Half Full
Always as if surprised
by their numbers, they join two,
then three tables, with great displays
of strength, or of effort and groaning. One comes
directly from the office
of her specialist, one is between specialists;
one has an attendant, who sits and knits,
watches the time and intake of sweets,
and is somehow not a presence; one drags
his own oxygen.
The hardest of hearing commands the center,
but who, really, is that? One comes
triumphant from consulting
his Financial Advisor, who is also his son; boasting
foresight about these dark times,
giving advice, wasting time,
though his advice is also, no doubt, precious.
The women share information
about specialists, disastrous children, exceptional
grandchildren and
pain in a barely subdued
yet disregarded current. The main flow
rises, meanwhile, not towards anger
but pedantry. What Hoover knew.
What he told Truman. What Stalin told Churchill.
Cheney and Rumsfeld leapfrogging through
the decades. What Geithner knows.
Occasional batting averages.
Ships. All thoroughly known, intensely
cited; when not, there are silences.
Other people in the café –
young mothers, small executives
from around that mall – accept
subordination, the cooption
of tables; the voices are not loud,
the rare nearsighted glances slightly pleading.
And when one leaves to see a specialist,
or otherwise, those remaining
seem always surprised.
Song
I go there often,
going against
the expectation – cultural?
archetypal? Anyway, intense –
of never seeing the place
again in this life, or longer, unless
as a hallucination
while dying. Or, maybe, once,
sadly, before the end
to find it not there,
which would prove one thing;
or there, with its dust,
cobwebs etc. proving
the same thing.
No respecter of feeling
gazing at me in silence leaving.
Instead I show up. Pay the rent.
Find the street
unchanged, i.e., changing
in the usual way
at the usual tedious rate.
Dust. Check for ants.
Close drawers I opened
last time. Stay long enough
to be certain no one else
is there, see his eyes close.
The Half-Seen
I’m not sure who she was.
A student who confided
in one long hopeless articulate blurt,
little knowing how little, behind my wise murmurs,
I believed them, or wanted to be there.
Whose complaint, in any case,
whose universe was all emotion,
unaware that, beneath my frozen kindness,
lay seas of impatience.
Or perhaps she did sense it, and her lament
was a way to drain my capacity for pity,
my heart’s blood, so to speak. –
It’s also possible she wasn’t a student
but came from before
old age. From times one listened
for hours to inanities,
hoping to get the speaker into bed,
who, sensing as much, refused, but went on talking.
I remembered her hair, the shape of her neck.
Such things seemed to make their own statements, have their own brains. –
My dream gave her money, security,
the fruits of her life’s effort
shoehorned into the body I remembered.
She absorbed them all quickly, graceful on her sofa,
while continuing to tell me
whatever. Her kids poked
their heads in. Without language,
reduced to discrete quanta of experience,
they had no problem
drifting between
the two great parties. Vampire. Zombie.
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