Free Thomas Murphy by Roger Rosenblatt Page B

earth.
    TO WIT. On my way to an interview at a newspaper the following morning, I stopped to talk with a woman on a stoop on Seventy-seventh Street. I took her for my ma. She asked where I was going, and when I told her, she said I must be an important person. No, I said. Just a poet. Oh, she said. Me, too. But I have yet to write my poems down, she said. They’re all in my head. A fine place to be, I offered, and she smiled a toothless smile. She told me she’d been a singer in a nightclub, a chantoosie at the Copa. Do you know “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” I asked her. She started to sing it in a cigarette voice. Naturally, I joined in. We chatted on. She had a daughter somewhere, who had been taken from her in the hospital in Baltimore where she’d given birth as a teenager. Many years ago, she had traced the girl to Albany, but never caught up with her. The woman was married once, to a no-good cornet player, she said. Lasted less than a year. How do you manage to live? I said. I work nights at a tollbooth on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano Bridge, she said. Do people ever talk to you, or do they just pay the toll and go? Sometimes they talk, she said. About the weather, or the traffic. Once in a while they ask directions. I gave her some money and sat with her a while longer, and could no longer recall where I had originally been headed. To an interview at a newspaper, she reminded me.
    MY MA , black cookie jar, hauls potatoes on her back, holding the twisted end of the sack in her fist and letting the weight of the potatoes fall below her shoulders. Sitting flat on her head is the kind of straw hat they put on horses for a joke, with the ears sticking out of holes in the brim. Ma does not smile. Her big eyes greet her tasks. The black jacket, the black skirt, down to the black-laced shoes. I never see her in fancy dress. The closest she comes is Sunday mass, when she and the other women sit in church on one side, while my da and the men sit on the other. The women are broader than the men, broader shoulders. Like rakes and pitchforks, they are built for the work they do. On that day only, Ma wears the red plaid shawl her mother wore. Otherwise, black. I have a grainy photo taken in the 1930s before I was born, by a Kodak Klito box camera, a plate-changing model. Ma is standing with a neighbor’s child, holding her hand, the girl looking at the camera, Ma studying the ground. Once in a while, I’d catch her looking at my da, with nothing in her look. No love. No question. Your ma’s as strong as a horse, Mickey Dailey said to me in the schoolyard. I popped him in the nose.
    REGRETS? ASKS THE KID from the newspaper. In your long distinguished career, Mr. Murphy, do you have any regrets? To which I reply, beguiling as ever, Sonny, I’m going to travel inside you for a while, and let you feel the gravel I shovel in your blood, and the bulge and beat I cause in your pulse, as I run amok among your tissues, go at your muscles with a paring knife, your every inner town and village unbulwarked against my assaults. I shall practice debauchery in the caves of your lymph nodes, terrorism in your viscera, barbarism in your glands. I shall scrape out your spleen, plough snow around your kidneys, and invite the monkey on your back to brachiate from vein to vein, all in an effort to cause as much pain as you can endure, more in fact. I shall assail your entrails, cause tumors on your humors, sup on your heart, and fling my empty oyster shells smack against your brain, which I then will toss out into the street for lack of payment of rent. When I have done all that to give you a taste of how the real world suffers, then see if you have the nerve to ask me: Regrets?
    UNTITLED
    for Oona
    (draft)
    Or is it the wood I am thinking of,
    And only transform it into the bright bird
    Because I dread the wood?
    The mind does that—tipped and bent
    From its fears, it whistles past the