History of My Heart

One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat

Rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls

Each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall

Across Thirty-Fourth Street into the busy crowd

Shopping at Macy’s: perfume, holly, snowflake displays.

Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked

Over her school vacation, the crowd swelled and stood

Filling the aisles, whispered at the fringes, listening

To the sounds of the large, gorgeously dressed man,

His smile bemused and exalted, lips boom-booming a bold

Bass line as he improvised on an expensive, tinkly

Piano the size of a lady’s jewel box or a wedding cake.

She put into my heart this scene from the romance of Joy,

Co-authored by her and the movies, like her others–

My father making the winning basket at the buzzer

And punching the enraged gambler who came onto the court–

The brilliant black and white of the movies, texture

Of wet snowy fur, the taxi’s windshield, piano keys,

Reflections that slid over the thick brass baton

That worked the elevator. Happiness needs a setting:

Shepherds and shepherdesses in the grass, kids in a store,

The back room of Carly’s parents’ shop, record-player

And paper streamers twisted in two colors: what I felt

Dancing close one afternoon with a thin blonde girl

Was my amazing good luck, the pleased erection

Stretching and stretching at the idea She likes me,

She likes it, the thought of legs under a woolen skirt,

To see eyes “melting” so I could think This is it,

They’re melting! Mutual arousal of suddenly feeling

Desired: This is it: “desire”! When we came out

Into the street we saw it had begun, the firm flakes

Sticking, coating the tops of cars, melting on the wet

Black street that reflected storelights, soft

Separate crystals clinging intact on the nap of collar

And cuff, swarms of them stalling in the wind to plunge

Sideways and cluster in spangles on our hair and lashes,

Melting to a fresh glaze on the bloodwarm porcelain

Of our faces, Hey nonny-nonny boom-boom, the cold graceful

Manna, heartfelt, falling and gathering copious

As the air itself in the small-town main street

As it fell over my mother’s imaginary and remembered

Macy’s in New York years before I was even born,

And the little white piano, tinkling away like crazy–

My unconceived heart in a way waiting somewhere like

Wherever it goes in sleep. Later, my eyes opened

And I woke up glad to feel the sunlight warm

High up in the window, a brighter blue striping

Blue folds of curtain, and glad to hear the house

Was still sleeping. I didn’t call, but climbed up

To balance my chest on the top rail, cheek

Pressed close where I had grooved the rail’s varnish

With sets of double tooth-lines. Clinging

With both arms, I grunted, pulled one leg over

And stretched it as my weight started to slip down

With some panic till my toes found the bottom rail,

Then let my weight slide more till I was over–

Thrilled, half-scared, still hanging high up

With both hands from the spindles. Then lower

Slipping down until I could fall to the floor

With a thud but not hurt, and out, free in the house.

Then softly down the hall to the other bedroom

To push against the door; and when it came open

More light came in, opening out like a fan

So they woke up and laughed, as she lifted me

Up in between them under the dark red blanket,

We all three laughing there because I climbed out myself.

Earlier still, she held me curled in close

With everyone around saying my name, and hovering,

After my grandpa’s cigarette burned me on the neck

As he held me up for the camera, and the pain buzzed

Scaring me because it twisted right inside me;

So when she took me and held me and I curled up, sucking,

It was as if she had put me back together again

So sweetly I was glad the hurt had torn me.

She wanted to have made the whole world up,

So that it could be hers to give. So she opened

A letter I wrote my sister, who was having trouble

Getting on with her, and read some things about herself

That made her go to the telephone and call me up:

“You shouldn’t open other people’s letters,” I said

And she said “Yes–who taught you that?”

–As if she owned the copyright on good and bad,

Or having followed pain inside she owned her children

From the inside out, or made us when she named us,

III

Made me Robert. She took me with her to a print-shop

Where the man struck a slug: a five-inch strip of lead

With the twelve letters of my name, reversed,

Raised along one edge, that for her sake he made

For me, so I could take it home with me to keep

And hold the letters up close to a mirror

Or press their shapes into clay, or inked from a pad

Onto all kinds of paper surfaces, onto walls and shirts,

Lengthwise on a Band-Aid, or even on my own skin–

The little characters fading from my arm, the gift

Always ready to be used again. Gifts from the heart:

Her giving me her breast milk or my name, Waller

Showing off in a store, for free, giving them

A thrill as someone might give someone an erection,

For the thrill of it–or you come back salty from a swim:

Eighteen shucked fresh oysters and the cold bottle

Sweating in its ribbon, surprise, happy birthday!

So what if the giver also takes, is after something?

