The Mind-Body Problem

Mind- Body Problem
 
When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
 but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
wanting to be touched the way an otter
loves water, the way a giraffe
wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling
 the tender leaves at the tops of the trees. It seems
unfair, somehow, that my body had to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high- minded romantic notions
that made me tyrannize and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English- professor husband ashamed of his wife—
her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels. Perhaps
my body would have liked to make some of our dates,
to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl
with “None of your business!” Perhaps
it would have liked more presents: silks, mascaras.
If we had had a more democratic arrangement
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis
and Sidney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
instead of the current curious shift of power
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body as though by some
swift and powerful dog. How eagerly
it plunges ahead, not stopping for anything,
as though it knows exactly where we are going.
 
 
Lives of the Nineteenth- Century Poetesses
 
As girls they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
Their mothers saw right away no man would marry them.
So they must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer as governesses out of Chekhov,
malnourished on theology, boiled eggs, and tea,
but given to outbursts of pride that embarrass everyone.
After the final quarrel, the grand
renunciation, they retire upstairs to the attic
or to the small room in the cheap off- season hotel
and write Today I burned all your letters or
I dreamed the magnolia blazed like an avenging angel
and when I woke I knew I was in Hell.
No one is surprised when they die young,
having left all their savings to a wastrel nephew,
to be remembered for a handful
of “minor but perfect” lyrics,
a passion for jam or charades,
and a letter still preserved in the family archives:
“I send you herewith the papers of your aunt
who died last Tuesday in the odor of sanctity
although a little troubled in her mind
by her habit, much disapproved of by the ignorant,
of writing down the secrets of her heart.”
 
 
A Walk
 
When I go for a walk and see they’re tearing down
some old red- plush Rialto for an office building
and suddenly realize this was where Mama and I
saw Lovers of Teruel three times in a single sitting
 
and the drugstore where we went afterward for ice cream’s
gone, too, and Mama’s gone and my ten- year- old self,
I admire more than ever the ancient Chinese poets
who were comforted in exile by thoughts of the transience
of life.
 
How yesterday, for instance, quince bloomed in the emperor’s
courtyard
but today wild geese fly south over ruined towers.
Or, Oh, full moon that shone on our scholarly wine parties,
do you see us now, scattered on distant shores?
 
A melancholy restraint is surely the proper approach
to take in this world. And so I walk on, recalling
Hsin Ch’i- chi, who when old and full of sadness
wrote merely, A cool day, a fine fall.
 
 
Aere Perennius
 
The mugger leaping out with his quick knife,
the waitress who does porno on the side,
even the stray dog, methodically marking
 
the acidulated saplings one by one—
what are they but life insisting on its life,
its own small heat, Don’t let me pass away
 
with nothing to show for it, as the wind passes
over the grass as though it had never been?
Clouds give birth to themselves in the windy sky
 
over and over, last year’s leaves lie
quiet under last year’s snow. That we’re not these
nor would be if we could is our whole meaning:
 
marble, murder, saxophones, lipstick, Nero
wasting the empire for the Golden House
in which he could live, at last, “like a human being.”