Dana Gioia - 99 Poems

or pick a fight for no apparent reason.

She wondered, too — as if intelligence

was ever any guarantee of goodness.

V.

I used to read at night back in my room.

I liked adventure stories most of all

and books about the War— To Hell and Back ,

The Death March at Bataan. You know the sort.

There weren’t more than a dozen books at home,

mainly the Bible and religious crap,

but back in town there was a library.

The books I liked the best I used to steal.

I filled my room with them— Pellucidar ,

The Dunwich Horror, Master of the World ,

Robur the Conqueror, Tarzan the Untamed.

I didn’t want them read by anyone but me—

not that the folks I knew were in much danger

of opening a book which had no pictures.

The more I read the more I realized

that power was the only thing that mattered.

The weak made rules to penalize the strong,

but if the strong refused to be afraid,

they always found another way to win.

Sometimes when she dozed off, I’d slip outside

and head off through the trees behind the house.

She said these woods had been a pasture once,

but now a second growth of scruffy pine

covered the fields as far as you could see.

I had a special hiding place back there.

Near the foundations of a ruined farmhouse

there was a boarded-up old well. I’d pried

a couple of planks loose covering it.

If I came there at noon, I could look down

and see the deep black sparkle of the water

framed by the darkness of the earthen walls.

At night it was an emptiness of must

and fading echoes that could swallow up

a falling match before it reached the bottom.

Sometimes I’d stretch along beside it dreaming.

I knew there was a boy who’d fallen there.

His family had boarded up the well

and moved away to let the trees reclaim

the fields they’d spent so many years to clear.

I wondered if they’d ever found the body

or if it floated there beneath the surface,

the features bloated like a sopping sponge,

the skin as black as the surrounding earth.

I didn’t mention it to anyone.

This was my place. I didn’t want it spoiled.

Most people are too weak to keep a secret,

but I knew knowledge gives a person power.

I came there every evening — or at least

whenever I could sneak away from her.

One night I started whispering down the well.

What was it like, I asked him, to be dead?

What was there left without your family,

your home, your friends, even your name forgotten,

the light shut out, the moist earth pressing round?

Of course he didn’t answer me. The dead

never do. Not him. Not even Jesus.

Only a razor’s edge of moonlight gleamed,

silent at the bottom of the well.

I realized that if he could return,

if he could rise again through the dark shaft

and stand there in the sun, breathing the air,

what use would all our morals be to him?

Death leaves an emptiness that words can’t fill.

No, he would seize whatever things he wanted,

and what would guilt or honesty or love

matter to him now? Coming from the dead,

he would be something more or less than human,

something as cruel and hungry as a wolf.

How was I any different from him?

I came to death each day and sat beside it.

I breathed its musty odor in my lungs.

That was the night that I was born again,

not out of death, but into it — with him,

my poor unwitting savior in the well.

If I could only become strong enough,

I could do anything. I simply had

to tear away the comfortable lies,

the soft morality — the way a snake

sloughs skin when it becomes too small, the way

a wolf cub sheds its milkteeth for its fangs.

The next day when I saw a neighbor’s dog

sniffing around the well, I called him over.

I let him nuzzle me, then slit his throat.

I stuffed him full of rocks and threw him in.

I wanted to be sick, but I stayed strong.

Later I killed a cat and then another dog,

and when I heard two neighbors talk about

keeping their kids and pets inside at night

because a wolf had come down from the hills,

I had to smile. My new life had begun.

I started pulling petty robberies,

spaced months apart at first but then more often.

I never got caught though, except by her.

I’d come home late at night, and there she’d be

staring at me, so pious, old, and ugly—

although she didn’t guess the half of it.

So things went on like that until one night

they caught me cold, and I still had the gun.

VI.

In prison everyone’s a little crazy—

nothing to do and lots of time to do it.

So soon you either fasten on some memory

or lose your mind. Most guys just choose a woman

or a special place, but who knows what it takes

to make one thing stick in your mind for years?

Some people there, who barely talked outside,

would ramble on for hours about Sue

or Laurie Jean, Lynette or dear old Mama.

I knew a fellow who talked all day long

about some Friday night five years before

when he’d gone drinking with his older brothers.

He sat there trying to remember it,

putting each scrap exactly in its place—

the car, the burger joint, the brand of beer.

And when no one would listen anymore,

he sat at dinner by himself and drew

street maps of his hometown on paper napkins,

carefully marking out the route they traveled.

Madness makes storytellers of us all.

I was no different. Think of it this way:

I lay there in my cell for seven years

and stared up at a window blank with sky,

day after day when nothing came in view.

My cell was littered with unfinished books.

The chaplain always complimented me

for reading, but he didn’t understand.

The stories didn’t matter anymore.

I grew to hate them. Writers lie too much.

They offer an escape which seems so real,

but when you’re finished, nothing ever changes.

The things I wanted couldn’t come from books.

I used to make up games to pass the time.

My favorite was called Roommates. I’d catch

a horsefly or a cockroach in a jar—

that would be roommate number one — and then

I’d look behind the toilet for a spider.

I’d drop him in the jar and see what happened.

I liked to watch the roommates get acquainted.

Know what I learned? That spiders always win.

At night I tried to keep myself from screaming.

I’d lie there listening to the toilets flush,

the bedposts scrape the floor, the yard dogs howl,

the guards who shuffled down the corridors,

the fellow in the next cell jerking off.

I had to think of something to keep sane,

and so I thought of her, of everything

she did for me, of everything she said.

I looked into my heart and heard a voice.

It told me what I must have known for years.

VII.

When they escape, most guys head straight for town,

steal anything they can, get drunk, get laid,

and then get caught. They don’t know what they want.

I knew exactly why I’d risked my neck.

I made it quite a distance before daybreak,

but, when the light came up, I started shaking.

I’d killed a guard the night before. I’d scaled

a barbwire fence that sliced up both my hands

and slithered through a slime-wet sewage pipe.

But I had planned that part back in my cell.

The thing I hadn’t counted on was sunlight—