Where are you now? the one on the left says. With the ghosts.
I am with Gianna those two years in Perugia. Meeting secretly
in the thirteenth-century alleys of stone. Walking in the fields
through the spring light, she well dressed and walking in heels
over the plowed land. We are just outside the city walls
hidden under the thorny blackberry bushes and her breasts naked.
I am with her those many twilights in the olive orchards,
holding the heart of her as she whimpers. Now where are you?
he says. I am with Linda those years and years. In American
cities, in København, on Greek islands season after season.
Lindos and Monolithos and the other places. I am with Michiko
for eleven years, East and West, holding her clear in my mind
the way a native can hold all of his village at one moment.
Where are you now? he says. I am standing on myself the way
a bird sits in her nest, with the babies half asleep underneath
and the world all leaves and morning air. What do you want?
a blonde one asks. To keep what I already have, I say. You ask
too much, he says sternly. Then you are at peace, she says.
I am not at peace, I tell her. I want to fail. I am hungry
for what I am becoming. What will you do? she asks. I will
continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.
THE NEGLIGIBLE
I lie in bed listening to it sing
in the dark about the sweetness
of brief love and the perfection of loves
that might have been. The spirit cherishes
the disregarded. It is because the body continues
to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko
that her body is so clear in me after all this time.
There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine
on her spoon merging with faint sounds
in the distance of her rising from the bathwater.
THE LOST HOTELS OF PARIS
The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit hearts of women,
to go into their bodies so we feel
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we used to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.
FEATHERS OR LEAD
Him, she said, and him. They put us in the second car
and followed her back to the villa. Our fear slowly
faded during the weeks. Everyone was kind but busy.
We could go anywhere on the first floor
and on the grounds this side of the fence.
They decided on me and sent the other boy away.
Before I had only glimpsed her at the upper windows.
Now we ate together at opposite ends of the table.
Candlelight eased her age, but not her guilt.
Once she said the world was an astonishing animal:
light was its spirit and noise was its mind.
That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.
Another time she warned me about walking on the lawns
at night. Told me of heavy birds that flew after dark
croaking, “Feathers or lead, stone or fire?”
Mounting people who gave the wrong answer and riding
them like horses across the whole county, beating them
with their powerful wings. We would play cards
silently on rainy days, and have sardine sandwiches
at four in the morning, taking turns reading aloud
from Tolstoy. “What need do we have for consulates?”
she said once before going upstairs, the grand room
beginning to fill with the dawn. “Why insist
on nature? A flower must be red or white, but we
can be anything. Our victories are difficult
because the triumph is not in possessing excellence.
It is found in reluctance.” Month after month
we lived like that. And with me telling her
what it was like out there among the living.
She was steadily failing, like a Palladian palace
coming apart gracefully. The last morning she stood
by the tall windows. “I will not give you my blessing,”
she said, “and I refuse you also my reasons. Who are you,
who is anyone to make me just?” When they came for her,
she smiled at me and said, “At last.”
WHAT PLENTY
Hitting each other. Backing up
and hitting each other again
in the loud silence of the stars
and the roar of their headlights.
Trying to force feeling and squeezing
out pain. Eden built of iron and grit.
Arcades fashioned entirely of guilt.
Paradise of loss, of lipsticked nipples,
lying to children about the soul.
Dead women stuffed with flowers.
Abandoned cabs in empty streets
not listening to the red lights,
yellow nor green.
THE GARDEN
We come from a deep forest of years
into a valley of an unknown country
called loneliness. Without horse or dog,
the heavens bottomless overhead.
We are like Marco Polo who came back
with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.
A sweet sadness, a tough happiness.
This beginner cobbles together a kind of house
and makes lentil soup there night
after night. Sits on the great stone
that is a threshold, smelling pine trees
in the hot darkness. When the moon rises
between the tall trunks, he sings without
talent but with pleasure. Then goes inside
to make courtesy with his dear ghosts.
In the morning, he watches the two nuthatches,
the pair of finches with their new son.
And the chickadees. There are chipmunks
in the afternoon finding seeds between
his fingers with their exquisite hands.
He visits his misbegotten garden where
the mint and chives flourish alongside
the few stunted tomatoes and eggplants.
They are scarce because of ignorance.
He wonders all the time where
he has arrived, why so much has been
allowed him (even rain on the leaves
of sugar maples), and why there is
even now so much to come.
MUSIC IS IN THE PIANO
ONLY WHEN IT IS PLAYED
We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
&nb
sp; as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices
of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells,
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise underway in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.
WINNING ON THE BLACK
The silence is so complete he can hear
the whispers inside him. Mostly names
of women. Women gone or dead. The ones
we loved so easily. What is it, he wonders,
that we had then and don’t have now,
that we once were and are no longer.
