Collected Poems (15 page)

I remember that house I’d rented with them.

The laughing and constant talk of love.

The energy of their friends.

And the sounds late at night.

The sound of whipping. Urging and screams.

Like the dead lying to each other.

Yearning inside the rejoicing. The heart’s famine

within the spirit’s joy. Waking up happy

and practicing discontent. Seeing the poverty

in the perfection, but still hungering

for its strictness. Thinking of

a Greek farmer in the orchard,

the white almond blossoms falling and falling

on him as he struggled with his wooden plow.

I remember the stark and precious winters in Paris.

Just after the war when everyone was poor and cold.

I walked hungry through the vacant streets at night

with the snow falling wordlessly in the dark like petals

on the last of the nineteenth century. Substantiality

seemed so near in the grand empty boulevards,

while the famous bronze bells told of time.

Stripping everything down until being was visible.

The ancient buildings and the Seine,

small stone bridges and regal fountains flourishing

in the emptiness. What fine provender in the want.

What freshness in me amid the loneliness.

A white horse, Linda Gregg wrote, is not a horse,

quoting what Hui Shih said twenty-three hundred

years ago. The thing is not its name, is not

the words. The painting of a pipe is not a pipe

regardless of what the title claims. An intelligent

poet in Iowa is frightened because she thinks

we are made of electrons. The Gianna Gelmetti

I loved was a presence ignited in a swarm

of energy, but the ghost living in the mansion

is not the building. Consciousness is not

matter dreaming. If all the stars were added

together they would still not know it’s spring.

The silence of the mountain is not our silence.

The sound of the earth will never be
Un bel di.

We are a contingent occurrence. The white horse

in moonlight is more white than when it stands

in sunlight. And even then it depends on whether

a bell is ringing. The intimate body of the Valerie

I know is not the secret body my friend knows.

The luster of her breasts is conditional:

clothed or not, desired or too familiar.

The fact of them is mediated by morning

or the depth of night when it’s pouring down rain.

The reason we cannot enter the same woman

twice is not because the mesh of energy flexes.

It is a mystery separate from both matter

and electrons. It is not why the Linda

looking out over the Aegean is not the Linda

eating melon in Kentucky, nor explains how

the mind lives amid the rain without being

part of it. The dead lady Nogami-san lives now

only in me, in the momentary occasion I am.

Her whiteness in me is the color of pale amber

in winter light.

Having reached the beginning, starting toward

a new ignorance. Places to become,

secrets to live in, sins to achieve.

Maybe South America, perhaps a new woman,

another language to not understand.

Like setting out on a raft over an ocean

of life already well lived.

A two-story failed hotel in the tropics,

hot silence of noon with the sun

straying through the shutters.

Sitting with his poems at a small table,

everybody asleep. Thinking with pleasure,

trailing his hand in the river he will

turn into.

Another beautiful love letter

trying to win her back. Finished,

like each night, just before dawn.

Down the corso Garibaldi to the Piazza

Fortebraccio. Across to the massive

Etruscan gate and up the via

Ulisse Rocchi. To the main square.

Past the cathedral, past the fountain

of Nicola Pisano. And the fine

thirteenth-century town hall.

To the post office so the letter

could get to California in three days.

Then to the palazzo to stand always

for a half hour looking up to where

Gianna was sleeping. Longing for

her and dreaming of the other one.

Walking in the dark streets of Seoul

under the almost full moon.

Lost for the last two hours.

Finishing a loaf of bread

and worried about the curfew.

I have not spoken for three days

and I am thinking, “Why not just

settle for love? Why not just

settle for love instead?”

The sea lies in its bed wet and naked

in the dark. Half a moon glimmers on it

as though someone had come through

a door with the light behind. The woman thinks

of how they lived in the neighborhood

for years while she belonged to other men.

He moves toward her knowing he is about to

spoil the way they didn’t know each other.

In the end, Hannibal walked out of his city

saying the Romans wanted only him. Why should

his soldiers make love to their swords?

He walked out alone, a small figure in

the great field, his elephants dead at

the bottom of the Alps’ crevasses. So might we

go to our Roman death in triumph. Our love

is of marble and large tawny roses,

in the endless harvests of our defeat.

We have slept with death all our lives.

It will grind out its graceless victory,

but we can limp in triumph over the cold

intervening sand.

The heat’s on the bus with us.

The icon in front, the chunk

of raw meat in the rack

on the other side. The boy

languid in the seat under it

rubbing his eyes. Old women

talking almost softly.

Quietly, I look in the bus waiting

next to us and meet the eyes

of a pretty Greek girl.

She looks back steadily.

I drop my eyes and the bus

drives away.

What the hell are you doing out there

(he writes) in that worn rock valley

with chickens and the donkey and not farming?

And the people around you speaking Greek.

And the only news faint on the Armed

Forces Network. I don’t know what to say.

And what about women? he asks. Yes,

I think to myself, what about women?

