Collected Poems (12 page)

The wild up here is not creatures, wooded,

tangled wild. It is absence wild.

Barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild.

Only the smell of weeds and hot air.

But a place where differences are clear.

Between the mind’s severity and its harshness.

Between honesty and the failure of belief.

A man said no person is educated who knows

only one language, for he cannot distinguish

between his thought and the English version.

Up here he is translated to a place where it is

possible to discriminate between age and sorrow.

Once upon a time I was sitting outside the café

watching twilight in Umbria when a girl came

out of the bakery with the bread her mother wanted.

She did not know what to do. Already bewildered

by being thirteen and just that summer a woman,

she now had to walk past the American.

But she did fine. Went by and around the corner

with style, not noticing me. Almost perfect.

At the last instant could not resist darting a look

down at her new breasts. Often I go back

to that dip of her head when people talk

about this one or that one of the great beauties.

Night after night after hot night in the clearing.

Stars, odor of damp grass, the faint sound of waves.

The palm trees around hardly visible, and the smell

of the jungle beyond. Hour after hour of the drumming

on bells, while young girls danced elegantly in their

heavy golden costumes. Afterward, groping his way

back along the dirt paths through blackness, dazed

by the trembling music, the dancing, and their hands.

(Pittsburgh so long ago. The spoor of someone inside

him. Knowing it sometimes waiting for a train in snow,

or just a moment while eating figs in a stony field.)

One evening the rain spilled down and he ran into

the tent behind the altar, where dancers and musicians

crowded together in the unnatural light of a Coleman

lantern: the girls undressing, rain in their hair,

the delicate faces still painted, their teeth white

as they laughed. None speaking English, their language

impossible. The man finally backstage in his life.

A boy sits on the porch of a wooden house,

reading
War and Peace.

Down below, it is Sunday afternoon in August.

The street is deserted except

for the powerful sun. There is a sound,

and he looks. At the bottom of the long

flight of steps, a man has fallen.

The boy gets up, not wanting to.

All year he has thought about honesty,

and he sits down. Two people finally come

and call the ambulance.

But too late. When everybody is gone,

he reads some pages, and stops.

Sits a moment, turns back to the place,

and starts again.

The sultry first night of July, he on the bed

reading one of Chandler’s lesser novels.

What he should be doing is in the other room.

Today he began carrying wood up from the valley,

already starting on winter. He closes the book

and goes naked into the pitch pines and the last

half-hour of the dark. Rain makes a sound

on the birches and a butternut tree. There is not

enough time left to use it for dissatisfaction.

Often it is hard to know when the middle game

is over and the end game beginning, the pure part

that is made more of craft than it is of magic.

Maybe when something stops, something lost in us

can be heard, like the young woman’s voice that

seemed to come from an upstairs screened porch.

There were no lights in the house, nor in the other

houses, at almost one o’clock. The muffled sweet

moans changed as she changed from what she was not

into the more she was. The small panting became

the gasping. Never getting loud but growing

ever more evident in the leafy summer street.

Whimpers and keening, a perishing, then nothing.

In the silence, the man outside began to unravel,

maybe altering. Maybe altering more than that.

I imagine the gods saying, We will

make it up to you. We will give you

three wishes, they say. Let me see

the squirrels again, I tell them.

Let me eat some of the great hog

stuffed and roasted on its giant spit

and put out, steaming, into the winter

of my neighborhood when I was usually

too broke to afford even the hundred grams

I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,

past the Street of the Moon

and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,

the Street of Silence and the Street

of the Little Pissing. We can give you

wisdom, they say in their rich voices.

Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,

the Algerian student with her huge eyes

who timidly invited me to her room

when I was too young and bewildered

that first year in Paris.

Let me at least fail at my life.

Think, they say patiently, we could

make you famous again. Let me fall

in love one last time, I beg them.

Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights

will be full enough and my heart feral.

Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,

stop! And found the bed full of glass,

his ankles bleeding, driven through the window

of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.

He knows about that: stained glass of the body

lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.

Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement

a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,

so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant

pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.

It understands and keeps. The having of the having.

But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation

is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are

taken over by something, we become an occupied

country, the audience to an intensity we are

only the proscenium for. The man does not want

to know rapture by standing outside himself.

He wants to know delight as the native land he is.

Light is too bare, too simple for her. She has lived

in the darkness so long, she prefers it. Sits among

the shrubs in the woods at night, singing of Orpheus,

who sings prettily but innocently. She knows we are

rendered by time, by pain and desire, so makes a home

always in the present. He still dotes on what was lost

and the losing of it, his cracked voice singing of his

young voice singing about love. The dark has derived

an excitement from her. Eurydice sings of passion

as a foreign country. Says candles made from birds

and tigers, from tallow of fox and snake, burn with

a troubling radiance. Orpheus sings about the smell

of basil growing in the rusting five-gallon can

on the wall between his vineyard and the well.

Eurydice tells of animals searching each other

on the bed meanwhile, shameful and vibrant.

