Collected Poems (16 page)

I waited until the sun was going down

to plant the bean seedlings. I was

beginning on the peas when the phone rang.

It was a long conversation about what

living this way in the woods might

be doing to me. It was dark by the time

I finished. Made tuna fish sandwiches

and read the second half of a novel.

Found myself out in the April moonlight

putting the rest of the pea shoots into

the soft earth. It was after midnight.

There was a bird calling intermittently

and I could hear the stream down below.

She was probably right about me getting

strange. After all, Basho¯ and Tolstoy

at the end were at least going somewhere.

The room was like getting married.

A landfall and the setting forth.

A dearness and vessel. A small room

eight by twelve, filled by the narrow iron bed.

Six stories up, under the roof

and no elevator. A maid’s room long ago.

In the old quarter, on the other hill

with the famous city stretched out

below. His window like an ocean.

The great bells of the cathedral counting

the hours all night while everyone slept.

After two years, he had come to

the beginning. Past the villa at Como,

past the police moving him from jail

to jail to hide him from the embassy.

His first woman gone back to Manhattan,

the friends gone back to weddings

or graduate school. He was finally alone.

Without money. A wind blowing through

where much of him used to be. No longer

the habit of himself. The blinding intensity

giving way to presence. The budding

amid the random passion. Mortality like

a cello inside him. Like rain in the dark.

Sin a promise. What interested him

most was who he was about to become.

Bring in the gods I say, and he goes out. When he comes

back and I know they are with him, I say, Put tables in front

of them so they may be seated, and food upon the tables

so they may eat. When they have eaten, I ask which of them

will question me. Let him hold up his hand, I say.

The one on the left raises his hand and I tell him to ask.

Where are you now, he says. I stand on top of myself, I hear

myself answer. I stand on myself like a hilltop and my life

is spread before me. Does it surprise you, he asks. I explain

that in our youth and for a long time after our youth we cannot

see our lives. Because we are inside of that. Because we can

see no shape to it since we have nothing to compare it to.

We have not seen it grow and change because we are too close.

We don’t know the names of things that would bind them to us,

so we cannot feed on them. One near the middle asks why not.

Because we don’t have the knack for eating what we are living.

Why is that? she asks. Because we are too much in a hurry.

Where are you now? the one on the left says. With the ghosts.

I am with Gianna those two years in Perugia. Meeting secretly

in the thirteenth-century alleys of stone. Walking in the fields

through the spring light, she well dressed and walking in heels

over the plowed land. We are just outside the city walls

hidden under the thorny blackberry bushes and her breasts naked.

I am with her those many twilights in the olive orchards,

holding the heart of her as she whimpers. Now where are you?

he says. I am with Linda those years and years. In American

cities, in København, on Greek islands season after season.

Lindos and Monolithos and the other places. I am with Michiko

for eleven years, East and West, holding her clear in my mind

the way a native can hold all of his village at one moment.

Where are you now? he says. I am standing on myself the way

a bird sits in her nest, with the babies half asleep underneath

and the world all leaves and morning air. What do you want?

a blonde one asks. To keep what I already have, I say. You ask

too much, he says sternly. Then you are at peace, she says.

I am not at peace, I tell her. I want to fail. I am hungry

for what I am becoming. What will you do? she asks. I will

continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.

I lie in bed listening to it sing

in the dark about the sweetness

of brief love and the perfection of loves

that might have been. The spirit cherishes

the disregarded. It is because the body continues

to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko

that her body is so clear in me after all this time.

There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine

on her spoon merging with faint sounds

in the distance of her rising from the bathwater.

The Lord gives everything and charges

by taking it back. What a bargain.

Like being young for a while. We are

allowed to visit hearts of women,

to go into their bodies so we feel

no longer alone. We are permitted

romantic love with its bounty and half-life

of two years. It is right to mourn

for the small hotels of Paris that used to be

when we used to be. My mansard looking

down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,

and me listening to the bell at night.

Venice is no more. The best Greek islands

have drowned in acceleration. But it’s the having

not the keeping that is the treasure.

Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon

and said he was giving up poetry

because it told lies, that language distorts.

I agreed, but asked what we have

that gets it right even that much.

We look up at the stars and they are

not there. We see the memory

of when they were, once upon a time.

And that too is more than enough.

Him, she said, and him. They put us in the second car

and followed her back to the villa. Our fear slowly

faded during the weeks. Everyone was kind but busy.

We could go anywhere on the first floor

and on the grounds this side of the fence.

