The Beauty (5 page)

Nothing says “you” if I offer “I,”

“I” if I proffer “you.”

I would go

to the Counter of Complaining—

there was one,

a hut of new pine wood

at the base of the Yellow Mountains in China,

the door was open, a woman sat in the chair—

but nothing says “counter,”

nothing says “yellow” or “mountain.”

Erased dust of the chalkboard, barnacle,

less
sleep
than
bed
—

what can I do, faceless, with no one to kiss or shout at?

I cast my hook, my vote against it,

I decide to make peace.

I declare this intention but nothing answers.

And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof,

then into an oven. I wait.

Peace is patient and undemanding, it
surpasseth.

And the bulldozers move

from the palace of breaking to the places of building.

And the students return to their classes.

Tuna swim freely.

The sky hoists the flag of the sky.

All this in the space of a half-page, a little ink,

a small bite of hubris

sweetened with raisins and honey.

I begin to consider what I will make of tomorrow’s speechless.

A person protests to fate:

“The things you have caused

me most to want

are those that furthest elude me.”

Fate nods.

Fate is sympathetic.

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,

are triumphs

for only the very young,

the very old.

During the long middle:

conjugating a rivet

mastering tango

training the cat to stay off the table

preserving a single moment longer than this one

continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

and the penmanships love practices inside the body.

A hand holds one power,

whose exercise requires the hand be empty.

The woman, the tiger, the door, the man, the choice.

Riddles are soulless.

In them, it is never raining.

the cat sleeping

paw prints of bear in the road-sand

a day moth confusedly walking the glass between them

but today

in rain

without coat without hat

Loyalty of a book

to its place on the shelf

in a still life.

Like that,

the old loves continue.

A thirsty mouse turns a river.

A stone turns a river.

Bodiless words turn us.

a woman in a distant language sings with great feeling

the composer’s penciled-in instructions to sing with great feeling.

I misread the journalist’s sentence:

“In this human drama, the police ate the supporting actors.”

Have teeth.

A woman says to her daughter,

for fifteen years,

“For the first time now,

I am feeling my age, for the first time.”

A blessed life.

Each day’s yesterday was joyous.

Each year completed was good.

“I am here.

I want to be nowhere but here,”

says the still hanging apricot,

growing rounder

like a page from Lewis Carroll.

New new new new new

bluster the young birds in spring.

An old branch holds them.

Generation.

Strange word: both making and passing.

I wanted, I thought, only a little,

two teaspoons of silence—

one for sugar,

one for stirring the wetness.

No.

I wanted a Cairo of silence,

a Kyoto.

In every hanging garden

mosses and waters.

The directions of silence:

north, west, south, past, future.

It comes through any window

one inch open,

like rain driven sideways.

Grief shifts,

as a grazing horse does,

one leg to the other.

But a horse sleeping

sleeps with all legs locked.

A common cold, we say—

common, though it has encircled the globe

    seven times now handed traveler to traveler

    though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an

    seen Piero della Francesca’s
Madonna del Parto
in Monterchi

    seen the emptied synagogues of Krasnogruda

    seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo

A common cold, we say—

common, though it is infinite and surely immortal

    common because it will almost never kill us

    and because it is shared among any who agree to or do not agree to

    and because it is unaristocratic

               reducing to redness both profiled and front-viewed noses

               reducing to coughing the once-articulate larynx

               reducing to unhappy sleepless turning the pillows of down,

                      of wool, of straw, of foam, of kapok

A common cold, we say—

common because it is cloudy and changing and dulling

    because there are summer colds, winter colds, fall colds,

               colds of the spring

    because these are always called colds, however they differ

               beginning sore-throated

               beginning sniffling

               beginning a little tired or under the weather

               beginning with one single innocuous untitled sneeze

    because it is bane of usually eight days’ duration

               and two or three boxes of tissues at most

The common cold, we say—

and wonder, when did it join us

    when did it saunter into the Darwinian corridors of the human

    do manatees catch them do parrots I do not think so

    and who named it first, first described it, Imhotep, Asclepius, Zhongjing

    and did they wonder, is it happy sharing our lives

               as generously as inexhaustibly as it shares its own

               virus dividing and changing while Piero’s girl gazes still downward

               five centuries still waiting still pondering still undivided

while in front of her someone hunts through her opening pockets for tissues for more than one reason at once

Nothing on two legs weighs much,

or can.

An elephant, a donkey, even a cookstove—

those legs, a person could stand on.

Two legs pitch you forward.

Two legs tire.

They look for another two legs to be with,

to move one set forward to music

while letting the other move back.

They want to carve into a tree trunk:

2gether 4ever.

Nothing on two legs can bark,

can whinny or chuff.

Tonight, though, everything’s different.

Tonight I want wheels.

Once, I

was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,

sleepy and nameless.

As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

Light on the neck-nape

of time

as two wings of one starling,

or lovers so happy

neither needs think of the other.

In daylight, I turned on the lights,

in darkness, I pulled closed the curtains.

And the god of More,

whom nothing surprises, softly agreed—

each day, year after year,

the dead were dead one day more completely.

In the places where morels were found,

I looked for morels.

In the houses where love was found,

I looked for love.

If she is vanished, what then was different?

If he is alive, what now is changed?

The pot offers the metal closest to fire for burning.

The water leaves.

A person speaking

pauses, lets in

a little silence-portion with the words.

It is like an hour.

Any hour. This one.

Something happens, much does not.

Or as always, everything happens:

the standing walls keep

standing with their whole attention.

A noisy crow call lowers and lifts its branch,

the crow scent enters the leaves, enters the bark,

like stirred-in honey gone into the tea.

How rarely I have stopped to thank

the steady effort of the world to stay the world.

To thank the furnish of green

and abandon of yellow. The ancient Sumerians

called the beloved “Honey,” as we do.

Said also, “Borrowed bread is not returned.”

Like them, we pay love’s tax to bees,

we go on arranging the old notes in different orders.

Desire inside A C A G G A T.

Forgiveness in G T A C T T.

In a world of space and time, arrangement matters.

An hour has no front or back,

except to those whose eyes face forward,

whose tears blur thought and stars.

Five genes, in a certain arrangement,

will spend this life unrooted, grazing.

It has to do with how the animal body comes into being,

the same whether ant or camel.

What then does such unfolded code understand,

if it finds in its mouth the word
important
—

the thing that can be carried, or the thing that cannot,

or the way they keep trading places,

grief and gladness, the comic, the glum, the dead, the living.

Last night, the big Sumerian moon

clambered into the house empty-handed

and left empty-handed,

not thief, not lover, not tortoise, just looking around,

shuffling its soft, blind slippers over the floor.

This felt, to me, important, and so I looked back with both hands

open, palms unblinking.

What caused the fire, we ask, meaning,
lightning, wiring, matches.

How precisely and unbidden

oxygen slips itself into, between those thick words.