Nothing by Design
Page 3
and it is, indeed, terrible and amazing
you must be told again.
I know you, though—that undimmed politesse
of eighty-plus years when, awestruck again
by a too-brilliant question, you sit there gazing
thoughtfully into space, and only then
do you say the terrible thing. “It’s hard to say.”
CITIES IN THE SKY
The buildings you drew were stooped
a little like you, lanky and tall and shambling
in your cloud-colored sweater, smiling vaguely
but curiously through your chic, black-rimmed,
perfectly round glasses.
Good morning. Yes thanks, coffee.
Show me your latest cities.
Or in any case, cities I can’t keep straight.
They hunch and huddle in my head—
the toy building-block houses,
blank-faced and pink and red,
that fall willingly from some cliff you invented
but do not fall; they stall.
They stay there, falling; even you don’t know why.
We drink more coffee in Claverack,
New York, on a day of arctic cold
and I inspect another high
cloud packed like an attic
with a city, clover-leafed with ramps
of cheerful, commuting cars, wherever
cars commute to up there,
a cloud that hovers like the dream
of the cows below,
unaware they’re dreaming:
they’re realists in their watercolor,
browsing, heads down, on a meadow
of saturated green.
Another cloud, jammed with people, is shaped
exactly like a map
of the continental United States.
“That’s interesting,” you say. “I didn’t see that.”
Thought clouds, that’s what these are, as in
cartoons of characters thinking.
No words for what you’re thinking, though,
just blueprints, unfeasibility studies, for cities
no one has time to build—
pulleys and sluices, ladders and cranes and pipelines
to nowhere. Bridges to caves. Nowhere
somewhere changing to something.
Knife-edged but bulging vehicles, cut
as from a tray of strudel.
A city sliced across the cranium,
its brains exposed like a motherboard.
Blockhead figures, only their bodies sinuous,
twisting like wind-whipped banners.
A robot stepping right through the plaster
walls of a town house,
leaving his empty shape behind
like a crumbling shadow.
Oh, here’s your wife of fifty-some years,
the adorable Colette.
She has brought us farm eggs, juice, and toast.
Stay for a bit; your houseguest
has more to ask.
Is this what you think the afterworld is,
cities of real and unreal things
cohabiting in the sky?
That was only a question. I meant it idly.
Wake up, Jim, don’t die.
It’s only eight in the morning.
OVER AND OUT
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
Those of you on the left side of the aisle
surely have spotted, on this fine Fourth of July,
fireworks erupting all around the city.
Pockets of color. Ooh baby, look at that.
From thirty thousand feet, you never hear
the pop pop when they open. No, they seem
to blossom in the dark, in suspended silence—
to dilate and fill like delicate parachutes
descending with curious tautness, until at last
they safely resolve to a shimmer of memory
that lingers like stars, then truly disappears.
Or that’s what I’m seeing. Excuse the poetry.
Sometimes I get carried away up here.
I’ve left the seat-belt sign illuminated,
and though we expect no turbulence, weather-wise,
I’ll ask you not to move about the cabin
unless you have to. The truth is we’re in trouble.
Those of you on the right side may have noted
a funny rumble. That’s not the fireworks, folks.
I’m going to get this plane down the best I can.
I bet you’d trade in every one of your frequent-
flier points for the real-life parachutes
we lack on this particular budget aircraft.
Wouldn’t it be divine if we all drifted
to terra firma guided as if by winged
angels in parti-colored, ballooning silks?
Instead I’m duty-bound to propose that you
gather up—not your personal belongings
but any final reflections you may feel
will comfort you. Naturally you hate
being reminded your fate is in the hands
of faceless authority—that would be me;
but my advice is, try to rise above that.
You should have had a third little flask of scotch,
some of you are thinking. Some of you gals
are wishing our steward Keith, in business class,
so handsome, were available for a few
minutes, anyway. Triumphant sex
with strangers as the fireworks fade forever—
the dizzy thrill of The End? That dream would only
come true in the pathetic paperbacks
you brought on board. Real terror, let me tell you,
is no aphrodisiac. How stupidly
you lined up for this trip! How much you cared
who was preboarded first, or whether Misty,
our blonde in coach, would start from the front or back
when she rolled out her little tinkling cart
of snack boxes, which, although not fit for a dog,
you paid for meekly, and with the exact change.
