It’s winter; I’m reading What Narcissism Means
to Me, and my son in the next room tells
his friend,
my mom’s
house burned down when she was a kid.
For a moment, I’m wearing flip-flops and a colored robe,
the house burning around me lighting up my
imagination
like a flashlight
borrowed from Tony, and I’m waving
across the years to my son and my son’s friend,
the time between then and now about what
it takes
to finish reading
“Narcissus Lullabye” and turn
the page. Tony Hoagland’s tongue is his best muscle;
you just know he’s been taking his
own advice, turning
light switches
on and off with it. In Malkovich no one
wants to be themselves, and in all of T’s poems, that’s all
he is, the gospel of self, the season of
being alive
never waning.
So there I am, forgiven for being
on that second floor, my robe the color of a New York sunset
over New Jersey, and Tony and Malkovich are
both below
in the yard
yelling, Jump! I’ll catch you, like I should trust
either of them, but I do, jump that is, and the house
becomes ash sifting down over my son and
his friend,
like we’ve
been caught in a snowstorm. My son says,
Ma, tell us the story, and I do, since the sins of the mother
are only in what’s withheld and narcissism
is learning
to embrace
what you know can’t ever be caught.
It’s winter; I’m telling a story, and the time it takes
is the time from one blazing moment to the
next
the water to
douse them as elusive as your image
in a pond, as vital as the book my son’s friend takes
with him when he heads out into the sweet
wreckage
of winter singing
a lullaby he didn’t know existed.
Giallo Antico
For
C.J.
The word friend was once part of a verb meaning to love
and my friend taught me to cook and to never put food
on the table all at once. He knew how to seduce
the senses, the art of ancient yellow, how to coax
it from the ruins of any country: a dinner party,
a book reading, an ESPN vintage event.
Once, when I’d learned how to use Kazaa
and downloaded scores of songs, he came to dinner
and I asked him what his favorite song was.
The answer, Nessun Dorma, and I, knowing nothing
of opera, scoffed and went about my chopping
until, the song found, and playing, I cried
tears as if I was working with onions,
a sweetness so sneaky and unsettling
and redemptive I’d pay to be overtaken
like that again.
No one is sleeping; no one is sleeping.
How could one sleep? The hero
has answered three riddles and given one
himself to the woman who won’t be loved:
say his name and at dawn he dies.
I’ve betrayed my friend by not knowing enough
about keeping secrets, letting things lie
the law – La legge e questa – that friendship
is a precarious monument to love, whispers
that must be made over and over onto dying
lips redolent with the last meal they tasted,
the salt of the last tears cried, the master
of metaphor thrown on the chopping block,
what separates as beautiful as what was whole.