(Someone Must Have Done Something)
 
There was a history to all this.
Had she given you what you wanted,
were you not still burning from her refusals,
reeling from supernumerous unnecessary hurts
you might have given her this. Been more
companionable. Had she not kept her distance
while you entered the mystic waterfall at Jalapa
alone, had she not chosen to be sick
 
—clutching her stomach—the same desperate-dramatic
way she did the afternoon we met
only with different expressive designs
 
(no mention of hunger menstrual cramps P.M.S.)

the morning you were set to go to Teotihuacan
 
you might have talked to yourself the way they advised
in the self-help pop-psych
 
books which I railed against

without having read them! I'm not implying that your bias
against behaviorism isn't warranted, but there are
times in men's lives when practicable solutions
are practical.
 
Not another word about solutions, if you don't
mind, including one I don't think you of all people
need to be reminded of.
 
"What, moody?"

Is't not my right, my lord? I'm not asking you to disappear so I can return to the love..., the damaged affair I have long felt compelled to examine before
other cares and phantoms crowd in, and crowd out this curious
evanescent moment I have longed long to reconsider.

I will do what you ask.

It's one thing to say it.

But now as a sprite, a spirit; prisoner of the afterlife;
I can do, or undo, things which gravity, that hanger-on,
makes of life-on-earth a physical comedy for all
concerned—during their tenuous tenure.
 
Don't fret, I'll be off before you can recite your mother's names.
 
Nine, not including her given name. Isn't there some
cabalistic significance to the number nine?

Now you're provoking a detour.
And seven and twelve are far more...
 
Propitious?

Expedient. The great wheel needs all twelve spokes to complete its revolutions.
 
Otherwise the months themselves would fall out
like fallout.
 
I vacillate incessantly between torpor and activity,
numb to anything in-between
beyond pure function.

Like obtaining milk for your son.

You've been dead a while now—.

So substitute his current needs and desires
and don't give the little Rabbi a hard time.

(Pause.)

I didn't mean to—

Drop it! Express your thoughts in actions.
And go back to the...painful subject...of...
you and that...later Laura—
 
(after the song, after your laughter in the rain
that wasn't falling with the Laura you really fell for,
after the incidents in the bedroom when your mother walked in),
 
who has risen for
reasons beyond your ken, if not beyond—
 
~

Not wanting to be interminably absent with her not well, I abjured
public transportation and let the hotel hook me up with one of those

fly-by-eternity-guided-schleps in a coal-black, battered Ford
squeezed between four middle-aged suburban women
in matching polyester schemes that glowed
                       
blinked telegraphed disaster
 
who had only one question which they repeated
and repeated in a kind of choral fugue:

Is that where the sacrifices were?
 
Is that where they slit the throats of the children?
 
I got off one cosmological question
regarding the placement of the pyramids
and the number of narrow steps—
52—leading to the Aztec launching pad.

For you—a springboard into eternity;
for others—a chopping block.
 
So, you were not only inexcusably ignorant
about the Aztec calendar—even for a twenty-one
year old pip fresh out of
(coughs)...excuse me...if you could call it (coughs up phlegm)...that—
 
I thought you'd eased up on the stogies.

What, you think death is a free ride?
You think I'm coughing for what I'm doing now?
 
How in hell should I know?

Because I've been—and yes you're right
I've got a sarcastic grin on my face—
instructing you (wasting my breath once more)
in the variance between life before and after.
 
Maybe one of your friends, like that...
that painter born in the camps who wanted you to see
her painting in the Jewish Theological Seminary
(while I killed time on my penultimate
visit to New York, waiting)
 
would be more appreciative.
 
Like a congregation you might have had if things had worked out differently.

And you said you didn't mind if I went off for an hour.
 
All right, all right.
 
Remember I never said you weren't good at unforeseeable moves.
 
What I just said?

Never mind. But how can you know Mexico as you claim to do
 
(God forbid you should step foot in Israel some time. God forbid.)

without bothering to do immerse yourself in Prescott's history is beyond me.
 
History is beyond me. And with every year you picked up fewer books. Why is knowing the news as it happens so bloody important?

