Becoming Light (5 page)

bells,

her dried-up joke of a river, had played

the ark to all his fantasies of flood,

he felt a little foolish. He was walking

in the gallery then, thinking of the doges:

how they tread on clouds which puff and

pucker

like the flesh of their fat Venetian whores;

how thanks to Tintoretto’s shrewd, old eyes,

they saw themselves amid the holy saints;

how shrewd, old Tintoretto, for a price,

painted his patrons into paradise.

the sky sinks its blue teeth

into the mountains.

Rising on pure will

(the lurch & lift-off,

the sudden swing

into wide, white snow),

I encourage the cable.

Past the wind

& crossed tips of my skis

& the mauve shadows of pines

& the spoor of bears

& deer,

I speak to my fear,

rising, riding,

finding myself

the only thing

between snow & sky,

the link

that holds it all together.

Halfway up the wire,

we stop,

slide back a little

(a whirr of pulleys).

Astronauts circle above us today

in the television blue of space.

But the thin withers of alps

are waiting to take us too,

& this might be the moon!

We move!

Friends, this is a toy

merely for reaching mountains

Merely

for skiing down.

& now we’re dangling

like charms on the same bracelet

or upsidedown tightrope people

(a colossal circus!)

or absurd winged walkers,

angels in animal fur,

with mittened hands waving

& fear turning

& the mountain,

like a fisherman,

reeling us all in.

So we land

on the windy peak,

touch skis to snow,

are married to our purple shadows,

& ski back down

to the unimaginable valley

leaving no footprints.

Because you did, I too arrange flowers,

Watching the pistils jut like insolent tongues

And the hard, red flesh of the petals

Widening beneath my eyes. They move like

the hands

Of clocks, seeming not to move except

When I turn my gaze; then savagely

In the white room, they billow and spread

Until their redness engulfs me utterly.

Mother, you are far away and claim

In mournful letters that I do not need you;

Yet here in this sunny room, your tulips

Devour me, sucking hungrily

My watery nourishment, filling my house

Like a presence, like an enemy.

Geared to your intervals as the small hand

Of a clock repeats the larger, I,

Your too-faithful daughter, still drag behind

you,

Turning in the same slow circles.

Across the years and distances, my hands

Among these fierce, red blossoms repeat

Your gestures. I hope my daughter never

writes:

“Because you did, I too arrange flowers.”

He was a two-bit Petrarchist who lounged

Near the Uffizi in the ochre afternoons

Surveying the girls. A certain insolence

In how he moved his hips, his stony eyes,

His hands which seemed to cup their breasts

like fruit

As they slid by, pretending blank disdain,

Won him a modest reputation in a place

Where sad-eyed satyrs of an ageless middle

age

Are seldom scarce.

On rainy days he stalked

The galleries. Between the Giottos

And Masaccios, he slithered hissing

In his moccasins, and whistling low.

His metaphors were old; the girls were

young.

Their eyes (he said) were little lakes of blue

(Rolling the
bella lingua
off his tongue).

Their hair was gold, their lips like flowers

that grew

Within his
bel’ giardino
on the hill.

(Although he had no garden on the hill,

In summer the young girls grew thick as

weeds.)

Blonds were his passion but (like Tacitus)

he thought

The German fräuleins blowzy, rugged,

rough

And yet inevitable: August brought

Such hordes as might have sacked another

Rome.

He always sent the fair barbarians home

With something Burckhardt hardly hinted at.

(He kept his assignations in a Fiat.)

You should have seen his little pied-à-

terre—

Two blocks from where his mother lived;

there

He kept his treasures: blonds of every

nation—

(Two dozen half-undressed U.N.

legations)—

Were photographically ensconced along his

wall.

Beside the crucifix and Virgin was a small

Photo of la Mamma—which surveyed,

With madamely aplomb, the girls he’d laid.

(Note also: right below the feet of God,

A shelf with hair oil and Justine by Sade.)

He says he is a perfect poet.

He lives alone, with his perfect mate.

& sometimes they don’t even speak,

So perfectly do they “communicate.”

He lives alone, his greatest pleasures are

His pipes, his books, his wife’s behind—

Which he will often pinch to hear her laugh;

He’s got a perfect love for womankind.

He seldom writes, distrusting language as

A clumsy tool, unequal to his thoughts:

He uses it as rarely as he can

(No doubt to punish it for all its faults).

But when he writes, he keeps the upper hand

(On principle, since words are enemies).

He melts them down, then counterfeits his

own—

A kind of literary alchemy.

He’s fortunate to have a perfect muse.

A live-in muse, who cooks inspiringly;

And sometimes after an ambrosial meal,

He’ll grab his pen, composing feverishly

A perfect poem, describing in detail

The salad, wine, the roast in buttery baste.

And reading it, his musing wife agrees

That every line smacks of his perfect taste.

