Collected Poems (10 page)

What do they say each new morning
in Heaven? They would
weary of one always
singing how green the
green trees are in
Paradise.

Surely it would seem convention
and affectation
to rejoice every time
Helen went by, since
she would have gone
daily by.

What can I say then each time
your whiteness glimmers
and fashions in the night?
If each time your voice
opens so near
in that dark

new? What can I say each morning
after that you will
believe? But there is this
stubborn provincial
singing in me,
O, each time.

Let’s get hold of one of those deer

that live way up there in the mountains.

Lure it down with flutes, or lasso

it from helicopters, or just take it out

with a .30-30. Anyhow, we get one.

Then we reach up inside its ass and maybe

find us a little gland or something

that might make a hell of a perfume.

It’s worth a try. You never know.

Not the river as fact, but the winter river,

and that river in June as two rivers.

We feel it run through our nature, the water

smelling of wet rotting just before spring,

and we call it love, a wilderness in the mind.

Mediterranean light as provender of women.

All of it contingent. This version of me

differs from another version as a vector product.

The body is a condition of the spirit.

The snow sifts down from the pines in the noon

and makes the silence even louder. A tumult

of singing when we cross the border of courtesy

into a savor of the heart. Each of us tempered

by the other, altered in ways more truly us.

We go into the secret with the shades pulled

down at dawn. Like a house on fire in sunlight.

We enable God to finally understand there is

a difference between you sitting in the clearing

confused by moonlight and you sitting in the bare

farmhouse amid the kerosene light. The two of you.

The boy came home from school and found a hundred lamps

filling the house. Lamps everywhere and all turned on

despite the summer shining in the handsome windows.

Two and three lamps on every table. Lamps in chairs

and on the rugs and even in the kitchen. More lamps

upstairs and on the topmost floor as well. All brightly

burning, until the police came and took them away.

An excess of light that continued in him for a long time.

That radiance of lamps flourishing in the day became

a benchmark for his heart, became a Beaufort scale

for his appetites. The wildness and gladness of it,

the illicitness in him magnified the careful gleam

of Paris mornings when he got to them, and the dark

glisten of the Seine each night as he crossed

the stone bridges back to his room. It was the same

years later as the snow fell through the bruised light

of a winter afternoon and he stood in a narrow street

telling Anna he was leaving. All of it a light beyond

anybody’s ability to manage. The Massachusetts sunlight

lies comfortably on the maples. The Pittsburgh lamps

inside of him make it look maybe not good enough.

For Linda Gregg

From this distance they are unimportant

standing by the sea. She is weeping, wearing

a white dress, and the marriage is almost over,

after eight years. All around is the flat

uninhabited side of the island. The water

is blue in the morning air. They did not know

this would happen when they came, just the two

of them and the silence. A purity that looked

like beauty and was too difficult for people.

On Fish Mountain, she has turned away

from the temple where they painted

pictures of Paradise everywhere inside

so that a population who prayed only

not to live could imagine yearning.

She is looking at a tree instead.

Below is a place where the man

and the beautiful woman will eat

cold noodles almost outside on a hot day.

Below that is the sound of fast water

with a barefoot woman beside it beating

an octopus on the wet stones. And then

the floor of the valley opening out onto

the yellow of blooming mustard and smoke

going straight up from large farmhouses

in the silent early evening. Where they

will walk through all of it slowly,

not talking much. A small him

and a smaller her with long black hair,

so happy together, beginning the trip

toward where she will die and leave him

looking at the back of her turned away

looking at a small tree.

“Barefoot farm girls in silk dresses,” he thinks.

Meaning Marie Antoinette and the nobles

at Versailles playing at the real world.

Thinking about the elaborate seduction of ladies

and their languorous indifference in complying.

“Labored excess,” he mutters, remembering

the modern Japanese calligraphers straining

at deliberate carelessness. He is still

waiting for his strange heart to moderate.

“Love as two spirits merging,” he thinks,

“the flesh growing luminous and then transparent.

Who could deal with that? Like a summer lake

flickering through pine trees.” It says

in Ecclesiastes that everything has its season.

A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.

He used to wonder about the proper occasion

for casting away stones, whether it might

mean desire. He wonders if Pimpaporn went back

to her village, pictures the jungle and houses

made of teak on stilts. Tries to understand that

as a real world. Tries to know her belatedly.

He thinks of the multitude of giant rats he killed

in those cavernous, Sunday-empty, neon-dark

steel mills. Remembers piling them up

on winter nights, the weight of each, one after

the other. White mist on the black river outside.

On the beach below Sperlonga everyone else is

speaking Italian, lazily paradisal in the heat.

He tries to make something of it, as though

something were going on. As though there were

something to be found in the obvious nakedness

of breasts. He complicates what is easily true,

hunting it down. It matters disproportionately

to him to see the ocean suddenly as he turns over.

