I wrote this poem, this next poem, about four years ago,
I think.
And I have actually never read it in public.
And I might be about to discover why.
When I left Tucson, my wife and I moved to San Francisco.
And I took a job working in a law firm,
three nights a week from 6:00 in the evening until 4:00
in the morning, proofreading legal documents.
And this poem is about that experience.
"Document Processing."
Not the Chilean debt restructuring,
not even the pro bono for San Quentin prisoners,
and certainly none of the Venture Sheets,
the startups in gene splicing, none of it loved us.
24 floors below, the Embarcadero,
impudent, the neon pagodas and coffee roasting plants,
melancholy.
The fog erasing bridges in Bay.
But it never blanked the legal docs I proofed.
So, lights off, three or four of us, the night shift,
slouched in attorneys' chairs, our midnight lunch
break in the law firms, unadorned, Politburo-gray glass
and Formica conference room, where,
occasionally, one of the document processors, a woman,
would entertain.
She said, at home, coming from some of the other apartments,
there were little moans.
She heard them through her kitchen window.
And we all loved her voice, its connivance and submersion.
A dark glint because the men and women she imagined making love
were never the real tenants, but people
she pulled together from other places and times, whoever had
loved enough, whoever had not.
The clerk from a Palo Alto bookstore,
the slur of her long, blond hair across the nipples of a man she
had seen throw a painting into a dumpster.
The ones in 3H, brothers who painted barracks on a military
post.
They masturbated for their wives.
The document processor told us about it.
She said little moans, persuasive slatherings,
light slaps like spanking, or like slaps,
altercations, short cries and louder moans, snaps
undone and giggled cliches.
And every so often, the shiver of smudged instruction,
of fabric, the breath of a wet command, annoyance, zippers,
endearment, coaxing, ripping, wheedling.
That noisy?
Of course not, no.
But augmented, prolonged in the privacy of my blood, my brain.
And now you think I'm telling you some secret about myself.
I did, after all, move from body to body, borrowing.
Why be stuck staying one person, a mouthful of hopes,
a handful of denials?
She brought together whoever she felt
most needful and polished or inept and thrilled.
The work product rippled across our desks, currency agreements,
development bankruptcies.
And we drifted along.
We pictured her at a stove frying onions and leaning
nearer the window, listening to two women she'd
watched at a rugby game, the Marina Green, the asbestos
litigation, the conveyance of profit margins,
the deeding of cattle empires, of windmill projects.
The singer at the BART station, he was loud, a heckler.
At home, polite, because the waitress, a Moroccan,
wanted him submissive.
It was always after arriving from work, she said,
or as she got ready to go.
But some of you might care more that on those nights
she had no stories, we improvised,
through the nearly deserted offices and corridors,
a course from minigolf.
Knocking the ball around ficus trees and computer stations,
playing carpet holes and cigarette burns
as water hazards, file folders as sand traps.
The building swayed in wind and light earthquakes.
A temblor of 5.3, and, imperceptibly, the dimpled ball
rolled.
6.4 and my curiosity surprised me, revolving.
3.7, I lost interest in my own inhibitions.
On clear nights, Sausalito smeared the hilly, black horizon
with its imitation of sparks, a mercenary army's encampment,
the fires of the victors and vanquished.
Whoever wished could try to pick out
the lights of the split-level where a young broker drowned
a woman he'd hired to fuck, bound
and gagged in a bathtub, his wife and children off visiting.
Now, you think I'm telling you innocence flares only as
its potential for destruction and self-indictment,
as if there were too many games.
But there aren't enough.
Their purpose is always to reflect,
to mirror the darker leathers, the worn and unworn, the mouth
marks that stain the skin for a day or two,
to mimic the speechless plural of glances, swellings,
a drunken gentle attendance, the ungentle.
You think I'm telling you something naive or wrong.
But I don't exist except as an absolute distrust of words,
a dark trinket you can wear and finger
while you decide what you most want, the care or the taunts.
Whichever you think you're getting,
the strappado or the luxuries, whatever is unexpected.
The windows raised and wanton and wanting.
You know the ones.