What the Living Do Read online

  Further praise for Marie Howe and

  What the Living Do

  “The tentative transformation of agonizing, slow-motion loss into redemption is Howe’s signal achievement in this wrenching second collection, which uncovers new potential for the personal poem.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review, and chosen as one of the five best books of poetry published in 1997)

  “Her verse is almost unornamented though she manages through some great gift of will and expression to convey the sharpest feelings in long, graceful lines that seem to breathe on the page…. Despite the fathomless pain inherent in these poems, Howe never succumbs to sentimentality or self-pity; her tone is passionate yet detached, her vocabulary and imagery evocative, appropriate, and devastating.”

  —Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “These are important poems by an established practitioner, defining contemporary poetry as accessible to all…. Howe is a truth-teller of the first order. Fearless in presenting unfiltered experiences, she interweaves her simple, economical language into long, subordinated sentences, loose, enjambed couplets that spill compellingly down the page with near-invisible artistry.”

  —Providence Sunday Journal

  “The love in this book is tangible and redemptive.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  WHAT THE LIVING DO

  ALSO BY MARIE HOWE

  The Good Thief

  In the Company of My Solitude:

  American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic

  (edited with Michael Klein)

  WHAT THE LIVING DO

  poems

  Marie Howe

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  Copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

  The text of this book is composed in Electra with the display set in Electra Bold

  Desktop composition by Chelsea Dippel

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Howe, Marie, 1950–

  What the living do: poems / Marie Howe.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07590-8

  I. Title.

  PS3558.O8925W48 1997

  811'.54—DC21 97-10798

  CIP

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

  Some of these poems first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly; Agni; Columbia Magazine; the Harvard Review; the New England Review; the Plum Review; Tikkun; Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction & Deliverance (edited by Sarah Gorham and Jeffrey Skinner); and Lights, Camera, Poetry!: American Movie Poems (edited by Jason Shinder).

  “Practicing” and “The Fort” first appeared in The New Yorker.

  I am grateful to the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Engelhard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts for support: the time and space to work on these poems.

  So many friends have helped me, too many to mention here, but I’m especially grateful to Marcus Alonso, who first walked me to the road, and to Charlene Engelhard for her many gifts and for walking with me.

  I am grateful to Donna Masini for her generosity, and to my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her steady heart.

  Finally, this book would not have come into being without the specific help I received from Jane Cooper, Tony Hoagland, Georgia Heard, James Shannon, and Jason Shinder.

  Contents

  The Boy

  Sixth Grade

  The Fort

  From My Father’s Side of the Bed

  Buying the Baby

  Practicing

  The Mother

  In the Movies

  The Attic

  Beth

  The Fruit Cellar

  The Copper Beech

  The Game

  The Girl

  The Dream

  For Three Days

  Just Now

  A Certain Light

  How Some of It Happened

  Rochester, New York, July 1989

  The Last Time

  Without Music

  Pain

  Faulkner

  The Promise

  The Cold Outside

  The Grave

  The Gate

  One of the Last Days

  Late Morning

  Wanting a Child

  Tulips

  Watching Television

  The Dream

  More

  Separation

  The Bird

  Prayer

  Two or Three Times

  Reunion

  The Kiss

  Yesterday

  Memorial

  My Dead Friends

  The Visit

  The New Life

  What the Living Do

  Buddy

  With gratitude for my brother John Howe

  in memory of Jane Kenyon and Billy Forlenza

  and for the living, James Shannon.

  WHAT THE LIVING DO

  The Boy

  My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban summer night:

  white T-shirt, blue jeans—to the field at the end of the street.

  Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit overgrown

  with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,

  and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.

  He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.

  And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him—you know

  where he is—and talk to him: No reprisals. He promised. A small parade of kids

  in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in spring.

  And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father

  will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next

  month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.

  What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk

  down a sidewalk without looking back.

  I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,

  calling and calling his name.

  Sixth Grade

  The afternoon the neighborhood boys tied me and Mary Lou Mahar

  to Donny Ralph’s father’s garage doors, spread-eagled,

  it was the summer they chased us almost every day.

  Careening across the lawns they’d mowed for money,

  on bikes they threw down, they’d catch us, lie on top of us,

  then get up and walk away.

  That afternoon Donny’s mother wasn’t home.

  His nine sisters and brothers gone—even Gramps, who lived with them,

  gone somewhere—the backyard empty, the big house quiet.

  A gang of boys. They pulled the heavy garage doors down,

  and tied us to them with clothesline,

  and Donny got the deer’s leg severed from the buck his dad had killed

  the year before, dried up and still fur-covered, and sort of

  poked it at us, dancing around the blacktop in his sneakers, laughing.

  Then somebody took it from Donny and did it.

  And then somebody else, and somebody after him.

  And then Donny pulled up Mary Lou’s dress and held it up,

  and she began to cry, and I became a boy again, and shouted Stop,

  and they wouldn’t.


  And then a girl-boy, calling out to Charlie, my best friend’s brother,

  who wouldn’t look

  Charlie! to my brother’s friend who knew me

  Stop them. And he wouldn’t.

