Peter Weltner

Poetry

 

 

A Last Letter to John Baird

 

Manhattan frigid, you, I, and Barbara, bar-hopping,

Elaine’s, some dive across

the street, tinsel decor, moss

fringing the windows, drinking without stopping

 

until it was midnight and I said good-bye, the next

day my interview at MLA

for a job, the city a gray

blur in my eyes as, tight, I worked to recall the text

 

of the letters I’d sent to schools, struggling to

sober up, to clear my head

by reciting the books I’d read

for my thesis to myself while thinking of you,

 

as I did all during the play we attended together

three days later, Hadrian

VII with Alec McCowen,

your knee pressing against mine, the weather

 

outside like an Antarctic storm, white-out, ball-

shrinking cold, you said,

as you left me, half led-

on by the copy of Sheeper you’d loaned me, the total

 

praise you’d lavished on Jack Smith, smitten

by you, thinking, despite

Barbara, the others, you might

be gay, inviting you down, after you’d written

 

me you’d nowhere to go, to Crescent Beach

my last lazy summer before

I left for that unknown shore,

for San Francisco where I’d gotten a position to teach

 

at State, in our motel, the third night, you standing

at the foot of my bed, knowing

I must be awake, showing

me what I wanted to see, that’s all, landing

 

on your feet, so to speak, after our wild pub crawl

in Myrtle, early in the morning

finding a girl, I nothing

to you in the way I wanted to be, the sexual

 

wall between us unbroken, unsaid, your body

still so like a teen age

boy’s and yet with rage

in it too, some will to hurt yourself or me,

 

 

the girl you’d been screwing out of your hair you declared

as I drove you to the airport

where, like a good sport,

you kissed me on the cheek and I waited and stared,

 

as if you hadn’t  been with me at all, till your plane

took off and I started my car

and drove for five days, as far

as I’d ever drive, hitting the city at the insane

 

end of the hippie days, and we still were writing, talking

on the phone, you with nowhere

to go as always, no care

for tomorrow, reading Burroughs, Genet, walking

 

the wild side, as Reed sings, of Manhattan, pretty

as little Joe, then one night

you asked to live with me, tight

friends as we were, and I said yes too freely

 

and when it came time, you needing the money

for the ticket I said no,

said fast I had to go

since I was in love with another guy and you and me

 

I never did understand, the flirting the books

the sly innuendos amidst

the girls the women, and I’d kissed

you once with no response, no dismissive looks,

 

no words, just your turning away and so I hung

up and heard later

from friends you were happier

alone but I knew even then it was wrong

 

of me, that I had betrayed you, that it was despair

that made you call me

and afraid of the responsibility

I’d refused, and suddenly you were taking care

 

of an old gay alcoholic in upstate New York,

Bobo, long retired

from our college, hired

way back in the ‘teens, who liked to pop the cork

 

off champagne bottles too often and fondle his boys,

you maybe the last one,

generous, a bit of a stone

head, but kind, bright, annoyed by the noise

 

around you of fools, reading your half-mad writers

yet keeping your cool, always

contending how it pays

better to play at life than to be one of its fighters,

 

my hearing, two years after, rumors you’d died, young,

just over thirty or so,

I never did know

how or why, like a precocious poet unsung

 

in his grave, you, John, too late now I ask you

for forgiveness, who denied

you, who meanly lied

to you when I said yes and meant no those too

 

many years ago and I crazily in love

with you yet, still wanting

you who are haunting

me as I lie in bed in the motel room I think of

 

most when I think of us, you standing at its foot

again like a messenger,

not thinking of the girl, of her

but of me, and I and you equally mute,

 

nothing to say, and you, though an angel borne out of the sea,

won’t free me or take me away

but silently declare I must stay,

here, in the exactitude of my desire, in my failure’s clarity.

 

 

"A Last Letter to John Baird," from Late Summer Storm in Early Winter,  with photographs and paintings by Galen Garwood, Marrowstone Press, 2015  

 

 

 

Santiago

 

1.

 

Santiago’s our city, built on ruins, rubble,

the dead, unexcavated grave sites

below high rises, apartments that resemble

Manhattan’s or London’s.  Urban lights

 

have replaced stars and moon. The bridge across

the river you wanted to walk on with me

is my refusal, fearful your life’s my loss.

I’m black, you’re a changeable gray.

 

Our passions’ two colors foretell the day

you’ll go.  I sense under my feet

the men before me, the casual way

they’d quit you in a dive on an unlit street.

 

2.

 

Smell the grit, the dirt on men’s hands,

the sweat on faces, in armpits.  Pity’s

how a road should be mapped, by garbage cans,

refuse bins, the sewers under cities.

 

It’s not foolish for the body to be led

by desire.  The old places are visible

still, rocks from a subway that astonished

you, almost Incan, easily chipped, friable.

 

Like mortal men, an expiring world takes

its time to die.  Find me again.

The season is quickly thinning, lakes

we swam in gone dry from lack of rain.

 

3.

 

You loved women.  I never could or did,

not in your way.  I’d wait for sunset

to head to the bar where I found you hid-

den in a back room one night, anxious, who let

 

me kiss you as I’d dreamed of while a stream

of men passed us, me sinking in them,

in you, who pushed me away, seem-

ingly straight, the music playing my hymn

 

to you, steady beat, thumping rhythm

of a synthesizer like waves pounding

bridge pilings, cocks risen, jism

later spewed in water:  me diving to you swimming.

