The Poetry of Robert Hill Long, Part 2

The Conspiracy

The Cambodian kids speak English faster,
better than any other kid on the block
and all three bang my door the third
hopeful time since noon: Seth home now?

Not yet, not yet, no. Away they sprint,
barefoot on the flagstone walk
though it's November: wild geese last week,
this week the B-52's homing in on Chicopee

on dry-runs so low I see shark-teeth
painted under their black clown-noses.
It's touch-and-go all day, those bombers,
regular as these kids: who bang, now, to ask

can they attack my big leaf-pile?
Up they fling maple shrapnel--then I hear
mother-noise, Cambodian. Ordering
her kids out of my leaves and home, probably.

On her porch she ducks the roar
of the B-52: a bow to old terror domesticated
to what? a polite fear that I'll call
welfare cops for Cambodian leaf-pile vandalism?

Two kids already she's renamed
for saint and martyr--Paul, Christina--,
already bought them baseball jackets
and drills them in English, manners, quickness

as though to head off the schoolyard hate
we both know their gold faces will attract.
She's let me teach them to bunt and steal second,
turn them into ghosts full of trick or treat,

but her folk-dance of immigrant dread
--wince and bow to neighbor-with-leafpile,
welfare officer, bomber that bombed
her youth to moon-mud--makes me wince and bow

on my small porch, and wave to show I know
how that dance goes. One hand on the door,
one foot inside the house where each night
America surrenders to Cambodia,

she gives a wave so underhanded
I almost miss the small quick smile.
The smile that translates all-clear, truce,
OK, hello. That says the kids can stay.

Walking to Manhattan

Out from a brick ranch house bounded by squash fields,
in lint-colored hat, high heels and ankle-length coat
cut possibly from a roll of tarnished silver foil, a stout woman
strides--farm wife's wide double-chinned face aimed past
the winter vegetable miles that are heart and soul of Hadley,
Massachussetts--and makes a hard left onto Route 47 south

where I slow my car to see nothing local
worthy of her well-furred hairdo and metallic sheath:
not the mom and pop store that squats by the dam
or the clapboard church where mice hunt bits of stale God-wafer;
she's not out to impress the five million carrots of Hatfield
and as for Bub's Bar-B-Q and the New Polish-American Tavern

forget it, she's gone, she's walking to Manhattan,
leaving farm-husband dumped in his mangy recliner
mind full of sports announcers, fanbelts and pesticides,
face like a wilted turnip chewed by brown beetles,
leaving one teenager to jack off in a lapful of horror comics
and the other to finish squash inventory in the barn.

The whole unflashy family spread shrinks step by step
as she shrinks in my rearview mirror to a shiny speck
primed to parade through galleries on West 57th: in her mind
maybe she's already transformed Hadley's two-lane blacktop
into Broadway where at each click of her heels men jerk
sunglasses off and taxis honk for a piece of her attention

but there are SoHo champagne openings to wade through,
brilliant painters and dancers and tenors and writers
who lie depressed and obscure as bulbs in sawdust
only for her to discover and lift up and let blossom,
plus the matter of jewels and fur and the right address
including a chauffeur with ice-blue eyes and good hands.

But after driving this fantasy halfway to South Hadley
I ease off the poor woman who for all I know is walking
to the silver anniversary of a friend born like her and raised
content not to stray past the vegetable boundaries of Hadley.
And if her husband snores weekends away in the recliner
it's because he's worked harder than God for thirty years

to transform cabbages into money to buy his kids comics
and computers and cars and college and yes, a silver-foil coat
for his wife who rubs his feet, endures his every snore
and has raised both boys to be better than felons or oafs
and so deserves a coat that isn't as drab as cabbage:
even if she's tacky as K-Mart I find no fault with this woman,

I blame myself: since I was a boy I was bored, bored
by the tobacco fields cramping my hot dirt play-yard,
by dad's bland job, mom's bland cooking, by school
and Sunday school and the whole stupid, humid, tepid south,
so bored I felt alive only in Life magazine and TV shows
that showed life in the city, and the city was New York,

and New York was Manhattan and I'd be getting there soon.
So when the teacher red-inked my report card Daydreams Too Much
I carried it home in a daydream by the cypress-lined creek,
hardly seeing the snowy egrets building nests in live oaks
and was nearly bitten by a water moccasin who lay sunning
in the sand path where I was walking, walking to Manhattan.

