Nothing by Design (2 page)

This aquarium,

I thought, was a sort of think

tank for non-thinkers

in their open-mouthed

safety-in-numbers forage,

needing no courage.

Yet so beautiful:

mathematically serving

one end while swerving

in a fraction of

a second into action:

how do they sense when

to advance or back-

track, tail that guy, or swallow

the law to follow?

Somewhat in the line

of Leibniz, Mandelbrot coined

the term
fractal:
it’s

the hall-of-mirrors

parthenogenesis of

a recursive, nonce,

anonymously

irregular form: i.e.,

copies no other

formula can make.

(I learned that when I got home.)

An eye on either

side of a flat head

is useful, I read; herring

have a keen sense of hearing,

but it’s not that that

gives them their unerring

“high polarity,”

pooling together

just close enough to discern

skin on a neighbor,

far enough to skirt

collision. That’s a vision

scaled for fish—but what

human can marshal

acceptance, much less a wish,

for sight so partial?

“Stand back from the glass,

make room for the universe,”

I thought then; “at least

for whatever we

can compass: iteration

on iteration,

until fish fill the ocean.”

THE GODS

I always seem to have tickets

in the third or fourth balcony

(a perch for irony;

a circle of hell the Brits

tend to call “the gods”),

and peer down from a tier

of that empyrean

at some tuxedoed insect

scrabbling on a piano.

Some nights there’s a concerto,

and ranks of sound amass

until it’s raining upward

(violin bows for lightning)

from a black thundercloud.

A railing has been installed

precisely at eye level—

which leads the gaze, frustrated,

still higher to the vault

of the gilt-encrusted ceiling,

where a vaguely understood

fresco that must be good

shows nymphs or angels wrapped

in windswept drapery.

Inscribed like the gray curls

around the distant bald spot

of the eminent conductor,

great names—
DA VINCI PLATO

WHITTIER DEBUSSY
—

form one long signature,

fascinatingly random,

at the marble base of the dome.

It’s more the well-fed gods

of philanthropy who seem

enshrined in all their funny,

decent, noble, wrong

postulates, and who haunt

these pillared concert halls,

the tinkling foyers strung

with chandeliered ideals,

having selected which

dated virtues—
COURAGE

HONOR BROTHERHOOD
—rated

chiseling into stone;

having been quite sure

that virtue was a thing

all men sought, the sublime

a mode subliminally

fostered by mentioning

monumentally.

All men. Never a woman’s

name, of course, although

off-shoulder pulchritude

gets featured overhead—

and abstractions you might go

to women for, like
BEAUTY

JUSTICE LIBERTY
.

Yet at the intermission,

I generally descend

the spiral stairs unjustly

for a costly, vacant seat

I haven’t paid for. Tonight

I’ve slipped into D9.

The lights dim. Warm applause

and, after a thrilling pause,

some stiff-necked vanities

for a moment float away—

all the gorgeous, nameless,

shifting discordances

of the world cry aloud; allowed

at last, I close my eyes.

A TOAST FOR RICHARD WILBUR

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his first book
,
The Beautiful Changes

Poems like yours are, frankly, hard to beat—

    snapping and flapping from each line

    like a deceptively blank sheet

    that turns into an angel—but

    of course the image isn’t mine;

your poems inspire the rest of us to cheat.

So, while I’m out borrowing, let me steal

    another angel from your brain.

    I’m thinking of Bruna Sandoval

    in your “Plain Song for Comadre,”

    who mopped the church floor seventeen

years, and daily saw her tinted pail

of scrubwater take the sheen of heavenly wings.

    For fifty years the beautiful change

    you’ve wrought upon the plainest things

    of this world has been like that—

    a private labor to estrange

the eye from yesterday, so that it brings

forward the clean habit of surprise.

    To become a “giver of due regard”

    you prayed to Saint Lucy once. I rise

    before you, glass raised, to insist

    that regarding you was never hard,

you for whom seeing is the keenest praise.

FROM A BALCONY, LAKE COMO

    1.

Up close, last night’s beads of rain

cling to the underside of the railing

like berries to a vine.

    2.

Is it still raining? How to be sure

this morning, if not for the tall

columnar cypress

so many plummeting

meters down, a solemn

sentry standing at attention

to everything that can’t be seen

by the human eye? Only

against such opacity

can we discern the soundless

drizzle, a mild

disturbance like midges.

    3.

A blur of terra cotta

and ochre here and there:

while I describe it,

    4.

the village is clearing a little.

Just below, a gardener’s

broom of snapped branches

scratches a surface,

sidelines another heap of debris.

On a rooftop (so far from us

it’s a floor), a roofer

plants his boots on the tiles,

fixing the middle distance.

    5.

From which the village climbs again,

receding from

the valley in switchbacks

(we can tell because

of that minuscule vehicle

ducking in and out of trees)

to scale the face of the first

cloud-haloed

mountain in a series

of mountains, each slipped

neatly behind the last:

ever-flatter and -duller

file folders of color,

emerald to jade to a faded

wafer of blue so watery

it comes out of sumi-e.

