Sailing Alone Around the Room (7 page)

At the first chink of sunrise,

the windows on one side of the house

are frosted with stark orange light,

and in every pale blue window

on the other side

a full moon hangs, a round, white blaze.

I look out one side, then the other,

moving from room to room

as if between countries or parts of my life.

Then I stop and stand in the middle,

extend both arms

like Leonardo’s man, naked in a perfect circle.

And when I begin to turn slowly

I can feel the whole house turning with me,

rotating free of the earth.

The sun and moon in all the windows

move, too, with the tips of my fingers,

the solar system turning by degrees

with me, morning’s egomaniac,

turning on the hallway carpet in my slippers,

taking the cold orange, blue, and white

for a quiet, unhurried spin,

all wheel and compass, axis and reel,

as wide awake as I will ever be.

I pour a coating of salt on the table

and make a circle in it with my finger.

This is the cycle of life

I say to no one.

This is the wheel of fortune,

the Arctic Circle.

This is the ring of Kerry

and the white rose of Tralee

I say to the ghosts of my family,

the dead fathers,

the aunt who drowned,

my unborn brothers and sisters,

my unborn children.

This is the sun with its glittering spokes

and the bitter moon.

This is the absolute circle of geometry

I say to the crack in the wall,

to the birds who cross the window.

This is the wheel I just invented

to roll through the rest of my life

I say

touching my finger to my tongue.

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense

that you cannot make out the calendar of pinup

drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.

Your ears are ringing with the sound of

the mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe,

and as you look closer you notice that this month’s

is not the one pushing the lawn mower, wearing

a straw hat and very short blue shorts,

her shirt tied in a knot just below her breasts.

Nor is it the one in the admiral’s cap, bending

forward, resting her hands on a wharf piling,

glancing over the tiny anchors on her shoulders.

No, this is March, the month of great winds,

so appropriately it is the one walking her dog

along a city sidewalk on a very blustery day.

One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head

and the other is grasping the little dog’s leash,

so of course there is no hand left to push down

her dress which is billowing up around her waist

exposing her long stockinged legs and yes the secret

apparatus of her garter belt. Needless to say,

in the confusion of wind and excited dog

the leash has wrapped itself around her ankles

several times giving her a rather bridled

and helpless appearance which is added to

by the impossibly high heels she is teetering on.

You would like to come to her rescue,

gather up the little dog in your arms,

untangle the leash, lead her to safety,

and receive her bottomless gratitude, but

the mechanic is calling you over to look

at something under your car. It seems that he has

run into a problem and the job is going

to cost more than he had said and take

much longer than he had thought.

Well, it can’t be helped, you hear yourself say

as you return to your place by the workbench,

knowing that as soon as the hammering resumes

you will slowly lift the bottom of the calendar

just enough to reveal a glimpse of what

the future holds in store: ah,

the red polka-dot umbrella of April and her

upturned palm extended coyly into the rain.

My teacher lies on the floor with a bad back

off to the side of the piano.

I sit up straight on the stool.

He begins by telling me that every key

is like a different room

and I am a blind man who must learn

to walk through all twelve of them

without hitting the furniture.

I feel myself reach for the first doorknob.

He tells me that every scale has a shape

and I have to learn how to hold

each one in my hands.

At home I practice with my eyes closed.

C is an open book.

D is a vase with two handles.

G flat is a black boot.

E has the legs of a bird.

He says the scale is the mother of the chords.

I can see her pacing the bedroom floor

waiting for her children to come home.

They are out at nightclubs shading and lighting

all the songs while couples dance slowly

or stare at one another across tables.

This is the way it must be. After all,

just the right chord can bring you to tears

but no one listens to the scales,

no one listens to their mother.

I am doing my scales,

the familiar anthems of childhood.

My fingers climb the ladder of notes

and come back down without turning around.

Anyone walking under this open window

would picture a girl of about ten

sitting at the keyboard with perfect posture,

not me slumped over in my bathrobe, disheveled,

like a white Horace Silver.

