by Stephen Perry

        My grandfather worked in a barber shop
        smelling of lotions he’d slap on your face
        hair and talc.  The black razor strop

        hung like the penis of an ox.  He’d draw
        the sharp blade in quick strokes over
        the smooth-rough hide, and then carefully

        over your face.  The tiny hairs would gather
        on the blade, a congregation singing
        under blue spruce in winter,

        a bandstand in the center of town
        bright with instruments, alto sax, tenor
        sax, tuba or sousaphone—the bright

        oompah-pahs shaving the town somehow,
        a bright cloth shaking the air
        into flakes of silvering hair

        floating down past the houses, the horses
        pulling carriages past the town fountain,
        which had frozen into a coiffure

        of curly glass.  My grandfather had an affair
        with the girl who did their nails
        bright pink, bright red, never blue,

        perhaps as the horses clip-clopped on ice
        outside his shop, his kisses
        smelling of lather and new skin—

        when she grew too big and round
        with his child, with his oompah love,
        with his bandstand love, with his brassy love,

        and the town dropped its grace notes
        of gossip and whispered hiss,
        he bundled her out of town

        with the savings which should have gone
        to my mom.  But how could you hate him?
        My mother did, my father did,

        and my grandmother, who bore his neglect.
        When she was covered in sheets
        at her last death,

        he flirted with the nurses, bright
        as winter birds in spruces
        above a bandstand—

        I’ll always remember him in snow, a deep lather
        of laughter, the picture
        where he took me from my mother

        and raised me high, a baby, into the bell
        of his sousaphone, as if I were a note
        he’d play into light—

        by Stephen Perry

        The surgeon prizes open the heart,
        like an oyster, and so the ground
        opens for the tweezers of the archaeologist,
        dusty time moved grain by grain

        by Sir Leonard Woolley and his crew
        of Englishmen, who uncover the dancers,
        the retinue of the king, bullock carts
        and drivers that brought the body in,

        the officers of the court, the hands
        of the harpists, skeleton hands
        at the strings where strings would be
        on the harp, had they, and the hands,

        not decayed—it’s not that we should not
        uncover this primal scene, like our parents
        at it in the bedroom, or the ghost
        in the hiss of mist in the auto which took

        a curve too fast—what are we to do
        but look? Surely it isn’t us who are pinned
        against the wheel, or led underground
        with the whip of a Sumerian king—

        we go willingly, cattle who pull the cart,
        gawking at our fellows, who’ll have to die,
        the pretty dancers, the beautiful women
        with headbands of silver and gold—

        (one poor lady had hers wrapped at her hip,
        as if she’d been late and hadn’t time
        to put it on). You see, they buried them
        alive, no meter registering the beats

        of their hearts in a surgical theatre
        preserved behind glass, one mother and father
        holding hands for the life of their daughter,
        her breath clear and empty as water—

        in Ur they celebrated with wine and henbane,
        with dancing girls, and harpists
        whose skeleton hands still try to play
        at the hamstrings of the young,

        haughty even in death, the little cups
        at their sides—never laying back
        the dress of your daughter, her skin,
        probing her heart for slivers of glass

        and broken bone—the glitter of the scalpel
        brings the light into her heart, one life,
        something we all pass on, as if her heart,
        our heart, were being cut—here

        in Chicago, where you teach History
        and Biology, respectively, they have laid
        the whole tomb of Ur, a reconstruction
        in every detail, of an ancient burial—

        who were these people, your students ask—
        the iron lungs of the machine breathing
        for your daughter—and Sir Leonard Woolley
        steps away, brushing the dust

        from his hands, the flat plain at Ur
        an open chest, the sleeping dancers
        and harpists safe from their grief,
        an old play, an old book, taken from the shelf

        to help you forget the scarf you bought
        for her birthday, or the car for her 21st,
        a new Stingray, just days ago, or years
        ago it seems, when she reached up on her toes

        and kissed you both goodnight.

        by Stephen Perry

        These days when the dogwoods are preparing to bloom
        with urn-shaped buds and my allergies
        are set on springs to explode,

        taking their ball peen hammers to play
        “All around the mulberry bush the monkey chased
        the weasel” and other atrocities

        on my skull, I try to put in a request
        for something more refined, perhaps an aria
        of the Böser Geist in Schumann’s Faust—“Gretchen!

