Poetry 365

Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel like raising our voices
Just a little, or sometimes during late autumn
When the evening flowers a moment over the western range
And we imagine angels rushing down the air’s cold steps
To wish us well, if we have lost our will,
And do nothing but doze, half hearing the sighs
Of this or that breeze drift aimlessly over the failed farms
And wasted gardens? These days when we waken.
Everything shines with the same blue light
That filled our sleep moments before,
So we do nothing but count the trees, the clouds,
The few birds left; then we decide that we shouldn’t
Be hard on ourselves, that the past was no better
Than now, for hasn’t the enemy always existed,
And wasn’t the church of the world always in ruins?

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
treble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.

All of Paris must have been away on holiday
when Pascal said that men are not happy
because they are incapable of staying in their rooms.

It is the kind of thought that belongs in a room,
sealed off from the vanities of the world,
polished roadsters, breasts, hunting lodges,
all letdowns in the end.

But imagine Columbus examining the wallpaper,
Magellan straightening up the dresser,
Lindbergh rearranging some magazines on a table.

Not to mention the need for everyday explorations,
the wandering we do, randomly as ants,
when we rove through woods without direction
or allow the diagram of a foreign city to lead us
through long afternoons of unpronounceable streets.

Then we are like children in playgrounds
who are discovering the art of running in circles
as if they were scribbling on the earth with their bodies.

We die only when we run out of footprints.
Then the biographers move in to retrace our paths,
enclosing them in tall mazes of lumber
to make our lives seem more complex, more arduous,
to make our leaving the room seem heroic.

Waiting to leave all day I hear the words:
That poet in prison, the poet newly-died
whose words we wear, reading, all of us. I and my son.

All day we read the words:
friends, lovers, daughters, grandson,
and all night the distant loves
and I who had never seen him am drawn to him

Through acts, through poems;
through our closeness—
whatever links us in our variousness;
across worlds, love and poems and justices
wishing to be born.

for E. K.

We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,

the serrated log, the yellow-blue
gaseous core

the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes,
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin

Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain

You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,

that print, that cave,
that sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this

or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down

feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire

for twelve in their pickup trucks

As lemmings run into the sea, old priests appear
at the house of Thomas Aquinas an Thomas More
to fix their faith and Hume opens the door.
They ran that way before the sea was there.

Because they couldn’t remember the bypass
that cut across their roads and cut them down
a dozen farmers have died coming to town.
All they remembered was dust, gravel, and grass.

Bent over
the open notebook—

ligt fades out
making the trees stand out
and my room
at the back
of the house, dark.

In the dusk
I am still
looking for it—
the language that is

lace:

a baroque obligation
at the wrist
if a prince
in a petty court.
Look, just look
at the way he shakes out

the thriftless phrases,
the crystal rhetoric
of babbined knots
and bosses:
a vagrant drift
of emphasis
to wave away an argument
or frame the hand
he kisses;
which, for all that, is still

what someone in the corner
of a room,
in the dusk,
bent over
as the light was fading

lost their sight for. 

On this fourth day in a row of rain
There is a sameness to the streets broken only by the odd
Brightly painted house—the way those who pass by
In tan or black trench coats look back at the girl
Wearing a yellow slicker. The yellow slicker,
A gift from her aunt who knew London would be wet,
Having lived there herself just after The War,
The Europe she had known transformed to a state
Of the mind, no longer Central but Eastern, far away,
Bombed-out, depopulated, at least of her kind.

But for a girl of nineteen with American thoughts,
Traveler’s cheques, a boy at home, a university
Address, the decline of the West compels less
Than each step she takes through the London rain.
Even these British so accustomed to their weather
Admire the girl in the yellow slicker, as if she
With her uncovered streaming blond hair might shine
As the only sun they will see all wee. Now,
That’s the kind of history she likes to hear.

They do not come with furred caps,
Smelling of maresmilk, scimitared,
Dour, as tellable as kites.

They live quietly next door,
Speak almost the same language,
Wear almost the same clothes.

Inside the walls. But
Do not think they lack
Precisely the same intentions.

I want to take the word back into my body, back
from the northern restaurants with their neon signs
announcing it like a whore. I want it to be private again,
I want to sink back into the swamps that are nothing
like these clean restaurants, the swamps
with their mud and jaws and eyes that float
below the surface, the mud and jaws and eyes
of flood or death. I want to see my father’s father’s
hands again, scarred with a life of netting and trapping,
thick gunk of bayou under his fingernails,
staining his cuticles, I want to remember the pride he took
gutting and cleaning what he caught; his were nothing
like the soft hands and clipped fingernails that serve us
in these restaurants cemented in land, the restaurants nothing
like the house we lived in and died in, anchored in water,
trembling with every wing and flood.

And what my father’s mother knew:
how to make alligator tail sweet, how to cut up
muscled squirrel or rabbit, or wild duck,
cook it till it was tender, spice it and mix it all up
with rice that soaked up the spice and the game so that
it all filled your mouth, thick and sticky, tasting
like blood and cayenne. And when I see the signs
on the restaurants, Cajun food served here,
it’s like a fish knife ripping my belly, and when I see
them all eating white meat of fat chickens
and market cuts of steak or fish someone else
has caught and cooked cajun style, I feel it
again, the word’s been stolen, like me,
gutted.