It started when he was a young man

and went to Italy. He climbed mountains,

wanting to be a poet. But was troubled

by what Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in

her journal about William having worn

himself out searching all day to find

a simile for nightingale. It seemed

a long way from the tug of passion.

He ended up staying in pensioni

where the old women would take up

the children in the middle of the night

to rent the room, carrying them warm

and clinging to the mothers, the babies

making a mewing sound. He began hunting

for the second-rate. The insignificant

ruins, the negligible museums, the back-

country villages with only one pizzeria

and two small bars. The unimproved.

An unfamiliar woman sleeps on the other side

of the bed. Her faint breathing is like a secret

alive inside her. They had known each other

three days in California four years ago. She was

engaged and got married afterwards. Now the winter

is taking down the last of the Massachusetts leaves.

The two o’clock Boston & Maine goes by,

calling out of the night like trombones rejoicing,

leaving him in the silence after. She cried yesterday

when they walked in the woods, but she didn’t want

to talk about it. Her suffering will be explained,

but she will be unknown nevertheless. Whatever happens,

he will not find her. Despite the tumult and trespass

they might achieve in the wilderness of their bodies

and the voices of the heart clamoring, they will still

be a mystery each to the other, and to themselves.

I called the tree a butternut (which I don’t think

it is) so I could talk about how different

the trees are around me here in the rain.

It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats

would leave blank places in his drafts to hold on

to his passion, spaces for the right words to come.

We use them sideways. The way we automatically

add bits of shape to hold on to the dissolving dreams.

So many of the words are for meanwhile. We say,

“I love you” while we search for language

that can be heard. Which allows us to talk

about how the aspens over there tremble

in the smallest shower, while the tree over by

the window here gathers the raindrops and lets them

go in bunches. The way my heart carols sometimes,

and other times yearns. Sometimes is quiet

and other times is powerfully quiet.

Poem, you sonofabitch, it’s bad enough

that I embarrass myself working so hard

to get it right even a little,

and that little grudging and awkward.

But it’s afterwards I resent, when

the sweet sure should hold me like

a trout in the bright summer stream.

There should be at least briefly

access to your glamour and tenderness.

But there’s always this same old

dissatisfaction instead.

It would be easy if the spirit

was reasonable, was old.

But there is a stubborn gladness.

Summer air idling in the elms.

Silence hunting in the towering

storms of heaven. Thirty-two

swans in a København dusk.

The swan bleeding to death

slowly in a Greek kitchen.

A man leaves the makeshift

restaurant plotting his improvidence.

Something voiceless flies lovely

over an empty landscape.

He wanders on the way

to whoever he will become.

Passion leaves us single and safe.

The other fervor leaves us

at risk, in love, and alone.

Married sometimes forever.

When I woke up my head was saying, “The world

will pardon my mush, but I’ve got a crush”

and I went outside. The wind was gone.

The last of the moon was just up and the stars

brighter even than usual. A freighter

in the distance was turning into the bay,

all lit up. The valley was so still I could

hear the engine. The dogs quiet, worn out barking

all week at the full moon. Their ease in failure.

The ship came out the other side of the hill

and blew its horn softly for the harbor.

Waking a rooster on the mountain. It went

behind the second hill and I started back inside

the farmhouse. “All the day and night time,

hear me cry. The world will pardon my emotion,”

I sang from my bed, up into the dark, my voice

unfamiliar after not speaking for days.

Thinking of Linda, but singing to something else.

All honor at a distance is punctilio.

One dies dutifully by a code

which applies to nothing recognizable.

It is like the perfect grace of our

contessa who has been mad and foul

for the last thirty years.

There is a wren sitting in the branches

of my spirit and it chooses not to sing.

It is listening to learn its song.

Sits in the Palladian light trying to decide

what it will sing when it is time to sing.

Tra la, tra la, the other birds sing

in the morning, and silently when the snow

is slowly falling just before evening.

Knowing that passion is not a color

not confused by energy. The bird will sing

about summer having its affair with Italy.

Is frightened of classical singing.

Will sing happily of the color fruits are

in the cool dark, the wetness inside

overripe peaches, the smell of melons

and the briars that come with berries.

When the sun falls into silence,

the two birds will sing. Back and forth,

making a whole. Silence answering silence.

Song answering song. Gone and gone.

Gone somewhere. Gone nowhere.

The girl shepherd on the farm beyond has been

taken from school now she is twelve, and her life is over.

I got my genius brother a summer job in the mills

and he stayed all his life. I lived with a woman four

years who went crazy later, escaped from the hospital,

hitchhiked across America terrified and in the snow

without a coat. Was raped by most men who gave her

a ride. I crank my heart even so and it turns over.

Ranges high in the sun over continents and eruptions

of mortality, through winds and immensities of rain

falling for miles. Until all the world is overcome

by what goes up and up in us, singing and dancing

and throwing down flowers nevertheless.