This Morning Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Sixtieth-Birthday Dinner

  A Cartoon of Hurt

  Airplane Food

  Dachau

  I Had a Tapeworm

  Fucked Up

  Half Mile Down

  Insult

  No Warning No Reason

  Hard Times

  My Young Mother

  Odd Moment

  In the Mirror

  II

  The Dog

  Mug

  Garbage Truck

  The Daily News

  Splitsville

  Melanoma Clinic Infusion Center Waiting Area

  Open Window Truck Noise 3 A.M.

  Daredevil

  Here I Am

  Sabbatical

  A Round

  Funeral

  Ill Wind

  III

  Against Which

  Very Hot Day

  Sustenance

  Earphones

  Petting Zoo

  Campus Vagrant

  This Morning

  Contentment

  Happy Anniversary

  Spring

  Miss Joy

  Condolence

  Girls Middle School Orchestra

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Ryan

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ryan, Michael, date.

  This morning : poems / Michael Ryan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-68459-8

  I. Title.

  PS3568.Y39T45 2012

  811'.54—dc23

  2011042370

  Book design by Greta D. Sibley

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Doreen and Emily

  I

  Sixtieth-Birthday Dinner

  If in the men’s room of our favorite restaurant

  while blissfully pissing riserva spumante

  I punch the wall because I am so old,

  I promise not to punch too carelessly.

  Our friend Franco cooks all night and day

  to transform blood and bones to osso buco.

  He shouldn’t have to clean them off his wall

  or worry that a customer gone cuckoo

  has mushed his knuckles like a slugger

  whose steroid dosage needs a little tweaking.

  My life with you has been beyond beyond

  and there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking.

  I just don’t want to leave it, and I am

  with every silken bite of tiramisu.

  I wouldn’t mind being dead

  if I could still be with you.

  A Cartoon of Hurt

  Burglar noise brought me downstairs bare-chested

  wielding my daughter’s aluminum softball bat

  as if in three A.M. living-room shadowland

  I’d be terrible Hector instead of a senior English professor

  and there you were, my father—

  forty years dead, rummaging my liquor,

  younger than me now and ageless and faint,

  your grip too soft to lift the fifths and quarts

  but rattling them to the old family music:

  falsetto amber-bottle-scrape-and-clink of a man

  rushing to fix himself a drink, as you always did

  the moment you came home from work.

  How could you be so unchanged by death?

  Even out of this world you want out of this world.

  —Unchanged in me, I guess. Watching you,

  aluminum softball bat drooping like a penis,

  I’m a cartoon of hurt, embarrassed by it.

  “Dad,” I whimper, but you can’t hear it.

  You abandon the liquor to open the refrigerator.

  Its sudden light flashes through you like a bomb blast.

  The twist-off beer caps shred your hands to Kleenex.

  The pulltab of a tallboy pulls half a finger off.

  You howl in pain you couldn’t feel but felt,

  the same pain of yours I couldn’t feel but felt,

  which now morphs obligingly into all my ugliness,

  demons and ogres dancing in my kitchen,

  envy and resentment, despair and disappointment

  spitting and farting, sticking out their thorned tongues.

  Airplane Food

  Compressed chicken product, festive succotashed rice,

  dead iceberg lettuce with a pale cherry tomato

  hard as a mothball, and the coup de grâce: a baby bundt cake

  I expect will taste like my passport

  but to my delight is not bad,

  half bad, or even sort of bad: it is good.

  Good good good good good all good

  this plain sweet baby bundt cake like much else

  I shall never taste touch hear see or smell,

  baked for the heavens in its own fluted tube pan

  for every blessed one of us ticketed passengers,

  purely for our pleasure and then only briefly—

  ingested, enjoyed, absorbed, and fading from memory

  since we lack the capacity to retaste baby bundt cake

  unlike the many childhood wounds I experience

  half a century later from the faintest reminders.

  This same baby bundt cake might seem scandalous

  to the incognito Michelin Guide reviewer

  in a three-star restaurant in the south of France.

  It could cost the owner-and-chef all his stars

  when losing one drives such men to relentless self-torment.

  It could cause his wife-the-hostess to cease loving him

  instantly, if she had worked eighty-hour weeks with him in concert

  painstakingly perfecting the desserts they were known for.

  “Marcel, have you lost your senses?”

  she’d scream (in French, of course).

  “This bundt cake tastes like Michael Ryan’s passport!”

  All right, she wouldn’t say like my passport

  but some local invective for culinary blasphemy

  such as “this bundt cake tastes like duck drop—

  the underside of a sink—reduction of pig bristle—

  your incontinent mother’s bidet brush holder”—

  an untranslatable invective for premeditated betrayals

  like secretly developing and serving a recipe

  based on the winner of a Pillsbury Bake-Off.

  God knows what happened after their disgrace

  to the couple, or their employees, much less their children,

  especially the boy who loved nothing more

  than working in the kitchen alongside his parents.

  He certainly wouldn’t touch a bundt cake for the rest of his life.

