title: author: publisher: isbn10 | asin: print isbn13: ebook isbn13: language: subject publication date: lcc: ddc: subject: Candy Necklace Wesleyan Poetry Bedient, Calvin Wesleyan University Press 0819522341 9780819522344 9780585371467 English American poetry 1997 PS3552.E314C36 1997eb 811/.54 American poetry Page i Candy Necklace Page ii WESLEYAN POETRY Page iii Candy Necklace Cal Bedient Page iv Wesleyan University Press Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 © 1997 by Cal Bedient All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of Lannan Foundation in the publication of this book Page v For Madison Faulkner, b 1995 How beautiful you are I see Gertrude Stein Page vii CONTENTS The Night Is Cold The Earth Is the Weakest of the Flames Ten Thousand Ears Stood Out from Shaved Heads and Listened Back a Van Gogh Yellow Speech Is Kinder than the Night 10 The Ache of Not Yet Being 12 The Gull's Cry My Watermark 15 Muse of the Tender Night 17 Spring Rights 21 No Whip, No Velvet 23 The Wild Troops of Proportion 25 The Shepherd Leading His Flock to the Rainbow 27 Unclean Poem 29 The Ave of Our Path 32 Woman with the Stuff 34 Great World Intentional 36 In the Fox's Red Face There Is Hard Beauty 38 Venus Squirming in the Pool of Art 40 blue fire 41 Baskets and Ashes 45 My Ears' Red Morning in the Snow 46 First Stain, Second Stain 48 Hands Tied Behind Each Back by the Maniac Desire Possum 49 51 Love-In Mit Wittgenstein 52 Candy Necklace 54 Page viii White Snow Falling Without Wind 59 On Leaving My Son's Wedding Before the Cutting of the Cake 61 How Do You Do I Adore You 63 In the Place Where the Dream Stumbles Over Its Reality 65 The Dead Put Up a Bad Fight 67 When Zeus Rid Heaven of Necessity 72 New Music in Every Face 74 The Child Is the Keeper of the Garden 77 Very Oyster, Very Few 78 Can That Be She 82 Bush Vet Keeping 84 Grief 86 Any Son of a Bitch 87 The Gods Do Not Fear Because They Are Not Any Place Among 89 Acknowledgments 91 Page 1 Page 78 Very Oyster, Very Few To mount the sun-wave and come down shucked and blackened, called oyster, called fewthis, cousin D., is you You cry as you tape out the wheedling light, cry because your darling girl told the police on you not very sorry not nearly that This is it, cousin, the end of "Papa" the end of how can I it's death it's sugar sugar one more time So let gas equal apocalypse apocalypse equal amends and get on with the minor mention in the evening paper, minor pain and minor sorry and in a minute your good-bye (Did you stuff enough rags in the exhaust? Can you find that deep-back keyhole?) Ah, cousin, is this you, to be so lettuce-balled, you who were danger and big, fire in her mouth her lap her sleep hinting and boldness bristle and lumpy hands? You who were allowed? Your Sunday river voice made her butter made her nuts made her your pearl and stew And didn't she eat it up eat you up when she was a girl? Didn't she run to you first daddy look with her injuries? Wasn't she ally and buttercup yellow chin? Your hum your come in? Page 79 Apricots have bees and you a daughter, and she a daughter, it's heaven and its rot, and no one looks at my history, I'm made against, oyster and low, my boyhood was mother lookaway, father cockahorse, father this-is-love Now you slump in your seat, your car storing gas like a grave, a men's room cartoon under a tacked-up court order because your grown-up daughter, daughter leg-tremor, has got tough, daughter limp limbs will break the wrist that twisted open doll number one, then number two All right, cousin, I'll hate her a moment with you, for daughters should be darling, daughters should be coil and puss, puss and loyal, puss and sweet, should pay for their stains and not rear up Funny how they forget their early-tipped-moon nods the whorish whisper deals and for what? a formal and the keys to the truck You're groggy, you're going, good-bye to the all-fingering light, goody-bye to the stepped row of women and girls, the youngest three, holding up the world's longest snake, now dirty and without Good-bye to nervous persistence, not without and as inclined, Page 80 small doses, immunity, carelessness and carefulness, triumph and dry mouth when the woman upstairs coughed awake in the sneak down hours; it was breathtakingly now it was what it was, not less, spatula tongue and mother won't hear (she dare