When I lost my baby
I almost lost my mind.
Let the edges of the hills be just about to brighten. Let the trees never fuzz with leaves. Let the black towns sleep in one long night like Lesbia’s lover. Let the monks in the half-built monasteries remain on their knees in the 4 A.M. Latin prayer. Let Pat Boone stand on the highest rung of the Hit Parade and tell all the factory night shifts:
I went to see the gypsy
To have my fortune read.
Let snow always dignify the auto graveyards on the road to Ayer’s Cliff. Let the nailed shacks of apple vendors never show polished apples and hints of cider.
But let me remember what I remember of orchards. Let me keep my tenth of a second’s worth of fantasy and recollection, showing all the layers like a geologist’s sample. Let the Caddie or the VW run like a charm, let it go like a bomb, let it blast. Let the tune make the commercial wait forever.
I can tell you, people,
The news was not so good.
The news is great. The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad. Pat is doing all my poems for me. He’s got lines to a million people. It’s all I wanted to say. He’s distilled the sorrow, glorified it in an echo chamber. I don’t need my typewriter. It’s not the piece of luggage I suddenly remembered I forgot. No pencils, ball-pens, pad. I don’t even want to draw in the mist on the windshield. I can make up sagas in my head all the way to Baffin Island but I don’t have to write them down. Pat, you’ve snitched my job, but you’re such a good guy, old-time American success, naïve big winner, that it’s okay. The PR men have convinced me that you are a humble kid. I can’t resent you. My only criticism is: be more desperate, try and sound more agonized or we’ll have to get a Negro to replace you:
She said my baby’s left me
And she’s gone for good.
Don’t let the guitars slow down like locomotive wheels. Don’t let the man at CKVL tell me what I’ve just been listening to. Sweet sounds, reject me not. Let the words go on like the landscape we’re never driving out of.
gone for good
O.K., let the last syllable endure. This is the tenth of a second I’ve traded all the presidencies for. The telephone poles are playing intricate games of Cat’s Cradle with the rushing wires. The snow is piled like the Red Sea on either side of our fenders. We’re not expected and we’re not missed. We put all our money in the gas tank, we’re fat as camels in the Sahara. The hurtling car, the trees, the moon and its light on the fields of snow, the resigned grinding chords of the tune — everything is poised in perfection for the quick freeze, the eternal case in the astral museum.
good
So long, mister, mistress, rabbi, doctor. ’Bye. Don’t forget your salesman’s bag of adventure samples. My friend and I, we’ll stay right here — on our side of the speed limit. Won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz?
“Want to stop for a hamburger?” says Krantz as though he were musing on an abstract theory.
“Now or one of these days?”
13
Breavman and Tamara were white. Everybody else on the beach had a long summer tan. Krantz was positively bronze.
“I feel extra naked,” said Tamara, “as if I had taken off a layer of skin with my clothes. I wish they’d take off theirs.”
They relaxed on the hot sand while Krantz supervised the General Swim. He sat on a white-painted wooden tower, megaphone in one hand, whistle in the other.
The water was silver with thrashing bodies. His whistle pierced the cries and laughter and suddenly the waterfront was silent. At his command the campers paired off, lifting their joined hands out of the water at their turns.
Then, in succession, the counsellors posted along the docks snapped, “Check!” A hundred and fifty children kept still. The safety check over, Krantz blew his whistle again and the general din was resumed.
Krantz in the role of disciplinarian surprised Breavman. He knew Krantz had worked many summers at a children’s camp, but he always thought of him (now that he examined it) as one of the children, or let’s say, the best child, devising grand nocturnal tricks, first figure of a follow-the-leader game through the woods.
But here he was, master of the beach, bronze and squint-eyed, absolute. Children and water obeyed him. Stopping and starting the noise and laughter and splashing with the whistle blast, Krantz seemed to be cutting into the natural progression of time like a movie frozen into a single image and then released to run again. Breavman had never suspected him of that command.
Breavman and Tamara were city-white, and it separated them from the brown bodies as if they were second-rate harmless lepers.
Breavman was surprised to discover on Tamara’s thigh a squall of tiny gold hairs. Her black hair was loose and the intense sun picked out metallic highlights.
It wasn’t just that they were white — they were white together, and their whiteness seemed to advertise some daily unclean indoor ritual which they shared.
“When the Negroes take over,” Breavman said, “this is the way we’re going to feel all the time.”
“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”
They both stared at him, as if for the first time.
Perhaps it was this curious fracturing of time of Krantz’s whistle that removed Breavman into the slow-motion movie which was always running somewhere in his mind.
He is watching himself from a long way off. The whistle has silenced the water-play. Even the swallows seem motionless, poised, pinned at the top of ladders of air.
This