  The sight of someone enjoying one could make him furious

  and the aroma of baking bundt cake wafting from a Paris apartment,

  unidentifiable to other strollers among the aromas of the city,

  could make him weep as automatically as turning a faucet.

  He would never discuss the bundt cake episode in interviews

  after he had revolutionized the national pastry

  and become famous for his supernal puffy napoleons.

  Bundt cake could mean only his father’s sudden dementia
r />   and the years of grief and poverty suffered by his family,

  but, since my experience and circumstances are so different,

  I thought this bundt cake was really good.

  Dachau

  Dachau isn’t Dachau

  to the people who live there:

  it’s like “Chapel Hill” or “Charlottesville”

  only smaller and older, the quaint

  medieval city preserved meticulously

  at its center, innocent and neat,

  as if to say, “Here’s history too”

  to tourists like me who come for the death camp.

  This is what’s disturbing about it:

  the citizens of Dachau aren’t wrong

  not to not have children anymore

  and slowly starve themselves to death

  on an eight-hundred-calorie diet,

  or even—though this is less certain—

  not to drop to their knees every morning

  and press their foreheads to the ground

  and weep for what they allowed to happen.

  The most hopeful idea of all—that no matter what,

  life goes on—in Dachau

  becomes horrifying. People buying toothpaste,

  lunching on delicious beer and Weisswurst—

  as if nothing’s heinous enough

  to permanently eradicate commerce and good cheer,

  love and friendship and laughter

  that express how unfathomably lucky it is

  just to be alive. But isn’t this terrifying?

  It means humans can do anything

  to one another and go on living.

  Dachau could be an advertisement for it,

  such pastel charm and calm and beauty

  while the death camp squats on the outskirts:

  aptly closed the day I took the train from Munich—

  aptly to its place in my life

  born into postwar prosperity in the United States

  as skeletons stumbled out of death camps

  I didn’t see even on newsreels until I was in college.

  Their specter, the specter of being a good German

  as I read now about tortures in Iraq and Guantánamo,

  which are no doubt a fraction of what’s hidden,

  made me feel I’d better see what I can in person.

  The cab driver, a bright retired woman

  who was only a baby during the war,

  drove me through kilometer after kilometer

  of manicured farmland, and when I mentioned

  how far from town the Nazis built the death camp,

  she said the townspeople then

  never spoke of it, they knew but didn’t want to know

  what was going on out there, and this common agreement

  was so effective that some people

  actually were surprised when they “found out”

  after the war was over.

  Was this the story she told to tourists?

  Then it was there: a low fortress,

  eerily unimposing, startlingly small,

  a few acres defined by an eight-foot concrete wall

  topped with double struts of barbed wire,

  nothing like a maximum security prison now

  at Guantánamo or anywhere else.

  I did a chin-up to hold my face above the concrete

  and peer through the strands of barbed wire

  and, though I didn’t expect rusty gasworks

  and blood-soaked mud, the fresh white

  clapboard cottages and trimmed lawns criss-crossed

  with gravel paths looked like a prep school campus

  or, at worst, an army base, shut down.

  I held myself up as long as I could

  to feel my weight hurt the soft flesh of my hands

  before I let myself down. “It’s pretty bizarre,”

  I said more to myself than to the cab driver

  as I slid onto the back seat’s padded leather

  and cupped its soothing plumpness in my palms.

  She turned and smiled as if at a child

  and asked, “It’s a pretty bazaar?”

  (June 2005)

  I Had a Tapeworm

  I had a tapeworm, and imagined it

  flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps,

  pallid red, a quarter-inch wide

  with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes

  peeking out of my asshole as I lolled

  in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool

  (the kind that used to be in inner-city Y’s:

  windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings

  chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither

  seen nor heard of for thirty years

  were saying I’d give everyone in the pool

  my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten

  my insides and now had threaded through

  both my intestines and was trying to get out.

  Where were we? Everyone was old, old—

  gray, infirm; flaccid and thin

  or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping—

  the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps

  and black one-piece suits as if we were all

  on an outing from a nursing home.

  I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was,

  but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty,

  as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed

  brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair

  after cheating on the lover you were cheating

  on your husband with, who was at that moment

  waiting for you in another motel room

  from which you had slipped to meet me secretly:

  a secret inside a secret, buried, encased,

  as if if we dug deep enough into it

  we’d find what we were trying

  to get or stop.

  Fucked Up

  I needed to be wanted

  So I made myself into

  Someone you would look at

  If he looked at you.

  You were cute (or not) and smart (or not),

  A lovely soul (or not)—

  What mattered most to me about you

  Was if I made you hot.

  You think I didn’t know even then

  What this meant about me?

  I was not the only one

  Locked in fantasy

  Because real life was terrifying

  And difficult and dull.

  Which made you (plural squared)

  Irreplaceable.

  Of all enslavements, not the worst.

  But there weren’t enough of you,

  And many too many others

  Who so easily saw through

  The ecstatic adventure I offered

  To my self-loathing despair

  That the creep with the come-on look

  Simply was not there.

  He’s still not there, or anywhere.

  It’s years since he’s been fed.

  But he likes to bite my brain

  To show me he’s not dead