1.

"Helen of Troy's captor, five letters,"

my English teacher of 25 years ago

quizzes like a crossword in a dinner jacket

at my 25th high school reunion

which he and Miss Knapp, the school nurse, are crashing.

 

They must be in their 70s.

I must be exactly 43—

18 plus 25, carry the one

of the self around like some complex algebraic

expression bearing a mixed drink.

 

He extracts the tiny spear of a toothpick

from something marine on a cracker,

pops it in his mouth and drops his eyes

into the beaked pitcher of water.

    

 "Paris," I offer the old mariner,

 and he flourishes his tiny spear,

 raises a water glass and declaims,

 "'Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus' son

Achilleus!' A toast:

 

To good memory! And great poetry!"

And he gives the nurse a kidnapped look.

And I wonder whatever became of Faith Seletsky...

I can still see the pharmacist's face

as he sized me up at the register and fished the Trojans from all that camouflage

of candy--Starburst, Pez, Bazooka—

piled on top like a piebald football team,

and counseled me with a wink, "Don't

mix these up with those."

I was 15, a freshman. Faith was a senior

expert on the hydraulics of the penis

of Mark Winkles, her ex,

whom she left for a short spring for my

more literary point of view.

 

But I only ended up disproving

every borrowed theory of hydraulics

that between the two of us, I

couldn't come up with

one terrified, truant spring afternoon

in my mother's empty house.

 

This is a very long story.

About a beautiful woman.

And a diminishing spear.

It has psychological overtones

 

and undertows. Faith drowned,

you might say. And for the longest time

this didn't get written down.

It just kept getting reenacted

till the players all grew old

and moved away, or died,

or came back again like tonight,

 

looking around for what's different and the same—

what's greater than, or less than,

or approximately equal to,

which is an equal sign with a squiggly mark

that looks like a bed with a sagging mattress

in a room with only a bed in the middle with a sagging mattress.

 

2.

Ralph Santillo says he's in sanitation.

And he says he doesn't remember me.

And I wonder if sanitation and Santillo

are somehow related etymologically

besides being historically entwined

since the 10th grade

 

when he and the other neighborhood toughs

hung out at the municipal dump

smoking grass and swapping their draping girlfriends. He doesn't

remember swaggering up to me (a girl named Frankie

in tow) with the unmistakable posture

of a furniture mover I didn't call

because I wasn't moving

 --come to help me move,

to favor me with the falling pianos

of his attentions.

He wanted only one thing: a fight

which I wouldn't give him. Not

(though I tried to give the impression)

that my deep commitment to nonviolence

and my contempt for all forms of adolescent besting

forbade it—

 

but because I was chicken shit. I didn't

give him a fight because I didn't have a fight

in me. And he knew it. And that felt

like being known--in a slavish sort of biblical

sense I've carried around with me ever since.

O vestigial

 

orifice! O pit where the scuttling rats

of history chew and copulate in their own excreta!

O garbage dumps of childhood

where the Ralph Santillos who don't

even remember us

are still at work.

 

3.

though I looked like a stomach floating down a tessellated hallway

taking it all in through my univalve shell.

 

I attached myself for a time to Stephen Rubin,

that avalanche of books towing its scuttled self

(the wreck of the Stephen Rubin) down that hallway,

sinking down on one knee to pick up a book

 

while all around him the man-eating fish thrashed

and the mermaids giggled and wiggled away. Later

I became a man-eating fish myself, trying

to attach to a giggling mermaid, but that required

 

a betrayal: denying I'd ever sailed with the Stephen Rubin

still plainly hauling his untidy hull down that hallway—

shirttail luffing, shoelaces trickling, raising

and lowering himself in his own unfathomable lock.

 

So the mermaid and I went arm in arm together

wrinkling past without a nod or an ahoy

to the Stephen Rubin eyeing us darkly from the bridge

of an elegant, bespectacled Jewish nose. And nothing

 

was said. Not until 25 years later

when a divorced shell of a whelk turns up at a high school

reunion, half looking for a mermaid who isn't there.

And who do you suppose he bumps into--balding now

 

and drinking a beer, and willing to call it all

water under a bridge--but the bookish boat!

We drink to each other, one toast after another,

and go floating down an extinct hallway in our heads.