Sex and Candy
Candy: it’s the nookie of children. For when you are a child,
candy is what you think about during
every waking moment. It’s something you can’t get from yourself
and for which, therefore, you depend on the kindness of others.
It’s what you hide from other children when you do get some,
what you devour greedily when you have it and bitterly lament
the absence of when you don’t, what’s bad for you if you have
too much of it, and so on. Whereas, when you are grown, while candy
retains some allure, now it is sex that you think about
all the time, what you hide from other adults when you get some, and so on.
So would a divinity student say either candy or sex is a belief system?
Maybe they’re practices, like Buddhism or Quakerism,
rather than belief systems like Roman Catholicism or football.
Certainly sex was a practice to this fellow I used to know
in college who had all these elaborate schemes for getting women
and who actually succeeded at them, not because the schemes
were any good—for the most part, they were pretty dumb,
as a matter of fact, as when he got excited when he saw that one
of the objects of his desire wore a wedding ring
“because that means they do it” or when one smoked,
a sure sign of a moral flexibility—but because the schemes
were a bridge between his desires and their fulfillment,
a way to get from point A to point B, as it were,
just as he must have had similarly-successful schemes
for wheedling candy out of his parents when he was young.
Of course, sex is a slightly more complex field of study,
as I realized when I asked a nonagenarian German gentleman
of my acquaintance what single thing he’d like to have now
from his student days, when he spent his mornings reading Goethe
and Schiller and his afternoons dueling with sabers
and his nights emptying stein after stein of lager, and the old gentleman,
who’d been retired for more years than he’d worked
and who still had the scars from saber cuts on his cheeks, smiled
and pointed toward his belt and leaned close and whispered,
“Ein Steifer!” and you don’t have to have a Ph. D. in German
to know that’s one of those words that must mean pretty much
what it sounds like! But while he was talking about sex,
I also think he was being not only funny but also nostalgic
for his dead wife, just as we are all sentimental about those
whom we love, yet when we look around, where are they?
Perhaps they are eating candy in heaven, just shoveling it in.
Now let’s say they’re waiting for us
because they want to have sex with us—heavenly sex!—
though in the meantime, they get to have all the candy they want.
But when we get there, they won’t want either one, and neither will we,
and instead, we’ll all want the thing that’s better than either sex
or candy, the thing that we got just a glimmer of once,
like a firefly in a distant meadow that we saw one night
as we were stuffing our faces or pulling somebody’s pants down,
and it’s got a name, that thing, we just don’t know what it is.
Hello, I Must Be Going
I’m sitting in a London lecture theater and thinking
of my mother, dead just these three weeks—
and by the way, ladies and gentlemen, this will not,
repeat, not be one more crappy poem about a dying mother!—
as I listen to Dr. David Parker speaking on
“Love and Death in Dickens,” how the novelist wrote
about Christmas falteringly in his early work
and then with symphonic fullness when he realized
what was missing, namely, pain, cruelty, death,
and the bullying of small children, as when everyone
is so mean to Pip, for example, like Mr. Pumblechook,
who asks the orphan to imagine what it would have
been like if he had been a pig instead of a boy
and answers for him: “You would have been disposed
of for so many shillings according to the market
price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher
would have come up to you as you lay in your straw,
and he would have whipped you under his left arm,
and with his right he would have tucked up
his frock to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat pocket,
and he would have shed your blood and had your life.”
Sheesh! Before Great Expectations, says Dr. Parker,
Dickens’ attitude to Christmas was close
to the “fashionable indifference” of John Clare’s
Shepherd’s Calendar and other similar works,
but then he took one of his long walks and thought hard
and finally figured out the pain part—showing, not Tiny Tim,
but Tiny Tim’s empty chair—or, better, the way
to use the pain to make readers happy, because,
while it’s true that Mr. Pumblechook’s meanness
casts into bright relief the almost saintly sweetness
of Jo Gargery, who answers every threat by covering
Pip’s plate with more and more gravy, that’s not
the only way pain works. Because we want the pain.
