Becoming Light (16 page)

reverberate

with the fleshly echo

of the music

of the spheres.

When the flesh falls from these bones,

the notes will be clearer.

When the skin withers

& the spirit sails out

clear as the autumn air,

crisp as the falling leaves,

shining as the waters of our planet

seen from afar

by creatures who are made

of melody,

& who are invisible,

untouchable & far

except when they come to earth

to make music

on our fragile bones.

I sit in the black leather chair

meditating

on the plume of smoke that rises

in the air,

riffling the pages of my life

as if it were a book of poems,

flipping through

past & future.

If I go back, back, back,

riding the plume of smoke,

I find I died

in childbirth in another life,

died by fire in the life before that,

died by water twice, or more.

I pick out days

& relive them

as if I were trying on dresses.

When the future beckons,

I follow,

riding another plume of smoke,

feeling the barrier

between skin & air

evaporate,

& my body disappear

like the myth it is.

My cheeks burn against the air,

flaming where two elements collide

& intermingle

becoming one.

Oh explosion at the body’s edge!

I live on a ledge of time,

gazing

at the infinite.

Broken ivories

playing

the blue piano

of the sea.

We have come

from the bitter city

to heal ourselves.

We have come

looking for a patch of beach

not yet built into a fortress

of real-estate greed,

a coral reef

not yet picked clean

of buried treasure,

not yet bare of birds.

The first night in the Keys,

I dreamed I was a bird

soaring over a hilly city,

soaring & dipping

like a gull or egret.

& I thought:

“Ah—this is a flying dream!

Enjoy it.”

But I really think

that my soul

had been transported

for a night

into the body of

a bird

& I was
flying
.

I woke up

exhausted,

arms weary,

eyes red.

The beach was dazzling

with its white sand,

the sun blinding,

& I seemed to know the palm trees

from above

as well as below.

They root in the sand

with elephant feet,

yet they also root

their delicate fronds

in air.

& these are a comfort

as you fly

half bird, half human

through a dream of sky.

Everything was new

to a spirit

so divided

between two kingdoms.

The water was alive

with fish,

the air with birds

& palm fronds,

clouds, thunderous presences

of rain

gathering & parting,

& fiery sun playing through.

I knew

that I stood

on a patch of earth

connected to the sky,

that my heart beat

with the sea,

that my arms moved

with the clouds,

that my flesh

was finally irrelevant

though it surrounded me

as the case of a piano

surrounds its strings,

while the fingers play

on the ivory keys

& the human music

rises to the sky.

I put on my poetry suit.

The prose falls away

like a dream I cannot remember,

the images unraveling like threads

in a cheap dress, sewn in Hong Kong

to feed the hungry mouths

of sweet-faced Chinese children.

Now I am in my poetry suit.

I zip myself into it,

pink as flesh, tight as the suit

I was born in, & looking

seamless as a perfect poem,

gleaming as the golden fleece,

slim as a stripper at the Crazy Horse Saloon,

transparent as silk stockings,

& smelling of jasmine & tea rose.

But what was that old perfume

I left in the pocket,

that cotton ball soaked

in Bal à Versailles,

that yellowing glacé glove

that lacks a mate,

that fine cambric handkerchief

brown with dried blood

from an old nosebleed?

Even poetry, pure as nothing

but snow or music,

drags life along

in its hidden pockets.

Oh for an art

that is not made of words

with all their odors

& indiscretions.

Bobbing in the waters of the womb,

little godhead, ten toes, ten fingers

& infinite hope,

sails upside down through the world.

My bones, I know, are only a cage

for death.

Meditating, I can see my skull,

a death’s head,

lit from within

by candles

which are possibly the suns

of other galaxies.

I know that death

is a movement toward light,

a happy dream

from which you are loath to awaken,

a lover left

in a country

to which you have no visa,

& I know that the horses of the spirit

are galloping, galloping, galloping

out of time

& into the moment called NOW.

Why then do I care

for this upside-down Buddha

bobbling through the world,

his toes, his fingers

alive with blood

that will only sing & die.

There is a light in my skull

& a light in his.

We meditate on our bones only

to let them blow away

with fewer regrets.

Flesh is merely a lesson.

We learn it

& pass on.

The experiencer of fear is not an observer of it; he is fear itself, the very instrument of fear.

—J. Krishnamurti

In dreams I descend

into the cave of my past:

a child with a morgue-tag

on its toe,

the terrible metal squeaking

of the morgue-drawers,

& the chilly basement

& the slam of doors.

Or else I am setting up dreamhouse,

with the wife

of my second ex-husband.

She complains of him

with breaking sorrow—

& I comfort her.

(She only married him, it seems, for me.)

Sometimes I wake up naked

in Beverly Hills—

the table set for ten, a formal dinner—

a studio chief on my left side,

a fabled actor on my right.