They decided on me and sent the other boy away.

Before I had only glimpsed her at the upper windows.

Now we ate together at opposite ends of the table.

Candlelight eased her age, but not her guilt.

Once she said the world was an astonishing animal:

light was its spirit and noise was its mind.

That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.

Another time she warned me about walking on the lawns

at night. Told me of heavy birds that flew after dark

croaking, “Feathers or lead, stone or fire?”

Mounting people who gave the wrong answer and riding

them like horses across the whole county, beating them

with their powerful wings. We would play cards

silently on rainy days, and have sardine sandwiches

at four in the morning, taking turns reading aloud

from Tolstoy. “What need do we have for consulates?”

she said once before going upstairs, the grand room

beginning to fill with the dawn. “Why insist

on nature? A flower must be red or white, but we

can be anything. Our victories are difficult

because the triumph is not in possessing excellence.

It is found in reluctance.” Month after month

we lived like that. And with me telling her

what it was like out there among the living.

She was steadily failing, like a Palladian palace

coming apart gracefully. The last morning she stood

by the tall windows. “I will not give you my blessing,”

she said, “and I refuse you also my reasons. Who are you,

who is anyone to make me just?” When they came for her,

she smiled at me and said, “At last.”

Hitting each other. Backing up

and hitting each other again

in the loud silence of the stars

and the roar of their headlights.

Trying to force feeling and squeezing

out pain. Eden built of iron and grit.

Arcades fashioned entirely of guilt.

Paradise of loss, of lipsticked nipples,

lying to children about the soul.

Dead women stuffed with flowers.

Abandoned cabs in empty streets

not listening to the red lights,

yellow nor green.

We come from a deep forest of years

into a valley of an unknown country

called loneliness. Without horse or dog,

the heavens bottomless overhead.

We are like Marco Polo who came back

with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.

A sweet sadness, a tough happiness.

This beginner cobbles together a kind of house

and makes lentil soup there night

after night. Sits on the great stone

that is a threshold, smelling pine trees

in the hot darkness. When the moon rises

between the tall trunks, he sings without

talent but with pleasure. Then goes inside

to make courtesy with his dear ghosts.

In the morning, he watches the two nuthatches,

the pair of finches with their new son.

And the chickadees. There are chipmunks

in the afternoon finding seeds between

his fingers with their exquisite hands.

He visits his misbegotten garden where

the mint and chives flourish alongside

the few stunted tomatoes and eggplants.

They are scarce because of ignorance.

He wonders all the time where

he has arrived, why so much has been

allowed him (even rain on the leaves

of sugar maples), and why there is

even now so much to come.

We are not one with this world. We are not

the complexity our body is, nor the summer air

idling in the big maple without purpose.

We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

as it passes through. We are not the wood

any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage

between the two. We are certainly not the lake

nor the fish in it, but the something that is

pleased by them. We are the stillness when

a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices

of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident

when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part

of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists

only in the singing, and is not the singer.

God does not live among the church bells,

but is briefly resident there. We are occasional

like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed

with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold

on to the enterprise underway in our chest.

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

He continues past the nunnery to the old villa

where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides

touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,

which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

The silence is so complete he can hear

the whispers inside him. Mostly names

of women. Women gone or dead. The ones

we loved so easily. What is it, he wonders,

that we had then and don’t have now,

that we once were and are no longer.

It seemed natural to be alive back then.

Soon there will be only the raccoon’s

tracks in the snow down by the river.

The old women in black at early Mass in winter

are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes

they have seen Christ. They make the kernel

of his being and the clarity around it

seem meager, as though he needs girders

to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses

against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.

Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges

across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills

along the banks where he became a young man

as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten

again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them

even though they are gone, to measure against.

The silver is worn down to the brass underneath

and is the better for it. He will gauge

by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.

He is like an old ferry dragged onto the shore,

a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams

and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.

A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt.

Why the mouth? Why is it the mouth we put to mouth

at the final moments? Why not the famous groin?

Because the groin is far away.

The mouth is close up against the spirit.

We couple desperately all night before setting out

for years in prison. But that is the body’s goodbye.

We kiss the person we love last thing before

the coffin is shut, because it is our being

touching the unknown. A kiss is the frontier in us.

It is where the courting becomes the courtship,

where the dancing ends and the dance begins.

The mouth is our chief access to the intimacy

in which she may reside. Her mouth is the porch

of the brain. The forecourt of the heart.

The way to the mystery enthroned. Where we meet

momentarily amid the seraphim and the powers.