is the first time the Germans took her to the river.
Small figures appeared in the distance. Drifted
silently across the desert, slowly through the blur
of the heat. Soon she could see how young they were.
A few riding on horses. All discarding their clothes
as they got closer to the water. Wading, swimming
across. The black horses splashing. Stopping
in a ragged line, waiting to be chosen
for the later choosing. Mostly now she dreams
of those motionless figures in the powerful emptiness.
Wordless, shining, staring at her out of their blank faces.
MICHIKO DEAD
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
GHOSTS
I heard a noise this morning and found two old men
leaning on the wall of my vineyard, looking out
over the fields, silent. Went back to my desk
until somebody raised the trap door of the well.
It was the one with the cane, looking down inside.
But I was annoyed when the locked door rattled where
the grain and wine were. Went to the kitchen window
and stared at him. He said something in Greek.
I spread my arms to ask what he was doing.
He explained about growing up out there long ago.
That now they were making a little walk among
the old places. Telling it with his hands.
He made a final gesture, rubbing the side
of the first finger against that of the other hand.
I think it meant how much he felt about being here
again. We smiled, even though he was half blind.
Later, my bucket banged and I saw the heavy one
pulling up water. He cleaned the mule’s stone basin
carefully with his other hand. Put back a rock
for the doves to stand on and poured in fresh water.
Stayed there, touching the old letters cut in the marble.
I watched them go slowly down the lane and out
of sight. They did not look back. As I typed,
I listened for the dog at each farm to tell me
which house they went to next. But the dogs did not
bark all the way down the long bright valley.
HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS
We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can.
MAN AT A WINDOW
He stands there baffled by pleasure and how little
it counts. The long woman is finally asleep on the bed,
the sweat beautiful on her New England nakedness.
It was while he was walking toward the shuttered window
with sunlight blazing behind it that something
important happened. He looks down through the gap
between the shutters at the Romans and late summer
in the via del Corso, trying to find a name for it,
knowing it is not love. Nor tenderness. He considers
other times just after, the random intensity sliding away,
unrecoverable. It is the sorrow that stays clear.
This specialness inside his spirit is bonded to
each minor shift of his body traced out the bones
with agony, making his skeleton more and more clear
inside him. As though floodlit. He remembers
the intricate way he would lift his arm from the bed
in the hospital, turning his hand cautiously this way
and that to find the bearable paths through the air,
discovering an inch here and there where the pain
was missing. Or the cold and hunger as he walked
the alleys all night that winter down by the docks
of Genoa until each dawn, when he held the hot bowls
of tripe in his numb hands, the steam rising into his face
as he drank, the tears mixing with happiness. He opens
the shutters, and the shutters of the other window,
so the Mediterranean light can get to her. Desperately
trying to break the code while there is still time.
SONATINA
She told about when the American soldiers
came to the island. How the spirits would cling
to the wire fence and watch their bigness
and blondness, often without shirts, working
in the sunlight. So different from reality.
So innocent and laughing, as though it were
simple to be happy and kind. And their smell!
They had a smell that made the spirits shiver
and yearn to be material. She said that
the spirits would push long thin poles,
ivory in the moonlight, silently through
the fence, trying to touch the whiteness
those sleeping men had around their hearts.
FORAGING FOR WOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN
The wild up here is not creatures, wooded,
tangled wild. It is absence wild.
Barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild.
Only the smell of weeds and hot air.
But a place where differences are clear.
Between the mind’s severity and its harshness.
Between honesty and the failure of belief.
A man said no person is educated who knows
only one language, for he cannot distinguish
between his thought and the English version.
Up here he is translated to a place where it is
possible to discriminate between age and sorrow.
IN UMBRIA
Once upon a time I was sitting outside the café
watching twilight in Umbria when a girl came
out of the bakery with the bread her mother wanted.
She did not know what to do. Already bewildered
by being thirteen and just that summer a woman,
she now had to walk past the American.
But she did fine. Went by and around the corner
with style, not noticing me. Almost perfect.
At the last instant could not resist darting a look
down at her new breasts. Often I go back
to that dip of her head when people talk
about this one or that one of the great beauties.
CONCEIVING HIMSELF
Night after night after hot night in the clearing.
Stars, odor of damp grass, the faint sound of waves.
The palm trees around hardly visible, and the smell
of the jungle beyond. Hour after hour of the drumming
on bells, while young girls danced elegantly in their
heavy golden costumes. Afterward, groping his way
back along the dirt paths through blackness, dazed
by the trembling music, the dancing, and their hands.
(Pittsburgh so long ago. The spoor of someone inside
him. Knowing it sometimes waiting for a train in snow,
or just a moment while eating figs in a stony field.)
One evening the rain spilled down and he ran into
the tent behind the altar, where dancers and musicians
crowded together in the unnatural light of a Coleman
lantern: the girls undressing, rain in their hair,
the delicate faces still painted, their teeth white
as they laughed. None speaking English, their language
impossible. The man finally backstage in his life.
