From the Sixties
If it existed, that building,
except as a memory palace, it meant
a past too harmless to rebel against –
even likeable: radios, Roosevelt …
A boarding-house feel, with anomalies:
on orgy nights, girls naked or nearly,
running between rooms; the smell of grass
subduing mildewed carpeting.
No one who wasn’t young, and noisy
about some revolution of the time,
except the former prof who had named names
to Congress but had lost his job anyway
and lived ever since on the top floor.
People looked in on him, brought groceries.
He tipped with booze the few who drank,
told tales about their closeted lying profs.
A couple of other old people kept
to themselves, and the Jesus freak
in 305 muttered and glared
whenever he passed an open door
but never called the cops. Each month
a detective visited the building,
but never cared to smell anything,
and liked the music and to argue
with Don about Marcuse and Mao.
(His position, Don said,
seemed to be that the system
was reforming itself from within,
inexorably.) He came to see Amy,
whose boyfriend had been attacked
a year before on the street outside;
had taken days and much surgery
to die, but had described the two
who stabbed him. The kid was a hippie,
the killing one of those random, insoluble
things – so said the Division,
but the detective took an interest
in Amy. It wasn’t sexual.
Daughter-he’d-never-had, maybe.
After he found the perps and they were sentenced
he said she could get her life moving again,
but she said that was just a phrase:
Tim’s death had become her life,
and getting vengeance for it; that was all.
So he argued with her about that.
Sometimes she talked with Ellen, who lived
with the nervously funny Paul.
When they met he had coughed all the time –
sore throats, squeaky voice, large frame
not grown into. Ellen begged him
to see a doctor, but he hated doctors;
his father was one, a shrink in fact,
highly placed with state government.
I’m proof, Paul said, of the cliché
that shrinks have fucked-up kids.
He evaded, joked. But Ellen had faced
a harder set of childhood wars
and forced him to go. It was
a chronic tonsil infection
the father, who hated imperfection,
and null-set mother had ignored.
A benign university surgeon swore
it was life-threatening, and operated.
Then Paul was in bed for months – late growth spurt,
no energy – and Ellen worked two jobs,
made soup. When he recovered,
he never spoke to his parents again
in that voice an octave lower.
Eventually he and Ellen split up.
In the Eighties, she married money. Him, I don’t know.
No doubt there were cultists, addicts, mindfuckers,
the future, but for a moment there weren’t.
The future is the interest the moment bears,
but like a good hippie I’ve spent all
the principal. Which otherwise could have made
some half-a-dozen perfect poems.
This one seems probably too much like prose:
diffuse, underdetermined. Well,
so what? Poetry is worthless
unless it speaks for the dead or kindness.
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