She’s Not There

Poe says the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic

in the world, but I’m not buying it. There are a lot of topics 

more poetical than the death of a beautiful woman—actually, 

there’s just one, which is the unattainability of a beautiful woman

or man or even a man or woman who is not exactly an oil painting,

as they used to say back in the day, and if this is true for poems, 

how much truer is it for songs, starting with today’s and going back 

to the old ones and then the really old ones, the songs that don’t 

seem to have an author, that just seem to flow up out of our need 

for sadness, for the pain that, if handled right, in the end

becomes pleasure. My question is, are these songs outside of us

and do they arise only when our hearts are broken, or are they inside 

us already and require little more than a mild shock to lurch into life

like a distraught monster, howling with pain as it throws the furniture 

through the window, burns the house down, and heads out to trample

civilization as we know it under its hobnailed boots? When you 

think of heartbreak, your first thought might be of a girl sobbing 

in her bedroom as her mother calls from downstairs and begs her 

to eat something, but “monster” is an apt synonym for “heartbreak”

given the thin line between love and not just hate but the kind 

of rage that just makes you want to obliterate the person you adored 

five minutes earlier, the one you idolized, loved to distraction, 

doted on, were charmed and fascinated and bewildered by. 

Once two fans who loved NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon so much 

that they dressed themselves in outfits that duplicated his—

boots, gloves, helmet, fire suit festooned with his sponsors’ 

logos—and leaned from the rail of a crosswalk over the track 

and tried to get Jeff’s attention as a reporter was interviewing him,

but the sound of the engines was so loud that Jeff never heard 

them, never even looked up, and in a heartbeat the young men 

turned on him and began to curse and shake their fists and spit 

at Jeff Gordon, who didn’t even know they were there. You say

well, that’s NASCAR for you, but it’s as bad or worse when 

the subject is Irish politics, as in “Pretty Peggy-O,” an anonymously-

authored ballad in which troopers arrive in a town 

called Fennario, and their captain falls in love with a lady like a dove 

and calls her by her name, Pretty Peggy-O, but she won’t

marry him even though he says he’ll set her cities free if she does 

and then, when she jilts him, says if ever I return / your cities 

I will burn and destroy all the people in the area-o, but the next 

thing you know, he’s the one who dies, who falls right over when 

Pretty Peggy-O tells him to get lost, hit the bricks, beat it, 

amscray. I guess he wasn’t so hard-hearted, after all. So you’re 

looking at a captain who’s as mad as a frustrated Jeff Gordon fan

and announces that he’s going to burn down an entire country 

and everyone in it if a maid doesn’t yield to him as well as a maid 

faced with a classic dilemma: should she remain chaste

at the expense of everyone else or spend the night with the captain 

and save thousands from a fiery death? Happily, she doesn’t have 

to decide, since the jilted captain dies of disappointment before 

he can find his box of matches. And that, you’d think, would be that 

except for one thing, which is that the song doesn’t really end, 

it just starts over: instead of a concluding stanza that ties everything 

up as neatly a festive ribbon in a bonnie lass’s hair, the song’s last 

stanza is the same as the first, meaning that the captain falls 

in love with a lady like a dove all over again, and off they go 

for a second round of failed love and heartbreak or as many rounds 

of failed love and heartbreak as you and your Irish pub buddies want,

the captain cajoling and threatening and dying 

as Pretty Peggy-O flirts and rejects and mourns anew, the scene 

rolling out again and again over the years, over the beers, over 

the centuries, the epochs and eras and eons, the geologic periods 

of time from the Cambrian through whatever they call the one 

we’re living in today. There’s a reason why some of the songs 

that get under our skin the most aren’t so much written 

as assembled: one songwriter’s ideas and images and feelings 

might be his or hers alone, whereas when a song’s authors 

are as many as the entire population of Fennario (or actually several 

multiples thereof), that means thousands of us are pouring 

our hopes and fears into a seven-stanza (or eight-, if you count 

the repeated stanza twice) song. Journalist Ted Anthony 

writes of what he calls “handmade music” or “mongrel music,” which isn’t 

a negative description at all, because our mix of “heritages 

and experiences and outlooks and travails makes us stronger 

and healthier both in our culture and in the music,” 

he says, for “we come from what we believe is a single world, 

but it is so many, all existing at once.” What rough beast 

sleeps within you, reader, its one eye about to open? 

