Serotonin

 

 

1

 

It was the year of the Contract with America.

We were renting.  I went outside for a smoke

and twilight and insect bites in the small garden.

Next door, behind a trellis, 

a man was installing a rain gutter 

or awning, or caulking a window – something

demanding competence, overalls, 

and a boombox playing Rush Limbaugh.  

The day was fading quickly, but he saw

no need for a lamp (perhaps he had none), 

or to go inside and light the room (probably

our neighbor, the producer, had locked it).

He bummed a smoke.  Mountain accent,

long gray hair.  As he worked, he spoke

of the New World Order.  It apparently talked

to him personally, telling him to do things -

work with or for fags, 

give money to immigrants, blacks, 

the UN, pseudo-educated assholes –

and punishing him in unspecified ways

when he wouldn’t.  He referred to himself

in the third person

and seemed unaware of questions as such;

they only jogged him to another grievance.

Monosyllables, silence

when asked what he earned, if he was married,

had children, read anything,

or when I gave him another cigarette

and said goodnight –

thinking I was part of the last generation

for which the term “worker” held pathos; and now

had met one, like a unicorn in the dusk.

 

2

 

At school, Denny was remarkably

without the affectations you’d expect

from his type – the stiff, aggrieved disdain,

the voice descending from an astral plane

when the Flag was questioned; warmer version of same

when the Cross was at issue;

fond in-jokes about one’s class,

vulgarity for those below it;

the errors of passion about success

and noisy pride in one’s unscrupulousness.

But Denny merely automatically

excused whatever massacre,

village deprived of water 

or jungle of trees the firms he interned for

required somewhere.  Grew angry

only when time was taken from his work,

and was thus universally admired

for maturity.  His libido 

was largely reserved for debutantes in summer,

and later one or another

advantageous co-worker.  He married late and well.

But by then even a starter

McMansion, the country club etc.

required two incomes, and years passed

before Denny Junior appeared.

Who at three wasn’t talking;

at five only laconically,

when spoken to.  Who stared

and could not be hugged; whose arms

flapped strangely, who screamed and punched

when something, a smell, set him off.

And Denny’s career and expenditures

changed.  He joined all the support groups,

attended every therapy session,

studied the websites, kept a log,

looked after his wife when she broke.

His features, which at Yale had been

so clear, became lined with grief 

and with that hopeless patience which cuts deeper.

Without embarrassment, in later years,

he said things about love

and friendship that reduced old friends to tears.

But really, it may not have happened that way.

He may have taken one look at the problem

and put the boy in an institution –

expensive, but less than home care.

He may never have had a kid.

He might have been gay, never married, or sterile.

It isn’t as if we ever spoke.

 

3

 

Now and then I’ve imagined compassion

as an alternative.  But because

the conditional tense is awkward,

you’ll have to accept a counterfactual

narrative.  My world is without mirrors,

except for the tiresome tiny reflection

I avoid in other people’s eyes

because it would waste time.

I listen.  There’s a subtext

that wants to become the main text

and does, given time.  It seems to be spoken

by a handful of suffering people

into whom the ostensible billions

collapse.  I say what I can,

often nothing.  I touch

or don’t.  A con-man

sitting beside me on a long flight

confessed all his crimes when his spiel failed,

and became very tedious

to himself.  The religious

patient in the next bed at the hospital

that time, proclaimed me the Antichrist

when after three days I said

it’s better to read many books than only one.

He needed to hate me; recovered.  I work

in soup-kitchens, and for an embattled NGO.

At home the phone rings, and often it’s someone

I don’t know.  I should arrange my laundry,

closets, and papers better.  At the museum

I like a few pieces,

especially a corroded smiling form

under glass, the “Buddha of the Future.”

It isn’t I who wrote this –

I find the tone unattractive –

but my reflection, which is vicious,

intolerant, morbid, creative. 

 

4

 

I know that we shall live again

as algorithms of some alien

intelligence that will do

what earthly power never could imagine:

subsume itself in its own creation.

Boredom will end, but not imagination,

in a dimensionless and wanton leisure,

where after many ages you

may rouse yourself from pleasure

to walk the thousand gleaming levels

of a city, meeting friends and equals

in every form.

Some of whom may be art –

as all immortals choose to be

a moment – concentrating in themselves

the multiple and comic future,

and universal elegy.

Or you may enter nature,

its only pain the memory of pain, 

your senses those of butterflies and trees

while theirs are yours, the sun 

a mind no more than amiably warm;

the lucid rivers thoughtful as they climb

around the rusting cogs and wheels of time. 

– And sing, until the moon

helps you revise an ancient noble tune:

*Who has no house by now may build one yet

and brush away the dead leaves of regret*.