SCENE ALONG THE DRIVE
“Make money, stay sane.” Richard Hugo, from “Glen Uig”
Some afternoons my eye will stray
from the work before me—
a form to fill, a bill to pay—
as now, to a young gray squirrel
frisking in the dirt along the drive.
He approaches a stick, his tail
upright, a flag of caution,
as if the stick might be a snake.
And in a sudden blur of motion
he bites it and flips it in the air,
then tumbles in the gravel, crazed
with what outwardly might seem fear
but is, to my human eye, play, nothing less.
He disappears into a laurel hedge,
returns to the stick to toss
once more his toy, and again
he leaps up, as if possessed
by the smoke of dust, then gone.
And I wonder if, to stay alive,
I must make believe, must lie—this event,
for instance—in order to revive
myself, always gasping, near to drowning
in the rising sea of America.
Everyone’s got a gun, and they’re aiming.
They’ll never know the secret joy
of imagining the scene I see—
squirrel, stick—whatever it might be—
that invents the world to the world.
The mind—mine—must be allowed to stray
to keep the rising tide at bay.
GREAT APES AT THE ZOO
Behind the glass barrier and the laughter
of children and parents, the mother sits,
eating something the keepers have given her.
She holds a rind—avocado or papaya—
as if it were a small ceramic bowl,
lifting morsels of whatever it is to her mouth.
She delicately licks her slender fingers.
Squatting in straw, she seems Buddha-calm,
unaware of the gawking world,
unaware, too, apparently, of her tussling boys,
one no bigger than the toddler beside me,
his nose to the glass, squealing in recognition,
as if he too would like to wrestle and box.
The straw flies. Dust rises in misty puffs.
The little ape slaps his older brother,
does a back flip, bumps his head on a log,
runs to mama, and crawls on her back
to catch his breath. Mama doesn’t budge.
She drops the rind and surveys her world
of leafless climbing trees the keepers have installed,
a webbing of ropes, an artificial stream,
and across it the dark pocket of a concrete cave.
Her eyes are bland, resigned,
like the eyes of any prisoner or refugee.
Kids and their parents have strolled away.
The older brother shits in the straw,
then knuckle-walks to the stream
where he cups his hands to drink.
The mother gazes off, as if at some other life.
She reaches back and lifts her little fellow
over her head, rolls sideways onto the straw
and grooms him till he falls asleep.
Two: The Gods
“They all go ice-free in the future.”
~Comment by Marika Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, regarding the predictions of her computer models that track the rapid disappearance of ice in the Arctic Sea. (From “Does the Disappearance of Sea Ice Matter?” by Jon Gertner, New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2016).
ICE CHILDREN OF THE ANDES
Priests led the boy and girl up the steep trace
above their village wedged in stone
and stunted pines. Small plants brightened the slope,
their red leaves frost-whitened in mid-day sun.
The young ones had been well-fed, dressed
in buckskin chewed to soft felt. Both wore beads
of azure and shell, their feet fur-shod
against the raw uncaring stones.
Below, gorges flowed with lakes of mist.
Now and then they paused to rest, the priests
speaking in solemn tones, pointing out
the silver of distant rivers, torrents veined
in the creased walls across the chasm.
They asked the children if they could hear
the mountains call to them to climb on.
And when in the thinning air the girl and boy
could walk no more, the priests bore them
on their backs, arriving in twilight
at the ice cave, its opening scalloped
to a glass polish, its blue ceiling
catching the last light exhaled by the gods.
They sat them down, fed them coca leaves
to put their fears to sleep. The priests addressed
the gods, describing the girl’s head tilted
on her shoulder. The boy, they reported,
remained upright, his frozen hair laced
across his glazed eyes, his lips parted
as if on the verge of speech, as if to tell his sister
his dream, how he fell into a warm river,
how he swam until it spilled him into the sky.
ICEBERGS NEAR TWILLINGATE
From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, en route
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.
TO THE WOMAN AT THE MARCH
She was frail, bespectacled, in a dated
but flowery housedress, light
for the warmth of the day. Her hat,
too, seemed to come from another era,
likewise bedecked with flowers—
small, needle-pointed rosebuds, I believe
they were. Me, white. She, black.
