Collected Poems (21 page)

The man wondered if he had become

like Di Stefano, when he was no longer able

to sing the best of Verdi. He knew how better

than anyone, but finally didn’t have the strength

for Othello. My friend’s wife had left him

and he wondered if he could still hold the world

in his arms. And would he know if his quiet

was the beginning of decline. He talked often

of the first girl he kissed, when he was sixteen.

He had not been prepared for the velvety

plushness. We watched the evening begin.

“Fifty and waning,” he said. Touched my arm and we

walked slowly back. Silent and wonderfully content.

When we get beyond beauty and pleasure,

to the other side of the heart (but short

of the spirit), we are confused about what

to do next. It is too easy to say arriving

is enough. To pretend the music

of the mountain needs only to be heard.

That the dance is known by the dancing,

and the lasagne is realized by eating it.

Not in this place on the other side

of desire. We can swim in the Aegean,

but we can’t take it home. A man finds

a melon by the road and continues up

the hill thinking it is the warm melon

that will remain after he has forgotten

the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells

himself this even as the idea of the taste

is replacing what the melon tasted like.

He thought of the boy in the middle

of the poison gas. The gas mask dangerously

slipping on his face, because he was sweating

so much. (“Death on all sides.”) Fear all through him,

but also the excitement from his intruding,

because of the privacy he had penetrated.

The hidden world he was not part of.

Glimpsed all his life in the windows he walked past

at night. The young mother dancing slowly

with her little daughter. The teenager preening

in her new dress in front of her father.

The world without him he was seeing as he

opened cupboards and pulled clothes

from the bureaus. Drawers of the daughter’s

mysterious underclothes. What they had on

the dresser. Curiously the same as his rummaging

earlier in the refrigerator for the food

to put on the porch. Finding what had gotten

lost, shriveled, or spoiled. All his life wondering

what reality was, without his presence.

Lying in somebody’s side lawn, the night rain

coming down and the smell of lilacs

as he watched a family eating dinner in their light.

Later the Hispanic women in the Laundromats.

And in Rome, when he lived with the peasants

from Calabria. Never a part of it

despite their friendship. Now in the village

of black magic with tokens among the trees

announcing which paths led to death. Trying

to decide about the Australian woman

beside him. The borders again, he thinks,

remembering the woman in København he had

never seen as he slid out of the terrible

cold into her sleepy warmth. Her face

invisible in the dark. The soft sound

she made welcoming him wordlessly,

utterly. Into the great light of her body.

He gets dead sage and stalks of weeds mostly.

Oleander can kill a fire, they say.

The length of valley below is green

where the grapes are. The small farms

of wheat tiny. And two separate cows.

Then the sea. Here’s a terraced mountain

abandoned to bracken and furze and not

even that. If there was water once,

there isn’t now. Rock and hammering sun.

He tastes all of it again and again,

his madeleine. He followed that clue

so long it grew faint. Which must account

for his happiness in this wrong terrain.

There was no water at my grandfather’s

when I was a kid and would go for it

with two zinc buckets. Down the path,

past the cow by the foundation where

the fine people’s house was before

they arranged to have it burned down.

To the neighbor’s cool well. Would

come back with pails too heavy,

so my mouth pulled out of shape.

I see myself, but from the outside.

I keep trying to feel who I was,

and cannot. Hear clearly the sound

the bucket made hitting the sides

of the stone well going down,

but never the sound of me.

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.

And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia

merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.

He ran away with the circus at fourteen.

Neither one got through grammar school.

And here I am in the faculty toilet

trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

Lying in front of the house all

afternoon, trying to write a poem.

Falling asleep.

Waking up under the stars.

Deep inside the night on the eighth floor.

Scared to be alone with him in his room.

Hoping the drug still controls his violence.

The massiveness of him. The girth

of the wrist as he holds it. And the sound

of his heart. In the corridor outside,

blank eyes at each of the small windows.

The silence getting denser and denser

as it continues farther away.

Everywhere the sighing of the beds

rocking slowly, steadily, eternally

in the hushed dimness as he reaches in

to the hot bed of the contagious fat woman

to turn her over. Him frightened in

the paper clothes and a mask.

They give him a dead woman swathed

tightly in loop after loop of brown tape,

from the crown of her head down

to the toes. Like a mummy under water.

Wrestling with it in the concrete basement.

The weight of her slack body pulling

out of his arms. Lifting her with difficulty

by hugging the body against him. Shocked

at the dead thing’s heat. Fighting to get

her into the immaculate drawer. The sound

of steel sliding on steel.

The straight-edge razors they use on

Saturday nights slash so fast and clean

there is no pain. They fight on without

noticing the mutilation. Ears gone, noses

carved, cheeks laid bare. Standing in line

later to be neatly staunched and stitched.

Got up before the light this morning

and went through the sweet damp chill

down to the mindlessly persisting sea.

Stood neck-deep in its strength thinking

it was the same water young Aristotle

knew before he stopped laughing.

The cold waves came in on me,

came in as the sun went from red

to white. All the sea turned blue

as I walked back past the isolate

shuttered villa.

