from Rider: [14. In the Wake]

In the Wake

Riding north on the bus after hours in cars

or in the air or airports or bus stations,

I felt almost happy for a moment

as the tires hissed over the wet highway,

I was both in the rain and protected

from it, distracted from grief

by the sensual pressure of the instant,

water beading on the glass, the darkening hills.

But how glad I was to be riding north!

Sunoco on one side, Mobil on the other.

His best friend was from Mobile.

I always wanted to go there.

He died too soon, or I left home,

I can’t remember.

Two days ago my stepfather’s body

was laid to rest.

Comatose, sucking air

through a respirator, I can’t say

he was resting; I saw him

underground when I closed

my eyes at night and went

to bury the clock under mounds

of towels and pillows—I had not

heard it ticking so ferociously

while he lived—and it would not

quiet down. And the rain

tonight, it’s not like any other,

and I wish the bus would go faster.

I saw the rain in the heavy hanging clouds.

That’s a lie. Immense factories

blackening under a charcoal sky—

and rivers whose names I’ll never remember.

I saw a sign reflected in my window:

Milwaukee Light.

Whenever the Chicago White Sox

beat the Braves it made his day.

The Braves were in Milwaukee then,

with lefty Warren Spahn and slugger Hank Aaron.

The bus company is Peter Pan,

and the Peter Pan coffee shop

was our first stop in Chicago when we drove in;

and that’s where I was when,

though I didn’t know it then,

he married my mother in Bermuda—

watching Peter Pan in New York

with my “real” father…

And oh those prophetic lines,

not to grow up, never to go to school.

Never then to die! Only the living

are immortal. Like these rain clouds.

The fact of death—a silence attends it;

an absence with which we’re all

He was the lightest sleeper I’d ever known;

he’d open one eye if I merely peeked into his room.

intimate. He’s there when I close

my eyes but not when I reach out in the dark.

At his bedside I peeled back his eyelids,

rubbed his blue feet, his bloated hands,

almost screamed in his ear,

wake up, man, I’ll be lonely without you,

I’ll be ANGRY if you don’t wake up;

and in the silence of our nearness to death—

the grinding hum of the generators

working at their limit for too long

to pump cool air in the killing heat;

the glug of him swallowing through the respirator.

AT THE BUS STATION IN SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

The lateness of the bus angers

a tough young woman from Montana

travelling with her toddler son.

And yet she knows the way: I can see it

in her green peaked cap,

her direct taut anger—bus late,

I kill the driver—boy knock over

suitcase—I kill him too.

BUS BOARDED

The water bubbles on the windows

break; there is less and less outside to see…

And he was not even my real father.

That should put a cap on it.

It’s like knowing the name of the lake

you pass never seeing it again and yet

finding it tough to forget,

that jagged square of black water

just off the highway—

that lake, and not another.

Baudelaire boasted that he laughed

at funerals and wept at feasts.

Now in the bus it’s only early evening;

I turn around and everyone’s sleeping—

mother and son, matron and magician.

Half-awake, I stare at the tree line,

and the blessing of rain,

and I would like to lie down on the roadside

and drink and drink and roll

in the mud.

Mortifying, one’s presence in the face

of nature’s sanguine gaze,

green whitewashing

the past. Whatever grooms

the body for the afterlife

pitches in this life like a tent

in a night encampment before

the dawn storming of the fortress.

The yellow day lilies wag

their heads at the first

touch of wind and I see what

others have always seen

in flowers, a sign marked

TRANSIENTS

that keeps them awake; see

now, as, standing catatonic

at the kitchen sink, the overhead

fluorescent light strip sinks into the pitch

dark bottom of a coffee mug.

Seeing is native to us and yet

we stupefy our native sight.

Not the eye’s sight.

Some mourners hurl dirt stiffly on the coffin

because it seems the right thing to do.

Some hold back. The flag-draped casket honors

the first Army chaplain in the Pacific Theater,

for praying good prayers above the bodies

of the dead and of the living.

Prelude to an Afterword

Why should I feel compelled to write

a thousand postscripts when I don’t

work from life, but to hear

the testimonials of people

who knew the rider, the “little Rabbi,”

moves me to tears while I am here

to attend my mother who lies

in bed with her stomach reaching

toward the sky—(where Sam talks

calmly to his “grandpa in heaven,”

matter-of-fact celestial discourse)—

and I listen to this Baptist preacher

and hospice worker as he crouches beside my chair

in her hospital room talk about his work

with mourning; how difficult

it is to get people to understand

the element of surprise-over-time…;

how he kissed the little Rabbi

the first time he met him

and the last time he saw him

before “death took him so swiftly”

there were no “last words”

and he was enveloped in silence,

in absence—“the way death often

comes...” I see him more clearly

through this stranger’s eyes.

I wouldn’t have thought that he could help

confirm my sense of what is real,

but this man who knew him less than two years

feels so indebted that I allow myself

to think of the rider’s life in terms of the people

he affected, the bizarre love he could

elicit—not standard preacherly fare

by any means but some connection

by being entirely present for others—

promiscuously present—

meanwhile, as the nurses haul my mother

from wheelchair to bed

why do I feel impelled to turn

away… (we think we have the answers) …

and flash to an image of my friend caring

for her father—bathing him?—but she

didn’t come out of his penis, did she?

or is that another wrong turning in my thought?

The hospice preacher offers a prayer.

He holds my mother’s swollen, psoriatic hand,

the arthritic clumps poling from her fingers,

and as the dry, flaky patches blaze

in the unforgiving light, I find

not a word to object to—except two—

“religion” and “churches.” I tell him that I left home

as soon as I could because I couldn’t stand

being around the two of them; he admits he always

felt sick “for hours afterward”

when he’d been with them together;

it wasn’t just quarreling, I have to add,

seeking absolution for my absence,

but hatred (can’t let my mother milk

the bereaved widow role). He nods—

matter-of-factly. And sets me free.