the alchemy of someone else
to rise in me. Sitting with you on the terrace,
I scarcely noticed. Bats tacked blackness
to the sky, erotic and detached
as Japanese tattoos. One by one, stars broke
sharply into the harbor
like silver extracted from lead in a bowl.
ABENDLIED
All the animals in the city: blood
in a butcher’s window. Beneath
a butcher’s stoop. A white parrot
in an opera lover’s bedroom:
keeping watch, telling. I hear them all.
Even a family crest above an entrance
studded with bees. Even a lion
with a ring in his mouth. Even the lips
troubled with knocking.
MIDWINTER
Wearing Wellington boots, we followed the retriever
along the perimeter of the property.
Just that morning a man and his son
had brought in firewood from the fallen tree.
Through barberry: a small clearing
in the woods, hollow like the inside of a cello.
I walked around a tree stump, like Mustardseed.
After sunset, we looked through a square window
into the stark cabin where Jean writes.
In a bubble in the antique glass, the sky swirled—
reflected like a sequin, like summer even,
though it was New Years Day, and the world
was dusky, and the dog, the house, the woods, the books—
they weren’t even ours.
THE GATES
The crystal doorknob coils
back. Light
shifts into
a new pattern
on the ceiling, as it did
from time
to time, when
the swallows left
the tree outside the window,
when there was a tree—
How else
can I describe your leaving,
farfetched
as it seems?
GATEKEEPER
In another time, the choice
might have been depicted as two gates:
Open the one, and it is winter.
Snow covers the cobblestones, the spires,
the December markets shrill
with lettuces. Snow covers the butcher’s stoop,
the little chapel. The iron gates at the far edge of the city, of sleep—
I thought I saw you there.
Open the other, and it is winter.
I can tell because the lion’s mouth is filled with snow.
In a room, my lover presses a photograph of the city
against glass, and fastens
the back of the frame, which has hinges also, and opens
and closes.
EGYPTIAN COTTON
Once nothing separated us but the gossamer
of sheets—white and gauzy in the summer, when a world
of heat blew in, inflating
the curtains into the room that was his
and mine, when no one else was there—
nothing between the body, whose hot-bloodedness,
whose frailty I had come to know
the duration of my life,
and the body
he drank cool water with, the body he salted, mile after mile
along the coast, fucked me with, with which
he told me what troubled him
—the two of us in our bed
of Egyptian cotton.
The sea reflected us, our human emotions.
Then the sea refused us, like the sea.
AFTER
When the sun broke up the thunderheads,
and dissonance was consigned
to its proper place, the world was at once foreign
and known to me. That was shame
leaving the body. I had lived my life
from small relief to small relief, like a boy pulling a thorn
from his foot. Wet and glistening,
twisting toward light, everything seemed
recognizable again: a pheasant lazily dragging
his plume; the cherries dark and shining
on the trellis; moths hovering cotton-like
over an empty bowl; even myself,
where I reclined against an orange wall,
hopeful and indifferent, like an inscription on a door.
IMPERIAL CITY
From the outset I hated the city of my ancestors.
I was fearful I’d be put in the dungeon below
the cathedral. The best example of the Romanesque
a guide was saying in German in English in French
where are buried eight German kings four queens
twenty-three bishops four Holy Roman Emperors
all of whom used this bishopric on the river as the seat
of the kingdom. On the old gate at one end a clock
told an ancient form of time. I sulked along behind
my parents as the guide gave facts about the war
with the Saracens about the place where the Jews bathed
about the child like me whose father the Peaceful
having already produced an heir by his first marriage
could marry for love.
Notes
The four “Sea Interludes” take their titles from Benjamin Britten’s interludes from his opera, Peter Grimes.
“Three Cranes”: The quoted passages in section 3 are taken from Hart Crane’s letter to Waldo Frank, dated April 21, 1924, reprinted in O My Land, My Friends: the Selected Letters of Hart Crane, edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber.
“Illustration from Parsifal”: See Willy Pogány’s illustrations in the E. W. Rolleston translation of Wagner’s Parsifal published in 1912. This poem is for J. D. McClatchy.
“Scene from Caravaggio”: Derek Jarman’s.
“Erotic Archive”: The italicized line is from James Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number.
“The Ships”: From the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (“The Deeds of Divine Augustus”), a funerary inscription written for Augustus’ death in A.D. 14.
“Braying”: See Psalm 39 and Proverbs 27.
“Second Empire”: The line “inhaling avidly the absence…” translates a line from Alda Merini’s poem “Apro la sigaretta.”
“Night Ferry”: Some language in this poem was suggested by Myfanwy Piper’s libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera version of Death in Venice.
“Midwinter”: This poem is for Emily Leithauser.
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