The River Kept from Us

Rain pools on the roof of the museum gallery,
digs between slates, finds the tiny way in:
a rivulet aims down the wall between a Seurat
and a Monet. Soon enough guards will see it,
pull the paintings, close off this wing.
As far as I can see the rivulet threatens
neither painting: I keep it to myself.
The Monet is the third day of creation, inhuman,
waterlilies and light smearing still waters,
the world before paintings and museums;
Seurat's trees are infinitesmal points
of drily analyzed August light. Under them
a profiled woman stands staring downhill
at something we are kept from seeing. Seurat
was no more concerned with her point of view
than with the sweat that rimmed her bonnet and ran
down armpits and ribs beneath the immense bloom
of underclothes. Under his vest and straw hat
the same sweat pooled, and sweat vanishes.
He hurried her into memory, cropping the river
she watched. In the studio, he added a monkey
on all fours at the woman's side. Its tail arched
perfectly. The monkey would make people look.

But what holds the woman there is the way
her husband hunches over a slender cane pole
that he tugs, slackens, depending on the undertow.
Pipe smoke rises over his sunburnt bald spot.
Their youngest daughter drowned at this spot,
and he keeps fishing for a gold locket holding
the fine hair he snipped from the girl's head
at baptism. Religious, a believer in the mysteries,
he wants the final tug that means angelic pity
returns this last small thing to his hands.
His wife stares at his thinning back. For a month
she has brought bread and cheese to his side,
and watched it harden untouched as last light
yellowed the spires of Montparnasse. Finally
she'd take it downriver and toss in hunks
to a lame white goose. The goose now leaves the river
at the small, stricken sound of her voice, lets her
stroke its neck as she once caressed her daughter
and will never again touch her husband. She saw
the man pretending not to sketch her earlier:
he had the pinched, superior stare of a mocker.
Men are fools for miracles. When no miracle comes
they mock. This goose, she thinks, is the one
angel she can expect. The river does not empty
into heaven. Her daughter has been dissolved
into lilies and water-light and lifted
into clouds that are no proof of God breathing.
Upstream, her husband gives his question
another tug and ordinary darkness rises
from the river, but not to answer anything.

Refuge

When the shooting started, he crawled under
a loose board into some kind of animal shed.
Little room to move, even less light--a smell
of dried sweat and shit in the rickety walls.
They had swung around the corner, jeep-mounted
machineguns, swerving so hard the firing
seemed accidental, the gunners untrained
or drunk, hanging on wildly while one jeep
fishtailed and the other went up on two wheels.
But the bullets ran neatly up the street
to a whitewashed wall where graffiti artists
had worked, like cat burglars, after curfew;
a woman carrying a big tin of milk in front
of one misspelled slogan tripped over
a puff of dust; everyone dove and slid.

Something made a throaty noise in one corner
of the shed. Shit, he thought, a dog, a mean pig.
Pulling one foot back for a good kick he flicked
his lighter: two girls gasped at his big shoe.
They had shiny clutch-purses, eyeshadow and rouge
like bruises. Knees drawn up, they were naked
under vinyl miniskirts. They tried to hide
in each other's hair. Snapping the lighter shut,
he tried to reconstruct what minutes ago
had been a tourist stroll: goat and pig heads
hung outside a market stall, a barefoot man
in ripped shorts and top hat hawked brass bells
to scare away demons. The peanut vendor bent
over an oil-drum oven, his sash of peanuts
rattled with street-corner authority.
Store and house fronts leaned flaky pastel walls
against each other, four boys squatting
in the gutter pounded roll caps with brick.
He'd set his camera for automatic exposure.
Much later he saw it hadn't been loaded.

The shooting was blocks past the shed now.
He was sick of animal shit and darkness
and girl-whores pissing terror in the straw.
OK, he thought, you send bullets running up
somebody's steps to pound the door, break it down
and find who it is you want, because bullets
do it faster, bullets don't waste time on coffee
and dirty jokes or get shot serving a warrant.
He saw the logic--move fast, hit hard,
get the fuck out. But he let the whores crawl out
first. The click of their spike heels vanished
unchallenged across the street. Emerging himself,
he saw the peanut vendor's sash in the road.

______________________________

The postcard pastels of houses and stores were pimpled
with bullet holes. A boy's bare legs stuck up
feet first from a storm drain. One of the feet,
as he watched, began to relax and bend back,
slowly as a dancer's foot, toward the ground.

