at their legs. It’s a job for someone who’s willing to sell cheap Mexican imports from a wooden shack in Mendota. Where country music strikes like a rattlesnake from a small radio beside the register as fat truckers wearing overalls come in to buy Carlos Torano cigars and walk out with Hank Williams in their veins.

Billy leans toward the campfire and spits his whiskey into the flame--Tomorrow, he says, we’ll ride past Furnace Creek, over Funeral Mountain, and ‘cross them canyons. And we’ll make it, he says, as frozen rain beats against his leathery face--we’ll make it outta Devil’s Hole by sundown.

It’s a job just outside of Tahoe. One that requires its employees to spend their summers at a nudist resort at Laguna Beach. Where Gilbert, the Resort Manager, makes the observation that it’s ok to be naked, that it’s ok too to wear clothes, but that it’s not ok for a man’s private parts to be sticking out of his clothes.

Fine, Nora says, let’s just say this job’s for real. You still don’t know anything about it. What’s the money like? Do you have any idea where you’re going to stay? Really, she says, it’s not like California is right down the street.

But this is a job with winters that kill. Where men disappear for weeks, even months, only to return with beards thick and wild. Where an infant sucks milk from its mother’s breast as the wagon they’re riding in moves slowly along the Santa Fe Trail. 69

Christ, Billy yells, riding his horse hard against the wind, Jesus God-damned Christ. And now the sound of gunfire splits the sky as a group of riders appear on the distant plain. Keep pushin’, Billy urges, as his horse kicks up a long plume of dust--And pay them sons-a-bitches no mind.

It’s a job for someone who’s willing to pan for gold in the Sacramento Valley and listen to a one-legged man with a scar across his cheek pluck “Oh! Susanna” on a banjo. Where nights are spent drinking whiskey in the Flapjack Saloon. Where the local undertaker has a handle-bar mustache and poses next to an up-right coffin for a picture with a gunslinger who has thirty-seven holes in his body.

This is getting ridiculous, Nora says, getting up from the table. She’s walking around the kitchen slamming everything--the cabinet, the door, she even slams the window shut. I don’t get it, she says, stopping for a moment, things aren’t any different there. Where are you going with this? What do you think you’re going to find in California?

And as light continues to fade, dark pockets cover the valley floor. Puffing his cigar down to its butt Billy flicks it over the cliff. They’re climbing that ridge below, he says--It’s best we get movin’. In the sky a vulture circles as it glides on the howling wind. After leading his horse through the pass Billy begins to ride toward the burning sun setting before him and spreading like blood across the Western horizon. 70

Special Recognition

Driving the streets of Boston, I keep telling Nora this city hasn’t earned our love. I’m insisting Boston has not adequately considered how dollar bills would dance out of wallets, parade out of purses, if we were only hired to make weekly public appearances. And even as Nora refuses to respond, I complain that economists have never fully researched how cities might flourish from our presence—how our love could renovate the dilapidated houses of Little Rock, our kisses rebuild the abandoned warehouses of Boise. I’m suggesting Savannah would be more than willing to supply us with an antebellum mansion if we only allowed local residents to watch us slow dance each Sunday on the village green. I want Nora to appreciate, as she cruises the radio dial, as she lights another Marlboro Menthol, how within days of our arrival Grand Forks would become the passion-pulsing-Paris of North Dakota. Let economists write their books, they’re simply men who have never been kissed by lips which burn everything they touch. Let them go on cable TV to explain theories overlooking the obvious: whenever Nora’s morning-grey eyes gaze upon me, whenever the tips of her fingers touch the yearning follicles on my neck, companies within a ten-mile radius rise twenty points on the stock exchange. Nora needs to know, even as she covers her ears with her hands, that our kind of love deserves special recognition: a free hazelnut coffee or low-fat cranberry muffin from every Dunkin’ Donuts in the greater Boston area. Stopped at a downtown traffic light, I tell Nora it’s time for Santa Fe to consider the mystery of us, for our love to be viewed by each inhabitant from the fiery peaks of the Sangre de Christo Mountains.

