Darkened by evening shadows,
I spent my childhood on a cross
In a yard full of weeds,
White butterflies, and white chickens.
War
The trembling finger of a woman
Goes down the list of casualties
On the evening of the first snow.
The house is cold and the list is long.
All our names are included.
A Book Full of Pictures
Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.
There was a black raincoat
in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother’s long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head just then.
The pages I turned sounded like wings.
“The soul is a bird,” he once said.
In my book full of pictures
A battle raged: lances and swords
Made a kind of wintry forest
With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.
Evening Walk
You give the appearance of listening
To my thoughts, O trees,
Bent over the road I am walking
On a late-summer evening
When every one of you is a steep staircase
The night is slowly descending.
The high leaves like my mother’s lips
Forever trembling, unable to decide,
For there’s a bit of wind,
And it’s like hearing voices,
Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,
A huge dark mouth we can all fit in
Suddenly covered by a hand.
Everything quiet. Light
Of some other evening strolling ahead,
Long-ago evening of silk dresses,
Bare feet, hair unpinned and falling.
Happy heart, what heavy steps you take
As you follow after them in the shadows.
The sky at the road’s end cloudless and blue.
The night birds like children
Who won’t come to dinner.
Lost children in the darkening woods.
Hotel Starry Sky
Millions of empty rooms with TV sets turned on.
I wasn’t there, but I saw everything.
Titanic sinking like a birthday cake on the screen.
Poseidon, the night clerk, blowing out the candles
one by one.
At three in the morning the gum machine in the lobby
With its cracked and defaced mirror
Is a new Madonna with her infant child
Wanting to know how much to tip the bellboy.
To Think Clearly
What I need is a pig and an angel.
The pig to stick his nose in a slop bucket,
The angel to scratch his back
And say sweet things in his ear.
The pig knows what’s in store for him.
Give him hope, angel child,
With that foreverness stuff.
Don’t go admiring yourself
In the butcher’s knife
As if it were a whore’s mirror,
Or tease him with a bloodstained apron
By raising it above your knees.
The pig has stopped eating
And stands among us thinking.
Already the crest of the rooster blazes
In the morning darkness.
He’s not crowing but his eyes are fierce
As he struts across the yard.
The Chair
This chair was once a student of Euclid.
The book of his laws lay on its seat.
The schoolhouse windows were open,
So the wind turned the pages
Whispering the glorious proofs.
The sun set over the golden roofs.
Everywhere the shadows lengthened,
But Euclid kept quiet about that.
Missing Child
You of the dusty, sun-yellowed picture
I saw twenty years ago
Inside the window of a dry-cleaning store,
I thought of you again tonight
Sitting by the window,
Watching the street,
As your mother must’ve done every night,
And still does, for all I know.
The sky cloudy, and now even
The rain beginning to fall
On the same old city, the same old street
With its padlocked, dimly lit store,
And your thin, pale face
Next to the poster for a firemen’s ball.
Marina’s Epic
The Eskimos were ravaging Peru,
Grandfather fought the Huns,
Mother sold firecrackers to Bedouins.
We were inmates of an orphanage in Kraków;
A prison in Panama;
A school for beggars in Genoa.
In Japan I was taught how to catch ghosts
With chopsticks.
In Amsterdam we saw a Christmas tree
In a whorehouse window.
My sister roamed French battlefields in World War I
Rescuing ladybugs.
She’d carry the shivering insect
Into a village church and leave it in care of a saint.
In Paris, we knew a Russian countess
Who scrubbed floors at the opera
With a red rose between her teeth.
Father played a dead man in a German movie.
It was silent. The piano player looked like
Edgar Allan Poe wearing a Moroccan fez.
On the back of a large suitcase
We sailed the stormy Atlantic one February
Taking turns to mend the rips in our grandmother’s
wedding dress,
We used as a sail.
The next thing we knew,
We were outside a pink motel in Arizona singing:
“We love you, life,
Even though you’re always laughing at us.”
One day, we joined some Tibetan monks.
They had a holy mountain
From which one could see all of Los Angeles.
A meal of Sardinian goat cheese, Greek olives,
Spanish wine and black Russian bread,
Because talking about the past makes one hungry.
In New York, the movie screens were as big as the pyramids.
Broadway was a river as wide as the Nile
Crowded with barges and pleasure boats
Carrying Cleopatras and her beaus for a night on the town.
We stood on the corner of Forty-second Street
Peddling vials of gypsy love potion and statues of African gods,
And waiting for General Washington
To ride by on his white horse and nod in our direction.
Lost Glove
Here’s a woman’s black glove.
It ought to mean something.
A thoughtful stranger left it
On the red mailbox at the corner.
Three days the sky was troubled,
Then today a few snowflakes fell
On the glove, which someone,
In the meantime, had turned over,
So that its fingers could close
A little . . . Not yet a fist.
So I waited, with the night coming.
Something told me not to move.
Here where flames rise from trash barrels,
And the homeless sleep standing up.
