Sailing Alone Around the Room (12 page)

Let the other boys from the village

gather under your window

and strum their bean-shaped guitars.

Let them huddle under your balcony

heavy with flowers,

and fill the night with their longing—

locals in luminous shirts,

yodeling over their three simple chords,

hoping for a glimpse of your moonlit arm.

Meanwhile, I will bide my time

and continue my lessons on the zither

and my study of the miniature bassoon.

Every morning I will walk the corridor

to the music room

lined with the fierce portraits of my ancestors

knowing there is nothing like practice

to devour the hours of life—

sheets of music floating down,

a double reed in my mouth

or my fingers curled

over a row of wakeful strings.

And if this is not enough

to rouse you from your light sleep

and lure you through the open doors,

I will apply myself to the pyrophone,

the double-lap dulcimer,

the glassarina, and the tiny thumb piano.

I will be the strange one,

the pale eccentric

who wears the same clothes every day,

the one at the train station

carrying the black case

shaped like nothing you have seen before.

I will be the irresistible misfit

who sends up over a ledge of flowers

sounds no woman has ever heard—

the one who longs to see your face

framed by bougainvillea,

perplexed but full of charity,

looking down at me as I finger

a nameless instrument

it took so many days and nights to invent.

Because he has been hungry for days,

the woodsman wishes for a skillet of hot sausages

and because she is infuriated at his stupidity,

his lack of vision, shall we say,

his wife wishes the skillet would stick to his nose,

and so the last wish must also be squandered

by asking the genie to please

remove the heavy iron pan from the poor man’s face.

Hovering in the smoke that wafts up

from his exotic green bottle,

the genie knew all along the couple

would never escape their miserable lot—

the cheerless hovel, the thin dog in the corner,

cold skillet on a cold stove—

and we knew this too, looking down from

the cloud of a sofa into the world of a book.

The man is a fool, it is easily said.

He could have wished for a million gold coins

as his wife will remind him hourly

for the rest of their rueful lives,

or a million golden skillets

if he had a little imaginative flair,

and that is the cinder of truth

the story wishes to place in one of our shoes.

Nothing can come from nothing,

I nod with the rest of the congregation.

Three wishes is three wishes too many,

I mutter piously as I look up from the story.

But every time I think of it,

all I ever really feel besides a quiver

of sympathy for the poor woodsman

is a gnawing hunger for sausages—

a sudden longing for a winter night,

a light snow falling outside,

my ax leaning by the door,

my devoted, heavyset wife at the stove,

and a skillet full of sizzling sausages,

maybe some green peppers and onions,

and for my seventh and final wish,

a decent bottle of Italian, no, wait … make that Chilean red.

I sit in the study,

simple walls, complicated design of carpet.

I read a book with a bright red cover.

I write something down.

I look up a fact in an encyclopedia

and copy it onto a card,

the lamp burning,

a painting leaning against a chair.

I find a word in a dictionary

and copy it onto the back of an envelope,

the piano heavy in the corner,

the fan turning slowly overhead.

Such is life in this pavilion

of paper and ink

where a cup of tea is cooling,

where the windows darken then fill with light.

But I have had enough of it—

the slope of paper on the desk,

books on the floor like water lilies,

the jasmine drying out in its pot.

In fact, I am ready to die,

ready to return as something else,

like a brown-and-white dog

with his head always out the car window.

Then maybe, if you were still around,

walking along a street in linen clothes,

a portfolio under your arm,

you would see me go by,

my eyes closed,

wet nose twitching,

my ears blown back,

a kind of smile on my long dark lips.

I would like to watch a movie tonight

in which a stranger rides into town

or where someone embarks on a long journey,

a movie with the promise of danger,

danger visited upon the citizens of the town

by the stranger who rides in,

or the danger that will befall the person

on his or her long hazardous journey—

it hardly matters to me

so long as I am not in danger,

and not much danger lies in watching

a movie, you might as well agree.

I would prefer to watch this movie at home

than walk out in the cold to a theater

and stand on line for a ticket.

I want to watch it lying down

with the bed hitched up to the television

the way they’d hitch up a stagecoach

to a team of horses

so the movie could pull me along

the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

I would stay out of harm’s way

by identifying with characters

like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

who rides into town,

the fellow who knows enough to duck

when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

Or the stationmaster

in the movie about the perilous journey,

the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

helps a lady onto the train,

and hands up a heavy satchel

to the man with the mustache

and the dangerous eyes,

waving the all-clear to the engineer.

Then the train would pull out of the station

and the movie would continue without me.

