In the fountained courtyard and the open day.
The Return
to Paolo Bertolani
I The Road
I could not draw a map of it, this road,
Nor say with certainty how many times
It doubles on itself before it climbs
Clear of the ascent. And yet I know
Each bend and vista and could not mistake
The recognitions, the recurrences
As they occur, nor where. So my forgetting
Brings back the track of what was always there
As new as a discovery. And now
The summit gives us all that lies below,
Shows us the islands slide into their places
Beyond the shore and, when the lights come on,
How all the other roads declare themselves
Garlanding their gradients to the sea,
How the road that brought us here has dropped away
A half-lost contour on a chart of lights
The waters ripple and spread across the bay.
II Between Serra and Rocchetta
Walking to La Rocchetta, thirty years
Would not be long enough to teach the mind
Flower by flower their names and their succession.
Walking to La Rocchetta, leave behind
The road, the fortress and the radar tower
And turn across the hill. From thirty years
I have brought back the image to the place.
The place has changed, the image still remains –
A spot that, niched above a half-seen bay,
Climbs up to catch the glitter from beyond
Of snow and marble off the Apennines.
But where are the walls, the wells, the living lines
That led the water down from plot to plot?
Hedges have reached the summits of the trees
Over the reeds and brambles no one cut.
When first I came, it was a time of storms:
Grey seas, uneasily marbling, scourged the cliff:
The waters had their way with skiff on skiff
And, beached, their sides were riven against stone,
Or, anchored, rode the onrush keels in air
Where hope and livelihood went down as one.
Two things we had in common, you and I
Besides our bitterness at want of use,
And these were poetry and poverty:
This was a place of poverty and splendour:
All unprepared, when clarity returned
I felt the sunlight prise me from myself
And from the youthful sickness I had learned
As shield from disappointments: cure came slow
And came, in part, from what I grew to know
Here on this coast among its reefs and islands.
I looked to them for courage across time,
Their substance shaped itself to mind and hand –
Severe the grace a place and people share
Along this slope where Serra took its stand:
For years I held those shapes in thought alone,
Certain you must have left long since, and then
Returning found that you had never gone.
What is a place? For you a single spot.
Walking to La Rocchetta we can trace
In all that meets the eye and all that does not
Half of its history, the other lies
In the rise, the run, the fall of voices:
Innumerable conversations chafe the air
At thresholds and in alleys, street and square
Of those who climbed this slope to work its soil,
And phrases marrying a tongue and time
Coil through the mind’s ear, climbing now with us
Through orchids and the wild asparagus:
For place is always an embodiment
And incarnation beyond argument,
Centre and source where altars, once, would rise
To celebrate those lesser deities
We still believe in – angels beyond fable
Who still might visit the patriarch’s tent and table
Both here and now, or rather let us say
They rustle through the pages you and I
Rooted in earth, have dedicated to them.
Under the vines the fireflies are returning:
Pasolini spoke of their extinction.
Our lookout lies above a poisoned sea:
Wrong, he was right, you tell us – I agree,
Of one thing the enigma is quite sure,
We have lived into a time we shall not cure.
But climbing to La Rocchetta, let there be
One sole regret to cross our path today,
That she, who tempered your beginning pen
Will never take this road with us again
Or hear, now, the full gamut of your mastery.
III Graziella
We cannot climb these slopes without our dead;
We need no fiction of a hillside ghosted,
A fade-out on the tremor of the sea.
The dead do not return, and nor shall we
To pry and prompt the living or rehearse
The luxuries of self-debating verse.
Their silence we inhabit now they’ve gone
And like a garment drawn the darkness on
Beyond all hurt. This quiet we must bear:
Put words into their mouths, you fail to hear
What once they said. I can recall the day
She imitated my clipped, foreign way
Of saying Shakespeare: English, long unheard,
Came flying back, some unfamiliar bird
Cutting a wing-gust through the weight of air
As she repeated it – Shakespeare Shakespeare –
Voice-prints of a season that belongs
To the cicadas and the heat, their song
Shrill, simmering and continuous.
