of the seat. No real dawn. Beginning to see
a little into the mist. The looming mountain
brindled with snow. The higher pines crusted.
Oyster-white behind them. The train running along
a river between the hills. Mostly apple orchards
with occasionally pale apples still near the top.
Also vineyards. No feeling of Italy here.
No sense of the Umbrian peasants farming
with their white ocean. A tractor instead
putting out compost near an orchard with rotten
red squash gourds. Later another man standing
in the river with a long-handled net, looking
steadily down. Then the commuter line between
Bolzano and Merano. Changing pants on the toilet.
Checked my bag in the station and walked
to the center of the town. Hotels everywhere.
Mountain scenery in the summer, skiing in winter.
Went into the CIT and asked about Pound. (Because
the address had been left at home in Perugia.)
They said he was not there anymore. Went to
the tourist office. Herr Herschel said, yes, Pound
was still there. I came out chuckling, as though
I had been sly. Then, waiting for the first bus
to Tirolo. It leaves at ten-thirty. It’s supposed
to be a half hour’s walk from there.
NOT THE HAPPINESS BUT
THE CONSEQUENCE OF HAPPINESS
He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,
the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will
not hear his voice all day. He remembers what
the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.
The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking
about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense
of what is not. The January silence is the sound
of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding,
or the scraping calls of a single blue jay.
Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute.
Many days in the woods he wonders what it is
that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand
in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,
but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married
into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange
mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit.
He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying.
For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop
as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning
coldness of her head when he kissed her just after.
There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.
It is, he decides, a quality without definition.
How strange to discover that one lives with the heart
as one lives with a wife. Even after many years,
nobody knows what she is like. The heart has
a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,
is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably
after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late.
Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods,
leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.
INFIDELITY
She is never dead when he meets her.
They eat noodles for breakfast as usual.
For eleven years he thought it was the river
at the bottom of his mind dreaming.
Now he knows she is living inside him,
as the wind is sometimes visible
in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb
are in the garden and then not.
Her ashes are by the sea in Kamakura.
Her face and hair and sweet body still
in the old villa on a mountain where
she lived the whole summer. They slept
on the floor for eleven years.
But now she comes less and less.
THE REINVENTION OF HAPPINESS
I remember how I’d lie on my roof
listening to the fat violinist
below in the sleeping village
play Schubert so badly, so well.
LOOKING AT PITTSBURGH FROM PARIS
The boat of his heart is tethered to the ancient
stone bridges. Beached on the Pacific hills with
thick evening fog flooding whitely over the ridge.
Running in front of the Provençal summer. Drowned
Forever richly laden with Oak Street and Umbria.
“There be monsters,” they warn in the blank spaces
of the old maps. But the real danger is the ocean’s
insufficiency, the senseless repetition throughout
the empty waters. Calm and storms and calm again.
Too impoverished for the human. We come to know
ourselves as immense continents and archipelagoes
of endless bounty. He waits now in the hold
of a wooden ship. Becalmed, maybe standing to.
Bobbing, rocking softly. The cargo of ghosts
and angels all around. The wraiths, surprisingly,
singing with the clear voices of young boys.
The angels clapping the rhythm. As he watches
for morning, for the dark to give way and show
his landfall, the new country, his native land.
“MY EYES ADORED YOU”
For Kerry O’Keefe
She came into his life like arriving halfway
through a novel, with bits of two earlier lives
snagged in her. She was the daughter of
a deputy attorney general. And when
that crashed she tried singing and got married.
Now she is in trouble again, leaving soup
on his porch before really knowing him.
Saying she heard he had a bad cold, and besides
it was a tough winter. (It was like
his first wife who went to the department store
and bought a brass bed, getting a salesman
his size to lie down so she could see if it fit.
When she still knew him only at a distance.)
But when people grow up, they should know better.
You can’t call it romance when she already had
two children. He had decided never again to get
involved with love. Now everything
has gone wrong. She doesn’t just sing softly
up to his window. You can see them in the dark
upstairs, him singing badly and her not minding.
BEYOND PLEASURE
Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important
(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.
Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was
inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,
beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when
he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.
He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back
to what he knew then. Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.
DUENDE
I can’t remember her name.
It’s not as though I’ve been in bed
with that many women.
The truth is I can’t even remember
&
nbsp; her face. I kind of know how strong
her thighs were, and her beauty.
But what I won’t forget
is the way she tore open
the barbecued chicken with her hands,
and wiped the grease on her breasts.
THE GOOD LIFE
When he wakes up, a weak sun is just rising
over the side of the valley. It is eight
degrees below zero in the house.
He builds a fire and makes tea. Puts out seeds
for the birds and examines the tracks
in fresh snow, still trying to learn
what lives here. He is writing a poem
when his friend calls. She asks what
he plans to do today. To write some
letters, he tells her (because he is falling
behind in his project of writing one
every day for a month).
She tells him how many letters famous poets
write each day. Says she doesn’t mean
that as criticism. After they hang up,
he stands looking at the unanswered mail
heaped high on the table. Gets back
in bed and starts reworking his poem.
FLAT HEDGEHOGS
For Isaiah Berlin
When the hedgehogs here at night
see a car and its fierce lights
coming at them, they do the one
big thing they know.