Across the table,

Greta Garbo, Scott Fitzgerald,

John F. Kennedy & Marilyn Monroe—

& I alone not properly dressed for dinner,

& besides unprepared

for the final exam,

in which our immortality

will be tested,

& one of us shall perish

as dessert.

Send parachutes & kisses!

Send them quick!

I am descending into the cave

of my own fear.

My feet are weighted

with the leg-irons of the past.

The elevator plummets

in the shaft.

Trapped, trapped in the bowels

of my dream,

locked in the cellar

by myself the jailer.

Rats and spiders scuttle

through the coal bin.

I cower in the corner.

I am fear.

If God is a dog drowsing

contemplating

the quintessential dogginess

of the universe, of the whole

canine race, why are we

uneasy?

No dog I know

would hurl thunderbolts,

or plant plague germs,

or shower us with darts

of pox or gonococci.

No. He lies on his back

awaiting

the cosmic belly rub.

He wags his tail signifying

universal love.

He frolics and cavorts

because he has just

taken a galactic shit

& found it good.

All dogs are blessed;

they live in the now.

But God is all too human.

Somehow we have spelled his name

wrong, got it backward,

aroused his growl.

God drowses

like a lazy old man

bored

with our false

alarms.

We made them

in the image of our fears

to cry at doors,

at partings—even brief,

to beg for food at table,

& to look at us with those big

aching eyes,

& stay beside us

when our children flee,

& sleep upon our beds

on darkest nights,

& cringe at thunder

as in our own

childhood

frights.

We made them sad-eyed,

loving, loyal, scared

of life without us.

We nurtured their dependency

& grief.

We keep them as reminders of our fear.

We love them

as the unacknowledged hosts

of our own terror

of the grave—abandonment.

Hold my paw

for I am dying.

Sleep upon my coffin;

wait for me,

sad-eyed

in the middle of the drive

that curves beyond the cemetery wall.

I hear your bark,

I hear your mournful howl—

oh may all dogs that I have ever loved

carry my coffin,

howl at the moonless sky,

& lie down with me sleeping

when I die.

In a season of deaths,

when the dead ones, the great ones

were falling all around,

when the leaves were turning

scarlet, crimson, brown as blood,

when the birches trembled

& the oaks turned gold,

I dreamed,

perhaps for the last time,

the old exam-dream:

a history course

& I had not read a word.

Though I took my degree Phi Bete

with every honor,

I trembled in my dream

that I would fail.

Oh the terror

in the college corridor!

The fear of reprisals,

the fear of death.

The history of the world

is blank to me.

The only thing I know

is certain

death.

How are we tested?

Why do our minds

go blank?

Why the exam room,

courtroom,

why the witness stand?

Even the Phi Bete kids

must fail in dreams;

A’s & F’s are equalized

by sleep.

Perhaps we are tested by mortality.

No childhood of anxiety

& pain,

no eyes behind glasses

searching flyspeck print

can spare us

from the certain truth

we fail.

Teach us to live

each day

as if our last.

Teach us the present tense,

teach us the word.

Teach us to take air in

& let it out

without the fearful catch

of breath on death.

Truce with the cosmos,

soul at peace within,

we may stop dreaming

that we fail

life’s school.

Our lives are in your hands,

our deaths assured.

Between this knowledge

& our schooldays

fall our dreams.

All night he lies awake tuning the sky,

tuning the night with its fat crackle of static,

with its melancholy love songs crooning

across the rainy air above Verdun

& the autobahn’s blue suicidal dawn.

Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed,

the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches,

his stained fingers on the tuning bar, fishing

for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond,

for the tinsel & elusive fish

(brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)—

the copper-colored daughter of the pond god.

He casts for her, the tuning bar his rod,

but only long-dead lovers with their griefs

haunt him in Piaf’s voice—

(as if a voice could somehow only die

when it was sung out, utterly).

He finally lies down and drowns the light

but the taste of her rises, brackish,

from the long dark water of her illness

& his grief is terrible as drowning

when he reaches for the radio again.

In the daytime, you hardly know him;

he walks in a borrowed calm.

You cannot sense

his desperation in the dawn

when the abracadabras of the birds

conjure another phantom day.

He favors cities which blaze all night,

hazy mushrooms of light under the blue

& blinking eyes of jets.

But when the lamps across the way go under,

& the floorboards settle,

& the pipes fret like old men gargling—

he is alone with his mouthful of ghosts,

his tongue bitter with her unmourned death,

& the terrible drowning.

I watch from my blue window

knowing he does not trust me,

though I know him as I know my ghosts,

though I know his drowning,

though, since that night when all harmony broke for me,

I have been trying to tune the sky.

It used to be hard

for women,

snowed in their white lives,

white lies,

to write books