Mitchell Untch

At Four Years Old and Counting

Childhood does not grow smaller.

—Rilke

 

Was it terrible

To want

To touch

My older brother’s body

Standing there

In our bathroom

As I watched him

slip on a pair

Of underwear.

Pull his t-shirt

down over his chest.

I was only four

And what did I

Know except that

I did know

There was something

beautiful about him,

That I couldn’t name,

The way the light

Hit his body

seemed to float

Down his legs.

What are you looking at?

Snapping his towel at me. Laughing.

Even then my eyes

Grew and

My fingers branched

forward.

My lips

Mouthed silence.

And I looked

Without fear

And what did

I know of hate

Brushing my teeth,

Towel in my hand.

What did I know

Of death

And the

Fear of God.

Of mother

Of father

And the

Fear of love

And what

Did I know

Of being

Putting its

Hands over

My little boy mouth

Telling me

Be quiet

Don’t move

You’ll regret

It someday

When did

I know

I was just

Here

to surrender

When do

I appear?

When do

I dance?

When does

A child

Become the buried

Body

Of a song?

Family Tree

Your father sits in a tree.
He reaches down, tries to

grab hold of your hand.
At night he is filled with stars.

Your mother sings beside him.
The two of them fill the night,

howl in your ear.
Dogs run toward them,

Try to climb the tree.
You are one of the dogs.

Stars, lights that you ascend.
When you reach the top,

Your father is reading a newspaper.
Your mother, watching TV.

Their roots are still spreading.
The tree is growing taller.

You are digging a hole,
the hole already filled with your brothers.

It’s morning and they are rising
through a mirror of white clouds.

You are looking up.
They are looking down.

Your family is holding hands—
their arms, branches.

You’re flying toward them.
I’ve already flown.

Perpetuity

I never buried my twin. In my reflection, two of me.
Plant. Animal. Indivisible. Under sky, no difference,
unable to calculate hours
that disappeared no more
than it can fraction off endlessness.
The two of us, air circling,
holding on,
our melodies rooted.
I am two people, one interred inside the other,
picking off noise, thunder’s burrowing sighs.
No missing him when I die. On this page it reads
here we died. I can’t love him too little or too much.
Afraid of adding or subtracting something
from myself that would harm him,
take him away from me,
hand him over to God who can’t love him
more than I can, more than his sunlit hands
shuddering leaves,
reaching toward me to grab hold.
I have no desire to witness eternity—
prefer the unaccountable to draw on.
When it speaks, I will listen when I want to know
where I’ve been, why, and how far it is
I travel to find what’s no longer here.
At night I dream:
I’m standing in a churchyard,
inside unknowable edges,
face, hands
tethering sunlight,
the solace of constellations.
I don’t understand.
Will I be able to taste the air
he walked through?
Is it peace I’m after?
I hide inside him. Out of focus.
A lens of stained-glass windows
above my head,
wearing his thorny crown,
asleep at the foot of our bed.

Floribunda

As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field.

Psalm 103: 15-16

 

