Layaway
After offices are flushed, we workers go home or
to a nearby bar, museum, or movie house that fills
the blanks left decades ago, last year, or yesterday.
A wind kicks up again, displacing our own weight,
edging purple between red and gold on a small pad.
She draws a man who looks down to bewilder herself,
turns stern if she isn’t altogether curable, her legs air
when the wave comes in, and how swiftly clouds travel
before fading away, information worth having after all
to serve a double purpose, the grip always equal to bulk
rounded upward unless held by young sailors who learn
to agree with her or not, admitting the impossibility of
a water line, tiers of promenades, a tangle of ventilators
that finish off the appearance, given a smile at the door
of solid green water, knocked senseless against pieces
better suited to an emergency than a fence around it that
prevents accidental falling but gives jumpers an advantage
until she’s sick of the tears he’ll have to sort out himself,
great patches of wet paintwork and the stages and ladders
of a headache she’s endured a hundred times before, the
stranger says, and now it’s too late, they can’t agree more
up and down walls instead of the floor, a sudden ceiling—
space wrong to start with and getting worse with the tact
of a diplomat, part of the canopy cleared, harbor grime
thick, they like to tell themselves, or that’s what she said
about the river’s street, narrow, then widening to the sea
and a period between flashes, either named, numbered, or
just small and tumbling for days of tossing waves before
they stay afloat again, the Cape Cod lighter, some paint
rubbed off, clear plastic turning yellow, as serviceable
as the first day he gave it to her, back when they both
smoked Luckies and none of their friends had cancer yet,
though Jim F hangs himself by mistake in a drinking barn
as the pictures fade and Ghoulardi steps into another flick
about today, front seat that night, yesterday a rowboat
from which they climbed, how far out the shifting flaw
they ignore as if casually in a torn stillness verging on
impatience most of the time, for the tale should unfold
like a summer tablecloth, white linen, from a chest they
hadn’t noticed, calling him to the woman on his arm,
done with land a while but not the steamed and chilled
Dungeness crab it took them two hours and a bottle of
Chardonnay to eat at That Place on Bellflower, right after
the Chardin exhibit, suddenly dark with light described
as death on the highway day or night, fog, broken rules,
and a wave of the hand half the time, just before lunch
on days spent waiting for letters to answer themselves.
He bets on a horse, buys a spread in the football pool:
what was once a major adventure is now an everyday
road atlas with a dozen alternative routes neatly marked
during light hours that won’t bother her as much as the
varnished circulating boy whose compositions break off,
in effect outlawed, a racket disliked by the orthodox, but
slowly, reverently, as the minister makes love to his wife.
Recognition’s simple for members who know the virtues,
faults, and diversity of free fall, with its manifold appear-
ance, the long graceful curves vanishing straight up, and
the sun, behind indexed figures, that gives them an idea
and successfully, much as mourners look back at a video
and realize that they’ve witnessed a raw wound of death,
not their own this time, but close enough to make the care-
fully chosen words cut deeply, in all directions, as friends
appear to listen and attention wanders during the sermon.
They come and go or stay more important than a standard
answer, the sea of discriminating faces, he tells his wife
after hours of activity imperiled by weather, an accidental
contact with every good looking girl who wants promotion,
and he thinks she’s not looking, so he balls up the empty
cigarette pack, misses a wastebasket five feet away, and
leaves it where it bounced to the carpet. Wait, she’ll check
the wall, no ceiling in sight, but the proportions haven’t
changed, she concentrates on the gigantic friction between
as ever, but aware as she hadn’t been, all those years ago,
added to, subtracted from, and generally complicated by
the improvements, developments actually, they have to be
away for anything like abstract to her, or so she’d like to
believe for as long as it takes her to get from where she’s
going to where she’d been, he’s there too, he’s here now,
and gravity’s pull on clear water, thanks to moon and sun,
the same floating a single chip of wood or the new QE2,
his mother searching for her lost wedding ring, worn thin,
as the great ship enters New York harbor in digital color,
not black and white and leaving for Callao, the Santa Rosa
fifty years before, platinum shiny and snug on her finger
and three minutes of film the height of a lighthouse seen
once in Olinda, Márcio must have had enough of Rio then,
half do, half don’t, their democracies enforced by poverty
even if they have jobs, wear nice clothes, and go clubbing
at night, the figures small in vast Cubatão those moments
they show at all, the dance music reverb makes everyone
hard to see, that’s the point, as it is of the naked concrete
hole in the bottom traveling downward, the tone of voice
always visible, even when close enough to swerve a bridge
from city to suburb, she says, fixed herself, even prevailing,
and Pete’s wife still at the register upstairs, crying softly
as she reads a widow’s memoir, invisible to clerks who
watch, at least those who haven’t turned away in respect,
routine on the afternoon shift, a relic of days and systems
likely to hang around the wreck until another comes along
but quiet now that he has misunderstood and confused
everything she told him, having heard it before, clearly,
then settled back to wait for the help he hopes is coming.
She puts her hand on the side of his waist, she’s novice
enough, and the change from the library is exhilarating,
when sudden intricacies of cotton, moist flesh, hair, spit
come first, last longest, her age the same as the number
of her apartment, so he’ll never know whether she told
the truth or not, about how old she is, she had no reason
for the work clothes drying on a wooden rack in a tub that
pushes him sideways then ahead, he expects light bruises
and a smile for breakfast, her eyes the shimmering gold
statues and uneven steps of rooftops standing against a sky
that opens clean bitter aromas. Grass drenched with dew
flows into the rippling sound of a fountain, great carp wait
beneath the pond’s surface under the pines, he’s forgotten
the Top of the Mark, and San Francisco, spread out below,
a bed of embers, São Paulo at night from the circling DC7.
