The Lions

I

At first it’s just a mist: a neural drizzle

priming the sense of summer dusk and ocean.

Then memory filters down the colors.

Nana stands swathed in electric green.

She has me carrying coats to the shuttered

shade of the living room. The patio hums.

Glasses chime through the flash and clatter.

As if wavering between relief

and disappointment, she cinches her lips.

One line remains unchecked on her guest list.

She mumbles to the air: “ . . . Well, they’ll be missed.”

The perfumed coats lie sleeve to sleeve, complete.

So I was free.

                      The lucent harbor side

those nights (and this one lingers most)

became a reef: a sprawl of hidden life.

I hungered for a narrative . . . . The blur

of bodies shadowed on the screened-in porches.

Their conversation clumped to one murmur

from behind the sputtering garden torches.

They had that allure of murder mysteries.

I pictured sneaking in there. Prowling through

the moonlit hallways, knowing what to seize.

Somewhere the clues lay hidden in plain view.

I imagined a lion in Botswana

coiled in his lunge, suspended there, then landing

on a scuttle of freaked gazelles. His claws

were regulators, rulers of the flow.

Reality lay hot beneath him, steamed

from the spill of entrails smutting his nose.

Then the flow had fled and the world had changed.

Less than the meadows change beneath the clouds

but still: this sense of impending emptiness.

I must have seen it on a nature show.

The harborside itself was like a screen

I played those looped scenarios across:

those doors into the dark like fired glass

molten and coursing. Then transparent again.

And there was only me. Our driveway shone

beneath the pines. Inside my metal pail

the fish called scup, their dorsal fins a clump

of spikes, flashed silver at the alien air.

II

Again tonight I play the DVD.

In Technicolor blue the sonar men

watch contacts pulse across their screen.

The soundtrack is ambient flutes and rain.

War without end is about to begin

again. The green of the far off shoreline

quivers and glints.

                             Then McNamara’s voice

(its chopping, crowlike nasal): “I was part

of a mechanism . . . I was part . . .”

                                                       Again I feel

this expectant thrill. As the flute notes swerve

and his wooden pointer slaps his map

of the Bay of Tonkin

                                I see our harborside.

The dripping honeysuckle and rosehips.

It seems ethereal. As if the leaves

brushing the houses against the dark shore

were opening. The space they make cleaves

the shadowed walls. Becomes a trembling core.

A piercing stinging. Dim retinal trace

of languorous curves, uncovered hips and breasts.

And then it’s gone. I’m slouching on our couch

watching two F-4 Phantoms swoop then strafe.

Only the sting remains.

                                     “Vietnam”:

the very sound the slice then hum of pain.

How obvious it seems: those nights marauding

yard to yard through the ivy beds . . . the secret

fenced from view was the failure of their war.

Swirling around the grownups with their drinks

the threat of its acknowledgment

                                                     was the gulp

of that impending emptiness: as close

as the white noise of trees above the harbor.

Caught in the minima of new reports

“on CLL in veterans exposed

to the herbicide known as Agent Orange”:

my uncle

              ghosting the house that summer bald

from chemo.

                   Or the boy my aunt adored

in high school.

                       How his name once fell

in conversation. Sudden uneasiness.

Branch shadows serrating the patio.

Then one of them caught the drop with

rueful amusement, telling how he clomped

straight through the glass wall of the Bauhaus

arts center.

                   How my father and his friends

stood round in wonder as he shed

the pane, its shattered, clattering cascade.

IV

The one line unchecked on the guest list.

This family lore I delve through all the more

for its eeriness.

                         My mother’s parents met

in 1938 on Beacon Hill.

They were towelling off champagne flutes and humming

show tunes at Robert McNamara’s sink.

The thrill (all three had grown up poor)

must have cut the rush of approaching war.

And the decades falling

                                     like my parents falling

out of love.

                  In the shadow of the leaves

blending to black above the patio

their present starts to read as a prelude.

Or afterwards.

                       And Nana’s Julia Childish

promptings (her piercing alto ahs) go shrill:

desparate loopings and cinchings to hold fast

our story line inside the growing darkness.

Her invitation zipped across the Sound

to the World Bank President’s summer home

was a sheer lark.

We were anonymous.

And the decades falling

                                     like the numbers

plummeting now across my TV screen and

zapping each city’s casualties to stats.

They hide the girl in the famous shot who runs

right down the center of the highway naked

dangling her arms as if to shake off

some especially terrible nightmare

though what she’s shaking are flags of flesh.

Shots on a screen.

                              But how immediate

that voice, biting through now:

                                                 “ . . . I was

part of a mechanism . . . I was part . . . ”

The obvious logic of history

grinds down inside of it: no him, no me.

And my anger against the propped up surfaces:

my rage to rip through to the other side

and the fear that all that waited there

was emptiness:

                          even now as tracers flare

to pixels

              those unstanchable currents ride

my sprawl of nerves

                                while Jack and Amy sleep

and passing headlights swivel round our ceiling.

V

Dim underbrush. The lions smudged

to brownish yellow clumps in the foliage.

A couple, circling, grow clearer now.

Their liquid pink yawns. White flash of fang.

Dissolving like a dream, the picture bleeds.

Uphill from the harbor, I’m standing on mildewed

planks to the beachouse.

                                        Could it really have been

that same night?

                           I drop the pail of fish

and slouch to the entrance. The salt air makes

fresh water puddled by the showers smell fresher.

No lions nuzzling each other’s manes and necks.

But stretching on a spread of towels: a woman.

I can see her strawberry pubic hair

beneath her t-shirt.

                               And a man is coming

out from the shadows kneeling over her.

It happens so fast, their blur of rupture:

like that, he’s thrusting into her. Her thighs

have butterflied around his waist: they squeeze

then slacken.

                     Their faces simmer in the plaques of

late sun through the window.

                                               I don’t know them.

Only I see: that this is violence.

Only a kind they don’t deny but relish:

diving inside of it again, teeth clenched.

And their striving.

                            And the tensed but molten feeling

circling my chest.

                           A force behind all motion.

There is a force behind all motion.

Coiled in, then bursting forward, it unfolds

itself through time. Then this, then this, then this:

life happening, each instant, rivers history.

Or nothing. Blankness between small lucid splotches.

Then this, then this, then this. East Asia plumed

with chemical fire. Me sitting here.

The images half unreal through the televised wash.

But the smaller pain the larger links to:

next to me, on the plastic monitor

the syncopated phosphoresecent beads

tracking Jack’s sleeping breathing now

open their little waterfall of nerves:

this need to clutch our bond of family

while the funneling drub of force

crashes and spumes.

                                 Out there in the world

people ride elevators with glassed views

of warehouse blocks and freeways unfurling

into the treetops.

                            People walk the blue

checkpointed tunnels to missile silos.

                                                          And to pull

against it, tearing through the surface, feels

impossible.

                  Unless some animal

intelligence, sharp toothed, could slice a path.

I mean the force I saw that night, before

I broke and ran.

                          It’s clear in memory.

She’s striding him now. Her eyes are closed.

She pushes down, then stretches up, as if

she’s pulling out of her that power

gathering in her enraged yet delicate

cascade of shattered ohs:

                                         that creature

released to make its home now as the night falls

among the broken sheets of sizzling surf

and the honeysuckle dripping and rosehips.