Collected Poems (20 page)

In the outskirts of the town

the street sweeper puts down

his broom of faggots and angrily

begins to shake the young ginkgo.

The leaves fall faster.

He shakes it even harder

and the leaves fall by ones and twos.

He rests to calm himself.

A passing boy speeds up

and leaps in the air,

slamming the trunk with both feet.

The yellow leaves spurt out.

The three of them stand looking up.

One leaf falls, then more.

The water nymphs who came to Poseidon

explained how little they desired to couple

with the gods. Except to find out

whether it was different, whether there was

a fresh world, another dimension in their loins.

In the old Pittsburgh we dreamed of a city

where women read Proust in the original French,

and wondered whether we would cross over

into a different joy if we paid a call girl

a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour.

Would it be different in kind or only

tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great

love might make everything else an exile.

It turned out that being together

at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria

did, indeed, measure everything after that.

There is always the harrowing by mortality,

the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.

Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive

in the difficult way adults want to be alive.

It is worth having the heart broken,

a blessing to hurt for eighteen years

because a woman is dead. He thinks of long

before that, the summer he was with Gianna

and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted

the General, their father, and driven south

to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.

The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.

Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls

of the compound. A butler with white gloves

serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid

in her uniform bringing his breakfast each

morning on a silver tray: toast both light

and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world

like
Tosca.
A feudal world crushed under

the weight of passion without feeling.

Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.

The young man wild with romance and appetite.

Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.

The woman is not just a pleasure,

nor even a problem. She is a meniscus

that allows the absolute to have a shape,

that lets him skate however briefly

on the mystery, her presence luminous

on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor

at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets

after summer rain on maples and sycamore.

As well as the car suddenly crossing two blocks

away in a blare of light. The importance

of the rocks around his Greek shepherd hut,

and mules wandering around in the empty fields.

He crosses the island in the giant sunlight,

comes back in the dark thinking of the woman.

The fact of her goes on, loved or not.

I begin to see them again as the twilight darkens.

Gathered below me and to the right under the tree.

Ghosts are by their nature drawn to the willows.

They have no feet and hover just above the grass.

They seem to be singing. About apples, I think,

as I remember the ones a children’s red in the old

cemetery in Syracuse where I would eat one each day

because the tree grew out of a grave and I liked

to think of someone eating what was left of my heart

and spirit as I lay in the dark earth translating

into fruit. I can’t be sure what they are singing

because no sound comes through the immense windows

of my apartment. (Except for the sound somebody

makes at two and four in the night as he passes

around what was the temple grounds hitting a block

of wood two or three times with a stick. I have

begun listening for it as I lie on the floor awake.)

I try to see in what is left of the light down there

the two I was. The ghost of the boy in high school

just before I became myself. The other is the ghost

of the times later when I could fall in love:

the first time, and three years after that for eight

years, and the last time ten years after. I feel

a great tenderness for all the dozen ghosts down

there trying to remain what they were. Behind each

pile of three boulders that are the gravestones

is a railing making an enclosure for the seven-foot,

narrow, unpainted planks with prayers written on them.

They are brought on the two ceremonial days each year

by the mourners and put with the earlier ones. But

in many enclosures there are just weathered old ones,

because they are brought only as long as there is

still someone who knew the dead. It puzzles me that

I care so much for the ghost of the boy in high school,

since I am not interested in those times. But I know

why the other one frightens me. He is the question

about whether the loves were phantoms of what existed

as appearance only. I know how easily they come,

summoned by our yearning. I realize the luminosity

can be a product of our heart’s furnace. It would

erase my life to find I made it up. Then I see them

faintly dancing in the dark: spirits that are the invisible

presence of what those women were. There once was

a Venezia even if there is not now. The flesh thickens

or wanes, but there was somebody I knew truly. Three

of them singing under the willow inside my transience.

There is an easy beauty in the bronze statues

dredged up from the ocean, but there is a worth

to the unshapely our sweet mind founders on.

Truth is like a pearl, Francis Bacon said.

It is lovely in clear light, but the carbuncle

is more precious because its deep red shows best

in varied illumination. “A mixture of a lie

doth ever add pleasure.” When the Chinese made

a circle of stones on the top of their wells,

one would be a little skewed to make the circle

look more round. Irregularity is the secret

of music and to the voice of great poetry.

When a man remembers the beauty of his lost love,

it is the imperfect bit of her he remembers most.

The blown‑up Parthenon is augmented by its damage.

We want to believe that what happens

in the dark bedroom is normal.

Pretending that being alive

is reasonable keeps the door shut

against whether maggots, nematodes,

and rot are also created in God’s image.

Our excess is measured, our passion

almost deliberate. As we grow up,

we more and more love appropriately.

When Alicia got married, the priest

conducted the Mass in English because

it was understandable. He faced us

as though we were friends. Had us

gather around the altar afterwards.

