Alone and Not Alone (2 page)

It Takes Two

My replacement in the universe

is the little tyke who'll soon arrive

and let me be superfluous if

and when I feel like being so.

I don't really mean that.

It's just the openness

of what will or might be,

when what matters most

is the right now of now,

which,

when I draw back and look reveals

an old fool in the foggy bliss

of whatever this morning is.

Straighten up, old thing!

You aren't
that
old and he or she

will reach right up and grasp

some years and break them off

your psyche—what is it? like stardust?

glittering on those tiny tiny fingers.

The First Time

The first time Marcello went outside

the sun and moon were at his side

(his happy mom and happy dad)

(also the happiness known as granddad).

The first time Marcello breathed the outside air

he seemed to like it there.

The first time he got in a car

it zoomed him fast and far

(for such a little guy)

to Brooklyn: “Hi,

Brooklyn!” he didn't shout:

his words were too little to get out.

But clearly in his sleeping face

he felt comfy in the human race.

Circles

Marcello sees

But then at night

No, that's the moon

above his bed—

Colored circles rise and fall.

Grandpa Brushed His Teeth

This morning Grandpa brushed his teeth

so hard it knocked Marcello down

but he got back up to watch

Grandpa brush those teeth

Ah Grandpa brushing up and down

with joy he sang almost Glug glug!

The toothpaste tasted excellent

and the brush it zigged and zagged

It's a good thing he has teeth to brush

and that he likes the brushing of them

The only missing ones are Wisdom

and Marcello does not need them

And Grandpa doesn't either

Good-bye to Wisdom teeth and Wisdom

Buon giorno
to Marcello

Little toothbrush fellow

Coffee Man

She might be hearing the burbling song of the bird outside, but it is impossible to tell, since she has rolled over and I think gone back to sleep. If I were to say quietly, “Good morning, dear, here is your coffee,” she would open her eyes and manage a groggy “Thank you.” But when she realizes that I am standing there without coffee, I would forget which tense I'm waiting to lift from the jar with the red lid in the kitchen.

Where Is My Head?

It makes you nervous to think not about death

but about dying and being dead yourself

but when you don't think about it

it doesn't exist,

at least in your universe.

And since that's the universe you happen to be in

you want to stay there:

you have to fix the world

and then save it,

you have to do that one thing

you can't remember what it is

but you know it's there somewhere

like the death you forgot for a moment.

I should have spent my life

meditating so deeply that the thought of death

would be relaxing like a breeze or a feather

but instead I have spent it promising myself

that someday I would go to that special place

in my psyche where the spirit enters and leaves

and make my peace with the beast I call myself.

I hate myself for dying, how

could I have done this!

But all I did was nothing

other than believe that I was actually important!

Everything my mother did proved it.

But when she died she just glided away—

she didn't mind at all.

She didn't think she was important

and she had a farmgirl's view of dying:

chickens do it all the time,

they run around the yard with blood

gushing from where their heads used to be.

I wish I could do that!

In Paris the heads that dropped into the basket

—were they still thinking about the executioner?

Today I am my own executioner.

Survivor Guilt

It's very easy to get.

Just keep living and you'll find yourself

getting more and more of it.

You can keep it or pass it on,

but it's a good idea to keep a small portion

for those nights when you're feeling so good

you forget you're human. Then drudge it up

and float down from the ceiling

that is covered with stars that glow in the dark

for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,

and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—

I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,

its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.

If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!

But your arms are just there and you are kaput.

It's all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—

the kind word you thought of saying but didn't,

the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,

thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,

your stupid idea that you would live forever—

all
tua culpa
. John Phillip Sousa

invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.

Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.

But when you wake up, your body

seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,

and you don't look too bad in the mirror.

Hi there, feller!

Old feller, young feller, who cares?

Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,

to hell with him. That was then.

The Young Cougar

The doors swing open and in walks a young cougar wearing white shoes and light-blue socks, come to help his father. “Where do we put this in the registry?” one servant asks another. Or
they
were wearing the shoes and socks.

Radio in the Distance

Beneath the earth covered with men

with snow atop their heads, down

to where it is dark and deep, to where

the big black vibrating blob of wobble

is humming its one and only note, I lie,

orange hair not in the idea of diagonal,

a Betty not composed of vertical fish

or dog with grid-mark cancellations,

but easy as an orchestra of toy atoms

lazy with buzz and fizzle in their drift

as if above this late and lost Manhattan

spread out like a diagram of what we want

from heaven, wherever it is when we think

we know what it is and even when it really is.

Face Value

From a face comes a body an entire body

and from a body everything

but I can't face you

fully

not yet

maybe never

and even if I did or thought I did

how would I know

How would I know

what face value is

From a face comes face value

and from face value a lot of baling wire

—the face scribbled over with dark coils of it

I was born in Kentucky almost

There were no faces there

so I was born elsewhere

from inside a fencepost

to which barbed wire had been affixed

by Frederic Remington

The air was cool, the night calm

and each star had a face

like a movie star's or someone in the family

They too had star quality I thought

but they had statue quality

and then turned sideways

like music blending into fabric and little curtains

along the kitchen windows

attractive kitchen windows

Now you can sit down at this table

and look me square in the eye

and tell me what you've been wanting to

or you can stand up like a photograph on a piano

and sing to me

a song that has no words or music

Which is it? —But

a heavy magnetic force pulls you to the wall

and holds you there

As soon as you get used to it

it lets you go

for a while

and then
your
heavy magnetic force pulls the wall to
you

and you walk around with a wall stuck to your side

The Wall of Forgetting

it's called

but it's not a wall it's a mirror

that picks your face up off the floor

and whirls it onto a head

that has gone on without you

The Plank and the Screw

There
is
one thing.

