and groped back toward my desk, feeling for the matches
with barefoot geisha steps. Began to shake and moan,
my teeth chattering like the hero did in the old movie
when his malaria returned. I smiled but was worried.
No telephone and nobody going by out there in the field
I could call to. And God knows what I had. Realized
I was on all fours again. Interesting, something said
as I dragged myself onto the bed. Interesting?
another part said. Interesting! For Christ’s sake!
TROUBLE
That is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico
raising peacocks for the rest of your life.
The seriously happy heart is a problem.
Not the easy excitement, but summer
in the Mediterranean mixed with
the rain and bitter cold of February
on the Riviera, everything on fire
in the violent winds. The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world. Love is always
disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.
Eden cannot manage so much ambition.
The kids ran from all over the piazza
yelling and pointing and jeering
at the young Saint Chrysostom
standing dazed in the church doorway
with the shining around his mouth
where the Madonna had kissed him.
IN THE BEGINNING
In the morning when Eve and Adam
woke to snow and their minds,
they set out in marvelous clothes
hand in hand under the trees.
Endlessly precision met them,
until they went grinning in time
with no word for their close
escape from that warm monotony.
MÉTIER
The Greek fishermen do not
play on the beach and I don’t
write funny poems.
YELAPA
Having swum in the jungle pool
under the waterfall and struggled
down again through the wattle huts,
we still had three hours to wait
before the boat would go back.
The only foreigners had a gallery.
She was British and naked in her halter.
He also was standard, with his stubble
and drunken talk of sex at ten
in the morning. Telling us loudly
how she stayed with him because
of his three hundred a month. She waded
through their old hatred picking up
the sketches as each in turn blew down
in the wind running before the storm.
A TASTE FOR GRIT AND WHATEVER
More and more it is the incidental that makes
him yearn, and he worries about that.
Why should the single railroad tracks
curving away into the bare December trees
and no houses matter? And why is it
the defeated he trusts? Is it because
Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he
has the picture on his wall of God’s head
torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe
growing up in that brutal city left him
with a taste for grit and whatever it was
he saw in the titanic rusting steel mills.
It might be the reason he finally moved out
of Paris. Perhaps it is the scale
of those long-ago winters that makes him
restless when people laugh a lot.
Why the erotic matters so much. Not as
pleasure but a way to get to something darker.
Hunting down the soul, searching out the iron
of Heaven when the work is getting done.
MAYBE SHE IS HERE
She might be here secretly.
On her hands and knees
with her head down a bit
tilted to peer around the doorjamb
in the morning, watching me
before I wake up.
Only her face showing
and her shoulders. In a slip,
her skin honey against the simple
white of two thin straps
and the worked edge of the bodice.
With her right hand a little visible.
THE DANCE
MOST OF ALL
[2009]
EVERYWHERE AND FOREVER
It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain
flayed bare by the great sun. All around
are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing
the house was built by the king’s telegrapher.
“To write at a distance.” He keeps the gate closed
with a massive hasp and chain. The weeds inside
are breast-high around the overgrown rosebushes
and two plum trees. Beyond that, broad stairs
rise to a handsome terrace and the fine house
with its tall windows. He has excavated most
of the courtyard in back. It’s there they
spent their perfect days under a diseased
grape arbor and the flowering jasmine. There is
a faint sound of water from the pool over by
the pomegranate tree with its exaggerated fruit.
The basin is no longer choked by the leaves
accumulated in the twelve years of vacancy.
He has come to the right place at the right time.
The blue Aegean is far down, and the slow ships
far out. Doves fly without meaning overhead.
He and the Japanese lady go out the back gate
and up the stream stone by stone, bushes on each side
heavy with moths. They come out under big plane trees.
There is a dirt path from there to a nunnery.
She says goodbye and he starts down to the village
at the bottom where he will get their food for a week.
The sky is vast overhead. Neither of them knows
she is dying. He thinks of their eleven years together.
Realizes they used up all that particular time
everywhere in the cosmos, and forever.
PAINTING ON PLATO’S WALL
The shadows behind people walking
in the bright piazza are not merely
gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness
is not the absence of badness.
Goodness is a triumph. And so it is
with love. Love is not the part
we are born with that flowers
a little and then wanes as we
grow up. We cobble love together
from this and those of our machinery
until there is suddenly an apparition
that never existed before. There it is,
unaccountable. The woman and our
desire are somehow turned into
brandy by Athena’s tiny owl filling
the darkness around an old villa
on the mountain with its plaintive
mewing. As a man might be
turned into someone else while
living kind of happy up there
with the lady’s gentle dying.
ALYOSHA
The sound of women hidden
among the lemon trees. A sweetness
that can live with the mind, a family
that does not wear away. He will let
twenty lives pass and choose the twenty-
first. He longs to live married to
slowness. He lives now with the lambs
the minute they are being born,
lives with their perfection as they
blunder around right away in pure innocence.
