The Luxury of a Few Caved-In Moments

        Gussie dropped her head onto the baby’s and brushed her lips against the
        soft hair. She allowed herself the luxury of a few caved-in moments,
        trying to find the strength to enter the house.
                  —Maureen Armstrong

1
None of your characters
was especially well-educated,
brave, hopeful, or beautiful
enough to feel loved by fate.

Some were molested by priests
and then terrified of what
in themselves remained unmolested.

They all hated their old Connecticut houses
and country-club privileges,
the brutal expense of
their time-shares,
of the indomitable dance,
the unreprieved grief
of their Irish Catholic pain.

Some volunteered in soup kitchens
and used-furniture shops,
languishing among the
volatile emergencies
of the stricken
and the discarded,
the too-far-down-to-find
who, like themselves,
explained and apologized for sins they were not guilty of,
every minute hour day of
their unembellished lives.

2
I, who found love late,
earned just enough money
to get by, often
couldn’t find
the simpleton’s insight,
the twist of spite,
the human suppleness,
the tender interruption
of sober sensibility,
without which
it’s impossible
to write, or bear
the scrutiny
of any visibility.

I, who obeyed laws
buried deep in
the collapsed bellies
of motionless nightmares,

presumed
to know how
to help you
become a writer.

3
Teaching,
the great presumption,
the great merging
of sympathy
and mutual self-loathing,
of anxious mistakes
and the unfulfillment
of resurrection dreams,

is primarily,
basically,
fundamentally,
quintessentially,
an act of murder.

One is asked
to ask another
to kill in themselves,
at great risk
to everyone involved,
the utter predictability
of their ignorance,

to subject
to inexorable humiliation
the broken vows
and opposable prejudices
of their well-deserved illusions,

in order to attempt
to change them
from whom they never
actually were
to someone usually
profoundly less than
who they ever
wanted to be,
exactly.

To someone
comprising
a little of you
and a little of me.

4
Everyone fancies himself a teacher.
Our mailman explains why
dogs bark at him: “You come,
they bark, you go away.
They’re control freaks.”

Our plumber delineates
his rich and famous clients:
“To the Jews I say
I’m Puerto Rican,
to the Christians, Jewish,
to the famous, crazy,
to the filthy rich, horny
because above all else
the rich and famous like
crazy Hispanic Yids
who’ll fuck anything.”

My barber twirls his scissors,
winks at my persona
imprisoned in his mirrored infinity,
describes in detail
how the wrist, fingers,
and scissors merge
with the peculiar foliage
of the beloved
under the stress
of relentless sorrow.

Basically,
I was helping you
rid yourself
of the illogical farce,
the murderous inept factory
of your pummeled-into-oblivion
self-esteem.

Indeed,
in the manner of fiction,
you were learning
to distance yourself
from yourself
with divine tranquility,

and I,
frankly,
was attempting to
accomplish this
by absorbing you

into my bloodstream,
into my bone marrow.

5
Thus sprang
out of the rollicking,
cranky upset,
the bruised,
betrayed vulnerability
of you and me,
Gussie, a character
who obeyed no laws
of rise and fall,
of theology, psychology, epistemology,
or hurdy-gurdy self-gratification schemes,

other than the pendulum swerve
of her brutal immunology,
by which I mean:
the lunatic set of organs
and randy tissues
the body recognizes
as its own
and thus doesn’t attack
with the antibodies
of its historical imagination.

6
There are things
one cannot teach:
the accident of change,
the solace of knowledge,
the beauty of self-cruelty,
the vowels of woe
and alphabet of
unpardonable blasphemies,
the tiny, ceaseless
valedictory
lamentations of
one’s real biography.

After we stopped speaking,
hung up, I’d sit there,
glowering, regretting
everything I said,
wishing I’d admitted
that no one under
any conditions
ever actually
saves anyone.

7
I was never Irish or Catholic,
rich or leisured
no priest ever touched me,
but I knew what
it felt like
to be screamed at,
repeatedly.

How tiny,
vanquished,
insignificant,
unprotected,
whittled down
to zero
one becomes.

