who had just made up the business
of the 100 Chinese silences—
the Silence of the Night Boat,
and the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.
Palermo
It was foolish of us to leave our room.
The empty plaza was shimmering.
The clock looked ready to melt.
The heat was a mallet striking a ball
and sending it bouncing into the nettles of summer.
Even the bees had knocked off for the day.
The only thing moving besides us
(and we had since stopped under an awning)
was a squirrel who was darting this way and that
as if he were having second thoughts
about crossing the street,
his head and tail twitching with indecision.
You were looking in a shop window
but I was watching the squirrel
who now rose up on his hind legs,
and after pausing to look in all directions,
began to sing in a beautiful voice
a melancholy aria about life and death,
his forepaws clutched against his chest,
his face full of longing and hope,
as the sun beat down
on the roofs and awnings of the city,
and the earth continued to turn
and hold in position the moon
which would appear later that night
as we sat in a café
and I stood up on the table
with the encouragement of the owner
and sang for you and the others
the song the squirrel had taught me how to sing.
Memento Mori
It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.
Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.
Even the Church of St. Anne will do,
a structure I just noticed in a magazine—
built in 1722 of sandstone and limestone in the city of Cork.
And the realization that no one
who ever breasted the waters of time
has figured out a way to avoid dying
always pulls me up by the reins and settles me down
by a roadside, grateful for the sweet weeds
and the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers.
So many reminders of my mortality
here, there, and elsewhere, visible at every hour,
pretty much everything I can think of except you,
sign over the door of this bar in Cocoa Beach
proclaiming that it was established—
though established does not sound right—in 1996.
The Guest
I know the reason you placed nine white tulips
in a glass vase with water
here in this room a few days ago
was not to mark the passage of time
as a fish would have if nailed by the tail
to the wall above the bed of a guest.
But early this morning I did notice
their lowered heads
in the gray light,
two of them even touching the glass
table top near the window,
the blossoms falling open
as they lost their grip on themselves,
and my suitcase only half unpacked by the door.
Gold
I don’t want to make too much of this,
but because the bedroom faces east
across a lake here in Florida,
when the sun begins to rise
and reflects off the water,
the whole room is suffused with the kind
of golden light that might travel
at dawn on the summer solstice
the length of a passageway in a megalithic tomb.
but it reminds me of a brand of light
that could illuminate the walls
of a hidden chamber full of treasure,
pearls and gold coins overflowing the silver platters.
I feel like comparing it to the fire
that Aphrodite lit in the human eye
so as to make it possible for us to perceive
the other three elements,
but the last thing I want to do
is risk losing your confidence
by appearing to lay it on too thick.
Let’s just say that the morning light here
would bring to any person’s mind
the rings of light that Dante
deploys in the final cantos of the Paradiso
to convey the presence of God,
while bringing the Divine Comedy
to a stunning climax and leave it at that.
Genesis
It was late, of course,
just the two of us still at the table
working on a second bottle of wine
when you speculated that maybe Eve came first
and Adam began as a rib
that leaped out of her side one paradisal afternoon.
Could be, I remember saying,
because much was possible back then,
and I mentioned the talking snake
and the giraffes sticking their necks out of the ark,
their noses up in the pouring Old Testament rain.
I like a man with a flexible mind, you said then,
lifting your candle-lit glass to me
and I raised mine to you and began to wonder
what life would be like as one of your ribs—
to be with you all the time,
riding under your blouse and skin,
caged under the soft weight of your breasts,
your favorite rib, I am assuming,
if you ever bothered to stop and count them
which is just what I did later that night
after you had fallen asleep
and we were fitted tightly back to front,
your long legs against the length of mine,
my fingers doing the crazy numbering that comes of love.
Horoscopes for the Dead
Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the newspaper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.
Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals,
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.
Another day, I learn that you should not miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.
I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.
A dramatic rise in income may be a reason
to treat yourself, but that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.
But you will be relieved to learn
that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back seat
to the business responsibilities that you never really had.
And
don’t worry today or any day
about problems caused by your unwillingness
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more romance,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.
So leave it up to me now
to plan carefully for success and the wealth it may bring,
to value the dear ones close to my heart,
and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way
though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.
I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the same clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.
And you stay just as you are,
lying there in your beautiful blue suit,
your hands crossed on your chest
like the wings of a bird who has flown
in its strange migration not north or south
but straight up from earth
and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.
Hell
I have a feeling that it is much worse
than shopping for a mattress at a mall,
of greater duration without question,
and there is no random pitchforking here,
no licking flames to fear,
only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.
Yet wandering past the jovial kings,
the more sensible queens,
and the cheerless singles
no satin sheet will ever cover,
I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno,
which I could fully bring to mind
and recite in English or even Italian
if the salesman who has been following us—
a crumpled pack of Newports
visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—
would stop insisting for a moment
that we test this one, then this softer one,
which we do by lying down side by side,
arms rigid, figures on a tomb,
powerless to imagine what it would be like
to sleep or love this way
under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,
which Dante would have surely included
had he lain on his back between us here today.
A Question About Birds
I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,
and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John Audubon might have wandered
through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,
and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?
Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?
Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?
Watercoloring
The sky began to tilt,
a shift of light toward the higher clouds,
so I seized my brush
and dipped my little cup in the stream,
but once I streaked the paper gray
with a hint of green,
water began to slide down the page,
rivulets looking for a river.
And again, I was too late—
then the sky made another turn,
this time as if to face a mirror
held in the outstretched arm of a god.
Poem on the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Trinity School
When a man asked me to look back three hundred years
Over the hilly landscape of America,
I must have picked up the wrong pen,
The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.
So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse
Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,
A sight we might have seen so many years ago—
Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace—
Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,
The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,
Which I climbed and then could see even more,
A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.
The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,
And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,
Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,
Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without bridges.
And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,
Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,
Three hundred of them, one for every school year
Walking single-file over the decades into the present.
I thought of the pages they had filled
With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,
The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,
The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.
And then I heard their singing, all those voices
Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years
Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,
History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.
The Chairs That No One Sits In
You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone
sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.
Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.
It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.
The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,
the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.
Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne
Every reader loves the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.
And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.
But after a few steps into stanza number two,
wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes,
I can feel the first one begin to fade
like the puffs of sky-written letters on a windy day.
And by the time I have taken in the third,
the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,
a wavering line of acrid smoke.
So it’s not until I leave the house
and walk three times around this hidden lake
that the poem begins to show
any interest in walking by my side.
Then, after my circling,
better than the courteous dominion
of her being all states and him all princes,
better than love’s power to shrink
the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,
and better even than the compression
of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas
is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,
testing the plank of every line,
it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.
My Unborn Children
…of all your children,
only those who were born.
—Wislawa Szymborska
I have so many of them I sometimes lose track,
several hundred last time I counted
but that was years ago.
I remember one was made of marble