So what if with guile she strove to color

Everything she gave with herself, the lady’s favor

A scarf or bit of sleeve of her favorite color

Fluttering on the horseman’s bloodflecked armor

Just over the heart–how presume to forgive the breast

Or sudden jazz for becoming what we want? I want

Presents I can’t picture until they come,

The generator flashlight Italo gave me one Christmas:

One squeeze and the gears visibly churning in the amber

Pistol-shaped handle hummed for half a minute

In my palm, the spare bulb in its chamber under my thumb,

Secret; or, the knife and basswood Ellen gave me to whittle.

And until the gift of desire, the heart is a titular,

Insane king who stares emptily at his counselors

For weeks, drools or babbles a little, as word spreads

In the taverns that he is dead, or an impostor. One day

A light concentrates in his eyes, he scowls, alert, and points

Without a word to one pass in the cold, grape-colored peaks–

Generals and courtiers groan, falling to work

With a frantic movement of farriers, cooks, builders,

The city thrown willing or unwilling like seed

(While the brain at the same time may be settling

Into the morning Chronicle, humming to itself,

Like a fat person eating M&M’s in the bathtub)

Toward war, new forms of worship or migration.

I went out from my mother’s kitchen, across the yard

Of the little two-family house, and into the Woods:

Guns, chevrons, swordplay, a scarf of sooty smoke

Rolled upwards from a little cratewood fire

Under the low tent of a Winesap fallen

With fingers rooting in the dirt, the old orchard

Smothered among the brush of wild cherry, sumac,

Sassafras and the stifling shade of oak

In the strip of overgrown terrain running

East from the train tracks to the ocean, woods

Of demarcation, where boys went like newly-converted

Christian kings with angels on helmet and breastplate,

Bent on blood or poaching. There are a mountain and a woods

Between us–a male covenant, longbows, headlocks. A pack

Of four stayed half-aware it was past dark

In a crude hut roasting meat stolen from the A&P

Until someone’s annoyed father hailed us from the tracks

And scared us home to catch hell: We were worried,

Where have you been? In the Woods. With snakes and tramps.

An actual hobo knocked at our back door

One morning, declining food, to get hot water.

He shaved on our steps from an enamel basin with brush

And cut-throat razor, the gray hair on his chest

Armorial in the sunlight–then back to the woods,

And the otherlife of snakes, poison oak, boxcars.

Were the trees cleared first for the trains or the orchard?

Walking home by the street because it was dark,

That night, the smoke-smell in my clothes was like a bearskin.

Where the lone hunter and late bird have seen us

Pass and repass, the mountain and the woods seem

To stand darker than before–words of sexual nostalgia

In a song or poem seemed cloaked laments

For the woods when Indians made lodges from the skin

Of birch or deer. When the mysterious lighted room

Of a bus glided past in the mist, the faces

Passing me in the yellow light inside

Were a half-heard story or a song. And my heart

Moved, restless and empty as a scrap of something

Blowing in wide spirals on the wind carrying

The sound of breakers clearly to me through the pass

Between the blocks of houses. The horn of Roland

But what was it I was too young for? On moonless

Nights, water and sand are one shade of black,

And the creamy foam rising with moaning noises

Charges like a spectral army in a poem toward the bluffs

Before it subsides dreamily to gather again.

I thought of going down there to watch it a while,

Feeling as though it could turn me into fog,

Or that the wind would start to speak a language

And change me–as if I knocked where I saw a light

Burning in some certain misted window I passed,

A house or store or tap-room where the strangers inside

Would recognize me, locus of a new life like a woods

Or orchard that waxed and vanished into cloud

Like the moon, under a spell. Shrill flutes,

Oboes and cymbals of doom. My poor mother fell,

And after the accident loud noises and bright lights

Hurt her. And heights. She went down stairs backwards,

Sometimes with one arm on my small brother’s shoulder.

Over the years, she got better. But I was lost in music;

The cold brazen bow of the saxophone, its weight

At thumb, neck and lip, came to a bloodwarm life

Like Italo’s flashlight in the hand. In a white

Jacket and pants with a satin stripe I aspired

To the roughneck elegance of my Grandfather Dave.

Sometimes, playing in a bar or at a high school dance, I felt

My heart following after a capacious form,

Sexual and abstract, in the thunk, thrum,

Thrum, come-wallow and then a little screen

Of quicker notes goosing to a fifth higher, winging

To clang-whomp of a major seventh: listen to me

Listen to me, the heart says in reprise until sometimes

In the course of giving itself it flows out of itself

All the way across the air, in a music piercing

As the kids at the beach calling from the water Look,

Look at me, to their mothers, but out of itself, into

The listener the way feeling pretty or full of erotic revery

Makes the one who feels seem beautiful to the beholder

Witnessing the idea of the giving of desire–nothing more wanted

Than the little singing notes of wanting–the heart

Yearning further into giving itself into the air, breath

Strained into song emptying the golden bell it comes from,

The pure source poured altogether out and away.

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Source: Poetry (February 1983)