I am learning to play

“It Might As Well Be Spring”

but my left hand would rather be jingling

the change in the darkness of my pocket

or taking a nap on an armrest.

I have to drag him into the music

like a difficult and neglected child.

This is the revenge of the one who never gets

to hold the pen or wave good-bye,

and now, who never gets to play the melody.

Even when I am not playing, I think about the piano.

It is the largest, heaviest,

and most beautiful object in this house.

I pause in the doorway just to take it all in.

And late at night I picture it downstairs,

this hallucination standing on three legs,

this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.

Much of what is said here

must be said twice,

a reminder that no one

takes an immediate interest in the pain of others.

Nobody will listen, it would seem,

if you simply admit

your baby left you early this morning

she didn’t even stop to say good-bye.

But if you sing it again

with the help of the band

which will now lift you to a higher,

more ardent and beseeching key,

people will not only listen;

they will shift to the sympathetic

edges of their chairs,

moved to such acute anticipation

by that chord and the delay that follows,

they will not be able to sleep

unless you release with one finger

a scream from the throat of your guitar

and turn your head back to the microphone

to let them know

you’re a hard-hearted man

but that woman’s sure going to make you cry.

All you have to do is listen to the way a man

sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people

and notice how intent he is on making his point

even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science

fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own

are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine

when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle

with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,

their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

to be in love with you

is a theme that keeps coming up

in songs and poems.

There seems to be no room for variation.

I have never heard anyone sing

I am so beautiful

and you are a fool to be in love with me,

even though this notion has surely

crossed the minds of women and men alike.

You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool

is another one you don’t hear.

Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.

That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon

I am listening to Johnny Hartman

whose dark voice can curl around

the concepts of love, beauty, and foolishness

like no one else’s can.

It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette

someone left burning on a baby grand piano

around three o’clock in the morning;

smoke that billows up into the bright lights

while out there in the darkness

some of the beautiful fools have gathered

around little tables to listen,

some with their eyes closed,

others leaning forward into the music

as if it were holding them up,

or twirling the loose ice in a glass,

slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,

borne beyond midnight,

that has no desire to go home,

especially now when everyone in the room

is watching the large man with the tenor sax

that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.

He moves forward to the edge of the stage

and hands the instrument down to me

and nods that I should play.

So I put the mouthpiece to my lips

and blow into it with all my living breath.

We are all so foolish,

my long bebop solo begins by saying,

so damn foolish

we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

I cannot leave you without saying this:

the past is nothing,

a nonmemory, a phantom,

a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss

is composing another waltz no one can hear.

It is a fabrication, best forgotten,

a wellspring of sorrow

that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

Leave it behind.

Take your head out of your hands

and arise from the couch of melancholy

where the window-light falls against your face

and the sun rides across the autumn sky,

steely behind the bare trees,

glorious as the high strains of violins.

But forget Strauss.

And forget his younger brother,

the poor bastard who was killed in a fall

from a podium while conducting a symphony.

Forget the past,

forget the stunned audience on its feet,

the absurdity of their formal clothes

in the face of sudden death,

forget their collective gasp,

the murmur and huddle over the body,

the creaking of the lowered curtain.

Forget Strauss

with that encore look in his eye

and his tiresome industry:

more than five hundred finished compositions!

He even wrote a polka for his mother.

That alone is enough to make me flee the past,

evacuate its temples,

and walk alone under the stars

down these dark paths strewn with acorns,

feeling nothing but the crisp October air,

the swing of my arms

and the rhythm of my stepping—

a man of the present who has forgotten

every composer, every great battle,

just me,

a thin reed blowing in the night.

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

or on any river for that matter

to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month

have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found

in a quiet room like this one—

a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table—

trying to manufacture the sensation

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt

that others have been fishing

on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

sliding the oars under the water

then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to

fishing on the Susquehanna

was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time

in front of a painting

in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

dense trees along the banks,

and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green

flat-bottom boat

holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely

ever to do, I remember

saying to myself and the person next to me.