in the house of sweets. We ate cake at intermission
in order to stay awake.
SCENE FROM CARAVAGGIO
Meanwhile, the artist’s hand
spreads black against black,
the rest of him offscreen, grinding
colors—divine wine for the lips, underside-
of-watercress for the skin—glancing back toward me,
as if I am in the picture.
Watching him, alone
in lived time, I feel anachronistic, like the fedora
he wears, the cigarette he holds
against his lips with two fingers.
The screen I watch is a canvas strewn
with nudity, with the taken-
down, everything happening all
too late. The artist paints an angel, posed
on a box with a quiver,
though in the glow of the film, I can see
he is only a model with props in a studio.
Artificial light
burns in the stillness,
chiaroscuro. The other half
veiled and equivocal, like the room
in which I myself am staged.
In which the screen illuminates
my mouth and forehead and eyes.
In which the difference between an angel
and a boy with wings is real.
MIRROR
You’d expect a certain view from such a mirror—
clearer
than one that hangs in the entry and decays.
I gaze
past my reflection toward other things:
bat wings,
burnt gold upon blue, which decorate the wall
and all
those objects collected from travels, now seen
between
its great, gold frame, diminished with age:
a stage
where, still, the supernatural corps de ballet
displays
its masquerade in the reflected light.
At night,
I thought I’d see the faces of the dead.
Instead,
the faces of the ghosted silver sea
saw me.
ANTIQUE BOOK
The sky was crazed with swallows.
We walked in the frozen grass
of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep.
Trees shook down their gaudy nests.
The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow.
I was jealous of the river,
how the light broke it, of the skein
of windows where we saw ourselves.
Where we walked, the ice cracked
like an antique book, opening
and closing. The leaves
beneath it were the marbled pages.
DESCRIPTION
Where you were, everything was becoming ice.
The paved courtyard, the windows looking out onto it.
You traveled back and forth between buildings on a bus,
passing trees and umbrellas
inverted in the wind. You moved back and forth.
I was elsewhere, in a small studio
painted white so many times the walls were thick with it.
Once a poet told me, Your eyes are whores.
Once description was all I thought I needed
to bridge things. And snow shawled the branches.
And you took the keys from your pocket. And snow feathered the grass
which was mine to remember and forget.
AMOR VINCIT OMNIA
Some nights, we lived that way: like a horse
carrying his rider, unseen, into a village—
There was nothing to do there but memorize
each other.
Returning, we smelled of where we’d been:
the markets, the metal troughs, the trees,
the hands that touched our heads.
OCTOBER 29, 2012
Nothing changes at the seaside house.
You wait out this tempest in the Windsor chair, away from the windows.
There are books for your eyes:
one about Pound as a young man, one with photographs
of glaciers. For your hands:
frozen dough thawing. Towels in the dryer.
There is music; a crate of CDs you purchased
when you were younger, when you resisted solitude by listening
to massive collaborations:
32 violins, 6 French Horns, 8 double basses, a piccolo.
The one on top is Mahler’s fifth,
conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who was buried
with that score across his heart. Someone extinguishes
the lamps along the beach. Mahler drowns out
the weather against the roof.
KEYS TO THE CITY
Didn’t rain choke the animal throats
of the cathedral sputter
against the roofs of the city didn’t the flight
of stairs rise up above the cobbled street
didn’t the key clamor
in the lock flood
the vestibule with clattering didn’t we climb
the second flight
toward the miniature Allegory
painted on the ceiling
and touch the flat-faced girls
winged part animal
who did not flinch and did not scamper
SEA INTERLUDE: STORM
Where the sky, Chinese red, dropped
its rawboned chin to the sea, that darkness
opened, hollow as an empty boat:
it could not hold itself; nor the seabirds,
where they fled or resisted,
tossed like heavy, black stones toward the shore.
With the fuss and tumult of a thousand feathers
fanning open, the surge, black-throated,
drank of itself, like a ritual, then folded
its wet wings across the shoals and sandbanks,
sated at last as from self-love. That night, I clung
like a feeding gull to the sureness of flesh:
a man’s chin bristled against my stomach
like the breakers’ dim retreat on sand.
BRIGHT WALLS
It was not penitence I sought, standing outside
the bedroom in the old apartment
where you had spent the night alone.
To bend, to kneel before some greater force—
that was no longer what I wished.
Clouds blew in from the coast, and I felt
the sun abandoning the window behind me,
making the bright walls suddenly colorless,
obscuring everything, for a moment,
that I wanted. When I finally entered,
I saw you still asleep—a wet strand
of hair tucked behind your ear, the husk
of your body—and lingered there for a minute,
before walking upstairs to shut the windows.
EROTIC ARCHIVE
We sleep in his bed
among his silent books.
Though I never knew him,
I’ve spent my life thinking it’s his ghost
I belong to.
We pass his books
between us. We read inscriptions
meant for him. We record them
dutifully. Remembering
the blue room of an evening,
I look past the window
the light changes through,
past the boats
with their tied-up sails and canvas covers.
The window shows
the sea as unattainable
and distant as art,
our lovers far away.
THE HARBOR
Afterwards everything whitened
like paper or breath—
The room was suddenly anchored to itself,
the chains stopped groaning.