He watches the afternoon as though it had

a secret. For years he will be considering

the two women nearby who decide to get lunch

at the restaurant back by the cliff. The taller

one picks up her top and tries to get

into it as they start out. But it tangles,

and she gives it indolently to the prettier one,

who puts it on as they walk away carelessly

into the garnishing Mediterranean light.

He lives in the barrens, in dying neighborhoods

and negligible countries. None with an address.

But still the Devil finds him. Kills the wife

or spoils the marriage. Publishes each place

and makes it popular, makes it better, makes it

unusable. Brings news of friends, all defeated,

most sick or sad without reasons. Shows him

photographs of the beautiful women in old movies

whose luminous faces sixteen feet tall looked out

at the boy in the dark where he grew his heart.

Brings pictures of what they look like now.

Says how lively they are, and brave despite their age.

Taking away everything. For the Devil is commissioned

to harm, to keelhaul us with loss, with knowledge

of how all things splendid are disfigured by small

and small. Yet he allows us to eat roast goat

on the mountain above Parakia. Lets us stumble

for the first time, unprepared, onto the buildings

of Palladio in moonlight. Maybe because he is not

good at his job. I believe he loves us against

his will. Because of the women and how the men

struggle to hear inside them. Because we construe

something important from trees and locomotives,

smell weeds on a hot July afternoon and are augmented.

He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing

inside him. He labors up through the pines

with firewood and goes back down again.

Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries

finished, and the iris gone before that.

The peas dead in the garden and the beans

almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.

The thing is inside him like that, and will

come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.

Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often

in the dark and ends up throwing stones.

The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,

cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.

They stand glaring in the faint starlight.

The snow falling around the man in the naked woods

is like the ash of heaven, ash from the cool fire

of God’s mother-of-pearl, moon-stately heart.

Sympathetic but not merciful. His strictness

parses us. The discomfort of living this way

without birds, among maples without leaves, makes

death and the world visible. Not the harshness,

but the way this world can be known by pushing

against it. And feeling something pushing back.

The whiteness of the winter married to this river

makes the water look black. The water actually

is the color of giant mirrors set along the marble

corridors of the spirit, the mirrors empty

of everything. The man is doing the year’s accounts.

Finding the balance, trying to estimate how much

he has been translated. For it does translate him,

well or poorly. As the woods are translated

by the seasons. He is searching for a baseline

of the Lord. He searches like the blind man

going forward with a hand stretched out in front.

As the truck driver ice-fishing on the big pond

tries to learn from his line what is down there.

The man attends to any signal that might announce

Jesus. He hopes for even the faintest evidence,

the presence of the Lord’s least abundance. He measures

with tenderness, afraid to find a heart more classical

than ripe. Hoping for honey, for love’s alembic.

Is she more apparent because she is not

anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white

because she was the color of pale honey?

A smokestack making the sky more visible.

A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko

said, “The roses you gave me kept me awake

with the sound of their petals falling.”

What is the man searching for inside her blouse?

He has been with her body for seven years

and still is surprised by the arches of her

slender feet. He still traces her spine

with careful attention, feeling for the bones

of her pelvic girdle when he arrives there.

Her flesh is bright in sunlight and then not

as he leans forward and back. Picasso in his later

prints shows himself as a grotesque painter

watching closely a young Spanish woman on the bed

with her legs open and the old duenna in black

to the side. He had known nakedness every day

for sixty years. What could there be in it still

to find? But he was happy even then to get

close to the distant, distant intermittency.

Like a piano playing faintly on a second floor

in a back room. The music seems familiar, but is not.

Mogins disliked everything about Anna’s pregnancy.

Said it was organs and fluids and stuff no man wanted

to know about. He was so disturbed by her milkiness

after the birth that he took his class to another part

of Denmark for the summer. When we finally made love,

the baby began to cry, and I went to get him. Anna held

the boy as we continued, until the strength went out

of her and I cradled his nakedness asleep against me

as we passed through the final stages. In the happiness

afterward, both of us nursed at her, our heads

nudging each other blindly in the brilliant dark.

The Lord sits with me out in front watching

a sweet darkness begin in the fields.

We try to decide whether I am lonely.

I tell about waking at four a.m. and thinking

of what the man did to the daughter of Louise.

And there being no moon when I went outside.

He says maybe I am getting old.

That being poor is taking too much out of me.

I say I am fine. He asks for the Brahms.

We watch the sea fade. The tape finishes again

and we sit on. Unable to find words.

I wake up like a stray dog

belonging to no one.

Cold, cold, and the rain.

Friendships outgrown or ruined.

And love, dear God, the women

I have loved now only names

remembered: dead, lost, or old.

Mildness more and more the danger.

Living among rocks and weeds

to guard against wisdom.

Alone with the heart howling

and refusing to let it feed on

mere affection. Lying in the dark,

singing about the intractable

kinds of happiness.