Why does a mere word seem autonomous
We catch back from the grave? The wave it rides
Was spent long-since, dissolved within the tides
Of space and time. And yet the living tone
Shaped to that sound, and mocking at its own,
A voice at play, amused, embodied, clear,
Spryer than any ghost still haunts the ear.
The dog days, the cicada had returned
And through that body more than summer burned
A way and waste into its dark terrain,
Burned back and back till nothing should remain,
Yet could not dry the mind up at its source:
Clear as her voice-print, its unyielded force
Would not be shadowed out of clarity
Until the moment it had ceased to be.
Downhill, between the olives, more than eye
Must tell the foot what path it travels by;
The sea-lights’ constellations sway beneath
And we are on the Easter side of death.
IV The Fireflies
I have climbed blind the way down through the trees
(How faint the phosphorescence of the stones)
On nights when not a light showed on the bay
And nothing marked the line of sky and sea –
Only the beating of the heart defined
A space of being in the faceless dark,
The foot that found and won the path from blindness,
The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark.
The soundless revolution of the stars
Brings back the fireflies and each constellation,
And we are here half-shielded from that height
Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far
Incandescence where the single star
Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time.
Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme
With consonances unforeseen, and, gone,
Were brief beneath the
seasons and the sun.
We wait now on the absence of our dead,
Sharing the middle world of moving lights
Where fireflies taking torches to the rose
Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches,
Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow
Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go.
The adagio of lights is gathering
Across the sway and counter-lines as bay
And sky, contrary in motion, swerve
Against each other’s patternings, while these
Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both,
Trusting to neither empty space nor seas
The burden of their weightless circlings. We,
Knowing no more of death than other men
Who make the last submission and return,
Savour the good wine of a summer’s night
Fronting the islands and the harbour bar,
Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings
How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it,
Equal, in their arrivals and their goings,
With the order and the beauty of star on star.
Catacomb
A Capuchin – long acquaintance with the dead
Has left him taciturn – stands guard
At gate and stairhead. Silent, he awaits
The coin we drop into his dish, and then
Withdraws to contemplation – though his eye
Glides with a marvellous economy sideways
Towards the stair, in silent intimation
You may now descend. We do – and end up
In a corridor with no end in view: dead
Line the perspective left and right
Costumed for resurrection. The guidebook had not lied
Or tidied the sight away – and yet
Eight thousand said, unseen, could scarcely mean
The silence throughout this city of the dead,
Street on street of it calling into question
That solidity the embalmer would counterfeit.
Mob-cap, cape, lace, stole and cowl,
Frocked children still at play
In the Elysian fields of yesterday
Greet each morning with a morning face
Put on a century ago. Why are we here? –
Following this procession, bier on bier
(The windowed dead, within), and those
Upright and about to go, but caught
Forever in their parting pose, as though
They might have died out walking. Some
Face us from the wall, like damaged portraits;
Some, whose clothing has kept its gloss,
Glow down across the years at us
Why are you here? And why, indeed,
For the sunlight through a lunette overhead
Brightens along a sinuous bole of palm:
Leaves catch and flare it into staring green
Where a twine of tendril sways inside
Between the bars. Light from that sky
Comes burning off the bay
Vibrant with Africa; in public gardens
Tenses against the butterflies’ descent
The stamens of red hibiscus. Dead
Dressed for the promenade they did not take,
Are leaning to that light: it is the sun
Must judge them, for the sin
Of vanity sits lightly on them: it is the desire
To feel its warmth against the skin
Has set them afoot once more in this parade
Of epaulette, cockade and crinoline. We are here
Where no northern measure can undo
So single-minded a lure – if once a year
The house of the dead stood open
And these, dwelling beneath its roof,
Were shown the world’s great wonders,
They would marvel beyond every other thing
At the sun. Today, the dead
Look out from their dark at us
And keep their counsel. The Capuchin
Has gone off guard, to be replaced
By a brother sentry whose mind is elsewhere –
Averted from this populace whose conversion
Was nominal after all. His book
Holds fast his eyes from us. His disregard
Abolishes us as we pass beyond the door.
