Becoming Light (3 page)

The current is love,

is poetry,

the blood beat

in the thighs,

the electrical charge

in the brain.

Our long leap

into the unknown

began nearly

a half century ago

and is almost

over.

I think of the

amphorae of stored honey

at Paestum

far out-lasting

their Grecian eaters,

or of the furniture

in a pharaoh’s tomb

on which

no one sits.

Trust the wind,

my lover,

and the water.

They have the

answers

to all your questions

and mine.

All my life

I have resented

umbrellas:

middle child

defying the rain,

seeing rainbows

in the parachutes of grey

that collapse over our heads

on rainy days,

I skip in the shiny streets

hearing the songs in the tires,

and loving the sound

of the rain.

Long before I surrendered

to my fate,

I surrendered

to the rain—

a fugue by Bach

raining softly on my head

teaching me fearlessness.

Reader: I give you

this rain.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain
.

—Thoreau

The raspberries

in my driveway

have always

been here

(for the whole eleven years

I have owned

but have not owned

this house),

yet

I have never

tasted them

before.

Always on a plane.

Always in the arms

of man, not God,

always too busy,

too fretful,

too worried

to see

that all along

my driveway

are red, red raspberries

for me to taste.

Shiny and red,

without hairs—

unlike the berries

from the market.

Little jewels—

I share them

with the birds!

On one perches

a tiny green insect.

I blow her off.

She flies!

I burst the raspberry

upon my tongue.

In my solitude

I commune

with raspberries,

with grasses,

with the world.

The world was always

there before,

but where

was
I?

Ah raspberry—

if you are so beautiful

upon my ready tongue,

imagine

what wonders

lie in store

for me!

In the glass-bottomed boat

of our lives, we putter along

gazing at that other world

under the sea—

that world of flickering

yellow-tailed fish,

of deadly moray eels, of sea urchins

like black stars

that devastate great brains

of coral,

of fish the color

of blue neon,

& fish the color

of liquid silver

made by Indians

exterminated

centuries ago.

We pass, we pass,

always looking down.

The fish do not

look up at us,

as if they knew

somehow

their world

for the eternal one,

ours for

the merely time-bound.

The engine sputters.

Our guide—a sweet

black boy with skin

the color of molten chocolate—

asks us of the price of jeans

& karate classes

in the States.

Surfboards too

delight him—

& skateboards.

He wants to sail, sail, sail,

not putter

through the world.

& so do we,

so do we,

wishing for the freedom

of the fish

beneath the reef,

wishing for the crevices

of sunken ship

with its rusted eyeholes,

its great ribbed hull,

its rotted rudder,

its bright propeller

tarnishing beneath the sea.

“They sunk this ship

on purpose,”

says our guide—

which does not surprise

us,

knowing how life

always imitates

even the shabbiest

art.

Our brains forged

in shark & seawreck epics,

we fully expect to see

a wreck like this one,

made on purpose

for our eyes.

But the fish swim on,

intimating death,

intimating outer space,

& even the oceans

within the body

from which we come.

The fish are uninterested

in us.

What hubris to think

a shark concentrates

as much on us

as we on him!

The creatures of the reef

spell death, spell life,

spell eternity,

& still we putter on

in our leaky little boat,

halfway there,

halfway there.

Rising in the morning

like warm bread,

from a bed

in America,

the aroma

of my baking

reaches you

in Italy,

rocking in your boat

near the Ponte Longo,

cutting through the glitter

of yesterday’s moonlight

on your sunstruck

canal.

My delicious baker—

it is you

who have made

this hot bread

rise.

It is you

who have split the loaf

and covered it with the butter.

I prayed to the moon

streaking the still lagoon

with her skyblue manna;

I prayed for you

to sail into my life,

parting the waters,

making them whole.

And here you come,

half captain, half baker—

& the warm aroma of bread

crosses

the ocean

we share.

Mandando una lettera

da New York a Venezia

da amante ad amante,

da Inglese Americano

ad Italiano Veneziano,

e come mandare

una nota in una bottiglia

da un mare

ad un altro,

da una galassia

ad un altra,

da un epoca

ad un altra,

scirolando per creppacci

nello spazio.

Mio amante

così lontano

eppure. Qui

dentro alia mia anima,

quando respire

al telefono,

un canale

si apre

nel mio cuore,

un canale chiaro

in quell mondo scintillante,

dove ci cullavamo

in una barca

amandoci,

sapendoci parte

della danza

del mare.

E tutt’ uno.

