snow, and in his reluctance to talk to the utterly
discursive: “I will belove less than feared …”
He trotted up, he trotted down, he trotted all around the town.
Were his relatives jealous of him?
Still the tock-tock machinery lies half-embedded in sand.
Someone comes to the window, the wave is a gesture proving nothing,
and that nothing has receded. One gets caught
in servants like these and must lose the green leaves,
one by one, as an orchard is pilfered, and then, with luck,
nuggets do shine, the baited trap slides open.
We are here with our welfare intact.
Oh but another time, on the resistant edge of night
one thinks of the pranks things are.
What led the road that sped underfoot
to oases of disaster, or at least the unknown?
We are born, buried for a while, then spring up just as
everything is closing. Our desires are extremely simple:
a glass of purple milk, for example, or a dream
of being in a restaurant. Waiters encourage us, and squirrels.
There’s no telling how much of us will get used.
My friend devises the cabbage horoscope
that points daily to sufficiency. He and all those others go home.
The walls of this room are like Mykonos, and sure enough,
green plumes toss in the breeze outside
that underscores the stillness of this place
we never quite have, or want. Yet it’s wonderful, this
being; to point to a tree and say don’t I know you from somewhere?
Sure, now I remember, it was in some landscape somewhere,
and we can all take off our hats.
At night when it’s too cold
what does the rodent say to the glass shard?
What are any of us doing up? Oh but there’s
a party, but it too was a dream. A group of boys
was singing my poetry, the music was an anonymous
fifteenth-century Burgundian anthem, it went something like this:
“This is not what you should hear,
but we are awake, and days
with donkey ears and packs negotiate
the narrow canyon trail that is
as white and silent as a dream, that is,
something you dreamed.
And resources slip away, or are pinned
under a ladder too heavy to lift.
Which is why you are here, but the mnemonics
of the ride are stirring.”
That, at least, is my hope.
SUSAN
Flotsam, I told you, isn’t the same as jetsam.
The latter is “cast overboard by the master,
to lighten the load in time of distress.”
And as for lagan, it’s very different, it’s
“debris washed up from the sea, the right to possess such debris,”
or “goods thrown into the sea with a buoy attached
in order that they may be found again.”
See what I mean? It’s folk art,
as the shy scrolls around the oarlocks announce:
free booty. For everybody. For everybody on that wet strand,
anyway. Waves race to deliver the goods.
I want to get one of those big bags of music
before it’s too late, before the sale ends
and we’re left without even a fashion
to stand tiptoe on. Though that’s when I’ll find out
at last what my profession is,
staunch the energy hemorrhaging from my career,
and get back to work again. You know something?
You have the name of a street, that holds
wiles, incantations, thread, in memory of
the mess that made us. You’re indigent
as an apple. There is nothing of substance here:
pink sky, gray buildings, white flowers,
a cup that lacks a base …
Are they annuals or perennials?
What does it mean to be a bush that grows
some of the year and then rests
until we decide to celebrate it
into trope? She said how quickly that poet followed too,
and after that the peninsula was stilled.
THE KING
So have I heard and do in part believe it.
—Hamlet
1/
And you forgave the bastards
for a time
and even so their revenge amazes you.
Alarms wilt in our noon, the winding
roads mark the changing grades of the hills,
hovel and monastery fall.
At last night approached:
“Use me as you will, my properties
are yours; hallow or besmirch them.”
How come no god sees
the tears that ooze from under
rusty eyelids? The road is
pitted and incorrect but it happens
to lie in territory that is ours.
We shall chase
the heavenly
bandit:
handlebars
of snow anchor the tole
steeple, so much
that is not ours, and the tale
besides, of bedouins
who broke out of silence as a river
assaults a dam.
These, our cold
possessions. The gods are never quite forgotten.
2/
In June the plaited sheaves are still
undreamt of; the highest
prophecy is only a moment gathering
in a sibyl’s throat like a tuck in a shirt.
In that moment, live some of
winter’s peace. We can be seen
wearing our oldest clothes when it
shifts abruptly to darkness’s excitement:
falling down with bears and our tears
cleanse the past, stiff architecture
too tired to mope, the actual thing,
hinge the story wrests from sleep,
lit in daybreak. And fools and
sages can read this, and it concerns them all.
