American Melancholy Read online

  Fifty years live and relive the infamous experiment through the ruin

  of your life.

  Fifty years sleepless made to recall the silence after you’d delivered

  four hundred seventy-five volts . . .

  Fifty years shame, you’d killed a human being.

  Followed orders, to the end. Nor would being debriefed lessen the

  horror—Killed a human being.

  For it was explained to you at last, the protocol of the

  experiment. The role you’d played, you had not realized.

  The acts you’d perpetrated, you had not realized.

  No volts, no shocks. No “learner.”

  Only you, the “teacher.” Yet not a “teacher.”

  You, the experimental subject.

  Always and only you.

  Everyone in the lab was in collusion against you.

  All of history was in collusion against you.

  Not your fault. Following orders. Continue to the end.

  You will not be blamed.

  Loney

  Old fears in dead of night

  like lozenges

  stuck dry

  on the tongue.

  Wakened numb

  as Novocain.

  In dead of night ask

  For God’s sake what

  did you miss. You know

  God-damned well you

  have missed what

  they hid from you.

  The lost, the loney.

  You knew them too late.

  Dying too soon.

  The young uncle you’d loved most.

  Killed himself to free

  his spirit, trapped like a genie

  in a Coke bottle.

  Never knew why. How

  was a secret too whispered

  in the cornstalks.

  Misshapen ears of corn,

  wizened faces. By November

  you could see them

  seeing you along the rows

  of stalks.

  You ran from the faces,

  hid your eyes. Gut-kick,

  spine-cold, sick

  with fear of what

  had no name.

  Oh that was terrible! Just—

  terrible . . . Something

  like that, in a family—

  you never forget.

  Forty years ago.

  Like yesterday.

  A rifle, he’d used. You knew

  this—didn’t you? One of his.

  Somehow he’d missed where

  he was aiming. Not once,

  not twice, three times pulled

  the trigger pressing the barrel

  against his chest . . .

  We heard the shots

  at the back of the house

  and then the quiet.

  It’s the quiet

  after gunshots you remember.

  The Coming Storm

  Oblivion was a familiar blue sky, once.

  And the lake, too, familiar though now turned to ink.

  That border of marshgrass luridly bright!

  Sun-glaring amid darkness as a demon eye.

  If it’s 1859 you believe, probably,

  in the radiant soul. That single white sail

  at the prow of oblivion.

  Or are you, a man in shirtsleeves, that solitary rower

  in an invisible boat? Straining at the oars

  and never to reach shore.

  As by quickened pulsebeat the end-of-things

  blows out of the fabled Northeast.

  Oh, oblivion! That gnarly tarry taste.

  That smell of airborne wet.

  You won’t have time even for prayer.

  Or have you become a paper cutout in red shirt,

  Beige vest, straw hat, a figure jauntily seated

  at the edge of the nightmare lake?

  A fisherman? That’s what you are?

  And your little dog?

  At the edge of the pit?

  Oh, where are the adults who once loved you,

  and stood guard?

  (Martin Johnson Heade, The Coming Storm, 1859)

  Edward Hopper’s “Eleven A.M.,” 1926

  She’s naked yet wearing shoes.

  Wants to think nude. And happy in her body.

  Though it’s a fleshy aging body. And her posture

  in the chair—leaning forward, arms on knees,

  staring out the window—makes her belly bulge,

  but what the hell.

  What the hell, he isn’t here.

  Lived in this damn drab apartment at Third Avenue,

  Twenty-third Street, Manhattan, how many

  damn years, has to be at least fifteen. Moved to the city

  from Hackensack needing to breathe.

  She’d never looked back. Sure they called her selfish,

  cruel. What the hell, the use they’d have made of her,

  she’d be sucked dry like bone marrow.

  First job was file clerk at Trinity Trust. Wasted

  three years of her young life waiting

  for R.B. to leave his wife and wouldn’t you think

  a smart girl like her would know better?

  Second job also file clerk but then she’d been promoted

  to Mr. Castle’s secretarial staff at Lyman Typewriters. The

  least the old bastard could do for her and she’d

  have done a lot better except for fat-face Stella Czechi.

  Third job, Tvek Realtors & Insurance and she’s

  Mr. Tvek’s private secretary—What would I do

  without you my dear one?

  As long as Tvek pays her decent. And he doesn’t

  let her down like last Christmas, she’d wanted to die.