Never write a poem that includes flowers, the instructor begins. Of course, Glück immediately comes to mind, ringlets of water lilies on the coffee table, rims of moonlit gardenias, curtains—the lapis lazuli of delphinium. So yes, there were no flowers as the instructor read from her latest collection, licking her fingertips, flipping each Jeanne d’ Arc tinted page, no weeping perennials, no sunflower’s eyelids drooping, no crestfallen faces in tall yellow grasses, no sudden miscarriages of a rose or rampant rash of camellia like so many broken hearts opening. As I listened, I remembered how last week I sat on my yellow lawn chair, on my newly minted grass, and watched my neighbor across the street weed her garden, her broad brim hat, a sundial as the sunlight flew over the bright red bricks, unsaddled her house, the host of hedgerows, the honeysuckle, the crows bickering in a bed of sweet peas. Her sunny rubber garden gloves smudged with dirt, essences of broken glitter and flints of Mesopotamian bone, unstitched ragweed, lopped the heads off dandelions. Fingering her trowel as if it were a scalpel, she searched for a spot to root petunias, circumventing an earthworm’s misguided crawl, the directionless wings of a ladybug, an itinerant bee, filling the banks of her fertilized nests with slips of African violets, misting them with water, their petals like dusty windows after a rain, slowly toweled in the sunlight. I saw how she lifted dahlia’s from their lime colored hammocks of moss, measured the crochet of circular walls on which they would cling, spraying the leaves like she would the back of her neck—O’ Lady Day, another gardenia, a spotlight in the wind’s applause, O’Lady Day, a strand of poppies pricking the effulgent soil as it gives where it needed, as it always has, swiftly as gifts, as rain. I see her knees selfless swelling in roots, her narrow fingers narrowing in the long stems and in the blooming crowns, a resurrection. I wondered if what she was doing was right- love hacking the soil, the switch grass, scissoring, scaffolding, meddling with what has managed for so long to make beauty from the dead, what we give it, the entrusted soul, while the wild OxEye, butterfly weed, the insatiate lupine sing over the blonde fields, over the wind, their streaming trumpets of song. By this time, of course, the thorn of my resistance began to rise as I thought of Blake, Keats, Frost, Kunitz, the petal, the stem, the stamen, studied the instructor’s polka dot dress, like sweet-eyed peonies, her hair spun like dusty millers, her shoes, sprigs of springtime outer wear strapless in the earth’s morning foxglove, chrysanthemums, the outward pouring of a selfless sun. Pull up the weeds for the ghosts who garden here. Soon and soon enough our hands will touch the soil. Ground gives and takes as it pleases. Birds sing here, here, here. Soon we will be ghosts that travel between headstones, whispering leaves and what the ground grows-forgiveness for an anger, a love turned, a mother, a father forgotten. Put a fence around the ones you love, or have grown to. And if you haven’t grown to yet, you will. Wade through the mist of a thousand years—each step dissolves the step before it, grass lies still over the mound, stones have settled in, wind sings the names like water sings names left at sea. What difference this soil, this broken land. Each hold, each carry. Here are the pavilions where ancestors loved, where Sparrows flew in legions out of our cathedrals, and out of our of mouths, a few prayers. Here love is audible. They brought me here, those still remembered. The sunlight is ransacked. My hands are in my pockets. My feet press down on the grass. My shadow lies here, here, here—here is my head, arms, my root crown, here my body stem.

 

Spencer

—for Spencer Reece

 

The park is empty, the sky: a palace. for Spencer Reece
Winter ducks paddle in nearby Harlem Meer,
draw behind them furrows of light.
Ducklings ride atop the sharp tips of little arrows,
glide over a surface they are too young to see the bottom of.
The mother never looks behind her.
All point in one direction.
The water welcomes their warmth.
Cattail signal their arrival, widen their harbors.
I count the circles. Notes that ring
from the shore.
The ducks waddle up the bank of the pond,
pull the wide net of their shadows behind them,
shake off in the sun.
Even denuded, the Yoshino Cherry wears its promise,
flipping its wrists of baubles along Reservoir,
Lilac Walk, Sheep Meadow.
A second string of showgirls wait backstage for their entrance.
I walk having nowhere to go.

***

Mid-afternoon, Park Avenue.
Work crews gather at construction sites.
Helmets blaze in circles like sunflowers.
Cranes prop up the sky with iron wrists.
There’s nowhere for the traffic noise to go,
thick as the Sunday Times.
Goldfinches, sparrows, siskins build winter homes.
I spend the day in the Library reading a collection of his poems.
The quiet inside the immensity of the reading hall,
where only light sheds its architecture on a mural
to repair the cracks in its sky.

***

It is small and polite, Stonewall, carries no aftermath, no anger.
I sit on a vinyl stool and have a drink delivered to me
by a shirtless bartender adorned with tattoos.
Judy sang from her toes up through the top of her head
peeling herself off year after year until she became completely
unlayered for those of us who dared to see ourselves in her,
who needed to.
After she sang, there was nothing left.
The enamored world moved on.
The riot of history abandoned the history it began.
We are still singing “Over the Rainbow.”
We are still trying to find those slippers.

***

Manhattan never leaves the dark alone.
Times Square intoxicates the buildings, bubbles over
like a bottle of cheap champagne.
Tourists navigate with their iPhones, mapping their steps.
What is night becomes day all over again.
Cameras flash their constant astonishment.
Somewhere on stage someone is dancing
in the front row of a chorus,
back- lit, wearing feathers.
The director gets it right,
brings the feathers forward.