No single person wrote “Pretty Peggy-O” and a million songs like it. 

Another way to say it is, you did, and you there, and you, and you.

Cause of Death Unknown

Guy I know was visiting his mom

when she died suddenly, and when

I asked him how he was doing,

he said he was grieving, sure,

but was also pissed at the cops

because they said his mom’s bedroom

was a crime scene, making him 

a criminal. Which is not how it works:

another friend who is a police officer

said no, what we say is cause of death 

unknown, because even when 

you find yourself looking at a bloody corpse,

you don’t know how it got that way.

Everyone thinks “Something in the Way

She Moves” is about Patti Boyd,

but George Harrison says I wasn’t thinking

about Patti when I wrote that song—

I was thinking about Ray Charles.

Guy’s mom had had a stroke, of course;

the coroner could tell that just by looking 

at her. She’d dressed, had breakfast,

read her Bible, decided to lie down 

for a minute before driving to work,

and that’s how her son found her:

hair done, hose and shoes on, hands 

resting on her stomach, purse 

by her side, eyes open like she was 

trying to figure it all out, he said.

Later

That’s what they say in novels:

a couple meet, they have a drink,

one thing leads to another,

you turn the page, and there’s that

word. Later, it says, exactly as it should:

any attempt to describe what just happened

will come across as mechanical 

or embarrassing or both. You’d feel

silly: you might as well be looking

at a clipboard, saying first they kissed

ten or eleven times, and then 

he got on his back, and she put 

her left leg under his right, and so on. 

It’s different in the movies, but there 

you feel as though you’re looking 

at something you shouldn’t,

as though you’re sitting across the room

as the lovers writhe and change 

positions. And do what, really? 

Something they won’t even remember, 

just as you can’t recount what you 

and your beloved did just the other morning. 

What you do remember is how you felt later

as you lay side by side with the sheets

twisted around the two of you, stunned animals

staring at the ceiling and catching your breath, 

and then one of you said how’d that happen

or what just happened, and the other 

said what your mother used to say 

when you were a little kid and you asked her 

how wars started and why some people 

are mean and others nice or, later, 

when you were a teenager, 

how you could tell if someone really 

loved you or simply wanted to use you

and also how you could tell if you, too, 

were in love or just wanted to be,

and your mother said I have no earthly idea.

Six Seconds

Local man is eating lunch in his car and reading the newspaper 

when a guy with a gun jumps in and says okay, start her up, 

and off they go to one bank drive-thru after another,

the guy putting his handgun to the driver’s temple

and counting down from ten as the man pleads with the tellers 

to hand over the money. At one point, the gunman trips up

on the number six, so the driver says you miscounted 

and the gunman says what and the driver says 

you miscounted, so the gunman starts over again. 

What was the driver thinking during the silent times, 

the stretches when the two men were going 

from one bank to another, stopping at the red lights, 

keeping an eye out for cops? Maybe he thought that life 

will break you, as Louise Erdrich says, and when it does,

you should sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples 

as they fall around you, wasting their sweetness,

or maybe he remembered years earlier when he saw 

a car flip and land so hard that no one inside 

could have survived, and in that instant he knew 

that someone had died before the person who loved them most

knew: the wife chopping a salad in the kitchen, 

the husband wondering why his wife is late at work. 

The gunman who miscounted finally succumbed 

to drugs or mental illness or fatigue or all three

and staggered into a field and was picked up 

by the officers who’d been trailing him. 

Now the driver is spending his days doing 

the things you or I might do and remembering that 

he’d managed to add a handful of seconds to his time 

on this earth, enough to taste, what, one more apple? 

The Bowmen of Agincourt

Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time—

they were never on time. Hitler didn’t invent 

the autobahn, either; it was already there when 

he took office. And the bowmen of Agincourt 

didn’t appear at the Battle of Mons on August 23, 1914

to win the day for the heavily outnumbered British.

Officer after officer said they saw them, though,

saw “a long line of shapes, with a shining about them”

raining thousands of arrows upon the enemy.

