Shame: An Aria

You think you’ve grown up in various ways

and then the elevator door opens and you’re standing inside

reaming out your nose­—something about the dry air

in the mountains—and find yourself facing two spruce elderly couples

dressed like improbable wildflowers in their primary color

definitely on vacation sports outfits, a wormy color of one of the body’s

shameful and congealed lubricants gleaming on your fingertip

under the fluorescent lights, and there really isn’t too much to say

as you descend the remaining two flights with them in silence,

all five of you staring straight ahead in this commodious

aluminum group coffin toward the ground floor.  You are,

of course, trying to think of something witty to say.  Your hand

is, of course, in your pocket discreetly transferring the offending article

into its accumulation of lint.  One man clears his throat

and you admit to yourself that there are kinds of people—if not

people in particular—you hate, that these are they,

and that your mind is nevertheless, is nevertheless working

like a demented cicada drying its wings after rain to find some way

to save yourself in your craven, small child’s large ego’s idea

of their eyes.  You even crank it up a notch, getting more highminded

and lugubrious in the seconds it takes for the almost silent

gears and oiled hydraulic or pneumatic plungers and cables

of the machine to set you down.  “Nosepicking,” you imagine explaining

to the upturned, reverential faces, “is in a way the ground floor

of being.  The body’s fluids and solids, its various despised disjecta,

toenail parings left absently on the bedside table that your lover

the next night notices there, shit streaks in underwear or little, faint,

odorous peeblossoms of the palest polleny color, the stiffened

small droplets in the sheets of the body’s shuddering latenight loneness

and selflove, russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax,

phlegm, the little dead militias of white corpuscles

we call pus, what are they after all but the twins of the juices

of mortal glory:  sap, wine, breast milk, sperm, and blood.  The most intimate hygienes,

those deepest tribal rules that teach a child

trying to struggle up out of the fear of loss of love

from anger, hatred, fear, they get taught to us, don’t they,

as boundaries, terrible thresholds, what can be said (or thought, or done)

inside the house but not out, what can be said (or thought, or done)

only by oneself, which must therefore best not be done at all,

so that the core of the self, we learn early, is where shame lives

and where we also learn doubleness, a certain practical cunning,

and what a theater is, and the ability to lie—“

the elevator has opened and closed, the silverhaired columbines

of the mountain are murmuring over breakfast menus in the room full of bright plastics

somewhere, and you, grown up in various ways, are at the typewriter,

thinking of all the slimes and jellies of decay, thinking

that the zombie passages, ghoul corridors, radiant death’s-head

entries to that realm of terror claim us in the sick, middle-of-the-night

sessions of self-hatred and remorse, in the day’s most hidden,

watchful self, the man not farting in the line at the bank,

no trace of discomfort on his mild, neighbor-loving face, the woman

calculating the distance to the next person she can borrow a tampon from

while she smiles attentively into this new man’s explanation

of his theory about deforestation, claims us also, by seepage, in our lies,

small malices, razor knicks on the skin of others of our meannesses,

deprivations, rage, and what to do but face that way

and praise the kingdom of the dead, praise the power which we have all kinds

of phrases to elide the fact that none of us can worm our way out of—

“that no man can evade,” “which all must kneel to in the end”—

praise it by calling it time, say it is master of the seasons,

mistress of the moment of the hunting hawk’s sudden sheen of grape-brown

gleaming in the morning sun, the characteristic slow gesture,

two fingers across the cheekbone deliberately, of the love dreamily

oiling her skin, in this moment, no other, before she turns to you

the face she wants you to see and the rest

that she hopes, when she can’t keep it hidden, you can somehow love

and which, if you could love yourself, you would.


by Robert Hass