A score of women if you count love both large
and small, real ones that were brief
and those that lasted. Gentle love and some
almost like an animal with its prey.
What is left is what’s alive in me. The failing
of your beauty and its remaining.
You are like countries in which my love
took place. Like a bell in the trees
that makes your music in each wind that moves.
A music composed of what you have forgotten.
That will end with my ending.
VALLEY OF THE SPIRITS
Not for rhyme or reason, but for the heart’s
sweet seasons and her perfect back sleeping
in the morning dark.
SUDDENLY ADULT
The train’s stopping wakes me.
Weeds in the gully are white
with the year’s first snow.
A lighted train goes
slowly past absolutely empty.
Also going to Fukuoka.
I feel around in myself
to see if I mind. Maybe
I am lonely. It is hard
to know. It could be
hidden in familiarity.
WE ARE THE JUNCTION
The body is the herb,
the mind is the honey.
The heart, the heart is
the undifferentiated.
The mind touches the body
and is the sun.
The mind touches the heart
and is music.
When body touches heart
they together are the moon
in the silently falling snow
over there. Which is truth
exceeding, is the residence,
the sanctified, is the secret
closet and passes into glory.
UNCOLLECTED
POEMS
VALLEY OF THE OWLS
Night rises up from the fields
as the stars gather. Under the earth
are the stones and holding the stones
together is the silence. His heart
smelling of the cypress tree.
The whole valley at dawn sweet
with its emptiness. There is a door
in the wind, lima bean soup on the stove.
Tomorrow begins in the dark.
Today is the mountain of what we have
become. Surprised to be alive
in the abundance of time. Two thousand
six hundred and twenty days,
four thousand nights another time.
The red on the large woodpecker
four times in the pine trees.
The hoopoe in the chinaberry tree
only once. Wang Wei in his loneliness
noticing the first raindrops
in the light dust.
THIS TIMES THAT
The silence around the old villa
was magnified by the shrilling
cicadas. Her soft voice redoubled
that stillness. At night the two
kinds of owls did not consider
each other but together made
something. The small owl mewed
and the other said dark . . . dark.
How fine it was up there on
the mountain. How happy Michiko
was. She was perishing but did
not know it. I took care of her
body in ways that crossed over
the boundaries of politeness.
The white ship that crossed slowly
to the next island every noon
doubled the blue of the Aegean.
Her absence makes this New England
town completely visible and less.
SPRING
I call it exile, or being relegated.
I call it the provinces.
And all the time it is my heart.
My imperfect heart which prefers
this distance from people. Prefers
to intimacy. Provisional friendships
that are interrupted near the beginning.
A pleasure in not communicating.
And inside, no despair or longing.
A taste for solitude. The knowledge
that love preserves freedom in always
failing. An exile by nature. Where,
indeed, would I ever be a citizen?
A MAN IN BLACK AND WHITE
There was a small butcher shop in the North End
of Boston whose specialty was inferior foods.
Chicken feet and chicken heads. Gizzards, tripe
and beef hearts. Salty fatback and wet brains.
Prosperous people came from the suburbs to pay
too much for the food they ate in hard times.
The man living with difficulty in the winter woods
remembers as he looks at the fresh raccoon tracks
in the snow and wonders if they will tug at him
in the Mediterranean light, if he will write
about the classical bareness of cold and truth
while eating the suckling pig and fried bananas
of Indonesia. Will he miss the Mill River
with its slags of ice and the sound of crows
in the silence. Some years ago, a child was asked
whether he liked radio or television best. The boy
said radio, because the pictures were better.
WINTER HAPPINESS
Pride, pride, pride, pride, pride,
pride and happiness. Winter
and empty fields and beyond the trees
the Aegean. The night sky
bright in the puddles of this lane.
Such dear loneliness. Going along
to no man’s clock. No one who knows
my middle name for a thousand miles.
My youth gone and death unable to find me.
Thinking back to childhood. Astonished
that I could find the way here.
MAY I, MAY I
Mother says,
Take two baby steps.
