Cat in an Empty Apartment
Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.
Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.
Every closet has been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.
Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
Parting with a View
I don’t reproach the spring
for starting up again.
I can’t blame it
for doing what it must
year after year.
I know that my grief
will not stop the green.
The grass blade may bend
but only in the wind.
It doesn’t pain me to see
that clumps of alders above the water
have something to rustle with again.
I take note of the fact
that the shore of a certain lake
is still—as if you were living—
as lovely as before.
I don’t resent
the view for its vista
of a sun-dazzled bay.
I am even able to imagine
some non-us
sitting at this minute
on a fallen birch trunk.
I respect their right
to whisper, laugh,
and lapse into happy silence.
I can even allow
that they are bound by love
and that he holds her
with a living arm.
Something freshly birdish
starts rustling in the reeds.
I sincerely want them
to hear it.
I don’t require changes
from the surf,
now diligent, now sluggish,
obeying not me.
I expect nothing
from the depths near the woods,
first emerald,
then sapphire,
then black.
There’s one thing I won’t agree to:
my own return.
The privilege of presence—
I give it up.
I survived you by enough,
and only by enough,
to contemplate from afar.
Séance
Happenstance reveals its tricks.
It produces, by sleight of hand, a glass of brandy
and sits Henry down beside it.
I enter the bistro and stop dead in my tracks.
Henry—he’s none other than
Agnes’s husband’s brother,
and Agnes is related
to Aunt Sophie’s brother-in-law.
It turns out
we’ve got the same great-grandfather.
In happenstance’s hands
space furls and unfurls,
spreads and shrinks.
The tablecloth
becomes a handkerchief.
Just guess who I ran into
in Canada, of all places,
after all these years.
I thought he was dead,
and there he was, in Mercedes.
On the plane to Athens.
At a stadium in Tokyo.
Happenstance twirls a kaleidoscope in its hands.
A billion bits of colored glass glitter.
And suddenly Jack’s glass
bumps into Jill’s.
Just imagine, in this very same hotel.
I turn around and see—
it’s really she!
Face to face in an elevator.
In a toy store.
At the corner of Maple and Pine.
Happenstance is shrouded in a cloak.
Things get lost in it and then are found again.
I stumbled on it accidentally.
I bent down and picked it up.
One look and I knew it,
a spoon from that stolen service.
If it hadn’t been for that bracelet,
I would never have known Alexandra.
The clock? It turned up in Potterville.
Happenstance looks deep into our eyes.
Our head grows heavy.
Our eyelids drop.
We want to laugh and cry,
it’s so incredible.
From fourth-grade homeroom to that ocean liner.
It has to mean something.
To hell and back,
and here we meet halfway home.
We want to shout:
Small world!
You could almost hug it!
And for a moment we are filled with joy,
radiant and deceptive.
Love at First Sight
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways—
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don’t remember—
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?—
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has beeen toying with them
now for years.
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
May 16, 1973
One of those many dates
that no longer ring a bell.
Where I was going that da
y,
what I was doing—I don’t know.
Whom I met, what we talked about,
I can’t recall.
If a crime had been committed nearby,
I wouldn’t have had an alibi.
The sun flared and died
beyond my horizons.
The earth rotated
unnoted in my notebooks.
I’d rather think
that I’d temporarily died
than that I kept on living
and can’t remember a thing.
I wasn’t a ghost, after all.
I breathed, I ate,
I walked.
My steps were audible,
my fingers surely left
their prints on doorknobs.
Mirrors caught my reflection.
I wore something or other in such-and-such a color.
Somebody must have seen me.
Maybe I found something that day
that had been lost.
Maybe I lost something that turned up later.
I was filled with feelings and sensations.
Now all that’s like
a line of dots in parentheses.
Where was I hiding out,
where did I bury myself?
Not a bad trick
to vanish before my own eyes.
I shake my memory.
Maybe something in its branches
that has been asleep for years
will start up with a flutter.
No.
Clearly I’m asking too much.
Nothing less than one whole second.
Maybe All This
Maybe all this
is happening in some lab?
Under one lamp by day
and billions by night?
Maybe we’re experimental generations?
Poured from one vial to the next,
shaken in test tubes,
not scrutinized by eyes alone,
each of us separately
plucked up by tweezers in the end?
Or maybe it’s more like this:
No interference?
The changes occur on their own
The graph’s needle slowly etches
its predictable zigzags?
Maybe thus far we aren’t of much interest?
The control monitors aren’t usually plugged in?
Only for wars, preferably large ones,
for the odd ascent above our clump of Earth,
for major migrations from point A to B?
Maybe just the opposite:
They’ve got a taste for trivia up there?
Look! on the big screen a little girl
is sewing a button on her sleeve.
The radar shrieks,
the staff comes at a run.
What a darling little being
with its tiny heart beating inside it!
How sweet, its solemn
threading of the needle!
Someone cries enraptured:
Get the Boss,
tell him he’s got to see this for himself!
Slapstick
If there are angels,
I doubt they read
our novels
concerning thwarted hopes.
I’m afraid, alas,
they never touch the poems
that bear our grudges against the world.
The rantings and railings
of our plays
must drive them, I suspect,
to distraction.
Off duty, between angelic—
i.e., inhuman—occupations,
they watch instead
our slapstick
from the age of silent film.
To our dirge wailers,
garment renders,
and teeth gnashers,
they prefer, I suppose,
that poor devil
who grabs the drowning man by his toupee
or, starving, devours his own shoelaces
with gusto.
From the waist up, starch and aspirations;
below, a startled mouse
runs down his trousers.
I’m sure
that’s what they call real entertainment.
A crazy chase in circles
ends up pursuing the pursuer.
The light at the end of the tunnel
turns out to be a tiger’s eye.
A hundred disasters
mean a hundred comic somersaults
turned over a hundred abysses.
If there are angels,
they must, I hope,
find this convincing,
this merriment dangling from terror,
not even crying Save me Save me
since all of this takes place in silence.
I can even imagine
that they clap their wings
and tears run from their eyes
from laughter, if nothing else.
Nothing’s a Gift
Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.
I’m drowning in debts up to my ears.
I’ll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life.
Here’s how it’s arranged:
The heart can be repossessed,
the liver, too,
and each single finger and toe.
Too late to tear up the terms,
my debts will be repaid,