La barca

abbracciata dall’ acqua

e i corpi nostril

abbracciati l’uno

all’ altro,

e la luce del sole

strisciando il mare

finchè il plenilunio

lo colma,

e nel tondo della luna

nasce il nostro amore.

L’amore ci guarisce

perchè ci ricorda

l’integrità

che abbiamo perso

nella nostra lotta

contro noi stessi.

E in questa bottiglia

ti mando quella integrità

e il mare la solleva

e la lascia cader

giù.

La luna e la nostra postina

Porterà il messaggio.

Io aspetto sulla spiaggia

il suo sorgere.

Rendo questo scintillio

nelle sue mani

capaci.

When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door…

—Suzuki

Sick of the self,

the self-seducing self—

with its games, its fears,

its misty memories, and its prix fixe menu

of seductions (so familiar

even to the seducer)

that he grows sick

of looking at himself

in the mirrored ceiling

before he takes the plunge into this new

distraction from the self

which in fact leads back

to self.

Self—the prison.

Love—the answer and the door.

And yet the self should also be a door,

swinging, letting loves both in and out,

for change

is the world’s only fixity, and fixity

her foremost lie.

How to trust love

which has so often

betrayed the betrayer,

seduced the seducer,

and then turned out

to be not even love?

We are jaded,

divorced from our selves

without ever having found

ourselves—and yet we

long for wholeness

if not fixity,

for harmony

if not music of the spheres.

If life is a flood

and there is no ark,

then where do the animals float

two by two?

I refuse to believe

that the flesh falls

from their bones

without understanding

ever coming,

and I refuse to believe

that we must leave

this life entirely alone.

Much harrumphing

across the ocean,

my brother poet coughs,

clears his throat

(he smokes too much),

and gazes into the murky

depths of his word-processor,

as if it were a crystal ball.

I do not know

all that hides

in his heart of darkness

but I know I love

the thoughts

that cloud the surface

of his crystal ball.

He longs to leap

headlong into his future

and cannot.

This chapter’s finished,

his self peels back

a skin.

Snakes hiss,

shedding their scales.

The goddess smiles.

She sends her missives

only to the brave.

You open to me

a little,

then grow afraid

and close again,

a small boy

fearing to be hurt,

a toe stubbed

in the dark,

a finger cut

on paper.

I think I am free

of fears,

enraptured, abandoned

to the call

of the Bacchae,

my own siren,

tied to my own

mast,

both Circe

and her swine.

But I too

am afraid:

I know where

life leads.

The impulse

to join,

to confess all,

is followed

by the impulse

to renounce,

and love—

imperishable love—

must die,

in order

to be reborn.

We come

to each other

tentatively,

veterans of other

wars,

divorce warrants

in our hands

which we would beat

into blossoms.

But blossoms

will not withstand

our beatings.

We come

to each other

with hope

in our hands—

the very thing

Pandora kept

in her casket

when all the ills

and woes of the world

escaped.

(to my lover gazing out the window)

Because I am here

anchoring you

to the passionate darkness,

you gaze out the window

at the light.

My love is the thing

that frees you

to follow your eyes,

as your love,

a sword made of moonlight

and blood,

and smelling of sex

and salt marshes,

frees me to gaze

with a calm inward

eye.

In all your frenzied searching

you never stood

calmly at the window.

But now the sea,

the city and the sky

are all seen

as if from a perch

at the edge of the cosmos,

where I sit behind you

gazing

at the fire.

Unable to bear the falsehoods—

the girls calling up

each time you came

to my bed—

I fled

and now I dream of you

knowing you are

dreaming of me,

knowing we will always be

each other’s muse, forbidden lover,

witch and warlock

joined by a filament of flesh,

lover through the looking glass.

I dream of you

as the witch

beside her husband’s hearth

dreams of the grandmaster

of the coven,

dreams of burning stones

that sting the flesh,

while her good husband

strokes her rump,

muttering words

of tame domestic love.

You are my demon,

the devil in my flesh,

the wild child,

the boy with eyes of flame,

the bad seed I took

into my body,

the infected needle

I craved

more deeply

than health.

On every seashore

I see you waving your arms

out of the whitecaps

as you drown

only to be reborn

in the foam

between my legs.

In every bed

you appear, sexual dybbuk,

mocking my lovers

with your twinkling blue eyes

and the crooked cane of your cock

smelling of the pit.

You are trouble, double trouble,

triple trouble,

the wrecker of peace,

but you make

my cauldron boil.

I dream of you always

as I lie

in the sheltering arms