Aimless Love (7 page)

and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—

forever out of favor with Augustus—

on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,

where eventually he died, but not before

writing a poem about the fish of those waters,

into which, as we know, he was never transformed,

nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,

nor into a star like Julius Caesar,

not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.

Never use the word
suddenly
just to
create tension.

—Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias

outside in the garden,

and suddenly I was in the study

looking up the word
oligarchy
for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,

you planted the last petunia in the flat,

and I suddenly closed the dictionary

now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves

standing suddenly in the kitchen

where you suddenly opened a can of cat food

and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity

and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge

of the stone birdbath

when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market

and I stunned you by impulsively

pointing out that we were getting low on butter

and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?

another drip from the faucet?

another little spasm of the second hand?

Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?

Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?

Would the stove hold its position?

Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

The sun rose ever higher in the sky.

The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map

when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch

where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,

and a path that led over the mountains to another country

with strange customs and eye-catching hats

each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

All I do these drawn-out days

is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge

where there are no pheasant to be seen

and last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls

and spend the day there playing bridge,

but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail

would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run

and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.

One of them smokes, and neither can run,

so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?

I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

It was getting late in the year,

the sky had been low and overcast for days,

and I was drinking tea in a glassy room

with a woman without children,

a gate through which no one had entered the world.

She was turning the pages of an expensive book

on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,

a book of colorful paintings—

a landscape, a portrait, a still life,

a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.

Men had entered there but no girl or boy

had come out, I was thinking oddly

as she stopped at a page of clouds

aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.

This one is my favorite, she said,

even though it was only a detail, a corner

of a larger painting which she had never seen.

Nor did she want to see the countryside below

or the portrayal of some myth

in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.

This was enough, this fraction of the whole,

just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough

now that the light was growing dim,

as was she enough, perfectly by herself

somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.

When it’s late at night and branches

are banging against the windows,

you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself

into the fire of someone else,

but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds

who might be hiding in that bush

for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love

was like forcing a horse to drink

but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.

Love is not as simple as getting up

on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen

feels after it has defeated the sword.

It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle

and tell me love is an ill wind

that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,

as our shadows tremble on the walls,

that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

The ancient Greeks … used to chain
their statues to prevent them from fleeing.

—Michael Kimmelman

It might have been the darkening sky

that sent them running in all directions

that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,

but were they not used to standing out

in the squares of our city

in every kind of imaginable weather?

Maybe they were frightened by a headline

on a newspaper that was blowing by

or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?

Did they finally learn about the humans

they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?

Did they know something we did not?

Whatever the cause, no one will forget

the sight of all the white marble figures

leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.

In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.

The vendor froze under his umbrella.

A dog tried to hide in his owner’s shadow.

Even the chess players under the trees

looked up from their boards

long enough to see the bronze generals

dismount and run off, leaving their horses

to peer down at the circling pigeons

who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.

According to the guest information directory,

baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel.

Baby-listening—not a baby who happens to be listening,

as I thought when I first checked in.

Leave the receiver off the hook
,

the directory advises,

and your infant can be monitored by the staff
,

though the staff
, the entry continues,

cannot be held responsible for the well-being

of the baby in question
.

Fair enough: someone to listen to the baby.

But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,

lying there in the room next to mine

listening to my pen scratching against the page,

or a more advanced baby who has crawled

down the hallway of the hotel

and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.

Lucky for some of us,

poetry is a place where both are true at once,

where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.

Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door

as well as the baby who is being listened to,

quietly breathing into the nearby telephone.

And it also wants the baby

who is making sounds of distress

into the curved receiver lying in the crib

while the girl at reception has just stepped out

to have a smoke with her boyfriend

in the dark by the great wash and sway of the North Sea.

Poetry wants that baby, too,

even a little more than it wants the others.

is not just a phrase I made up

though it would have given me pleasure

to have written those words in a notebook

then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.

No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy

on the label of a clear plastic package

containing one cow and four calves,

a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.

I hesitated to buy it because I knew

I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,

which would leave no room in the tub

for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.

It’s enough just to have the words,

which alone make me even more grateful

that I was born in America

and English is my mother tongue.

I was lucky, too, that I waited

for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,

otherwise I might not have wandered

down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.

I think what I am really saying is that language

is better than reality, so it doesn’t have

to be bath time for you to enjoy

all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

As soon as the elderly waiter

placed before me the fish I had ordered,

it began to stare up at me

with its one flat, iridescent eye.

I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,

eating alone in this awful restaurant

bathed in such unkindly light

and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

And I feel sorry for you, too—

yanked from the sea and now lying dead

next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—

I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city

with its rivers and lighted bridges

was graced not only with chilled wine

and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

even after the waiter had removed my plate

with the head of the fish still staring

and the barrel vault of its delicate bones

terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.

As young as I look,

I am growing older faster than he,

seven to one

is the ratio they tend to say.

Whatever the number,

I will pass him one day

and take the lead

the way I do on our walks in the woods.

And if this ever manages

to cross his mind,

it would be the sweetest

shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

If this were a novel,

it would begin with a character,

a man alone on a southbound train

or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told

that it was morning or the dead of night,

and I, the narrator, would describe

for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train

right down to his red tartan scarf,

and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,

as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually—one can only read so fast—

you would learn either that the train was bearing

the man back to the place of his birth

or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this

as you waited patiently for shots to ring out

in a ravine where the man was hiding

or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem,

and the only characters here are you and I,

alone in an imaginary room

which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another

or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.

I ask you: who needs the man on the train

and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence

lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.

I mean the sound that we will hear

as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it

to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat

or, more faintly, just the wind

over that field stirring things that we will never see.

Once, two spoons in bed,

now tined forks

across a granite table

and the knives they have hired.

is the usual thing to say when you begin

pulling on the toes of a small child,

and I have never had a problem with that.

I could easily picture the piggy with his basket

and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.