And at the end of the day

I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,

my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—

Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.

It is not the tilted buildings or the blind alleys

that I mind,

nor the winding staircases leading nowhere

or the ones that are simply missing.

Nor is walking through a foreign city

with a ring of a thousand keys

looking for the one door the worst of it,

nor the blank maps I am offered by strangers.

I can even tolerate your constant running

away from me, slipping around corners,

rising in the cage of an elevator,

squinting out the rear window of a taxi,

and always on the arm of a tall man

in a beautiful suit

and a perfectly furled hat

whom I know is carrying a gun.

What kills me is the way you lie there

in the morning, eyes closed,

curled into a sweet ball of sleep

and that innocent look on your face

when you tell me over coffee and oranges

that really you were right there all night

next to me in bed

and then expect me to believe you

were lost in your own dreamworld,

some ridiculous alibi

involving swimming through clouds

to the pealing of bells,

a transparent white lie about leaping

from a high window ledge

then burying your face

in the plumage of an angel.

There is a section in my library for death

and another for Irish history,

a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan,

and in the center a row of reference books,

solid and imperturbable,

the ones you can turn to anytime,

when the night is going wrong

or when the day is full of empty promise.

I have nothing against

the thin monograph, the odd query,

a note on the identity of Chekhov’s dentist—

but what I prefer on days like these

is to get up from the couch,

pull down
The History of the World
,

and hold in my hands a book

containing almost everything

and weighing no more than a sack of potatoes,

11
pounds, I discovered one day when I placed it

on the black iron scale

my mother used to keep in her kitchen,

the device on which she would place

a certain amount of flour,

a certain amount of fish.

Open flat on my lap

under a halo of lamplight,

a book like this always has a way

of soothing the nerves,

quieting the riotous surf of information

that foams around my waist

even though it never mentions

the silent labors of the poor,

the daydreams of grocers and tailors,

or the faces of men and women alone in single rooms—

even though it never mentions my mother,

now that I think of her again,

who only last year rolled off the edge of the earth

in her electric bed,

in her smooth pink nightgown,

the bones of her fingers interlocked,

her sunken eyes staring upward

beyond all knowledge,

beyond the tiny figures of history,

some in uniform, some not,

marching onto the pages of this incredibly heavy book.

This is not bad—

ambling along 44th Street

with Sonny Rollins for company,

his music flowing through the soft calipers

of these earphones,

as if he were right beside me

on this clear day in March,

the pavement sparkling with sunlight,

pigeons fluttering off the curb,

nodding over a profusion of bread crumbs.

In fact, I would say

my delight at being suffused

with phrases from his saxophone—

some like honey, some like vinegar—

is surpassed only by my gratitude

to Tommy Potter for taking the time

to join us on this breezy afternoon

with his most unwieldy bass

and to the esteemed Arthur Taylor

who is somehow managing to navigate

this crowd with his cumbersome drums.

And I bow deeply to Thelonious Monk

for figuring out a way

to motorize—or whatever—his huge piano

so he could be with us today.

The music is loud yet so confidential

I cannot help feeling even more

like the center of the universe

than usual as I walk along to a rapid

little version of “The Way You Look Tonight,”

and all I can say to my fellow pedestrians,

to the woman in the white sweater,

the man in the tan raincoat and the heavy glasses,

who mistake themselves for the center of the universe—

all I can say is watch your step

because the five of us, instruments and all,

are about to angle over

to the south side of the street

and then, in our own tightly knit way,

turn the corner at Sixth Avenue.

And if any of you are curious

about where this aggregation,

this whole battery-powered crew,

is headed, let us just say

that the real center of the universe,

the only true point of view,

is full of the hope that he,

the hub of the cosmos

with his hair blown sideways,

will eventually make it all the way downtown.

It was a weekday afternoon, around three,

the hour some drinkers call the Demon,

and I was possessed by the feeling

that nothing had really changed for me

since childhood,

that I was spinning my wheels in a sandbox,

or let’s say that I had been pedaling

around Scotland since 1941,

on the same maroon 3-speed Raleigh bicycle—

that I had begun my life

with clips on my trousers,

pushing off by the side of a garage,

throwing a leg over the crossbar,

then crunching down a straight gravel path.

And now, near the end of the century,

I was still moving over the same

wind-shocked hills, dotted with sheep,

and my terrier curled on a tartan blanket

in my large wicker carrier basket.

I have done all my pedaling in silence,

except whenever I came to an intersection—

a birthday, a wedding, a death—

and then I would ring the bell on the handlebar.

Otherwise, I kept my thoughts to myself,