And even as Nora unbuckles her seatbelt, as she places her hand on the door handle, I insist she understand how any couple on any street in any other city in all of America would provide her and me with countless signed checks simply to watch us share a bowl of Cherry Garcia ice cream on the living room couch. I’m saying the time has arrived, she needs to say yes. I’m begging Nora to stay in the car because in only moments, I’m more than convinced,

71 this feverish red light before us will turn, the break I’ve been waiting for, into an unstoppable, ATM-withdrawable, river-flowing green. 72

The History of Longing

I. Evolution

The world began in darkness with a cluster of microbes arguing, telling each other where to shove things, until almost by accident there was a touch. Out of hunger came the arm, the hand, the lips--the tongue.

In the late Cambrian era a not-quite-human thing crawled from the water and looked upon a woman. She slept in a mango tree, and even though its lips couldn’t form the word desire, nothing could stop this creature from wanting to climb the branches and sleep beside her.

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II. The Middle Ages

War covered the globe like a king-size blanket. Everyone was overwhelmed with despair except for a lady in black who listened to classical jazz. Every night Lord Trollope wrote letters to which she’d never respond. During the battle of Ludford Bridge a sword ripped a hole the size of London in his chest. Most soldiers agreed that the cry Lord Trollope gave while falling to the ground was not one of pain but of relief.

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III. Astronomy

Every Tuesday Galileo would drink at Downtown Joe’s and talk about the planet he loved. He said she owned a blue dress which twice a week she’d have laundered at Kip’s Dry Cleaners.

He said she bathed by the light of her two moons; that she’d slip out of her bathrobe and climb into water so hot it would burn anyone but her. After finishing his last drink Galileo would stare into his empty glass, frozen in thought, wondering why she’d always let him watch but never would come close enough to touch.

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IV. Georgia

General Sherman torched Atlanta because a man shouldn’t have to be 6’1 just to get a date.

He watched mothers flee the city carrying their children like grocery bags. He listened to the pleas of the mayor and then hanged him from a telegraph pole. The only building Sherman left standing was a house in the Prescott district. It rested on a hill with a woman inside reading a book by Milton. At no point did she seem concerned with the cries from below which rose past her chimney to climb like curses toward heaven.

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V. Realism

For over twenty years Thomas Eakins painted the same face. In the summer he’d stand before the canvas and understand everything about her lips; on Thursday mornings he could always catch the right shade of her eyes. But Eakins could never paint her hair which flowed like an ocean he’d never seen; and somehow her skin had a tone which ran outside the realm of color. During his days of retirement Eakins denied everything about it. The paintings had long been destroyed and he only wanted the world to forget that once there was a face he knew so well but could never fully capture.

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VI. Myth

Every day he followed as she’d pick oranges in the orange grove and eat cherries underneath the unnamed stars. Adam tried to tell her she was doing it wrong, but still she ate bananas for breakfast and kiwi for lunch. One Sunday in late May he met with the serpent and together they agreed something should be done. But the next morning Adam woke after the sun only to see her slipping out the garden gate.

Even with an unknown world before her she didn’t slow when he called out her name, when Adam pleaded for her to return as he stood alone under the apple tree. 78

Winter Refrain

Let’s be honest, it snowed every day. 8:07 a.m., and you scraping ice from your windshield, that thankless circle you stared through all winter, when the same flake touched your shoulder like a secret. Each day you drove to work, wind from the west, while she packed her lilac bathrobe and took The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. That same sunset-purple Trans-Am passed you on the inside lane, and when you finally sat at your desk, walls the color of rain, you listened, always, to “Sloop John B.” Let me go home, you sang, Let me go home. But each day she took the bottle of late harvest Riesling, that framed photograph of Elvis with lamb-chop sideburns, every fire-browned brick in the fireplace.

During break you ate a tuna fish sandwich and carrot sticks while she took the black table lamp you bought together at Pier One.

5:32 p.m., and you driving through eight inches of snow singing Hoist up the John B.’s sail, See how the main sail sets.