We want to cry. We like to feel bad, though not as bad
as I felt the night I got the call saying Miss Josie only
had a few hours to live. The woman who was with her
passed the phone to me, and I said, “Hello, Miss Josie!”
and she said, “Hi, David!” and that was the last thing
anybody heard her say, because within a few minutes
she started to slip away. Billy Collins told me how he sat
by the bed of his own dying mother, and when he saw that
her eyes had rolled back but her lips were moving,
the Caribbean lady who sat with her said, “Look, she’s traveling.”
So that was the night Miss Josie traveled. Zoom!
Off to the Unknown Country, and without so much as a by-your-leave.
She was a regular Thane of Cawdor of a woman, my mom;
nothing became her life like the leaving of it. She worked hard,
she was kind to others, she was grateful for what she had,
and when it was time for her to go, she didn’t grumble;
she just left. And I, who shared her indifference
to any hope for an afterlife yet feared I might start shouting
for a confessor when my own time comes, I said to myself,
yes, that’s it, that’s what you do. I said to myself,
this is the real knowledge: that there’s no knowledge.
And so, after some initial sniffling and nose-blowing
and eye-wiping, I found myself not merely reconciled
but so happy I wanted to sing as I walked the streets
of London, because here I’d been disbelieving
in the afterlife, sure, like most of the overeducated, yet hopeful—
full of hope!—partly because, well, I do want to see
my dead parents again and figure that, after I die, I’ll want
to meet up with my wife and kids for another go-round
but also because the idea of Paradise is so appealing
in a literary way, much more so than just,
you know, fucking . . . Buddhistic acceptance, blah blah.
Hence most religions. Hence “Danny Boy”
and the father singing that when he’s in his grave,
he’ll hear the son walking above him and then bending low
to whisper “I love you” so the father can sleep
until the day the son follows him to wherever.
Hence, too, the eight-year-old girl whose mother
found her crying because her father had died
in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers
and she was afraid that when she became
an old woman and died and went to heaven, her father
wouldn’t be able to recognize her.
But isn’t it a little, um, selfish? To want someone else
to leave the earth and all its pleasures just so you won’t
be bored down there among the moles and grubworms?
“La forme, c’est le fond qui remonte à la surface,”
says Victor Hugo. Is that what belief is,
the depth which rises to the surface?
Ah, la religion, qu’est-ce que c’est, as wise old Mr. Hugo
would have it, he who wrote the fabulous Broadway musical
Les Miserables and inspired my friend Roberto G. Fernández
to begin a novel called The Miserables, pronounced,
not Lay Mizzerob-bluh, but Thuh Mizzerabulls.
“I no sad!” say many people, “I go to heaven!,”
but I’m not sure they’re thinking it through.
Also, there’s one big problem with the afterlife, as I see it,
which is what are you going to say to or do
with all these people that you didn’t say or do anything to
or with when you were up on the surface
going to ball games and cookouts?
Because if there’s only heaven and hell,
they’ll be in heaven; you don’t go to hell
for charring the weenies or bobbling an infield fly.
Also, instead of sitting around in the trailer
scratching yourself and mumbling, “We believe our reward’s
in the next world, not this one,”
isn’t it just a little more important that you try to do
good things in the here and now, and by “good things”
I mean not only avoiding the bad behavior of, for example,
the men in the Italian war camp whom Primo Levi
describes in If This Is a Man who, when they found out
they were going to be sent to Auschwitz, spent the night
before the train left fighting and fucking each other
but also practicing the good behavior of, for example,
the women who spent that night making food
and washing the children and cleaning the children’s clothes
for what would be their final journey, so that when
the sun rose the next day, it shone on the tiny shirts
and pants the women had hung on the wire to dry.
Picasso to Matisse: “When one of us dies,
there will be things that the other will be able
to say to no one.” Okay, but is that so bad?
Oh, sure, you may think you want your departed loved ones
to reappear the way the dead do in John Marston’s
The Malcontent (1604), ridiculous strangers
with big red noses and tufts of hair over their ears
who pull off their masks and kiss the astonished women
who thought themselves widows and clap pistols
to the heads of those who betrayed them
in the first place. But if I got my mother back,
she’d still be a sick old lady.