CHASTITY
A boy sits on the porch of a wooden house,
reading War and Peace.
Down below, it is Sunday afternoon in August.
The street is deserted except
for the powerful sun. There is a sound,
and he looks. At the bottom of the long
flight of steps, a man has fallen.
The boy gets up, not wanting to.
All year he has thought about honesty,
and he sits down. Two people finally come
and call the ambulance.
But too late. When everybody is gone,
he reads some pages, and stops.
Sits a moment, turns back to the place,
and starts again.
ME AND CAPABLANCA
The sultry first night of July, he on the bed
reading one of Chandler’s lesser novels.
What he should be doing is in the other room.
Today he began carrying wood up from the valley,
already starting on winter. He closes the book
and goes naked into the pitch pines and the last
half-hour of the dark. Rain makes a sound
on the birches and a butternut tree. There is not
enough time left to use it for dissatisfaction.
Often it is hard to know when the middle game
is over and the end game beginning, the pure part
that is made more of craft than it is of magic.
A GHOST SINGS, A DOOR OPENS
Maybe when something stops, something lost in us
can be heard, like the young woman’s voice that
seemed to come from an upstairs screened porch.
There were no lights in the house, nor in the other
houses, at almost one o’clock. The muffled sweet
moans changed as she changed from what she was not
into the more she was. The small panting became
the gasping. Never getting loud but growing
ever more evident in the leafy summer street.
Whimpers and keening, a perishing, then nothing.
In the silence, the man outside began to unravel,
maybe altering. Maybe altering more than that.
I IMAGINE THE GODS
I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.
THINKING ABOUT ECSTASY
Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wants to know delight as the native land he is.
NIGHT SONGS AND DAY SONGS
Light is too bare, too simple for her. She has lived
in the darkness so long, she prefers it. Sits among
the shrubs in the woods at night, singing of Orpheus,
who sings prettily but innocently. She knows we are
rendered by time, by pain and desire, so makes a home
always in the present. He still dotes on what was lost
and the losing of it, his cracked voice singing of his
young voice singing about love. The dark has derived
an excitement from her. Eurydice sings of passion
as a foreign country. Says candles made from birds
and tigers, from tallow of fox and snake, burn with
a troubling radiance. Orpheus sings about the smell
of basil growing in the rusting five-gallon can
on the wall between his vineyard and the well.
Eurydice tells of animals searching each other
on the bed meanwhile, shameful and vibrant.
He sings of soup cooking in the dented pot.
Of how fine it was out there in the stony fields,
eating and grieving and solitary year after year.
EATING WITH THE EMPEROR
Sixteen years old, surrounded by beasts in the pens
at two in the morning. The animals invisible.
Clumsy sounds of their restlessness in the dark.
Touching them. Not for the risk, but for the clues.
Not for the danger. Searching into the difference,
and the smell of wildness all around. The stink
of yaks and hyenas, the wet breathing of buffalo.
There is no handbook, no map for his heart in there,
no atlas for his spirit ever. The only geography
we have is the storybooks of our childhood. We go
step by step, mouthful and handful at a time.
Is this an apple? Yes, it tastes like an apple.
The Bible says the good place is somewhere else.
This somewhere else is certainly not that one.
He had no hope of getting to what he seemed to be.
When I think of him among camels, tapirs, and
llamas,
it reminds me of the banquets of Japanese emperors.
Each dish of marvelous food was put in front of
the guest and, after a while, taken away untouched.
Course after course. I remember that youth I was
and wonder if it is the same way with the soul.
They never learned whether the emperor’s food was
just much better or if it was something beyond that.
We end up asking what our lives really tasted like.
PLAYING HOUSE
I found another baby scorpion today. Tiny,
exquisite, and this time without his mother.
Alone in a bag of onions. I wonder
what was between them, this mother and babe.
Does she grieve now someplace up there hanging
by her claws as she makes her way awkwardly
back and forth across my bamboo ceiling?
Is there a bewildered sound? Like the goat
calling her eaten kid for three long days.
Is there a thin, whispery voice I can’t hear
going back and forth? Which the Chinese Elm
hears. Which the grapes and ants, the spiders
and the rat I won’t let in hear. Or is it insectal?
The sound of apparatus? Did she feed him incidentally
beside her? Did they sleep unafraid? Merely alert?
Not needing to touch the other first?
BEYOND BEGINNINGS
How could he later on believe it was the best
time when his wife died unexpectedly
and he wandered every day among the trees, crying
for more than a year? He is still alone and poor
on the island with wildflowers waist-deep
around his stone hut. In June the wind will
praise the barley stretching all the way
to the mountain. Then it will be good
in the harvested fields, with the sun nailed
to the stony earth. Mornings will come and go
in the silence, the moon a heaven mediated
by owls in the dark. Is there a happiness
later on that is neither fierce nor reasonable?
A time when the heart is fresh again, and a time
after that when the heart is ripe? The Aegean