But there where
the bend in the river is unseen,
watch out! And over all the
slopes we used to think of as our own
millennial rails have pierced
to the aquifers. No explanation
is offered, and none necessary.
THE WHOLE IS ADMIRABLY COMPOSED
In rainy night all the faces look like telephones.
Help me! I am in this street because I was
going someplace, and now, not to be there is here.
So billows pile up on the shore, I hear
the mountains, the tide of autumn pulls in
ever thicker like a blanket of tears, and
people go about their business, unconcerned
if with another. And to those whose loneliness
shouts envy in my face, I say I am here on this
last floor, room of sobs and of grieving.
It’s better you know to actually live it
since always some unexpected detail intervenes:
how he came to your house long ago
on a forgotten afternoon filled with birds’ wings
and the standard that stood then has crumpled
yet another has taken its place:
high up in the ivy where the water from the
falls disappears amid smooth boulders,
this renown, this envy. And most of all
the challenge sleep brings, how it coaxes
the dunce out of his lair, how meals are shared
and whispers passed around. Then the real boy
comes to you like a kite on wind that is flagging
through the needle hole of the hourglass—
as though this were the summit.
There is more to inconstancy than you will
want to hear, and meanwhile the streets have dried,
tears been put away until another time, and a smile
paints the easy vapor that rises from all
human activity. I see it is time to question trees,
thorns in hedges, again, the same blind investigation
that leads you from trap to trap before bargaining
to forget you. And this is only a bump
on the earth’s surface, casting no shadow, until
the white and dark fruits of the far pledge be
wafted into view again, out of control, shimmering
in the dark that runs off and is collected
in oceans. And the map is again wiped clean.
BY FORCED MARCHES
the prodigal returns—to what mechanical
consternation, din of slaughtered cattle.
It was better in the wilderness—there at least
the mind wanders daintily as a stream meanders
through a meadow, for no apparent reason.
And one can catch snatches of the old cries
that were good before this place began
on a day some seventeen centuries ago.
We have reached the tip of a long breakwater
dividing the lake from the deeper and silenter ship channel.
A still-functioning beacon flashes there, proud
of its purpose and its reflection in the night.
There is nothing to do except observe the horizon,
the only one, that seems to want to sever itself
from the passing sky.
Now the links we had left behind
must be reassembled, since this is the land we came from.
It is no place for the squeamish. But as a finger triggers
a catapult, so is the task of the day discharged.
There were many of us at the stream’s tip.
I squatted nearby trying to eavesdrop on the sailors’
conversations, to learn where they were going. Finally
one comes to me and says I can have the job if I want it.
Want it! and so in this prismatic whirlpool I am renewed
for a space of time that means nothing to me.
And there is dancing under the porches—so be it.
I am all I have. I am afraid. I am left alone.
Yet it is the way to a certain kind of satisfaction.
I kiss myself in the mirror. And children are kind,
the boardwalk serves as a colorful backdrop
to the caprices acted out, the pavanes and chaconnes
that greet the ear in fragments, melodious
ones it must be said. And the old sense of a fullness
is here, though only lightly sketched in.
AUTUMN ON THE THRUWAY
Say that my arm is hurting.
Say that there are too many buts in the sky today.
Say that we need each other off and on to see how it feels.
After which we’ll promise to see to it, see that it
Doesn’t happen this way again so that we may
Do something about it when it does happen.
Or that sincerity cover us with a cloak of shame
While our clothes are drying by the campfire this night
Of nights that means to go on and prepackage some of the original flame
In order to sell it so as to recoup some of the losses that
Started us on this path, repay the original investors.
How sweet then the bargain, the transaction. And you fear nothing
Notable, the skylight has been activated already.
Best to stay around admiring the new look on things.
Invent a new hat. Put on a growing season, staple the others
To the door hidden in the wilderness. And the losses be ours,
Not someone’s in the sun, slut of some, weeping pointedly.
And the blinders—I have signed for them too.
Studies show it hanging in frost, in pajamas, up in the air
And a cerberus basks underneath, its own snowhole round
As an apple in belief. Water the tree in this area and it
Never expedites how much we were hoping to receive out of
What was promised originally, yes, traced on the tracing paper
Of some mood one day. We can never actually account for it
Or how lush its primitivism, in the beginning,
How steep the wall of its veil over face, or how Far you had come, little
Spinner that that’s all right now. How we come to be seen.
