I live with the sound my body is,
with the earth which is my daughter.
And the clean separation which is my wife.
There is no one who can control us
because we live secretly under the ocean
of each day. Except for the music.
The memory of rainy afternoons
in San Francisco when I would play
all the slow sections of Mozart’s
piano concertos. And the sound
of the old Italian peasant who occasionally
came down from the mountain to play
a primitive kind of guttural bagpipe,
and sometimes sing with his broken voice
in the narrow lanes about the moon
and the grief of lovers. That reedy sound
is stuck in me. Like the Japanese monk
who would come through the graveyard
at night striking two sticks together.
I can’t forget the pure sound I heard once
when a violin string snapped nearby
in three o’clock’s perfect silence.
But I tell myself I’m safe. I remind myself
of the boy who discovered order in the piano
and ran upstairs to tell his little sister
that they didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
PIECING OF THE LIFE
The man wondered if he had become
like Di Stefano, when he was no longer able
to sing the best of Verdi. He knew how better
than anyone, but finally didn’t have the strength
for Othello. My friend’s wife had left him
and he wondered if he could still hold the world
in his arms. And would he know if his quiet
was the beginning of decline. He talked often
of the first girl he kissed, when he was sixteen.
He had not been prepared for the velvety
plushness. We watched the evening begin.
“Fifty and waning,” he said. Touched my arm and we
walked slowly back. Silent and wonderfully content.
NOT EASILY
When we get beyond beauty and pleasure,
to the other side of the heart (but short
of the spirit), we are confused about what
to do next. It is too easy to say arriving
is enough. To pretend the music
of the mountain needs only to be heard.
That the dance is known by the dancing,
and the lasagne is realized by eating it.
Not in this place on the other side
of desire. We can swim in the Aegean,
but we can’t take it home. A man finds
a melon by the road and continues up
the hill thinking it is the warm melon
that will remain after he has forgotten
the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells
himself this even as the idea of the taste
is replacing what the melon tasted like.
CROSSING THE BORDER, SEARCHING FOR THE CITY
He thought of the boy in the middle
of the poison gas. The gas mask dangerously
slipping on his face, because he was sweating
so much. (“Death on all sides.”) Fear all through him,
but also the excitement from his intruding,
because of the privacy he had penetrated.
The hidden world he was not part of.
Glimpsed all his life in the windows he walked past
at night. The young mother dancing slowly
with her little daughter. The teenager preening
in her new dress in front of her father.
The world without him he was seeing as he
opened cupboards and pulled clothes
from the bureaus. Drawers of the daughter’s
mysterious underclothes. What they had on
the dresser. Curiously the same as his rummaging
earlier in the refrigerator for the food
to put on the porch. Finding what had gotten
lost, shriveled, or spoiled. All his life wondering
what reality was, without his presence.
Lying in somebody’s side lawn, the night rain
coming down and the smell of lilacs
as he watched a family eating dinner in their light.
Later the Hispanic women in the Laundromats.
And in Rome, when he lived with the peasants
from Calabria. Never a part of it
despite their friendship. Now in the village
announcing which paths led to death. Trying
to decide about the Australian woman
beside him. The borders again, he thinks,
remembering the woman in København he had
never seen as he slid out of the terrible
cold into her sleepy warmth. Her face
invisible in the dark. The soft sound
she made welcoming him wordlessly,
utterly. Into the great light of her body.
CRUSOE ON THE MOUNTAIN GATHERING FAGGOTS
He gets dead sage and stalks of weeds mostly.
Oleander can kill a fire, they say.
The length of valley below is green
where the grapes are. The small farms
of wheat tiny. And two separate cows.
Then the sea. Here’s a terraced mountain
abandoned to bracken and furze and not
even that. If there was water once,
there isn’t now. Rock and hammering sun.
He tastes all of it again and again,
his madeleine. He followed that clue
so long it grew faint. Which must account
for his happiness in this wrong terrain.
SUMMER AT BLUE CREEK, NORTH CAROLINA
There was no water at my grandfather’s
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people’s house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor’s cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.
GOING HOME
Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.
GETTING IT RIGHT
Lying in front of the house all
afternoon, trying to write a poem.
Falling asleep.
Waking up under the stars.
ALONENESS
Deep inside the night on the eighth floor.
Scared to be alone with him in his room.
Hoping the drug still controls his violence.
The massiveness of him. The girth
of the wrist as he holds it. And the sound
of his heart. In the corridor outside,
blank eyes at each of the small windows.
The silence getting denser and denser
as it continues farther away.
Everywhere the sighing of the beds
rocking slowly, steadily, eternally
in the hushed dimness as he reaches in
to the hot bed of the contagious fat woman
to turn her over. Him frightened in
the paper
clothes and a mask.
They give him a dead woman swathed
tightly in loop after loop of brown tape,
from the crown of her head down
to the toes. Like a mummy under water.
Wrestling with it in the concrete basement.
The weight of her slack body pulling
out of his arms. Lifting her with difficulty
by hugging the body against him. Shocked
at the dead thing’s heat. Fighting to get
her into the immaculate drawer. The sound
of steel sliding on steel.
The straight-edge razors they use on
Saturday nights slash so fast and clean
there is no pain. They fight on without
noticing the mutilation. Ears gone, noses
carved, cheeks laid bare. Standing in line
FEELING HISTORY
Got up before the light this morning
and went through the sweet damp chill
down to the mindlessly persisting sea.
Stood neck-deep in its strength thinking
it was the same water young Aristotle
knew before he stopped laughing.