  And then more softly, and looking directly at him, I said, Charlie.

  And he said Stop. And they said What? And he said Stop it.

  And they did, quickly untying the ropes, weirdly quiet,

  Mary Lou still weeping. And Charlie? Already gone.

  The Fort

  It was a kind of igloo

  made from branches and weeds, a dome

  with an aboveground tunnel entrance

  the boys crawled through on their knees,

  and a campfire in the center

  because smoke came out of a hole in the roof,

  and we couldn’t go there. I

  don’t even remember trying, not

  inside. Although I remember

  a deal we didn’t keep—so many

  Dr Peppers which nobody drank,

  and my brother standing outside it

  like a chief: bare-chested, weary

  from labor, proud, dignified,

  and talking to us as if we could never

  understand a thing he said because

  he had made this thing and we had not,

  and could not have done it, not

  in a thousand years—true knowledge

  and disdain when he looked at us.

  For those weeks the boys didn’t chase us.

  They busied themselves with patching

  the fort and sweeping the dirt outside

  the entrance, a village of boys

  who had a house to clean, women

  in magazines, cigarettes and soda and

  the strange self-contained voices they used

  to speak to each other with.

  And we approached the clearing where

  their fort was like deer in winter

  hungry for any small thing—what

  they had made without us.

  We wanted to watch them live there.

  From My Father’s Side of the Bed

  When he had fallen deep asleep and was snoring

  and I had moved out slowly from under his heavy arm,

  I would sometimes nudge him a little,

  not to wake him—

  but so that he would sleep more lightly

  and wake more easily should the soldiers,

  maybe already assembling in the downstairs hall,

  who were going to kill my father and rape my mother,

  begin to mount the stairs.

  Buying the Baby

  In those days you could buy a pagan baby for five dollars,

  the whole class saved up. And when you bought it

  you could name it Joseph, Mary, or Theresa, the class took a vote.

  But on the day I brought in the five dollars

  my grandmother had given me for my birthday something happened

  —a fire drill? an assassination? And if it was announced

  Marie Howe has, all by herself, bought a baby in India and gets to name it,

  it was overshadowed and forgotten.

  And if I tried to picture my baby, the CARE package

  carried to her hut and placed before her, as her sisters and brothers watched,

  that image dissolved into the long shining hall to the girls’ lavatory.

  Even in my own room, waiting for Roy Orbison to sing “Only the Lonely”

  so I could sleep, I couldn’t conjure that baby up.

  The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that:

  because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it.

  Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention,

  sister to the Sin of Omission, which was

  the price for what you hadn’t done but thought.

  Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed

  it would start to happen;

  then I’d beg it to stop, and it would.

  Practicing

  I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

  a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

  of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

  That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

  how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and

  one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out

  the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our

  nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

  concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

  Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

  instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,

  plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

  We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs

  outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

  practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

  in someone’s hair…and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

  the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d

  shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

  for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,

  just before we made ourselves stop.

  The Mother

  In her early old age the mother’s toenails curl over her toes

  so that when she walks across the kitchen floor some click.

  The doctor has warned her, for the third time, that her legs will

  ulcerate if she doesn’t rub moisturizer into them so

  unwilling is she to touch her own body or care for it

  —the same woman who stood many nights at the foot of that attic stairs

  as her husband weaved and stammered up into the room where her daughter slept

  —on the landing, in her bathrobe,

  by the laundry chute, unmoving,

  like a statue in the children’s game her children play—

  and now the soft drone of her daughter’s waking voice, reasoning and

  rising, and the first slap

  and the scrape of her son’s chair pushed back from his desk,

  the air thick now with their separate listening,

  and again the girl’s voice, now quietly weeping, and the creak of her bed…

  In the game, someone has to touch you to free you

  then you’re human again.

  In the Movies

  When a man rapes a woman because he’s a soldier and his army’s won,

  there’s always somebody else holding her down, another man,

  so the men do it together, or one after the other,

  in the way my brothers shot hoops on the driveway with their friends

  while we girls watched. Their favorite game was PIG.

  A boy had to make the exact shot as the boy before him, or he was a P

  I G consecutively until he lost. I’ve been thinking

  about the sorrow of men, and how it’s different from the sorrow

  of women, although I don’t know how—

  In the movies, one soldier holds the woman down, his hand over her mouth,

  and another soldier or two holds down the husband

  who’s enraged and screaming because he can’t help the woman he loves.

  When the soldiers go, he crawls across the dirt and grass

  to reach his wife who’s speaking gibberish now.

  He kisses her cheek over and over again…

  —The woman lives on. We see her years later,

  answering a man’s questions in the drawin
g room, a crescent scar

  just above her lace collar. She’s dignified and serene. Maybe

  her son has been recently killed, maybe she’s successfully

  married her daughter.

  How can a woman love a man? In the movies, a man

  rapes a woman because he’s a soldier and his army’s won, and he

  wants to celebrate—all those nights in the dark and the mud—

  and there’s always someone else holding her down, another soldier, or