I've never gotten much response re my longish narrative poems, but I
think the form is more suited to bio. and autobio. material than the
lyric ... At any rate, this is my most recent poem and my last sub. for
this project, which I think has collected a lot of good work.


Neighbor's Blues


"Not even the usual failed novel,"
he said with a rare, vague smile,
his eyes, as always, elsewhere. Only
some sort of newsletter, making
financial data handy
for State Department decisions or vice versa
for thirty years. The information, as
he often said, was there; but you had to funnel
(exhaustingly) his edgy constant drone
towards scandal, secrets, institutional
denial when you met him,
by chance, in the park, and talked an hour,
or accompanied him to the library where,
towards the end, he worked.
An old man's voice and vest and tie
though Stan wasn't old.

We invited them once, him and his wife
(ex-wife, it turned out), Ilse.
Swiss; in good shape; taller. She
had worked, but also had money.
Beyond their plate-glass windows facing ours,
a room that might have been inviting - late-
Kokoschka-looking alpscapes, tiles from warm places;
the only mess, the paper, gone by noon.
She spent most hours in her garden,
creating miniature gravel paths.
The dinner didn't go well - Stan
chatted; periodically,
Ilse, not impatiently,
would interrupt and, with her pleasant accent,
briefly respond to things we might have said.
- His look when we said, "We'll do this again soon."

One topic in those accidental
meetings around the neighborhood arose
once, and his delivery
was spare, though as mild as usual -
except when it came to the kid. But the girl
was mentioned first, though not, of course, explained.
A temp at the newsletter.
One pictured a community-college
graduate with chaste sweaters,
sweet pained voice and grammar,
or someone with spiked hair and secrets;
probably the former.
The only facts stated
were love and that
she hadn't been pregnant
when he divorced Ilse and married her.

They lived in Silver Spring. He was good
about, and almost got off
the track to explore
the economics of suburbs:
what put the gentry here, the losers there.
And schools: he was trying to provide
the best from the start, commuting
to work and a second job. (Took out,
not breaking stride, a shot of
his daughter; it was ten years old and faded.)
And the washer-dryer, the hundred problems
the girl, who stayed home
with the kid, was supposed to solve.
The low-rate workmen true to local folkways,
servile to bullying, brutal to weakness.
She started sleeping with one of them.

A neighbor told Stan. "At which point,"
he said, "for about a week,
I lost it." The experience
of driving into that labyrinth
of Virginia where strip-malls and
aggrieved shacks intersect
the lofty, GS-16-and-over complexes,
finding the place and waiting
(pissing on his knees beside his car)
for the dude to return; muscling
open the closing door with crazy strength
and shouting at the dude, who laughed
and circled till Stan shot him in the leg.
And staring at laundry
(the guy left through a window)
for twenty minutes till the cops came.

He didn't describe his four years in prison
and I didn't push.
Enormous detail
about the lover's various scams -
theft and resale
from building sites, substandard substitutions;
items a lawyer and, later, a private detective
had given Stan.
His only aim was to find his daughter
or learn that she was well,
but daughter, wife, and lover had long vanished.
Ilse had visited him
in jail, and written.
This aspect too was skimped:
eclipsed by other matters, or perhaps
by now he had reached the library, or his door.

We went on vacation
and, returning, failed
for two weeks to notice he was missing.
"He would speak to anyone, dogs, trees if
no person," said Ilse,
her face working.
Pain in his chest, unusual
at nine one morning,
and he spent all day in his room;
at seven began rambling, "the way he did, but
different," she said
and gazed, like him, away.
The ambulance took longer than the cops.
She ran outside because she thought she heard it
and he died while she was gone.
I like to think he howled, or that I would.

Since then her garden hasn't satisfied
Ilse, apparently - nor
a man we believe she knew
during Stan's madness,
who has also returned to her.
She sweeps the parking areas and the lane
on either side of which our houses and
the neighbors' are,
filling us all with guilt-feelings.
As I said, she's in incredible shape for her age.
In spring, the pollen,
in fall, the smallest leaf …
the next day leaves return, but so does she.
It would be wrong to tell her
to get a life, I think. This is her way
of doing art, of adding man to nature.