.................................
Last Night, I Dreamed of The Five Satins
.................................

In a vast gymnasium, in the inevitable ultraviolet,
my glowing tuxedo and I subdue an erection
for the last slow dance of time: a mass coupling of thighs
and whispery rubbings of man-made fibers,
an inching of soles across the variegated floor,
the great river of us all, none unelected, all encoached,
finding the still center of the B-side night.

Music flows from the basement of St. Bernadette's,
from Hillhouse High and the VFW,
from the cold shadows of faux-gothic arches
and the beaten wood of Dixwell Avenue porches:
in sequined turquoise, in shoes of Army issue, spit-polished,
the abiding angels and a pick-up sax
announce the end of remembering.

 
.................................
My Life with the Virgin Mary
.................................

1

Always the blue veil, the blue sky, the blue countenance,
the black serpent between her almond toes
pleading for a gloss on the power that keeps it there.
Her panties: also blue.

2

Never have I seen the white of her teeth.
I tumble out of the confessional as if stillborn,
the curtain groping at my ankles, and all I see is
a thin black line between her lips.
I have sinned, drawing chalk pricks on red bricks
for all the nuns to see.

3

She drops my enemies into the palm of her hand and blows:
a breath to her, to them a hurricane.
Filth keeps my hair in place,
exposing a pink floor, scabbed and littered
with droppings of the unimaginable.
I must be cleaner, more obedient, better: the ocean,
out of pity, can interpose with doom.

4

Only I can taste her garlicky descent, the salt
of her helplessness and the living yeast of her love.

5

My intestines are tightly windlass wound.
Reciting the psalter in a tub of ice, I see the future.
Milk spurts from my wrists in a tall fountain
and a cherry tree springs from the white pool;
later, milk gushes from its sticky branches
and from those pools nothing will ever bloom again.

6

In her kitchen there are four halos of blue flame.
In bed I find crumbs of talcum paste among
the coffee-colored spots above her breasts.

7

She points out midnight at noon, the sleeping moth,
for instance, like a seashell glued to a tree.

8

Light-devouring, she races through winters,
blue-lipped, coughing up yellow pellets.
In the song of radiators, I hear her gasping.
The snow buries wire fences, white statues,
the forgotten places where sumac grows
and its light must find her through tiny walls of ice,
as blue as forget-me-nots and jittery.

 
.................................
The Bookie's Wedding
.................................

He has chosen sweetness over risk,
a quiet girl who plays the clarinet quietly.
We no longer see the artful passes
that kept a mole and then its scar
in the shadow of her hand.

Her mother, an autumn garden,
a reddish sinking in the ground,
wears her hard life as rouge.
She extends her cold hand coldly
and has not saved the good wine until last.

Ringing glasses do not summon kisses.
The flowers are already on their
weary airborne way to spring.
The aunts dance in circles circumspectly;
the uncles remain close to death.

He leans against the wall like a poolstick.
There are neither sums nor remainders,
only means endlessly.
The Knicks are laid waste:
who will bemoan them?

 
.................................
Emptying a House
.................................

After I put aside the black searches for a vein
and nightly encounters with her perfume,
her book spills out notes requesting books
in a scrawl that lives forever.

The last fork finds its fork-shaped slot.
Packed away, the square glasses
will no longer surprise children
who don't think to use the corners.

There are clothes to give away
and jewelry to silence in a black velvet bag.
The walls are indifferent tissue,
the wooden floors hold a tiny smudge of light.

In her folder, documents are wrapped
in ribbon like love letters.
In the refrigerator, I find a last carton of juice
and, in the crisper, a failed pharmacy.

 
.................................
The Jackson Pollock School of Driving
.................................

For Mary Shapiro.

The day began with bands of lawn and marsh
and a quick glimpse at the Accabonac,
then cedar shingles and the painting floor, now holy,
now requiring booties, parodies of his dance
in someone else's museum, by appointment only.
He put on his sobering old shoes,
glanced at the enormous Cadillac in his driveway
and stirred the colors of the west, not of Springs,
with its fisherman's bias for blue.

Maybe he never wanted to transcend the potato fields
and clam joints and discover some other place,
a first or final place, a blurred nation
of impossible freedoms, a universe
within or beyond or at least nearby.
The violence of prompting paint, pushing it,
finally breaking it, had no power of entry:
earth in liquid form only hardened,
returned to what it was, guardian of the secret.

Plunging into the August heat took him there,
penetrating the boundary, the roadside vestibule,
until something unmoving in it stopped him
with the thud of the ferry coming in.
Maybe he knew there was no other way.
As for us, we are left with sea plums
and goldenrod, the autumn that outlived him,
and a sidetrip all the way to Montauk
with its park and view of the incomprehensible.

 
.................................
The Summer of Our Best Tomatoes
.................................

My friend was newly brown and mostly stomach
and, recently mad, he needed a place to stay.
At the lake, where wives yearned for flesh
that returned a touch, he performed comedies
of error and mistaken identity.

During dinner the children begged him
to unhinge his mouth and stuff hard-boiled eggs into it.
He called himself Uncle Insane and, fearful of the sun,
which could bring him, like a kettle, to a boil,
he tended our small garden in his coolie hat.

We grew rutabaga that year, and Japanese watermelon,
and bumpy squash that took the shape of bearded men.
But everyone marveled at our tomatoes,
so plump and red and not a blemish on them.
It was a shame to cut them open.

 
.................................
The Italian Woman Upstairs
.................................

Each spring, flowers are placed at a cupid's feet.
Each summer, her thyme is a surprise of blossoms
and her basil is rendered budless with an efficient snap.
Her crabclaw hands cling to something fateful in the air:
the steam tears produce may scald the soul,
but in America, at least, the beef is always good.
For Sunday dinner, sfogliata di cappelleti,
little hats baked in a pie, hats like the bonnet
a sunless girl once wore in a bed of satin.
To make a proper sauce you don't need cream
when the cheese is by nature creamy.
A white lake appears with a catastrophe of floating hats
and among them a face like an embryo's
with small shadows for a nose and mouth
and cheeks as fat as figs: white dress,
white gloves, white shoes and ankle socks,
and hair as black as nothing tucked out of sight.

.................................
John Surowiecki
.................................

 
Copyright © John Surowiecki
November 1998

...a poem in this room by Kathleen Rogers...

hopi silver
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