Aimless Love (5 page)

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hands,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

It was late afternoon,

the beginning of winter, a light snow,

and I was the only one in the small park

to witness the lone boy running

in circles around the base of a bronze statue.

I could not read the carved name

of the statesman who loomed above,

one hand on his cold hip,

but as the boy ran, head down,

he would point a finger at the statue

and pull an imaginary trigger

imitating the sounds of rapid gunfire.

Evening thickened, the mercury sank,

but the boy kept running in the circle

of his footprints in the snow

shooting blindly into the air.

History will never find a way to end,

I thought, as I left the park by the north gate

and walked slowly home

returning to the station of my desk

where the sheets of paper I wrote on

were like pieces of glass

through which I could see

hundreds of dark birds circling in the sky below.

was what they called you in high school

if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall

and all your books went flying.

Or if you walked into an open locker door,

you would be known as Einstein,

who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

Later, genius became someone

who could take a sliver of chalk and squire pi

a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

or a man painting on his back on a scaffold,

or drawing a waterwheel in a margin,

or spinning out a little night music.

But earlier this week on a wooded path,

I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir

were the true geniuses,

the ones who had figured out how to fly,

how to be both beautiful and brutal,

and how to mate for life.

Twenty-four geniuses in all,

for I numbered them as Yeats had done,

deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface—

forty-eight if we count their white reflections,

or an even fifty if you want to throw in me

and the dog running up ahead,

who were at least smart enough to be out

that morning—she sniffing the ground,

me with my head up in the bright morning air.

A morning after a week of rain

and the sun shot down through the branches

into the tall, bare windows.

The brindled cat rolled over on his back,

and I could hear you in the kitchen

grinding coffee beans into a powder.

Everything seemed especially vivid

because I knew we were all going to die,

first the cat, then you, then me,

then somewhat later the liquefied sun

was the order I was envisioning.

But then again, you never really know.

The cat had a fiercely healthy look,

his coat so bristling and electric

I wondered what you had been feeding him

and what you had been feeding me

as I turned a corner

and beheld you out there on the sunny deck

lost in exercise, running in place,

knees lifted high, skin glistening—

and that toothy, immortal-looking smile of yours.

It is difficult to describe what we felt

after we paid the admission,

entered the aluminum dome,

and stood there with our mouths open

before the machine itself,

what we had only read about in the papers.

Huge and glistening it was

but bolted down and giving nothing away.

What did it mean?

we all openly wondered,

and did another machine exist somewhere else—

an even mightier one—

that was designed to be its exact opposite?

These were not new questions,

but we asked them earnestly and repeatedly.

Later, when we were home again—

a family of six having tea—

we raised these questions once more,

knowing that this made us part

of a great historical discussion

that included science

as well as literature and the weather

not to mention the lodger downstairs,

who, someone said,

had been seen earlier leaving the house

with a suitcase and a tightly furled umbrella.

I am the dog you put to sleep,

as you like to call the needle of oblivion,

come back to tell you this simple thing:

I never liked you—not one bit.

When I licked your face,

I thought of biting off your nose.

When I watched you toweling yourself dry,

I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,

your lack of animal grace,

the way you would sit in a chair to eat,

a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,

but I was too weak, a trick you taught me

while I was learning to sit and heel,

and—greatest of insults—shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash

would excite me

but only because it meant I was about

to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,

but I have no reason to lie.

I hated the car, the rubber toys,

disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.

You always scratched me in the wrong place.

All I ever wanted from you

was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe

as the moon rose in the sky.

It took all of my strength

not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,

the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,

the absurdity of your lawn,

and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed

and are glad it did not happen sooner—

that everyone here can read and write,

the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.

I want to carry you

and for you to carry me

the way voices are said to carry over water.

Just this morning on the shore,

I could hear two people talking quietly

in a row boat on the far side of the lake.

They were talking about fishing,

then one changed the subject,

and, I swear, they began talking about you.

I am under the covers

waiting for the heat to come up

with a gurgle and hiss

and the banging of the water hammer

that will frighten the cold out of the room.

And I am listening to a blues singer

named Precious Bryant

singing a song called “Fool Me Good.”

If you don’t love me, baby, she sings,

would you please try to fool me good?

I am also stroking the dog’s head

and writing down these words,

which means that I am calmly flying

in the face of the Buddhist advice

to do only one thing at a time.

Just pour the tea,

just look into the eye of the flower,

just sing the song—

one thing at a time

and you will achieve serenity,

which is what I would love to do

as the fan-blades of the morning begin to turn.

If you don’t love me, baby,

she sings,

as a day-moon fades in the window,

and the hands circle the clock,

would you please try to fool me good?

Yes, Precious, I reply,

I will fool you as good as I can,

but first I have to learn to listen to you

with my whole heart,

and not until you have finished

will I put on my slippers,

squeeze out some toothpaste,

and make a big foamy face in the mirror,

freshly dedicated to doing one thing at a time—

one note at a time for you, darling,

one tooth at a time for me.

The trouble with poetry, I realized

as I walked along a beach one night—

cold Florida sand under my bare feet,

a show of stars in the sky—

the trouble with poetry is

that it encourages the writing of more poetry,

more guppies crowding the fish tank,

more baby rabbits

hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?

unless the day finally arrives

when we have compared everything in the world

to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do

but quietly close our notebooks

and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy

and I rise like a feather in the wind.

Poetry fills me with sorrow

and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me

with the urge to write poetry,

to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame

to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,

to break into the poems of others

with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,

cut-purses, common shoplifters,

I thought to myself

as a cold wave swirled around my feet

and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,

which is an image I stole directly

from Lawrence Ferlinghetti—

to be perfectly honest for a moment—

the bicycling poet of San Francisco

whose little amusement park of a book

I carried in a side pocket of my uniform

up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

What is there to say about them

that has not been said in the title?

I saw them near dawn from a glassy room

on the other side of that river,

which flowed from some hidden spring

to the sea; but that is getting away from

the brightly colored boats upturned

on the banks of the Charles,

the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.

They were beautiful in the clear early light—

red, yellow, blue and green—

is all I wanted to say about them,

although for the rest of the day

I pictured a lighter version of myself

calling time through a little megaphone,

first to the months of the year,

then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing

as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.

I recall someone once admitting

that all he remembered of
Anna Karenina

was something about a picnic basket,

and now, after consuming a book

devoted to the subject of Barcelona—

its people, its history, its complex architecture—

all I remember is the mention

of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park

where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.

The sheer paleness of her looms over

all the notable names and dates

as the evening strollers stop before her

and point to show their children.

These locals called her Snowflake,

and here she has been mentioned again in print

in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive

and helping her, despite her name, to endure

in this poem where she has found another cage.

Oh, Snowflake,

I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—

its people, its history, its complex architecture—

no, you were the reason

I kept my light on late into the night

turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

On that clear October morning,

I was only behind a double espresso

and a single hit of anti-depressant,

yet there, on the shore of the reservoir

with its flipped-over row boats,

I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen

to borrow the jargon of the streets.

Yes, I was wearing the crown,

as the drug addicts like to say,

knitting a bonnet for Charlie,

entertaining the troops,

sitting in the study with H.G. Wells—

so many ways to express that mood

of royal goodwill

when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.

And later in the afternoon

when I finally came down,

a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.

In my upholstered chair by a window

with dusk pouring into the room,

I appeared to be doing nothing,