Stranger by Night

Chapter 1 My Friends Don’t Get Buried My friends don’t get buried in cemeteries anymore, their wives can’t stand the sadness of funerals, the spectacle of wreaths and prayers, tear-soaked speeches delivered from the altar, all those lies and encomiums, the suffocating smell of flowers filling everything. No more undertakers in black suits clutching handkerchiefs, old buddies weeping in corners, telling off-color stories, nipping shots, no more covered mirrors, black dresses, skullcaps, and crucifixes. Sometimes it takes me a year or two to get out to the backyard in Sheffield or Fresno, those tall ashes scattered under a tree somewhere in a park somewhere in New Jersey. I am a delinquent mourner stepping on pinecones, forgetting to pray. But the mourning goes on anyway because my friends keep dying without a schedule, without even a funeral, while the silence drums us from the other side, the suffocating smell of flowers fills everything, always, the darkness grows warmer, then colder, I just have to lie down on the grass and press my mouth to the earth to call them so they would answer. The Black Dress I don’t know why I opened her book almost randomly, on a whim, it signaled me from the shelf after all these years, like a burning black dress tangled in the branches, her dress, she was the one who was burning, and that’s when the letter fell out, a love letter, sort of, after we’d given up on each other, or did we?, our impossibility, and suddenly it came back to me in a rush, that night in Boston, a restaurant on the harbor, a storm simmering outside, that slinky black dress she was wearing, I didn’t know she was burning inside of it, I thought it was the coming storm, summer lightning, I didn’t know I was turning the pages of her book, her body, which I would read so closely, I wanted it so desperately, she was the fire, I didn’t know she was already mourning for her childhood in the orchard, her lost self, forgive me, I didn’t know she was burning when she took off that black dress. The Unveiling Instead of a pebble to mark our grief or a coin to ease his passage you placed a speaker at the top of his head and suddenly a drumbeat came blasting out of the grass, startling the mourners on the far side of the cemetery, clanging the trees, scattering the swifts that had gathered around the stone like souls of the dead, souls that were now parting to make way for a noisy spirit rising out of the dirt. The Keening All morning I heard a thrumming in the distance, a wail, a wild cry— atonal, primitive— so faint and far away that I tried to blot it out and follow the news breaking like a fog over the day, though I kept hearing it rising and coming closer, a chant, a plea from the dead suddenly burning inside me, one of the grief-stricken ones, wearing a button-down with a tie and walking the hall with a notebook as if I belonged here, as if I had something else to report. After the Stroke (In memory of William Meredith) Imagine him standing at the bottom of an empty well, raising a broken arm in darkness and calling out to someone, anyone who may be passing by but cannot hear a voice in the ground, the desperate plea of a singer whose faith has not deserted him, though he is silenced now like a cello locked in a black case, a church bell buried somewhere in the earth. The Secret (In memory of Richard Rifkind) We were watching flamenco dancers stomping on the stage and swirling around us, and I noticed the way he looked at them with a mixture of curiosity and contentment, a happiness free of desire, a state foreign to me, and when I asked about it later he smiled with such a great sweetness that it seemed like a light he had discovered within himself, a secret he shared with me once for a little while, and I’ve carried that secret with me ever since as a token, a stone for good luck, a memory for good fortune. In Memory of Mark Strand (Krumville Cemetery, Olivebridge, New York) I’m not sure why I glanced back at the bus driver grinding a cigarette butt with her heel into the gravel driveway. She was a figure from a myth, from one of his poems, a stranger, a guardian marking the passage to the other world. Maybe she was just another way of distracting myself from the burial, from waiting in stunned silence with the other mourners, all the forlorn gathered at the graveside without a rabbi or a priest to lead us in prayer. It could be said that we were godless, haunted, lost, as we stood in the vanishing light and light rain. Perhaps we had given up too much— the fundamental beliefs, the consoling rituals— that would have made the day more bearable. But as we huddled together in the afternoon, quivering a little in the chill mist, muffling our sobs, looking up every now and then at the tall pines, we felt something lonely moving amongst us, a current almost, a small gust of wind, not a ghost exactly, nothing like that, but the ghost of a feeling, a shiver, which we might have missed altogether, except he had changed us, we were changed. Let’s Go Down to the Bayou Let’s go down to the bayou and cast our sins into the brown water on little strips of paper slowly floating uphill the way we did that fall when we moved to Houston and lived with a small anonymity in a large complex set up for the families of patients treated for months in a nearby hospital because maybe this time our neighbor’s daughter with the shaved head will be healed and the bayou will accept our murky sins the way God never did and cleanse us. When You Write the Story When you write the story of being a father don’t leave out the joy of romping up and down the stairs together or curving a wiffle ball across the hallway or sneaking past the poor dog who has fallen asleep under the grand piano in the living room of the house on Sul Ross, don’t forget the giddiness of eating together in a secret winter fortress hidden somewhere— I’m not saying where— in someone’s backyard, and what was that song you invented to lull him to sleep? and wasn’t it yesterday that you carried him down the stairs to the car humming in the driveway at five a.m.? The Radiance (Detroit, 1984) Late September in the shade outside of State Hall, that concrete brutality, where my students are smoking off a hangover and gossiping in Ukrainian while Dan Hughes leans on his walker and talks to me about Shelley’s bright destructions. I did not know it was indelible— the sun spangling the campus trees, the traffic thickening the smog outside the museum on Woodward, our voices rising. When you tell the story of those years going up in flames, don’t forget the radiance of that day in autumn burning out of time. Riding Nowhere (In memory of Philip Levine) After all these years I still can’t forget collecting you in the snowy darkness and driving in silence along Jefferson Avenue to a local gym where we stretched side by side on stationary bicycles riding nowhere at a steady pace in front of a window framing the Detroit River that glided on and on at its own sweet will under the skyscrapers churches and factories glittering together in the early-morning light. Let’s Get Off the Bus Let’s get off the bus in 1979 in front of the empty fairgrounds on Eight Mile and Woodward and stop for a few rounds at the Last Chance Bar. The moon is tilted at a rakish angle and we can toast the unruly poets of Detroit and praise our students who work three jobs and still show up for class. Don’t get lost in the sad stories of the regulars and make sure to step over the junkies on the corner and dodge the cars barreling past the stoplights for the suburbs. Let’s surprise my wife who is napping off her grief and crank up the stereo for Stevie Wonder’s road trip through The Secret Life of Plants. Someone has started a garden on the far side of Palmer Park— or is it Woodlawn Cemetery?