Sailing Alone Around the Room (10 page)

These are not the lines that came to me

while walking in the woods

with no pen

and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,

a handful of coins

dropped through the grate of memory,

along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place—

all gone and forgotten

before I had returned to the clearing of lawn

in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,

its notebooks and reams of blank paper,

its desk and soft lamp,

its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,

those six or eight exhalations,

the braided rope of the syntax,

the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end

wagging like the short tail

of a perfectly obedient spaniel

sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing

where I say Go, little poem—

not out into the world of strangers’ eyes,

but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,

unremembered names,

and fugitive dreams

such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,

erased itself

in the bright morning air

just as I was waking up.

First, her tippet made of tulle,

easily lifted off her shoulders and laid

on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,

the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more

complicated matter with mother-of-pearl

buttons down the back,

so tiny and numerous that it takes forever

before my hands can part the fabric,

like a swimmer’s dividing water,

and slip inside.

You will want to know

that she was standing

by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,

motionless, a little wide-eyed,

looking out at the orchard below,

the white dress puddled at her feet

on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments

in nineteenth-century America

is not to be waved off,

and I proceeded like a polar explorer

through clips, clasps, and moorings,

catches, straps, and whalebone stays,

sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook

it was like riding a swan into the night,

but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—

the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,

how her hair tumbled free of its pins,

how there were sudden dashes

whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is

it was terribly quiet in Amherst

that Sabbath afternoon,

nothing but a carriage passing the house,

a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale

when I undid the very top

hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,

the way some readers sigh when they realize

that Hope has feathers,

that Reason is a plank,

that Life is a loaded gun

that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

Every day the body works in the fields of the world

mending a stone wall

or swinging a sickle through the tall grass—

the grass of civics, the grass of money—

and every night the body curls around itself

and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises

from the body in the middle of the night,

leaves the trapezoidal bedroom

with its thick, pictureless walls

to sit by herself at the kitchen table

and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe

and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,

and opens a book on engineering.

Even the conscience awakens

and roams from room to room in the dark,

darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof

in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,

singing a song about the wildness of the sea

until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.

Then, they all will return to the sleeping body

the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,

talking to each other or themselves

even through the heat of the long afternoons.

Which is why the body—that house of voices—

sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen

to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called

before bending again to its labor.

Frost covered this decades ago,

and frost will cover it again tonight,

the leafy disarray of this woodland

now thinned down to half its trees,

but this morning I stand here

sweating in a thin shirt

as I split a stack of ash logs

into firewood

with two wedges, an ax, and a blue-headed maul.

The pleasures here are well known:

the feet planted wide,

the silent unstoppable flow of the downswing,

the coordination that is called hand-eye,

because the hand achieves

whatever the concupiscent eye desires

when it longs for a certain spot,

which, in this case, is the slightest fissure

visible at one end of the log

where the thin, insinuating edge

of the blade can gain entry,

where the shape of its will can be done.

I want to say there is nothing

like the sudden opening of wood,

but it is like so many other things—

the stroke of the ax like lightning,

the bisection so perfect

the halves fall away from each other

as in a mirror,

and hit the soft ground

like twins shot through the heart.

And rarely, if the wood

accepts the blade without conditions,

the two pieces keep their balance

in spite of the blow,

remain stunned on the block

as if they cannot believe their division,

their sudden separateness.

Still upright, still together,

they wobble slightly

as two lovers, once secretly bound,

might stand revealed,

more naked than ever,

the darkness inside the tree they shared

now instantly exposed to the blunt

light of this clear November day,

all the inner twisting of the grain

that held them blindly

in their augmentation and contortion

now rushed into this brightness

as if by a shutter

that, once opened, can never be closed.

Once every man wore a hat.

In the ashen newsreels,

the avenues of cities

are broad rivers flowing with hats.

The ballparks swelled

with thousands of straw hats,

brims and bands,

rows of men smoking

and cheering in shirtsleeves.

Hats were the law.

They went without saying.

You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

You bought them from Adams or Dobbs

who branded your initials in gold

on the inside band.

Trolleys crisscrossed the city.

Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.

Men with hats gathered on the docks.

There was a person to block your hat

and a hatcheck girl to mind it

while you had a drink

or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.

In your office stood a hat rack.

The day war was declared

everyone in the street was wearing a hat.

And they were wearing hats

when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

My father wore one to work every day

and returned home

carrying the evening paper,

the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

But today we go bareheaded

into the winter streets,

stand hatless on frozen platforms.

Today the mailboxes on the roadside

and the spruce trees behind the house

wear cold white hats of snow.

Mice scurry from the stone walls at night

in their thin fur hats

to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

And now my father, after a life of work,

wears a hat of earth,

and on top of that,

a lighter one of cloud and sky—a hat of wind.

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats

with the possible company of my death,

this sprawling miscellany of people—

carry-on bags and paperbacks—

that could be gathered in a flash

into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.

Not that I think

if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,

holding hands like a ring of sky divers,

into a sudden gasp of brightness,

or that there would be some common spot

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,

some spaceless, pillarless Greece

where we could, at the count of three,

toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase

so carefully arranged,

the way that girl is cooling her tea,

and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter’s hair …

and when you consider the altitude,

the secret parts of the engines,

and all the hard water and the deep canyons below …

well, I just think it would be good if one of us

maybe stood up and said a few words,

or, so as not to involve the police,

at least quietly wrote something down.

The house sits at one end of a two-acre trapezoid.

There is a wide lawn, a long brick path,

rhododendrons, and large, heavy maples.

Behind the geometry of the nine rooms,

the woods run up a hillside;

and across the road in front

is a stream called the Plum Brook.

It must have flowed through an orchard

that no longer exists.

Tomorrow early, I will drive down

and talk to the stonecutter,

but today I am staying home,

standing at one window, then another,

or putting on a jacket

and wandering around outside

or sitting in a chair

watching the trees full of light-green buds

under the low hood of the sky.

This is the first good rain to fall

since my father was buried last week,

and even though he was very old,

I am amazed at how the small drops

stream down the panes of glass,

as usual,

gathering,

as they always have,

in pools on the ground.

This is the beginning.

Almost anything can happen.

This is where you find

the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,

the first word of
Paradise Lost
on an empty page.

Think of an egg, the letter
A
,

a woman ironing on a bare stage

as the heavy curtain rises.

This is the very beginning.

The first-person narrator introduces himself,

tells us about his lineage.

The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.

Here the climbers are studying a map

or pulling on their long woolen socks.

This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.

The profile of an animal is being smeared

on the wall of a cave,

and you have not yet learned to crawl.

This is the opening, the gambit,

a pawn moving forward an inch.

This is your first night with her,

your first night without her.

This is the first part

where the wheels begin to turn,

where the elevator begins its ascent,

before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.

Things have had time to get complicated,

messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.

Cities have sprouted up along the rivers

teeming with people at cross-purposes—

a million schemes, a million wild looks.

Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack

here and pitches his ragged tent.

This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,

where the action suddenly reverses

or swerves off in an outrageous direction.

Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph

to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.

Someone hides a letter under a pillow.

Here the aria rises to a pitch,

a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.

And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge

halfway up the mountain.

This is the bridge, the painful modulation.

This is the thick of things.

So much is crowded into the middle—

the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,

Russian uniforms, noisy parties,

lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—

too much to name, too much to think about.