The Americans tried and tried to see

the invisible Indians in the deeper jungle

of Brazil. Finally they put things in the clearing

and waited. They waited for months,

maybe for years. Until a knife and a pot

disappeared. They put out other things

and some of those vanished. Then one morning

there was a jungle offering sitting on the ground.

Gradually they began to know the invisible

by the jungle’s choices. Even when nothing

replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.

Like the woman you camp outside of, at the five portals.

Attending the conduits that tunnel from the apparatus

down to the capital of her. Through the body

and its weather, to the mind and heart, to the spirit

beyond. To the mystery. And gradually to the ghosts

coming and leaving. To the difference between

the nightingale and the Japanese nightingale

which is not a nightingale. Getting lost in the treachery

of language, waylaid by the rain dancing its pavane

in the bruised light of winter afternoons.

By the flesh, luminous and transparent in the silent

clearing of her. Love as two spirits flickering

at the edge of meeting. An apartment on the third

floor without an elevator, white walls and almost

no furniture. Water seen through pine trees.

Love like the smell of basil. Richness beyond

anyone’s ability to cope with. The way love is after fifty.

It was not difficult to persuade the captain

to sail a little off course and leave him

at the island. With his boxes on the sand

and the ship getting small, he was home.

Foolishly, he was disappointed that Ariel

was not amazingly there to meet him.

A part had secretly dreamed it would be a woman.

But that lasted briefly and then he was happy.

How dear the bare place looked. How good it felt

getting the supplies up to the house.

She takes off her clothes without excitement.

Her eyes don’t know what to do. There is silence

in the countries of her body, Umbrian hill towns

under those small ribs, foreign voices singing

in the distance of her back. She is invisible

under the glare of her nudity. Somewhere there

is a table and the chairs she will go back to.

These men will never know what station the radio

is already set on. She will leave soon and find

herself walking in the streets with the few

people who are still awake. She will enter

her room tired and a little confused by the night.

Confused by their seeing her utterly, seeing

everything but the simple fact of her. Tomorrow

she will be in a supermarket buying potatoes

and milk, mostly naked under her dress and maybe

different. Strangers around the city will know

the delicate colors of her nipples. Some will

remember her long feet. Will she feel special

now as she sets the alarm? Is there a danger she

might feel that nothing significant happened?

Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional,

and according to which moment. Whether in the burgeoning

of July or the strict beauty of January. The language

itself is mutable. The word
way
is equally an avenue

and a matter of being. Our way into the woods

is according to the speed. To stroll into loveliness,

or leaves blowing so fast they would shred

birds in an explosion of blood. It’s the Devil’s

mathematics that Blake spoke of, which I failed

all three times. Everyone remembers the wonderful day

in Canada when the water was perfect. I remember

the Italian afternoon when I carried Gianna on my shoulders

in the pool, her thighs straining around my head.

My falling awkwardly and getting water in my nose.

The embarrassment forty-nine years ago which I have rejoiced in.

“To war with a god-lover is not war,” Edith Hamilton wrote,

“it is despair.” What of the terribly poor Monet

scrounging for the almost empty tubes of paint his students

left. Or Watteau dying so long near Versailles. Always

the music of the court and the taste of his beautiful

goddesses constantly going away.

Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving

or an emptying out? If the heart persists

in waiting, does it begin to lessen?

If we are always good does God lose track

of us? When I wake at night, there is

something important there. Like the humming

of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations

in the slums. There is a silence in me,

absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted

by the day I walked through the Greek village

where everyone was asleep and somebody began

playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside

the upper floor of a plain white stone house.

The bright green of the flat fields stretching away

endlessly under the procession of great white clouds.

A ceremony without punctuation. The land empty

except for the way Chief Joseph ended just short

of the Canadian border.

                         He did not talk to them

about that, or how the tribe dwindled away amid

the immaculate silence. (As we did after

leaving college.) He did not talk to the young

about sweat lodges, or the pipe ceremony. He talked

about how America was born from the size around them,

the American mind and its spirit shaped by that

scale. They said it was just distance for them.

And boredom. How small it made them feel.

He asked about their old poetry, saying he could

not understand how it worked. They said they had never

read any of that. He talked about imagination,

as something hard. He began to hear their minds flickering.

An old woman showed him the big photographs she had

bought from the government of their great men.

She said she was one of the last three people who could

speak the language, and she would die soon. He felt

the doom everywhere. They were like a kind of whale

that was so scant it could never replace itself.

Hearing about the drunkenness and drugs and incest

each day. Then the amazing stars at night. Riding

around all day with the woman from the foundation

that had brought him there. Getting to know her

as they roamed through the ideal landscape. Lunch

and dinner together all the time. She talking about

her Irish family and growing up in New York. About

the man she lived with. Getting somebody to take

their picture. His heart flickering. His surprise.

His heart that had retired, safe in ripeness, hidden

in the light. Standing together in the terminal,

her plane straight ahead, his to the left. Both of them

stranded without a language for it.