He sings of soup cooking in the dented pot.

Of how fine it was out there in the stony fields,

eating and grieving and solitary year after year.

Sixteen years old, surrounded by beasts in the pens

at two in the morning. The animals invisible.

Clumsy sounds of their restlessness in the dark.

Touching them. Not for the risk, but for the clues.

Not for the danger. Searching into the difference,

and the smell of wildness all around. The stink

of yaks and hyenas, the wet breathing of buffalo.

There is no handbook, no map for his heart in there,

no atlas for his spirit ever. The only geography

we have is the storybooks of our childhood. We go

step by step, mouthful and handful at a time.

Is this an apple? Yes, it tastes like an apple.

The Bible says the good place is somewhere else.

This somewhere else is certainly not that one.

He had no hope of getting to what he seemed to be.

When I think of him among camels, tapirs, and llamas,

it reminds me of the banquets of Japanese emperors.

Each dish of marvelous food was put in front of

the guest and, after a while, taken away untouched.

Course after course. I remember that youth I was

and wonder if it is the same way with the soul.

They never learned whether the emperor’s food was

just much better or if it was something beyond that.

We end up asking what our lives really tasted like.

I found another baby scorpion today. Tiny,

exquisite, and this time without his mother.

Alone in a bag of onions. I wonder

what was between them, this mother and babe.

Does she grieve now someplace up there hanging

by her claws as she makes her way awkwardly

back and forth across my bamboo ceiling?

Is there a bewildered sound? Like the goat

calling her eaten kid for three long days.

Is there a thin, whispery voice I can’t hear

going back and forth? Which the Chinese Elm

hears. Which the grapes and ants, the spiders

and the rat I won’t let in hear. Or is it insectal?

The sound of apparatus? Did she feed him incidentally

beside her? Did they sleep unafraid? Merely alert?

Not needing to touch the other first?

How could he later on believe it was the best

time when his wife died unexpectedly

and he wandered every day among the trees, crying

for more than a year? He is still alone and poor

on the island with wildflowers waist-deep

around his stone hut. In June the wind will

praise the barley stretching all the way

to the mountain. Then it will be good

in the harvested fields, with the sun nailed

to the stony earth. Mornings will come and go

in the silence, the moon a heaven mediated

by owls in the dark. Is there a happiness

later on that is neither fierce nor reasonable?

A time when the heart is fresh again, and a time

after that when the heart is ripe? The Aegean

was blue just then at the end of the valley,

and is blue now differently.

All that remains from the work of Skopas

are the feet. Sometimes not even that.

Sometimes only irregularities on the plinth

that may indicate how the figure stood.

Using the feet, or shadows of feet,

and the exact diagrams of German professors,

learned men argue about what the arms

were doing and how good the sculpture was.

As we do with our lives, guessing whether

the woman was truly happy when it rained

and if her father was really the ambassador.

Whether she was passionate or just wanted to please.

They dragged me down. Down the muddy hill

with me frantically digging in my heels,

grabbing at bushes and weeds. Kicking

and bellowing, I was pulled down and under

the bridge. Dead for sure, I thought,

now that I was out of sight. They had me on

my back and were stomping, driving in

their heavy shoes and hurting me

with their fists. Me yelling no! no! no!

and twisting away, furious. And them,

furious, trying to kill me now because

I was too dumb to give in. Afterward,

sitting at the bus stop cleaning off

the blood, something in me wanted to know

what I was like in the middle of it,

down there under the bridge.

The woman is asleep in the bedroom. The fan is making

its sound and the television is on behind him

with the sound off. The chuck-will’s-widow is calling

in the scrub across the asphalt road. Farther on,

the people are asleep in their one-story houses

with the lawn outside and the boat in the driveway.

He is thinking of the British Museum. These children

drive fast when they are awake. Twenty years ago

this was a swamp with alligators and no shape.

He is thinking of the Danish cold that forced him

into the gypsy girl’s bed. Like walking through

a door and finding Venezia when he thought he was

in Yugoslavia. The people here seem hardly here

at all: blond desire always in the middle of

air conditioning. He remembers love as it could be.

Outside, the moon is shining on nothing in particular.

The air this morning is pleasant and praises nothing.

It lies easily on each thing. The light has no agency.

In this kind of world, we are on our own: the plain

black shoes of a man sitting in the doorway,

pleats of the tall woman’s blue skirt as she hurries

to an office farther on. We will notice maybe

the gold-leaf edges of a book carried by the student

glinting intermittently as she crosses into the bright

sunlight on our side of the street. But usually

we depend on meditation and having things augmented.

We see the trees in their early-spring greenness,

but not again until just before winter. The common

is mostly beyond us. Love after the fervor, the wife

after three thousand nights. It is easy to realize

the horses suddenly running through an empty alley.

But marriage is clear. Like the faint sound of a cello

very late at night somewhere below in the stillness

of an old building on a street named Gernesgade.