Peter Weltner 108

Peter Weltner

Late October, 1959 ~ The Not Inside You

Late October, 1959

He yearns in his memory of it for more, craves

more details, more dialogue, more friends in it,

seeks more particulars, the dailiness that saves

the past from vanishing into night after the half-lit

shadows at dusk, that welcomes dawn, morning,

the school day just beginning, birds aloft in the light,

cars on the road, people on buses, crowding

the sidewalks hurrying to work, the strange sight

of kids half-woken up, their nightly slumbers over

until darkness and sleep descend again. Even

the uncertainty of what’s ahead’s no matter. It’s the power

of lives recalled he’s longing for, the heaven

of the usual, the common, the sun that sings

in October of young bodies and places and things.

He’s standing today where he stood twenty years

before and often five decades ago. It’s fall.

Little’s changed. Suddenly in front of him appears

himself, seventeen. The school, classrooms, hall

he lingers in, staring out a window, are the same,

the trees’ leaves just turning oak orange or maple

red, his long life to come calling out his name

as a friend might, something so plain, simple

about friendship then, so kind when he thinks

of it now, despite his old loneliness. The lockers,

their gun metal gray unchanged, the faucets, sinks

in the chemistry room are as rusty. Like clockers,

a few teachers spy on the walkways, still time how long

their students dawdle, envy what they’re doing wrong.

The parking lot is crowded with cars. Yellow

school buses line up below the football field.

He’s standing on a bleacher. How can he know

the meaning of what fails to alter or yield

to time? The stadium is exactly the same,

too, like the auditorium with its WPA murals

and plywood-like uncushioned seats. The past is shame-

less the way it clings dustily to ceilings, walls

and floors. He hears sounds like yearbook photos

or Miss Madlin’s voice teaching him Latin syntax,

immutable, permanent–the pictures she shows

to her class, the maps of Rome, eternal facts

he learns by translating Caesar, Ovid, Cicero,

learning of ancient ways he’s told he’ll outgrow.

The air’s spare, tawny, an October afternoon

smell to it like the delights of Halloween,

though he and his friends, all seniors, are too old too soon

for trick or treating. It’s the same light he’d seen

in woods as a child when the trees were chang-

ing and the sun took on its own autumn colors

even at noon, a Rembrandt light, the strange

sheen of a painting painted in old age that favors

the gleam in eyes to the shine of young bodies.

He stands at the end of the Science building, listening

to Jabbo preach about physics. What he sees

instead of the experiment his teacher’s performing

is the light outside, not at eight or twelve or three

fifteen, but a day being what it will always be.

From a page of Tennyson, a dreary, nocturnal,

romantic meditation on friendship and oblivion,

he looks anxiously up at Miss Joyner. She does call

on him next. He wonders what to say, if he’d done

enough already that class, an accomplishment

of sorts, just understanding the poem–the dread

that is existence, the loss, whatever is meant

by before and after, presentiments said

to belong to God or his holy ones. Not yet,

for him, the deep unknowing, the past surging

into the poet’s thoughts by the death of his friend. Forget

it, Lord T., he’d callously say. It’s everything

he’s not, not yet, sitting in a classroom, mur-

muring beneath his breath lines he’ll need years later.

As Rick’s rooms become fewer, smaller, the more ill

he is, his mind weakens. His days are nightmares

that haunt him awake with cold, strident, shrill

voices that force him to raise his, the dread that dares

him to become what he was never before, shrew-

shrill, who when his stricken boyfriend comes

in his wheelchair to visit him will always do

the impossible–stick out his tongue. His home’s

long lost. He’s shrunken to no size. He shits

in his diapers, wipes it on his thighs and knees.

This is what the boy could never imagine he’d see,

friends dying young like the most ruined old be-

come, their lives mere mutterings, a mad language

of ravings, of youth betrayed, its confusions and rage.

At the border between now and then, the word

not otherwise spoken, the music not otherwise

sounded, a Schubert sonata perhaps, the third

from the last, the one in C minor: no lies,

no illusions possible in such music, profundities

revealed not given to words, reserved for night,

dreams, memories, whatever one needs to seize

the past, to bring it back, to make it right,

true if you like, unburdened by the impurities

of human speech, the music of another sense,

better for saying what we mean and cannot

say, how it is his youth that lingers in the lim-

inal half-light and shadows of a dying man’s

work, mourning a time he too late understands.

This is a poem for Lindley, Corb, many others,

schoolmates he’d failed too often, Lester, Bob,

Sherry, Walton, Dan, Cricket, like lovers

of his later years, Anne, Shannon, Rob-

ert, Julie, Tony, friends seen by a certain

strain of light, late October’s, the orange sun

dying into red over the trees, stain-

ing their faces with a burning glow, each one

still young, brighter in the twilight than they are by

day because he who writes, old now, holds onto dreams

and images that cling to his mind like a white lie

he tells to himself, because otherwise the past seems

to escape him, as love does, unless he’s true to desire,

to memories like fall leaves at sunset, doubly on fire.

