of cutting some sweet deal with Uncle Sam.
Street murder scents the gentle, saline air.
SUN SPOT EXPLODES, BECOMES METROPOLIS.
White millionaires’ drab palaces still peep
behind the drooping bougainvillea, but
the crash, as in slow motion, widens out;
the moon keeps skidding through the gilded clouds.
Fly
What have we done this winter to deserve
this plague of giant flies? They breed in the house,
being born to batter and buzz at the glass
of windows where sunshine shows a world of snow.
Stupid out of season, they are easy to swat,
and some can’t seem to fly, but run across
the kitchen linoleum in a comical hurry,
more like a frantic man than you would think.
Stupid myself one noon, I watched one primp
head-down on a sunstruck kitchen wall.
He rubbed his face on his rotating head
with forelegs finer than a pencil line;
a cleansing seemed in progress, bit by bit.
He held each wing out stiff, its rainbow shadow
projected down the wall diagonally,
and scrubbed the membranes with a fussy leg.
All creatures groom, but who would figure that
a fly, which thrives on dirt, could be so nice?
His head and legs were like a watchworks ticking,
but spaced by intervals of what seemed thought.
His interlocking parts’ complexity
was photocopied by his lengthened shadow,
a sharp mechanical drawing sunshine drew:
each twitch, each quick caress of mouth-parts,
each hinge of animate anatomy.
Up from a maggot had arisen this tower
of microcosmic beams, their third dimension
craned outward to contain a fourth, called life.
So how can I crush construction so rare?
A bomber flattens cities but cannot see
the child in the map, the network of girders.
Swat not, not I at the moment, all eye.
Flurry
There is an excited nonserious species of snowstorm,
flurrying flakes thick as goosefeathers, actualized air,
that dies in an instant, succeeded by watery sunshine
and the ponderous dull of a gray winter day, like a flurry
of love some old gentleman once underwent, to think back on,
his duty to Eros fulfilled, and the world none the worse for it.
Bindweed
Intelligence does help, sometimes;
the bindweed doesn’t know
when it begins to climb a wand of grass
that this is no tree and will shortly bend
its flourishing dependent back to earth.
But bindweed has a trick: self-
stiffening, entwining two- or three-ply,
to boost itself up, into the lilac.
Without much forethought it manages
to imitate the lilac leaves and lose
itself to all but the avidest clippers.
To spy it out, to clip near the root
and unwind the climbing tight spiral
with a motion the reverse of its own
feels like treachery—death to a plotter
whose intelligence mirrors ours, twist for twist.
July
Deep pools of shade beneath dense maples,
the dapples as delicious as lemon drops—
textures of childhood, and its many flavors!
The gratefulness of cool, the bottles of
sarsaparilla and iodine-red cream soda
schooled like fish, on their sides,
in the watery ice of the zinc-lined cooler
in the shade of the cherry trees
planted by the town baseball diamond,
where only grown-ups cared what the score was
and the mailman took his ups with a grunt
that made the crowd in its shirtsleeves laugh.
The sun kindled freckles like a match
touching straw, and beneath a tree
a quality reigned like the sound of a gong,
solemn and sticky and calm. Then the grass
bared the hurry of ants, and each blade
bent to some weight, some faint godly tread
we could not see. The dapples
were not holes in the shade but like pies,
bulging up, and air tasted of water,
and water of metal, and metal of what
would never come—real change, removal
from this island of stagnant summer,
the end of sarsaparilla and its hint
of licorice taste, of sassafras twig,
of things we chewed with the cunning of Indians,
to whom all trees had souls, the maples no more
like birches than clouds are like waterfalls.
The dying grass smelled especially sweet
where sneakers had packed it flat,
or out of the way, in the playground corner,
where the sun had forgot to stop shining.
This was the apogee, July, a month
like the piece of a dome where it flattens
and reflects in a smear high above us,
the ant-children busy and lazy below.
To a Dead Flame
Dear X, you wouldn’t believe how curious
my eyebrows have become—jagged gray wands
have intermixed with the reddish-brown, and poke
up toward the sun and down into my eyes.
