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They'd slur off line and drift

  to a ditch—or creep back down,

  the driver squinting out from a half-

  open door, his hindsight glazed

  by snow on the rear window

  and cold breath on the mirrors.

  Soon he'd be at the house to use

  the phone and peer a few feet out

  the kitchen window at the black

  night and insulating snow.

  Those were the uphill cars. One night

  a clump of them had gathered

  at the turn and I'd gone out

  to make my usual remark—

  something smug about pride disguised

  as something about machines and snow—

  and to be in a clump myself. Then

  over the hillbrow one mile up the road

  came two pale headlights and the whine

  of a car doing fifty downhill through

  four tufted inches of snow atop a thin

  sheet of new ice. That shut us up,

  and we turned in thrall, like grass

  in wind, to watch the car and all

  its people die. Their only chance

  would be never to brake, but to let

  the force of their folly carry them, as if

  it were a law of physics, where it would,

  and since the hill was straight until

  the hairpin turn, they might make it

  that far, and so we unclumped fast

  from the turn and its scatter of abandoned cars;

  and down the hill it came, the accident.

  How beautifully shaped it was, like an arrow,

  this violent privation and story

  I would have, and it was only beginning.

  It must have been going seventy when it

  somehow insinuated through the cars

  we'd got as far away from as we could,

  and it left the road where the road left

  a straight downhill line. Halfway

  down the Morgans' boulder- and stump-

  strewn meadow it clanged and yawed,

  one door flew open like a wing, and then

  it rolled and tossed in the surf of its last

  momentum, and there was no noise from it.

  The many I'd imagined in the car were only one.

  A woman wiped blood from his crushed

  face with a Tampax, though he was dead,

  and we stood in the field and stuttered.

  Back at the turn two collies barked

  at the snowplow with its blue light

  turning mildly, at the wrecker, at the police

  to whom we told our names and what we saw.

  So we began to ravel from the stunned

  calm single thing we had become

  by not dying, and the county cleared

  the turn and everyone went home, and, while

  the plow dragged up the slick hill the staunch

  clank of its chains, the county cleared the field.

  Twins

  One may be a blameless

  bachelor, and it is but a

  step to Congreve.

  —Marianne Moore

  When I was eleven and they

  were twenty-two, I fell in love

  with twins: that's how I thought

  of them, in sum, five run-on

  syllables, Connie-and-Bonnie.

  They were so resolutely given

  as a pair—like father-and-

  mother—I never thought to prefer one,

  warm in her matching bed

  like half an English muffin

  in a toaster, though Bonnie

  was blonde, lithe, walleyed,

  angular, and fey. And Connie

  was brunette, shiny-eyed, and

  shy, as most true flirts

  describe themselves, over and over.

  And shouldn't love be an exclusive

  passion? To fall in love with twins

  made me unfaithful in advance?

  It made me paralyzed, or I made

  it—my love doubled forever

  into mathematical heaven—paralysis.

  Frocks rhyme and names confuse

  and the world is thicker with sad

  futures than lost pasts. And I,

  who hoarded names like marbles,

  how could I say what I knew?

  Indeed, how can I say it now?

  I knew the two meanings of cleave.

  I looked into those eyes I loved,

  two brown, two blue, and shut my own

  (grey) from any light but mine

  and walked straight home and kissed

  my parents equally and climbed my growing

  body's staircase to the very tip of sleep.

  Our Strange and Lovable Weather

  for Daniel Halpern

  First frost, and on the windows snow

  is visible in embryo,

  though Seattle has only one

  snow a winter. Mostly we have

  cool rain in fog, in drizzle, in mist

  and sometimes in fat, candid drops

  that lubricate our long, slow springs.

  But I'm way ahead of myself.

  From behind windows one season

  is another. You have to go

  out to feel if this is winter

  gathering or giving itself up,

  though whichever it may be, soon

  enough turmoil under leafmold

  begins, and the bulbs swell, and up

  the longings of themselves spring's first

  flowers shinny. February.

  Here you can fill in the bad jokes

  about weather and change, about

  mixed feelings, about time, about

  not wanting to die, and by the time

  you've run round their circumference

  the year has turned to May, and night

  drags its feet home slow and dusty

  as a schoolboy. But soon it's June,

  usually rainy here, then summer

  arrives in earnest, as we say,

  with its long, flat light pulling

  like an anchor against the sun.