Palermo
In Memory of George Oppen
We were talking of O’Hara.
‘Difficult’, you said
‘to imagine a good death – he died
quietly in bed, in place of:
he was run down
by a drunk.’ And now, your own.
First, the long unskeining year by year
of memory and mind. You ‘seemed
to be happy’ is all I hear.
A lost self does not hide:
what seemed happy was not you
who died before you died. And yet
out of nonentity, where did the words
spring from when
towards the end you told
your sister, ‘I don’t know
if you have anything to say
but let’s take out all the adjectives
and we’ll find out’ – the way,
lucidly unceremonious,
you spoke to her in life and us.
At Huexotla
Tall on its mound, el Paupérrimo –
the poorest
church in Mexico
and the smallest.
It was not the sight
but the sound of the place
caused us to quicken our step
across the intervening space
between us and it –
such skeins, scales, swells
came from each bell-tower
though not from bells.
Who would compose
a quartet for flutes? – and yet
that was the music
rose to assail us.
A minute interior:
sun on the gold:
flute-timbre on flute
still unfolded there.
Flanking the altar,
caged birds hung,
the alchemy of light transmuting
gold to song:
for it was the light’s
reflection had set
those cages in loud accord
and only night would staunch it.
A Rose for Janet
I know
this rose is only
an ink-and-paper rose
but see how it grows and goes
on growing
beneath your eyes:
a rose in flower
has had (almost) its vegetable hour
whilst my
rose of spaces and typography
can reappear at will
(your will)
whenever you repeat
this ceremony of the eye
from the beginning
and thus
learn how
to resurrect a rose
that’s instantaneous
perennial
and perfect now
Ararat
We shall sleep-out together through the dark
The earth’s slow voyage across centuries
Towards whatever Ararat its ark
Is steering for. Our atoms then will feel
The jarring and arrival of that keel
In timelessness, and rise through galaxies,
Motes starred by the first and final light to show
Whether those shores are habitable or no.
Annunciations (1989)
Annunciation
The cat took fright
at the flashing wing of sunlight
as the thing
entered the kitchen, angel of appearances,
and lingered there.
What was it the sun
had sent to say
by his messenger,
this solvent ray,
that charged and changed
all it looked at, narrowing even the eye of a cat?
Utensils caught a shine
that could not be used, utility
unsaid by this invasion
from outer space, this gratuitous occasion
of unchaptered gospel.
‘I shall return,’ the appearance promised,
‘I shall not wait for the last
day – every day
is fortunate even when you catch
my ray only as a gliding ghost.
What I foretell
is the unaccountable birth each time
my lord the light, a cat and you
share this domestic miracle:
it asks the name anew
of each thing named
when an earlier, shining dispensation
reached down into mist
and found the solidity
these windows and these walls surround,
and where each cup,
dish, hook and nail
now gathers and guards the sheen
drop by drop
still spilling-over
out of the grail of origin.’
The Plaza
People are the plot
and what they do here –
which is mostly sit
or walk through. The afternoon sun
brings out the hornets:
they dispute with no one, they too
are enjoying their ease
along the wet brink of the fountain,
imbibing peace and water
until a child arrives,
takes off his shoe
and proceeds methodically
to slaughter them. He has the face
and the ferocious concentration
of one of those Aztec gods
who must be fed on blood.
His mother drags him away, half-shod,
and then puts back the shoe
over a dusty sock.
Some feet go bare, some sandalled,
like these Indians who march through
– four of them – carrying a bed
as if they intended to sleep here.
Their progress is more brisk
than that of the ants at our feet
who are removing – some
by its feelers, some
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 10
