1

Walk along back of the library
in 1952
someone’s there to catch your eye
Vic Greenberg in his wheelchair
paraplegic GI—
Bill of Rights Jew
graduate student going in
by the only elevator route
up into the great stacks where
all knowledge should and is
and shall be stored like sacred grain
while the loneliest of lonely
American decades goes aground
on the postwar rock
and some unlikely
shipmates found ourselves
stuck amid so many smiles


Dating Vic Greenberg you date
crutches and a chair
a cool wit an outrageous form:
“—just back from a paraplegic’s conference,
guess what the biggest meeting was about—
Sex with a Paraplegic!—for the wives!—”
In and out of cabs his chair
opening and closing round his
electrical monologue the air
furiously calm around him
as he transfers to the crutches

But first you go for cocktails
in his room at Harvard
he mixes the usual martinis, plays Billie Holiday
talks about Melville’s vision of evil
and the question of the postwar moment:
Is there an American civilization?
In the bathroom huge
grips and suction-cupped
rubber mats long-handled sponges
the reaching tools a veteran’s benefits
in plainest sight


And this is only memory, no more
so this is how you remember


Vic Greenberg takes you to the best restaurant
which happens to have no stairs
for talk about movies, professors, food
Vic orders wine and tastes it
you have lobster, he Beef Wellington
the famous dessert is baked alaska
ice cream singed in a flowerpot
from the oven, a live tulip inserted there

Chair to crutches, crutches to cab
chair in the cab and back to Cambridge
memory shooting its handheld frames
Shall I drop you, he says, or shall
we go back to the room for a drink?
It’s the usual question
a man has to ask it
a woman has to answer
you don’t even think


2

What a girl I was then what a body
ready for breaking open like a lobster
what a little provincial village
what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells
what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud
what a gone-and-come tide pool


what a look into eternity I took and did not return it
what a book I made myself
what a quicksilver study
bright little bloodstain
liquid pouches escaping

What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump
splitting
into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which
the sun’s eclipse could seem normal
what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask
eager to sink to be found
to disembody what a mass of swimmy legs


3

Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face
laying hands first on your head
onto whose thighs pulled down your head
which fear of mine would have wound itself
around which of yours could we have taken it nakedness
without sperm in what insurrectionary
convulsion would we have done it mouth to mouth
mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus earlobe to nipple
what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts
what tears boil up through sweat to bathe
what humiliatoriums what layers of imposture


What heroic tremor
released into pure moisture
might have soaked our shape two-headed avid
into your heretic
linen-service
sheets?