Section 7
Excerpt poem from Rider

IV

“If you want to see what man could do if he wanted to you have only to think of those who have broken out of prison or tried to break out.  They have done as much with a single nail as they could have with a battering ram.”
            Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

CONVERSION IN SCAFA      

“Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call: soul.”  
                                                            Dr. Vigil in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
                                                           

Something happened.

I want to tell you.

I want you to know.

I can’t talk about it.

I can’t talk at all and my voice isn’t hoarse.

My voice only becomes hoarse when I talk about it to my wife
who’s with me in this St. John of the Cross-esque dark

night of the soul but often

doesn’t respond.

So I say it again.

And then I pass out from exhaustion.

I mean total spiritual exhaustion.

The real exhaustion.

I knew who I was and shuddered at who I had become.

I understand the conversions of so many writers I love for the first time.

And it might not have happened if I hadn’t been disabled by air I could not breathe,
result of freakish late blooming trees and fumes from the asphalt factory in Scafa,
able to rise from breakfast washed down with lots of espresso
only to drag upstairs and collapse back into bed

hour after hour after hour

in the beautiful emptiness.

From the dawns, which my retina has stored for all time.
//stanza break//

To cockcrow.

To the first swallows looping.

And many times I saw you there, in that doorway, saying
embrace the fear.

And have you looked at Fear and Trembling lately?

Looked at, I thought.

Fear, trembling.
Shuddering through uncertainty.
Ambition’s barroom.
And while walking around with
boundless trepidation I’d think,

Kierkegaard, ok, but the same

thing happened to Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo,

he’d known the risks,

and so the worst happened,

but now his life was limited—and not by his language—

and the screenplay limited his fears to heights

but heights also meant a few feet off the ground
as when he stands on Midge’s stool to show her

it’s ok, it’s nothing,

one more step and he is suddenly, overwhelmingly,
overcome.

A cure?

To go through it again?

But how can you go through anything again?

Only when emptied out can you begin again.
And then a glass of wine.

For pure pleasure or to mourn.

For relief from the pent-up blues in the ruins.

My father never had a glass of wine.
Never a casual drink for pleasure with the others.
Only a tumbler at a time.             

He mastered the black art of putting everyone
on the defensive with his barbed quips.

Which led to confrontations.
They’ve come back to vex me again,
erasing any gains I’d made in

dealing with the two sides of his nature right out of the book by Stevenson he loved
to talk about more than any other except the one by Conrad.

            I love to wear the Jekyll and Hyde tee shirt I bought after I’d taken Sam to see the 
            musical.

And it looks better now that it’s faded and bloody and the colors run and blur.

And who is who and what is what.

I regret having sought solutions more convenient
than the one that enabled
the neuralgia-wracked Francis Parkman
to write his history of Montcalm and Wolfe
in a bathtub on a board propped on the sides
(I believe that Wolfe said he would rather have written Gray’s Elegy
than taken Quebec, but did he really say it in the boat
moments before the bullet entered his heart?).
It didn’t solve the pain; it solved the problem.

And I have lost time.

I have wasted time.

Overcoming.

Teddy Roosevelt was my hero, no, my role model, no, my uncle my brother my father, no, nothing to me at all, but once I was forced to accept, through the frequency of doctor’s visits if nothing more conscious, my fragility, Teddy became a figure of Biblical proportions.

It wasn’t the ailments, it was that I underestimated the physical difficulties and repercussions. 

Why did I care?

I moved around a lot.

I had to find a way.

I wanted to participate.

To make a life for myself
wherever I lived for however
short a time. 

Ball.

Let me see: Dad wasn’t around, the Rabbi managed two
physical acts a year during the High Holidays,
holding the Torah and blowing the Ram’s Horn.

And my passion for mud was unappeasable,
and no amount of asthma, short of asphyxiation,
could deter me from the thrill of rolling in the mud…,
no, not rolling, being completely immersed.

Football.

Looking back, I wish I’d been a textbook introvert and said “only philosophy bucks me up,” involved in school beyond the minimum of what was required and not

                                                                        living   for recess

and what was happening in the street after
school.

It’s my fantasy that I could have lived more in my mind’s interior, constructing sub- worlds to inhabit while my body was elsewhere, like somebody who really gets lost—and found—in chess or mathematics. 
//stanza break//

Among the myriad risks some were truly unwise: stupid.

