It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees
along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.
In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.
Now it waits in New England while I say grace over
almost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,
the single light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,
and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets
are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side
with barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.
The heart is a foreign country whose language none
of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,
but already it looks discarded as the birds return
and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power
or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.
My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing
and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.
THE ABUNDANT LITTLE
We have seen the population of Heaven
in frescoes. Dominions and unsmiling saints
crowded together as though the rooms were small.
We think of the grand forests of Pennsylvania,
oaks and maples, when we see the miniatures
of blue Krishna with farm girls awkwardly
beside a pond in a glade of scrub trees.
The Japanese scrolls show mostly Hell.
When we read about the Christian paradise,
it is made of gold and pearls, built on
a foundation of emeralds. Nothing soft
and rarely trees, except in the canvases
of Italians where they slip in bits of Tuscany
and Perugino’s Umbria. All things
are taken away. Indeed, indeed.
But we secretly think of our bodies
in the heart’s storm and just after.
And the sound of careless happiness.
We touch finally only a little.
Like the shy tongue that comes fleetingly
in the dark. The acute little that is there.
WORTH
It astonished him when he got to Kathmandu to hear
the man from the embassy say a friend was waiting
outside of customs. It was the Australian woman
he had met in Bali. His fault for running back
across the tarmac when he realized she was crying.
Kissing her while the plane waited with the door open.
Wanting her to feel valuable. Now she had used up all
her money flying to Nepal. In trouble because
we can’t parse the heart. Calling what had been
what it was not. Now lying awkwardly on the bed
for a month, marooned in the heat, the Himalayas
above the window. As he watched the delicate dawns
and the old women carrying too much firewood down
from the mountain on their backs. Him thinking of their
happiness up in the lush green terraces of rice.
Remembering her laughter as he came out of the shower,
saying the boy had come again with a plate of melon.
“He asked if you were my husband,” she said, “and I
said you were my father.” Her eyes merry. Now they sat
in cheap restaurants trying to find anything to say.
Remembering how beautiful she was the first time
coming through the palm trees of the compound at dusk.
Tall and thin in a purple dress that reached to her
bare feet. Watching while he played chess with
the Austrian photographer all night. Now calling
that good thing by the wrong name. Destroying
something valuable. Innocently killing backwards.
PERFECTED
In the outskirts of the town
the street sweeper puts down
his broom of faggots and angrily
begins to shake the young ginkgo.
The leaves fall faster.
He shakes it even harder
and the leaves fall by ones and twos.
He rests to calm himself.
A passing boy speeds up
and leaps in the air,
slamming the trunk with both feet.
The yellow leaves spurt out.
The three of them stand looking up.
One leaf falls, then more.
LIVING HUNGRY AFTER
The water nymphs who came to Poseidon
explained how little they desired to couple
with the gods. Except to find out
a fresh world, another dimension in their loins.
In the old Pittsburgh we dreamed of a city
where women read Proust in the original French,
and wondered whether we would cross over
into a different joy if we paid a call girl
a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour.
Would it be different in kind or only
tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great
love might make everything else an exile.
It turned out that being together
at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria
did, indeed, measure everything after that.
THE MISTAKE
There is always the harrowing by mortality,
the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.
Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive
in the difficult way adults want to be alive.
It is worth having the heart broken,
a blessing to hurt for eighteen years
because a woman is dead. He thinks of long
before that, the summer he was with Gianna
and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted
the General, their father, and driven south
to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.
The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.
Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls
of the compound. A butler with white gloves
serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid
in her uniform bringing his breakfast each
morning on a silver tray: toast both light
and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world
like Tosca. A feudal world crushed under
the weight of passion without feeling.
Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.
The young man wild with romance and appetite.
Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.
A FACT
The woman is not just a pleasure,
nor even a problem. She is a meniscus
that allows the absolute to have a shape,
that lets him skate however briefly
on the mystery, her presence luminous
on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor
at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets
after summer rain on maples and sycamore.
As well as the car suddenly crossing two blocks
away in a blare of light. The importance
of the rocks around his Greek shepherd hut,
and mules wandering around in the empty fields.
He crosses the island in the giant sunlight,
comes back in the dark thinking of the woman.
The fact of her goes on, loved or not.
BECOMING REGARDLESS
I begin to see them again as the twilight darkens.
Gathered below me and to the right under the tree.
Ghosts are by their nature drawn to the willows.
They have no feet and hover just above the grass.
They seem to be singing. About apples, I think,
as I remember the ones a children’s red in the old
cemetery in Syra
cuse where I would eat one each day
because the tree grew out of a grave and I liked
to think of someone eating what was left of my heart
and spirit as I lay in the dark earth translating
into fruit. I can’t be sure what they are singing
because no sound comes through the immense windows
of my apartment. (Except for the sound somebody
makes at two and four in the night as he passes
around what was the temple grounds hitting a block
of wood two or three times with a stick. I have
begun listening for it as I lie on the floor awake.)
I try to see in what is left of the light down there
the two I was. The ghost of the boy in high school
just before I became myself. The other is the ghost
of the times later when I could fall in love:
the first time, and three years after that for eight
years, and the last time ten years after. I feel
a great tenderness for all the dozen ghosts down
there trying to remain what they were. Behind each
pile of three boulders that are the gravestones
is a railing making an enclosure for the seven-foot,
narrow, unpainted planks with prayers written on them.