Now, moving in, cartons on the floor,

the radio playing to bare walls,

picture hooks left stranded

in the unsoiled squares where paintings

were,

and something reminding us

this is like all other moving days;

finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life,

hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit,

and burned-out matches in a corner;

things not preserved, yet never swept away

like fragments of disturbing dreams

we stumble on all day…

in ordering our lives, we will discard them,

scrub clean the floorboards of this our home

lest refuse from the lives we did not lead

become, in some strange, frightening way,

our own.

And we have plans that will not tolerate

our fears—a year laid out like rooms

in a new house—the dusty wine glasses

rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves

sagging with the heavy winter books.

Seeing the room always as it will be,

we are content to dust and wait.

We will return here from the dark and silent

streets, arms full of books and food,

anxious as we always are in winter,

and looking for the Good Life we have

made.

I see myself then: tense, solemn,

in high-heeled shoes that pinch,

not basking in the light of goals fulfilled,

but looking back to now and seeing

a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl

in a bare room, full of promise

and feeling envious.

Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives

forward

into the future—as if, when the room

contains us and all our treasured junk

we will have filled whatever gap it is

that makes us wander, discontented

from ourselves.

The room will not change:

a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint

won’t make much difference;

our eyes are fickle

but we remain the same beneath our suntans,

pale, frightened,

dreaming ourselves backward and forward

in time,

dreaming our dreaming selves.

I look forward and see myself look back.

Abandoned by their parents

in a wood,

Hansel & Gretel

found this place:

a child’s nightmare

run wild with weeds;

blank stage for the hero,

seats stepping off:

optical illusions;

poles for flags flapping:

cheering tongues;

pines bayonetting the sky;

a forest formed

of all the fears

in night’s imagination.

Now we come upon it hand in hand,

see nothing but an earthen bowl

littered with bottle bits

& condom wrappers,

disowned by the town,

harangued by rain,

the focus of conflicting

memories. (“Hitler spoke here.”

“No, he never did.”)

—As if it mattered.

This place is a house

bought by a manic

& not remembered

later in the asylum.

Invisible from the city,

forgotten in a gothic forest,

it waits for Hansel & Gretel

(us perhaps) to wake up,

dreaming some recurrent dream.

A delicate border. A nonexistent country.

The train obligingly dissolves in smoke.

The G.I. next to me is talking war.

I don’t “know the Asian mind,” he says.

Moving through old arguments.

At Potsdam (a globe-shaped dome,

a pink canal reflecting sepia trees)

we pull next to a broken-down old train

with
REICHSBAHN
lettered on its flank.

Thirty years sheer away leaving bare cliff.

This is a country I don’t recognize.

Bone-pale girls who have nothing to do with

home.

Everyone’s taller than me, everyone naked.

“Life’s cheap there,” he says.

But why are we screaming over a track

which runs between a barbed wire corridor?

And why has it grown so dark outside,

so bright in here

that even the pared moon is invisible?

In the window we can only see ourselves,

America we carry with us,

two scared people talking death

on a train which can’t stop.

Living in a house

near the Black Forest,

without any clocks,

she’s begun

to listen to the walls.

Her neighbors have clocks,

not one

but twenty clocks apiece.

Sometimes

a claque of clocks

applauds

the passing of each day.

Listen to the walls

& wind your watch.

Poor love, poor love,

have they caught you

by the pendulum?

Do they think they’ve

got you stopped?

Have you

already gathered how,

living near the Black Forest,

she gets by

on cups of borrowed time?

If you ask him he will talk for hours—

how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers

raw with cold, and later painted bowers

in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played checkers

for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;

how he fled the border to a country

which disappeared wars ago; unfriended

crossed a continent while this century

began. He seldom speaks of painting now.

Young men have time and theories; old men work.

He has painted countless portraits. Sallow

nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk

above anonymous mantelpieces.

The turpentine has a familiar smell,

but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.

Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.

He has come to like his resignation.

In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear

the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.

His pen alone recalls that years ago,

one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear

which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.

You take me to the restaurant where one

plays god over a fish tank. The fat trout

pace their green cage, waiting to be taken

out of an element. Who knows what they know?

There are thirteen in a tank meant

for goldfish. I don’t care which one I eat.

But the waiter expects a performance,

con brio. This is a ritual

solemn as wine-tasting or the Last Judgment.

Eating is never so simple as hunger.

Between the appetite and its satisfaction

falls the net, groping blindly in dark water.

The fish startle and thrash. You make your catch,

flourishing a bit for the waiter

so as not to be thought a peasant. You force

air into the trout’s gills as if he were Adam,

and send him squirming toward the kitchen

to be born. Then it’s my turn. I surprise

myself with my dexterity, almost

enjoying the game. A liter of wine

later, the fish return, foppishly dressed

in mushrooms and pimentos, their eyes

dreamily hazed. Darling, I am drunk. I watch you pluck

the trout’s ribs out of your perfect teeth.

The lessons we learned here