Like saying yes to playing tackle in a scrimmage without shoulder pads
with the Utes, carrying the ball into the line just to see what would happen.

“Nobody’s serious when they’re seventeen.”

Nobody’s bones are formed at fifteen.

An ex-All American guard, Jewish, married to the daughter of a family friend, offered:

A Jewish linesman?

I figured he’d watch over me.

Or that they’d go easy on a kid.
Athletes usually did.

Seven years older and seventy more pounds?

Or that there’d be someone.

Instead of no one.

To open up a hole in the defense.

But the guard became absorbed in the game.

­­—Who knows what game he was replaying in imagination?

They let me pass a few times and I managed a few unintercepted incompletes without   harm,
so when I took the handoff and stayed right behind my All American friend
I hadn’t considered that the defensive line, joined
by the linebackers, would converge to upend me at the ankle and as I fell
hit me higher and higher, from all sides,
thigh, waist, torso, shoulder, neck,

and when I was down, piled on.

To complete the crush, squeeze the air out.

I didn’t mind a new order of pain.

//stanza break//

And to lie motionless under the hard-edged autumnal blue.

There were two things I didn’t want: a broken neck or to lose the use of my legs for life.

“Give the kid some time,” I heard a voice say out of the huddle, and it wasn’t Ned’s.
(They weren’t worried, good sign.)

Only on the drive home did Ned confess his fear that I might have broken something when I didn’t get up and they had to run the next few plays around me.   He confessed, quietly, that he hadn’t thought they would have played that rough.   Later, over drinks,
he managed to get a word in over the wild, boozy, and hilarious banter between my stepfather and his father-in-law; he said he couldn’t believe that I had hung in there and played despite some brutal hits.  They weren’t listening, didn’t take it in, but I did.  And so did Mom, who appeared proud.

But the real danger wasn’t in any lack of control
over animal or machine, it was panic, doing the reverse
of what was best in a crisis. 

Gunning the engine at cliff’s edge when I wanted to turn it off.

Maybe if “Mom” hadn’t used so much of her air time warning me what not to do
I would have been less reckless, more lucid in exhilaration,
able to pay more careful attention
to where my body was in the physical world.

Sure, Mom had to get the dirt out.

It’s like yesterday.  When the sky burst open, people asked:
“How can you continue without an umbrella.”

I didn’t say, “something else I’m going to leave behind?”

If I was going to get wet I wanted to get drenched.

In these dark times my concentration goes and I can’t change
gears, switch to something
more practical, consume myself, workaholic style,
in something so consuming it would take my mind off

the repercussions

the question of what would happen.
Economics.

It’s daunting to raise a child in Manhattan when you don’t have money.

A more modest lifestyle out of the city?

And the boy is adamant about staying.

Maybe it’s your fault for playing that song when he was three,

the one with the refrain

“First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”

But this July in the rugged Abruzzo something stole my sleep. 

In exhaustion, it all comes clear.

The stars so close to the ground.

The way, the way they appear, one by one.

No vasty, vertiginous blur.

The dry, ravaged air that molds
every rock and shrub and crevice and grotto,
every white house chiseled into the Appenine range.

Not that there is no secret to the universe,
but that the secret may not be one
we want to hear.

Mutinous, destitute, monotonous
squeaking in the fields.
Every night, a reenactment.

Some pernicious scent.
It must have come this way to the others.
This emptying.   This knowing

that nothing after today will ever
be that way again, calling
for a new metamorphosis.
Hour after hour, duration, blankness, ashen distances,
once in a while a cloud crossing the trees
in the emptiness like a visionary haze.  

Silence.  Dogbark.  The occasional tractor.

That afternoon in Chieti, whiteness.

Immeasurable.

As every night I pray for deluge.

Section 11
Excerpt poem from Rider

*

I was no rider, but a pretend
horse and rider always rode
beside my train window—at a canter
no matter how fast the rails clicked by—
and though he wore a bandana
and leaned slightly forward in the saddle
to pull himself aboard,
his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent,
was like the Polish Rider’s.

Even as I was an only child I was never lonely.