She wouldn’t be as I remember her best:
45, still sexy (though I wouldn’t have thought so then),
toiling like a beskirted Hercules at work
and home both, growing champion roses, raising
horsessheepchickensducksburros,
and cooking every morning and most nights
for three male ingrates: my father, my brother,
and yours truly, the poet. No, she’d be 99
still and sharp of mind, yet so frail in body
and weak in sight and hearing that she’d say
“I’m ready to die!” most days of her last year,
though on others she’d want to know what
the Portuguese are famous for. Or how yogurt is made.
Or whether popsicles have seeds. Or if the Japanese
have taken over yet. “Not yet!” I’d say, though yogurt
remains a mystery. And it is just one month later that I am in
Baton Rouge with Barbara and the boys
and my brother and his family, burying my mother’s ashes
and giving away the few things she had left
and taking a few with me as I say goodbye forever
to the then-little, now medium-sized town I grew up in.
Goodbye, Baton Rouge! Good bye to the City Club,
where my father stayed his first night in 1936.
Goodbye to the LSU campus, where Dr. Tommy
looked out his classroom window and stopped
dead in the middle of his Chaucer lecture
when he saw the pretty young chemistry teacher
and decided he had to meet her, “come what may.”
Goodbye to Mike & Tony’s and the Italian Garden,
where Doctor Tom used to woo Miss Josie
over well-done beefsteaks and factory-strength spaghetti sauce.
Goodbye to the tiny grave of Thomas A. Kirby III,
the brother who should be six years older than I am
but who lived only a day. Goodbye to Moss Side Lane
and the pond and the barn and the pine patch
and the three live oak trees, one of which grew
so fast than that my father asked around and found
it had been planted in what was once a mule cemetery,
years earlier. Goodbye, goodbye to all that!
And goodbye to all the other little towns
on Interstate 10 that I’d pass on the way over and back!
Goodbye, Milton, and goodbye, Bagdad,
that appeared together on a single sign
reading “Milton Bagdad” and always made me think
of a fat man in a fez and white suit,
like the Sidney Greenstreet character in Casablanca.
And goodbye to Defuniak Springs, the town containing
“fun” in its name but also “aaakk!” or the sound we make
just before the ax strikes, if we can see it coming.
Can you imagine what it would be like to live in a country
that doesn’t have a town named “Defuniak Springs”?
No? Good, because you don’t have to!
And now that I am back in darling Tallahassee,
so maligned by so many Frenchmen of my acquaintance
who say to me, “Bot eet moss be so terry-bull to leeve in zis . . .
zis . . . how do you call heem?—zis Tallahass!,”
neglecting the fact that their own Montaigne
preferred his farm to the huggermugger of Bordeaux,
I am free to reflect on what a lovely dream it is,
this afterlife. Pow! Christ is resurrected, in a burst
of radiance that burns his image into the Shroud of Turin.
Fabulous! And no less fabulous for the fact
that spoilsport investigator Joe Nickell wrote a book
in which he described how he used powdered pigments
and a bas-relief statue to create a Shroud of Bing Crosby!
Ha, ha! Very funny, Joe! And exceedingly rational to boot.
It’s just that you can’t stop people from believing
in an afterlife or at least hoping that there is one.
In Verona, Dante passed a group of women, one of whom said
“Isn’t that the man who goes down to Hell as he likes
and returns and brings back news of them below?”
to which another replied, “Indeed, it must be him—
do you not see how his beard is singed and his skin darkened
by the heat and smoke that are below?” And Dante is said
to have heard the words and passed on, though smiling a little.
Then eight months after Dante’s death, his son Jacopo
dreamed that his father appeared before him, dressed in white.
Jacopo asked him if he lived, and Dante said, “Yes,
but in the true life, not our life.” Oh, isn’t that pretty?
But isn’t “our” a better word than “true”? Our sweetheart.
Our favorite movie. Our mom and dad. Our childhood.
Our little town. Our couch, our nap. Our bottle, our glass,
our sandwich. Our dream! That’s the deal: it’s only a dream.
The son with his mother again, the little cripple in his chair.