But each day the front door was gone from its frame, the frame gone from your blue-shingled house. She had taken that first date to Olive Garden, the Butter Pecan ice cream cone you shared in Paragon Park. Let’s be honest, it was a blizzard, even if no one else noticed. And each night you walked the yard searching for the kitchen, for her rain-cloud colored sneakers in the hallway. There was nothing. Just your voice lost in the furious snow. 79

Sacred Heart

I miss praying a Hail Mary with my father as we rode in his El Camino whenever an ambulance sounded in the distance. I miss my mother knocking on my door each Sunday morning, 8 a.m., insisting it was an insult to Jesus Himself if I did not get out of bed. There was the white cassock I wore as an altar boy.

The Feast of the Ascension when Tom Carter, yawning wide, dropped the thirty pound wooden cross. I miss Father Barry’s horrified gasp.

Everyone was Irish-Catholic; everyone pretended not to know each other’s secrets: Mr. O’Shea, in a green blazer each Sunday, who walked out on a wife and seven children to a start a new life with a twenty-three-year-old florist. The girl sitting beside me in eighth grade had hair so fiercely red

I couldn’t ignore the crude thoughts intense as sun flares. I miss Sister O’Connor, eighty years old, blind in one eye, explaining the function of each bead on the rosary as David Henry drew stick figures engaged in sexual acts none of us quite understood. I will never miss walking to school in ninth grade terrified the distant sky judged my every thought, or kneeling before my bed praying obsessively, working myself to tears--three Our Fathers for each person I knew who had died.

I still do not forgive Monsignor O’Neil for instructing me to say the Act of Contrition as penance for kissing Sara Lyons in the backyard while her parents watched television.

But there was the annual church bazaar where my father, so often angry, ran a ping-pong shooting booth looking foolishly kind in a torn felt hat.

And in eleventh grade Father Hickey called our house--my mother answering the black rotary telephone--to ask if I’d come out of altar-boy-retirement to serve Sacred Heart’s centennial celebration. There was the red cardigan my mother bought, her hair done proudly, and me ringing the chimes one final time as Father Hickey raised the Holy Eucharist. I miss the familiarity of the uncomfortable wooden pews, Father Kearns’ sermons which oversimplified all human behavior to right and wrong. And when my mother was dying, Father Hickey--

80 who I had not seen in fifteen years, his back now hunched with age-- drove to my parents’ house. There was the dignity of my mother’s Last Rites.

How we formed a circle around her, my father’s cheeks red with grief, as Father Hickey recited the 23rd Psalm. I miss holding my mother’s still-living hand those minutes before her lungs stopped, that long hour we waited for the undertaker as her forehead cooled, and how in the empty silence beside my mother’s body I allowed myself-- once again--to repeat every useless prayer she taught me as a boy. 81

Another City

In the other story of my brother’s life there will not be abandoned train tracks his shoulders fitted as if in a casket between the rails.

The city where he had lived--its sidewalks of trash and second-hand stores-- will no longer be the place where my brother wanders beyond street lamps for a dime bag of dope only to be assaulted by the purple force of a tire iron.

In another city waits the arthritis which will haunt my brother’s knees at sixty. It’s a cold city where wind travels hard through the streets and his lungs struggle from nicotine ache.

Above a twenty-four hour dry cleaner is a small apartment where my brother, pepper-grey moustache, watches television, his cigarette smoke with each slow year paints the ceiling yellow.

Evening after evening he wanders this city--past a parking lot half-filled with rusted cars, a motel whose few tenants shoot heroin behind locked doors. Here it is always December, my brother one of several grim men walking the sidewalk.

And because he has no money and the drunks at the bar seldom remember his name, my brother dials my house at a blurry hour on one of those curbside payphones that has survived well beyond its real end.

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Tired, I will not consider how good it is to hear his voice or how fortunate I am he wants to joke about the Red Sox last place finish--his fingers grasping the metal cord tight--but will only feel bothered, pulled once again from my welcomed rest by the burden of his needs.

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