 

4.

 

The legends aren’t wrong, men like you surviving

by escaping across the bridge, though

it’s a rougher life they’re now living,

stains on their clothes, tears they sew and re-sew,

 

rips, the fraying that tough work has caused.

You’re walking on El Puente de Despedidas.

Will you return to me? I thought you’d paused,

looked back, exchanged gray for black.  No mas.

 

I’m studying the neighborhood’s oldest maps,

tracing your journey, why you’ve had to leave,

my embraces a dare, my kisses traps

to keep you, a last “No” my one way to grieve.

 

5.

 

All passion’s a chant before sunrise, what is

real, unstoppable, that sanctifies the world,

makes it holier, a man abandoned, his

hopes denied him, mine by women that hurled

 

you from me.  I followed your route.  I watched

you walking not to get away, but to be

less ruined, to return some day, touched

by my hands, my lips, your wanting to see

 

more clearly the rooms we might dwell in, poorer

but more free, seeking to renew what’s below

you, what you’d seen in water flowing under

the bridge, enough rubble there to restore Santiago.

 

"Santiago," from The Light of the Sun Become Sea, BrickHouse Books, 2017

 

 

 

West from the Bay

 

1.  Golden Gate Bridge

 

Foghorns groan.  They’re moaning from below the ocean,

old bones or Tennyson’s kraken.   Sirens sound near-

by, though they don’t scare him.  He’s there to lean

precariously over the railing.  A life is made clear-

 

er when it starts to fall.  The stories, the art that make

it seem right plummet into the sea, for bad

or good, unmoored by waves.  His life feels a fake.

Who is he to pretend he could save her?  She’s mad.

 

She believes in her poems and her husband’s.  Just those.

And in enemies.  Thirty nine years ago, they stood

on the Golden Gate Bridge.  He might have torn off his clothes

and jumped.  The appeal of water is like a falsehood

 

he’s compelled to tell and can’t stop telling.  She held

his hand as they walked back to safety and his car.

She recited a sad poem she’d written.  The waves swelled

over the road.  It was the day after the end of the war.

 

2.  Lookout over Baker Beach

 

A row of bunkers waits years later

for an army that never comes, slumbering

like tombstones, by which a man stands, pondering

the beach below, hollowed like a bomb crater

 

by an invading sea that puts in harms’

way sky, sunlight, air, the undeep

things it lulls too easily asleep,

the boys it’s snatched from their parents’ arms.

 

3.  A Strong Spring Wind off the Bay

 

His books are piled in stacks as high as the backs

on straight chairs.  Though time won’t let him read them

all, he still buys more, so many that he racks

his brain trying to recall where they are.  Remem-

 

ber what the future glibly promised years ago?

Clichés.  Art’s long, life’s short.  The art part isn’t

really so.  On his deck, he hears the wind blow

through the Golden Gate.  A glass bowl’s a prism,

 

refracting twilight.  Most books die faster than

whoever writes them.  Play tag if you can, little

boy.  Why should it matter who’s an old man?

Play tag if you can.  The wind carries the spittle

 

he spits into it like seeds on the wing he watches

fly free.  There’s a music in its gusts he could use.

He scribbles some French with a stick in thick patches

of dust on the redwood.  Je ne suis pas heureuse.

 

Lost Mélisande.  Debussy’s in his head.  Children’s

Corner, the faun, the sea.  In an earthquake, all

of his books would fall and bury him.  There are sirens

close by for the tsunami.  Let them call him in.  Let them call.

 

4.  Ocean Beach

 

The ice plant’s in bloom.  The ships sit on the horizon.

The waves sound like traffic, the traffic like waves.

He knows all this, this truth, my son,

who sits in his room doing nothing.

 

5.  Lookout on Mount Tamalpais

 

There’s no wind.  The day is clear, still, airless.  

he bends his ear toward it as he did to hear

his father’s last words when he’d little breath left.  “Say yes,

my friend, to no more fear.  It’s a bright new year.”

 

When Stefan went insane, he stepped on land’s end’s rocks

so anxiously because he knew he’d fall through

the spaces in between into the Absolute.  Flocks

of pelicans in their strict formation are flying to

 

the headlands northwest.  The beach is a cemetery,

broken grave markers, the Prince Philip’s hull,

sand, shells, buried fin whales, driftwood, sea-

weed, jellyfish baking in the sun. He tries to cull

 

from nature what he is able to pray to.  To take back

his hopes from crows.  The moon he woke to

has dropped from the sky, between him and a crack

in the earth.  He thinks of dying with quick eyes, true

 

to Stef, his sights set on the view they hiked to Tam’s summit

for, the Pacific from the make-do lookout tower

of the storm-bent oak they climbed–infinite, no limit

to it, as Stef’d promised they’d see, now and in the hour.

 

6.  Fort Point

 

Youth’s a green country west from the bay,

no longer voyageable to, now its islands

have fallen beneath the sea.  Some day,

perhaps, they’ll rise again.  Who understands

 

this understands all, looking out beyond

the Golden Gate or at the rocks below,

like a man departing, tightening his bond

with the ocean, the love of tides for undertow.

 

"West from the Bay" from Stone Altars, BrickHouse Books, 2015

Peter Weltner is DM's 2017 Artist-in-Residence. He 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.