PROSPERO LISTENING TO THE NIGHT
The intricate vast process has produced
a singularity which lies in darkness
hearing the small owls, a donkey snorting
in the barley field, and frogs down near
the cove. What he is listening to is
the muteness of the dog at each farm
in the valley. Their silence means no
lover is abroad nor any vagrant looking
for where to sleep. But there is a young
man, very still, under the heavy grapes
in another part of Heaven. There are still
women hoping behind the dark windows
of farmhouses. Like he can hear himself not
hearing Verdi. What else don’t the dogs know?
THE END OF PARADISE
When the angels found him sitting in the half light
of his kerosene lamp eating lentils, his eyes widened.
But all he said was could he leave a note. The one
wearing black looked at the one in red who shrugged,
so he began writing, desperately. Wadded the message
into an envelope and wrote Anna on the front. Quickly
began another, shoulders hunched, afraid of them.
Finished and wrote Pimpaporn on it. Began a third
one and the heavy angel growled. “I have Schubert,”
the man offered, turning on the tape. The one in black
said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”
When the ink ran out, the man whimpered and struggled
to the table piled with books and drafts. He finished
again and scrawled Suzanne across it. The one in red
growled again and the man said he would put on his shoes.
When they took him out into the smell of dry vetch
and the ocean, he began to hold back, pleading:
“I didn’t put the addresses! I don’t want them to think
I forgot.” “It doesn’t matter,” the better angel said,
“they have been dead for years.”
THE LOST WORLD
Think what it was like, he said. Peggy Lee and Goodman
all the time. Carl Ravazza making me crazy
with “Vieni Su” from a ballroom in New Jersey
every night, the radio filling my dark room
in Pittsburgh with naked-shouldered women
in black gowns. Helen Forrest and Helen O’Connell,
and later the young Sarah Vaughan out of Chicago
from midnight until two. Think of being fifteen
in the middle of leafy June when Sinatra and Ray
Eberle both had number one records of “Fools Rush In.”
Somebody singing “Tenderly” and somebody doing
“This Love of Mine.” Helplessly adolescent while
the sound of romance was constantly everywhere.
All day long out of windows along the street.
Sinatra with “Close to You.” And all the bands. Artie
Shaw with “Green Eyes” and whoever was always playing
“Begin the Beguine.” Me desperate because I wouldn’t
get there in time. Who can blame me for my heart?
What choice did I have? Harry James with “Sleepy
Lagoon.” Imagine, on a summer night, “Sleepy Lagoon”!
MAYBE VERY HAPPY
After she died he was seized
by a great curiosity about what
it was like for her. Not that he
doubted how much she loved him.
But he knew there must have been
some things she had not liked.
So he went to her closest friend
and asked what she complained of.
“It’s all right,” he had to keep
saying, “I really won’t mind.”
Until the friend finally gave in.
“She said sometimes you made a noise
drinking your tea if it was very hot.”
THE MANGER OF INCIDENTALS
We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication. We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.
THE THIRTY FAVORITE LIVES: AMAGER
I woke up every morning on the fourth floor,
in the two-hundred-year-old walls made
of plaster and river grass. I would leave
the woman and walk across beautiful København
to the island of Amager. To my small room
in the leftover Nazi barracks that looked out
on a swamp. Most of the time it was winter.
I would light my hydrant-size iron stove
and set a pot on top, putting in hamburger
and vegetables while the water was getting hot.
Starting to type with numb hands. The book
I planned to write in two weeks for a thousand
dollars already a week behind (and threatening
to get beyond a month). Out of money and no
prospects. Then the lovely smell of soup
and the room snug. I would type all day
and late into the night. Until the soup
was finished. Then I would start back across
the frozen city, crunching over the moats,
loud in the silence. The stars brilliant.
Focused on her waiting for me, ready to fry
sausages at two in the morning. Me thinking idly
of the ancient Chinese poet writing in his
poverty, “Ah, is this not happiness.”
BURMA
Used, misled, cheated. Our time always shortening.
What we cherish always temporary. What we love
is, sooner or later, changed. But for a while we can
visit our other life. Can rejoice in its being there
in its absence. Giving thanks for what we are allowed
to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes.
For knowing it is there. The way women on rainy days
sometimes go into the bedroom to cry about losing
the first man they loved. The way a man remembers the young
woman at an upstairs window looking out he saw once,
for a moment, as he drove through a sleeping village.
Or the brightness in the memory of the failed hotel
where the waiters in their immaculate white uniforms
were barefoot. The elegant dining room silent except for
the sound of rain falling in the tin buckets. And
the whispering of giant overhead fans with broken
blades as they turned in the heat. There was the scraping
sound in the piles of dead leaves on the lavish veranda.
And occasionally the bright sound of broken glass.
All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.
Like a giant bell ringing long after you can’t hear it.
WHAT I’VE GOT
After twenty hours in bed with no food, I decided
I should have at least tea. Got up to light the lamp,
but the sweating and shivering started again
and I staggered backwards across the room. Slammed
against the stone wall. Came to with blood on my head
and couldn’t figure out which way the bed was.
Crawled around searching for the matches but gave up,
remembering there was one left in a box by the stove.
It flared and went out. “Exaggerated,” I said