Circle of voices slipstreaming through the oiled evening.
Hmmm … Not exactly transplendent:
Look to the nature of all things …
The clouds slide from the west to the east
Over the Berici Mountains, hiding the half of what he spoke of.
Wind is asleep in the trees,
weighing the shelled leaves down.
A radio comes and goes from a parked car below the hill.
What is it these children chant about
In their games?
Why are their voices so like those
I thought I heard just moments ago
Centrifugal in their extantsy?
Concentrate, listen hard …
A motor scooter whines up the hill road, toward the Madonna.
—9 July 1985
(Cà Paruta)
—All morning the long-bellied, two-hitched drag trucks
Have ground down the mountainside
loaded with huge, cut stone
From two quarries being worked
Some miles up the slope. Rock-drilled and squared-off,
They make the brakes sing and the tires moan,
A music of sure contrition that troubles our ears
And shudders the farmhouse walls.
No one around here seems to know
Where the great loads go or what they are being used for.
But everyone suffers the music,
We all sway to the same tune
when the great stones pass by,
A weight that keeps us pressed to our chairs
And pushes our heads down, and slows our feet.
Volcanic originally, the Euganean hills
Blister a tiny part,
upper northeast, of the Po flood plain.
Monasteries and radar stations
Relay the word from their isolate concentration,
Grouped, as they are, like bread mold
and terraced like Purgatory.
Their vineyards are visible for miles,
cut like a gentle and green
Strip-mining curl up the steep slopes.
During the storm-sweeps out of the Alps,
From a wide distance they stand like a delicate Chinese screen
Against the immensity of the rain.
Outside my door, a cicada turns its engine on.
Above me the radar tower
Tunes its invisible music in:
other urgencies tell their stories
Constantly in their sleep,
Other messages plague our ears
under Madonna’s tongue:
The twilight twists like a screw deeper into the west.
Through scenes of everyday life,
Through the dark allegory of the soul
into the white light of eternity,
The goddess burns in her golden car
From month to month, season to season
high on the walls
At the south edge of Ferrara,
Her votive and reliquary hands
Suspended and settled upon as though under glass,
Offering, giving a gentle benediction:
Reality, symbol and ideal
tripartite and everlasting
Under the bricked, Emilian sun.
Borso, the mad uncle, giving a coin to the jester Scoccola,
Borso receiving dignitaries,
or out hawking,
Or listening to supplications from someone down on his knees,
Or giving someone his due.
Borso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara and Modena, on a spring day
On horseback off to the hunt:
a dog noses a duck up from a pond,
Peasants are pruning the vines back, and grafting new ones
Delicately, as though in a dance,
Ghostly noblemen ride their horses over the archway,
A child is eating something down to the right,
a monkey climbs someone’s leg …
Such a narrow, meaningful strip
of arrows and snakes.
Circles and purple robes, griffins and questing pilgrims:
At the tip of the lion’s tail, a courtier rips
A haunch of venison with his teeth;
At the lion’s head,
someone sits in a brushed, celestial tree.
What darkness can be objectified by this dance pose
And musician holding a dead bird
At each end of the scales?
What dark prayer can possibly escape
The black, cracked lips of this mendicant woman on her pooled
knees?
The shadowy ribbon offers its warnings up
under the green eyes of heaven.
Up there, in the third realm,
light as though under water
Washes and folds and breaks in small waves
Over each month like sunrise:
triumph after triumph
Of pure Abstraction and pure Word, a paradise of white cloth
And white reflections of cloth cross-currented over the cars
With golden wheels and gold leads,
all Concept and finery:
Love with her long hair and swans in trace,
Cybele among the Corybants,
Apollo, Medusa’s blood and Attis in expiation:
All caught in the tide of light,
all burned on the same air.
Is this the progression of our lives,
or merely a comment on them?
Is this both the picture and what’s outside the picture,
Or decoration opposing boredom
For court ladies to glance up at,
crossing a tiled floor?
How much of what we leave do we mean to leave
And how much began as fantasy?
Questions against an idle hour as Borso looks to his hounds,
Virgo reclines on her hard bed
under the dragon’s heel,
And turreting over the green hills
And the sea, color of sunrise,
the city floats in its marbled tear of light.