A Japanese- or Chinese-

Italian scroll, a vertiginous

landscape hung

in the empty niche

between the open French windows.

    6.

When did the puddle

of rain on the balcony

chair disappear?

I thought I was looking.

Did it drip through the slats?

Evaporate? What?

    7.

Sun picks out

the young olive trees

positioned widely in a field

with their new shadows,

as if gawkily waiting

to be tagged in a game.

And on the lake, finally,

all agitations, tremblings

longed-for are visible:

slubbed yellows, prismatic

pinks like the costly

shantungs of Como

smoothed out on a counter,

cupped again, crumpled,

marveled at, lifted

to light; set aside.

    8.

Behind the brooding,

regrouping humidity,

lightning

is assembling all our

slate-blue, shifting

late afternoons into one simple,

zigzagged, single-minded line:

not here yet, but

coming on schedule

like the ferry pushing

off from Varenna,

appointed to veer this way.

CONSTELLATIONS

His parents want him to play less.

Well then, they should have thought ahead—

they
knew
the type of mind he had;

Dad never should have taught him chess.

But face it, Dad’s still limited

at seeing long-term consequences.

Dumb strategies, those lame defenses—

it makes him sad, alone in bed

on a Saturday night, beneath a quilt

his mother calls a floral chessboard;

at only five years old, he’d floored

them both by beating him. (It’s guilt,

not sadness, that he’s really feeling:

he gets the picture faster than

they’ll ever fathom.) Tonight again

he looks up at his stickered ceiling

for the vision of the infinite

Grand Master. There, instead of glue-on,

glow-in-the-dark stars, the view

some guys make do with, he has eight

squares by eight: a constellation

of white on black, a sixty-four-

tile universe, a dizzy dance floor

on which his moves, some combination

he thought of, might not have been seen

once in the game’s unending annals.

King-usurping gambits, channels

around the wide skirts of the queen.

He should be “thinking about dating,”

his mother says. As if he isn’t!

She seems to think he’s self-imprisoned

here, that some brave girl is waiting

to rescue him, like Rapunzel, from

the castle. Of course he’s desperate

to kiss them, to plunge into that sweet

wet something: but thinking hard can summon

even that sensation. It’s long

since he has bothered clasping, lifting

a piece: admittedly, the shifting

of objects on a plane isn’t wrong,

if you need that, but he’s in a space

mentally where he needs no square

markers above him to know he’s there,

sliding a checkmate into place.

How not resolve it, knight after knight,

side-sneaking bishop, stalwart pawn?

He’ll probably be up till dawn

with this endgame—genius, if he’s right—

but even when sleep’s stubborn law

overtakes him, some new dream position

may break the surface: if not a win,

he thinks, at least a draw.

CARDINAL NUMBERS

Our heads down, two of a

kind, we’re reading at either end

of the red sofa.

Is it a one in a million

chance? Not that such

a thing would happen—

that each of us

would look up to catch

on the wing that moment—

but that we speak in unison

when (framed in a mullion

of double windows)

two cardinals descend

to a fiery perch

on a barren pear tree.

Perfectly twinned,

they’re content to stand

for pure ornament,

to be bright but dumb:

“like red bows

tied to the boughs.”

That’s what we both said.

Attachment is in

the air, evidently.

So we note, in tandem,

another twosome

mirroring them:

the marvelous,

upright, waxen ear-

trumpets of amaryllis

propped on the sill,

their double-bloomed red

deaf to the blaring

echo outside;

blind to the cardinals

that are blind to our staring.

Off the pair flies

to amaze somewhere else.

Our two pairs of eyes,

back and forth like birds,

flit from the plant

to twice-read words.

OUR FRIENDS THE ENEMY

Christmas 1914

Were they mad?

They kicked the severed head

of the football across the frozen mud

like Ajax running wild in the field:

it was sheep he killed

when he’d thought he’d been slaughtering

Odysseus and Agamemnon.

Now it was either the war to end

all wars, or Armageddon,

but surely they’d been out of their wits

picking their way across No Man’s Land

unarmed but for brandy and cigarettes

and pictures of girls they liked.

In no time the chaps with cameras

were snapping photographs—

Tommy swapping his cap for the spiked

pickelhaube on Fritz.

It started, Colonel, the night before.

Sir, I can explain…

The Jerrys who wanted them dead so close

all along the front

they could hear them clear

as the stars, singing “Stille Nacht.”

Some of the boys sang back:

“O Come All Ye Faithful.”

A friendly taunt:

“Engländer! Engländer!”

And all ablaze,

the candles in rows

on the Germans’ Christmas trees.

How did they dare walk across?

They’d trod their way through worse before—

lads underfoot in the muck;

now the day was cold enough those poor

contorted stiffs

were coated in merciful rime.

As for them, whose time

hadn’t come, you could say that squalor

was the better part of valor.

You could call it a sort of luck

not standing in standing slime in the trench.

Not fraternizing with the rats

but clambering over the parapets

with a few of your rations in hand.

Sergeant Bernard Joseph Brookes

of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles

wrote in his diary:

In the afternoon I went out

and had a chat