We had marched together with the others,
some thousands, neither of us speaking,
turning now and then to smile as if
to acknowledge that we were, both of us,
alone, thrown together by chance,
hemmed by the river of our fellows
flowing salmon-like to the rhythm of someone
drumming, someone playing a recorder,
another far ahead exhorting us
with a bullhorn to chant in unison
our anger, our conviction—The people,
united, will never be defeated.
The march ended at a park where,
more or less unscripted, our throng formed
a great choir before the makeshift stage,
to await the dozen speakers gathered
with their prepared sermons.
Somewhere from behind rose
the hymn “We Shall Overcome.”
That’s when, without looking, she took
my hand, squeezed it not gently,
and joined in. I felt her bright contralto
first as a hum, so pure it frightened me,
its current rising through my wrist,
up my arm, where it settled in my chest.
And I, who cannot carry a tune to save
my life, sang Oh, deep in my heart,
I do
believe, we shall overcome some day,
wishing as I sang never to let go.
HONEYMOON
A delirium of blossoms, he recalled.
Here we are on the bank of the Huzo,
walking in pink snow.
They were Americans, in love with love,
spellbound by pictures of Mount Fuji
they’d seen in National Geographic.
And there it was, appearing at sunrise
on the train window. How about that,
he’d said, waking her. It seems to hover.
It’s a vision, a floating island,
a perfect cone, just like the photos—
so symmetrical, so ideal, darling, like you.
In Kyoto, the river glided,
bright as mica, tinged with glacial till.
All the city, it seemed, had come to savor
the soft explosions of cherry trees,
just as they had come, these newlyweds,
arriving in a rickshaw, crowding with others
onto boats poled by young men
whose tanned arms glistened in April sun.
Then, excursions to temples and gardens,
where the azaleas had just begun to ignite
among the Zen stones. Such tranquility,
he told her on a stroll. Such harmony
with the natural world, don’t you think?
You won’t find that back home.
They even made love in a bamboo grove,
he remembered, thinking at the time
they were alone, with only the calls
of the different birds high in the green light,
then noticing as she rolled off him onto the moss,
her skirt askew, they were being watched.
An old woman in a conical hat smiled.
They smiled, mortified, unable to answer
the woman’s slight bow and greeting: Konnichiwa.
So long ago it was, that afternoon in the city
of pagodas and monuments, markets thronged
and rich with smells they’d never smelled.
Now, for Christ’s sake, they want to try out
the new bomb—Fat Boy, or Fat Man, or something—
on Kyoto, our Kyoto, where we climbed above the river
to that temple. What was it called? She wept, even,
when statues of the Buddha would appear
as if by magic, like sudden awakenings, among the pines.
He could imagine the shrines flattened,
ancient timbers blown to kindling by the blast,
the curved black roof tiles of ten-thousand buildings
swirling in typhoons of white fire.
Our city, for God’s sake. Our city.
Even the ice-fed Huzo would boil,
its boats aflame by the collapsed bridge
they’d walked across a dozen times,
and the young men who poled the boats—
they’d be burned to death in seconds.
So charmed the couple had been, so taken
by the politeness of the bowing Japanese,
so delighted were they when,
pulling their phrasebooks from their rucksacks,
they’d stutter a few words to a shopkeeper
or a woman planting rice shoots
along a road, and be understood.
He would demand that the committee
remove Kyoto from the list of targets.
Surely there were other cities more suitable
from a military standpoint,
more appropriate strategically.
What about Kokura’s munitions plants?
What about Yokohama or Hiroshima?
No matter what General X said or what General Y
argued would be the Emperor’s next move,
no matter what logic or tactical line of thinking
they’d array on their table of maps,
damage projections, casualty estimates,
he’d hold the line. He would not stand by
to see Kyoto—their Kyoto—
reduced to miles of radioactive ash.
The bomb, he vowed, would be dropped,
just not on the city he loved, his Kyoto.
His decision would be final.
Was he or was he not Secretary of War?
He’d go to Truman, if necessary,
get the full backing of the President.
Not one Shinto shrine, goddamn it.
