Auburn Hills, Pittsburgh, Noblesville,
Maryland Heights, Chicago, then done,
those last shows, autobiographies of indulgence.
Lightning struck a branch. We left early.
Tapers caught every note of the show.
You can hear it forever at archive.org.
In my greatest period of disorientation
the Dead, like death, seemed best avoided.
Yet I was the sort who might admit
a simplifying affection like the Dead.
I remember, coming down in a cornfield
near a creek at dawn, talking it out with Jason
whether those trees were weird, or that
weirdness took the form of trees,
and every woman I pursued
had a pet cat that made me sneeze.
They either liked the Dead or Neil
Diamond. Yet I would persevere,
like one with a disorder, hanging
in the doorway to their petite kitchens
while they ground coffee, or searched
the crisper for a roommate’s hidden beer.
I longed to become more elaborate,
my approaches too simple and still are,
ask anyone about pleasure’s light opera
and the children’s music of the first kiss,
the hair metal of the second. And now
I play the Dead around the house.
It’s children’s music. We play operettas,
Pinafore, Penzance, for the same reasons,
because they are kind and almost meaningless.
I make few claims. What lasts is awkward
chance, like this thrift-store wrench
anthologized on pegboard, or smudges
on a yellow phone. I’m not buying
the tapes today. The price isn’t marked
and the clerk’s busy. I keep what marriage
and child need, a few books and held-back objects,
metal or paper, letters from old loves,
because letters are antique, and for
the limestone antiquity of those affections.
Ode to the Macarena
The chair I’m sitting on is mostly nothing.
Electrons go right through it. Memory, which
is electricity, seems lighter than a scatter
and yet in the inexplicable universe I’m there
again, and it’s now again, summer of the Macarena.
Two months in Abilene, Kansas, and I see
nobody in the central air of the Sunflower Hotel.
My eighth-floor window stares down buttery hills.
Streetlights pink the tracks downtown
like a chalk outline to fill in later.
I’m writing a novel set among historians
working at the Eisenhower Library.
I go to its chapel daily, sit before his tomb
then sit in my kitchenette, alone and twenty-three.
Some weekends I drive to Kansas City
where a woman who won’t need me
lets me stay over, though at sex I’m still a boy,
as at rigorous thinking, naive, unskilled,
fascinated by form and lazy about content,
but I work the paths that lead from myself.
Ike stays a boy, winning the worst war.
As president little happened we praise him for,
and by we I mean the characters,
among the adult troubles they fall into
and I don’t understand. This summer
at the Democratic Convention in Chicago,
where the man who gives Leaves of Grass
away carelessly will be renominated,
the delegates keep doing the macarena
every time I look at the lobby TV.
The vice president claims during his speech
to be doing the macarena, but does not move,
then offers to demonstrate it again. Presidents
are always late in the day of their time.
Like dances, our political lives come and go.
It’s the summer of all dances, coffee leaping
in the percolator, gravity-defiant solitude,
and through the window, houses and fields
seduced in their own passing crazes
of seasons, life and death, which won’t need me.
The Empty House
Only children have homes; and an adult who feels at home in the world is out of touch with reality. Growing up means needing a map. Children shouldn’t feel lost; adults should feel lost because that is what they are.
Adam Phillips, On Balance
Help me remember which house was mine,
or name. Which way to live in hazard.
Ours held work, applesauce, and milk,
cabinets never closed, like movie crypts,
and the sink a bay of sunken ships.
But in the empty house next door
an obstinate order obtained in gray,
glimpsed rooms without sweat
and sex and no sex and sleep,
toilet unfreckled by use, porcelain
curves like the neck of a marble nude.
Sprinklers met their times, some
lights inside on timers mocked schedule.
No maggots wiggled in their trash cans,
although they had a couple in the alley,
side by side, wired into place, fathomless.
Today I pick up my last paycheck. My son
yodels at the ceiling. My wife folds towels
before going to her job, her reward for not
writing stories anymore. I watch my son all summer.
Outside, roadwork goes on in light rain.
The steamroller’s under the maple.
As steam swirls off the asphalt, a worker
strides across it, and doesn’t burn.
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