Among the Missing

Know me?  I am the ghost of Gansevoort Pier.
      Out of the Trucks, beside the garbage scow
      where rotten pilings form a sort of prow,
I loom, your practiced shadow, waiting here

for celebrants who cease to come my way,
      though mine are limbs as versatile as theirs
      and eyes as vagrant.  Odd that no one cares
to ogle me now where I, as ever,  lay

myself out, all my assets and then some.
      weather permitting.  Is my voice so faint?
      Can’t you hear me over the river’s complaint?
Too dark to see me?  Have you all become

ghosts?  What earthly good is that?  I want
      incarnate lovers hungry for my parts,
      longing hands and long-since-lonely hearts!
It is your living bodies I must haunt,

and while the Hudson hauls its burdens past,
      having no hosts to welcome or repel
      disclosures of the kind I do so well,
I, with the other ghosts am laid at last.
                    

In Loco Parentis

    for Anne Close

    Not now, Charles. Just leave the wine,
we’ll help ourselves... (Always fussing, except
    when you need them.)  I do want
our lunch to be festive, Naomi. You know
     how I’ve gloried, this past year,

in all your achievements…You’re really
     our star editor now—a feat
for a fête. But before the soufflé arrives
     (I know how you love dessert)
give me a moment:  I want to discuss

     something intimate.  Not just 
about you or me, but us: that’s what makes it
     intimate.  I think  you know
how this has happened, hour by hour, day after
     day, as you sat at your desk

in the office next to mine, learning more 
     than anything I could teach—    
I would step in and watch you getting through
     a  dish of crème brûlée as if
it were a lost chapter of Flaubert,

     and then restoring a page
of Kahlil Gibran to the superior
     crème brulée the author meant 
his pie in the sky to become all along;
     the fact is, my dear, you were                                                           

teaching me what a publisher can do
     and as I learned you became,
in the gradual process, a sort of
     sagacious daughter to me:
the girl I never had with Alfred… And in you
    
      I see—just beginning, dear—
what has turned my flesh to ash, and what I would
      spare you if I could.  Once I…
I used to be a different woman, Naomi.
      Let me tell you a story…

In 1923 Alfred took me to Paris                                                           
     and every day, after lunch,
we ritually went to the Louvre.  Once, 
     coming down the staircase from
the Victory of Samothrace, we passed two

elderly gentlemen climbing up, the one
      near me staring hard. And just
as  Alfred mouthed “Blanche, that’s Conrad!” 
      the man himself murmured
“Quelle belle Juive!”  Ever since that day,

      I’ve stopped eating (eating as
I like to eat) and never started again.
      It’s gone on for forty years,
my resolve not to become what I had been:
      a zaftig Yiddle, the kind 

‘admired’, so to speak, by dirty old men.
      When (rarely) I’m tempted to
éclairs or crèpes Suzette, I can see her, 
      that headless flat-bellied girl
at the top of the stairs, and I still hear
     
      the Pole’s hateful appraisal...
Naomi, I won’t prescribe breast reduction,
      I’m not your mother, am I?                                                          
 But take for yourself the omen, the sign
      given me back then, and gain

where I lost, or lose where I had gained:
      at your age, it will be simple
and quick too; you won’t suffer long, merely
      qualify your hungers.  Shall we
begin today?  Charles, cancel the soufflé.

    
Another Elucidation     

Erratum

             The Minnesota
         College Press deeply regrets
     the misspelling of the author’s name
         on the spine and title page
     of her newly published book of verse.
         The correct spelling is
              Gussie Fauntleroy

Corrigendum

              With that reminder,
          the whole thing comes back to me,
     somewhat ludicrously assisted 
          by the tony font called
     Lucida Blackletter (sure to be
          the heroine of the first
               Western I can write):

               she (Gussie, of course,
          not Lucida) had just won
     a poetry contest: the reward,
          publication and a shared
     reading with two senior east-coast bards
          of some repute: James Merrill
               and Richard Howard.
                All of which, I guess,
           came off as planned—James doing
     his perfect mimesis of a man
          inspired at that moment by
     six or seven Muses at once (not
           a phenomenon often
              observed, I surmise,
               
              in Minnesota),
           and I attempting to bring
     some effete Edwardian master
           (and his mistress) to a life
     quite alien to my audience
           clearly innocent of such
                neuro-fuzzy goings-on.

              “Well, James,” I complained
          on the way to the station    
    (after all, we had been invited!),
          “we weren’t tarred and feathered, but
     I suspect it was only because
           they believed we already
              looked, and sounded, weird

              enough.”  “Richard dear,
         don’t you see they had their own
     Miss Gutsy to set the tone?  Besides,”
          observed my preceptor in
      midwestern morality, “this is     
            what happens when the Great Plains
                meet the Great Fancies.”