Still, I
looked forward
to our conversations,
me, staring out my study window
at the rasping hodgepodge
of the rain, you,
driving down a far-flung
nighttime highway
in your husband’s vinegar gray Porsche,
accompanied by
the sonic echoes of
his overbearing roar.

8
The very sibilance
of her name, Gus-sie,
delighted you and me;
“Guess what Gussie said
to his face, yet!” Often,
she spoke to you
in a dream, soft sweet jazz sass
over easy unafraid
to shut her study door,
she’d never hide her diary or cell phone
in a safe-deposit box (like you),
be afraid to give her home number
to her therapist, no not she,
not this lady who listened closely
and understood the great pearly Lady of grief,
Billie Holiday’s unbreakable mercy—
Gus-sie—also
took shit from no one,
believe me.

9
Tell me please—how did you
find her? Hidden,
like a bouquet of valley lilies,
a shameless flea
in the hair of the god Hypnos,
inside an apology,
one of Zarathustra’s aphoristic hymns,
under a stone
to the left of
a belligerent triangle,
on the fragile corner
between Insatiable Desire Avenue
and The Deepest Ebb of Fear Street?

Did you really think
the Red Sea would open
and she’d lead
you out of bondage,

that fiction
would set you free?

10
You didn’t finish her.
She was left unrealized
in the shadows
of a hurricane-destroyed kitchen
desperately seeking dialogue
out of which an idea
might reverberate
into a solution
to a predicament
even Job refused
tolerance of,

her story being:
After a hurricane leveled
her island (Nantucket) house,
after her husband chose work
over her and their four children,
after he screamed and broke
a chair into a million insults,
threatened to destroy
her reputation as
a manifold slave,
and take her children away
if she left him, after
his rage was spent,
she smelled her strength
in the delectable innocence
of her baby’s intelligent hair,
and didn’t reach for whisky (like you did),
but looked deep
into the umbrage
of her boldfaced soul
and found the ultimate revenge
of imagining herself
into pure being.

Telling me, your voice
found the industriousness of,
the perseverance of,
its rage. You, who spent
your life regretting
every other thing
you said, were,
with the force of all four horsemen
of the apocalypse,
finally, speaking up.

After
all the pummeling,
dream-cowering,
worrying whose side
your mother would take,
fear of being penniless,
you found someone
who didn’t fall to her knees
and beg forgiveness
for being only half of
someone respectful enough
of herself, no, not this lady;
she pounded her tiny fists,
refused to disappear
into despair, she, Gussie,
took her kids and left
the motherfucker.

11
Death doth interrupt.
You were two, maybe three pages
away from ending it.
Gussie, in your mind’s eye,
was headed out the door
and already driving north
with her children toward Maine
or Canada, or the jungles of Eden.
She was simultaneously
heading toward
and away from
the end and the beginning of
her story.

What’s the term,
a word meaning
imprisoned
in the distorted reality
of someone else’s
disturbed consciousness?

Being driven crazy by it.
What’s the word?

I’m a teacher,
I should know.

12
In the last draft
he stood there, bent,
listening, she between him
and her fear of herself,
holding the baby,
telling God to strike him dead,
telling her mother to disappear,
telling her heart to stop stuttering
and grow wings
and rise, rise up
out of its own depths.

In other words:
Awaken!

13
The last time we spoke,
you sick with cancer, calling
from a hospital bed in Boston,
your voice buoyant, telling me
the not-yet-written end
of the story: Gussie calling
her mother from a highway
to say, yes, she was headed north
toward Canada, maybe,
beginning over with nothing
but her curiosity to see
how far a little self-respect
would take her. To say
everything was just dandy,
your children all healthy
and settled, you did what
you could, finally,
you just wished you had a little more time
to finish your story
and say good-bye to Gussie.

Imagine, you laughed,
a character, born of
your imagination, alive
in the world, living the life
you were afraid to,
out there somewhere,
forever heading north.

Yes, indeed,
this is the way one should live.

Philip Schultz and his wife, the sculptor Monica Banks, and their two sons, live in East Hampton, New York. He is the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for creative writing in Manhattan, which is going into its twenty-second year. His most recent book of poems, Failure, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

“The Luxury of a Few Caved-In Moments” appears in our Spring 2009 issue.