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Gather Us
Not like a regular window at all,
but a quilt of color laid over the brick.
Wednesday nights they practice choir,
so I get stained glass without God,
like love without a word to weigh it down.
From my window I watch wind wile the trees,
coax leaves to life. The branches sway and cradle
the light. Is this the holy spirit? So delicate
that those who hold it cannot feel its weight.
It is color and wind, tree and church—
something like art and love but given breath,
real as brick and glass, or voices singing,
light splashing limbs, wind riffling leaves.
Sometimes my hope can hold together.
Come Sunday we wrap ourselves in each other
and the gauze of half sleep, as sun drowses
through the curtains. Morning is slow, a religion
of two; our hands find congregation, fold into
a mutual prayer. This is too easy, I know,
but doesn’t love, when it’s good, feel like
Adam and Eve renaming themselves—
part animal, almost God? Simple as blood.
Across the street they crowd the pews
in a low-rent room, pray Jesus will save
enough change from the plate to keep
the doors open at least another month.
We hold each other to keep the world at bay.
Outside, our slums push ever upward.
Soon the city will pour new sidewalks,
plant a light on the corner, call the building
next door the latest condo bargain.
Rent will shoot the sky; we’ll have to move.
We are slipping out of that one-year window
between artist and yuppie. There are no
paintings left—save graffiti—no musicians
on the angle at Cortland and Fairfield,
only neighbors who won’t speak except
to make investment plans. They will sandblast
the rainbowed names from brownstones;
they will bulldoze the church for lofts.
We must have thought we’d find a place
where colors and words were commerce,
where we’d find jobs in the field of unknowns,
as if the world needed something that wasn’t.
I went searching for a place to read my poems,
stumbled across Shakespeare Machine
at Shakespeare’s dead-end on California Ave.
Some underground theatre troupe?
I opened the door, smelled burnished metal,
saw sparks launch against my shadow.
A machine shop. My degrees have made me dumb.
In our neighborhood, nothing is painless as art;
everyone has some place to be.
The church has been evicted, we read,
and a woman yells in Spanish at the man
who plants the sign. Dramatic Artist Lofts,
his brochures say, and we’re white,
so he tries to give us one. But I have come
to believe in nothing more than the el train,
how it rumbles distant and swells, echoes
in my hollow and fades; the street-to-street
shuffle of the underemployed and wrong-brained.
C_____ and I are somewhere lost between
marketers and artists: four degrees between us,
we’re poor enough for supper from a can,
spoiled enough to expect something more.
I couldn’t be her brother, who worked in an office
and made in a week all I manage per month.
He would have been the one to chase us
from our slums, into the burbs, then back again
depending on the market’s ebb and flow.
But he couldn’t be one of them either—
read Beckett and Blake, hiked mountains, loved
casting lighted lines into rushing thunder of water,
coaxing the flash of trout into morning sun.
His cubicle was an achievement in order,
so every day I try to make no sense but to myself
for fear of an office, its orifice a mouth,
its row of computers like a line of shiny teeth.
Like the flash of trout in the morning sun,
I thought at his closing, where they gave away
a box of his ties, diamond-shiny and slicker
than butter. Company reps perched in pews,
nodded off his praise like a checklist, and left.
But I would rather think of death as becoming
more a part of life. I wonder if he had a window
to hold an oak tree for his gaze. He must have
longed to dip his fingers into soil or stroke the leaves.
One night he swallowed the hollow eye of a pistol
and scattered himself into nature. I like to think
of him as part of the wind, the roots of a tree.
But wouldn’t it be too sloppy to say?
I was at an open mic when she called
to bring me home. We talked till nothing was left
but the wait for words to begin again.
They cleaned out what was left in his condo—
books, clothes, a jar of quarters—gave it all to us.
I still watch those poets lick their fudgesicle pain,
but never read, myself. Today I washed my face
with a dead man’s towel. I read a dead man’s book.
I bought my bus fare with a dead man’s change.
I feel too much or too little to compete
in this game of sorrow’s one-uppance.
You can’t expect your tongue to unfurl
with broken glass stuck in your throat.
Like two bullets—the twin despairs of death
and poverty. I come home, laid off,
and find her curled in a ball on the bed,
red-faced and swollen-eyed from crying.
I spoon behind her, wonder how many times
I can tell the same lie: some day his dying
won’t be our whole life. I stay, though I know
we unravel like his old sweater that
she wouldn’t dare to throw away.
I know the ways that people salve their grief—
the preacher who told me that death is only
the soul returning home; the teacher who said
distance is a poem’s only aim.
Some aim straight enough without, I want to say.
Maybe when we suffer we should say it
from the stage. Even if there are no answers there.
It’s Sunday again and we’re walking—
always the world is being born or dying,
and who can sand it down, smooth a surface,
build a home? In the neighborhoods up north
we look at houses we could never afford,
compelled as we are to meet our parents
half-way to wealth, driven as her brother was.
She paints the houses in her mind,
longs to brighten drabs of gray and white.
But he is the shadow in every patch of sun.
He could not live without the currency
with which we purchase our lives—
poems and condos, abstractions and things.
But we could all live on a street like this—
if he were alive, if we could afford it.
All the houses have yard work and trees;
we can’t even hear the el. We walk quiet
as the sky, and she loves me as much
as she can. With one hand, she holds on
to my hand. With the other she reaches up,
plucks an acorn from a tree. I want her to say,
We’ll plant this when we get home,
grow an oak tree in our living room.
Stay.
Return to Volume 2.5
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