-Ron Horning
Ron Horning lives in Beacon, New York. "Layaway" was published in the online version of the September 2023 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.
Portrait, “Columbus, Ohio 2012,” by Anna West
The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Two): Ron Horning
Ron Horning’s “Layaway” is both a welter of memory and desire and a stretch of concentrated experience, starting with its image of offices “flushed” that evokes both scurrying quail and purification. The balance between expectation and surprise that strong poems create tilts toward surprise, and we find ourselves part of a mystery the more compelling for its insolubility. I read it as a poem of love and the memory of love, with a partial likeness to Kenneth Koch’s beguiling “The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951,” also a poem made of several stanzas whose numbers of lines are uniform (predictable)—in Horning’s case, nine; in Koch’s, two—lines with a suspicion of blank verse, a ghost of the iamb. In “Layaway,” the text has a comforting visual uniformity that belies its vertiginous changes of scene.
Koch’s mysteries clash playfully with the obvious: “She is dancing and I / Think she is pretty. That’s one part of it” and “It is satisfying to have a nose / Right in the middle of my face.” Horning mixes mystery with geography, with the maritime, and with the landmarks of particular cities and their quotidian associations. The poem’s poles are Ohio and Brazil, areas with no obvious connection but lots of non-obvious ones.
I have always been captivated by Cleveland. When I was growing up, it was King of Ohio, with Cincinnati the Queen. By contrast, I grew up in southeastern Ohio, Appalachia. Cleveland was the height of sophistication. My father, long before the concept of TMI, loved to recount his treatment at its famous clinic. The poem’s Cleveland includes its now-defunct but still-famous restaurant, That Place on Bellflower, and a former perennial of its late-night TV scene, a gonzo movie host named “Ghoulardi.”
As its title suggests, “Layaway” is in part a poem about what to do before something else can happen, the kind of time-filling that masquerades as unimportant but is really the center of who we are, as “we workers go home or / to a nearby bar, museum, or movie house that fills / the blanks left decades ago, last year, or yesterday.”
In stanza one we meet a woman, apparently an artist: “She draws a man. . . .” The man is our “he,” “who looks down to bewilder herself,” a bewildering that seems to apply to both parties, and to us. It is not about to stop. There is a hint of majesty in the voice reminiscent of John Ashbery in his meditative mode, and also a stern practicality—“a tangle of ventilators
that finish off the appearance”—seen at moments, as in Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”:
. . .the avatars
Of our conforming to the rules and living
Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,
Brushing the teeth and all that
Lost in the poem’s dizzying kinesthetic, we cling to the recognizable: an anti-suicide fence, “yesterday / a rowboat from which they climbed”—what a great definition of “yesterday”—part of the rich lore the poem gives us seemingly in passing, as are “days spent waiting for letters to answer themselves” and “much as mourners look back at a video / and realize that they’ve witnessed a raw wound of death. . . .”
The poem gives us the tips of icebergs and their bluish depths, but no view of a whole berg.
A mother appears, “searching for her lost wedding ring, worn thin”—a poignant image:
as the great ship enters New York harbor in digital color,
not black and white and leaving for Callao, the Santa Rosa
fifty years before, platinum shiny and snug on her finger
and three minutes of film the height of a lighthouse seen
once in Olinda, Márcio must have had enough of Rio then,
half do, half don’t, their democracies enforced by poverty
even if they have jobs, wear nice clothes, and go clubbing
at night, the figures small in vast Cubatão those moments
they show at all, the dance music reverb makes everyone
We are reminded that the role of media in memory, how screens rub off on sight, and how past and present never disentangle. We glimpse dancing in a Brazilian city. Further aggregation ensues, becoming itself a method, a mode, like “dance music reverb,” developing in long periodic sentences that climb over themselves in their haste. How excellent and true the phrase “their democracies enforced by poverty.”
Consummation, real and/or imaged, seems to happen here:
She puts her hand on the side of his waist, she’s novice
enough, and the change from the library is exhilarating,
when sudden intricacies of cotton, moist flesh, hair, spit
come first, last longest, her age the same as the number
of her apartment, so he’ll never know whether she told
the truth or not, about how old she is, she had no reason
for the work clothes drying on a wooden rack in a tub that
pushes him sideways then ahead, he expects light bruises
and a smile for breakfast,
The woman, though known in “sudden intricacies,” remains mysterious. Koch’s “The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951,” which like Horning’s poem contains a parent and boating, doesn’t solve itself either. Its fifth section, “A Critical Point,” says, “I went up to her and started to speak. / I felt shy but I had to confront the beautiful.”
Horning’s poem ends with this wonderfully-phrased climactic sentence:
Grass drenched with dew
flows into the rippling sound of a fountain, great carp wait
beneath the pond’s surface under the pines, he’s forgotten
the Top of the Mark, and San Francisco, spread out below,
a bed of embers, São Paulo at night from the circling DC7.
North and South America mate as “a bed of embers,” as we circle in our DC7, the last commercial prop plane before the advent of jets, vehicle that holds us in a past we’ve forgotten, a bar at SF’s highest point, watering place in existence for eight decades, looking downward, as the artist’s subject looks downward at the poem’s start. There are worse places to be. Our encounter is at an end, unresolved. Why have we read? “I felt shy but I had to confront the beautiful.” --Angela Ball
