there or someplace else.
Seven cities stood there.
So we think.
They were meant to stand forever.
We suppose.
They weren’t up to much, no.
They were up to something, yes.
Hypothetical. Dubious.
Uncommemorated.
Never extracted from air,
fire, water, or earth.
Not contained within a stone
or drop of rain.
Not suitable for straight-faced use
as a story’s moral.
A meteor fell.
Not a meteor.
A volcano exploded.
Not a volcano.
Someone summoned something.
Nothing was called.
On this more-or-less Atlantis.
Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition
So these are the Himalayas.
Mountains racing to the moon.
The moment of their start recorded
on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.
Holes punched in a desert of clouds.
Thrust into nothing.
Echo—a white mute.
Quiet.
Yeti, down there we’ve got Wednesday,
bread and alphabets.
Two times two is four.
Roses are red there,
and violets are blue.
Yeti, crime is not all
we’re up to down there.
Yeti, not every sentence there
means death.
We’ve inherited hope—
the gift of forgetting.
You’ll see how we give
birth among the ruins.
Yeti, we’ve got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall,
we turn lights on, Yeti.
Up here it’s neither moon nor earth.
Tears freeze.
Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,
turn back, think again!
I called this to the Yeti
inside four walls of avalanche,
stomping my feet for warmth
on the everlasting
snow.
Nothing Twice
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with exactly the same kisses.
One day, perhaps, some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
Buffo
First, our love will die, alas,
then two hundred years will pass,
then we’ll meet again at last—
this time in the theater, played
by a couple of comedians,
him and her, the public’s darlings.
Just a little farce, with songs,
patter, jokes, and final bows,
a vaudeville comedy of manners,
certain to bring down the house.
You’ll amuse them endlessly
on the stage with your cravat
and your petty jealousy.
So will I, love’s silly pawn,
with my heart, my joy, my crown,
my heart broken, my joy gone,
my crown tumbling to the ground.
To the laughter’s loud refrain,
we will meet and part again,
seven mountains, seven rivers
multiplying our pain.
If we haven’t had enough
of despair, grief, all that stuff,
lofty words will kill us off.
Then we’ll stand up, take our bows:
hope that you’ve enjoyed our show.
Every patron with his spouse
will applaud, get up, and go.
They’ll reenter their lives’ cages,
where love’s tiger sometimes rages,
but the beast’s too tame to bite.
We’ll remain the odd ones out,
silly heathens in their fools’ caps,
listening to the small bells ringing
day and night.
Commemoration
They made love in a hazel grove,
beneath the little suns of dew;
dry leaves and twigs got in their hair
and dry dirt too.
Swallow’s heart, have
mercy on them.
They both knelt down on the lakeshore,
they combed the dry leaves from their hair;
small fish, a star’s converging rays,
swam up to stare.
Swallow’s heart, have
mercy on them.
Reflected in the rippling lake,
trees trembled, nebulous and gray;
o swallow, let them never, never
forget this day.
O swallow, cloud-borne thorn,
anchor of the air,
Icarus improved,
coattails in Assumption,
o swallow, calligraphy,
clockhand minus minutes,
early ornithogothic,
heaven’s cross-eyed glance,
o swallow, knife-edged silence,
mournful exuberance,
the aureole of lovers,
have mercy on them.
from
1962
The Monkey
Evicted from the Garden long before
the humans: he had such infectious eyes
that just one glance around old Paradise
made even angels’ hearts feel sad and sore,
emotions hitherto unknown to them.
Without a chance to say “I disagree,”
he had to launch his earthly pedigree.
Today, still nimble, he retains his charme
with a primeval “e” after the “m.”
Worshiped in Egypt, pleiades of fleas
spangling his sacred and silvery mane,
he’d sit and listen in archsilent peace:
What do you want? A life that never ends?
He’d turn his ruddy rump as if to say
such life he neither bans nor recommends.
In Europe they deprived him of his soul
but they forgot to take his hands away;
there was a painter-monk who dared portray
a saint with palms so thin, they could be simian.
The holy woman prayed for heaven’s favor
as if she waited for a nut to fall.
Warm as a newborn, with an old man’s tremor,
imported to kings’ courts across the seas,
he whined while swinging on his golden chain,
dressed in the garish coat of a marquis.
Prophet of doom. The court is laughing? Please.
Considered edible in China, he makes boiled
or roasted faces when laid upon a salver.
Ironic as a gem set in sham go
ld.
His brain is famous for its subtle flavor,
though it’s no good for trickier endeavors,
for instance, thinking up gunpowder.
In fables, lonely, not sure what to do,
he fills up mirrors with his indiscreet
self-mockery (a lesson for us, too);
the poor relation, who knows all about us,
though we don’t greet each other when we meet.
Lesson
Subject King Alexander predicate cuts direct
object the Gordian knot with his indirect object sword.
This had never predicate entered anyone’s object mind before.
None of a hundred philosophers could disentangle this knot.
No wonder each now shrinks in some secluded spot.
The soldiers, loud and with great glee,
grab each one by his trembling gray goatee
and predicate drag object him out.
Enough’s enough. The king calls for his hone,
adjusts his crested helm and sallies forth.
And in his wake, with trumpets, drums, and flutes,
his subject army made of little knots
predicate marches off to indirect object war.
Museum
Here are plates but no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.
Here’s a fan—where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords—where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.
Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his moustache on the Exhibit Number . . .
Eight. Metals, clay, and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.
The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.
As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!
A Moment in Troy
Little girls—
skinny, resigned
to freckles that won’t go away,
not turning any heads
as they walk across the eyelids of the world,
looking just like Mom or Dad,
and sincerely horrified by it—
in the middle of dinner,
in the middle of a book,
while studying the mirror,
may suddenly be taken off to Troy.
In the grand boudoir of a wink
they all turn into beautiful Helens.
They ascend the royal staircase
in the rustling of silk and admiration.
They feel light. They all know
that beauty equals rest,
that lips mold the speech’s meaning,
and gestures sculpt themselves
in inspired nonchalance.
Their small faces
worth dismissing envoys for
extend proudly on necks
that merit countless sieges.
Those tall, dark movie stars,
their girlfriends’ older brothers,
the teacher from art class,
alas, they must all be slain.
Little girls
observe disaster
from a tower of smiles.
Little girls
wring their hands
in intoxicating mock despair.
Little girls
against a backdrop of destruction,
with flaming towns for tiaras,
in earrings of pandemic lamentation.
Pale and tearless.
Triumphant. Sated with the view.
Dreading only the inevitable
moment of return.
Little girls
returning.
Shadow
My shadow is a fool whose feelings
are often hurt by his routine
of rising up behind his queen
to bump his silly head on ceilings.
His is a world of two dimensions,
that’s true, but flat jokes still can smart;
he longs to flaunt my court’s conventions
and drop a role he knows by heart.
The queen leans out above the sill,
the jester tumbles out for real:
thus they divide their actions; still,
it’s not a fifty-fifty deal.
My jester took on nothing less
than royal gestures’ shamelessness,
the things that I’m too weak to bear—
the cloak, crown, scepter, and the rest.
I’ll stay serene, won’t feel a thing,
yes, I will turn my head away
after I say good-bye, my king,
at railway station N., some day.
My king, it is the fool who’ll lie
across the tracks; the fool, not I.
The Rest
Her mad songs over, Ophelia darts out,
anxious to check offstage whether her dress is
still not too crumpled, whether her blond tresses
frame her face as they should.
Since real life’s laws
require facts, she, Polonius’s true