Plundered Hearts (20 page)
Authors: J.D. McClatchy
For those who collect their tears, later to drink
Like a thick wine, or place on the Last Day’s scales,
The impulse to seduce is all the body’s.
But I prefer revenge to magic, like the wife
Whose husband was enslaved to help construct
The Great Wall, and when she searches for him
Only to find that he has died and been thrown
Into the ground under the Wall, she bursts
Into a flood of tears that, in time, washes away
A hundred miles of the Wall and its overlords.
When the mind wells up, the heart too can think.
But what do I know? I enjoy a happy ending
Because of its illusion, the scrim through which
The death of love can all too clearly be seen.
Sadness is a stimulant I crave like any other.
Secretions and secrets, letting things out
Or keeping them in, are my threatened jewel box,
The tribute I pay myself for tearing down
The trellis on which a spindly grief is trained.
How sweet the bitterness has become in my mouth,
A rancid honey that, drop by drop, drips
From the certainty of being nothing.
Heavenly hysteria, or the way music makes
Our melancholies, distances us from despair,
And emptying time of its eternities
Dries the eye, but which of us would yield
His voluptuous clinging to things that pass?
Without suffering, life would be unbearable.
The heart’s open wound, where lovers play,
And ice packs on the next morning’s swollen
Second thoughts, wrung of their consolations,
Seem in themselves somehow to create
The strange thirst our two teardrops slake.
In mine is the bridal suite at the Paradise
And, tiled with chips of noon, its infinity pool,
The size of a compact car, where on the edge
Of the world’s overspill the slim young groom,
Nightcap in hand, is lazily humping his bride
From behind, her groans exaggerated to please
His vanity, while he stares out at the stars,
The ones that fall and the ones that stay there
In their stories, sword and prey, lust and grief.
Slowly, they circle around the point of it all.
He holds up his glass, rattling the ice.
In yours, I can see the frigid bottom water
Oozing along the ocean floor, the warmer
Current above it, without coagulating
Salt and darker duties, running free
In sun or spindrift, without the pressure
Slowly to move toward what will ruin it.
The dead and the living float together in layers,
This thin sheet of fresh water atop
The denser open sea of souls. Listening
From the surface I can hear the low unhappy
Pulse of love, and what will echo after.
The argument had smoldered for a week,
Long enough for the fine points of fire,
Banked from the start against self-righteousness,
To have blurred in the pale ash of recrimination.
I couldn’t tell which wound would be the deeper—
To stay on, behind the slammed door,
Forcing you to listen to me talk about it
With others, or to leave you altogether.
What caused the argument—another crumpled
Piece of paper with a phone number on it—
Felt at last as lost as all the bright
Beginnings, years back. And then …
And then
You were standing at the sink with your back to me
And must have sensed me there behind you, watching.
Suddenly you turned around and I saw in your eyes
What all along had been the reason I loved you
And had come to this moment when I would be forced
To choose but could not because of what I had seen,
As when the master of the tea ceremony,
Determined to embody his ideal,
Had constructed a room of such simplicity
That only a decade of deliberating its angles
And details was in the end required of him,
A wooden floor so delicately joined
That birds still seemed to sing in its branches,
Three salmon-dyed silken cushions
On which the painted quince petals trembled,
A pilled iron kettle disguised as a sea urchin,
Each cup the echo of cloud on wave,
And on the long low wall, a swirling mural
Of warlords and misty philosophers,
The Ten Most Famous Men in the World,
Floating at its center the gold-leafed emperor …
Who, rumors having reached the court,
Was invited to come approve the great design,
But when he saw himself as merely one
Of ten, declared that because the master’s
Insult was exceeded only by his skill
He would be allowed to take his own life
And have a month to plan the suicide.
The master bowed, the emperor withdrew.
At the month’s end, two aged monks
Received the same letter from their old friend,
The master, who had now built his final teahouse—
An improvisation, a thing of boards and cloth
On the mountain in the province of their childhood—
Inviting them for one last cup together.
The monks too wanted nothing more,
The sadness of losing their friend to his ancestors
Eased by the ordinariness of his request.
But they were feeble and could not make the climb.
Again the master wrote, begging them
To visit—he was determined to die the very day
They came and in their company, and besides,
He reminded them, from the mountain they would have
A view of the sea, its round immensity
The soul’s own, they could never elsewhere command.
The two monks paused. Their duty to a friend
Was one thing, but to have at last a view of the sea,
A wish since each had been a boy bent
Over pictures of its moonswept midnight blue.…
So they agreed and undertook the difficult journey,
Sheer rock, sharp sun, shallow breaths until
They reached the top. The master was waiting for them,
The idea of leaving life already in his looks,
A resignation half solemn, half smiling.
He led them past a sapling plum he noted
Would lean in the wind a hundred years hence.
A small ridge still blocked the sea, but the master
Reassured them it would be theirs, a memory
To return with like no other, and soon, soon.