Let’s be frank. This flight is headed for
your longest vacation. Tonight, the only gates
we’ll taxi to are pearly: no connection
to the party raging on down there without us.
It’s far too late to squander precious seconds
resenting my sadly true banalities,
my jocular despair, my loud, phoned-in
philosophy no button can switch off.
I understand, though. You’d like a little peace
before the eternal one. Well, here you are.
Spend your last moments in big-hearted hope
we’re going to hurt nobody on the ground.
III
UNBROKEN MUSIC
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music.
—“A HERMIT THRUSH”
Amy Clampitt, 1920–1994
UNBROKEN MUSIC
1. Lenox, 2007
From an overlooked trunk
in your New England attic,
and bound in a week
for Lake Como, I happen
on your small, marbled notebook
from the same place, begun
the same week of May
sixteen years before.
At seventy-one
you’d have three years more.
Surely you thought
you’d have longer: spring
days to clean out
what you never meant,
or meant no one to read
(even us, the ring
of the last ones, the trusted
who sat at your bed).
But then, as you said,
in time everything
we save w
ill be lost.
And who could read your scrawl—
like a lizard darting
from a stone wall?
2. Rain at Bellagio
Thunder wakes me:
electrical storm behind
the mountains but no
skeletal hand
of evidence, no rain, just a flash
of a dream and almost afraid
to look at it
I reach for the little book
I brought on the plane.
Open it and truly
read for the first time.
Crumbled like
crackers in bed, pressed
flowers I can’t name
spill from the sheets
of dated poem-notes
5/21/91
moonlight on the wet flagstones
and the picayune
twin columns
of expenses
taxi $3.25
tip 50 cents
apportioned between yourself
and H, your lover
of decades by then.
Comically undomestic,
hopeless really, but ever
the Depression-era
Iowa farm girl so
haunted, so imprinted—
in sophisticated,
well-heeled, celebrated
old age—by the fear
of poverty.
I didn’t fully know;
still now, surely,
have no right to. Guarded
in what you said
even in solitude, peevish
perhaps but decorous,
you’ve left here only
tantalizing scraps
of Jamesian prose:
To that towering pompous stick
of an academic
she has, Dorothy W.–like,
given up her life.
To wish them gone is so rude
that one resists it, and
becomes the more put off.
Oh, I can just hear you!
Did hear you, only today,
for the first time
in years, on my laptop
cleverly set up
to obliterate distance:
log on, double-click, play
audio: dead
distinguished poet
reciting in her proud,
high-pitched, breathy, not
entirely misremembered voice
a poem about the call
of a hermit thrush. Impossible
to achieve back then
the high-tech séance (yours
was the Italy
of the last gettone
jammed in the slot
of the bar’s one phone,
the slow, shrugging Italy
of francobolli
licked for luck onto cards
destined not to arrive
at their destination). Radically
old-school anyway, you
traveled via the QE2
and your manual typewriter.
And your scribble
in journals: what terrible
penmanship, Amy, when
will you learn to correct it?
In loving memory
of Sidney … of Stanley…who?
A graveyard you visited
near here, apparently.
You took the time to
copy the epitaph
whole, and almost
wholly illegibly.
An hour has passed.
Three a.m. The storm’s
now moving in on
the villa you stayed in
and pounding the moonless
flagstones. Static
hissing, a long-playing record.