It hurts, a self-caress that brings tears
and blurred vision. Aches and pains! The other day
my neck was so stiff I couldn’t turn my head
to parallel-park. Another man
would have trusted his mirrors, but not I;
I had the illusion something might interpose
between reality and its reflection, as happened with us.
The aging smell, X—a rank small breeze wafts upward
when I shed my underwear. My potency,
which you would smilingly complain about,
has become as furtive as an early mammal.
My hair shows white in photographs, although
the barber’s clippings still hold some brown.
At times I catch myself making that loose mouth
old people make, as if one’s teeth don’t fit,
without being false. You’re well out of it—
I tell you this mentally, while shaving
or putting myself to bed, but it’s a lie.
The world is still wonderful. Wisps of mist
were floating off your old hill yesterday,
the hill where you lived, in sight of the course
where I played (badly) in a Senior Men’s
Four-Ball in the rain, each green a mirage.
I thought of us, abed atop that hill,
and of how I would race down through your woods
to my car, and back to my life, my heart
enormous with what I newly knew—
the color of you naked, the milk of your sighs—
through leaves washed to the glisten of fresh wounds.
What desperate youthful fools we were, afraid
of not getting our share, our prize in the race,
like jostling marathoners starting out,
clumsy but pulsingly full of blood.
You dropped out, but we all drop out, it seems.
You never met my jealous present wife;
she hates this poem. The living have it hard,
not living only in the mind, but in
the receding flesh. Old men must be allowed
their private murmuring, a prayer wheel
set spinning to confuse and stay the sun.
Back from Vacation
“Bac
k from vacation,” the barber announces,
or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.
They are amazed to find the workaday world
still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,
their customers having hardly missed them, and
there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,
the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,
the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved
in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,
the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.
But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.
Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,
warm as if never shucked. The world is so small,
the evidence says, though their hearts cry, “Not so!”
Literary Dublin
Damn near where’er you look, a writer’s ghost:
round plaques declaring Oscar Wilde slept here,
or Brendan Behan took a drink, or Patrick
O’Scrittore boarded for a year
as debt and desperate hopes revolved him through
the tattered brown-bricked streets, the blank-faced
Georgian rows, no pair of doors alike.
The scandal of them all, James Joyce, who sinned
against the Holy Spirit, said the Church,
is now a tourist souvenir, can you believe
it?—a bust in St. Stephen’s Green, Bloom’s route
all traced in a tidy pamphlet by some Yank,
and Daedalus’s execration hung
above the city like a blind man’s blessing.
Elderly Sex
Life’s buried treasure’s buried deeper still:
a cough, a draft, a wrinkle in the bed
distract the search, as precarious as
a safecracker’s trembling touch on the dial.
We are walking a slack tight wire, we
are engaged in unlikely acrobatics,
we are less frightened of the tiger than
of the possibility the cage is empty.
Nature used to do more—paroxysms
of blood and muscle, the momentous machine
set instantly in place, the dark a-swim,
and lubrication’s thousand jewels poured forth
by lapfuls where, with dry precision, now
attentive irritation yields one pearl.
Celery
So near to air and water merely
and yet a food, green,
fibrous like a ribbed sky at sunset,
diminishing inward
in nested arcs to a shaving-brush heart
paler than celadon:
the Chinese love you, and dieters,
for you take away
more calories in the chewing
than your mass bestows,
and children, who march around the table
to your drumbeat,
marking crisp time with their teeth,
your dancer’s legs long as they leap.
São Paulo
Buildings to the horizon, an accretion
big beyond structure: no glass downtown shimmering
with peacock power, just the elephantine
color of poured concrete repeated in clusters,
into the haze that foots the horizon of hills,
a human muchness encountering no bounds.
From the hotel window, ridged roofs of ruddy tile,
the black of corrugated iron, the green
and yellow of shopfronts, a triangular hut
revealed survival’s piecemeal, patchwork logic.
All afternoon, the view sulked beneath my room
in silence—a city without a city’s outcry.
And then a pronouncement—thunder?—overruled
the air conditioner’s steady whir, and a tapping
asked me to look. The empty, too-full view
held thousands of foreshortened arrows: rain,
seen from above, a raying angelic substance.