The cold waves came in on me,
came in as the sun went from red
to white. All the sea turned blue
as I walked back past the isolate
shuttered villa.
TO KNOW THE INVISIBLE
The Americans tried and tried to see
the invisible Indians in the deeper jungle
of Brazil. Finally they put things in the clearing
and waited. They waited for months,
maybe for years. Until a knife and a pot
disappeared. They put out other things
and some of those vanished. Then one morning
there was a jungle offering sitting on the ground.
Gradually they began to know the invisible
by the jungle’s choices. Even when nothing
replaced the gifts, it was a kind of seeing.
Like the woman you camp outside of, at the five portals.
Attending the conduits that tunnel from the apparatus
down to the capital of her. Through the body
and its weather, to the mind and heart, to the spirit
beyond. To the mystery. And gradually to the ghosts
coming and leaving. To the difference between
the nightingale and the Japanese nightingale
which is not a nightingale. Getting lost in the treachery
of language, waylaid by the rain dancing its pavane
in the bruised light of winter afternoons.
By the flesh, luminous and transparent in the silent
clearing of her. Love as two spirits flickering
at the edge of meeting. An apartment on the third
floor without an elevator, white walls and almost
no furniture. Water seen through pine trees.
Love like the smell of basil. Richness beyond
anyone’s ability to cope with. The way love is after fifty.
PROSPERO GOES HOME
It was not difficult to persuade the captain
to sail a little off course and leave him
at the island. With his boxes on the sand
and the ship getting small, he was home.
Foolishly, he was disappointed that Ariel
was not amazingly there to meet him.
A part had secretly dreamed it would be a woman.
But that lasted briefly and then he was happy.
How dear the bare place looked. How good it felt
getting the supplies up to the house.
NAKED WITHOUT INTENT
She takes off her clothes without excitement.
Her eyes don’t know what to do. There is silence
in the countries of her body, Umbrian hill towns
under those small ribs, foreign voices singing
in the distance of her back. She is invisible
under the glare of her nudity. Somewhere there
is a table and the chairs she will go back to.
These men will never know what station the radio
is already set on. She will leave soon and find
herself walking in the streets with the few
people who are still awake. She will enter
her room tired and a little confused by the night.
Confused by their seeing her utterly, seeing
everything but the simple fact of her. Tomorrow
she will be in a supermarket buying potatoes
and milk, mostly naked under her dress and maybe
different. Strangers around the city will know
the delicate colors of her nipples. Some will
remember her long feet. Will she feel special
now as she sets the alarm? Is there a danger she
might feel that nothing significant happened?
TRYING
Our lives are hard to know. The gardens are provisional,
and according to which moment. Whether in the burgeoning
of July or the strict beauty of January. The language
itself is mutable. The word way is equally an avenue
and a matter of being. Our way into the woods
is according to the speed. To stroll into loveliness,
or leaves blowing so fast they would shred
birds in an explosion of blood. It’s the Devil’s
mathematics that Blake spoke of, which I failed
all three times. Everyone remembers the wonderful day
in Canada when the water was perfect. I remember
the Italian afternoon when I carried Gianna on my shoulders
in the pool, her thighs straining around my head.
My falling awkwardly and getting water in my nose.
The embarrassment forty-nine years ago which I have rejoiced in.
“To war with a god-lover is not war,” Edith Hamilton wrote,
“it is despair.” What of the terribly poor Monet
scrounging for the almost empty tubes of paint his students
left. Or Watteau dying so long near Versailles. Always
the music of the court and the taste of his beautiful
goddesses constantly going away.
THE ANSWER
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is a silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everyone was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
the upper floor of a plain white stone house.
THE GROS VENTRE
The bright green of the flat fields stretching away
endlessly under the procession of great white clouds.
A ceremony without punctuation. The land empty
except for the way Chief Joseph ended just short
of the Canadian border.
He did not talk to them
about that, or how the tribe dwindled away amid
the immaculate silence. (As we did after
leaving college.) He did not talk to the young
about sweat lodges, or the pipe ceremony. He talked
about how America was born from the size around them,
the American mind and its spirit shaped by that
scale. They said it was just distance for them.
And boredom. How small it made them feel.
He asked about their old poetry, saying he could
not understand how it worked. They said they had never
read any of that. He talked about imagination,
as something hard. He began to hear their minds flickering.
An old woman showed him the big photographs she had
bought from the government of their great men.
She said she was one of the last three people who could
speak the language, and she would die soon. He felt
the doom everywhere. They were like a kind of whale
that was so scant it could never replace itself.
Hearing about the drunkenness and drugs and incest
each day. Then the amazing stars at night. Riding
around all day with the woman from the foundation
that had brought him there. Getting to know her
as they roamed through the ideal landscape. Lunch
and dinner together all the time. She talking about
her Irish family and growing up in New York. About
the man she lived with. Getting somebody to take
their picture. His heart flickering. His surprise.
His heart that had retired, safe in ripeness, hidden
in the light. Standing together in the terminal,
her plane straight ahead, his to the left. Both of them
stranded without a language for it.
WAKING AT NIGHT
The blue river is gray at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
CHERISHING WHAT ISN’T
Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this
long life, along with the few others.
And the four I may have loved, or stopped short
of loving. I wander through these woods
making songs of you. Some of regret, some
of longing, and a terrible one of death.
I carry the privacy of your bodies
and hearts in me. The shameful ardor
and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds
of happiness and the walled‑up childhoods.
I carol loudly of you among trees emptied
of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.