  How can the year have gone so fast?

  Already the cool nights tuned

  so perfectly to deep sleep admit

  a few slivers of cold, then swatches,

  and then they meet and are patterns.

  First frost once again, we think.

  Time to clear the clog of wet leaves

  from the gutters, time to turn off

  the water to the outside faucets.

  And time to think how what we know

  about our lives from watching this

  is true enough to live them by,

  though anyplace lies about its weather,

  just as we lie about our childhoods,

  and for the same reason: we can't

  say surely what we've undergone,

  and need to know, and need to know.

  Descriptive Passages

  Your hair is drunk again,

  someone explains to me.

  And it's not only my hair:

  no matter how rack-natty

  my clothes were, they're rum-

  pled on my body, dressed up

  like a child performing

  for its parents' guests.

  How much of childhood

  is spent on tiptoe! Clean up,

  wise up, speak up, wake up

  and act your age. But also one

  is uppity: something's gone

  to his head, a bubble

  in the bloodstream, a scratch

  in the record, a bad habit.

  No theory can explain

  personality, which expands

  to include, if it can, all

  its contradictory urges.

  It's so hard to think about

  this fact that we don't:

  we use crude code. The one

  with the limp, with big ti
ts,

  with the drunk hair. And we love

  so much to be loved—

  or failing that, remembered—

  that we limp a little, and thrust

  out our chests. On me it looks

  good, as the hunchback said.

  Use description carefully.

  For example, today as I

  glower out at morning fog

  I can feel the fatigue

  of matter, how glum a job

  endurance is. The gulls

  over Lake Union look heavy

  and disconsolate, like office life.

  Is this all there is, I could ask,

  secretly excited

  because if it is I've saved

  myself so much response

  and responsibility.

  It's harder than we think

  to name our children, but how

  can we be accurate?

  They'll find stories to live by.

  I envision my children

  sitting loosely in middle age.

  I give them good wine to talk by,

  I've lit them a fire if it's cold.

  I can't leave them alone, I think

  from the grave: a father's work

  is never done. One son turns

  to the other and says, You know

  how I always think of him?

  I remember his drunk hair.

  There's a pause. It's harder

  than we think to name

  our emotions. There were those

  sentimental poems he wrote

  about us, and his drunk hair,

  the other son says, proud

  for the intimate talk and sad

  for how little such talk says,

  though it wasn't drunk that often.

  Good Company

  At dinner we discuss marriage.

  Three men, three women (one couple

  among us), all six of us wary.

  "I use it to frighten myself."

  Our true subject is loneliness.

  We've been divorced 1.5 times

  per heart. "The trick the last half

  of our lives is to get our work done."

  The golfer we saw from the car

  this afternoon, his angered

  face in bloom with blood, lashed

  his strict ball for going where he'd hit it.

  We watched him turn from a worse shot

  yet and give us a look like our own,

  and on we dawdled through

  the afternoon toward dinner,

  here. Here means the married

  couple's house, of course.

  The rest of us use so much time

  being alone we don't entertain much.

  The wind loops and subsides.

  "What a fine night to sleep!"

  Upstairs a book falls off a shelf.

  We'll be sitting here ages hence:

  the scent of lawns, good company, Sancerre,

  fitful breezes suddenly earnest.

  "What sense does marriage make now?

  Both people want jobs, the sad

  pleasures of travel, and also

  want homes. They don't want dark houses

  or to live with cats. They have lives

  waiting up for them at home.

  Take me, I must read half an hour

  of Horace before I can sleep."

  The conversation luffs. The last

  bottle of wine was probably too much

  but God we're happy here.

  "My husband stopped the papers

  and flea-bathed the dog

  before he left." One of us has a friend

  whose analyst died in mid-session,

  non-directive to the end.

  Now we're drifting off to our nine lives

  and more. Melodramatic wind,

  bright moon, dishes to do, a last

  little puddle of brandy or not,

  and the cars amble home:

  the door, the stairs, the sheets

  aglow with reticence and moonlight,

  and the bed full to its blank brim

  with the violent poise of dreams.

  School Figures

  for Susan

  It's best to work before dawn:

  fresh ice, its surface silvered

  and opaque, and you scritch out

  onto the milky ice, not avid

  for grammar, too sleepy for speech.

  It's not that you're marking time;

  you're melting it grainy under

  your runners. Each time you sweep

  in your half-sleep around the figure

  eight, your blades are duller

  and record how far you've slid

  from your margin of error, zero.

