One does these things when nothing else makes sense,
feeling a giddy madness. The tree said nothing,
the cloudy shafts of sunlight stabbed, withdrew,
the cuckoo called from olives down below
its two comedic notes. I found the spring
and drank from it and washed the sweat from my face,
then turned back to the town where friends were waiting.
THE BAY OF WRITING
And I with only a reed in my hands.
—George Seferis
The reed, dried and cut, could make a pan-pipe
on an idle day. I say the word again,
kalamus, that early pen, from breezy
leaf to leaves of nervy writing—Sappho,
Archilochos, their fingering lines,
a silent music till our voices find it.
In retrospect I walk among those trees,
polled mulberries no longer home to silkworms,
the crone-like olives, upright cypresses
above the hammered metal of the bay
called Kalamitsi. There the lazy hours
watching the ant roads through the summer straw
taught me the frantic diligence of mind,
the way it ferries breadcrumbs and small seeds
fast fast to its storehouse in reedy shade.
The way the hand rests on an open book
I’ve disappeared into, takes up a pen
and traces letters in a trail of words.
Kalamus, Kalamitsi, bay of reeds,
music of everything I have not written.
FOGHORNS
The loneliest days,
damp and indistinct,
sea and land a haze.
And purple foghorns
blossomed over tides—
bruises being born
in silence, so slow,
so out there, around,
above and below.
In such hurts of sound
the known world became
neither flat nor round.
The steaming tea pot
was all we fathomed
of is and is not.
The hours were hallways
with doors at the ends
opened into days
fading into night
and the scattering
particles of light.
Nothing was done then.
Nothing was ever
done. Then it was done.
TREE LIGHT HOUSE
That slow familiar breathing
is the sea, I remember now,
and rain in the green limbs.
I dreamed your body
warm in the doona,
your unquestioning hands,
and woke to find you
fevered but alive
to be grateful for.
A cigarette lighter
fished from the surf
still lit the candles
at our little feast.
Night drew in
about the house
and when we fell
into bed the sea
erased our names.
The fever will not leave.
It will teach us waiting.
I write by the light of the trees,
by moss and salal,
the black flash of raven wings,
by the slow mist
salting the window,
rain on a neighbor’s roof
reflecting.
Is it a form of prayer
or relinquishment,
this wish to be turning
away from tasks,
from the road with its string
of identical malls?
To be feeling again
the original touch
of the world?
When I was sick
about the house all day
and brought me ginger ale.
That’s when I learned
by staying home from school
to live in the dream-time
as animals live
deeper in the world.
Your body heals itself
through fever,
the rasp of your cough
like surf over gravel.
Let me bring you tea,
let me feed you,
let me rock you
to the sweet
consolation of dreams.
We live high up in the trees
where bright green warblers rustle
and flit, songbeats in the light
and shadow. Where ravens sail
among the Sitka spruces
to rendezvous on branches.
We live in the breathing clock of the sea,
the whalesong of memory.
Wake me here. Lighten me.
THE BLUE OF THE BAY
What can be learned from the blue of the bay
I do not know, I cannot say,
the stone of the sand on the shore by the bay.
The bird on its back lying dead on the shore,
its breast torn open, its hollow core—
what more can be learned of the bird on the shore?
If someone is crying, I cannot hear,
and if I am crying inside I fear
no one will hear, no one will hear.
The moon held fast in the undertow.
I felt it pulling me, strong and slow,
the long withdrawing undertow,
and climbed on a barnacled rock by the sea,
the eelgrass wrapped around my knee,
my skin scrubbed raw by the cold cold sea.
If I can sleep I will dream of the day
drowning the hours in the deep blue bay,
the stone of the sand on the shore by the bay.
SEA SALT
Light dazzles from the grass
over the carnal dune.
This too shall come to pass,
but will it happen soon?
A kite nods to its string.
A cloud is happening
above the tripping waves,
joined by another cloud.
They are a crowd that moves.
The sky becomes a shroud
cut by a blade of sun.
There’s nothing to be done.
The soul, if there’s a soul
moves out to what it loves,
whatever makes it whole.
