Verging on the dark,
About that day’s tragedies
Which supposedly are not
Tragedies in the absence of
Figures endowed with
Classic nobility of soul.
Early Evening Algebra
The madwoman went marking X’s
With a piece of school chalk
On the backs of unsuspecting
Hand-holding, homebound couples.
It was winter. It was dark already.
One could not see her face
Bundled up as she was and furtive.
She went as if windswept, as if crow-winged.
The chalk must have been given to her by a child.
One kept looking for him in the crowd,
Expecting him to be very pale, very serious,
Carrying a book or two in his hand.
Ever So Tragic
Heart—as in Latin pop songs
Blaring from the pool hall radio.
The air had thickened, the evening air.
He took off his white shirt.
The heart, one could mark it
With lipstick on a bare chest,
The way firing-squad commanders mark it.
He was reading in the papers
About the artificial heart.
The same plastic they use for wind-up toys,
She thought. More likely
Like an old wheelbarrow to push:
Heart of stone, knife grinder’s
Stone . . .
Later
It was raining and they got into bed.
O desire, O futile hope, O sighs!
In coal miner’s pit and lantern:
The heart, the bright red heart . . .
Didn’t the blind man just call
His little dog that?
Hearts make haste, hasten on!
For the Sake of Amelia
Tending a cliff-hanging Grand Hotel
In a country ravaged by civil war.
My heart as its only bellhop.
My brain as its Chinese cook.
It’s a rundown seaside place
With a row of gutted limousines out front,
Monkeys and fighting cocks in the great ballroom,
Potted palm trees grown wild to the ceilings.
Amelia surrounded by her beaus and fortunetellers,
Painting her eyelashes and lips blue
In the hour of dusk with the open sea beyond,
The long empty beaches, the tide’s shimmer . . .
She pleading with me to check the ledgers,
Find out if Lenin stayed here once,
Buster Keaton, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote on love?
A hotel in which one tangos to a silence
Dark as cypresses in silent films . . .
In which children confide to imaginary friends . . .
In which pages of an important letter are flying . . .
But now a buzz from the suite with mirrors.
Amelia in the nude, black cotton over her eyes.
It seems there’s a fly
Pestering her lover’s Roman nose.
Night of distant guns, muffled and comfortable.
I am running with a flyswatter on a silver tray
Strewn with Turkish delights
And the Mask of Tragedy to cover her pubic hair.
At the Night Court
You’ve combed yourself carefully,
Your Honor, with a small fine-tooth comb
You then cleverly concealed
Before making your entrance
In the splendor of your black robes.
The comb tucked inside a handkerchief
Scented with the extract of dead roses—
While you took your high seat
In the hush of the empty courtroom.
The dark curly hairs in the comb
Did not come from your graying head.
One of the cleaning women used it on herself
While you dozed off in your chambers
Half undressed because of the heat.
The black comb in the pocket over the heart,
You feel it tremble just as ours do
When they ready themselves to make music
Lacking only the paper you’re signing,
By the looks of it, with eyes closed.
Dark Farmhouses
Windy evening,
China-blue snow,
The old people are shivering
In their kitchens.
Truck without lights
Idling on the highway,
Is it a driver you require?
Wait a bit.
There’s coal to load up,
A widow’s sack of coal.
Is it a shovel you need?
Idle on,
A shovel will come by and by
Over the darkening plain.
A shovel,
And a spade.
Popular Mechanics
The enormous engineering problems
You’ll encounter attempting to crucify yourself
Without helpers, pulleys, cogwheels,
And other clever mechanical contrivances—
In a small, bare, white room,
With only a loose-legged chair
To reach the height of the ceiling—
Only a shoe to beat the nails in.
Not to mention being naked for the occasion—
So that each rib and muscle shows.
Your left hand already spiked in,
Only the right to wipe the sweat with,
To help yourself to a butt
From the overflowed ashtray,
You won’t quite manage to light—
And the night coming, the clever night.
The Fly
He was writing the History of Optimism
In Time of Madness. It was raining.
One of the local butcher’s largest
Carrion fanciers kept pestering him.
There was a cat too watching the fly,
And a gouty-footed old woman
In a dirty bathrobe and frayed slippers
Bringing in a cup of pale tea.
With many sighs and long pauses
He found a bit of blue sky on the day of the Massacre of
the Innocents.
He found a couple of lovers,
A meadow strewn with yellow flowers . . .
But he couldn’t go on . . . O blue-winged, shivering one,
he whispered.
Some days it’s like using a white cane
And seeing mostly shadows
As one gropes for the words that come next!
Outside a Dirtroad Trailer
O exegetes, somber hermeneuts,
Ingenious untanglers of ambiguities,
A bald little man was washing
The dainty feet of a very fat woman.
In a chair under a soaring shade tree,
She kept giggling and shaking her huge breasts.
There was also a boy with glasses
Engrossed in a book of serious appearance.
One black sock drying on the line,
A parked hearse with trash cans in the back,
And a large flag hanging limp from the pole
On a day as yet unproclaimed as a holiday.
Dear Helen
There’s a thing in the world
I know nothing about it.
It just sounds cold and salty.
I think a salad of such cukes
Would be fine today.
I would have to dive for it, though,
Deep into the treacherous depths
While you mince the garlic
And sip the white wine
Into which the night is falling.
I should be back soon
With those lovely green vegetables
Out of the shark-infested sea.
