Sailing Alone Around the Room (4 page)

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an
L
as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:

Cézanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,

Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,

Rembrandt looks relieved, as if he were taking a breather

from painting
The Blinding of Samson
.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror

and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio

addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew

we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head

which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,

a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like

to be wearing such a chandelier on your head

as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read

any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him

lighting the candles one by one, then placing

the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,

then laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house

with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door

one dark night in the hill country of Spain.

“Come in,” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”

as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,

illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

The emotion is to be found in the clouds,

not in the green solids of the sloping hills

or even in the gray signatures of rivers,

according to Constable, who was a student of clouds

and filled shelves of sketchbooks with their motion,

their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.

Outdoors, he must have looked up thousands of times,

his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging

and the silent commotion of their eddying and flow.

Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw

as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers

and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors

to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

In photographs we can stop all this movement now

long enough to tag them with their Latin names.

Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus—

dizzying, romantic, authoritarian—

they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below

where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

High on the soft blue canvases of Constable

they are stuck in pigment, but his clouds appear

to be moving still in the wind of his brush,

inching out of England and the nineteenth century

and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,

bareheaded beneath this cupola of motion,

my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,

drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,

they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,

the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.

I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.

But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads

I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees

and rising again to show his familiar face.

And when he comes into full view over open fields

he looks like a young man who has fallen in love

with the dark earth,

a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,

his round mouth open

as if he had just broken into song.

I thought about his death for so many hours,

tangled there in the wires of the night,

that it came to have a body and dimensions,

more than a voice shaking over the telephone

or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.

His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs,

windows and shutters which are the motionless wings

of windows. His death had a head and clothes,

the white shirt and baggy trousers of death.

His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index,

and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read.

His death had hinges and bolts that were oiled and locked,

had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna that listened

to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past.

His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams.

It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor

you could not lie down on in the middle of the night.

In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took

his death to bed with me and his death was my bed

and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,

and then it was the light of day and the next day

and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future

like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

I want the scissors to be sharp

and the table to be perfectly level

when you cut me out of my life

and paste me in that book you always carry.

The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart

and still we are not touching, like things

in a poorly done still life

where the knife appears to be floating over the plate

which is itself hovering above the table somehow,

the entire arrangement of apple, pear, and wineglass

having forgotten the law of gravity,

refusing to be still,

as if the painter had caught them all

in a rare moment of slow flight

just before they drifted out of the room

through a window of perfectly realistic sunlight.

Trying to protect his students’ innocence

he told them the Ice Age was really just

the Chilly Age, a period of a million years

when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,

named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more

than an outbreak of questions such as

“How far is it from here to Madrid?”

“What do you call the matador’s hat?”

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,

and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom

on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom

for the playground to torment the weak

and the smart,

mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home

past flower beds and white picket fences,

wondering if they would believe that soldiers

in the Boer War told long, rambling stories

designed to make the enemy nod off.

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages

that I was still learning to turn,

Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,

playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos

of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,

the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood

the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:

frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams

carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister

even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,

and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type

of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she

were always pointing at something and shouting “Look!”

pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father

as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,

waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,

pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already

and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.

We had seen the dog, walked, watered, and fed the animal,

and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking

permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.

Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,

we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,

weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.

This is how I go about it:

I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.

Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile

as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only

a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.

I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.

I do this so that what I write will be pure,

completely rinsed of the carnal,

uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them

on a small table near the window.

I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms

when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.

I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.

I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.

Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,

most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe

where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.

Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.

Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.

Now I write only about death, most classical of themes

in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.

I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh

and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage

and speed through woods on winding country roads,

passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,

all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.

You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,

and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,

the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.

Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,

and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”

Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet

marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags

of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.

Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle

while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.

We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.

These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.

People would take walks to the very tops of hills

and write down what they saw in their journals without

speaking.

Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.

We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.

It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.