Aimless Love (6 page)

but inside I was busy riding the marble,

as the lurkers like to put it—

talking to Marco Polo,

juggling turtles,

going through the spin cycle,

or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.

I have envied the four-moon planet.

—The Notebooks of Robert Frost

Maybe he was thinking of the song

“What a Little Moonlight Can Do”

and became curious about

what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?

and what if you couldn’t tell them apart

and they always rose together

like pale quadruplets entering a living room.

Yes, there would be enough light

to read a book or write a letter at midnight,

and if you drank enough tequila

you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

But think of the two lovers on a beach,

his arm around her bare shoulder,

thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight

while he gazed at one moon and she another.

This love for everyday things,

part natural from the wide eye of infancy,

part a literary calculation,

this attention to the morning flower

and later to a fly strolling

along the rim of a wineglass—

are we just avoiding our one true destiny

when we do that, averting our glance

from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?

The leafless branches against the sky

will not save anyone from the void ahead,

nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

So why bother with the checkered lighthouse?

Why waste time on the sparrow,

or the wildflowers along the roadside

when we all should be alone in our rooms

throwing ourselves at the wall of life

and the opposite wall of death,

the door locked behind us

as we hurl rocks at the question of meaning

and the enigma of our origins?

What good is the firefly,

the droplet running along the green leaf,

or even the bar of soap sliding around the bathtub

when we are really meant to be

banging away on the mystery

as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

banging away on nothingness itself,

some with their foreheads,

others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.

—Jose Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,

it never occurred to me that day and night

would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering

if there will also be a sun and a moon

and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,

to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

Or will the first night be the only night,

a long darkness for which we have no other name?

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,

the horse we have ridden all our lives

rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning

and the word that was made flesh—

those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,

to sunlight bright on water

or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.

Poems are never completed—they are
only abandoned.

—Paul Valéry

That winter I had nothing to do

but tend the kettle in my shuttered room

on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

but I would sometimes descend the stairs,

unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets

often turning from a wide boulevard

down a narrow side street

bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

I followed a few private rules,

never crossing a bridge without stopping

mid-point to lean my bike on the railing

and observe the flow of the river below

as I tried to better understand the French.

In my pale coat and my Basque cap

I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie

or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,

and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

I would see beggars and street cleaners

in their bright uniforms, and sometimes

I would see the poems of Valéry,

the ones he never finished but abandoned,

wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line

or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,

but whenever I approached,

they would retreat from their ashcan fires

into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades

how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

I came across the one I wanted to tell you about

sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—

beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,

cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,

big fish in the school of Symbolism

and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters

of the League of Nations if you please.

Never mind how I got her out of the café,

past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—

remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.

It is enough to know that I moved my pen

in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple, final stanza, which ended,

as this poem will, with the image

of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,

her large eyes closed,

a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

and off to the side, me in a window seat

blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

When I came across the high-speed photograph

of a bullet that had just pierced a book—

the pages exploding with the velocity—

I forgot all about the marvels of photography

and began to wonder which book

the photographer had selected for the shot.

Many novels sprang to mind

including those of Raymond Chandler

where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.

Non-fiction offered too many choices—

a history of Scottish lighthouses,

a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.

Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,

the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain

and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.

But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,

I realized that the executed book

was a recent collection of poems written

by someone of whom I was not fond

and that the bullet must have passed through

his writing with little resistance

at twenty-eight-hundred feet per second,

through the poems about his sorry childhood

and the ones about the dreary state of the world,

and then through the author’s photograph,

through the beard, the round glasses,

and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear.

In this sentimental painting of rustic life,

a rosy-cheeked fellow

in a broad hat and ballooning green pants

is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock

while a boy is playing a squeeze-box

near a turned-over barrel

upon which rest a knife, a jug, and small drinking glass.

Two men in rough jackets

are playing cards at a wooden table.

And in the background a woman in a bonnet

stands behind a half-open Dutch door

talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.

This is all I need to inject me with desire,

to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,

or someone very much like you

on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface

as clouds go flying by

and the rustle of tall leafy trees

mixes with the notes of birdsong—

so clearly does the work speak to me of vanishing time,

obsolete musical instruments,

passing fancies, and the corpse

of the largely forgotten painter moldering

somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.

The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,

then the arms and legs,

and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.

And often an entire head followed the nose

as it might have done when bread

was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.

No hope for the flute once attached

to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,

nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,

the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,

the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,

and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.

But the torso is another story—

middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,

propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,

and the mighty stone ass endures,

so smooth and fundamental, no one

hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.

And that is the way it goes here

in the diffused light from the translucent roof,

one missing extremity after another—

digits that got too close to the slicer of time,

hands snapped off by the clock,

whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.

But outside on the city streets,

it is raining, and the pavement shines

with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—

hundreds of noses still intact,

arms swinging and hands grasping,

the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.

It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come

when there is nothing left of us

but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon

now exposed to the open air,

just the wind in the trees and the shadows

of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.

We did not have the benefit of a guide,

no crone to lead us off the common path,

no ancient to point the way with a staff,

but there were badlands to cross,

rivers of fire and blackened peaks,

and eventually we could look down and see

the jeweler running around a gold ring,

the boss trapped in an hour glass,

the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,

the banker plummeting on a coin,

the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,

and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.

We saw the pilot nose-diving

and the whore impaled on a bedpost,

the pharmacist wandering in a stupor

and the child with toy wheels for legs.

You pointed to the soldier

who was dancing with his empty uniform

and I remarked on the blind tourist.

But what truly caught our attention

was the scene in the long mirror of ice:

you lighting the wick on your head,

me blowing on the final spark,

and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.

is not really the title of a movie

but if it were I would be sure to see it.

I love their short legs and big heads,

the whole hippo look.

Hundreds of them would frolic

in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,

and I would eat my popcorn

in the dark of a neighborhood theatre.

When they opened their enormous mouths

lined with big stubby teeth

I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat

and in the water playing with the hippos,

which is the way it is

with a truly great movie.

Only a mean-spirited reviewer

would ask on holiday from what?

There was no art in losing that coin

you gave me for luck, the one with the profile

of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.

It rode for days in a pocket

of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,

past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,

and then it was gone, as lost as the lost

theorems of Pythagoras, or the
Medea
by Ovid,

which also slipped through the bars of time,