Afterward, the German general staff insisted their troops

were not defeated by phantom archers but by Turpinite, 

a nerve gas developed by chemist Eugène Turpin

that was delivered by artillery shells and tested 

prior to the battle on a herd of 400 sheep.

Catherine the Great died of illness. She wasn’t crushed

by the weight of a horse she was trying to mate with.

That was a rumor started by the French, who were jealous 

of her power and, in the sex department, have a lot 

to answer for themselves. 17% of Americans think 

Joan of Arc is Noah’s wife. Turpin himself was present 

at the Turpinite test and said afterward that there was 

just a faint odor of methylated spirit in the air

and that the subjects of his experiment were to a sheep

unharmed and “seemed only, perhaps, a little more gay.” 

No one will remember you if you say there’s no such thing 

as a magical nerve gas or that there was no miracle 

that day on the battlefield. If you say milk is good 

for you or that we should love our mothers, your listener

will turn back to the buffet table or suddenly remember 

an important appointment elsewhere. Another observer 

of the Turpinite test reported that, after the smoke cleared, 

“of the 400 sheep, 400 were dead," frozen in place 

with the grass hanging from their mouths. That account 

appeared in all the newspapers. And more than one 

British officer told how the corpses of German soldiers 

had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds.

Night Falling in Baltimore

There’s something a little off about the young woman

behind the counter at the diner on Charles Street where 

Ed and I are just now sitting down at the end of a long day, an air 

of preoccupation, you might say, a look on her face that says 

she’s really not here even though she is, is ready to take our orders 

even though she’s holding neither pad nor pencil but instead 

rests her hands on her hips and looks at us for a moment but then 

past us to the door we came in through, at night falling 

in Baltimore, and when she looks out, we look out, 

which is when I remember saying to Ed on our way over

There’re not many people out tonight and him saying I know, 

it’s like they’re all someplace else—what’s going on, you think?

A half hour earlier, we’d said goodbye to the actors who’d finished

yet another ten-hour day of rehearsals for a play that begins

with a violent shipwreck and a character who asks what country

she’s in, and when someone tells her it is Illyria, she says

And what should I do in Illyria? The woman is still looking out

the door, and sure enough, there’s nobody out there, 

just the emptiness of the night, and then a figure in the distance 

that moves and stops and slowly gets close enough for me to see 

that it’s the old woman who’s always out walking the dog 

that’s older than she is and who once shook her fist 

at me and said, How about a punch in the mouth, Joe College, 

and then even they disappear, and we turn back to the counter 

and the woman behind it, and Ed says Let me have 

a chicken salad on rye toast, no pickle, and a milkshake, 

and I say, I’ll make it easy on you—I’ll have the same, 

and the woman turns and puts four slices of bread 

in the toaster, and just then the little radio on the shelf 

over the grill crackles and a voice says, We interrupt 

this broadcast again to say that Dr. Martin Luther King 

was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee, 

and Ed puts his head in his hands, and I don’t know what 

to say to the woman behind the counter, so I say nothing. 

Somewhere on the other side of the door we came in through 

is a woman who could be this one’s mother, someone

who has waited her whole life to vote but can’t, and with her

is a white friend who was bloodied for marching at her side, 

a little boy who needed meals and help with his homework 

but got a bullet instead, an officer shot dead in the line of duty. 

The newscast is over, and a song begins on the radio; 

it is “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, 

himself dead a year earlier. Our food arrives. It’s pitch black outside. 

The streets are empty. Where are we, I wonder, what country.

Oman

when we wake up

one or the other of us says oh man

and then the other says Oman

which is a sultanate on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula

and for a moment we are Omani

which is what the people of Oman are called

but we don’t know what that means because we’ve never been to Oman

or met anyone from there

or even met anyone who has met anyone from there

I wonder if maybe the Omani don’t travel very much

I mean why would they

we travel a lot

but not to the Arabian Peninsula

when people say oh man

they mean it as a substitute for oh god

almost everybody in Oman is Muslim

I wonder what they say when they wake up

also when they hit their thumb with a hammer

and if they use hammers like ours

or special Omani hammers

I’m not telling anybody how great our sex life is

because if I did I should probably tell them how stupid it is sometimes