***

It was in New York in December
at a small café where he and I first met.
The city revolves around us,
A carousel of winter coats, scarves, traffic, scores of car horns.
Puddles blister along the sidewalks.
I had given him my poems to read.
My foot wagged beneath our tablecloth.
We could hardly hear one another through the brou-ha-ha
of waiters, busboys, customers waiting to be seated, fed.
He was tall, slim, with thinning hair, wore wire rimmed glasses
that made him look like a bank teller
or a clerk at a tailor shop.
He had the eyes of a poet, winter-born.
Manhattan cold engulfs us.
After he reads through several of my poems he says: “This one is good.”

***

We walk the neighborhood for an hour, through Chelsea,
through harbors of sunlight that spill
over the tops of the Willow Oak and Silver Linden,
gardens where winter flowers begin to take hold.
Rousseau would have loved it,
walking the gardens, watching birds feed, cataloguing nuance.
I tell Spencer the secret of how to keep his leather shoes
from getting ruined when it snows.
“Rub a dab of Vaseline over the tips of them,” I say.
He says he never thought of that as he wipes his eyeglasses clean.
I remember thinking that’s what I do when I want to hear someone better.

***

I leave Spencer at his front door and walk
back to my hotel, to the blue green curtains,
the blue green coverlet with the wintered look of those trees
in the park earlier, a chair, a table,
the mirror in the hallway that holds my mute reflection.
I lay on my bed and stare at the ceiling,
at the pock marks of the early nineteen eighties,
the stale yellow patina
lumpy as gooseflesh and think about what I didn’t
talk about, what I forgot to tell him.
Before my brother died his face was pimpled with rose colored
bumps. He looked like someone had glued pomegranate seeds
to his cheeks . He used makeup to cover them. He used a fan.
He laughed more times while he was dying than I do still living.
The ceiling reminds me of him, oddly, of his last month.
What is death that it should follow us only to bring us back to a beginning?
I want to move on.
My face is a burden.
In the eighties, my twin brother, all of my friends, died.

***

Later that evening, I meet Spencer at the Emma Lazarus house
for an elegant fundraiser.
We have come to raise money for an orphanage of little girls
who live without prospects, without food.
They are soon going to be filmed, hopeful in new classrooms, schoolbooks.
He wears his cleric collar.
I see him differently.
The archbishop is there.
I see the world differently.
I wear Men’s Warehouse and newly constructed hair,
stand in one corner of the room,
holding a drink with one hand,
trying to figure out what to do with the other.
Out of my element, small town born,
I cannot see where the walls end and the ceiling begins.
Before I arrived, I shined my shoes three times.

***

The evening fills with promise of money.
Photo-shopped faces of waiters
flaunt flawless jawlines,
v-shaped from head to toe like martini glasses.
An underground celebrity sings plaintive songs with her guitar.
Bursts of laughter clatter like clusters of the high heels
running downstairs.
Richard Blanco is there from Spain from Cuba from Florida.
We meet briefly.
Our hands extend toward one another
like foreign diplomats.

I thank Marie Howe for writing about her brother,
use both hands to clasp her one as if I were trying to prevent
a candle from being blown out.
Do we ever lose the ghosts of our interiors?
Seems they follow us everywhere with tireless ambition.
I was going to tell her about my twin who died of AIDS
but she was on her way out the door
along with others who were on their way out the door.
It didn’t matter in the end.

***

My last day in NY I send Spencer a text to say goodbye.
I go home with the knowledge that I will probably never see him again.
Or is it that I will always see him
in his cleric collar and deem myself unworthy
but for the beauty of his poems, for their undertaking.
To this day I have not contacted him.
It is 4 o’clock in the morning, two years after we met.
I cannot sleep, stare at my bedroom ceiling.
I am alone inside a room, inside another.
Before morning, I read “The Road to Emmaus” for the fifth time.
It will take me years before I complete this poem.

***

The director of the film about the orphanage of Honduras girls
sends me a trailer.
“I am wind blowing through a curtain, hear me.”
“I have learned to hold the moon in my hand when it turns.”
“I am a donkey, tireless. Do not underestimate me.”
Blouses flower in the wind, clipped to a laundry line,
crisp reds, blues, yellows.
I e-mail the director.
The trailer is beautiful I tell him:
a courtyard filled with children,
a priest standing in the middle,
wearing wire rimmed glasses who sees
more clearly what others do not.