From my balcony, the intense blue of the under-heaven,
Sapphiric and anodyne,
backdrops Madonna’s crown.
Later, an arched stretch of cloud,
Like a jet trail or a comet’s trail,
vaults over it,
A medieval ring of Paradise.
Today, it’s that same blue again, blue of redemption
Against which, in the vine rows,
the green hugs the ground hard.
Not yet, it seems to say, O not yet.
Heavy Italian afternoon: heat drives like a nail
Through the countryside,
everything squirms
Or lies pinned and still in its shining.
On the opposite slope, Alfredo, his long, curved scythe
Flashing and disappearing into the thick junk weeds
Between the vine stocks, moves,
with a breathy, whooshing sound,
Inexorably as a visitation, or some event
The afternoon’s about to become the reoccasion of:
St. Catherine catching the martyr’s head
in her white hands;
St. Catherine urging the blades on
As the wheel dazzles and turns,
Feeling the first nick like the first rung of Paradise;
St. Catherine climbing, step by step,
The shattering ladder up
to the small, bright hurt of the saved.
—25 July 1985
(Cà Paruta)
—Rilke, di Valmarana, the King of Abyssinia
And countless others once came to wash
At his memory, dipping their hands
into the cold waters of his name,
And signing their own
In the vellum, nineteenth-century books
The Commune of Padova provided,
each g
raced page
Now under glass in the fourteenth-century stone rooms
The poet last occupied.
We’ve come for the same reasons, though the great registers
No longer exist, and no one of such magnitude
Has been in evidence for some years.
On the cracked, restored walls,
Atrocious frescoes, like those in an alcove of some trattoria,
Depict the Arcadian pursuits
He often wrote of,
dotted with puffy likenesses
Of the great man himself, intaglio prints of Laura
And re-creations of famous instances
In his life.
Poems by devotees are framed and hung up
Strategically here and there.
In short, everything one would hope would not be put forth
In evidence on Petrarch’s behalf.
Arquà Petrarca, the town he died in,
and this is,
Dangles in folds and cutbacks
Down the mountainside,
medieval and still undisturbed
In the backwash he retired to, and the zone remains,
Corn, vineyards and fig orchards.
The town’s on the other side of the hill, and unseen,
And from the second-floor balcony,
southward across the Po Valley,
The prospect is just about
What he would have looked at,
the extra roadway and house
Gracious and unobtrusive.
I ghost from room to room and try hard
To reamalgamate everything that stays missing,
To bring together again
the tapestries and winter fires,
The long walks and solitude
Before the damage of history and an odd fame
Unlayered it all but the one name and a rhyme scheme.
Marconi, Victor Emmanuel II, prince
And princess have come and gone.
Outside, in the garden,
The hollyhocks and rose pips move quietly in the late heat.
I write my name in the dirt
and knock twice as we leave.
Farfalla comes to my door frame,
enters my window,
Swivels and pirouettes, white in the white sunlight,
Farfalla and bumblebee,
Butterfly, wasp and bumblebee
together into the dark
Latitudes of my attic, then out
Again, all but la vespa,
The other two into the daylight, a different flower:
Vespa cruises in darkness,
checking the corners out,
The charred crevices fit for her habitation, black
Petals for her to light on.
No clouds for four weeks, Madonna stuck
On the blue plate of the sky like sauce
left out over night,
Everything flake-red and dust-peppered,
Ants slow on the doorsill,
flies languishing on the iron
Railing where no wind jars them.
Dead, stunned heart of summer: the blood stills to a bell pull,
The cry from the watermelon truck
hangs like a sheet in the dry air,
The cut grain splinters across the hillside.
All night the stalled dogs bark in our sleep.
All night the rats flutter and roll in the dark loft holes over our
heads.
As St. Augustine tells us, whatever is, is good,
As long as it is,
even as it rusts and decays
In the paracletic nature of all things:
transplendent enough,
I’d say, for our needs, if that’s what he meant
Back there in the garden in that circle of voices
Widening out of the sunset and disappearing …
Dog fire: quick singes and pops
Of lightning finger the mountainside:
the towers and deep dish
Are calling their children in, Madonna is calling her little ones
Out of the sky, such fine flames
To answer to and add up
as they all come down from the dark.
