The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems
Page 2
lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.
In the Moment
It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,
the kind that gives you no choice
but to unbutton your shirt
and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.
And if a glass of ice tea and a volume
of seventeenth-century poetry
with a dark blue cover are available,
then the picture can hardly be improved.
I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,
and two black butterflies
with white and red wing-dots
bobbed around my head in the bright air.
I could feel the day offering itself to me,
and I wanted nothing more
than to be in the moment—but which moment?
Not that one, or that one, or that one,
or any of those that were scuttling by
seemed perfectly right for me.
Plus, I was too knotted up with questions
about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.
What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?
Why did John Donne’s wife die so young?
And more pressingly,
what could we serve the vegetarian twins
who were coming to dinner that evening?
Who knew that they would bring their own grapes?
And why was the driver of that pickup
flying down the road toward the lone railroad track?
And so the priceless moments of the day
were squandered one by one—
or more likely a thousand at a time—
with quandary and pointless interrogation.
All I wanted was to be a pea of being
inside the green pod of time,
but that was not going to happen today,
I had to admit to myself
as I closed the book on the face
of Thomas Traherne and returned to the house
where I lit a flame under a pot
full of floating brown eggs,
and, while they cooked in their bubbles,
I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink
to see if that crazy glass
had anything special to tell me today.
The Peasants’ Revolt
Soon enough it will all be over—
the shirt hanging from the doorknob,
trees beyond the windows,
and the kettle of water bubbling on a burner.
Soon enough, soon enough,
the many will be overwhelmed by the one.
Instead of the shaded road to the house,
the blue wheelbarrow upended,
and a picture book across my hips in bed,
just an expanse of white ink,
or a dark tunnel coiling away and down.
No sunflowers, no notebook,
no sand-colored denim jacket
and a piece of straw in the teeth,
just a hole inside a larger hole
and the starless maw of space.
But we are still here,
with all the world before us,
a beaded glass of water on the night table,
and the rest of this summer afternoon ahead.
So undo the buttons on your white blouse
and toss it over a chair back.
Let us lie down side by side
on these crisp sheets like two effigies on a tomb,
supine in a shadowy corner of a cathedral.
Let us be as still and serene
as Richard II and Anne of Bohemia—
he who ended the Peasants’ Revolt so ruthlessly
and she to whom he was so devoted,
now entombed together, hand in stone hand.
Let us close our eyes to the white room
and let the fan blades on the ceiling cool us
as they turn like the hands of a speeding clock.
Theme
It’s a sunny weekday in early May
and after a ham sandwich
and a cold bottle of beer on the brick terrace,
I am consumed by the wish
to add something
to one of the ancient themes—
youth dancing with his eyes closed,
for example,
in the shadows of corruption and death,
or the rise and fall of illustrious men
strapped to the turning
wheel of mischance and disaster.
There is a slight breeze,
just enough to bend
the yellow tulips on their stems,
but that hardly helps me
echo the longing for immortality
despite the roaring juggernaut of time,
or the painful motif
of Nature’s cyclical return
versus man’s blind rush to the grave.
I could loosen my shirt
and lie down in the soft grass,
sweet now after its first cutting,
but that would not produce
a record of the pursuit
of the moth of eternal beauty
or the despondency that attends
the eventual dribble
of the once gurgling fountain of creativity.
So, as far as the great topics go,
that seems to leave only
the fall from exuberant maturity
into sudden, headlong decline—
a subject that fills me with silence
and leaves me with no choice
but to spend the rest of the day
sniffing the jasmine vine
and surrendering to the ivory governance
of the piano by picking out
with my index finger
the melody notes of “Easy to Love,”
a song in which Cole Porter expresses,
with put-on nonchalance,
the hopelessness of a love
brimming with desire
and a hunger for affection,
but met only and always with frosty disregard.
Eastern Standard Time
Poetry speaks to all people, it is said,
but here I would like to address
only those in my own time zone,
this proper slice of longitude
that runs from pole to snowy pole
down the globe through Montreal to Bogotá.
Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band,
sitting up in your many beds this morning—
the sun falling through the windows
and casting a shadow on the sundial—
consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words.
They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are,
or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion.
Rather, they are at work already,
leaning on copy machines,
hammering nails into a house-frame.
