One Secret Thing Read Free

anything, as of
    coal, ore, or stone
—not ashes
    but a clod—
usually of a large size
    but not too large to be handled by one person
—as at
    times, in my life, I have been a dazzled
    rounded heap or mass of something
being
    glistened almost out of existence.
A cobnut
    was the boys’, and
a testicle,
but not
the stone
    of a fruit—especially a drupaceous fruit—
    or a peapod, or a small stack
    of grain or hay, or a bunch of hair,
    as a chignon—or a small loaf
    of bread, a kind of muffin, a baked apple
    dumpling!
Oh father me, tuck me in.
    I’ll be the
stocky horse, one having an
    artificially high stylish action,
    and gladly be the pabulum,
the
    string of crystals of sugar of milk,
    C 12 H 22 O 11
,
    separable from the whey, dextra-
    rotatory,
as one might search
    through matter for matter one could like being made of.
    A mixture consisting of unburned clay,
    usually with straw as a binder,
    for constructing walls of small buildings,
    or matter leaping up like spirit,
    a black-backed gull,
or the eight-legged Jesus,
    the
spider
—dear Dad, I search for how
    to be your daughter, and I find the
wicker
    basket
you liked to say you had carried me
    around in. And now I want to cob your name
    (to strike, to thump, specifically
    to beat on the buttocks, as with a strap
    or flat stick),
O
young herring,
    O
head of a herring.
Dear old awful herring,
    let’s go back through
covetous
    to
thresh out seed,
let’s go back
    to
ore dressing,
to
break into pieces,
    break off the waste and low-grade materials
—
    it is sweet
to throw, especially gently
    or carelessly, to toss,
as if
    your carelessness had been some newfangled
    gentleness. Your spirit lies in my
    spirit this morning
crosswise, as timbers
    or logs in cobwork construction,
as we
make
    or mend, coarsely,
as I
patch
or
botch
    these
cobbl’d
rhymes.

Men’s Singles, 1952
    I sat in the noonday sun, no hat,
    no comb, no braces, my teeth reaching out buck
    naked toward food and drink, no breasts,
    no fat—my first Finals by myself—
    in front of us, as in the language of a dream,
    grown men danced and rushed the net.
    And something was building in my belly, some scaffold,
    an edifice where the flesh of those half-bare
    kings could sing, a green bleachers
    of desire. One of them was elder, I rooted for his
    shapely legs, their straight hair black—
    my heart in the stands had a fierce fixation,
    like a secret ownership, on him,
    for his pins and his face, and his name which held
    some key to knowledge, Vic Seixas. But when
    the younger, big and tawny, would serve
    with his back to me, then I could be
    the ace, the golden tiger, the Schräber
    Apollo, the Tony Trabert. I baked,
    on the bleachers’ slats, Arden bench
    of cooked Arcadian wood, beside
    a grown-up I did not know, and when he
    came back, once, with a beer, he brought back
    a Coke, for me—the varicose
    brown-emerald bottle I had seen the magazine
    pictures of, forbidden drink with
    cocaine and dead men’s fingers in it, I
    drank, and cracked a sepia sweat—
    Diana racing through the forest, the V of her
    legs, at the top, as beautiful
    as the power of a man, the nipples on her chest
    pointing her to the hunt that makes death
    worth it, Love/Nothing, Advantage In,
    Let Ball, Take Two, the hush fell over us.

The Float
    A Commanding Officer, after The War,
    had given it to someone’s father, who had
    anchored it in the lake, a square
    aluminum pontoon, seamed with solder.
    I was a little postindustrial
    water rat in a one-piece suit with the
    Blue Willow pattern from a dinner plate on it,
    the man on the left nipple going
    away forever, the woman on the right
    forever waiting. I would dive into the lake
    —immediate, its cobalt reach and
    silence—slide down, into the rich,
    closed, icy book, blue lipped
    in a white rubber cabbage-roses
    headdress, and a coral rubber nose-clip,
    slow-flitting like an agate-eating
    swallow, floating sideways in
    the indigo pressure. The grown-ups said we must
    not, swim,