        Wo steht dein Kopf?”—but it usually does no good.
        My eyes feel attached to springs,
        my head the hard wood

        of dogwoods in the state of my birth,
        and health seems as far away as another country,
        so I swear on my father’s coffin,

        please God, not this year—when the hard buds
        open into melodies of pollen,
        dull Jack-in-the-box,

        Jack Ketch again will come to hang me
        from this tree, my eyes
        pendulous as fruits,

        bright red drupes, Judas Iscariot to the seasons,
        a dupe, a poor Punch and Judy,
        with my head beat in.

        by Stephen Perry

        Under the frosty stars in the gardens
        of brick, the grape vines frozen
        along the eaves, leaves like hearts
        you shoveled into a furnace last fall,
        the man dribbles the moon
        and throws it through a hoop—
        for one moment it suspends
        high among a spiral nebula—
        the planet suspends then drops
        through the hoop, the cold ring
        and watch left on a bench
        at the edge of the court, like time itself
        for the grapevines, shadows along the eaves,
        memories, left like sticks
        and an audience of one—you
        cheer and Adam glances under a halo of sweat
        on his forehead—one more basket
        and you’ll make the team, solve time,
        like Einstein in the patent office,
        something to compensate
        for your divorce—this rounded fire, perhaps
        Heraclitus would have called the ball,
        Adam who cannot talk to save his soul,
        whose hands are awkward fish at parties,
        but who on the court turns mercury
        of motion, his scuffed tennis shoes flashing
        like wings over clay, to impress who?
        Me? The tenements of windows?
        The roses of stars? These brick containers
        with sticks of memory? One brother
        to another: who cares? You need only
        that motion of hands balancing the ball,
        testing its weight, its fate to the hoop,
        the effortless arc in the air as you stand
        breathless and wanting for just one thing—
        that embrace of the circle, the fearful sphere
        of Pascal. God is a circle whose center
        is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.
        Robert Pinsky too turned God into a game,
        a field of baseball bums around a central drum
        of fire in the mind of a computer, the birth
        of stars, the death of stars, the opening
        and closing of a synapse, lonely for the other,
        the valve of the hoop—and Adam
        pauses again, judging the air, the stars
        in his sweat, like pearls, judging the distance,
        as if the rest of his life depended
        on this shot alone—then up
        it goes, spinning, careening
        among the grapevines, who snatch it in its flight
        and deflect it to the brick of tenements—
        Adam grins and retrieves the shadow
        from among the shadows, then turning quickly
        shoots his shot
        and like a star it falls
        into the hoop,
        into his hands to do it once again. Do the roses
        applaud? No. Do the stars swoon? No.
        Does your wife come back? Not a chance.
        So why do it? Is it just to walk the flat roses
        of the clay? Recall that anxious cheerleader
        puffed with pompoms who became your wife?
        The years of faculty dinners of the Philosophy
        Department where you were always embarrassed?
        The final obliquity of her affair
        with the drug store owner where you bought
        your Valium? Your daughter a coke-head
        who blurted out the news, one night,
        after your conference in St. Paul.
        Last spring, when the roses fluffed their pompoms
        all along the wall, you took your shears
        and cut them off—concise as a poem
        by Emily Dickinson—The Frost beheads it
        at its play— / In accidental power—
        “The muscles are a kind of philosophy,”
        you said. You took to running,
        and then to basketball at night. Sometimes
        I think it’s your wife’s head
        sailing through the air,
        the faintest whisper of a scream,
        or sometimes just your heart,
        a temporary planet,
        burning, beating against the clay,
        like a burning field of beans
        which you cannot cross—
        Pythagoras stopped—who once said
        you said, “Step not beyond the center
        of the balance.” Yet sometimes
        you’ll play all night, waking the birds
        even, rattling the frost
        like delicate stars from the vines,
        and powdering the bricks

        with your steps.

        by Stephen Perry

        Love loves you or another one.
        Can you tell the difference in his song?
        Sometimes it’s best to hold your tongue.
        Love loves you or another one.

        Hermit thrush or nightingale,
        It’s all the same: wind and hail.
        Love loves you or another one.
        Can you tell the difference in his song?

        by Stephen Perry

        Perhaps it was the oysters in the Dom Pérignon—
        they floated off the shell, the slick bone china,
        as if on ball bearings. The audience coughs,
        a fat man stuffed into his suit consults his program,
        shifting from thigh to thigh like a metronome,
        as if anticipating the Scarlatti. You begin.
        You raise your hands like the curved backs of crabs
        in cream sauce. You wish you could crack
        your fingers so all of music could slide like marrow
        instantly in one sweet mass, as Mozart said, all

        at once. Your hunger rumbles. You shift on your hams.
        Your colon curves in the tubings of a French horn.
        Please, God, not in your special arrangement
        of the Stabat Mater. Ten voices, ten fingers,
        a masterpiece. But the oysters are already rolling
        their pearls, bubbling through your bowels
        (the seat of all affection in the Renaissance).
        The countess in the décolletage in the first row
        leans forward to catch your bliss, the delicate
        notes mimicking human desire, and all she smells

