Nothing by Design (4 page)

our blonde in coach, would start from the front or back

when she rolled out her little tinkling cart

of snack boxes, which, although not fit for a dog,

you paid for meekly, and with the exact change.

Let’s be frank. This flight is headed for

your longest vacation. Tonight, the only gates

we’ll taxi to are pearly: no connection

to the party raging on down there without us.

It’s far too late to squander precious seconds

resenting my sadly true banalities,

my jocular despair, my loud, phoned-in

philosophy no button can switch off.

I understand, though. You’d like a little peace

before the eternal one. Well, here you are.

Spend your last moments in big-hearted hope

we’re going to hurt nobody on the ground.

III

UNBROKEN MUSIC

we drop everything to listen as a

hermit thrush distills its fragmentary
,

hesitant, in the end

unbroken music.

—“
A HERMIT THRUSH
”

Amy Clampitt, 1920–1994

UNBROKEN MUSIC

    1.
Lenox, 2007

From an overlooked trunk

in your New England attic,

and bound in a week

for Lake Como, I happen

on your small, marbled notebook

from the same place, begun

the same week of May

sixteen years before.

At seventy-one

you’d have three years more.

Surely you thought

you’d have longer: spring

days to clean out

what you never meant,

or meant no one to read

(even us, the ring

of the last ones, the trusted

who sat at your bed).

But then, as you said,

in time everything

we save will be lost.

And who
could
read your scrawl—

like a lizard darting

from a stone wall?

    2.
Rain at Bellagio

Thunder wakes me:

electrical storm behind

the mountains but no

skeletal hand

of evidence, no rain, just a flash

of a dream and almost afraid

to look at it

I reach for the little book

I brought on the plane.

Open it and truly

read for the first time.

Crumbled like

crackers in bed, pressed

flowers I can’t name

spill from the sheets

of dated poem-notes

5/21/91

moonlight on the wet flagstones

and the picayune

twin columns

of expenses

taxi $3.25

tip 50 cents

apportioned between yourself

and
H
, your lover

of decades by then.

Comically undomestic,

hopeless really, but ever

the Depression-era

Iowa farm girl so

haunted, so imprinted—

in sophisticated,

well-heeled, celebrated

old age—by the fear

of poverty.

I didn’t fully know;

still now, surely,

have no right to. Guarded

in what you said

even in solitude, peevish

perhaps but decorous,

you’ve left here only

tantalizing scraps

of Jamesian prose:

To that towering pompous stick

of an academic

she has, Dorothy W.–like
,

given up her life.

To wish them gone is so rude

that one resists it, and

becomes the more put off.

Oh, I can just hear you!

Did hear you, only today,

for the first time

in years, on my laptop

cleverly set up

to obliterate distance:

log on, double-click, play

audio: dead

distinguished poet

reciting in her proud,

high-pitched, breathy, not

entirely misremembered voice

a poem about the call

of a hermit thrush. Impossible

to achieve back then

the high-tech séance (yours

was the Italy

of the last
gettone

jammed in the slot

of the bar’s one phone,

the slow, shrugging Italy

of
francobolli

licked for luck onto cards

destined not to arrive

at their destination). Radically

old-school anyway, you

traveled via the
QE2

and your manual typewriter.

And your scribble

in journals: what terrible

penmanship, Amy, when

will you learn to correct it?

In loving memory

of Sidney … of Stanley…
who?

A graveyard you visited

near here, apparently.

You took the time to

copy the epitaph

whole, and almost

wholly illegibly.

An hour has passed.

Three a.m. The storm’s

now moving in on

the villa you stayed in

and pounding the moonless

flagstones. Static

hissing, a long-playing record.

    3.
The Horned Rampion

Bookmarked—by violets, I think—

the page of field notes is itself

a plot of withered, once-wild jottings

to make sense of later
rockrose (pink)

candytuft erinus alpinus

wood sage? cistus (shrub) nightshade

with tiny white clusters myrtle daphne

What’s this then?
horned rampion

Oh! it’s her first thought for her last

enraptured botanical poem
a spiny
,

highly structured, blue-purple star

Phyteuma Bellflower family
:

rare at first sighting, the rampion

would be rampant just days later. This

was the wildflower she’d plant

as if by happenstance at the end

of the poem, where a volume

of
Encyclopedia Britannica

(frequent companion, from which whole

paragraphs were duly typed

and inserted into correspondence

she hoped was edifying) falls

open at random—was she lying

to get at something true?—upon

its genus, species, and illustration.

For her, the trouvé had been
old love

reopened
daring words
still quivering

but who’d believe her notebook fallen

open to the seed of her poem

about another book fallen open?

    4.
A Silence Opens

Down at the lakeside, pleasure boats like toys

are glinting, tethered to their tinkling buoys

like spinning tops at last come to a stop

but for the slightest bobbing … as I’ve followed

my nose to scented hedgerows, ending here,

unable to botanize; can hardly tell

one boat from another.
Educata
,

one of them is called: I write that down,

absurdly, and with a heavy skeleton key

issued to the lucky ones like me

let myself out the gated come-and-go

Eden to Pescallo. A fishing village

sloshed at the margins, wind-and-grit-eroded

cobbles boldly throwing back the sun.