not) Cousin, it hurts me to see you so gagging, cornered, afraid of what the men hawking up spit would say of their hero foreman standup guy if they knew of the tree house, the game of pull down underwear, the color-sketch you showed her of the bomb you'd stitched into her sleeping heart She remembers now plainly not prettily in pieces, she's running a marathon of vomit and recall Would you cry come daughter ride in on a fire truck say you love me do? Ah, cousin, it's we who will come to you, your cousins, brothers, your sons, all the men who might have been you Yet you'll get rid of us before we get rid of you, we'll feel you sweat in our skin when we say daughter sit on my lap plant a big one here, hear the exhaust sobs, sort your inexhaustible excuses, very mushroom very poison very us, Page 81 very pink caterpillar larvae wagging on end in the gray lilac spawnclouds we burned when we pillaged the yard as boys Oh, cousin, we were blazing sticks, rapine and legion You've taken much away, we are few Page 82 Can That Be She This is the bathroom where he let her clean herself up, disgusting blood-rag This is the arise-and-color that held the pistol This is the pistol that shot light into the shadow men at the firing range These are the bullets her watery fingers jammed into the pistol for god's sake mean it You can imagine the yelp of the animal boy He pissed himself here, in the jeans This is the hand the gun yessed yes she could wait one more minute before firing again It was because 911 said don't kill him that she didn't kill him The voice wanted to know his age she asked him how old are you going to be when you die He said twenty-one she said to the voice twenty-one These are the policemen who broke through her door she wasn't hearing them This the nakedness shocked back into itself as they stared They wanted to wrench her nose straight again Jagged teeth she must have bitten the little bastard to the bone The dental assistants called her Amazon she knew she wasn't in this world anymore You can hear the women's voices lined up in the courtroom to hector him This is the violent boy look at me bitch when I come sitting sour alone The same who'd felt sunflower tissuey pooled and warm when he got back in The same who hit her nose her ear when he entered her because he would not give in This is his sentence: 66 years This is hers: Page 83 How climb the ladder to the woman she was? How cut the new screen without slicing her skin? How wake her without letting her see the woman no longer in the world? Page 84 Bush Vet Keeping Matt, a thing must have its getting in itself It is sidewise lost in a soldier's sleep Not vacating like a woman, compressed lips in a photograph, or it's the ugly of all the pretty it has seen Each thing its own most obliged Five years old, you scream at your burning mother to stop: wake up, Matt, you're too many explosions: burst sac: gasoline tank: napalm Heal with me Turn the color of thinking Of bark A thing's fall in and hup are in itself How your temper flares! Hang on my wall, windsock taken in from the wind, your anorectic tomahawk beside you Put that machete away; it looks depraved The train going by is full of anger and serenity, it shakes the cabin, the cabin heals in it What rejoins itself is one So very pleased ''Three days in a hole beneath the enemy Platoons begged to have me: a half-breed: I was luck I gobbled crystal They'll kill me if I told what all we did A woman split apart at the cunny." Matt, a thing must country backwoods in itself You'll be entire and contained until a woman comes, the bright confusion Listen: the train rushes at the night, the night remainstake comfort in that The train is first ahead of itself, then in the heart of its noise, then drags its throat toward the coast The river alders practice the white syllables They stay Birds, rain, their only distress Page 85 There's truth in what doesn't rock You've seen cabbage pinked by beet juice: it's a color not found but different I don't care for it A thing must have its please be seated in itself Today, after the rain, a turd-like reptile stood in the road Stubby, muddy periscope eyes With my stick I tamped the earth beside it; it didn't move The packed ground rang like a bell A thing must cup its stillness in itself Yet, I thought, he ought to find the female, the one And not be a pipe