  This damn room she hates. Dimlit like a region of the soul

  into which light doesn’t penetrate. Soft-shabby old furniture

  and sagging mattress like those bodies in dreams we feel

  but don’t see. But she keeps her bed made

  every God-damn day visitors or not.

  He doesn’t like disorder. He’d told her how he’d learned

  to make a proper bed in the U.S. Army in 1917.

  The trick is, he says, you make the bed as soon as you get up.

  Detaches himself from her as soon as it’s over. Sticky skin,

  hairy legs, patches of scratchy hair on his shoulders, chest,

  belly. She’d like him to hold her and they could drift into

  sleep together but rarely this happens. She hates feeling the

  nerves twitching in his legs. He’d leap from her as soon as he

  came she thinks, the bastard.

  Crazy wanting her, then abruptly it’s over—he’s inside his head,

  and she’s inside hers.

  Now this morning she’s thinking God-damn bastard, this has

  got to be the last time. Waiting for him to call to explain

  the night before when he didn’t show up. She’d

  waited from 8 P.M. until midnight and in those hours

  sick with hating him and hating herself and yet—the leap

  of hope when the phone rang. Telling her

  Unavoidable, crisis at home. Love you.

  Now she’s waiting for him to call again. And there’s the chance

  he might come here before calling which he has done more than

  once. Couldn’t keep away.

  God, I’m crazy for you.

  In this somber painting by Edward Hopper who could paint only

  his wife since Jo Hopper was jealous of nude models you can’t see

  her face but it’s a girl’s face grown heavy and pouty, and her lips

  lipstick-red, sulky-brunette face still damned good-looking and he

  knows it, he’s excited seeing men on the street following her with

  their eyes then it turns sour and he blames her.

  She’s thinking she will give the bastard ten more minutes.
>
  She’s Jo Hopper with her plain red-head’s face stretched

  on this fleshy female’s face and he’s the artist but also

  the lover and last week he’d come to take her

  out to Delmonico’s but in this dimlit room they’d made love

  in her bed and never got out until too late and she’d overheard

  him on the phone explaining—there’s the sound of a man’s voice

  explaining to a wife that is so callow, so craven, she’s sick

  with contempt recalling. Yet he says he has left his family, he loves her.

  Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And

  the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in the

  way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t

  leave me.

  Once in secret she’d seen him in the street with his younger son,

  scrawny boy of thirteen, father and son walking together so bonded

  they didn’t need to talk. Sharing a mood of solitude like

  their hawk-faces and widow’s-peak black hair. The son

  will grow into the father she saw and felt a stab of humiliation,

  excluded.

  He’d told her it wasn’t what she thought. Wasn’t his family

  that kept him from loving her all he could but his life

  he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry,

  in France. What crept like paralysis through him.

  Things that had happened to him, and things

  that he’d witnessed, and things that he’d perpetrated himself

  with his own hands. And she’d taken his hands and kissed

  them, and brought them against her breasts that were aching

  like the breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck,

  and sustenance. And she said No. That is your old life.

  I am your new life.

  She will give her new life five more minutes.

  II.

  The First Room

  The First Room

  In every dream of a room

  the first room intrudes.

  No matter the years, the tears dried

  and forgotten, it is the skeleton

  of the first that protrudes.

  Sinkholes

  take you where

  you don’t want to go.

  Where you’d been

  and had passed smilingly through,

  and were alive. Then.

  That Other

  They laughed, but no. You

  don’t remember that.

  What you think you remember—

  it wasn’t that.

  Yes—you remember

  some things. And

  some things did

  happen. Except not

  that way.

  And anyway, not

  to you.

  The Mercy

  So much depends

  upon

  forgetting much

  for our

  earliest

  yearnings never

  abandon us.

  The stroke

  that wipes out

  memory

  is another word

  for mercy.

  The Blessing

  Barefoot daring

  to walk

  amid

  the thrashing eye-glitter

  of what remains

  when the tide

  retreats

  we ask ourselves

  why did it matter

  so much

  to have the last

  word?

  or any

  word?

  Here, please—

  take what

  remains.

  It is yours.

  This Is not a Poem

  in which the poet discovers

  delicate white-parched bones

  of a small creature

  on a Great Lake shore

  or the desiccated remains

  of cruder road-kill

  beside the rushing highway.

  Nor is it a poem in which

  a cracked mirror yields

  a startled face,

  or sere grasses hiss-

  ing like consonants

  in a foreign language.