He was walking fast, trying to slap the smell
of dung-straw off his shirt when something slipped
around his ankle, almost tripped him. A hand,
a woman's hand--the milkwoman who got caught
by the wall. Lying in a dusty whitish puddle,
she had a hole in her chest: sucking in wheezes,
blowing out red bubbles. He started to kneel,
but he didn't want to get stopped with the camera
and hard currency. He had to focus on the hand
--not the wound, not the face. Starting on the little
finger, he worked it loose, then the ring finger,
and so on. Holding the hand open and away
from his leg, he wadded some bills into it
and pressed it shut before trotting off again.
Enough for a doctor maybe, he guessed, but if not
--he was running now--enough for a decent burial.

The Beam

The beeches with muscular gray torsos have nothing
to fear, or forget. Likewise the stands of corn
do not care whether they will be cut down
or fall naturally. Vegetable endurance explains
how fleabane, clumped along train tracks and fence lines
where humans herded each other, can keep issuing
starry lavender blooms when fall has torn away all
that stands in the way of remembering. It's written
in a Warsaw diary that the rabbi's mouth was dry
because he had to use all his spit on the Torah.
No matter that my hands shook, gripping the book:
they were fifty years too late. There was no stopping
the SS officer from spitting into the rabbi's mouth
so that the rabbi could continue to spit on the Torah.

When I take my son walking along the river
on leafless bright October Saturdays, he plays
Hide-in-my-Shadow, keeping rigidly at my heels,
laughing, refusing to let the least sun touch him
until he stumbles against my back and one of us
goes down, into frost-blackened nettle. My son's
mother is a Jew. My blond son is a Jew. Every weekday
I hand him over to daycare workers in a church basement,
to keep him safe a little longer from the stories
of how children escaped alone, how boys his size
walked off into survival's exile, holding
the hands of kind blond strangers.

On the edge of a cornfield in Silesia there still lies,
unburned, uneaten by ants or beetles, a beam of wood
on which a man hanged his six year old son.
When migraine shuts off the light in my study
and makes me lie on the dusty floor, hands over my eyes,
I see this beam, lying on its side in yellow grass
shrill with grasshoppers. The boy slept. His father
hugged him around the hips with one hand, the other hand
guided his head through the slipknot of torn sheeting.
Both hands pulled down on the ankles, a quick adrenal
jerk. No one else in the dormitory moved. After lifting
the boy down and laying him out on his plank, the father
climbed into the noose and hung there, quietly trying
to strangle. The struggle woke his friends, who pulled him
down, who saw what he'd done, and slapped him, and kicked him
and handed him over to the Germans. The Germans shot him.

The beam is not like the beech trees or fleabane,
it was milled for human use. The carpenter who framed it
square and true was also probably a numbered Jew.
The beam is a holy thing, nothing can approach it
but swallows and grasshoppers and mice. There is
no light in it. I cannot make the beam move by opening
my aching eyes, or shifting my body on the study floor.
I change nothing by hugging my son goodbye or hello.
Lying in the field, the beam is simply submitting
to the administrations of soil. Its patience is
bewildering. But when I think long enough,
the soil's patience is incomprehensible.

The Horizon Pain Opens

No part of the body escapes the pain
and the pain is gigantic. Inch by inch
the painter anatomized pain for the inmates
of plague and syphilis in the hospice
at Isenheim. Pain stretches arms as long
as legs, splays fingers into paralyzed rosettes,
the pain of the feet is doubled by the spike
driven through the arch bones. Pain the foreground,
pain from side to side, pain enough to drive
the god out of the collapsing lungs, out
of the extremities. Behind the giant pain,
the plains of Alsace dark with refugees
fleeing war and cholera. To pain's altarpiece
the syphlitics were brought, their pallets
laid before it, their heads lifted
by the monks to see the final imperfection
of passion. To consider love and all
it had done to them. What living with humans
comes to: open sores and houses full
of the swelling dead, bones strewn across
the marshes at Colmar and Venice. The body
of pain dwarfed them all as it dwarfs
the mourners painted beneath the cross,
but the pain opens outward on hinges,
the huge pain parts and gives birth
to its reverse. The inmates lay on the floor,
dying and watching, as the great wooden door
of Christ's chest opened to Madonna and child.
They saw the old forgone possibility
of bodies undistorted, calm, wholly given
to each other's good, and the light pouring
down the mountain behind the Madonna's head.
The light, too, was painted inch by inch
because Grnewald knew love has too much
to forgive, when all it can do is touch,
the way paint touches distantly onto pain,
and see that it has touched a horizon
never to come closer. The monks told them
that the painting could be opened once more,
that one other thing lay beyond
and there would be a time for them to see it
but not yet, the monks said, not yet.

On the cold floor the inmates lay imagining
what that horizon of mother and child opens into,
until the hospice was dark and the painting's light
wholly divided among them. They lay there looking
into themselves by that light until they died.

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