bomb left to itself Tempting to machete him into sausage rounds Well, what have we done? The cabin isn't balling the stars, is it? Nothing can hurt us here unless a woman comes, a bright confusion Billiard triangle unbroken Lonesome and looking How you Unkind to be displeased Chance for a little boasting To feel strong? Awkward Unlocked Bugled up Aswim The train goes forth, men and women are aboard But the unhistorical is best A thing must find its deep before and rest Tonight my nerve-ends hunch I picture the creature's head, swollen by rain, crashing through the pane andthen what? Somehow, Matt, it's you Silly But don't sleep yet Hang there while I find my flute Don't dream And no more of "yur a controllin' son of a bitch." I don't want to put you out, know what I mean? Your "I prefer women you've got that masculine burn." You're the maniac here, I'm the artist I turn my fingers into air A thing must gentle over and be fair Page 86 Grief Grief, you bridge, get on with it See the woman across, the one with the frozen little pork chop heels clopping ahead of the man who says, "like it or not," and she not liking the company Lose her a little at a time, till she's just a hat among the trees Does she fear those mobile clouds will dip and reel? Let her look down at the fish forming beneath the painter's brush Red-gold Cold red-gold Eyes no choice No, let her look up again It is well to have something to lift one's eyes to: moon tilted on its Modigliani neck, not permanent but ravishingoh, can I say sadness or will she hear? Grief, don't leave her there all year eye painted open under the bridge Page 87 Any Son of a Bitch Mother of the postscript, squinty voice from phosphorescent sheets, and you more weak than the sea, glassy, slippery, crashed, you'd lift me, would you, tease me into nuptials of lyric flies high on the carrion scent of La Push, when this is what I am, this boybicyclecrush on Highway in the great noise of the Cascades, my brain scraped, my neck snapped, my blood-tongue creeping toward the white and hanged waters of the mountains of dead snow, yes, broken and leaking is what I am, nameless, and I this T-shirted girl kneeling on pavement that will never flow again, I scream jay-voiced at the boy to live, oh why won't he live? and I this father and two sons collapsed together on the bank, sitting with arms pulling at each other's shoulders, a dun grief braid wracked and weeping, openly weeping because we're killers, yes, and he who drives around the flashing white cop car survivor and escapee is also me, man of the fair who was child of the rainy weather Clasp me around the shoulder, father, clasp me around the shoulder, son, we have tangled ourselves in our tethers till our tongues rasp on our own prickly beards, oh, who can remember how it was, did we tear the feathers from her clouds, till she who could have massed in the passes and poured on ranching and sweetly humming and trying to make a little green come of a little rain was flash flood, flash flood and then long broken-toilet trickle of after-rain? Perhaps she'd been quiet for too long, so we rummaged her, brought her to life, till she was played out, a ditch-soggy pop-up bitch of a book, unreadable Page 88 tearing sky and skin? Wiped her out just by being men? These boulders beside the buttons torn from her blouse, this lake her caught tear? If she'd never left her original dusk, if we'd not wanted all the place, not been the not-wanted who wanted all the place, what might we have become? I brown bear spot on the turquoise mountain, the cloud grazes from my hand, skin of many scents, oh farewell to sundry lovely slopes of the flesh, new snow and laughter, and I a blue weather at my Cascade table who will not kiss time mad on her mouth the ambulance screaming down the pass, and what father would find sleep in the made bed of this page? What sons who'd sit beside a known killer, his sobs jackhammering his head toward the earth, and hold him, shaking with his shaking, as any son of a bitch should? Page 89 The Gods Do Not Fear Because They Are Not Any Place Among Winged Victory pressing outward on my sternum into toward unleashed, don't drop me, brawny wings flung back, stone feathering, stone living speedier than flesh Make the noisome guards pry us apart! Don't drop me slain-piglet pink, like the tied-together shoes (signed