Whiting Award Winners

Fear the opera expert, he who knows everything, who puts your humble tastes to shame, who will criticize your recording of Turandot or even your affection for that vulgar opera, the opera queen who only like Monteverdi, the opera queen who doesn’t go to the Met anymore, the opera queen who can’t stand Sutherland, the opera queen who gave me his 1953 Callas Cetra Traviata because he said her voice was fingernails against a chalkboard, the opera queen who disagrees with the maestro’s tempi, the opera queen who hates Wagner or loves only Wagner, the opera queen who doesn’t recognize himself in this description, the opera queen who thinks homosexuality has nothing to do with opera, the opera queen who never has body odor but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, stinks, the opera queen who doesn’t come out to his mother because he says it will hurt her, the opera queen who loves the local production of Barbiere and the opera queen who makes fun of it, the opera queen who isn’t gay but seems gay because he has learned from opera queens how to be a connoisseur: the opera queen whose intense, phobic knowledge is a bludgeon.

but we are still at sea     we climbed into the rocking

boat again     the things that we could not afford

to remember in the vernacular      

                                                                       sun

                                                            sinking backwards into the world’s

                                                            light industry    Eros in idle hands

no one wants to admit it but you just

might end up one day in the wrong

place at the wrong time and some

evil shit rains down on you

and maybe you get

crippled or blind

or plain old

dead and

not one soul will give a good goddamn

because they can soothe them-

selves with a wrung out prayer

about wrong places and

wrong times, when

even as they’re

thinking that

they know

that everywhere is the wrong place

and every hour is the wrong hour

and that bad breaks don’t seek

you out; they’re always there

waiting to swing into action

like a traitor limb you

didn’t even know

you had

Still half-asleep and often still half-drunk,

They bitch about their wives and trucks and work.

The Skil saws lurch. A hammer hits a thumb

Or bangs a nail over or splits the wood

At a crucial joint, which anyway was out

Of square or measured wrong; then bending down

To pull the thing, his butt peeps out above

His pants. Mostly that’s how things get done.

But certain afternoons, with men arrayed

Around the frame, the sun appears to gleam

In sawdust winnowing behind the blade

And catch the hammer cocked above a beam

In a still life of the legendary glamour

Of craft and craftsmanship the mind is given

Long since and far away, where the poised hammer

Doesn’t fall, and not a nail gets driven.

WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.

We do not mean to complain. We know how it is.

In older, even sadder cultures the worst possible sorts

have been playing hot and cold with people’s lives

for much longer. Like Perrow says,

We’ll all have baboon hearts one of these days.

We wintered with ample fuel and real tomatoes.

We were allowed to roam, sniffing and chewing

at the tufted crust. We were let to breathe.

That is, we respirated. Now the soft clocks

have gorged themselves on our time. Yet

as our hair blanches and comes out

in hanks, we can tell it is nearly spring –

the students shed their black coats

on the green; we begin to see shade.

Lo, this is the breastbone’s embraceable light.

We are here. Still breathing and constellated.