works to be beautiful,
how we metabolize loss
as fast as we have to.
Bud Powell, Paris, 1959
I'd never seen pain so bland.
Smack, though I didn't call it smack
in 1959, had eaten his technique.
His white-water right hand clattered
missing runs nobody else would think
to try, nor think to be outsmarted
by. Nobody played as well
as Powell, and neither did he,
stalled on his bench between sets,
stolid and vague, my hero,
his mocha skin souring gray.
Two bucks for a Scotch in this dump,
I thought, and I bought me
another. I was young and pain
rose to my ceiling, like warmth,
like a story that makes us come true
in the present. Each day's
melodrama in Powell's cells
bored and lulled him. Pain loves pain
and calls it company, and it is.
Listening to Lester Young
for Reg Saner
It's 1958. Lester Young minces
out, spraddle-legged as if pain
were something he could step over
by raising his groin, and begins
to play. Soon he'll be dead.
It's all tone now and tone
slurring toward the center
of each note. The edges that used to be
exactly ragged as deckle
are already dead. His embouchure
is wobbly and he's so tired
from dying he quotes himself,
easy to remember the fingering.
It's 1958 and a jazz writer is coming home
from skating in Central Park. Who's that
ahead? It's Lester Young! Hey Pres,
he shouts and waves, letting his skates
clatter. You dropped your shit, Pres says.
It's 1976 and I'm listening
to Lester Young through stereo equipment
so good I can hear his breath rasp,
water from a dry pond—,
its bottom etched, like a palm,
with strange marks, a language
that was never born
and in which palmists therefore
can easily read the future.
The Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario
Each vast block in its batter
of sawdust must have weighed
as much as I did. The sweat
we gathered running down
the path began to glaze.
We could see our breaths,
like comic strip balloons
but ragged, grey, opaque.
A warehouse of water on an island.
Once we arrived by seaplane:
the island looked like a green footprint.
Someone in a hurry saved time
by not sinking with each step.
In the icehouse I'd clear my name
on a block of ice and the dank film
of sawdust on my finger was as dense
as parts of grown-up conversation,
the rivalry of uncles and managing
money. The managers I knew
wore baseball caps and yelled.
As for money, I thought it was like food.
When blueberries were in season
we ate them all the time.
I always hoped to find a pickerel
in some block of ice
I was signing. Eyes frozen clear,
the tiny teeth like rasps on a file, the head
tapering to so fine a point it seemed
it could drill its way out....
I'd smear the block clean with both hands cold
white under their gloves of sawdust.
Look here, I'd say clearly.
The Mail
The star route man downshifts
his pale purple jeep called a Bronco
instead of a Rat or a Toucan.
The mailbox gets fed. Sharon mutters
out in her sweater, imploring
herself. What about? The wind,
water, the dead current of woodgrain
in the headboard of the bed.
She goes in to open the mail
which mainly says Read Me
I'm Here and See You
Tomorrow, (signed) little ripples
of ink. They make her want
to brush her hair and if it could
her hair would rise to the brush
out the window. She could go anywhere.
Though the wind doesn't stop,
nor the light, to write a few words
beginning Dear Sharon, Dear Hair,
Dear Snowgrains Swirled Off The Roof,
Dear Window Pulling Me There.
Taking the Train Home
1
Dusk grew on the window.
I'd listen for the click
of the seams in the rails
to come at the same speed
the telephone wires sagged
and then shot upward to the pole.
All night I slept between
the rails, a boy on a stretcher.
When I'd wake up outside
Chillicothe I felt like a fish.
Alfalfa and cows peered in
as I went by in my
aquarium, my night
in glass. Dawn flew against
my window the same way
a fly swarms by itself
against the heat of a bare
light bulb, like a heart attack.
I'd be home soon, 7:15,
all out for Cincinnati.
2
It's Sunday and I'm only four
and my grandparents are taking
me to Sharonville, to the roundhouse.