3. The Horned Rampion
Bookmarked—by violets, I think—
the page of field notes is itself
a plot of withered, once-wild jottings
to make sense of later rockrose (pink)
candytuft erinus alpinus
wood sage? cistus (shrub) nightshade
with tiny white clusters myrtle daphne
What’s this then? horned rampion
Oh! it’s her first thought for her last
enraptured botanical poem a spiny,
highly structured, blue-purple star
Phyteuma Bellflower family:
rare at first sighting, the rampion
would be rampant just days later. This
was the wildflower she’d plant
as if by happenstance at the end
of the poem, where a volume
of Encyclopedia Britannica
(frequent companion, from which whole
paragraphs were duly typed
and inserted into correspondence
she hoped was edifying) falls
open at random—was she lying
to get at something true?—upon
its genus, species, and illustration.
For her, the trouvé had been old love
reopened daring words still quivering
but who’d believe her notebook fallen
open to the seed of her poem
about another book fallen open?
4. A Silence Opens
Down at the lakeside, pleasure boats like toys
are glinting, tethered to their tinkling buoys
like spinning tops at last come to a stop
but for the slightest bobbing … as I’ve followed
my nose to scented hedgerows, ending here,
unable to botanize; can hardly tell
one boat from another. Educata,
one of them is called: I write that down,
absurdly, and with a heavy skeleton key
issued to the lucky ones like me
let myself out the gated come-and-go
Eden to Pescallo. A fishing village
sloshed at the margins, wind-and-grit-eroded
cobbles boldly throwing back the sun.
Chastening, and happily so, to stumble
like Alice (in your favorite book) upon
such rough, offhand perfection, facing page
of privilege, steep alleys flanked and straitened
by fitted jigsaw walls from which fiori
spontanei sprout sideways from the mosses
that seem to mortar one rock to another
in matrices, in story upon story. At a wrought-
iron gate, I glimpse it now: can see beyond
your phrase truncated entrance to the olive
groves of Pescallo whose mystery made me wish
you’d lived to finish, start, a poem about it.
What life isn’t truncated, a path
that vanishes to a point of no perspective
upon itself again? The silvered heads
nod on the olive trunks; are ancient, wise,
indifferent as I turn to cross another
threshold of surprise just up the road:
the planted slabs of a little cemetery.
Come in. No gate, no lock, and as if these
lines were chiseled just for me: IN LOVING
MEMORY OF SIDNEY HERBERT BRUNNER
OF WINNINGTON CHESHIRE Look! AGED 23
WHO LOST HIS LIFE IN SAVING HIS ELDER BROTHER
FROM DANGER OF DROWNING Yes, this is the one
HIS BODY WAS RECOVERED and was tossed
the wreath WHITE FLOWER OF A BLAMELESS LIFE.
No wonder you had copied it all out
in spidery haste, the prairie poet drawn
time and again to drownings—of fishermen
in Maine; of the broken, heavy-lidded, stone-
pocketed Virginia Woolf, who blamed
no one; of Keats at twenty-five, whose lungs
filled with a choking liquid, and who called
out famously to erasure Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water. And here’s the flip
side of serendipity (my guide
thus far):
it’s this, the accidental horror,
young life cut short, the petrifying thing-
not-supposed-to-happen. But what was?
You and I used to say there was no fate,
only “the coincidence factory,” and so what
to make of this?—that our young hero’s corpse
surfaced in 1890 on the date,
the very date, September tenth, when you
would meet your death in Lenox, a hundred four
years later? Nothing. Happenstance. As is
my coming on it, noting it, or opting
to remember him or you; to use my life
to set these words still quivering to paper.
5. Matrix
After all that, you didn’t quote it. Laid
poor Sidney so deep in your final book
that nobody reading faceless in their nook
outside the walls, the name and birthplace of
the Englishman who drowned there could unearth
a shard of identity. Homage instead
to wordlessness, to the silent, stubborn worth
not only of the forgotten but of forgetting.
I’m packing up. Taking a cue from love
as defined by you, or in a phrase of letting
go that itself was soon shucked off: such
infinitudes of things that lived—
So much
for them, a memory virus in our blood
that surfaces to scar us, disappears
awhile, is survivable. Who will trouble
to cobble together what we did or said,
how will they choose? Finally unable
to salvage one word more, I see ahead
only to Lenox, to returning all your green
thoughts to their resting place. Amy, where
could I pick your flowers, take up your snakeskin