Lot's Wife
How simple the pleasures of those childhood days,
Simple but filled with exquisite satisfactions.
The iridescent labyrinth of the spider,
Its tethered tensor nest of polygons
Puffed by the breeze to a little bellying sail--
Merely observing this gave infinite pleasure.
The sound of rain. The gentle graphite veil
Of rain that makes of the world a steel engraving,
Full of soft fadings and faint distances.
The self-congratulations of a fly,
Rubbing its hands. The brown bicameral brain
Of a walnut. The smell of wax. The feel
Of sugar to the tongue: a delicious sand.
One understands immediately how Proust
Might cherish all such postage-stamp details.
Who can resist the charms of retrospection?
Excerpted from The Darkness and the Light by Anthony Hecht. Copyright© 2001 by Anthony Hecht. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of
Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Death the Whore
I
Some thin gray smoke twists up against a sky
Of German
silver in the sullen dusk
From a small chimney among leafless
trees.
The paths are empty, the weeds bent and dead;
Winter has
taken hold. And what, my dear,
Does this remind you of? You are
surprised
By the familiar manner, the easy, sure
Intimacy of my
address. You wonder
Whose curious voice is this? Why should that
scene
Seem distantly familiar? Did something happen
Back in my
youth on a deserted path
Late on some unremembered afternoon?
And
now you'll feel at times a fretful nagging
At the back of your mind
as of something almost grasped
But tauntingly and cunningly
evasive.
It may go on for months, perhaps for years.
Think of the
memory game that children played
So long ago. A grownup brought a
tray
Laden with objects hidden by a shawl
Or coverlet with fine
brocaded flowers
Beneath which, like the roofs of a small
city,
Some secret things lay cloaked. Then at a signal
The cloth
was whisked away for thirty seconds.
You were allowed to do nothing
but look,
And then the cover was replaced. Remember?
The tray
contained bright densely crowded objects,
Sometimes exotic--a small
cloisonne egg,
A candle-snuffer with an ivory handle--
But simple
things as well. It never occurred
To any of the children there to
count them;
You had been told simply to memorize
The contents of
the tray. Each child was given
Paper and pencil to list what he
recalled
And no one ever finally got them all;
Something always
escaped. Perhaps a needle,
A gum eraser or a plastic ruler.
And so
it is that now, as you're about
To eat or light a cigarette,
something
Passes too swiftly before you can take aim,
Passes in
furtive silence, in disguise,
Glimpsed only hazily in
retrospect--
Like a clock's strokes recounted once they're
done,
Never with confidence.
And
now you're angry
At what you think of as my long
digression
When in fact it's the eclipses of your mind,
Those
sink-holes, culverts, cisterns long avoided
As dangerous, where the
actual answer lies.
As for my indirection, I'll just say
I have
more time than I know what to do with.
Let me give you a hint. The
voice you hear
Is not the voice of someone you remember--
Or
rather, it's that voice now greatly altered
By certain events of
which you've partly heard,
Partly imagined, altogether
feared.
Does that help? No, I didn't think it would.
Perhaps we
can return another time
(A time when you're conveniently
abstracted)
To the topic of my voice and of that
smoke.
II
Much time elapses. (I could count the
days;
You, for your part, have no idea how many.)
Today a color ad
for undergarments,
Some glossy pages of Victoria's
Secret,
Modeled by a young blonde catches your eye.
Nothing so
vivid as a memory
Results. Perhaps a vague erotic sense,
A
fleeting impulse down between your legs,
Stirs like a sleeping dog.
Your mind begins
Its little, paltry Leporello's list
Of former
girlfriends who pass in review
As images, stripped even of their
names.
And then you linger upon one. It's me.
Don't be surprised.
All that was long ago.
Your indolent thought goes over my young
breasts,
Remembering, fondling, exciting you.
How very long ago
that was. It lasted
Almost two years. Two mainly happy years.
In
all that time, what did you learn of me?
My name, my body, how best
to go about
Mutual arousal, my taste in food and drink
And what
would later be called "substances."
(These days among my friends I
might be called
"A woman of substance" if I were still
around.)
You also learned, from a casual admission,
That I had
twice attempted suicide.
Tact on both sides had left this
unexplored.
We both seemed to like sex for the same reason.
It
was, as they used to say, a "little death,"
A tiny interval devoid of
thought
When even sensation is so localized
Only one part of the
body seems alive.
And when you left I began the downhill
slope.
First one-night stands; then quickly I turned pro
In order
to get all the drugs I wanted.
My looks went fast. I didn't really
care.
The thing that I'd been after from the first,
With you, with
sex, with drugs, was oblivion.
So it was easy. A simple
overdose
Knocked back with half a bottle of good Scotch.
In later
years the rumors found you out
Through mutual friends. And somehow
you remembered
That I had been disowned by my family.
My
parents would have nothing to do with me
After they found I'd been a
prostitute,
To say nothing of my trial suicides.
So, as you
guessed, when I at last succeeded,
They acted as if I never had been
born.
("Let the day perish ...," as the scripture says.)
There
was no funeral, no cemetery,
Nowhere for you to come in
pilgrimage--
Although from time to time you thought of me.
Oh yes,
my dear, you thought of me; I know.
But less and less, of course, as
time went on.
And then you learned by a chance word of mouth
That
I had been cremated, thereby finding
More of oblivion than I'd even
hoped for.
And now when I occur to you, the voice
You hear is not
the voice of what I was
When young and sexy and perhaps in
love,
But the weary voice shaped in your later mind
By a small
sediment of fact and rumor,
A faceless voice, a voice without a
body.
As for the winter scene of which I spoke--
The smoke, my
dear, the smoke. I am the smoke.
Excerpted from Flight Among the Tombs by Anthony Hecht. Copyright© 1998 by Anthony Hecht. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of
Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.