Pop drives. The part in the white crest
of his hair is like a compass needle.
Non sings. From the back seat
I lean between them, I can
feel the soot, the cinders
like black popcorn under my feet.
The roundhouse ceiling is charred
by sparks, and grime
smears its highest windows.
Coalcars smolder on sidings
while the engine turns
away from its arrival.
I was going to live in a roundhouse
when I grew up, a lighthouse.
Every morning the moon
would steam in over the sea
and turn around.
The table would be set for breakfast
before I went to bed,
my little tower of pills
beside the juice glass.
My hair would be white, like Pop's,
and by its light the ships,
long pods of sleep and fuel oil,
coffee beans, brooms
with real straw,
by the light of my hair
ships would sleep into port
and germinate.
3
In my dream I'm only four
again, Pop is alive.
He walks slowly—emphysema.
I've eaten something
metallic, something
I don't understand.
I circle away from him
to vomit among roadside weeds.
I force it up.
It's like gruel, with roofing nails
for lumps.
I love this dying man.
I look up and he bobs over a wave
in the road, he's swimming
out to sea. I begin
following but my legs are too short,
death is my father,
this is my body
which will fall apart.
I'm sleeping on the ocean.
I'm asleep on a train
outside Red Lion, Ohio.
I don't know; I can't tell,
but it seems to me
that if I could watch my body sleep
it would glow,
growing its antibodies
to eternal life,
growing the lives we give away
when we wake.
Waking at Dusk from a Nap
In the years that pass through
an afternoon's dream, like tape
at Fast Forward, there are
syllables, somehow, in the waterfall,
and in the dream I hear them each
clearly, a classroom
of children reciting their names.
the dream, in which such distinctions
go without saying. And in which
a confusion I may soon have—did I
wake at dawn or dusk?—seems
anticipated: a strand of stars
goes by, like elephants spliced
trunk-to-tail in children's books
or ivory carvings, and the dream won't say
if they're through for the night
or amiably headed for work.
And the dream—and once, I remember,
it seemed I was the dream—
the dream tilts up to pour me out.
For an instant when I wake
there's a whir, perhaps of props
and stagehands, and a laggard star
scrambles over the transom.
The grainy world with its sworls
and lesions, its puckering dusk light,
its dimming patina, its used and casual
beauty, reassembles itself exactly.
And I climb down from the bed, gather
my spilled book from the floor,
and watch the lights come on
in the valley, like bright type
being set in another language.
In Memory of W. H. Auden
1
His heart made a last fist.
The language has used him
well and passed him through.
We get what he collected.
The magpie shines, burns
in the face of the polished stone.
2
His was a mind alive by a pure greed
for reading, for the book
which "is a mirror,"
as Lichtenberg said: "if an ass
peers into it, you can't expect
an apostle to look out."
It was a mediating mind.
There were the crowds like fields of waving wheat
and there was the Rilkean fire
he didn't like
at the bottom of the night.
He loomed back and forth.
The space shrank.
The dogs of Europe wolved
about the house,
darks defining a campfire.
3
My friend said Auden died
because his face
invaded his body.
Under the joke is a myth—
we invent our faces:
the best suffer most and it shows.
But what about the face
crumpled by a drunk's Buick?
Or Auden's
face in its fugue of photographs
so suddenly resolved?
It isn't suffering that eats us.
4
They were not painting about suffering,
the Old Masters. Not the human heart but
Brueghel turns the plowman away
for compositional reasons
and smooths the waters for a ship he made
expensive and delicate.
The sun is implied by how
the sure hand makes the light fall
as long as we watch the painting.
The sure hand is cruel.
Nurse Sharks
Since most sharks have no flotation bladders and must swim
to keep from sinking, they like to sleep in underwater caves,
wedged between reef-ledges, or in water so shallow
that their dorsal fins cut up from the surf.