The eyes and inside the mouth,
nipples and naked feet.
Dreams lived and lost
as the great secret.
Mother may I, he says
and she lets him.
Cold rooms in Manhattan
and San Francisco.
First love for the second time.
All night every night
in coffeehouse and bar.
Poetry and painting,
hunger and movies,
disappointment and lies.
Happy and alone.
Take two baby steps,
Mother says. Spring and forest,
music and trains and owls.
Denise and Doris, Marie
and Moira, Anna and Valerie.
Ah, Mother, may I?
and she says You may.
A little success. Dinners
and famous names.
Then giant steps away
from all that.
From the simplicity.
Mother says, Take your heart
in both hands and squeeze
out darkness. You must take
scissor steps down
into longing and forgetting,
loneliness and fear.
Mother must I?
You must.
People’s agony and the injustice.
Your aging and listening.
Sickness and death.
The imperfecting.
Mother, he says, there is arriving
down here. Enjoyment
more than excitement.
Having been and being.
Happiness and ripeness
for all the time there is.
Italy and Greece when they are
spoiled and splendid.
THE WINNOWING
Their daughter makes a noise like
a giant fly.
The family brought her today for the threshing.
She grew up here until they moved to the village.
She takes me around to see the geranium sprigs
she tried to plant while I did the laundry.
With a circle of stones to make a house for each.
Grins when I dribble water on them obediently
where she points. She is twenty and misshapen
and cannot speak. Sits on the wall wearing pink,
rocking in the quiet sound of grain being sifted.
Shadows of my doves fly across the bright stones
as she looks down the valley singing and happy
in the late afternoon. A very big happiness I think.
THIRTY FAVORITE TIMES
The last year of my being young the way young people
mean young, I was living with a friend in Perugia,
one of those Italian towns made of towers and arches
and Etruscan walls. Down below was gentle Umbria
and summer was coming. Both of us were unhappy.
His love was in Austria and mine was in Berkeley,
and neither of them wanted us now. Every night
we sat in the kitchen at a marble table writing fine
hopeless letters to get them back. His wife cooked
and comforted us and went to bed about one when
we began decorating the envelopes. I would finish first
and take mine to the post office through the sleeping
ancient city. Usually about three in the morning.
Then I would go to the dark palazzo and stand looking
up at Gianna’s bedroom window. When I got home,
his pretty letter would be leaning on the sugar bowl.
I would go quietly across their bedroom to my door.
She would be sitting up holding him in her arms,
watching me as I passed through the first light of dawn.
BLINDED BY SEEING
I was lying on the deck with my eyes closed.
Somewhere to the left the women’s voices began
to change, the voice of one pushing the others.
She idly sang bits of old songs, laughing
as though not noticing. And began to clap,
accentuating the rhythm, crying out.
Her laughing became a gypsy laugh, though I could
hear a shyness underneath. I could hear how
she was as a girl when the men would have urged her on
until she danced, dazzling the whole village.
But these women fell silent. The men nearby
went on playing cards and she gradually stopped.
Later, when I went for tea, I returned that way
to see her spirit in its full-breasted body.
But there was only a group of old ladies
dressed in black, each like the others.
THE GREEK GODS DON’T COME IN WINTER
The Greek gods don’t come in winter,
and seldom in person. They speak through
others. Even in summer. Their voices seem
far off and very fast. It’s difficult also
because we can’t trust the people who say
they are translating. When the gods come
in the dawn, there is soon the odor
of roses and warm linen. They sit in their
high-backed chairs and mostly watch
the children. Especially when they are
running and laughing. They applaud
by humming when we read our poems.
They hum differently when the poems
are about lights and parallel geologies
of the sea. But they hum most of all
when the poems are about distance and desire.
THE CARGO AND THE EQUITY
A man lies warm under the blankets in a house still
frozen by the night, trying to remember the dream.
A lovely Japanese lady with bare breasts in a palanquin.
It changed and he was crowded against a fat man while
talking with a young woman from California at a party
who was beginning to tell him what she believed.
“Honor rather than bravery for instance,” she said.