In a fishing village on the coast of Norway

an idea came forth and spread

over the country and from there

to the rest of the world, namely

that floating inside the sun was its power source:

a plank and a screw

that had come loose from it,

and as long as they floated around,

never far one from the other,

the sun would continue to burn.

Let's try to imagine how hot it is

one inch from the sun.

Now that we have found it

impossible to imagine

we can go on

to the next thing we do not understand.

Meanwhile, the plank and the screw

continue to float—

the plank is roughly an eight-foot

one-by-ten, the screw a three-inch flathead—

but since there is nothing around them

except burning gas

they are both highly visible.

Many years passed.

Gradually the idea that had come from Norway

became so assimilated into the everyday lives

of people that they never thought of it—

it changed from an idea into people,

so they forgot

and for all practical purposes

the idea ceased to exist.

But everyone has inside them

a plank and a screw

floating around.

Everyone is warm enough

to be alive.

102 Today

If Wystan Auden were alive today

he'd be a small tangle of black lines

on a rumpled white bedsheet,

his little eyes looking up at you.

What did you bring?

Some yellow daffodils and green stems.

Or did they bring you?

Auden once said,

“Where the hell is Bobby?”

and we looked around,

but there was no Bobby there.

Ah, Auden, no Bobby for you.

Just these daffodils in a clean white vase.

The Pounding Rabbit

If you know the Japanese folktale

about the rabbit that ended up

on the moon, you will not be puzzled

by a table clock depicting a rabbit

pounding rice cakes on the moon,

but if you do not know this story

you will look at the clock and pound

your own head in disbelief,

as if to knock from it the spirit

you wish to offer to the gods

who munch the rice cakes

and never turn to say thank you

except by sending down a genius

to create such a clock, such a rabbit.

Mountains and Songs

Mountains of song

exert their force up through the earth

and rise above it

Peasants and villagers

cling to it as it rises

and they sing

and then they don't

for this is a pause

in the history of the world

and its mountains and songs

I saw them rising

and I knew it was weeping

this rising

for the mountains were going away

the villagers and peasants too

folded away in cupboards

in mountains and songs

It All Depends

But it is not love that I would speak of

for as you see, I am of

the nineteenth century, when love was

. . . well, it all depends,

and I can't get out of it,

whatever this love is.

I will die in it and I hope

of it, it is the preamble

to walking in and sitting

down and saying “Hi”

before anything else has a chance

to happen. And then

of course nothing does,

which is why you keep saying it—

you can't get out

of saying it. So you may as well

take off your hat and stay a while,

which is what you always planned on anyway.

The nineteenth century,

what a tremendous thing

to be in love in!

Cottages go by

and music piles up

like excited dead people.

They stop but don't,

like sleeping people who are alive,

but it's not that easy,

the century is more complicated

than one had expected

now that everyone has a pot and a pan

but not a love of the pot and the pan.

Still, look at those sailing ships

on the wide main and the stairways

that spiral into heaven

and that bird with a long red beard

sticking straight up!

It's our chance to separate ourselves

into numerous pieces and have them

go in different directions,

reassembling what time had dispersed

in the form of granules and mist.

Or was it even really there?

A nightingale warbled

the tune it was supposed to

so the world would calm down.

There's nothing wrong with resting

alongside this shady rill and taking medications

as if they were piles of stones placed at intervals

by people who must have had a meaning

in mind but with no thought of telling you

what it was, for they didn't know that you

would exist. Therefore, lie down and rest.

The afternoon is mild and your love

is not driving you crazy, temporarily.

A rest might give you the strength

to look love straight in the eye

and not fade into granules and mist.

Reverdy said

“One must try to live”—

the statement of a man

who didn't love

or wasn't loved

enough. A small rectangle

of light lay on his floor

and his shoe

flashed as it went by.

His wife was hidden

in the kitchen, his girlfriend

hidden in celebrity,

his God just hidden.

Pierre opened the kitchen door,

the trap door of fame,

and the side of the cathedral,

but there was nothing there,

and when he opened his heart

he found only a rectangle

of sunlight on the floor.

But it was enough.

Perhaps his wife was hiding

her love in the kitchen,

the dark kitchen in Solesmes,

where I saw her walking

briskly down the street

at the age of 97 or 98,

the same street

a few years later

she would move slowly up

and down the way

to lie down in the tomb

next to Pierre, her Pierre.

By then the girlfriend

had twirled into Eternity,

and God had hidden so deeply

in Pierre's poems

Pierre didn't know

He was there—

He had gone back and disappeared

beneath the period

that ended Pierre's first book,

like a dark glint.

But God too was trying to live.

He hasn't been around lately,

which is perhaps why

the landscape is so cheerful—

it gets to be just itself,

brutally wonderfully so, and birds

veer and chirp and lift

their wings to see what's there.

It's air.

And so singing.

“But that's what
I
did,”

says Pierre

out of nowhere.

“And you can't tell

if the singing made the air

or the other way around—

or both, which is most likely.”

And then, like a Frenchman,

he left, before I had a chance

to throw him around the room,

but with respect,

affection, and mountains,

the kind they had in the century

he was born in, mountains as black

as his tomb, which I am unable

to throw around now

that his wife's in there too.

Henriette: her name.

(Henri: his real first name.)

(Her name a little feminine version of his.)

(But we all get smaller and smaller.)

(Hoping to fit

inside a rectangle of sunlight.)

(And not be a shoe!)

(Though have the calmness of a shoe.)

(Beneath the bed at night.)

I will tell you this tonight.