The Relatives


The relatives stay close to the food,
though some of it’s alarming:
vegetables, pastries hitherto unknown.
If they didn’t stay close to the food,
they would have to cling to the walls,
which are hostile – paintings, inscrutable objects,
and books books books, every one of them
saying I will be on the test
you thought you flunked and finished years ago.
Even the wallpaper is wrong: it isn’t
shepherdesses, and teddy bears in the kids’ rooms;
there are no kids.  If they move
away from the food or walls, the relatives
are among the crowd, and bumped, and *seen:
the difference of their posture, look, and clothes,
which is clear enough, though impenetrable to language.
“They’re not even *trying,” cries the widow,
privately.  She will be pardoned anything
of course, but the crowd,
fair-minded and self-critical, thinks
*We aren’t trying.  No one draws *them out.
Wouldn’t we be equally ill at ease
at their church suppers, Nascar rallies,
or wherever it is they gather?  And some
try to talk to the relatives
in the loud, hearty pidgin believed
to bridge chasms.  Until, as evening and the wine
wear on, the relatives, who stay and stay,
relax and talk: the cousin
to a responsive void that is herself,
about herself; the sister
unearthing unrevealing hateful stories
about a man she barely knew; her husband,
on the verge of sleep in a side chair,
saying, “The bastard never
invited us when he was alive.” –
And the guests are quietly outraged by this
behavior.  With death in the house.





Girl in White


She appears in *Summer, 1982,
and *Early Morning*, ’84.
The same tight-wrapped white robe, and bathing cap,
and look; same paradisal Northern beach,
empty except for the group she’s with
and not with.  In the first, two girls,
seated on sand and watching her;
in the second, a mother and kids.
All nude but her.  She stands
apart on the shoreline, straight and firm,
her expression sealed, the light so broadly
and intensely of this world it might
suggest another.

                                 There are many doors
to the other world.  They open
at moments of political frustration.
She is the one that stood ajar
in ‘82 and ’84.
Behind the annealed, self-heedful features
she is communing with her painter, Nerdrum.
“I was in the crowd,” she says,
“that opened the prisons and welcomed
those who were capable of welcome into
a world whose walls we had also broken.
The girl who sat astride the man,
discovering power – I was she,
or in the next room, and the next cell
when Baader was gunned down.
I helped to lead the refugees ashore,
my eyes shone on the selfless hero …
How lovely freedom would be
if we could see it!  It deserves
your careful underpainting and impasto,
your agonized and speaking flesh.
When I leave this beach, descending night
will bring the starving men in scraps of leather,
chained, imitating clouds,
seeking their sons, holding pitiful leaves,
or with high-powered rifles
defending what remains of grain and water.
They will be followed by the stupid myth
of the Androgyne; your duller insistence
that what you’re doing isn’t art but Kitsch,
eternally warm; wispy nudes
protecting a globe; and those full-length erections –
I mean, who cares about your horrible cock!”

The painter’s hand trembles
as he blends the right amount of cinnabar
into the border between her and sky.
“Bitch,” he mutters, remembering
the student who, in a few years,
will in his manner paint herself as Judith
holding a knife in one hand, his head in the other.
And his growl comes from a rheumy, stubbled throat,
not from the droop-eyed
angel of the ‘81 self-portrait.




What He Had in Mind


After he abandoned the Camry,
whose driver he had shot in the head,
things get hazy.  Was the driver
of the car he took next, a Ford Explorer,
the woman who kept him company
the rest of his day, the next two hours?
Another ex-girlfriend serving as a girlfriend,
like the one he had written “My life is done”
from prison?  She is tentatively quoted,
the woman who was in the car, as saying
he picked her up to smoke some crack and fuck.
It’s unclear if he boasted
of beating down three guards and taking two guns
at the hospital, where he had been taken for “chest pains.”
Or that he would not return
to his sentence of life plus forty years.
Or whether he was wearing a shirt.  What is clear
and seems in some way thoughtful is that they drove
to a cemetery, where the cops closed in.
She was naked when she ran from the Ford,
out of range when the shooting started and he was killed.
His name is variously given as Polk or Poke.
The vision of that fleeing form
in the January chill lingers.
Does one hope she was pretty,
or sagging with needle-tracks?