They are brought on the two ceremonial days each year
by the mourners and put with the earlier ones. But
in many enclosures there are just weathered old ones,
because they are brought only as long as there is
still someone who knew the dead. It puzzles me that
I care so much for the ghost of the boy in high school,
since I am not interested in those times. But I know
why the other one frightens me. He is the question
about whether the loves were phantoms of what existed
as appearance only. I know how easily they come,
summoned by our yearning. I realize the luminosity
can be a product of our heart’s furnace. It would
erase my life to find I made it up. Then I see them
faintly dancing in the dark: spirits that are the invisible
presence of what those women were. There once was
a Venezia even if there is not now. The flesh thickens
or wanes, but there was somebody I knew truly. Three
of them singing under the willow inside my transience.
THE SECRET
There is an easy beauty in the bronze statues
dredged up from the ocean, but there is a worth
to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on.
Truth is like a pearl, Francis Bacon said.
It is lovely in clear light, but the carbuncle
is more precious because its deep red shows best
in varied illumination. “A mixture of a lie
doth ever add pleasure.” When the Chinese made
a circle of stones on the top of their wells,
one would be a little skewed to make the circle
look more round. Irregularity is the secret
of music and to the voice of great poetry.
When a man remembers the beauty of his lost love,
it is the imperfect bit of her he remembers most.
The blown‑up Parthenon is augmented by its damage.
THE NEW BRIDE ALMOST VISIBLE IN LATIN
We want to believe that what happens
in the dark bedroom is normal.
Pretending that being alive
is reasonable keeps the door shut
against whether maggots, nematodes,
and rot are also created in God’s image.
Our excess is measured, our passion
almost deliberate. As we grow up,
we more and more love appropriately.
When Alicia got married, the priest
conducted the Mass in English because
it was understandable. He faced us
as though we were friends. Had us
gather around the altar afterwards.
She hugged and kissed each one until me.
The bride, fresh from Communion,
kissed me deeply with her tongue,
her husband three feet away.
The great portals of our knowing
each other closed forever. I was flooded
by the size of what had ended.
But it was the mystery of marriage
and its hugeness that shocked me,
fell on me like an ox. I felt
mortality mixing with the fragrance
of my intimacy with her. The difference
between the garden of her body
and the presence of her being was the same
distance as the clear English of the Mass from
the blank Latin which held the immensities.
THE DANGER OF WISDOM
We learn to live without passion.
To be reasonable. We go hungry
amid the giant granaries
this world is. We store up plenty
for when we are old and mild.
It is our strength that deprives us.
Like Keats listening to the doctor
who said the best thing for
tuberculosis was to eat only one
slice of bread and a fragment
of fish each day. Keats starved
himself to death because he yearned
so desperately to feast on Fanny Brawne.
Emerson and his wife decided to make
love sparingly in order to accumulate
his passion. We are taught to be
moderate. To live intelligently.
SEARCHING FOR IT IN A GUADALAJARA
DANCE HALL
You go in from the cobbled back street.
Into an empty, concrete one-room building
where prim youngish women sit in a line
of straight chairs. The women are wearing
tea dresses thrown away by rich Texan
women two generations ago. The men are
peasants, awkward in a line of chairs opposite.
Nothing is sexual. There are proprieties.
No rubbing against anyone. No touching
at all. When the music starts, the men
go stiffly over to the women. It isn’t
clear whether they say anything. The dance is
a slow, solemn fox trot. When it stops,
they stand still while the men
find a coin. The women stow it and all
of them go back to the chairs to wait for
the music and another partner. This is
not for love. The men can get love
for two coins at a shack in the next field.
They know about that. And that they will
never be married, because it is impossible
to own even a little land. They are
groping for something else, but don’t know what.
TRIANGULATING
All taken down like Trastevere or København.
Like her apartment on Waller in San Francisco
or their place on Oak. The ruined cities
of America. The grand theaters built for vaudeville,
tawdry and soiled when he knew
them in Baltimore and Chicago. Full of
raggedness and a band. Calumet City when
it was a mob town with public vice.
A scale visible in the decay. Something
to measure against. Night after night
walking the Paris he knew. Hôtel Duc de Bourgogne
on Île Saint-Louis, the room
with a stone floor on the rue Boutarel across from
the cathedral. The old building where
his mansard was on a hill above the canal.
All taken down. Places that were clues
for a moment when he understood.
Knew the name of our qua
rry.
The something we were changing into.
THE DIFFICULT BEAUTY
The air full of pictures no matter where you reach in.
Vast caverns in the ground bright with electricity
and covered everywhere with language. Because you
live on the fourth floor, you can on Sundays look
down into the synagogue across the street where people
sing secretly together in Spanish. You are up there
trying to get the galleys marked which are so late
(because of love) that Yale threatens not to publish
the book at all. Noise so loud you finally look
outside and see everybody gathered on Fourth Street
near Avenue C to eat ice cream and watch the guys
carrying a naked woman down the fire escape clumsily
who had been promising all morning to jump. But best
of all are the gardens: hidden places where they have
burned down the buildings and kept the soil
poor so the plants won’t grow with vulgar abundance.
Like the Japanese gardens made only of rocks and sand
so their beauty would not be obscured by appearances.
Like the maharaja who set aside the best courtyards
in his palace for the dandelions he imported from
England to be kept alive by the finest gardeners
in the world who knew how to work against nature.
GROWING UP IN PITTSBURGH
Go down to the drugstore at the corner,
it said. At the drugstore it said,
Go to the old woman’s house. On her porch
was scribbled: Where has love gone?
To the arcades of the moon, I wrote.
To the Palladian moon, and is embezzled
there as well. Therefore are the gunwales
of my heart plated. For the birds
have rings on their necks and must
take the catch to the white boats
at the marble pier in exchange for gruel.
Old hoplites cursing under the arcades
snap the pale fish and wrap them in plundered
drawings. A whimpering leaks from the bundles,
from the stalls, into the piazza and up
to the roof where everyone in the shining
is watching a performance of romance.
INFECTIOUS