Poetry 365

I don’t need to know any more about death
from the Japanese beetles
infesting the roses and plum
no matter what my neighbor sprays
in orange rubber gloves.
You can almost watch them writhe and wither,
pale and fall like party napkins
blown from a table just as light fades,
and the friends
as often happens when light fades,
talk of something painful, glacial, pericardial,
and the napkins blow into the long grass.
When Basho writes of the long grass,
I don’t need to know it has to do with death,
the characters reddish-brown and dim,
shadows of a rusted sword, an hour hand.
Imagine crossing mountains in summer snow
like Basho, all you own
on your back: brushes, robe,
the small gifts given in parting it’s bad luck to leave behind.
I don’t want to know what it’s like to die on a rose,
sunk in perfume and fumes,
clutching,
to die in summer with everything off its knees,
daisies scattered like eyesight by the fence,
gladiolas open and fallen in mud,
weighed down with opening and breeze.
I wonder what your thoughts were, Father,
after they took your glasses and teeth,
all of us bunched around you like clouds
knocked loose of their moorings,
the white bird lying over you,
its beak down your throat.
Rain, heartbeats of rain.

After if rains you should sigh a little for the spongy world.
You should listen to the fish gasping in the underbrush
and the duck’s heart beating twenty yards away.
When the music arrives you should let it take you back across the river
into the kitchens where the clean hands are linked.
You should lie on the stones underneath the cold waterfall
and let you fingers drift hopelessly through the foam.
You should float slowly past the row of barking dogs
and visit the silent opossum in his grotto.
You should go to sleep between the sobs of the 9 o’clock local on the Jersey side
and the whines of Sea-Land and Roadway on the Pennsylvania.

Curled on the sofa,
In the fetal position, Jane wept day
And night, night and day.
I could not touch her; I could do nothing.
Melancholia fell
Like rain over Ireland for week
Without end.
I never
Belittled her sorrows or joshed at
Her dreads and miseries.
How admirable I found myself.

Birds in a whirl, drift to the rooftops
Kite dip, swing to the seabank fogroll
Form: dots in air changing line from line, the future defined.
Brush back smoke from the eyes, dust from the mind,
With the wing-feather fan of an eagle.
A hawk drifts into the far sky.
A marmot whistles across huge rocks.
Rain on the California hills.
Mussels clamp to sea-boulders
Sucking the Spring tides

Rain soaks the tan stubble
Fields full of ducks

Rain sweeps the Eucalyptus
Strange pines on the coast needles two to the bunch
The whole sky whips in the wing
Vaux Swifts
Flying before the storm
Arcing close hear sharp wing-whistle
Sickle-bird
     pale gray
     sheets of rain slowly shifting
     down from the clouds,
Black swifts.
     —the swift cry
As they shoot by, See or go blind!

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in the sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

You simply go out and shut the door
without thinking. And when you look back
at what you’ve done
it’s too late. If this sounds
like the story of life, okay.

It was raining. The neighbors who had
a key were away. I tried and tried
the lower windows. Stared
inside at the sofa, plants, the table
and chairs, the stereo set-up.
My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me
on the glass-topped table, and my heart
went out to them. I said, Hello, friends,
or something like that. After all,
this wasn’t so bad.
Worst things had happened. This
was even a little funny. I found the ladder.
Took that and leaned it against the house.
Then climbed in the rain to the deck,
swung myself over the railing
and tried the door. Which was locked,
of course. But I looked in just the same
at my desk, some papers, and my chair.
This was the window on the other side
of the desk where I’d raise my eyes
and stare out when I sat at that dest.
This is not like downstairs, I thought.
This is something else.

And it was something to look in like that, unseen,
from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.
I don’t even think I can talk about it.
I brought my face close to the glass
and imagined myself inside,
sitting at the desk. Looking up
from my work now and again.
Thinking about some other place
and some other time.
The people I had loved then.

I stood there for a minute in the rain.
Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.
Even though a wave of grief passed through me.
Even though I felt violently ashamed
of the injury I’d done back then.
I bashed that beautiful window.
And stepped back in.

At first they look like any other birds
on gun line from the underbrush, so someone
calls them sparrows and someone who thinks
he knows, scarlet tanagers or something else
exotic, as if they’ve slipped captivity—
one of those white sky August days the hammer
of the heat picks out the old one of the child
locked in a car, while gathered above the blank
grave of the pavement, at the altitude of snow,
enough rain to almost forgive it all.
Only two are really red, the rest a buoyant
rust blood brown, young or female, all of them
with masks and crests that make them what
they are, explosions from the other side
or blown in, with the paper, with the storm.
Whoever starts the clapping is answered
by a show of hands to meet baptismal waters
and a couple, who are high, bird-dancing.
Whoever starts the shouting is quieted
by the lady who hears silences,
cupping her clownish ears. …
For a moment the ringing air is clean, then
for a moment nothing happens, nothing moved
except for the cardinals, in and out of trees.
And in that moment ends. The cloudburst
passes, the air turns to fire again,
the sirens sing their distances, the walls
of light burn down. And in no time,
in the time it takes the runoff to drain
back underground, there’s no one left
but lifers and the dealers and rain birds
swallowed upward b the sun, and rain, new rain,
in the rivers and the reservoir uptown,
ready to rise and to pour its heart out all over.

Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And then shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing and not knowing to what

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.