The Not Inside You

A boy’s image is imprisoned in the glass of a window.

Could he release his reflection if he chose to, his face

on a rainy summer day sixty or more years ago?

He’s gazing out at his father’s soggy lawn. The lace

curtains in the living room are drawn back. The birds

are sopping, perched on drooping limbs. Worms–

pink, gray–are flailing on the walkway. A maid’s words

are no comfort to him. There are lessons a boy learns

from bad weather. The games she suggests he play

he cannot win or lose. The lamp before him illuminates

his face on the window, flickering like a flame. Today,

as he stares at the boy, sad without any playmates,

he can’t recall if he wanted in or out. Did he see

his fate in the glass, trapped, happy to be solitary?

There’s a strange, yet familiar pain in his gut, odd

new rumblings, his dried-up, blotched skin more wrinkled

this morning. It’s not wrong, just unwise to blame God

for age’s sorrows, the worrisome, ugly, crinkled

look on his face, the dizziness he feels when he

stands up too quickly, the slowing of his pace,

the names he can’t remember, what he can’t see

even with his glasses on. A sense of disgrace

is his country now, not belonging anywhere,

to anyone in the terror his mother left for a face,

the mask she wore after her death, in the final

breath his father took, the sudden exhaling of air

as he died. Paradise must be a lonely place.

So much pain to justify. All he’s refused to call.

He knows nothing of gods. The mountain’s quiet. Magic

has fled the earth or was expelled alongside tragedy.

He’s bored. Even trees dwell in solitude. He’s sick

of pretending the old myths are true. You see

before you an agèd Greek man wearing a worn

black shawl, mourning for the islands he’s lost.

He doesn’t belong here or deserve the city’s scorn

and its chastisements. Let him return to his coast,

his mountain top, where the sun makes the smell

of lemons pervade the heat, to the god-dwelling temple,

the theater he loved, to make believe, to his sin-

less, sensual world of sand and sea. Tell

him there’s a way to restore the ancient simple

things, that he’s not landless, homeless, without kin.

He sings a song of drowning out of men’s sight,

a wrecked ship in its music, wind blown, hawk’s cry,

broken shells, bones sinking in sand, a night

when sleepers awake in fear, their dreams not a lie

but a foreboding, plovers scattering before

hill-high waves, heavy as mud slides. Melodies

roll in, retreat, repeat, break on the shore,

mingling words, harmonies, rhythms, keys,

intoning a requiem icy water keeps to itself:

a drone, the moaning of a tempest long after

it’s gone, the storm sea-weary like a mariner,

wind-battered, who swims for dry land. The shelf

where he stands at low tide tolls with the laughter

of crewmen mocking him, derelict lonesome sailor.

He wanders underground, a cold world, his soul

its rock face, umber, lead-flecked, mouldering,

its coal mined out. Above, on earth, is the hole

he fell through. He descends deeper, ring after ring.

His eye is a small round black spot for a snake

to hide in. He is looking for his dearest friend

who left before him. How long death seems to take.

They’d climbed up snow-capped peaks, down valleys, pretend-

ing it might last, years ago, out of some need

to explore a strange country, the cold world apart

from all they’d known where icicles on trees splinter,

scatter like bones, thoughts drift like a solitary reed

down a stream until it freezes over and the heart

turns to ice. It is death to separate. It is zero winter.

A priest jogs on a dusty path in ancient plains

through forests, past corn fields, barns. He is running

so fast because love is outpacing him, like rains

that fall ahead of him and move on, drenching

only others. He has preached God is the Not

inside you all humanity shares. He runs and runs

because this is Poland and the dirt underfoot is the rot

of its years, its centuries of bloodshed and persecutions.

Let him lie on a bed in a room with no source of light.

See how brightly it’s lit. He’s just had sex with a boy

who will leave him for seminary. God is the sight

of a body you love lying beside you, a pleasure, joy

that’s forbidden, like a priest, unmarried, husband

to no one, in love with a boy in the solitude of Poland.

Late October, 1959 and The Not Inside You are extracted from Stone Altars (BrickHouse Books, 2015).

Peter Weltner has published six books of fiction, including The Risk of His Music and How the Body Prays, and, in 2017, The Return of What’s Been Lost, five poetry chapbooks, among them The One-Winged Body and Water’s Eye (both in collaboration with the artist Galen Garwood), and six full length collections of poetry, News from the World at My Birth: A History, The Outerlands, To the Final Cinder, Stone Altars, Late Summer Storm in Early Winter (with photographs and paintings by Galen Garwood), and most recently The Light of the Sun Become Sea. He and his husband live in San Francisco by the ocean.

Danse Macabre is proud to name Peter Weltner our 2017 Artist-in-Residence. May our dedicated Macabristas delight in his wondrous poetics in both DM and DM du Jour throughout the year - and heartfelt thanks to Peter for his generosity in sharing his artistry with us. Cent’anni!