but I knew I did not want to vanish down that hallway
never to see my parents again or my dog Sparky,
and never to grow up, as it turned out,
to study Tagore and think about the months
bearing their old Roman names from one year into the next.
Many Moons
The thinnest of slivers can come
as a surprise some nights.
A girl leaving a restaurant
points up to show her friends.
And there is the full one,
bloated with light,
a bright circle over the city
keeping the dreamers from sleep.
But the moon tonight
is crossed by a drift of clouds
and looks like a mug shot
of a criminal, a cornered man.
One of its seas forms a frown
that makes for a grudging look.
The last thing it ever wanted
was to end up being a moon.
It’s the only light in the sky
save for a solitary star,
whose sisters and brothers
must be blinking somewhere afar,
leaving the moon and me
to circle in our turning places,
his face remote and cold,
mine warm but vexed by his troubles.
Note to J. Alfred Prufrock
I just dared to eat
a really big peach
as ripe as it could be
and I have on
a pair of plaid shorts
and a blue tee shirt with a hole in it
and little rivers of juice
are now running down my chin and wrist
and dripping onto the pool deck.
What is your problem, man?
Speed Walking on August 31, 2013
Nothing much to report this morning
as if anyone were waiting to hear,
putting the day on hold like,
just a few women jogging by,
girls with their eyes lowered,
and a few men, their awkward hellos.
The squirrels don’t really count
because of their ubiquity,
but there was the one brown rabbit
frozen up ahead on the cinder path,
immobile as a painting of a brown rabbit,
so I stopped and tried to be
as still as a pencil drawing of a man,
and maybe a half a minute passed
before he bounced himself into the weeds.
Was that you, Seamus,
coming to pay me a little visit?
Who else could it possibly be?
I asked with confidence.
Not Robert Penn Warren surely.
No, only you with your eye still bright.
December 1st
Today is my mother’s birthday,
but she’s not here to celebrate
by opening a flowery card
or looking calmly out a window.
If my mother were alive,
she’d be 114 years old,
and I am guessing neither of us
would be enjoying her birthday very much.
Mother, I would love to see you again
to take you shopping or to sit
in your sunny apartment with a pot of tea,
but it wouldn’t be the same at 114.
And I’m no prize either,
almost 20 years older than the last time
you saw me sitting by your deathbed.
Some days, I look worse than yesterday’s oatmeal.
Happy Birthday, anyway. Happy Birthday to you.
Here I am in a wallpapered room
raising a glass of birthday whiskey
and picturing your face, the brooch on your collar.
It must have been frigid that morning
in the hour just before dawn
on your first December 1st
at the family farm a hundred miles north of Toronto.
I imagine they had you wrapped up tight,
and there was your tiny pink face
sticking out of the bunting,
and all those McIsaacs getting used to saying your name.
Genuflection
The moment I was told about the Irish habit
of tipping the cap to the first magpie
one encounters in the course of a day
and saying to him “Good morning, sir,”
I knew I would be in for the long haul.
No one should be made to count
the number of magpies I have treated
with such deference, such magpie protocol,
the latest being today when I spotted one
perched on the railing of a fence
along the crooked road from the house.
This was a bird well out of its usual climate
according to the map in my bird book—
a stray, a rebel-rebel if you will,
not flocking with birds of its feather,
rather flying to a different drummer
who beats his drum with the tiny bones of birds.
But why wouldn’t every bird merit a greeting?
a nod or at least a blink to clear the eyes—
a wave to the geese overhead,
maybe an inquiry of a nervous chickadee,
a salute in the dark to the hoot of an owl.
And as for the great blue heron,
as motionless in profile by the shore
as a drawing on papyrus by a Delphic priest,
will anything serve short of a genuflection?
As a boy, I worked on that move,
gliding in a black cassock and white surplice
inside the border of the altar rail
then stopping to descend,
one knee touching the cool marble floor
palms pressed together in prayer,
right thumb crossed over left, and never the other way around.
Thanksgiving
The thing about the huge platter
of sliced celery, broccoli florets,
and baby tomatoes you had arranged
to look like a turkey with its tail fanned out
was that all our guests were so intimidated
by the perfection of the design
no one dared disturb the symmetry
by removing so much as the nub of a carrot.