She hugged and kissed each one until me.

The bride, fresh from Communion,

kissed me deeply with her tongue,

her husband three feet away.

The great portals of our knowing

each other closed forever. I was flooded

by the size of what had ended.

But it was the mystery of marriage

and its hugeness that shocked me,

fell on me like an ox. I felt

mortality mixing with the fragrance

of my intimacy with her. The difference

between the garden of her body

and the presence of her being was the same

distance as the clear English of the Mass from

the blank Latin which held the immensities.

We learn to live without passion.

To be reasonable. We go hungry

amid the giant granaries

this world is. We store up plenty

for when we are old and mild.

It is our strength that deprives us.

Like Keats listening to the doctor

who said the best thing for

tuberculosis was to eat only one

slice of bread and a fragment

of fish each day. Keats starved

himself to death because he yearned

so desperately to feast on Fanny Brawne.

Emerson and his wife decided to make

love sparingly in order to accumulate

his passion. We are taught to be

moderate. To live intelligently.

You go in from the cobbled back street.

Into an empty, concrete one-room building

where prim youngish women sit in a line

of straight chairs. The women are wearing

tea dresses thrown away by rich Texan

women two generations ago. The men are

peasants, awkward in a line of chairs opposite.

Nothing is sexual. There are proprieties.

No rubbing against anyone. No touching

at all. When the music starts, the men

go stiffly over to the women. It isn’t

clear whether they say anything. The dance is

a slow, solemn fox trot. When it stops,

they stand still while the men

find a coin. The women stow it and all

of them go back to the chairs to wait for

the music and another partner. This is

not for love. The men can get love

for two coins at a shack in the next field.

They know about that. And that they will

never be married, because it is impossible

to own even a little land. They are

groping for something else, but don’t know what.

All taken down like Trastevere or København.

Like her apartment on Waller in San Francisco

or their place on Oak. The ruined cities

of America. The grand theaters built for vaudeville,

tawdry and soiled when he knew

them in Baltimore and Chicago. Full of

raggedness and a band. Calumet City when

it was a mob town with public vice.

A scale visible in the decay. Something

to measure against. Night after night

walking the Paris he knew. Hôtel Duc de Bourgogne

on Île Saint-Louis, the room

with a stone floor on the rue Boutarel across from

the cathedral. The old building where

his mansard was on a hill above the canal.

All taken down. Places that were clues

for a moment when he understood.

Knew the name of our quarry.

The something we were changing into.

The air full of pictures no matter where you reach in.

Vast caverns in the ground bright with electricity

and covered everywhere with language. Because you

live on the fourth floor, you can on Sundays look

down into the synagogue across the street where people

sing secretly together in Spanish. You are up there

trying to get the galleys marked which are so late

(because of love) that Yale threatens not to publish

the book at all. Noise so loud you finally look

outside and see everybody gathered on Fourth Street

near Avenue C to eat ice cream and watch the guys

carrying a naked woman down the fire escape clumsily

who had been promising all morning to jump. But best

of all are the gardens: hidden places where they have

burned down the buildings and kept the soil

poor so the plants won’t grow with vulgar abundance.

Like the Japanese gardens made only of rocks and sand

so their beauty would not be obscured by appearances.

Like the maharaja who set aside the best courtyards

in his palace for the dandelions he imported from

England to be kept alive by the finest gardeners

in the world who knew how to work against nature.

Go down to the drugstore at the corner,

it said. At the drugstore it said,

Go to the old woman’s house. On her porch

was scribbled: Where has love gone?

To the arcades of the moon, I wrote.

To the Palladian moon, and is embezzled

there as well. Therefore are the gunwales

of my heart plated. For the birds

have rings on their necks and must

take the catch to the white boats

at the marble pier in exchange for gruel.

Old hoplites cursing under the arcades

snap the pale fish and wrap them in plundered

drawings. A whimpering leaks from the bundles,

from the stalls, into the piazza and up

to the roof where everyone in the shining

is watching a performance of romance.

I live with the sound my body is,

with the earth which is my daughter.

And the clean separation which is my wife.

There is no one who can control us

because we live secretly under the ocean

of each day. Except for the music.

The memory of rainy afternoons

in San Francisco when I would play

all the slow sections of Mozart’s

piano concertos. And the sound

of the old Italian peasant who occasionally

came down from the mountain to play

a primitive kind of guttural bagpipe,

and sometimes sing with his broken voice

in the narrow lanes about the moon

and the grief of lovers. That reedy sound

is stuck in me. Like the Japanese monk

who would come through the graveyard

at night striking two sticks together.

I can’t forget the pure sound I heard once

when a violin string snapped nearby

in three o’clock’s perfect silence.

But I tell myself I’m safe. I remind myself

of the boy who discovered order in the piano

and ran upstairs to tell his little sister

that they didn’t have to be afraid anymore.