Heroin
I left a message for my editor to send copies of the contracts
to my new agent,
and then I read a passage about how no one talks
about heroin anymore, and the old life came back to me,
it was early yet, I hadn't used heroin for years,
I was one of the few rural junkies in the nation,
one of the few who tended cattle, there I was
nodding on a rock as the cows, stiff with unendurable shyness,
stumbled up to me. My wife and I would eat mashed potatoes
from the pot and lie out on the porch smoking reefer
until it got too dark to see. I bought drugs
from my friend at the railroad repair depot
just off the main line from Norfolk, Indochinese material,
Long Bin—to Guam—to Fort Ord—to VA—then by Mr. Fixit train to me,
traveling in a nylon medic's bag. I never trusted
the supply—like love—it could dwindle,
or simply give way,
the flexed utensil, like one of those measuring sticks
you unfold and lay across a map; anybody could step on it.
I loved the graciousness of heroin, the way everything externalized
and obvious in the daylight opened its shirt and revealed its soft pale breasts.
The world slept curled in its own foolhardiness.
And my wife came over the blankets to me and seemed
not to mind who I was. We inserted words
into spaces in the rain. For years I remembered the words
and whispered them to myself, half thinking I might
conjure her back into the world. They never caught us.
We missed them on the way to Mexico, to Puebla,
where eventually the line gave out. We slept on a bench outside a church.
It was two days before she died without regaining consciousness,
as I say in the memoir they are paying me handsomely for.
Real Time
. . . where Hiroshima was, someone said, there's a little star,
and I saw this star, like spit on the sidewalk
. . . and there's a quiet inlet of oaks,
someone said, a brazen light,
and a perpetual return, another promised,
and someone was always having a bad time of it,
grim forecasts and the heart worn down,
punched-in shops on the highway where we bought beer,
and that spring we argued all night,
night after night, and couldn't save the marriage—all that
someone said, will be replaced,
like a city replaced by a meadow
and replaced by a city again—and the little shudder
I got thinking of absent time,
or time without us in it,
and how, sometimes, a friend said, any thought of another
is godlike, is grace, and I read somewhere
about how tired explorers get just before they reach the goal,
about various seaweeds, movies shown in the open air,
about a river pressing in among the trees, and someone said
we all wish to publish manifestos,
and in the decline of summer that year
translations of old ideas appeared like new,
and someone nearly hysterical claimed
Honesty
Maybe Anna won't arrive.
Maybe mordant self-concern will become love.
O you who know things
never change. I imagine
E. A. Poe kissing his child bride, thirteen-year-old girl
her mother standing in for his mother
sweet tempered raking roast potatoes from the fire,
and shiver with tension and morbidity.
He was appalled by loneliness
by scary apartness, shuddering with resentment
and an alarming sense of smothering.
He lived awhile in a bee glade,
high on the island, in NYC.
Anna is
Anna Karenina. Maybe
she won't reach the station.
I used to think the fact my
crazy mother was still alive
meant there was hope. A fool's notion.
She became unreachable
long ago.
In the untidy southern village I come from
this is not unusual.
People are set.
Vietnam was so great, my friend says,
because folks who would never
get a chance to change their minds, did.
Like my friend's father fat ex-Air Force sergeant
who at last, weeping at the grave,
cried Please God end this, it's no good.
Not the end this important, but the it's no good.
A change of heart.
Not Vronsky saying okay
I didn't mean it, forget the war,
I love you let's get married raise a family,
but Anna.
It's no good. And Edgar Poe,
this weeping into my hat, tugging the sleeve
of a dead child woman: It's no good.
Once in my junkie days I kept a cattle herd.
It was winter in the mountains,
prohibitive, rage like a canvas shirt caked in ice,
I pushed hay bales out of a truck.
The cows, fretful women,
their bony hips, moaning, snotty,
when they snuffled up
I'd punch them in the face.
I wanted to punch
my wife
and the side of the mountain
and my life snarled like a deer in a fence.
I was filled with longing
for joyful permanent fixations, and insight,
for play and a secular individualism,
a spiritual life and some unnameable
opportunity like a right I vaguely
remembered and couldn't get purchase on.
It was no good.
It took me years and one mistake
after another to realize this
and even then I simply got washed out,
put aside
I didn't really learn a lesson.
I know it's not so much the mistakes
not the divisions, or cultural impediments,
the threats and isolation techniques
we run on each other
it's the heart.
My father went to his grave unchanged.
So did Poe.
And beautiful Anna Karenina.
And Ovid. Consuela Concepcion, too, my piano teacher.
They say in the end
Mussolini was so terrified his mind seized and he couldn't speak.
He sat there swelled-up and bug-eyed. This is not it.
Or anyone drowning or
lurching from the fire shrieking he didn't want this to happen.
There is so much gibberish. And imprecision.
No wonder we lock in.
Like you, I get scared.
I used to go to my friend's house,
sink into the old sofa on his back porch
and read all day. His family
and the ducks and dogs would pass by,
let me be—discreet love—I'd feel safe.
It was just after I stumbled out of my second marriage.
My friend practiced a religion
remarkable in its narrow-mindedness. He inserted
his children into this olla podrida
like a man stuffing leaves into a shoe.
It hurt to see it.
Broken saddle bronc of a beautiful face he had
and his wife a slim twist of blonde girl cunning
and fretful without shame
about anything—I spoke up eventually and got tossed.
I've spent years watching television.
I lie on the couch
eating chocolate and watching television,
arguing with some woman in my head.
Television says the world is not a mysterious place.
Don't worry, it says,
you don't have to change a thing.
And then I remember digging wild leeks,
buying eggs from a crippled old lady
who glanced into the next room sadly
as if a great novelist was dying in there,
and went on
talking, like Kissinger after the war.
And how scary things became when my wife
got up close. Change of heart.
Love leeching the lining away, exposing the pulp.
Stupidity and malice
and a fitful generosity,
shortsightedness and painful posturing,
and things continue lust as they are,
nut cases, disputes,
overbearing stupid
claims, modernity hamming it up,
life someone says only a device for entering other realms
—all these in the hopper.
And the tough decisions.
Poe dreaming of a cold finger
picking the lock. Anna stuffing screams back down.
Let go, or stay with it?
The Dali Lama saying Sure, sure, I'll take the sprouts,
including the Chinese in everything.
My girlfriend stunned by the power of her own rage,
nothing she can do about it yet,
rebuking paradise, groping for the cat.
(c) Charlie Smith. All rights reserved.
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