Who was probably baiting line for sand sharks
As they spoke. He fell asleep imagining
The man setting the line, pouring coffee,
Blowing on his hands, shivering against the cold.
She was awake beside him, her panic like the wind.
4.
It was hot. She was stripping a kitchen chair
She’d bought at a garage sale up the bay.
She was working indoors because the sun
outside would dry the paint remover
As fast as she applied it. So she worked
In the kitchen, opening the windows
And hoping for a little breeze. Which came and went.
There were three layers of paint on the chair,
She discovered, white, an evergreen shade of green,
Then red, and underneath the paint what looked like cedar.
She scraped hard and watched her mind
Shying from the notion of endeavor.
TWIN DOLPHINS
A paradise of palm and palm and palm
And glittering sea.
Rocks, pelicans, then pure horizon,
Angular white villas on a hillside
Tumbling to the sea.
“Gracias.” “De nada.”
A flycatcher in an ironwood,
Sulfur belly, whitish throat,
A thin rind of brown-gold on ash-gray wings.
Utterly alert. He has his work to do.
After breakfast they went their separate ways.
Gulls and lulls and glittering sea.
“The papaya was lovely this morning.”
“Yes, but the guava was not quite ripe.”
Expressionist crucifix: the frigate bird.
Sand-colored day, bright heat.
“What do you call a lot of pelicans?”
“A flotilla.” “Ah, a little float.”
“A baby fleet.” Smell of vanilla
In the desert, and, oddly, maple
(yerba santa?). Making love after,
To the sound of waves,
The sound of waves.
Eden, limbo.
Fan palms and the sea; festoons
of big-leaved fan palms
Fanning out; the sea on which they pitch
Raking sand and raking sand, sighing
And pitching and raking sand.
Harlequin sparrows in a coral tree.
one halcyon harrying another in the desert sky,
Blue, and would be turquoise,
Would be stone.
Bone china handle of a coffee mug: the moon.
What’s old? The silence
In this black, humped porous mass
of “prefossiliferous rock”
The ocean beats against.
No animals, no plants,
The tides of fire before there was a sea.
Before skin, words.
“Sonorous nutshells rattling vacantly.”
Brilliant welter, azure welter,
occurs—the world occurs—
only in the present tense.
“I’ll see you after lunch.”
(Kisses him lightly)
“—As if raspberry tanagers in palms,
High up in orange air, were barbarous.”
THEN TIME
In winter, in a small room, a man and a woman
Have been making love for hours. Exhausted,
very busy wringing out each other’s bodies,
They look at one another suddenly and laugh.
“What is this?” he says. “I can’t get enough of you,”
She says, a woman who thinks of herself as not given
To cliché. She runs her fingers across his chest,
Tentative touches, as if she were testing her wonder.
He says, “Me too.” And she, beginning to be herself
Again, “You mean you can’t get enough of you either?”
“I mean,” he takes her arms in his hands and shakes them,
“Where does this come from?” She cocks her head
And looks into his face. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes,” he says. “Self-hatred,” she says, “longing for God.”
Kisses him again. “It’s not what it is,” a wry shrug,
“it’s where it comes from.” Kisses his bruised mouth
A second time, a third. Years later, in another city,
They’re having dinner in a quiet restaurant near a park.
Fall. Earlier that day, hard rain: leaves, brass-colored
And smoky crimson, flying everywhere. Twenty years older,
She is very beautiful. An astringent person. She ’d become,
She said, an obsessive gardener, her daughters grown.
He’s trying not to be overwhelmed by love or pity
Because he sees she has no hands. He thinks
She must have given them away. He imagines,
very clearly, how she wakes some mornings
(He has a vivid memory of her younger self, stirred
From sleep, flushed, just opening her eyes)
To momentary horror because she can’t remember
What she did with them, why they were gone,
And then remembers, and calms herself, so that the day
Takes on its customary sequence once again.
She asks him if he thinks about her. “occasionally,”
He says, smiling. “And you?” “Not much,” she says,
“I think it’s because we never existed inside time.”
He studies her long fingers, a pianist’s hands,
or a gardener’s, strong, much-used, as she fiddles
With her wineglass and he understands, vaguely,
That it must be his hands that are gone. Then
He’s describing a meeting that he ’d sat in all day,
Chaired by someone they’d felt, many years before,
Mutually superior to. “You know the expression
‘A perfect fool,’” she ’d said, and he had liked her tone
of voice so much. She begins a story of the company
In Maine she orders bulbs from, begun by a Polish refugee
Married to a French-Canadian separatist from Quebec.
It’s a story with many surprising turns and a rare
Chocolate-black lily at the end. He ’s listening,
Studying her face, still turning over her remark.
He decides that she thinks more symbolically
Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,
For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.
She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,
Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure
In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.
It moves her—in the way that earnest limitation
Can be moving, and she is moved by her attraction to him.
Also by what he was to her. She sees her own avidity
To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate,
From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road
A startled deer running across an open field in the rain.
Wild thing. Here and gone. De
ath made it poignant, or,
If not death exactly, which she ’d come to think of
As creatures seething in a compost heap, then time.
THAT MUSIC
The creek’s silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses,
vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,
Do they confer, do the lovers’ bodies
In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face
Confer—, does the slow breeze in the pines?
If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: IN MEMORIAM
In his last years, when he had moved back to KrakÓw, we worked on the translation of his poems by e-mail and phone. Around the time of his ninetieth birthday, he sent me a set of poems entitled “Oh!” I wrote to ask him if he meant “Oh!” or “O!” and he asked me what the difference was and said that perhaps we should talk on the phone. On the phone I explained that “Oh!” was a long breath of wonder, that the equivalent was, possibly, “Wow!” and that “O!” was a caught breath of wonder and surprise, more like “Huh!” and he said, after a pause, “O! for sure.” Here are the translations we made:
O!