In the rings and after-chains,
In the great river of language that circles the universe,
Everything comes together,
No word is ever lost,
no utterance ever abandoned.
They’re all borne on the bodiless, glittering currents
That wash us and seek us out:
there is a word, one word,
For each of us, circling and holding fast
In all that cascade and light.
Said once, or said twice,
it gathers and waits its time to come back
To its true work:
concentrate, listen hard.
Enormous shadows settle across the countryside,
Scattered and misbegotten.
Clouds slide from the Dolomites
as though let out to dry.
Sunset again: that same color of rose leaf and rose water.
The lights of another town
tattoo their promises
Soundlessly over the plain.
I’m back in the night garden,
the lower yard, between
The three dead fig trees,
Under the skeletal comb-leaves of the fanned mimosa branch,
Gazing at the Madonna,
The swallows and bats at their night work
And I at mine.
No scooters or trucks,
No voices of children, no alphabet in the wind:
Only this silence, the strict gospel of silence,
to greet me,
Opened before me like a rare book.
I turn the first page
and then the next, but understand nothing,
The deepening twilight a vast vocabulary
I’ve never heard of.
I keep on turning, however:
somewhere in here, I know, is my word.
—3 August 1985
(Cà Paruta)
—A day licked entirely clean, the landscape resettled
Immeasurably closer, focused
And held still under the ground lens of heaven,
the air
As brittle as spun glass:
One of those days the sunlight stays an inch above,
or an inch inside
Whatever its tongue touches:
I can’t remember my own youth,
That seam of red silt I try so anxiously to unearth:
A handful of dust is a handful of dust,
no matter who holds it.
Always the adverb, always the ex-Etcetera …
20 August 1985
—On my fiftieth birthday I awoke
In a Holiday Inn just east of Winchester, Virginia,
The companionable summer rain
stitching the countryside
Like bagworms inside its slick cocoon:
The memory of tomorrow is yesterday’s storyline:
I ate breakfast and headed south,
the Shenandoah
Zigzagging in its small faith
Under the Lee Highway and Interstate 81,
First on my left side, then on my right,
Sluggish and underfed,
the absences in the heart
Silent as sparrows in the spinning rain:
How do I want to say this?
My mother’s mother’s family
For generations has sifted down
This valley like rain out of Clarke County,
seeping into the red clay
Overnight and vanishing into the undergrowth
Of different lives as hard as they could.
Yesterday all of us went
to all of the places all of them left from
One way or another,
apple groves, scrub oak, gravestones
; With short, unmellifluous, unfamiliar names,
Cold wind out of the Blue Ridge,
And reason enough in the lowering sky for leaving
A weight so sure and so fixed …
And now it’s my turn, same river, same hard-rock landscape
Shifting to past behind me.
What makes us leave what we love best?
What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself
When we need it most,
That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake
And holds us flush there
until we begin to love it
And have to begin again?
What is it within our own lives we decline to live
Whenever we find it,
making our days unendurable,
And nights almost visionless?
I still don’t know yet, but I do it.
In my fiftieth year, with a bad back and a worried mind,
Going down the Lee Highway,
the farms and villages
Rising like fog behind me,
Between the dream and the disappearance the abiding earth
Affords us each for an instant.
However we choose to use it
We use it and then it’s gone:
Like the glint of the Shenandoah
at Castleman’s Ferry,
Like license plates on cars we follow and then pass by,
Like what we hold and let go,
Like this country we’ve all come down,
and where it’s led us,
Like what we forgot to say, each time we forget it.
25–29 August 1985
—Ashes know what burns,
clouds savvy which way the wind blows …
Full moon like a bed of coals
As autumn revs up and cuts off:
Remembering winter nights like a doused light bulb
Leaning against my skin,
object melting into the image
Under the quickly descending stars:
Once the impasse is solved, St. Augustine says, between matter and
spirit,
Evil is merely the absence of good:
Which makes sense, if you understand what it truly means,
Full moon the color of sand now,
and still unretractable …
In a bad way,
I don’t even know what I don’t know,
Zone Journals Page 5