The sea stands still and moves,
denoting nothing new,
deliberating now.
The days are made of hours,
hours of instances,
and none of them are ours.
The sand blows through the fences.
Light darkens on the grass.
This too shall come to pass.
from ARRIVALS 2004
THE CITY
From the Greek of C. P. Cavafy
You said: “I’ll go away to another shore.
find another city better than this.
In all I attempt, something remains amiss
and my heart—like a dead thing—lies buried.
How long will my mind stew in all its worry?
Wherever I cast my eye, wherever I look,
I see the ruins of my life going black
here where I wasted and wrecked so many a year.”
You won’t find a new land or another shore.
This city will follow you, you’ll molder
in these streets, in these neighborhoods grow older,
and turn gray among familiar houses.
You’ll always end here—don’t hope for other places.
There is no ship, there is no road for you.
Now that you have decided you are through
with this place, you’ve wrecked your life everywhere.
GULLS IN THE WAKE
Late in our journey from the pier at Kos,
I had come up for air. Most passengers
had found their bunks or drunk t
in the comfy bar. Adrift and floodlit,
I let suspended time wash over me,
its kitchen smells, salt wind and plodding engines,
as two guys swinging beer cans walked the deck,
singing the liturgy. Christ is risen!
Drunken, genuinely happy, they waved
across cool space at constellated lights
of villages, and greeted me, a stranger.
I answered, Truly He is risen, though
I don’t believe it. Not risen for this world.
Not here. Not now.
Then I heard cadences
of priestly chanting from an Athens church
broadcast to any pilgrim still awake.
Who could explain an unbeliever’s joy
as rockets flared from the coast near Sounion
and music ferried death to life out there,
untethered in the dark?
And that was when I saw them—ghostly, winged,
doggedly following outside our light,
hopeful without a thought of hope, feeding
or diving to feed in waves I could not see.
KALAMITSI
A path I had not walked for sixteen years,
now almost hidden under rain-soaked grass
so even the locals told me it was gone,
but two steps down where it rounded the bay
and I was back. My heart beat all the faster.
Though half the olive trees had been cut down
the stone wall stood, the gate, the little house
looking as if no one ever lived there,
the cool spring where I dipped a pot for water
hidden by bramble mounds, the cistern greening.
I stiffly climbed the gate (now chained and locked)
and walked the point of land and knew each tree—
nothing but private memories, after all.
It wasn’t the loss of time or friends that moved me
but the small survivals I was here to mark.
I had come through to see this much again,
and that plank bench under a cypress tree
where I had placed it all those years ago
to soak up shade on summer afternoons—
only a small plank bench, but quite enough.
PELICANS AND GREEKS
Edward Lear in San Remo, Italy, 1888
Nights when he cannot sleep, Lear looks for paper,
uncertain whether he should sketch or write,
or whether his living friends might comprehend
his travels off the rough and tumble roads.
As soon as I picked up my pen I felt
I was dying.
And should he then have married?
On such long nights, lines from the laureate
chase through his brain like notes flung off the scale—
an infant with no language but a cry . . .
What of Bassaë, the temple on the mountain,
the thickened oaks still stretching out their arms
to sunlight he had tried to catch in oils?
Who owned that painting now? How could one own
the love that lay behind it? All the years
and all the travels must mean little more
than light that dies along the temple flutings.
Laden with lunch, the drawing boards and paints,
Georgis played Sancho Panza to his knight.
Dear Georgis—you who witnessed wonders with me . . .
Spoken to nothing but an empty room.
On Crete a black man came, and little boy,
and peasants, and I drew them. They were all
good-tempered, laughing. I remember how
the small boy saw my drawing of a donkey
and almost cried and was impelled to give me
lemons as a gift. I gave him a pencil.
A gesture I can’t forget, ingenuous
and awkward like the play of pelicans—
the ordinary beauty of the world
that makes one jubilate in sheer delight
and shudder when we feel life leaving us.
In India an English schoolgirl came
to meet the painter, having memorized
“The Owl and the Pussycat.” Such was fame.