(He can hear the slow freight passing through
the ruined cornfields down by the river.) Dreams are
mostly things that we let go. What memory really keeps
is the cargo, the equity we have in our life.
He remembers an almost full moon white in the pale
afternoon sky yesterday and the snow gleaming
in the silence of gray winter light. He thinks
of a bright New England window last week where
a young mother was singing with her children.
And the lighted window near Hampstead Heath years ago
where a naked adolescent girl was laughing sweetly
with a man who was probably her father, holding up
her pretty dress, getting ready to go dancing with
the boy she loved. Any of that heartbreaking abundance.
THE STOCKTON TUNNEL
Someone had left a door unlocked in the Stockton
Tunnel and I went through almost without thinking.
Inside was a vast construction of Byzantium.
It must fill all of San Francisco down there,
shining with beautiful stone light. The watchman
was drunk, and annoyed by something they’d done.
He began telling secrets about the Leader and the order
and imminent takeovers. Most of which I couldn’t follow
because of the whispering and looking away.
He changed after we’d crawled out on the scaffolding.
Wanted to attach electrical things to my earlobes.
It mattered a lot to him. When I still refused,
he started yelling and kicking the towers.
Harder and harder until a dim moaning began below
and timid voices floating up the mighty names
of the Paleologi, frail and lovely on the damp, spoiled air.
HOLDING ON TO MY FRIEND
The funeral service was people getting up
in the church and saying wonderful things
about my friend. The next night, the family
and some others gathered in the West Village
condominium and told flattering stories.
His daughter said Dad was always fun to be with.
I knew him well for thirty years and he had
never been fun, unless you counted those times
he struggled stubbornly to get the hang of charm.
My friend was fat and mean and lonely.
He made lots of money and never got anything
he really wanted. Most unhappy man I ever met.
There was resentment and even dislike in his
love for me. But we managed, knowing that.
We would spend long evenings reviewing again
his first marriage. Then he’d make his speech
about therapy teaching him how to express anger.
Afterwards, we would sit sleepy and silent
in the lavishness, embarrassed by our tenderness.
When I dream of him now, years later, he’s driving
me to the airport, or we are on Fifth Avenue
near Rockefeller Center with him explaining again
how to reach Columbus Circle. We stand on,
talking of nothing. Comfortable, as the snow
falls the way it did in the old Pittsburgh.
SECRETS OF POETRY
People complain about too many moons in my poetry.
Even my friends ask why I keep putting in the moon.
And I wish I had an answer like when Archie Moore
was asked by a reporter in the dressing room
after the fight, “Why did you keep looking in
his eyes, Archie? Th
e whole fight you were
looking in his eyes.” And old Archie Moore said,
“Because the eyes are the windows of the soul, man.”
ARS POETICA
He tries to tell the doctor:
“My heart springs open and I see
there is a woods inside.
The trees are full of birds
but they are unable to sing.”
It’s a good sign, the doctor says.
“My body begins to shine
brighter and brighter.
In the center of the light
there is a transparent woman
yelling, Go back! Go back!”
The doctor says that’s promising.
“No,” he says, “all of you lie to me.
Like the night they came to get me
out of bed at four in the morning.
Because Marmarosa wouldn’t play
anymore. Unless I was there, they said.
“It was one of those blind pig places
I remember. And he made something perfect.
Made an architecture with the piano.
Like one of those buildings by Palladio.
But when he came to my table he was
as crazy as before. Like after Los Angeles.
“We left and walked through the empty streets
of East Liberty afterwards. Just before
it got light, Dodo in pain and mumbling.
It’s what you’re good at they use
to destroy you he said.”
The doctor says Dodo was feeling
a little down because they took
away his children. “No, no!” he insists.
“I remember what Dodo was like before
he went with the Dorsey band.
When we were in high school, he was
like everybody else. When I went
to have his father cut my hair
I could always hear Dodo in the other
room practicing Chopin.”
Yes, of course, the doctor says.
“You don’t understand. He was famous.
He was important. Parker and Gillespie
would still go over to the house