They are not swallowing a vitamin like us;
rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon,
even jumping around on a dance floor,
or just now sliding under the covers,
pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps.
But we are not like these others,
for at this very moment on the face of the earth,
we are standing under a hot shower,
or we are eating our breakfast,
considered by people of all zones
to be the most important meal of the day.
Later, when the time is right,
we might sit down with the boss,
wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table,
but now is the hour for pouring the juice
and flipping the eggs with one eye o
n the toaster.
So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam,
lift our brimming spoons of milk,
and leave it to the others to lower a flag
or spin absurdly in a barber’s chair—
those antipodal oddballs, always early or late.
Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming,
the Canadian genius who first scored
with these lines the length of the spinning earth.
Let us move together through the rest of this day
passing in unison from light to shadow,
coasting over the crest of noon
into the valley of the evening
and then, holding hands, slip into the deeper valley of night.
The Long Day
In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”
In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall
I took off my clothes,
put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.
I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten
to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead?
And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east
when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,
and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward
I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a faraway towel.
TWO
I Ask You
What scene would I rather be enveloped in
than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
at ease in a box of floral wallpaper,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
It gives me time to think
about the leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high gray rocks,
and the world sailing on beyond the dunes—
huge, oceangoing, history bubbling in its wake.
Outside of this room
there is nothing that I need,
not a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
No, it is all right here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
an odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall,
and these three candles,
each a different height, singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
composed of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
Breathless
Some like the mountains, some like the seashore,
Jean-Paul Belmondo says
to the camera in the opening scene.
Some like to sleep face up,
some like to sleep on their stomachs,
I am thinking here in bed—
some take the shape of murder victims
flat on their backs all night,
others float face down on the dark waters.
Then there are those like me
who prefer to sleep on their sides,
knees brought up to the chest,
head resting on a crooked arm
and a soft fist touching the chin,
which is the way I would like to be buried,
curled up in a coffin
in a fresh pair of cotton pajamas,
a down pillow under my weighty head.
After a lifetime of watchfulness
and nervous vigilance,
I will be more than ready for sleep,
so never mind the dark suit,
the ridiculous tie
and the pale limp hands crossed on the chest.
Lower me down in my slumber,
tucked into myself
like the oldest fetus on earth,
and while cows look over the stone wall
of the cemetery, let me rest here
in my earthy little bedroom,
my lashes glazed with ice,
the roots of trees inching nearer,
and no dreams to frighten me anymore.
In the Evening
The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.
In the sky, traces of clouds,
the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.
The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.
I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick up an onion and a knife.
And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.
Bereft
I liked listening to you today at lunch
as you talked about the dead,
the lucky dead you called them,
citing their freedom from rent and furniture,
no need for doorknobs, snow shovels,
or windows and a field beyond,
no more railway ticket in an inside pocket,
no more railway, no more tickets, no more pockets.
No more bee chasing you around the garden,
no more you chasing your hat around a corner,
no bright moon on the glimmering water,
no cool breast felt beneath an open robe.
More like an empty zone that souls traverse,
a vaporous place
at the end of a dark tunnel,
a region of silence except for
the occasional beating of wings—
and, I wanted to add
as the sun dazzled your lifted wineglass,
the sound of the newcomers weeping.
Flock
It has been calculated that each copy of the
Gutenburg Bible … required the skins of 300 sheep.
—from an article on printing
I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,
all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling
which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.
Boyhood
Alone in the basement,
I would sometimes lower one eye
to the level of the narrow train track
to watch the puffing locomotive
pull the cars around a curve
then bear down on me with its dazzling eye.
What was in those moments
before I lifted my head and let the train
go rocking by under my nose?
I remember not caring much
about the fake grass or the buildings
that made up the miniature town.
The same went for
the station and its master,
the crossing gates and flashing lights,
the milk car, the pencil-size logs,
the metallic men and women,
the dangling water tower,
and the round mirror for a pond.
All I wanted was to be blinded
over and over by this shaking light
as the train stuck fast to its oval course.
Or better still, to close my eyes,
to stay there on the cold narrow rails
and let the train tunnel through me
the way it tunneled through the mountain
painted the color of rock,
and then there would be nothing