Romantic Sonnet
Evenings of sovereign clarity—
Wine and bread on the table,
Mother praying,
Father naked in bed.
Was I that skinny boy stretched out
In the field behind the house,
His heart cut out with a toy knife?
Was I the crow hovering over him?
Happiness, you are the bright red lining
Of the dark winter coat
Grief wears inside out.
This is about myself when I’m remembering,
And your long insomniac’s nails,
O Time, I keep chewing and chewing.
Beauty
I’m telling you, this was the real thing, the same one they kicked out of Aesthetics, told her she didn’t exist!
O you simple, indefinable, ineffable, and so forth. I like your black apron, and your new Chinese girl’s hairdo. I also like naps in the afternoon, well-chilled white wine, and the squabbling of philosophers.
What joy and happiness you give us each time you reach over the counter to take our money, so we catch a whiff of your breath. You’ve been chewing on sesame crackers and garlic salami, divine creature!
When I heard the old man, Plotinus, say something about “every soul wanting to possess you,” I gave him a dirty look, and rushed home to unwrap and kiss the pink ham you sliced for me with your own hand.
My Quarrel with the Infinite
I preferred the fleeting,
Like a memory of a sip of wine
Of noble vintage
On the tongue with eyes closed . . .
When you tapped me on the shoulder,
O light, unsayable in your splendor.
A lot of good you did to me.
You just made my insomnia last longer.
I sat rapt at the spectacle,
Secretly ruing the fugitive:
All its provisory, short-lived
Kisses and enchantments.
Here with the new day breaking,
And a single scarecrow on the horizon
Directing the traffic
Of crows and their shadows.
The Old World
for Dan and Jeanne
I believe in the soul; so far
It hasn’t made much difference.
I remember an afternoon in Sicily.
The ruins of some temple.
Columns fallen in the grass like naked lovers.
The olives and goat cheese tasted delicious
And so did the wine
With which I toasted the coming night,
The darting swallows,
The Saracen wind and moon.
It got darker. There was something
Long before there were words:
The evening meal of shepherds . . .
A fleeting whiteness among the trees . . .
Eternity eavesdropping on time.
The goddess going to bathe in the sea.
She must not be followed.
These rocks, these cypress trees,
May be her old lovers.
Oh to be one of them, the wine whispered to me.
Country Fair
for Hayden Carruth
If you didn’t see the six-legged dog,
It doesn’t matter.
We did and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.
She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.
VI
from A WEDDING IN HELL
Miracle Glass Co.
Heavy mirror carried
Across the street,
I bow to you
And to everything that appears in you,
Momentarily
And never again the same way:
This street with its pink sky,
Row of gray tenements,
A lone dog,
Children on rollerskates,
Woman buying flowers,
Someone looking lost.
In you, mirror framed in gold
And carried across the street
By someone I can’t even see,
To whom, too, I bow.
Late Arrival
The world was already here
Serene in its otherness.
It only took you to arrive
On the afternoon train
To where no one awaited you.
Because of its ordinariness
Where you lost your way
Searching for a place to stay
In a maze of identical streets.
It was then that you heard,
As if for the very first time,
The sound of your own footsteps
Passing a church clock
Which had stopped at one
On the corner of two streets
Emptied by the hot sun.
Two glimpses of the eternal
For you to wonder about
Before resuming your walk.
Tattooed City
I, who am only an incomprehensible
Bit of scribble
On some warehouse wall
Or some subway entrance.
Matchstick figure,
Heart pierced by arrow,
Scratch of a meter maid
On a parked hearse.
CRAZY CHARLIE in red spraypaint
Crowding for warmth
With other unknown divinities
In an underpass at night.
Dream Avenue
Monumental, millennial decrepitude,
As tragedy requires. A broad
Avenue with trash unswept,
A few solitary speck-sized figures
Going about their business
In a world already smudged by a schoolboy’s eraser.
You’ve no idea what city this is,
What country? It could be a dream,
But is it yours? You’re nothing
But a vague sense of loss,
A piercing, heart-wrenching dread
On an avenue with no name
With a few figures conveniently small
And blurred who, in any case,
Appear to have their backs to you
As they look elsewhere, beyond
The long row of gray buildings and their many windows,
Some of which appear broken.
Haunted Mind
Savageries to come,
Cities smelling of death already,
What idol will you worship,
Whose icy heart?
One cold Thursday night,
In a neighborhood dive,
I watched the Beast of War
Lick its sex on TV.
There were three other customers:
Mary sitting in old Joe’s lap,
Her crazy son in the corner
With arms spread wide over the pinball machine.
Paradise Motel
Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The president
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.
I lived well, but life was awful.
There were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other’s clothes
while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
A Wedding in Hell
They were pale like the stones on the meadow
The black sheep lick.
Pale stones like children in their Sunday clothes
Playing at bride and groom.
There we found a clock face with Roman numerals
In the old man’s overcoat pocket.
He kept looking at the sky without recognizing it,
And now it was time for a little rain to fall.