I felt lifted up, to God’s altitude.
If the rain was angelic, why not men and their works?
Their colorless habitations, like a drenched
honeycomb: men come in from the country
to the town’s crowded hope, the town grown
to a chaos but still open to the arrows
of Heaven, transparently, all life a veil.
Rio de Janeiro
Too good to be true—a city that empties
its populace, a hundred shades of brown,
upon its miles of beach in morning’s low light
and takes the bodies back when darkness quells
the last long volleyball game; even then,
the sands are lit for the soccer of homeless children.
A city that exults in nakedness:
“The ass,” hissed to us a man of the élite,
“the ass has become the symbol of Rio.”
Set off by suits of “dental floss,” girls’ buttocks
possess a meaty staring solemnness
that has us see sex as it is: a brainless act
performed by lumpy monkeys, mostly hairless.
Still, the herd vibrates, a loom of joy
threaded by vendors—a tree of suntan lotion
or of hats, or fried snacks roofed in cardboard—
whose monotonous cries in Portuguese
make the same carnival mock of human need.
Elsewhere, chaste squares preserve Machado’s world
of understated tragedy, and churches
the blackened bliss of gold. Life to the living,
while politicians dazzling in their polish,
far off in Brasília’s cubes, feign impotence.
Brazil
To go to the edge is to discover
the edge to be the center. Cabral
was on his way around Africa
and passed an unexpected, endless coast.
The king bestowed the land, but few
the donatários who cared to come.
Of those that did, most yearned to find gold
and go home. Still, life grew its holds—
churches, whores, the whole caboodle.
The Indians knew how to die, the slaves
had rolling, fetching eye-whites. Sugar paid,
and the sense of banishment dimly shifted.
To arrive at self’s end is to embark again
upon love’s narcissistic enterprise.
Upon Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home
Yes, this is how it was to have been born
in 1932—the having parents
everyone said loved you and you had to love;
the believing having a wonderful life began
with being good at school; the certainty
that words would count; the diligence with postage,
sending things out; the seeing Dreyer’s silent Joan
at the Museum of Modern Art, and being
greatly moved; the courtship of the slicks,
because one had to eat, one and one’s spouse,
that soulmate in Bohem-/Utop-ia.
You, dead at thirty, leaving blood-soaked poems
for all the anthologies, and I still wheezing,
my works overweight; and yet we feel twins.
At the End of the Rainbow
Is this the bliss for which you’ve tried to live?
The motel room, 10:45, alone,
the last book signed, the thunderous applause
still tingling in your body. The polite
exchanges with the distant relatives
who drove a hundred miles or so (as if
they didn’t trust a thing but downright seeing),
the nervous banter with your guardian,
the bearded chairman of the writing program
(between you in
the dark car like a dagger
his own slim oeuvre), the silken-faced coeds,
their smiles as warm as humid underpants—
all gone, endured. The square made bed. Hi-tech
alarm clock, digital. The john. The check.
Academy
The shuffle up the stairs betrays our age:
sunk to polite senility our fire
and tense perfectionism, our curious rage
to excel, to exceed, to climb still higher.
Our battles were fought elsewhere; here, this peace
betrays and cheats us with a tame reward—
a klieg-lit stage and numbered chairs, an ease
of prize and praise that sets sheath to the sword.
The naked models, the Village gin, the wife
whose hot tears sped the novel to its end,
the radio that leaked distracting life
into the symphony’s cerebral blend.
A struggle it was, and a dream; we wake
to bright bald honors. Tell us our mistake.
LIGHT VERSE
Mountain Impasse
“I despise mountains,” Stravinsky declared contemptuously, “they don’t tell me anything.”
—Life
Stravinsky looks upon the mountain,
The mountain looks on him;
They look (the mountain and Stravinsky)
And both their views are dim.
“You bore me, mountain,” says Stravinsky,
“I find you dull, and I
Despise you!” Says the mountain:
“Stravinsky, tell me why.”
Stravinsky bellows at the mountain
And nearby valleys ring:
“You don’t confide in me—Stravinsky!
You never tell me anything!”
The hill is still before Stravinsky.
The skies in silence glisten.
At last, a rumble, then the mountain: