Manners

1949 –

Just because a man pulls out your chair for you
and takes your coat at an elegant restaurant 
is no guarantee that he really loves you. You know this,
and so whether he burps or farts over the dinner 
like some sort of Chinese compliment 
does not much matter to you, whether he subscribes
to the high sanctimony of the right thing 
leaves you unmoved and lonely. Once, 
like a Turkish princess, you were feted and dined
by all sorts of mannerly people, in a high castle 
on the cliffs of Scotland. Now, so many thank-yous
and sincerelies later, it's the things unsaid, 
the warm rudities of late night, that most move you 
and you are wild for slurped sounds of the truly decent,
the I-chew-with-my-mouth-open look of the one 
you will love forever. Whatever it is that might be said
for the predictable thing, the good manners 
you were taught in childhood, it's more and more
the case of the auspicious oddity that excites you now,
the cool flippancy of the one who invents 
his own decencies. Darling, I say to you, 
fall to the floor all you want, I ain't pulling 
chairs out for anyone. But what I'll whisper to you later, 
in the orderly dark that comes every night like a good butler,
 will be sweeter than all that, believe me, 
something you can write home to mom about
as if I were the man who had sent you a, dozen roses
on Valentine's Day, or smiled in the pretty picture, 
or paid you the most beautiful compliment in the world—
only more slovenly, baby, more kind.

The Nurse

after Tennyson

Now come the purple garments, now the white;
Now move the vagrant beds among the disinfected halls;
Now stretch the opaque hose between the antiseptic rooms:
I waken: and she looks at me.

Now droops the freshly propped-up pillow like a ghost,
And like a ghost she sets it right for me.

Now lie the intravenous tubules by the door,
And all the body's ills stare openly at me.

Now drifts the slim physician on, and leaves
His clipboard hanging like a thought in front of me.

Now folds the young nurse all her aprons up,
And slips her lovely bos

Michael Blumenthal

2011

Suburban

Conformity caught here, nobody catches it,
Lawns groomed in prose, with hardly a stutter.
Lloyd hits the ball, and Lorraine fetches it.

Mom hangs the laundry, Fred, Jr., watches it,
Shirts in the clichéd air, all aflutter.
Conformity caught here, nobody catches it.

A dog drops a bone, another dog snatches it.
I dreamed of this life once, Now I shudder
As Lloyd hits the ball and Lorraine fetches it.

A doldrum of leaky roofs, a roofer who patches it,
Lloyd prowls the streets, still clutching his putter.
Conformity caught here, nobody catches it.

The tediumed rake, the retiree who matc

Michael Blumenthal

1987

Night Baseball

[I] retrace by moonlight the roads where I used to play in the sun.
                                                 — Marcel Proust


At night, when I go out to the field
to listen to the birds sleep, the stars
hover like old umpires over the diamond,
and I think back upon the convergences
of bats and balls, of cowhide and the whacked
thumping of cork into its oiled pockets,
and I realize again that our lives pass
like the phased signals of that old coach,
the moon, passing over the pitcher's mound,
like the slowed stride of an aging shortstop
as he lopes over the infield or the stille

Michael Blumenthal

1984

Poems

Manners

More by this poet

The Nurse

Suburban

Night Baseball

Poems

Page submenu block

Manners

More by this poet

The Nurse

Suburban

Night Baseball

Newsletter Sign Up