By the time I was twenty-one I was steeped in the great commentaries—
and when I got to Israel and sat at Buber's knees
 
no higher I hope
 
you can be sure I knew my history,
to say nothing about the rituals
which you couldn't be bothered to study,
much less learn, much less graze,
during the months you spent living high,
your nose in poetry (without rhyme)
and novels (without characters), made-up
worlds, when you ought to have been
gazing at bougainvillea, mountain ranges,
and ravines (chockfull with the unburied dead)
like your friend The Consul—who you'll admit had worse
jobs than I did and drank infinitely more—
 
—but he wasn't real—
 
or obsessing, letting yourself be consumed,
eaten alive by concern for a woman
who wouldn't think twice if you did disappear
forever when you left the room;
but had you taken the public bus
as your, (I must admit, well-chosen) friend D.
urged you to do, wasting his vocal register on
stubborn ears as I did until I said to hell with it, it's your
life; D. who from the years he spent at high risk in Brazil
(engaged in activities you never...divulged)
 
you who think of sneaking a box of Havana cigars
over the Canadian border as "smuggling"w o w

How would you like to risk being frisked at customs in a country
where it's a commonplace for people not to return from simple errands,
wearing gold charms, chains, and bracelets
up to your armpits under your shirt?

But had you listened to D., who knew what was up
in the Third World as well as any white man his age in the real
world, you would have been spared
 
the doldrums of time squandered at the Virgin of Guadeloupe's narcissistic gift shop,
and the guide's rote recitation (or was it a
recording?) of how the women "crawl from all over Mexico" (we'll spare each other the recitation of states, ok? ok ) "to pray
 
here,

and believe me that by the time they reach the steps where I am standing now they are
exhausted,"
 
—and as you reported to me with compassion (see, the "Brain"remembers) "hurting bad because each day they destroy the scabs that form on their bloody knees at night,"to which his numbness felt compelled to reply

            "but they don't care, they're healed by prayer, they come here to be healed"
 
the stench of the church's rabid shameless exploitation of the poor,
the return in the frantic rush hour traffic, when, as the driver now
pushed the rattletrap black Pontiac sedan for all it was worth,
V-8 engine whizzing past Chapultapec
Park with an urgency that stood the languor of the drive on its head—

though even that is deceptive since the increase in forward trajectory
doubled the unmufflered vehicle's growl—

I still caught sight of a little boy on a tricycle being
sideswiped by a truck that pushed and weaved mercilessly...
as if an escaping terrorist were at the wheel, hell-bent,

and I asked the guide to stop and when he wouldn't or seemed not to hear
I opened the door to a chorus of oh my god don't
 
as if riding in an open car meant death when it means life freedom air
 
but it might have taken you longer to ingest, to really take in, the Mexican
metaphor, the unspeakably tragic incompatibility of
Indian Mayan Aztec Mexico and Christian Spanish Mexico

And the weary, prematurely gray-haired guide said: "If you do that I will have to..."
And I said: "Did you see?"
"See? See what?"
"The boy...go under...and...no one's doing anything...."
"I'm sorry about the boy."

Who by now was out of sight.

At least he did not deny...
 
"I have a family too. But this is Mexico young man and you can see"
(waves his hand out the window)
"what the traffic is like. There is no way I can..."

"A phone then..."

An afternoon that would have induced a sharp
rise in the blood-pressure of an ant.

(Or praying mantis, wronged for so long.
Hey, what's the response up there
to the refutation of the accepted notion
that the female devours the male
after he has had his way with her
and she with him?

Good. The destruction of destructive
shibboleths is always regarded as a positive sign.
 
Always. I'm suspicious.)

The four women, divided, shook their heads dolefully.
Talked no more of offering the living to the dead,
the unforgiving, the superstitious, the nonexistent.
A purse-search would justify just looking down,
and God knows what those urchins might have done
when they were occupied with cameras and beat
after the difficult climb and distracted by the sun.

"Señor, it is not our business.
And I have another..."

I looked back at the seething congestion.
A still unmade movie of hell.