Chastening, and happily so, to stumble

like Alice (in your favorite book) upon

such rough, offhand perfection, facing page

of privilege, steep alleys flanked and straitened

by fitted jigsaw walls from which
fiori

spontanei
sprout sideways from the mosses

that seem to mortar one rock to another

in matrices, in story upon story. At a wrought-

iron gate, I glimpse it now: can see beyond

your phrase
truncated entrance to the olive

groves of Pescallo
whose mystery made me wish

you’d lived to finish, start, a poem about it.

What life isn’t truncated, a path

that vanishes to a point of no perspective

upon itself again? The silvered heads

nod on the olive trunks; are ancient, wise,

indifferent as I turn to cross another

threshold of surprise just up the road:

the planted slabs of a little cemetery.

Come in. No gate, no lock, and as if these

lines were chiseled just for me:
IN LOVING

MEMORY OF SIDNEY HERBERT BRUNNER

OF WINNINGTON CHESHIRE
Look!
AGED
23

WHO LOST HIS LIFE IN SAVING HIS ELDER BROTHER

FROM DANGER OF DROWNING
Yes, this is the one

HIS BODY WAS RECOVERED
and was tossed

the wreath
WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE
.

No wonder you had copied it all out

in spidery haste, the prairie poet drawn

time and again to drownings—of fishermen

in Maine; of the broken, heavy-lidded, stone-

pocketed Virginia Woolf, who blamed

no one; of Keats at twenty-five, whose lungs

filled with a choking liquid, and who called

out famously to erasure
Here lies One

Whose Name was writ in Water.
And here’s the flip

side of serendipity (my guide

thus far): it’s this, the accidental horror,

young life cut short, the petrifying thing-

not-supposed-to-happen. But what was?

You and I used to say there was no fate,

only “the coincidence factory,” and so what

to make of this?—that our young hero’s corpse

surfaced in 1890 on the date,

the very date, September tenth, when you

would meet your death in Lenox, a hundred four

years later? Nothing. Happenstance. As is

my coming on it, noting it, or opting

to remember him or you; to use my life

to set these words
still quivering
to paper.

    5.
Matrix

After all that, you didn’t quote it. Laid

poor Sidney so deep in your final book

that nobody reading
faceless in their nook

outside the walls, the name and birthplace of

the Englishman who drowned
there could unearth

a shard of identity. Homage instead

to wordlessness, to the silent, stubborn worth

not only of the forgotten but of forgetting.

I’m packing up. Taking a cue from love

as defined by you, or in a phrase of letting

go that itself was soon shucked off:
such

infinitudes of things that lived—

                                        So much

for them, a memory virus in our blood

that surfaces to scar us, disappears

awhile, is survivable. Who will trouble

to cobble together what we did or said,

how will they choose? Finally unable

to salvage one word more, I see ahead

only to Lenox, to returning all your green

thoughts to their resting place. Amy, where

could I pick your flowers, take up your
snakeskin

of Eden left behind
but in the fierce

desire to live my own days, light as air?

IV

LIGHTWEIGHTS

T. S. LIGHTWEIGHT AND EZRA PROFOUND

A meditation upon “The Waste Land”

Give Ezra his due credit

for that amazing edit.

Still, T.S. is the one who said it.

OUT OF THE WOODS

What is it about the forest?

Why can’t we give it a rest?

All those writers taking

soulful walks in the woods:

good heavens, it’s been done.

Step out and get some sun!

Dante did, after getting the goods

in the darkest glades from Virgil;

but what about Longfellow

sadly tagging along—

or ten steps back, at the distance

of a translated insistence?

Sure, I admire the flight paths

of the hawkmoths of Nabokov,

who pinned them down in a knockoff

of the hawthorn path in Proust—

but if I
must
lose my way,

I’ll take the route of song:

give me Sondheim any day.

I’ve had my fill of Frost,

proud again to be lost,

coming upon his fork

in the road for the millionth time,

or stumbling upon woodpiles

of somebody else’s work.

EDNA ST. VINCENT, M.F.A.

Chic and petite, blind to her destiny

of being hailed upon her death the worst

sometimes-excellent poet in history,

she ran the reading series, and ranked first

in her year despite some issues, namely those

pretentious, creaky sonnets e-mailed late

for workshop, densely wrought with “thee”s and “thou”s,

Apollo’s “dewy cart,” man’s “frosty fate”…

Her classmates listened, bored, without a clue.

Still, they liked her, partly because she friended

everybody who asked, and fucked them too,

lending them each some notoriety

by blogging through the night how things had ended.

Plus, she knew people at A.W.P.

URBAN HAIKU

Leash dog; strap iPod

to bicep; jog, shower, dress—

it’s not worth the time.