My mother’s father rode until he was old
and on a narrow pass his horse
jammed him up against rockface.
In his narrative of his life
this collision marked
the ruin of his hip
the rise of his cataracts.

My father rode “every morning before work.”

I never witnessed that,
but at a ranch in upper New York State
while I bloodied my hands
tugging the reins of a frothing giant
who would not budge from a weedpatch,
I watched him disappear
in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs
as he galloped over a far off hill:
more at ease in the saddle—in the air—
than I’d ever seen him in civilian life.

My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride.
Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride!

*

That’s the stuff of events.  What about
the signature inscribed by the sun,
the dark clouds sinister in just being there;
thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below,
candles lit in the deep interiors,
bread, wine, the plate making its way
around the table; what about—

leaping centuries ahead—
the energy from generators blazing
like auras through the clouds,
and, looking down from the heights,
the scattered lights,
the rotating tops of ambulances;
the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese

making the rounds, apple sauce
passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread
on a calcified plate,
children eating, heads down, in silence,
communicating through eye movements,
the mother wiping her lips, the father
grinning stupidly and drooling;
the television quacking in the background,
the perfect suburban night unfolding
in bedroom and drive-in and den,
the sprinkler system ticking.
The snipers in the tower—.
This is what the riders,
guests everywhere and nowhere,

say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter
as night comes down.  And last
night, driving to Connecticut,
I understood that the Polish Rider
gleans the permutations of light after dusk,
that its olive-gray smudges reflect
the absence of pitch-darkness.  I was wrong

about the Polish Rider all along:
he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment
crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?)
in the night, because, as the faint light
rimming the edges of the sky makes clear,
night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious.
The rider lives in order to depart.

The Woman Who Rode

She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house.
Bare trees, frost, the whole bit.

I wanted our lives to be like that:
as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting.

She came to me in her stride.
Dropped her crop on the chair.

Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled
under the covers.

Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.”
I felt like an accessory.

The wound was open.  Drowsily I rolled
onto her, no longer caring if she

was using me.  As the new
year wore on and black ice made riding

a fast track to certain death
or paralysis, she grew tense.

Came to me now with clinical terms,
“schi” words I worked hard to break down.

The good news was she was not a true
“split personality” —the glitch

that “she was divorced
from herself, and could not love or care.”

*

The light in her house
was like the light from dawn.

On the last of my rare visits
her mother jarred preserves while we watched

instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die.
Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps

testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter;
or taking precautions I would not overhear

what words were ricocheting
on his “hot line” to the patent office.

*

Any objective observer standing back
from the distraction of the impinging present

could see that her torment overleapt
any visible signs and that she was—

as a WASP “rider”—the wrong
person for the place she was in.

Her resilience could not be in question.
She lived to stray from known paths

to leap stone fences and break into open fields.
When her horse went down in an Irish bog

and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek—
the next day she was up and mounted him again.

*

When she came to me in the dream last night
her smile had loosened.

How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse.

Short Reviews of The Rider

Mark Rudman – poet, essayist, translator, and teacher – has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.

The Rider received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1995.

"Rider is the most believable book I have ever read about love."
– Thom Gunn

“[Rider] isa dynamic, passionate, many-textured dialogue between a writer and his ghosts, obsessive, caustic, grieving, and witty . . . the fierce dialogue between the writer and his voices propels the poem forward with psychic complexity and emotional continuity.”
– Tony Hoagland, Harvard Review

“[In Rider]  the power of dialogue, the back-and-forth movement, is linked also to wanderlust (recalling the poet’s own early and frequent migrations)—the obsessive need, the human need, to explore—and especially to forced explorations and permanent journeys, like the diaspora.  This inherited restlessness becomes implicitly and sometimes explicitly Jewish, this notion that that the proper structure for exploring life in all its aspects is conversation: question and answer.  Shakespeare is the great forbear of the form in poetry; but, further back, the literary ritual of the Jewish holy service, the sacred conversation between congregation and leader, provides the eternal, enshrined echo of celebrant and congregation.”
– Ted Blanchard, Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets

“An elegant, elegiac poem, [Rider] recovers his relationship with his rabbi stepfather . . . a formal tour de force in which grief, memory and passion are dramatically played out.”
– Publisher’s Weekly