by the New York City Ballet) tattered out in a Saratoga shop, my mouth scuffed horny toe What no longer moves, no longer hopes And you, moon over Saratoga, weren't you over Belsen too? Yet you'd dolphin would you, blue belly white arch you'd blue evening dolphin? Does everything that moves have hope? Heart, hitchhiking Route 66 in Feininger's stopped shot, cocky thumb stiff out, fingers crossed behind your back, be glad the century's mobile under clouds pasted all over like steamer trunks with countries you've yet to see the world in, not sticking like the ribs you ate at by the West End Garage of a town without an East, glad the Texaco stars come out at night o dogs flop-sentry on wooden porches and hearing human voices (Mary's kidney was removed, Wilma has to marry the Talmadge boy), that's no life for a dog: get a move on, there's a rabbit in the Phelps's lettuce patch Or take my Aunt Stella, yes, someone take her out of her Spokane shack, her legs hogshead barrels, the rabbits dead in the pen: when twelve she lived among tramps by the tracks, where she was not unwanted Slapped home she was barefoot harder to destroy Where steel Victory tracks, hope owns the miles URGERS Have you seen the tender neck of crystal broken by a sound stretching its plumage winged fierce desire for better wine? I, lingering, drink the spilled blood of that flying rose Page 90 Here where trees plume death-shadow over luscious Irish pasture, o motion garden I hope among, I think of Primo Levi's eyes' logy blood sharing the dove of shame with Russian rescuers who did not know where not to look in looking at the Lager dove At home in Turin zebra stripe guilt years delivering, Levi killed himself, shame sticky mourning dove smashed on his chest unkind Oh brush it roll back the gray dumb damage tongue and bloody trail, unhappy these words stirring still timid among Page 91 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A sabbatical in Ireland, generously granted by the University of California, enabled me to complete this collection I am also indebted to the Department of English and the Friends of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, for special assistance For instruction and inspiration, I'm indebted to Rita Dove, Carolyn Forché, Patricia Goedicke, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Sharon Olds, and Robert Pinsky Special thanks to Brenda Hillman for her encouragement Susan McCabe greatly helped with the arrangement of the poems My gratitude, also, to Judith Taylor, for several kinds of furtherance The author thanks the editors of the following journals, in which a number of these poems appeared, a few in different versions: Agni, The Antioch Review, The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, Pequod, Poetry, and Salmagundi In "The Night is Cold" the quotations from Plato are adapted from Simone Weil's Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks The sentence on the "loneliest" is from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra The title "The Gull's Cry My Watermark" is drawn from John Banville's novel Ghosts In "Love-In Mit Wittgenstein" the quotations are adapted from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Remarks and Ray Monk's biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius In "Speech Is Kinder than the Night" the sentence on "testicles of hatred" is from Antonin Artaud "The Wild Troops of Proportion" draws from Aristotle and Keats's "Hyperion." "Venus Squirming in the Pool of Art" adapts certain statements about art in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay "The Unpresentable," collected in his book The Subject of Philosophy "A tree is weaving a basket," adapted in "Baskets and Ashes," appears in Laura Jensen's book of poems Bad Boats "Hands Tied Behind Each Back" draws from three novels: Reinaldo Arenas's The Palace of the White Skunks, Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses "Bush Vet Keeping" is dedicated to Matthew Long Walk Purdue, missing person ...Page i Candy Necklace Page ii WESLEYAN POETRY Page iii Candy Necklace Cal Bedient Page iv Wesleyan University Press Published by University... 48 Hands Tied Behind Each Back by the Maniac Desire Possum 49 51 Love-In Mit Wittgenstein 52 Candy Necklace 54 Page viii White Snow Falling Without Wind 59 On Leaving My Son's Wedding Before the