Trees in the Open Country
for Jim
Like those who were eyewitnesses
to an enormity
And have since remained downcast
At the very spot,
Their shadows gradually lengthening
Into what look like canes, badly charred,
No choice but to lean on them eventually,
Together, and in a kind of reverie,
Awaiting the first solitary quip
From the maddeningly occulted birds,
Night birds bestirring themselves at last—
If you are still listening,
One has the impression the world
Is adamant on a matter of great importance,
And then—it isn’t anymore . . .
Unless it’s now the leaves’ turn to reply?
October Arriving
I only have a measly ant
To think with today.
Others have pictures of saints,
Others have clouds in the sky.
The winter might be at the door,
For he’s all alone
And in a hurry to hide.
Nevertheless, unable to decide
He retraces his steps
Several times and finds himself
On a huge blank wall
That has no window.
Dark masses of trees
Cast their mazes before him,
Only to erase them next
With a sly, sea-surging sound.
Ancient Autumn
Is that foolish youth still sawing
The good branch he’s sitting on?
Do the hills wheeze like old men
And the few remaining apples sway?
Can he see the village in the valley
The way a chicken hawk would?
Already smoke rises over the roofs,
The days are getting short and chilly.
Even he must rest from time to time,
So he’s lit a long-stemmed pipe
To watch a chimneysweep at work
And a woman pin diapers on the line
And then step behind some bushes,
Hike her skirt so her bare ass shows
While on the common humpbacked men
Roll a barrel of hard cider or beer,
And still beyond, past grazing cattle,
Children play soldier and march in step.
He thinks, if the wind changes direction,
He’ll hear them shouting commands,
But it doesn’t, so the black horseman
On the cobbled road remains inaudible.
One instant he’s coming his way,
In the next he appears to be leaving in a hurry . . .
It’s such scenes with their air of menace,
That make him muddled in the head.
He’s not even aware that he has resumed sawing,
That the big red sun is about to set.
Against Whatever It Is That’s Encroaching
Best of all is to be idle,
And especially on a Thursday,
And to sip wine while studying the light:
The way it ages, yellows, turns ashen
And then hesitates forever
On the threshold of the night
That could be bringing the first frost.
It’s good to have a woman around just then,
And two is even better.
Let them whisper to each other
And eye you with a smirk.
Let them roll up their sleeves and unbutton their shirts a bit
As this fine old twilight deserves,
And the small schoolboy
Who has come home to a room almost dark
And now watches wide-eyed
The grownups raise their glasses to him,
The giddy-headed, red-haired woman
With eyes tightly shut,
As if she were about to cry or sing.
First Frost
The time of the year for the mystics.
October sky and the Cloud of Unknowing.
The routes of eternity beckoning.
Sign and enigma in the humblest of things.
Master cobbler Jakob Boehme
Sat in our kitchen all morning.
He sipped tea and warned of the quiet
To which the wise must school themselves.
The young woman paid no attention.
Hair fallen over her eyes,
Breasts loose and damp in her robe,
Stubbornly scrubbing a difficult stain.
Then the dog’s bark brought us all outdoors,And that wasn’t just geese honking,
But Dame Julian of Norwich herself discoursing
On the marvelous courtesy and homeliness of the Maker.
Without a Sough of Wind
Against the backdrop
Of a twilight world
In which one has done so little
For one’s soul
She hangs a skirt
On the doorknob
Puts a foot on the chair
To take off a black stocking
And it’s good to have eyes
Just then for the familiar
Large swinging breasts
And the cleft of her ass
Before the recital
Of that long day’s
Woes and forebodings
In the warm evening
With the drone of insects
On the window screen
And the lit dial of a radio
Providing what light there is
Its sound turned much too low
To make out the words
Of what sounds like
A silly old love song
III
from THE WORLD DOESN’T END
My mother was a braid of black smoke.
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.
The sky was a vast and windy place for a child to play.
We met many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their overcoats with arms made of smoke.
The high heavens were full of little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars.
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.
It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.
She’s pressing me gently with a hot steam iron, or she slips her hand inside me as if I were a sock that needed mending. The thread she uses is like the trickle of my blood, but the needle’s sharpness is all her own.
“You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light,” her mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.
We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning in their beds. “These are dark and evil days,” the mouse told me as he nibbled my ear. Years passed. My mother wore a cat-fur collar which she stroked until its sparks lit up the cellar.
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving goodbye. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
“Everybody knows the story about me and Dr. Freud,” says my grandfather.
“We were in love with the same pair of black shoes in the window of the same shoe
store. The store, unfortunately, was always closed. There’d be a sign: DEATH IN THE FAMILY or BACK AFTER LUNCH, but no matter how long I waited, no one would come to open.
“Once I caught Dr. Freud there shamelessly admiring the shoes. We glared at each other before going our separate ways, never to meet again.”
He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail! Oh beards on fire, our doom appeared sealed. The buildings were tottering; the computer screens were as dark as our grandmother’s cupboard. We were too frightened to plead. Another century gone to hell—and for what? All because some people don’t know how to bring up their children.
It was the epoch of the masters of levitation. Some evenings we saw solitary men and women floating above the dark treetops. Could they have been sleeping or thinking? They made no attempt to navigate. The wind nudged them ever so slightly. We were afraid to speak, to breathe. Even the nightbirds were quiet. Later, we’d mention the little book clasped in the hands of the young woman, and the way that old man lost his hat to the cypresses.