and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.
But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn’t tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room.
Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.
But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.
No Things
This love for everyday things,
part natural from the wide eye of infancy,
part a literary calculation,
this attention to the morning flower
and later to a fly strolling
along the rim of a wineglass—
are we just avoiding our one true destiny
when we do that, averting our glance
from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?
The leafless branches against the sky
will not save anyone from the void ahead,
nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.
So why bother with the checkered lighthouse?
Why waste time on the sparrow,
or the wildflowers along the roadside
when we all should be alone in our rooms
throwing ourselves at the wall of life
and the opposite wall of death,
the door locked behind us
as we hurl rocks at the question of meaning
and the enigma of our origins?
What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap sliding around the bathtub
when we are really meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?
banging away on nothingness itself,
some with their foreheads,
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.
The First Night
The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Jose Ramón Jiménez
Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,
but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set
then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,
a long darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.
This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.
The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.
Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me
into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,
and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.
January in Paris
Poems are never completed—they are
only abandoned.
—Paul Valéry
That winter I had nothing to do
but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,
but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets
often turning from a wide boulevard
down a narrow side street
bearing the name of an obscure patriot.
I followed a few private rules,
never crossing a bridge without stopping
mid-point to lean my bike on the railing
and observe the flow of the river below
as I tried to better understand the French.
In my pale coat and my Basque cap
I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.
I would see beggars and street cleaners
in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
I would see the poems of Valéry,
the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.
Most of them needed only a final line
or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
but whenever I approached,
they would retreat from their ashcan fires
into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,
forsaken for so many long decades
how could they ever trust another man with a pen?
I came across the one I wanted to tell you about
sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—
beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,
cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache
by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,
big fish in the school of Symbolism
and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters
of the League of Nations if you please.
Never mind how I got her out of the café,
past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.
And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,
a simple, final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,
and off to the side, me in a window seat
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.
Ballistics
When I came across the high-speed photograph
of a bullet that had just pierced a book—
the pages exploding with the velocity—
I forgot all about the marvels of photography
and began to wonder which book
the photographer had selected for the shot.
Many novels sprang to mind
including those of Raymond Chandler
where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.
Non-fiction offered too many choices—
a history of Scottish lighthouses,
a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.
Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,
the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain
and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.
But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,
I realized that the executed book
was a recent collection of poems written
by someone of whom I was not fond
and that the bullet must have passed through
his writing with little resistance
at twenty-eight-hundred feet per second,
through the poems about his sorry childhood
and the ones about the drear
y state of the world,
and then through the author’s photograph,
through the beard, the round glasses,
and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear.
Pornography
In this sentimental painting of rustic life,
a rosy-cheeked fellow
in a broad hat and ballooning green pants
is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock
while a boy is playing a squeeze-box
near a turned-over barrel
upon which rest a knife, a jug, and small drinking glass.
Two men in rough jackets
are playing cards at a wooden table.
And in the background a woman in a bonnet
stands behind a half-open Dutch door
talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.
This is all I need to inject me with desire,
to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,
or someone very much like you
on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface
as clouds go flying by
and the rustle of tall leafy trees
mixes with the notes of birdsong—
so clearly does the work speak to me of vanishing time,
obsolete musical instruments,
passing fancies, and the corpse
of the largely forgotten painter moldering
somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.
Greek and Roman Statuary
The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,
then the arms and legs,
and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.
And often an entire head followed the nose
as it might have done when bread
was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.
No hope for the flute once attached
to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,
nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,
the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,
the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,
and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.
But the torso is another story—
middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,
propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,
and the mighty stone ass endures,
so smooth and fundamental, no one
hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.
And that is the way it goes here
in the diffused light from the translucent roof,
one missing extremity after another—
digits that got too close to the slicer of time,
hands snapped off by the clock,
whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.
But outside on the city streets,
it is raining, and the pavement shines
with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—
hundreds of noses still intact,
arms swinging and hands grasping,
the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.
It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come
when there is nothing left of us
but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon
now exposed to the open air,
just the wind in the trees and the shadows
of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.
Scenes of Hell
We did not have the benefit of a guide,
no crone to lead us off the common path,
no ancient to point the way with a staff,
but there were badlands to cross,
rivers of fire and blackened peaks,
and eventually we could look down and see
the jeweler running around a gold ring,
the boss trapped in an hour glass,
the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,
the banker plummeting on a coin,
the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,
and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.
We saw the pilot nose-diving
and the whore impaled on a bedpost,
the pharmacist wandering in a stupor
and the child with toy wheels for legs.
You pointed to the soldier
who was dancing with his empty uniform
and I remarked on the blind tourist.
But what truly caught our attention
was the scene in the long mirror of ice:
you lighting the wick on your head,
me blowing on the final spark,
and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.
Hippos on Holiday
is not really the title of a movie
but if it were I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theatre.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.
I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
Lost
There was no art in losing that coin
you gave me for luck, the one with the profile
of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.
It rode for days in a pocket
of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,
past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,
and then it was gone, as lost as the lost
theorems of Pythagoras, or the Medea by Ovid,
which also slipped through the bars of time,
and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—
forever out of favor with Augustus—
on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,
where eventually he died, but not before
writing a poem about the fish of those waters,
into which, as we know, he was never transformed,
nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,
nor into a star like Julius Caesar,
not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.
Tension
Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension.
—Writing Fiction
Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.
When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.
A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.
I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving
to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.
Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue
to han
g on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.
The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning
began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.
The Golden Years
All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasant to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
Aimless Love Page 5