They came to his simple house, a single room,
But surrounded by stunted pines and thick hedges
They could not see beyond. Patience was urged.
Inside, they were welcomed with the usual silences,
With traditional bows and ritual embraces.
At the far end of the room, the two cups of water
On the floor, the master explained, were for them
To purify their mouths with before the tea was served.
They were next told to lie on their bellies and inch
Toward the cups, ensuring a proper humiliation.
The monks protested—they had come to see their friend
Through to the end, to see his soul released,
Poured like water into water—and where, after all,
Was the unmatched view he had promised them?
They would, he countered, all have what they wished
If they yielded as they must to this ceremony.
The master waited. The monks slowly, painfully
Got to their knees, then to the straw mat,
Their arms outspread as they had been instructed,
And like limbless beggars made their way across
The floor, their eyes closed in shame, until
They reached the cups. With their lips they tipped
The rims back so the water ran over their tongues.
Now,
the master whispered,
now
look up.
They opened their eyes. They raised their heads a little.
And when they did, they saw a small oblong
Cut into the wall, and beyond that another
Cut through the hedge, and beyond that was what
They had waited for all their lives, a sight
So sublimely composed—three distant islands
Darkly shimmering on boundlessness—
That in the end they saw themselves there,
In their discomfort, in a small opening,
In a long-planned accidental moment,
In their rapture and their loss, in a view of the sea.
THREE POEMS BY WILHELM MÜLLER
Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827) was born in Dessau, the son of a shoemaker. He was a classicist by education and profession, and an ardent champion of political liberty. His earliest poems were published in 1816. His poetry is not held in high regard by literary historians, and it is likely that, had Franz Schubert not set many of his poems, he would be entirely, and unjustly, forgotten. In his own day, though, his
Griechenlieder
stirred German sympathies—as Byron roused the English—for Greece in its struggle against Turkish rule, and Heine admired the poems Müller wrote based on his interest in German folk song. What drew Müller was what he called the “naturalness, truth, and simplicity” of these songs, and he strove for just those qualities in the lyrics he wrote for two of Schubert’s great song cycles,
Die schöne Müllerin
(1824) and
Die Winterreise
(1827). My translations are of three of
Die Winterreise
’s twenty-four poems—“Auf dem Flusse,” “Der greise Kopf,” and “Der Leiermann.” The speaker is a young man, broken from a beloved, wandering through a winter landscape both literal and emotional, toward a death that he imagines would come as a relief. “Der Leiermann” is the sequence’s eerie last poem, and the figure of the hurdy-gurdy man is often taken to be Death itself. All of the poems in
Die
Winterreise,
I feel, however simple their format and however familiar their tropes, emanate an uncanny power that is as moving as it is unnerving.
Written to commemorate the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan.
The “three hags” referred to are the Fates of Greek mythology: Clotho, who spun the thread of an individual life; Lachesis, who measured its length; and Atropos, who cut it.
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO
These two arias by Lorenzo da Ponte are highlights of Mozart’s greatest opera, written in 1786. In
“Non più andrai,”
Figaro dresses the pampered, lovesick Cherubino in a uniform and sends him off to war. In
“Dove sono,”
the Countess, alone, broods on the infidelities of her husband.
The italicized portions of this poem are drawn from the account by the Roman historian Tacitus of the suicide of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4
B.C.–A.D
. 65), the Stoic philosopher, writer, playwright, and tutor to the emperor Nero.
The Cağaloğlu
hamam,
or public bath, in Istanbul was given to the city in 1741 by Sultan Mehmet I. It is a wonder of Ottoman architecture and has been constantly in use since it was built.
’
S FAREWELL
Ovid himself, in the single mysterious reference he made to the cause of his exile from Rome, spoke of
“carmen et error”
—his poem (the slyly erotic
Ars Amatoria
) and a mistake. It used to be thought that by the latter was meant he had witnessed some sexual “indiscretion”
committed by Augustus’s promiscuous daughter Julia—whose behavior finally led the emperor to act on his stern laws against adultery and have her banished as well. But I prefer the argument by recent historians that what Ovid had actually witnessed was a political conspiracy against the emperor of which Julia was a (perhaps unwitting) part.
Among the facts about Ovid’s life we do know for certain are that he had an older brother, who died suddenly when still relatively young, and that his third and beloved wife was named Fabia. It is to her that this poem is purportedly addressed, on the night before he is to leave for the bleak, freezing penal settlement at Tomis, on the Black Sea near the mouth of the Danube, among the barbaric Getae.
The Kid (Capricorn) and the Bear (Ursa Major), Hercules and the Serpent, are constellations.
Jean Renoir’s film
La Règle du jeu
appeared in 1939. The two friends of mine mentioned are the sculptor Natalie Charkow Hollander and the novelist James McCourt.
The first and third sections are anecdotal and symmetrical in their matching design of patterned and rhymed stanzas. The middle section is different, a discursive run of syllabics that speculates on the practice and theory of tattooing, of ornamenting the body.
