The Consecration of the House

I took a soak November 22nd.
John Kennedy was dead forty-five years.
I would be 66 in the same month’s time
it took me to turn 21 that year
and go out with my father for a drink
at Tommy Burke’s on Vernor in Detroit.
There I was in the tub we have upstairs
and thinking on the soul in good hot water,
the way some lines of Yeats advised me to,
and I felt certain it was about time,
a bit too late, or both, or none of these.

That morning I read “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid.”
Kusta ben Luka—doctor, philosopher—
unburdens to a Christian friend of his,
and tells him how the gift the Caliph brought him
could sleeptalk on a range of sacred matters
his age had driven him to care about,
regardless of what had seemed impossible,
along with things the girl could do awake
that made him wonder what the Caliph meant.
Before half of this monologue elapses,
Kusta reveals how certain people’s souls
appear to radiate from within their bodies.
I longed to learn exactly how that happens,
which ministered to an impulse to search out
Parmenides’ or Yeats’s allegory
left on the bookshelf where the Caliph kept
genial visions to be sought for comfort.
Somebody here knew something worth the knowing.

And here it was a Saturday in November,
with the first fire down in the grate, my wife
working her crossword puzzle, me in the tub,
the sun sparkling the window in the bathroom,
the weather apt to warm up later on.

I kicked the suds around until they died.
The quiet dropped again. And then I knew
why water is the generated soul,
and why from downstairs Ann would ask to find
the word to be in French, which I spelled out,
and added, “It’s also the word for being,
as in L’Être et le Néant by Jean-Paul Sartre,”
as if she welcomed too much information,
which in that case I was quite sure she hadn’t.
“And don’t forget the circumflex on the E.”
“How did I know you’d tell me that?” she said.
I thought she said it. I could not be sure,
for all the house between us and the way
the waters round had calmed me body and soul,
to keep on going onward, at a loss.

It wasn’t about that day or the day’s date.
Nothing about it was what we thought it was.
To keep on being or to be or not
to be were not the matter. They were all
beside the point. Once we had got the point,
the point itself would be beside the point.
When Kennedy took a sharp left onto Elm,
seconds before his brains burst from his head,
time went off where it came from, leaving him
the moment that his soul had left to shine
through him and out of him. The overpass
would darken him soon enough out of sight,
into more quiet than he knew already.

Hermitage

I had not fit my mind around the things
she needed me to do or answer for,
nor had I come to notice where she went,
which meant I had not thought to look for her.
No words were spoken that were any good,
nor any said to make good what was not.
My spite for almost everyone in town,
including her and me, had taken on
a numbness like an anchorite’s in a cave.
I often saw myself as such—on Gozo,
which seemed the kind of perfect fourth-rate place
to go and live, above a stretch of coast,
alone, or with a woman in a smock,
who’d feed me every other day or so
a simple meal of octopus and chips
washed down with local currant wine well chilled
from a sweaty beaker of aluminum.
She’d chop the tentacles in lengths like sausage,
set them on a bright blue plate with peppers
and cucumbers beside the cup of wine.
She’d watch me eat without a word and wait
until I sat there staring at the sea
in one of my redoubtable abstractions
while she ducked down the path back to the village.
The way these sons of bitches chop you up
and hand you little bits of you to eat
had left me silence as my only portion,
dredged in a complex seasoning of rage.
I had no reason to apologize
for what I did or was about to do.
My feeling state was mine and theirs was theirs.
As for herself, all I could do was go.
It was the pure clear light of June that watched it,
the way it can in the Dodecanese
between the rainy season and the hordes
that loose themselves from where it is they were
to go about their business on the beaches
in company with everybody else
likewise inclined, for however long they please,
while someone like myself would just as soon
go one way or the other on my own,
obliged to no one and in my own way,
and glad to be there or be rid of it
when riddance would be good and I could get it.
Kalymnos came to mind among the places
to simply disappear without a word,
as long as there was one more mountain path
to follow, up among the figs and crickets,
with blue above it bluer than any blue.
The short way out stood ready in the doorway.
The long one found a district of one-way streets
and detours into fields of disused airstrips
from which the crows shocked themselves into flight
to catch a load of leaves to perch among
and shout recriminations, reprehensions,
or cries for war and bits enough to dine on.

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