And there was Georgis who was mad again
because he could not ride an elephant.
And there were mountains higher than the ones
he loved in Crete and Thessaly. They too
compelled the draughtsman’s longing not to lose
minute sensations he had drawn upon,
fleabags and palaces, pelicans and Greeks.
If no one bought my drawings I should live
on figs in summertime, worms in winter,
with olive trees and onions, a parrot,
yes, and two hedgehogs for companionship,
a painting room with absolute north light . . .
So many friends are gone. No partner frets
that he cannot sleep, no child arrives to scold him.
He is the sum of all that he has lost,
his hand still dreaming on the empty page.
MUMBAI
The crowd’s no apparition on Nehru Road,
nor the grit of motor rickshaws on Nehru Road.
Nor the steady pace of people, raga, rock,
and all the unheard music of Nehru Road.
Nor the flowers, the fruit, bowls of sacred colors,
the goats and cows that stroll down Nehru Road.
The tiffin wallahs, internet cafés,
the dogs that lick the pavement of Nehru Road.
The girls with perfect skin who wear their saris
with a demigoddess air on Nehru Road.
The crones who squat, the beggars, and the boy
washing himself from a pail on Nehru Road.
Commuters lean for air from open doors
as the long train leaves the stop on Nehru Road.
Mason, you’ve come to the other side of the world—
why can’t you lose yourself on Nehru Road?
AGNOSTOS TOPOS
We had walked a whole day on high ridges
somewhere between the heat-struck sea and peaks,
each breath a desert in a traveler’s lungs,
salt-stung, dusty, like summer’s rasping grass
and the roughness of stone. Biblical thorns
penned us, while the stunted ilex trees
shadowed the path. It seemed from these dour fields
we could not emerge on anything like a road.
A landscape no one had commodified
or fenced. If there were gardens here
the poverty of soil defeated them.
If there were homes beyond some goatherd’s hut
the gravity of ages pulled them down.
No sound but cicadas like high-pitched drills
ringing till red sunlight hissed into the sea.
And that was when, our shins scratched and throats parched,
we stumbled into a village on the shore
where people, stupefied by days upon days
that were the same, told us what to call this place.
The distance to a road? Two cigarettes,
said the old man who sat webbing his net.
Now the road cuts down from cliffs above.
I’ve been back, bought wine from the old man’s son
who keeps his car parked in an olive’s shade.
It’s better, of course, that one can come and go.
One needn’t stare a lifetime at hot cliffs,
thinking them impassable except to goats
and men whose speech and features grew like thorns.
The old man’s dead. The friends I traveled with
are long since out of touch, and I’ll admit
I’ve lost much of a young man’s nimbleness.
I call these passing years agnostos topos,
unknown country, a place of panting lizards.
Yet how like home it seemed when I walked down
out of the unfenced hills, thirsty, footsore,
with words of greeting for the fisherman.
THE COLLECTOR’S TALE
When it was over I sat down last night,
shaken, and quite afraid I’d lost my mind.
The objects I have loved surrounded me
like friends in such composed society
they almost rid the atmosphere of fright.
I collected them, perhaps, as one inclined
to suffer other people stoically.
That’s why, when I found Foley at my door—
not my shop, but here at my private home,
the smell of bourbon for his calling card—
I sighed and let him in without a word.
I’d only met the man two months before
and found his taste as tacky as they come,
his Indian ethic perfectly absurd.
The auction house in St. Paul where we met
was full that day of cherry furniture.
I still can’t tell you why he’d chosen me
to lecture all about his Cherokee
obsessions, but I listened—that I regret.
My patience with a stranger’s geniture
compelled him to describe his family tree.
He told me of his youth in Oklahoma,
his white father who steered clear of the Rez,
a grandma native healer who knew herbs
for every illness. Nothing like the ’burbs,
I guess. He learned to tell a real tomahawk
from a handsaw, or lift his half-mad gaze
and “entertain” you with some acid barbs.
So he collected Indian artifacts,
the sort that sell for thousands in New York.
Beadwork, war shirts, arrowheads, shards of clay