its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.
THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE
1986
Stage Fright
Poets and writers.
So the saying goes.
That is poets aren’t writers, but who—
Poets are poetry, writers are prose—
Prose can hold anything including poetry,
but in poetry there’s only room for poetry—
In keeping with the poster that announces it
with a fin-de-siècle flourish of its giant P
framed in a winged lyre’s strings
I shouldn’t simply walk in, I should fly—
And wouldn’t I be better off barefoot
to escape the clump and squeak
of cut-rate sneakers,
a clumsy ersatz angel—
If at least the dress were longer and more flowing
and the poems appeared not from a handbag but by sleight of hand,
dressed in their Sunday best from head to toe,
with bells on, ding to dong,
ab ab ba—
On the platform lurks a little table
suggesting seances, with gilded legs,
and on the little table smokes a little candlestick—
Which means
I’ve got to read by candlelight
what I wrote by the light of an ordinary bulb
to the typewriter’s tap tap tap—
Without worrying in advance
if it was poetry
and if so, what kind—
The kind in which prose is inappropriate
or the kind which is apropos in prose—
And what’s the difference,
seen now only in half-light
against a crimson curtain’s
purple fringe?
Surplus
A new star has been discovered,
which doesn’t mean that things have gotten brighter
or that something we’ve been missing has appeared.
The star is large and distant,
so distant that it’s small,
even smaller than others
much smaller than it.
Small wonder, then, if we were struck with wonder;
as we would be if only we had the time.
The star’s age, mass, location—
all this perhaps will do
for one doctoral dissertation
and a wine-and-cheese reception
in circles close to the sky:
the astronomer, his wife, friends, and relations,
casual, congenial, come as you are,
mostly chat on earthbound topics,
surrounded by cozy earthtones.
The star’s superb,
but that’s no reason
why we can’t drink to the ladies
who are incalculably closer.
The star’s inconsequential.
It has no impact on the weather, fashion, final score,
government shake-ups, moral crises, take-home pay.
No effect on propaganda or on heavy industry.
It’s not reflected in a conference table’s shine.
It’s supernumerary in the light of life’s numbered days.
What’s the use of asking
under how many stars man is born
and under how many in a moment he will die.
A new one.
“At least show me where it is.”
“Between that gray cloud’s jagged edge
and the acacia twig over there on the left.”
“I see,” I say.
Archeology
Well, my poor man,
seems we’ve made some progress in my field.
Millennia have passed
since you first called me archeology.
I no longer require
your stone gods,
your ruins with legible inscriptions.
Show me your whatever
and I’ll tell you who you were.
Something’s bottom,
something’s top.
A scrap of engine. A picture tube’s neck.
An inch of cable. Fingers turned to dust.
Or even less than that, or even less.
Using a method
that you couldn’t have known then,
I can stir up memory
in countless elements.
Traces of blood are forever.
Lies shine.
Secret codes resound.
Doubts and intentions come to light.
If I want to
(and you can’t be too sure
that I will),
I’ll peer down the throat of your silence,
I’ll read your views
from the sockets of your eyes,
I’ll remind you in infinite detail
of what you expected from life besides death.
Show me your nothing
that you’ve left behind
and I’ll build from it a forest and a highway,
an airport, baseness, tenderness,
a missing home.
Show me your little poem
and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t written
any earlier or later than it was.
Oh no, you’ve got me wrong.
Keep your funny piece of paper
with its scribbles.
All I need for my ends
is your layer of dirt
and the long gone
smell of burning.
View with a Grain of Sand
We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.
Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.
The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.
The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.
A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.
Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.
Clothes
You take off, we take off, they take off
coats, jackets, blouses, double-breasted suits,
made of wool, cotton, cotton-polyester,
skirts, shirts, underwear, slacks, slips, socks,
putting, hanging, tossing them across
the backs of chairs, the wings of metal screens;
for now, the doctor says, it’s not too bad,
you may get dressed, get rested up, get out of town,
take one in case, at bedtime, after lunch,
show up in a couple of months, next spring, next year;
you see, and you thought, and we were afraid that,
and he imagined, and you all believed;
it’s time to tie, to fasten with shaking hands
shoelaces, buckles, velcro, zippers, snaps,
belts, buttons, cufflinks, collars, neckties, clasps
and to pull out of handbags, pockets, sleeves
a crumpled, dotted, flowered, checkered scarf
whose usefulness has suddenly been prolonged.
On Death, without Exaggeration
It can’t take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.
In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.
It can’t even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.
Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.
Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!
Sometimes it isn’t strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.
All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.
Ill will won’t help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat
is so far not enough.
Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies’ skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees far away.
Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it’s not.
There’s no life
if only for a moment.
Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you’ve come
can’t be undone.
The Great Man’s House
The marble tells us in golden syllables:
Here the great man lived, and worked, and died.
Here are the garden paths where he personally scattered the gravel.
Here’s the bench—don’t touch—he hewed the stone himself.
And here—watch the steps—we enter the house.
He managed to come into the world at what was still a fitting time.
All that was to pass passed in this house.
Not in housing projects,
not in furnished but empty quarters,
among unknown neighbors,
on fifteenth floors
that student field trips rarely reach.
In this room he thought,
in this alcove he slept,
and here he entertained his guests.
Portraits, armchair, desk, pipe, globe,
flute, well-worn carpet, glassed-in porch.
Here he exchanged bows with the tailor and shoemaker
who made his coats and boots to order.
It’s not the same as photographs in boxes,
dried-out ballpoint pens in plastic cups,
store-bought clothes in store-bought closets,
a window that looks out on clouds, not passersby.
Was he happy? Sad?
That’s not the point.
He still made confessions in letters
without thinking they’d be opened en route.
He still kept a careful, candid diary
knowing it wouldn’t be seized in a search.
The thing that most frightened him was a comet’s flight.
The world’s doom lay then in God’s hands alone.
He was lucky enough to die not in a hospital,
not behind some white, anonymous screen.
There was still someone there at his bedside to memorize
his mumbled words.
As if he had been given
a reusable life:
he sent out books to be bound,
he didn’t strike the names of the dead from his ledgers.
And the trees that he planted in the garden by his house
still grew for him as juglans regia,
and quercus rubra, and ulmus, and larix,
and fraxinus excelsior.
In Broad Daylight
He would
vacation in a mountain boardinghouse, he would
come down for lunch, from his
table by the window he would
scan the four spruces, branch to branch,
without shaking off the freshly fallen snow.
Goateed, balding,
gray-haired, in glasses,
with coarsened, weary features,
with a wart on his cheek and a furrowed forehead,
as if clay had covered up the angelic marble—he wouldn’t
know himself when it all happened.
The price, after all, for not having died already
goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would
pay that price, too.
About his ear, just grazed by the bullet
when he ducked at the last minute, he would
say: “I was damned lucky.”
While waiting to be served his noodle soup, he would