It seemed natural to be alive back then.
Soon there will be only the raccoon’s
tracks in the snow down by the river.
REFUSING HEAVEN
The old women in black at early Mass in winter
are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes
they have seen Christ. They make the kernel
of his being and the clarity around it
seem meager, as though he needs girders
to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.
Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges
across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills
along the banks where he became a young man
as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
The silver is worn down to the brass underneath
and is the better for it. He will gauge
by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.
He is like an old ferry dragged onto the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.
THE FRIENDSHIP INSIDE US
Why the mouth? Why is it the mouth we put to mouth
at the final moments? Why not the famous groin?
Because the groin is far away.
The mouth is close up against the spirit.
We couple desperately all night before setting out
for years in prison. But that is the body’s goodbye.
We kiss the person we love last thing before
the coffin is shut, because it is our being
touching the unknown. A kiss is the frontier in us.
It is where the courting becomes the courtship,
where the dancing ends and the dance begins.
The mouth is our chief access to the intimacy
in which she may reside. Her mouth is the porch
of the brain. The forecourt of the heart.
The way to the mystery enthroned. Where we meet
momentarily amid the seraphim and the powers.
A THANKSGIVING DANCE
His spirit dances the long ago, and later.
Starlight on a country road in worn-out
western Pennsylvania. The smell of weeds
and rusting iron. And gladness.
His spirit welcomes the Italian New Year’s
in a hill town filled with the music
of glass crashing everywhere in the cobbled
streets. Champagne and the first kisses.
Too shy to look at each other and no language
between them. He dances alone, the dance
of after that. Now they sit amid the heavy
Roman sunlight and talk of the people
they are married to now. He secretly
dances the waltz she was in her astonishing
beauty, drinking wine and laughing, the window
behind her filled with winter rain.
HORSES AT MIDNIGHT WITHOUT A MOON
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.
IMMACULATE
For Michiko
The brain is dead and the body is
Now it is just machines talking
to the machine. Helping it back
to its old, pure journey.
MOREOVER
We are given the trees so we can know
what God looks like. And rivers
so we might understand Him. We are allowed
women so we can get into bed with the Lord,
however partial and momentary that is.
The passion, and then we are single again
while the dark goes on. He lived
in the Massachusetts woods for two years.
Went out naked among the summer pines
at midnight when the moon would allow it.
He watched the aspens when the afternoon breeze
was at them. And listened to rain
on the butternut tree near his window.
But when he finally left, they did not care.
The difficult garden he was midwife to
was indifferent. The eight wild birds
he fed through both winters, when the snow
was starving them, forgot him immediately.
And the three women he ate of and entered
utterly then and before, who were his New World
as immensity and landfall, are now only friends
or dead. What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.
A KIND OF DECORUM
It is burden enough that death lies on all sides,
that your old kimono is still locked in my closet.
Now I wonder what would happen if my life did
catch on fire again. Would I break in half,
part of me a storm and part like ice in a silver bowl?
I lie
awake remembering the birds of Kyoto
calling No No, unh unh. No No, unh unh. And you
saying yes all night. You said yes when I woke you
again in the dawn. And even disgracefully
at lunchtime. Until all the men at the small inn
roamed about, hoping to see whoever that voice was.
The Buddha tells us we should clear every obstacle
out of the way. “If you meet your mother in the path,
kill her. If the Buddha gets in the way, kill him.”
But my spirit sings like the perishing cicadas
while I sit in the back yard hitting an old pot.
A WALK BLOSSOMING
The spirit opens as life closes down.
Tries to frame the size of whatever God is.
Finds that dying makes us visible.
Realizes we must get to the loin of that
before time is over. The part of which
we are the wall around. Not the good or evil,
neither death nor afterlife but the importance
of what we contain meanwhile. (He walks along
remembering, biting into beauty,
the heart eating into the naked spirit.)
The body is a major nation, the mind is a gift.
Together they define substantiality.
The spirit can know the Lord as a flavor
rather than power. The soul is ambitious
for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.
FARMING IN SECRET
They piled the bound angels with the barley
in the threshing ring and drove the cow
and donkeys over them all day. Threw the mix
into the wind from the sea to separate
the blond grain from the gold of what
had been. It burned in the luminous air.
When the night came, the mound of chaff
was almost higher than the farmhouse. But there
were only eight sacks of the other.
DECEMBER NINTH, 1960
Walked around Bologna at three in the morning.
Beautiful, arcaded, deserted piazza and winter rain.
Got the train at five of four. Slept badly
in a hot compartment, curled up on my half