  Family photo album

  filled with yearning

  strangers long-deceased,

  closet of beautiful

  clothes of the dead.

  Attic trunk, stone well

  or metonymic moon

  time-traveling for wisdom

  in the Paleolithic

  age, in the Middle Kingdom

  or Genesis

  or the time of Basho . . . .

  Instead it is a slew

  of words in search

  of a container—

  a sleek green stalk,

  a transparent lung,

  a single hair’s curl,

  a cooing of vowels

  like doves.

  Apocalypso

  Something thrill-

  ing in cata-

  clysm &

  in the col-

  lapse of Empires.

  Irrevocable, ir-

  remediable,

  Apocalypso

  & this myriad

  bloom-

  ing buzz

  in which,

  we’d hoped,

  we might

  have steered

  more bravely,

  sensibly &

  to more pur-

  pose, the

  effort of be-

  ing human,

  & “moral”

  & “good”

  coming,

  at last,

  finally

  terribly

  & simply

  to

  The End

  III.

  American Melancholy

  To Marlon Brando in Hell

  Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.

  Because you made of our adoration, mockery.

  Because you were the predator male, without remorse.

  Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away

  greatness like trash.

  Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.

  Because in this you made mockery of our lives.

  Because you died encased in fat

  And even then, you’d lived too long.

  Because you loathed yourself, and made of yourself a loathsome

  person.

  Because the wheelchair paraplegic of The Men was made to suffocate

  in the fat of the bloated Kurtz.

  Because your love was carelessly sown, debris tossed from a

  speeding vehicle.

  And because you loved both men and women, except not enough.

  Because the slow suicide of self-disgust is horrible to us, and fascinating

  as the collapse of tragedy into farce is fascinating

  and the monstrousness of festered beauty.

  Because you lured a girl of 15 to deceive her parents on a wintry-

  dark December school day, 1953.

  Because you lured this girl to lie about where she was going, what

  she was doing, in the most reckless act of her young life.

  Because you lured this girl to take a Greyhound bus from

  Williamsville, New York, to downtown Buffalo, New York, alone in

  the wintry dusk, as she had not ever been alone in her previous life.

  Because you lured this girl, shivering, daring to step onto the bus in

  front of Williamsville High School at 4:55 P.M. to be taken twelve

  miles to the small shabby second-run Main Street Cinema for a

  6:00 P.M. showing of The Wild One—a place that would’ve been

  forbidden, if the girl’s parents had known.

  What might have happened!—by chance, did not happen.

  Because
inside the Main Street Cinema were rows of seats near-

  empty in the dark, commingled smells of stale popcorn and

  cigarette smoke—(for this was an era when there was “smoking

  in the loge”), and on the screen the astonishing magnified figure

  of “Johnny” in black leather jacket, opaque dark sunglasses, on his

  motorcycle exuding the sulky authority of the young predator-male.

  Because when asked what you were rebelling against, you said with

  wonderful disdain, What’ve you got?

  Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to

  utter.

  Because as Johnny you took us on the outlaw motorcycle, we clung

  to your waist like the sleep of children.

  Because as Johnny you were the face of danger, and you were

  unrepentant.

  Because as Johnny you could not say Thank you.

  Because as Johnny you abandoned us in the end.

  Because on that motorcycle you grew smaller and smaller on the

  road out of the small town, and vanishing.

  Because you have vanished. Because in plain sight you vanished.

  Because the recklessness of adolescence is such elation, the heart is

  filled to bursting.

  Because recklessness is the happy quotient of desperation, and

  contiguous with shame, and yet it is neither of these, and greater

  than the sum of these.

  Because the girl will recall through her life how you entered her

  life like sunlight illuminating a landscape wrongly believed to be

  denuded of beauty.

  Because there is a savage delight in loss, and in the finality of loss.

  Because at age twenty-three on Broadway you derailed A Streetcar

  Named Desire, and made the tragedy of Blanche DuBois the first of

  your triumphs.

  So defiantly Stanley Kowalski, there has been none since.

  Because after Brando, all who follow are failed impersonators.

  Bawling and bestial and funny, crude laughter of the Polack male,

  the humiliation of the Southern female whose rape is but another

  joke.

  Because you were the consummate rapist, with the swagger of the

  rapist enacting the worst brute will of the audience.

  Because you were Terry Malloy, the screen filled with your battered