Once I woke a nurse shark (so named because it was
thought to protect its young by taking them
into its mouth). It shied from the bubbles I gave up
but sniffed the glint the murky light made on my regulator.
My first shark at last. I clenched
every pore I could. A shark's sense of smell
is so acute and indiscriminate that a shark crossing
the path of its own wound is rapt.
Once a shark got caught, ripped open by the hook.
The fisherman threw it back after it flopped
fifteen minutes on deck, then caught it again
on a hook baited with its own guts.
Except for the rapacious great white
who often bites first, sharks usually nudge
what they might eat. They're scavengers and like
food to be dead or dying. Move to show you're alive
but not so much as to cause panic: that's what the books
advise. The nurse shark nibbled at my regulator
once, a florid angelfish swam by, the shark
veered off as if it were bored. Its nubbled skin
scraped my kneecap, no blood
but the rasped kneecap pink for a week.
Another year I swam past a wallow of nurse sharks asleep
in three feet of water, their wedge-shaped heads lax
on each other's backs. One of them slowly thrashed
its tail as if it were keeping its balance in the thicket
of sharks sleeping like pick-up sticks. Its tail sent
a small current over me, a wet wind.
I swirled around a stand of coral and swam
fast to shore, startling the sharks to a waking frenzy:
moil, water opaque with churned-up sand,
grey flames burning out to sea. Last time I go diving
alone, I promised myself, though I lied.
Long
for Stanley Plumly
It's about to be too late.
Every shred of the usual weather
is precious and sexual as it goes,
the way the links of a fugue become
one another's strict abandonments.
As for the future, it will not swerve.
Fire sleeps in the tree. Which tree?
Fire sleeps without dreaming and cannot
say. If we call the future's name
it becomes our name, by echo.
And from the dead, not even
a plea that we leave them
alone, each dead locked
in its dead name. If the dead complained,
they would say we summon them poorly,
dull music and thin wine, nor love
enough for the many we make,
much less for the melted dead
in their boxes. Above them
we talk big, since the place is vast
and bland if we tire of looking closely,
washed bland by light from what light
lets us see, our study,
the scripture of matter,
our long narcosis of parting.
Flood (1982)
New
The long path sap sludges up
through an iris, is it new
each spring? And what would
an iris care for novelty?
Urgent in tatters, it wants
to wrest what routine it can
from the ceaseless shifts
of weather, from the scrounge
it feeds on to grow beautiful
and bigger: last week the space
about to be rumpled
by iris petals was only air
through which a rabbit leapt,
a volley of heartbeats hardly
contained by fur, and then the clay-
colored spaniel in pursuit
and the effort
less air
rejoining itself whole.
Cows Grazing at Sunrise
What the sun gives us,
the air it passes through aspires
to take back, and the day's long
bidding begins, itself a sort
of heat. Up goes the warm air
and down comes the cold.
In the cows' several bellies the bicker
of use is loud. Their dense heads
spill shadows thirty feet long,
heads that weigh as much as my grown
children, who can crack my heart:
the right tool makes any job
easy. And don't the cows know it,
and the dewy, fermenting grass?
And isn't the past inevitable,
now that we call the little
we remember of it "the past"?
Housework
How precise it seems, like a dollhouse,
and look: the tiniest socks ever knit
are crumpled on a chair in your bedroom.
And how still, like the air inside a church
or basketball. How you could have lived
your boyhood here is hard to know,
unless the blandishing lilacs
and slant rain stippling the lamplight
sustained you, and the friendship of dogs,
and the secrecy that flourishes in vacant lots.
For who would sleep, like a cat in a drawer,
in this house memory is always dusting,
unless it be you? I'd hear you on the stairs,
an avalanche of sneakers, and then the sift
of your absence and then I'd begin to rub
the house like a lantern until you came back
and grew up to be me, wondering how to sleep
in this lie of memory unless it be made clean.
Bystanders
When it snowed hard, cars failed
at the hairpin turn above the house.