Yet we know we must pay
Not use up any money in between, for it
To become us, and then all lost, a second time
But in a time the merry neutral wisdom is gathered, to be sewed
Never believe a false passport to the land of chocolate and bees’
Reasons and be forelost, freedom from a refuge
That took over once you began to get used to it. No, this other
Hand is the wish I bury and keep for you, really the only one
Beside me long, into a tense’s dense conditions
And then you tear, tearing: O how long was it going to be for us
Until the scenery lay quiet like a beloved dog’s head under the hand,
For what was moving to be moving, for it to have courted an aspirin
And lost face at the quarry edge. Hand me that theogony
And then get lost, don’t read me my rights, please get out of here
Until I can think and then two more of us, for a day, come to where we two
Parted and it is on a day. I can’t think
How it completes my thought but I never knew how that was going to begin.
Nor did it mean anything for anyone growing up then.
We were merely—“sentimental” about describes it, yet that can too be loving
In one’s breath, provided other people also move around in it,
Disturbing it. It’s no Volga but it’s vast and dreary and it moves,
Keeps on moving. And so it is a show window at Christmas,
Brimming with lights, with more suggested memories than it could deal with, and we,
Well we help it along for our sakes, which is to say not very much.
We thought about it so often. How many figures I had rehearsed
In the garret where you could see your breath, whomping
My sides from the cold. Now, to have written it, merely,
Seems tepid, a kind of clashing conundrums thing, and
People walk out in the middle of it, rustling programs, tears spatter
The hateful embroidered lace, O why not tear off that Juliet cap and throw it
With the papers of dubious cleanliness, anything so
As to avoid the recrimination of a look that says you did just what you did,
No other, and how is it now for you. Stupid spruces tremble at
Stucco corners and why is this not to be attributed to the hand
Of some vengeful but well-meaning deity too? Why are we alone
Held responsible for the way everything gets to look, why are we admonished
Every time we walk out and see things starting to be the way again
They probably were in the near past, just yesterdays ago, when we haven’t changed,
Only coarsened, merely from staying around a few too many seconds, an expression
That hardens while the photographer tries to focus on it, that’s enough
For today, this day at least. And how much farther he tries to follow when you
Have passed under the willows’ swinging garlands, past the sweep
Of the stream where you sink in up to the ankles, on to the drought and out,
And he says, what a fine time, why how much
to be here,
Only you don’t come round. Please send somebody to finish
Or our nails may be chipped, our locusts blighted, our hoarfrost dispelled by a breath
That who wants to enjoy the risk of? Not him. Not me, certainly,
Though what you ask for is not infrequently what you get.
Under an upturned cartwheel hat she looked up, so solemnly silly
That for a moment you had to forget to outtake her. And her drink needed replenishing.
So in the long run all of it takes us far from the sea of what we were as individuals
And more from the time when all that mattered, mattered as to a single
Individual too old for the part, though a pair. Now it’s possible to see
How far apart we were on most issues, and the European cooks it differently,
Besides, and set against the plainness of American lives it melts like a wall and
Rivulets, runnels drain off it as though from a roof, rushing to join you
In the gutter, and where the growing begins askance
This time. No more frankness, it is apt to cloud, to
Give off steam in the time it takes to distinguish one accent from the truth.
So the lovely second theme is somewhat marred
By buried memories of revenge, and when the time comes to
Reinvent the initial phase, why, all but grinning stupidly, it hands
Its cards to another player and takes off in the direction of the pond.
Wait! But another’s daring solution will never rescue twice the omen
That hankered for more polity, and beside us though we were of no mind
To reckon it into what we were being elaborated by. Myrtles fall,
Crape drapes. The spear
Is slowly lowered as for the last curtain.
You’ve got to decide what your name is going to be,
What to do about it. By what ring we are decoded. Tangles
Of snake-grass and more, though it wouldn’t
Do to talk about it, would it? Why, since I have come home from school,
Why must I intend it? Who is the person who wants this? How many
Guests has he invited, where do they come from? Who isn’t
In on the trail? Now his men have departed. They have been sent away. Does that
Mean they won’t be back? Do we ever avoid our own reckoning, even
When the moist, mild sky smiles and the portcullis is up,
The drawbridge lowered, the road delighted to wind
Into a newly dapper landscape, pointedly new, and it runs away