I knew I could not leave with you.
The sea outside was like the sea
on the map. A sea-god was blowing
into a crosshatched arc of sails.
PURPLE
From the Phoenicians, they learned to extract
the color from shells.
When their dogs ate sea snails along the coast,
their dogteeth were dyed purple—that’s how the Phoenicians knew.
To darken it,
the Romans added black, which came from soot, from scorched wood,
which abounded, one imagines, in an empire.
THE SHIPS
from an inscription of Augustus
“All the Germans
of that territory
sought by envoys
my friendship
The far reaches
of what any Roman had ever seen
opened to me
the mouth
of the Rhine the water
swallowing the gold-
colored hulls
What gods
would I find in the forests
in the riverbanks
scattered
with precious stones
I sailed my ships
on the sea dark
and full of meaning
When
our sails first caught
the wind
of the Cimbri it was rough
as their language
I watched
their shirtless oarsmen
maneuvering
the oars
I watched the ships
running their fingers
through the water
of the Roman people”
BRAYING
Now is the time we hear them coming back,
when the first sunlight drops to the field
like an animal being born, slick and shivering
where it falls. Their hooves grind against the earth,
wheat is pounded in a mortar
with a pestle, freed from its husks and impurities.
What wickedness clings to me, it sticks
to the last. I will keep my mouth with a bridle.
FLY
What the richest man in Rome feared most of all,
Pliny tells us, was losing his sight. The man wore Greek charms
around his neck in order to prevent it. He carried a living fly
in a white cloth that he might keep seeing.
Perhaps he thought the fly’s many eyes were a blessing.
Apologizing, devising elaborate rituals—what
will I carry? I have been counting ways
of keeping you.
SECOND EMPIRE
The water, for once,
unmetaphysical. Stepping over
the stones, you pulling
your shirt over your shoulders.
The flesh-and-
blood that constitutes you
could have been anything and yet
appears before me
as your body. Wading out again,
I am a little white omnivore
in the black water,
inhaling avidly
the absence of shame.
We lie on our backs
with our underwear on.
The soul is an aristocrat.
It disdains the body,
staring through the water
at the suggestion of our human forms.
NIGHT FERRY
I. DEATH IN VENICE
Everywhere the city looks over my shoulder.
The air grows colder
and sticks to wet stones, the old houses rescued
from the rising water, even the covered boat where I take refuge
from the wind, still it tousles the pages
of my guidebook. The ferry disengages
from the docks, and I am far away. The Adriatic salts
the undersides of boats
as they depart from the city, fade.
I lean and see what is made
in their wake. I know I will not find my dissolution
here in this city of water and stone,
where I’m a hierophant
to the past. They enchant
me, these things. I always knew
they’d make the veil I’d glimpse things through.
Tonight, distantly, the cold air
comes off the square,
where all those people, bundled in winter coats,
line up to buy tickets for the boats.
Everywhere the city disguises
them from each other. The black ferry moves. The water rises
in the dark.
The people disembark.
II. THE MARRIAGE OF THE SEA
The city remembered nothing of what I dreamed.
Only how strange it seemed
from the water when the Doge’s hand,
or his black glove, opened,
and he released the ring
to wed the Adriatic, and the ring
settled twice:
first, on the lagoon’s surface,
which represented, I thought,
the comfort
of the living moment, and which yielded to the ring; and, later,
in the earth beneath the water,
which was fierce
as history, and which yielded to it also, after many years,
and found stasis in the past,
which was its rest,
not in the luster
of ceremonies, but in the darkness which comes after.
III. SELF-PORTRAIT IN VENETIAN MASK
The mask with a long, sharp beak
I found, an antique
in a store of relics, displayed
on the wall. The mask I tried on. Like a shade,
it kept me from my life. You, too, have wished
for something else, you have vanished
almost fully, the mask said, as if a mask critiquing
itself could convince me it was not my own mouth speaking.
IV. SERENITY
The city cleaved things: together
and apart: a bridge restrained one ancient house from another:
the whole city was reflected below
the city: the bridge where they hanged prisoners: the tableau
of bodies held suspended
as on a frieze, splendid
with color and movement: thousands
of bits of glass: small islands
of gold and purple and bronze glued
into images: a pagan nude
with a feather: halos in concentric rings: the rudder
cut its dark path through the water,
pushing wake to either side, as if sorting testimonies of love
from jealousy: from above,
it must have looked like the black canal was rent
apart, halved, no matter where I went.
SEA INTERLUDE: MOONLIGHT
Nearly asleep, I thought of the wrecked
fishing ship—its hull, scuffed and split
open, scraped clean of its entrails
by the rusty brine that now pools
around the timbers, scouring the sand.
Searching for you in the hollow cage
of its body, the ribs of copper and wood
which once held men, I sensed a trembling,
as from a distant wharf, the dull thunder
of a body cast back into another
like a beach sea-worn to obedience:
my hunger, fallen into air from the mouth
of language; and the moonlight stiffening
around it like a mollusk’s silver shell.
THE SURROUND
That summer I was looking for an antidote
to art. I woke up early and spent
mornings swimming, wading out
with tiny piping plovers, whose nests
along the strip of beach had been roped of
f
with netting as protected land.
I wanted lust to exhaust itself. I wanted
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