Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— or totally to any one (the fur upon his buttocks might tell that to someone too late for it to matter), while not so knowingly for he is not by himself a poet he ships daily on the ship of state without questioning you know the Chicago-school anti-inflation economics his captains import to run the ship which lately has expanded its range though no less tightly compart-mented against local breach from ghost coasts it cruises multilaterally by theoretically lethal instruments only occasionally looking out a porthole into a life where this mufti officer himself will see here and there a wood fire, or its tiny glint from cabin embedded in a childhood mountain so that if we have, though not knowing him well, told him, we did not need to tell him, he’d suddenly like a wood fire right here in Luisa’s bedroom with its marble hearth (and could almost go looking for wood, send out for anything in this city) and at a moment when he finds he loves her, he does, and so won’t say (for now) the name he heard her (intelligently) say into a stage phone in her kitchen with its cold linoleum some minutes ago, he can puzzle that conundrum, puzzle and puzzle it with a lover’s fanaticism while not hearing in his arms Luisa’s mind say again the name from the phone — but now her lips themselves breathe the name, and he won’t seize whatever lead it gives, the name from the phone — and she runs her middle fingers hard down his spine, and he is quite taken if unprepared for the bumpy impress that is one track, one touch, and answers breath with breath, "There is a future in those fingertips—" "In America it is known as foreplay," she breathes back with an extra exhalation of smile—"Preparation," he breathes, and she, ‘7 feel it too," and part-withdraws part-draws him with her by the small of his back when he murmurs like a sleepwalker, "The motive of our preparations," as they move together, where are they exactly? the bed gives off light through her hair, and he knows for certain that she knows Mayn only as a name, a word, no doubt through her friend on the phone, yet knows that she has decided something about this unknown "Mayn": Absent, intimate, sitting on the edge of her bed, "I know," she says, "that that little woman you said watched me is a journalist; don’t ask me how; I know," but where her absentness is now he doesn’t know, but feels her friendly hand on his buttock, and his toe, firmly in the carpet, feels waited on; and "Good," he firmly answers, "good," while, being almost in the ship of kind, he is not enough there to know what would happen were he to find his sea to be land and if so if he would crash and crumble and kindle, or would pass simply into another life.

For we exact but what we are: we are relations. And if not always so perfectly where, yet we will loyally to ourself ever exact what. Between kin and kind, between blunder and art, between the first words of the saying the diva distinctly heard from the ponderous, shy, likable young American poeta and the second half of them, which seemed to come to us from other distances if not from no distance at all. And turning from the poeta (who was in turn turning from her) Luisa found in the three hyper-dressed men less matter for speculating what, say, they did than lumps taking up room unless one were to remove them by coup, by blender, by dribbling one’s salt on them so they dissolve on the rock threshold of one’s private house imagined beside the strong leg and ribs and shoulder of one’s father giving a nature lesson on a mountain rock that for small Luisa became a doorstep of a crazy cottage in the trees, far from all else save father and brother, and where question fades into question along with their interlinks: oh such as the one hundred percent inflation through the first nine months of ‘72 and how much of Chile vanished into Bethlehem’s pocket through iron from 1913 to the fifties, and what sign hangs over the sale in ‘23 of Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine, to Anaconda by the multinationally musical Guggenheims and who had told her lover she’s bought and sold and bought some shares of Voest Alpine for he so so so carelessly mentioned it as they stood together operatically approaching the monumental dirty green of the Statue in the harbor only the other day (who got herself together, walked out across the waters of New York, and took up her stand in the last century Luisa supposes it was and hasn’t moved since) — while her father’s prominent nose so large and beautiful and, in those childhood days, straight (not the nose of a frequently interrogated subject nor ever the nose of a drinker) and, in the days of her adolescent music training, without those hard-to-appreciate (you know) dark hairs creeping out at the nostril, is recalled withdrawing, almost funny like a Walt Disney cartoon she saw where creatures come and go and those Marxists aren’t yet explaining that in Disney the only workers are lumpen thugs or noblesses sauvages and you will no ever see them makin’ steel to make trusses to make a bridge to carry coal over and/or be in slow motion blown sky into wind high: no, you might see that culminating reality but never the industrial process.

Did you mean (?), asks our (now old) friend the shifting interrogator not wishing to be indelicate on the score of sexual version, that, well, the lady in the harbor otherwise known as a one-hundred-fifty-odd-foot copper envelope without portfolio had in the course of this American greening we used to hear about acquired a warped relation to the one-time Guggenheim gig deep in Chuquicamata (a vintage Chilean wine) on which we have run a time-and-motion CAT-type scan turning up no link with Voest Alpine or Bethlehem (iron, that is), which does however sell on the Zurich exchange—

— for the interrogator, part of us as we him, can use wind as we while not quite ‘‘getting" as we do the concept of passive energy to process us inward while more and more as if with interpurse generosity accommodating the multiplicity of small-scale relations, as that ironmolder whose father had been inspired two generations earlier by editor Heighton of the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia and who met Alexander in Pennsylvania in early March and met a thousand striking/striking ironmolders of Coxey’s Army with

The seed ye sow, another reaps

The wealth ye find, another keeps

: not that Jim young or older would know or care for Luisa’s doctor’s haunts — such sayings haunting him as "When me they fly, I am the wings," though that devoted one-shot-and-only-one-shot tapeworm importer, who got from Boston to New York years before the flying shuttle or even pre-shuttle flight scene yet stays young, has those words in common with Jim’s mother Sarah, as few would know nowadays besides Brad, back in Windrow, N.J., who might not know he knows, nor if it is a "quote" or a bone-deep gene of his long-gone mother: but in the midst of such outlandish matter at graveside as what Sarah who ridiculed weather conversation said once about wind curving, Jim easily retained a mystery he had already worked out for himself— that according to Sarah, speaking to him when he told her he’s going to work on the farm this coming summer not in the office of the newspaper, he would go away: "passed" away, Miss Myles even in a model obit could say — which, O.K., also retained mystery, if you want, and as with Jim and his mystery, or was it his mother’s, the mystery didn’t get solved and shelved or even lost, but got said: yet really just remembered:

: we already remember what had been going on, the whirlwind ride in Bob’s first pickup, the unknown piner boy who got on and off but appeared only to be first there and then not there, in the bed of the pickup, though visible at a distance that didn’t add up and apparently not carrying the later missing evidence of thievery that was all Jim would report to Bob, who at first had said if Jim had wanted the gasoline can he would have given it to him, then shook his head and agreed that the piner kid had taken it, what’d you expect of them? (—but what did that mean? Jim abruptly asked— Mean? why that those kids are survivors; that’s what Bob meant):