And the other thing about all that
was that it took only a few minutes
for the outline of the turkey to disappear
once the guests were encouraged to dig in,
so that no one else would have guessed
that this platter of scattered vegetables ever bore
the slightest resemblance to a turkey
or any other two- or four-legged animal.
It reminded me of the sand mandalas
so carefully designed by Tibetan monks
and then just as carefully destroyed
by lines scored across the diameter of the circle,
the variously colored sand then swept
into a pile and carried in a vessel
to the nearest moving water and poured in—
a reminder of the impermanence of art and life.
Only, in the case of the vegetable turkey
such a reminder was never intended.
Or if it was, I was too busy slicing up
even more vivid lessons in impermanence
to notice. I mean the real turkey minus its head
and colorful feathers, and the ham
minus the pig minus its corkscrew tail
and minus the snout once happily slathered in mud.
Under the Stars
It’s very peaceful pissing under the stars
or beneath the mild colors of twilight,
so refreshing to take a deep breath outdoors
then exhale all the woes of the day
and even the l
onger woes and thorns of the year.
Such a calm descends like a calm descending
as you piss from a dock into a wavy lake
and think about your many brethren,
spread out across the land, pissing tonight
against a tree beyond the circle of a campsite
or watering a flowering bush at a corner of a lawn,
some brothers holding a drink in one hand
others content to gaze up at the passing clouds
then down at the pissing still going on
then up again as if there were all the time in the world.
It’s a form of meditation only without the ashram,
and it’s no exaggeration to say that in doing this
you are doing what you were designed to do,
pissing away into a dark hedge,
just as the clouds above you are doing
what they were made to do, being nudged by a westerly wind.
Brother, you being yourself now
just as the moon is perfectly being itself
spreading its soft radiance throughout the sky
and lighting your way back through the garden
and across the lawn to the party you left
where everyone is hooting and shouting
over that song you love that’s playing so loud.
Mister Shakespeare
Whenever I taught “Introduction to Literature,”
I remember how I would wince
whenever a student, wishing to be respectful,
would refer to “Mr. Frost,” “Mr. Hemingway,”
or, worse yet, “Mr. Shakespeare.”
Just write “Hemingway” or “Frost,” I would tell them,
the way you would with a ballplayer like Jeter or Brady.
No one writes “Mr. Jeter stole second base”
or “Mr. Brady badly overthrew his receiver.”
So why don’t we just call Shakespeare “Shakespeare”?
And yet, when a living author is referred to
by the last name only, it sounds so final,
as if the author were already dead
and the critical comment were part of a eulogy
delivered over the body stretched out in a satin casket.
When I read “The closer Bidart gets to the self…”
or “Here Bidart addresses a former lover…”
I feel that Frank has been reduced to English literature,
turned into a stone where his name is chiseled
above his dates separated by the hyphen of his life.
Does anyone say “Good morning, Bidart”
or “Bidart, let me freshen up that drink.”
Only a drill sergeant would shout “BIDART!”
in Frank’s face with some barracks in the background,
or a teacher calling roll with a flag hanging limp in the corner.
So odd to suddenly become subject matter
then have some Sarah fail to identify you on a test
or be analyzed in an essay by a young Kyle
who is on to you and your obsession with sex.
It’s enough to make us forget where poems begin,
maybe in the upstairs room of an anonymous boy,
his face illuminated by lamplight.
He has penciled some lines in a notebook,
and now he pauses to think up a strange and beautiful title
while the windows of his parents’ house fill with falling leaves.
The Influence of Anxiety: a Term Paper
The greatest influence that anxiety can have
is directly on the anxious person,
the one who is suffering from the anxiety.
For sure.
Anxiety has two main influences
on these people—visible and invisible.
By visible, I mean trembling hands
and sometimes sweating like in a cartoon
with beads of sweat popping out of their foreheads.
Also shifty eyes and just appearing
to others to be acting jumpy and weird for no reason.