Not one Zen pavilion. Not one pond of koi,
not one boy—I see him plain as day—
little canvas knapsack on his back,
riding his rickety bike to school,
pausing on the bridge to cover his ears
against the howl of air raid sirens.
I see him turn for home at the instant
the sun comes down to earth, flowering
like God knows what—a rose, a death rose
of heat and fire. No, no and no.
Not in Kyoto. Not in our Kyoto.
They’ll have to add another city to the list.
[Author’s note: Henry L. Stimson (1867-1950,) US Secretary of War, 1940-1945, was de facto head of the Manhattan Project. This poem is loosely based on an event from Stimson’s life.]
THE GODS
They sit on comfy thrones and drift through time
high atop their Hawaiian Islands in heaven.
They snack on manna and nectar, those famous
unworldly hors d’oeuvres, and watch in mild
curiosity as we cross ice bridges and deserts.
They see us lashed to make-shift rafts,
tossed on oceans, amused by the prospect
that there’s just no way we’ll make it,
that we’ll topple, eventually, off the rim
of the earth. On occasion they’re diverted
by the rise and fall of our empires.
They smile and roll their eyes
at the puny attempts by some of us to appear
almighty, by this or that poseur who ends at last
as a shriveled mummy inside a pyramid.
That’s good for a chuckle. The gods take more interest
in our wars, recent or laced with the dust of history.
To the gods, the Trojan War was yesterday.
Like ageless toddlers, their attention span
is limited. Immortality can be tedious. After all,
they must appoint countless ministers to run
countless celestial agencies, not to mention
the hundred thousand jugglers
whose job it is to keep the cosmos in motion—
precisely why the gods barely give us
the time of day, why they fail to notice us in an unused
closet of one of their million winter palaces.
They save their affections for new-born stars.
As grandparents, they fawn over galaxies
we’ll never learn of, far beyond our little chips of glass.
Of course they have a soft spot for their
pet nebulae, and watch them with delight
as they flare in the fire of spectrums and halos
we’ll never observe, no matter how long we wiggle
through the eons, morphing a little here and there,
nothing to write home about. To the gods,
we’re an anomaly, a quirk among
the infinite number of possible constructs.
It’s all relative to them. There’s so much
they must attend to: the mountains and continents
of eternity, the fabulous geometry of matterlessness,
the great towers built out of heat
and the spliced guy wires of space and time—
all those gravity-sucking vampires who must be watched.
It’s demanding work, being a god, but not without
the occasional down time and wild parties. You’d think
we’d be modeled in their images
and not the other way
around, as is the case. We’re barely a second thought.
What intrigues the gods, however, are the rivers
of silver—newly discovered—said to flow on Io,
a moon of Jupiter. That, they find, is exciting.
THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO SAY
There’s nothing left to say
about the earth, about the day.
Who will bail us out
now that God has about
had it with his fun?
There’s nothing under the sun,
new or old. No one sings. No one.
Why do mountains drown?
No one dreamed we’d crown
a blind man, mute as well.
He sneered and locked us up in hell.
Now the seas have risen.
There’s nothing under the sun,
old or new. No one sings. No one.
The garden of dead cars,
their missing eyes eye the stars.
Where will children play?
All the songbirds have flown away,
following rivers that never run.
There’s nothing under the sun,
old or new. No one sings. No one.
THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY
We stood in the deeps of redwood shade just off 101, the nearly-
forgotten Pacific Coast Highway—a break from our family trip
and the long haul to L.A. Mom paid the man in a cowboy hat
a dollar. Over there, said the man, pointing to a wood porch
and small door. We shuffled down a dim hall, floorboards wincing,
rotted in places, rat turds scattered like black rice. My younger brother,
not ten feet up the narrow hall, now loomed huge, two heads taller
than me. There was my proof of unseen forces.
Through glassless window frames, redwoods tipped at crazy angles.
Some older boys in the house shoved each other, banged
into plywood walls and laughed. A sign warned something like:
Below this house, geologists have discovered a massive asteroid
known to be taller than the Eiffel Tower. This asteroid, said the sign,
The Law of the Unforeseen Page 2