1.
O happiness! To see an iris.
The color of indigo, as Ella’s dress was once, and the delicate scent was
like that of her skin.
O what a mumbling to describe an iris that was blooming when Ella did
not exist, nor all our kingdoms, nor all our desmesnes!
2.
GUSTAV KLIMT (1862–1918)
Judith (detail)
OESTERREICHISCHE GALERIE
O lips half-opened, eyes half-closed, the rosy nipple of your unveiled nakedness, Judith!
And they, rushing forward in an attack with your image preserved in their memories, torn apart by bursts of artillery shells, falling down into pits, into putrefaction.
O the massive gold of your brocade, of your necklace with its rows of precious stones, Judith, for such a farewell.
3.
SALVATOR ROSA (1615–1673)
A Landscape with Figures
YALE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM
O the quiet of water under the rocks, and the yellow silence of the afternoon, and flat white clouds reflected!
Figures in the foreground dressing themselves after bathing, figures on the other shore tiny, and in their activities mysterious.
O most ordinary, taken from dailiness and elevated to a place like this earth and not like this earth!
4.
EDWARD HOPPER (1882–1967)
Hotel Room
THYSSEN COLLECTION, MADRID
O what sadness unaware that it’s sadness!
What despair that doesn’t know it’s despair!
A business woman, her unpacked suitcase on the floor, sits on a bed half undressed, in red underwear, her hair impeccable; she has a piece of paper in her hand, probably with numbers.
Who are you? Nobody will ask. She doesn’t know either.
HORACE: THREE IMITATIONS
1.
ODES, 1.38 PERSICOS ODI, PUER, APPARATUS
I hate Persian filigree, and garlands
Woven out of lime tree bark.
on no account are you to hunt up, for my sake,
The late-blooming rose.
Plain myrtle will do nicely for a crown.
It’s not unbecoming on you as you pour
or on me as I sip, in the arbor’s shade,
A glass of cool wine.
Here, by the way, is your manumission.
Let it be noted that after two thousand years
The poet Horace, he of the suave Greek meters, has
At last freed his slaves.
2.
ODES, 3.2 ANGUSTAM AMICE PAUPERIEM PATI
Let the young, toughened by a soldiers’ training,
Learn to bear hardship gladly
And to terrify Parthian insurgents
From the turrets of their formidable tanks,
Also to walk so easily under desert skies
That the mother of some young Sunni
Will see a marine in the dusty streets
And turn to the daughter-in-law beside her
And say with a shudder: Pray God our boy
Doesn’t stir up that Roman animal
Whom a cruel rage for blood would drive
Straight to the middle of any slaughter.
It is sweet, and fit, to die for one ’s country,
Especially since death doesn’t spare deserters
or the young man without a warrior’s instincts
Who goes down with a bullet in his back.
Civic courage is a more complicated matter.
of itself it shines out undefiled.
It neither lies its way into office, nor mistakes
The interests of Roman oil for Roman honor.
The kind of courage death can’t claim
If you are going to speak truth in public places
You may as well take wing from the earth.
Knowing when not to speak also has its virtue.
I wouldn’t sit under the same roof beams
With most of the explainers of wars on television
or set sail on the same sleek ship.
They say the gods have been known
To punish the innocent along with the guilty
And nemesis often finds the ones it means,
With its limping gait, to track down.
3.
ODES, 3.19 QUANTEM DISTET AB INACHO
You talk very well about Inachus
And how Codrus died for his city,
And the offspring of old Aeacus
And the fighting at sacred Ilium under the walls,
But on the price of Chian wine,
And the question of who’s going to warm it,
Under whose roof it will be drunk,
And when my bones will come unfrozen, you are mute.
Boy, let’s drink to the new moon’s sliver,
And drink to the middle of the night, and drink
To good Murena, with three glasses
or with nine. Nine, says the madman poet
Whom the uneven-numbered Muses love.
Three, says the even-tempered Grace who holds
Her naked sisters by the hands
And disapproves altogether of brawling,
Should do a party handsomely.
But what I want’s to rave. Why is the flute
From Phrygia silent? Why are the lyre
And the reed pipe hanging on the wall?
oh, how I hate a pinching hand.
Scatter the roses! Let jealous old Lycus
Listen to our pandemonium,
And also the pretty neighbor he ’s not up to.
Rhoda loves your locks, Telephus.
She thinks they glisten like the evening star.
As for me, I’m stuck on Glycera:
With a love that smoulders
in me like slow fire.
STATE OF THE PLANET
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory
1.
October on the planet at the century’s end.
Rain lashing the windshield. Through blurred glass
Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled
Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum
Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color
of skinned copper, if copper could be skinned.
And under it, her gait as elegant and supple
As the young of any of earth’s species, a schoolgirl
Negotiates a crosswalk in the wind, her hair flying,
The red satchel on her quite straight back darkening
Splotch by smoky crimson splotch as the rain pelts it.
one of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.
Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of illustrations,
A book with a title like Getting to Know Your Planet.
The book will tell her that the earth this month
Has yawed a little distance from the sun,
And that the air, cooling, has begun to move,
As sensitive to temperature as skin is
To a lover’s touch. It will also tell her that the air—
It’s likely to say “the troposphere”—has trapped
Emissions from millions of cars, idling like mine
As she crosses, and is making a greenhouse
of the atmosphere. The book will say that climate