He watches them go up the mountain
each morning with the twelve-year-old
nearly child. Living with his faith
as he watches them eaten at Easter
to celebrate Christ. He is not innocent.
He knows the shepherdess will be given
to the awful man who lives at the farm
closest to him. He blesses all of it
as he mourns and the white doves soar
silently in the perfect blue sky.
WINTER IN THE NIGHT FIELDS
I was getting water tonight
off guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted
by those Chinese poets
and their immaculate pain.
OVID IN TEARS
Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”
he said, “there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later
he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said
as they picked him up. “Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”
THE SPELL CAST OVER
In the old days we could see nakedness only
in the burlesque houses. In the lavish
theaters left over from vaudeville,
ruined in the Great Depression. What had been
grand gestures of huge chandeliers
and mythic heroes courting the goddess
on the ceiling. Now the chandeliers were grimy
and the ceilings hanging in tatters. It was
like the Russian aristocrats fleeing
the Revolution. Ending up as taxi drivers
in Paris dressed in their worn-out elegance.
It was like that in the Pittsburgh of my days.
Old men of shabby clothes in the empty
seats at the Roxy Theater dreaming
of the sumptuous headliners
slowly discarding layers of their
lavish gowns. Baring the secret
beauty to the men of their season.
The old men came from their one room
(with its single, forbidden gas range)
to watch the strippers. To remember what used
to be. Like the gray-haired men of Ilium
who waited each morning for Helen
to cross over to the temple in her light raiment.
The waning men longed to escape from the spell
cast over them by time. To escape the imprisoned
longing. To insist on dispensation. To see
their young hearts just one more time.
Those famous women like honeycombs. Women moving
to the old music again. That former grace of flesh.
The sheen of them in the sunlight, to watch
them walking by the sea.
SOUTH
For Susan Crosby Lawrence Anderson
In the small towns along the river
nothing happens day after long day.
Summer weeks stalled forever,
and long marriages always the same.
Lives with only emergencies, births,
and fishing for excitement. Then a ship
comes out of the mist. Or comes around
the bend carefully one morning
in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.
Arrives on a hot fragrant night,
grandly, all lit up. Gone two days
later, leaving fury in its wake.
NEGLECTING THE KIDS
He wonders why he can’t remember the blossoming.
He can taste the brightness of the sour-cherry trees,
but not the clamoring whiteness. He was seven in
the first grade. He remembers two years later when
they were alone in those rich days. He and his sister
in what they called kindergarten.
They played every day on the towering
slate roofs. Barefoot. No one to see them on
those fine days. He remembers the fear
when they shot through the copper-sheeted
tunnels through the house. The fear
and joy and not getting hurt. Being tangled
high up in the mansion’s Bing cherry tree with
its luscious fruit. Remembers
the lavish blooming. Remembers the caves they
built in the cellar, in the masses of clothing and draperies.
Tunnels to each other’s kingdom with their stolen
jewelry and scarves. It was always summer, except for
the night when his father suddenly appeared. Bursting
in with crates of oranges or eggs, laughing in a way
that thrilled them. The snowy night behind him.
the drunkenness but not how he felt about it,
except for the Christmas when his father tried to embrace
the tree when he came home. Thousands of lights,
endless tinsel and ornaments. He does
not remember any of it except the crash as his father
went down. The end of something.
DREAMING AT THE BALLET
The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything it’s true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of you panting
and sweating, and your eyes after.
ELEGY
The bird on the other side of the valley
sings cuckoo cuckoo and he sings back, inside,
knowing what it meant to the Elizabethans.
Hoping she is unfaithful now. Delicate
and beautiful, making love with the Devil
in his muggy bedroom behind the shabby office.
While he is explaining the slums were there
when he got the job. And the Buicks burning
by the roads in the dark. He was not the one
doing the judging, he says. Or the one pointing down
at the lakes of burning lead. He is feeding
her lemons. Holding shaved ice in his mouth
and sucking her nipples to help with the heat.
AFTER LOVE
He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.
WAITING AND FINDING
While he was in kindergarten, everyb
ody wanted to play
the tom-toms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle. He does not remember
how they played the tom-toms, but he sees clearly
their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back
and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.
If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.
You mostly waited while the tambourines and tom-toms
went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all
triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.
Then it was tom-toms and waiting some more. But what
he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,
shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.
WINTER HAPPINESS IN GREECE
The world is beyond us even as we own it.
It is a hugeness in which we climb toward.
A place only the wind knows, the kingdom
of the moon which breathes a thousand years
at a time. Our soul and the body hold each other
tenderly in their arms like Charles Lamb
and his sister walking again to the madhouse.
Hand in hand, tears on their faces, him carrying
her suitcase. Blow after blow on our heart
as we grope through the flux for footholds,
grabbing for things that won’t pull loose.
They fail us time after time and we slide back
without understanding where we are going.
Remembering how the periodic table of the elements
didn’t fit the evidence for half a century.
Until they understood what isotopes were.
MEANWHILE