It’s not hard to spot a super anxious person
in a subway car or other form of public transportation.
By invisible, I mean what the anxious person
is feeling inside. For example, fear,
sinking feelings of insecurity,
nervousness about what the future may bring,
and also being scared of things
like heavy traffic, elevators, propellers,
rapids, balancing rocks, even wind chimes
if there is an unexpected gust of wind.
Well, enough about how anxiety
can have an influence on anxious people.
What about the rest of us who are cool
but sometimes have to put up with anxiety cases?
In conclusion, anxiety can have
many important influences,
first by making some unlucky people
all jittery and uncool
and second, by making regular chill people
appear to be all tense and edgy themselves.
As I have proven, anxiety can be contagious.
It can pass from a real loser
to a stone member of the cool team
just through normal everyday social contact.
Let’s face it: if you go out with someone for pizza
and he or she is twitching around
in the booth or in his or her chair
and starts getting creepy over the menu
and looks freaked when you remind him or her
that it’s his or her turn to pay,
well, you can start getting creepy too,
and it’s entirely the fault of your spooky friend,
though you shouldn’t have suggested going for pizza in the first place.
Goats
(to my imaginary brother)
If you were in the mood to get out the paint box
and paint some goats grazing in Italy,
this would be an excellent time to do it.
There’s five of them up on a grassy slope
above this spa in Umbria where a day pass
at 22 euros allows me to swim in the pool,
soak in the thermal baths,
or just lounge in a chaise under an umbrella,
all of which leaves me little time to paint goats.
I will tell you they’re all good-sized goats,
two being mostly white, making for a nice contrast
with the green and blond hillside,
the other three being darker—brown and grey.
So think about finding your way down here,
flipping open the old paint box
and getting right to work,
so that some day propped up on mother’s mantel,
or even framed, will be your oil painting
titled “Five Lovely Goats” or “Five Lonely Goats,”
your handwriting being what it is,
prompting mother, who always confuses the two of us,
to shake her cane in your face and shout
“And what would the likes of you be doing
in a swimming pool in Umbria of all places?!”
The Day After Tomorrow
If I had to pick a favorite
from the four heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa,
it would have to be Álvaro de Campos,
cast in the role of the Jaded Sensationist.
This morning nothing much is going on,
just the cat re-curling herself on a chair
and the tea water coming to a boil—
a scene Álvaro would have found entirely sufficient,
he who failed to start or finish anything,
who prefers the window
to the door, tomorrow to today
or better still, the day after tomorrow,
that citadel of stillness, unspoiled
by ambition or la
bor, unblemished even
by a hand lowering a needle onto a record
or moving a deck chair to a place in the sun.
Yes, I like the dreamy Pessoa
who avoids streetcars and markets,
and who, like the snowflake, barely exists at all,
but that’s not to say I don’t care for the others.
Right now, out my back window,
all four Pessoas are chasing one another
around a big tree, holding on to their hats,
each one somehow dressed more outlandishly
than the others. Above them a pale sky,
white clouds moving like sailboats over Portugal.
I can see it all from my couch where
I’m playing a few sad tunes on the piccolo.
Meanwhile, the tea water has boiled away,
and the crown of flames is working on the kettle,
and the cat has moved to another spot.
She loves the unmade bed, the mountainous sheets.
A Day in May
That was the day we made love
in a room without a bed,
a room of tall windows and a rose ceiling,
and then we moved outside
and sat there on a high deck
watching the pelicans dive into the waves
as we drank chilled white wine,
and after a little while
I put a finger in your hair and twirled it,
and you smiled and kept looking at the sea.
It must have been almost seven
when I found the car keys and kissed you
because you said you would make us
an interesting dinner
if I picked up some things at the market.
And the blue sky was still illuminated
as I walked across the parking lot
and through the electric doors,
for the days of the year
were now increasing by the minute,
and I will not soon forget how,
after I had filled the basket
with two brook trout,
asparagus, lemons, and parsley,
rum-raisin ice cream, and a watermelon,
the check-out girl—
no more than a junior in high school—
handed me the change
and told me to have a nice day.
The Lake
The Rain in Portugal Page 4