  That's why you skate it backwards.

  It's where you've been you have to go

  again, alert enough to numb

  every muscle memory but one.

  So much learning is forgetting

  the many mistakes for the few

  lines clear of the flourishes

  you thought were style, but were

  only personality, indelible as

  it seemed. Who but you could

  forge those stern exclusions? Where

  the line of concentration crosses

  itself, cutting and tying its knot

  both, there learning and forgetting

  are one attention, and are the thrall

  that pulls you stiff-ankled over

  the ice before dawn, turning

  over your shoulder as if you could

  skate back into your first

  path and get it right for once.

  Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal

  It's so cold my cock is furled

  like a nutmeat and cold,

  for all its warm aspirations

  and traffic of urine. 37

  years old and it takes me a second

  to find it, the poor pink slug,

  so far from the brash volunteer

  of the boudoir. I arc a few

  finishing stutters into the water.

  Already they're converted,

  opaque and chill. How com-

  modious the dark universe is,

  and companionable the stars.

  How drunk I am. I shake

  my shriveled nozzle and three

  drops lurk out like syllables

  from before there were languages. Snug

  in my pants it will leak a whole sentence

  in Latin. How like a lock-keeper's

  life a penis biography would be,

  bucolic and dull. What the penis

  knows of sex is only arithmetic.

  The tongue can kiss and tell.

  But the imagination has,

  as usual, most of the fun.

  It makes discriminations,

  bad jokes. It knows itself

  to be tragic and thereby silly.

  And it can tell a dull story well,

  drop by reluctant drop.

  What it can't do is be a body

  nor survive time's acid work

  on the body it enlivens,

  I think as I try not to pitch

  my wine-dulled body and wary

  imagination with it into the inky

  canal by the small force

  of tugging my zipper up.

  How much damage to themselves

  the body and imagination

  can absorb, I think as I drizzle

  to sleep, and how much

  the imagination makes

  of its body of work

  a place to recover itself.

  The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives

  I don't understand how Janis Joplin did it, how she made her voice break out like that in hives of feeling. I have a friend who writes poems who says he really wants to be a rock star—the high-heeled boots, the hand-held mike, the glare of underpants in the front row, the whole package.
He says he likes the way music throws you back into your body, like organic food or heroin. But when he sings it is sleek and abstract except for the pain, like the silhouette of a dog baying at the moon, almost liver-shaped, a bell hung from a rope of its own pure yearning. Naturally his life is exciting, but sometimes I think he can't tell the difference between salvation and death. When I listen to my Janis Joplin records I think of him. Once I got drunk & sloppy and told him I feared artists always had more fun and more death, too, and how I had these strong feelings but nothing to do with them and he said Don't worry I'd trade my onion collection for a good cry, wouldn't you? I didn't really understand but poetry is how you feel so I lie back and listen to Janis's dead voice run up and down my body like a fire that has learned to live on itself and I think Here it comes, Grief's beautiful blow job. I think about the painter who was said to paint with his penis and I imagine one of his portraits letting down a local rain of hair around his penis now too stiff to paint with, as if her diligent silence meant to say You loved me enough to make me, when will I see you next? Janis, I don't care what anybody thinks or writes, I don't care if my friend who writes poems is a beautiful fake, like a planetarium ceiling, I want to hold my life in my arms as easily as my body will hold forever the silence for which the mouth slowly opens.

  Bmp Bmp

  for James McGarrell

  Lugubriously enough they're playing

  Yes We Have No Bananas at deadpan

  half-tempo, and Bechet's beginning

  to climb like a fakir's snake,

  as if that boulevard-broad vibrato

  of his could claim space in the air,

  out of the low register. Here comes

  a spurious growl from the trombone,

  and here comes a flutter of tourist

  barrelhouse from the pianist's left hand.

  Life is fun when you're good at something

  good. Soon they'll do the Tin Roof Blues

  and use their 246 years

  of habit and convention hard.

  Now they're headed out and everyone

  stops to let Bechet inveigle his way

  through eight bars unaccompanied

  and then they'll doo dah doo dah doo

  bmp bmp. Bechet's in mid-surge as usual

  by his first note, which he holds, wobbles

  and then pinches off to a staccato spat

  with the melody. For a moment this stupid,

  lumpy and cynically composed little money-