Arcs
No shame in appreciating
the narrative ends—redemptive, conversionary—
that television ads propose, as if they were fates
a god and a patient might jointly subscribe to,
as if trust in resolution came wrapped in every package
of quandary like a roadside bomb ingeniously disguised, as if
the death of a pet or poet or parent fitted seamlessly into one’s course
of existence, and other more or less unguessed deaths
brought along their own bundles of explanation
ready to be unwrapped in the first light of morning:
the little stories, the least arcs the headlong imagination
is capable of, though they are capable of overpowering us,
leave us with a hint of more behind. Do we want it?
If we believe, or even know, that we are capable of more
adequate suffering, and if we see this as what makes
us, does that make us want it? An end—
a story about what everybody wants or what a little group
may want everybody to want so they can supply it—
is, whatever else, enough to keep us
awake for a spell
and, after we sleep and rouse again in a new dream, leave us
unsurprised at our own faces
surfacing in that window or this mirror.
The point isn’t money changing hands or hands money,
but the staving off of the twin enemies of every soldier,
death and boredom—and now and then the red trajectory
of a bird that means nothing to our survival
and everything to the afternoon.
Oedipus Ux
on the wall at Thebes
This has to be the prime of life.
I feel I almost understand
the tight twist of my feeling, these
spectacular nights that so endorse
the charm of having married well.
A shy boy, a puzzler, happiest
in the herb garden in my adoptive
parents’ yard, leaving almost
on a whim, a dark saying,
filial piety’s own conundrum;
a traveler, nearly nameless, with
a strange adventure to his name—
two to be exact, a monster and
a fool old man—now wedded to
a queen! A king! And night by night
beside this wondrous, destined wife,
whatever my old friends would have said
or my new town says, I don
myself again, as if a crowned
eye clambered up a flickering cave
and found a mirror at the end.
For symmetry, she’s twice my twenty.
I have to say I’d always been
in sex a kind of foreigner—
a man for women, sure, but sure
mostly of fitting pipe to flange,
a plumber’s pleasure; pleasure,
certainly, but one reported
dutifully by my nerves
while I was elsewhere, busy with
some business incipiently like
(I now perceive) kingship. Pure work,
though I see now why men want to rule,
the scepter balanced in the hand.
This is something else. It’s not
polite to talk about your lady’s
bedroom ways, nor even your own,
certainly not the queen’s; and maybe
it isn’t her so much as something
(I have to say it) magical
between us, some flare there
in the thumb space, my extremity
learning the palm hollow of her
at the far finale of the queen’s way:
as if for once the royal road
were a two-way street
where gods and ancestors might meet
and talk things out with dignity.
Then, too, I feel how men could want
to die. In the great bed, quietly
laughing together within our joined
skins, tossing one another
high in the blanket of the air—
in all the glee, something echoes
confusedly behind my senses,
a whisper like a scent: that I
know her, that something in my noble bride
calls out to something in me
anointed long ago;
a warm feeling oddly like
a child’s who, dreaming, wets the bed.
Enough. It isn’t possible
to name these fears exactly. Not
euphemism but metaphor’s
the way we think. It feels
almost beyond me, as if I heard
the future’s call on kings, a seed
spread, a race ready to run.
Thinking of this, and of the child
the queen expects, I surprise myself
by trembling as I murmur, Who am I
to earn so full a fate?
