The Beauty (3 page)

the pronoun dozes

An hour is not a house,

a life is not a house,

you do not go through them as if

they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,

four walls, a ceiling.

An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.

Some want sleep.

My eyes went

to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

even

a small purple artichoke

boiled

in its own bittered

and darkening

waters

grows tender,

grows tender and sweet

patience, I think,

my species

keep testing the spiny leaves

the spiny heart

However many holes are in you,

always there’s room for another.

However much you carry,

you can hold more.

Like a saint making a joke,

imperfection of surface

suits you.

Your seams

remind of quiet tectonic plates.

Chthonic corkboard,

always beneath

even when hung on your vertical side,

your waiting thumbtacks

seem to me

a glittering affection,

the
mi casa, su casa

of a door standing open in every weather

of invitation.

I apologize to you, corkboard—

I, who would like

to be more like you in spirit,

cover you over

with maps, plans, bills.

Even these words that praise you

further disguise you.

Like the small soaps and shampoos

a traveler brings home

then won’t use,

you, memory,

almost weightless

this morning inside me.

Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,

restless, stunned, relieved.

Does a tree also?

A mountain?

A cup holds

sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.

I hold these.

In my wallet I carry a card

which declares I have the power to marry.

In my wallet I carry a card

which declares I may drive.

In my wallet I carry a card

that says to a merchant I may be trusted to pay her.

In my wallet I carry a card

that states I can borrow a book in the town where I live.

In my hand I carry a card.

Its lines declare I am cardless, carless,

stateless, and have no money.

It is buoyant and edgeless.

It names me one of the Order of All Who Will Die.

An idea appears.

It catches

against the edge of the bedside table.

Coffee on the wall.

Coffee on the marble tabletop.

Coffee on the sheets.

The idea has flown everywhere with it.

Aplysia, marine snail of memory,

someone may someday find in your 20,000 neurons

this thought I have lost.

My task to find your less studied sister,

the erasing

and soapy sea sponge.

So many things

you’d not have thought of

until they were given.

Even the simple—

a cottage cheese sandwich,

a heron’s contractible neck.

You eat. You look.

Then you look back and it’s over.

This life. This flood—

unbargained for as lasting love was—

of lasting oddness.

A well runs out of thirst

the way time runs out of a week,

the way a country runs out of its alphabet

or a tree runs out of its height.

The way a brown pelican

runs out of anchovy-glitter at darkfall.

A strange collusion,

the way a year runs out of its days

but turns into another,

the way a cotton towel’s compact

with pot and plate seems to run out of dryness

but in a few minutes finds more.

A person comes into the kitchen

to dry the hands, the face,

to stand on the lip of a question.

Around the face, the hands,

behind the shoulders,

yeasts, mountains, mosses multiply answers.

There are questions that never run out of questions,

answers that don’t exhaust answer.

Take this question the person stands asking:

a gate rusting open.

Yes
stands on its left,
no
on its right,

two big planets of unpainted silence.

In a room with many windows

some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

Three silent bicyclists. Slowly, a woman on crutches.

It is like the night you slept out on the sandy edge of a creek bank,

feeling the step of some light, clawed thing on your palm,

crossing to drink. You were nothing to it.

Hummock. Earth clump. Root knob wild in the dark.

Like that thirsty creature, to you.

You could guess it, but you can’t name it.

Even 3 + 2 is like this.

A photograph of a face half lit, half in darkness.

A train station where one train is stopped

and another passes behind it,

heard, but not seen.

A person proud of five good senses

lives without echolocation.

Dogs pity our noses

as we pity the bee that blunders the glass.

Take out every other word of the world,

what is left?

A half half darkness.

A station one is and passes.

We live our lives in one place

and look in every moment into another.

As on a child’s map,

where X

marks both riddle and treasure.

It is near, but not here.

Long ago, someone

told me: avoid
or.

It troubles the mind

as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog.

Now I too am sixty.

There was no other life.

There are kinds of transparence.

Yours was invented

sometime between

tempered glass and Saran Wrap.

I have at times wanted to be you:

something looked through and past.

You were born noble: a tree.

Caustics and acids changed you

to what you now are,

protective, stiff, almost weightless.

Both captive and guard,

your desire is to be frivolous, self-destructive,

undone and opened.

Your bright red necklace announces:

“Tear here.”

Inside you, tobacco.

Inside you, peppermints, gingersnaps, gum.

You would not be found

wrapping a mattress or gun.

You were dictated into the world

by the muse of “it could be.”

You were unlikely but useful,

so kept.

Your art is audible, immodest:

to preserve against time.

In this, you are like a small metal flute

whose throat knows no aging

or a few words

from the second century,

stumbled on once in translation—

“I come from the river, husband,

its brushy bank left these scratches.”

Made to be seen through, for pleasure.

The ideas of a physicist

can be turned into useful objects:

a rocket, a quartz clock,

a microwave oven for cooking.

The ideas of poets turn into only themselves,

as the hands of the clock do,

or the face of a person.

It changes, but only more into the person.

My life was the size of my life.

Its rooms were room-sized,

its soul was the size of a soul.

In its background, mitochondria hummed,

above it sun, clouds, snow,

the transit of stars and planets.

It rode elevators, bullet trains,

various airplanes, a donkey.

It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.

It ate, it slept, it opened

and closed its hands, its windows.

Others, I know, had lives larger.

Others, I know, had lives shorter.

The depth of lives, too, is different.

There were times my life and I made jokes together.

There were times we made bread.

Once, I grew moody and distant.

I told my life I would like some time,

I would like to try seeing others.

In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.

I was hungry, then, and my life,

my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep

our hands off         our clothes on

our tongues from

Makes one wall darker than the other,

leaving a corner.

Makes one leaf more red than another, leaving a tree.

Blocks with an earthquake, an illness, a phone call,

what once seemed important.

Holds one perfume close, indelible, while others fade.

Is cubic from every direction, except when rounded.

Sneezes at ardor, boredom, despair.

Cannot in general be found, yet is everywhere local.

Likes magic, for which it is frequently useful.

Likes dice.

Likes everything just as it is, then just as it is, then just as it is.

Enjoys folding anything—

card hands, laundry, letters, elbows and knees.

Hums softly in Giotto, loudly in Tintoretto.

Likes mirrors, windows, old portraits, taking the long view—

This Chinese scroll, for instance, unrolling as if without limit

its small boat, downrushing river, and strolling deep-sleeved officials

in oddly shaped caps,

the curious horse looking out

from behind the long-needled pine it’s been momentarily tied to forever.

The landscape by Dürer

of a dandelion amid grasses