        is the pier, the yawning barnacles with their breath
        of the ages, tapping their lips in ceramic kiss
        like the clicks of a metronome. Has she really
        found you out? You pray she’ll be transported
        into the heavenly frescos of painted sound,
        delicate as Venus on the half-shell. Perhaps,
        you could take her back to your room at the Waldorf,
        the Neptune Suite, where she’ll bob for the apples
        of your true desire. Ah, but then there was the wonderful
        pie with two scoops of ice cream and cherries jubilee,

        which you had in Bonn after the concert for the count,
        who kept watching you in his monocle, as if you were
        his favorite dish. Glad to get out of that.
        You will make music tonight as you will make love,
        perhaps in the back of her carriage, after an apéritif,
        with hors d’oeuvres on exquisite crackers from Italy,
        just salty enough to wet your tongue for more.
        But hardly has the tenth measure passed into immortality
        than the beast in your bowels lets loose a burp,
        something so base and slurpy that some in the audience

        gasp. You hold your breath. You improvise some stunning
        ornaments, a freedom of notes, each as sharp
        as a fishhook, dazzling them. They lean back
        in astonishment. You increase the speed and they are yours
        again. One faux pas does not a concert make.
        But the beast is turning in your bowels, improvising
        a smile, you think, your buttocks parting in another
        thunderclap above the sea of corpses as in The Raft
        of the Medusa, Géricault’s masterpiece. You imagine
        the canvas bubbling. You imagine the Master

        in the morgue taking measurements, when some unsuspected
        deep gas is released. People are beginning to leave,
        with silk handkerchiefs over their noses—
        you try for naturalistic technique, playing with your sinews,
        your viscera, your spine. The notes snap
        from their envelopes of silence. You are the Master,
        you are Scarlatti, you are Mozart bouncing in his carriage,
        thinking of symphonies, concertos, fellatio
        under the piano. You are music itself, the strings
        that pluck the past, and bring them the ghost

        of God. God, you are powerful. Your style is your own.
        Innovative, avant-garde, a bit of Chopin’s slow
        decay in passages. You fart again. But what is this
        but Cage and the post modernists? You are aware
        of yourself in the music, and the stink of all the ghosts
        of crabs, of hollandaise sauce, of lobsters plucked
        from the boiling pot assails their sensibilities.
        This is the modern age through the past, simultaneous.
        And your aquiline nose is the aquiline nose of Mozart,
        as natural to your style as the rainbow to your fart.

        by Stephen Perry

        I want to tell you, who will not believe it,
        you are as special as the rain
        in a full moon maple, as perfect and unknowing
        as the moon-shell of an egg,
        the nest damp, but letting the tears
        pass through. All the loamy love
        of the glen, the scent of night
        and the blue wings returning,
        the love that shaped your resting place
        in an ariel grave of bent twigs,
        nightshade, and morning light,
        when she too worked without knowing,
        taking from some unknown place in herself
        all of love and knowledge which shaped
        your birth. Let the light of the moon,
        the wet wings of your mother, love
        you into birth in the rain, so you can know
        without knowing too, the green wings of the full moon
        maple, the loam, which rises in the perfume
        of wet twigs and lightshade, which your mother
        shaped, in the forest’s beautiful unknowing.
        Know what you cannot know, that you are
        the blue wings, and the secret heart
        of blood which is yours beats as surely
        as all wings, blue and beautiful as light
        falling in rain. But yours is the gift
        of not knowing, the self born in the open
        beak which drinks the rain, thinking it will
        sustain, when out of the blue,
        someday you know, in the urging of your muscles,
        the push of your heart toward the edge
        and the falling, and the light of morning
        in the vanishing leaves of the full moon maple
        and cold and frightening openness, openness
        of the air, and the opening of blue unknowing,
        that you will be what you will be, the cracked shell
        of the moon, by the light of all beginnings,
        yourself your child, your child opening as your wings
        open for the first time, and you know that you can fly.

        by Stephen Perry

        The low mounds like graves cut by the bevel of the sled,
        and my father’s hand around the rope,
        his feet in the grooves, returning,
        and the icy song of the silence and singing
        sled over the snow—I remember
        somehow the absence of birds,
        as if the shadows were cutouts
        in the air of the trees
        which I only learned later
        were pines—it was their green
        which did the shadowy singing,
        a choir of emptiness,
        a song of vacancy,
        punctuated by the hiss and whisper
        of the rails of the sled,
        and my father like the largest horse
        pulling me into song.