— where we can throw a party for our friends who are still alive. In the Valley What was teaching in that first Pennsylvania winter but listening to directions and learning how to drive on icy two-lane roads from Easton to Bethlehem? You were tested by a deer standing starkly on the yellow line and a dead opossum freezing in the gravel and the radio playing spirituals about going home on a lonesome highway. The sun skidded to a halt in the smokestacks over the river and I can still see you climbing the snowy hills and coasting past the empty factories and abandoned warehouses to a Catholic school on the edge of town. You were a skeptic in the Valley of the Lord who carried “Pied Beauty” in your jacket pocket and drank scalding coffee in the teacher’s lounge with two old priests and a lanky young nun who played pickup basketball and noticed all things counter, original, spare, strange. What was teaching but quieting a classroom and learning how to stand at a blackboard with an open book and praise the unfathomable mystery of being to children writing poems or prayers in the failing blue light of a weekday afternoon? What Is Happiness? What is happiness anyway? someone wondered aloud at the lingering party on the lawn, and all at once I was catapulted back into a raucous second-grade classroom in northern Pennsylvania, everyone clamoring with memories of wading naked into the Susquehanna River, running wildly over sandstone and shales, jumping over concrete dividers, steel railings, the whole family pointing together at the peak of North Knob… I stood at the blackboard calling out names and noting it all down, marveling at so much jubilance, fully absorbed in our creation. Windber Field I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to bring Wilfred Owen’s poem on the colliery disaster of 1918 to that tiny high school class in western Pennsylvania, but soon they were writing about smokeless coal and black seams in the ground, the terror of firedamp, the Rolling Mill Mine Disaster in Johnstown, the closing of Windber Field, the memory of standing in a wide ring around a mine shaft to watch a man emerge from the earth like a god, a father in an open cage sailing across the sky. Night Class in Daisytown I was failing my night class for the eleven parents of my students in the Conemaugh Valley when I mentioned as if by accident— or was it desperation?— the Pitman Poet of Percy Main, who worked the mines in Northumberland and wrote songs and carols for the coalfields, and before long I was standing there with a piece of fresh chalk collecting memories about coal in Cambria County, the pickaxe and the lantern hanging by the front door, the father-in-law who woke up in the dark and worked all day in the dark and slept with a night light, the mother who whispered about blackdamp, the brother who got lost for twenty-four hours in the underworld and then found a steel cable glinting in a mine shaft and pulled himself into the light. The Stony Creek I drove along the Stony Creek past the coal piles and the abandoned mine land to a little company town without a company, a community where I parked the car in front of a church in foreclosure and crossed the street to the first school that would let me teach all day until it was time to drive home again past the pockmarked land and the dark caves, the moon glinting through the gloam like a headlamp, heat lightning in the distance, a storm sweeping slowly across the thunderous sky over the mountains. In the Endless Mountains Early morning. I still remember the wild cherry tree behind an empty train station in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania. I was traveling to teach Japanese poetry, stray flashes of beauty, to a high school classroom, but for a moment I sat down on a wooden bench flooded with sunlight. Nothing moved, time stopped like a question on the dusty clock in the corner, and blue swallows hovered over the fire cherry. I could hear an endless hush in the mountains. Days of 1975 It started with the tattered blue secret of Basho, that windswept spirit, riding my back pocket for luck. It started with a walk through the woods at dawn, mud on my new shoes, high humming in the trees. I was not prepared for the scent of freshly turned soil to pervade the empty classroom or the morning to commence with a bell that did not stop ringing in my head. So many expectations filed noisily into the room— I was ready to begin. From the tall windows I could see a storefront church opening on the other side of the polluted river. I remember walking past the rows and rows of bent heads, scarred desks, and gazing up at the Endless Mountains. In those hopeful days of 1975 I drove the country roads in honor of radiance. O spirit of poetry, souls of those I have loved, come back to teach me again. Are You a Narc? I don’t know what possessed you to step into that small joint near Penn Station at rush hour on a Thursday night in late summer, but at twenty-four you should have known enough to leave when the room quieted and everyone swiveled around to look at you before turning back to their drinks. You were too embarrassed or clueless to turn back in those days and so you sat down at the bar next to a woman in a postal uniform who advised you to make the smart play and leave forty bucks on the counter and head for the door while you could still walk. The Iron Gate Don’t look for the Warsaw Ghetto on a Polish map in 1974, it’s not there, don’t show up at the Iron Gate and try to enter the Second Polish Republic, there’s no guidebook to the trauma of the Muranów neighborhood, there’s no sign to guide you through the bloody streets of the Uprising, the War that destroyed the city where you’ve come to see what’s been lost, what’s been rebuilt, though you walk for days on end without understanding where you are, where you’ve been, the desperation growing inside of you when you lie down at night in a youth hostel and feel the darkness pressing through the treetops, the sound of something wild brushing against the window, a winter fever, a terror in the wind, the ghosts of your ancestors pushing apart the fence outside the building.