Collected Poems (18 page)

For Isaiah Berlin

When the hedgehogs here at night

see a car and its fierce lights

coming at them, they do the one

big thing they know.

The intricate vast process has produced

a singularity which lies in darkness

hearing the small owls, a donkey snorting

in the barley field, and frogs down near

the cove. What he is listening to is

the muteness of the dog at each farm

in the valley. Their silence means no

lover is abroad nor any vagrant looking

for where to sleep. But there is a young

man, very still, under the heavy grapes

in another part of Heaven. There are still

women hoping behind the dark windows

of farmhouses. Like he can hear himself not

hearing Verdi. What else don’t the dogs know?

When the angels found him sitting in the half light

of his kerosene lamp eating lentils, his eyes widened.

But all he said was could he leave a note. The one

wearing black looked at the one in red who shrugged,

so he began writing, desperately. Wadded the message

into an envelope and wrote
Anna
on the front. Quickly

began another, shoulders hunched, afraid of them.

Finished and wrote
Pimpaporn
on it. Began a third

one and the heavy angel growled. “I have Schubert,”

the man offered, turning on the tape. The one in black

said quietly that at least he didn’t say “So soon!”

When the ink ran out, the man whimpered and struggled

to the table piled with books and drafts. He finished

again and scrawled
Suzanne
across it. The one in red

growled again and the man said he would put on his shoes.

When they took him out into the smell of dry vetch

and the ocean, he began to hold back, pleading:

“I didn’t put the addresses! I don’t want them to think

I forgot.” “It doesn’t matter,” the better angel said,

“they have been dead for years.”

Think what it was like, he said. Peggy Lee and Goodman

all the time. Carl Ravazza making me crazy

with “Vieni Su” from a ballroom in New Jersey

every night, the radio filling my dark room

in Pittsburgh with naked-shouldered women

in black gowns. Helen Forrest and Helen O’Connell,

and later the young Sarah Vaughan out of Chicago

from midnight until two. Think of being fifteen

in the middle of leafy June when Sinatra and Ray

Eberle both had number one records of “Fools Rush In.”

Somebody singing “Tenderly” and somebody doing

“This Love of Mine.” Helplessly adolescent while

the sound of romance was constantly everywhere.

All day long out of windows along the street.

Sinatra with “Close to You.” And all the bands. Artie

Shaw with “Green Eyes” and whoever was always playing

“Begin the Beguine.” Me desperate because I wouldn’t

get there in time. Who can blame me for my heart?

What choice did I have? Harry James with “Sleepy

Lagoon.” Imagine, on a summer night, “Sleepy Lagoon”!

After she died he was seized

by a great curiosity about what

it was like for her. Not that he

doubted how much she loved him.

But he knew there must have been

some things she had not liked.

So he went to her closest friend

and asked what she complained of.

“It’s all right,” he had to keep

saying, “I really won’t mind.”

Until the friend finally gave in.

“She said sometimes you made a noise

drinking your tea if it was very hot.”

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.

By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,

power without consequence. The stubborn iteration

that is present without being felt.

Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon

and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.

No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.

No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

The horror of none of it being alive.

No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.

Nothing that knows what season it is.

The stars uninflected by awareness.

Miming without implication. We alone see the iris

in front of the cabin reach its perfection

and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness

and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed

with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.

We live the strangeness of being momentary,

and still we are exalted by being temporary.

The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,

being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.

We are a singularity that makes music out of noise

because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness

and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

I woke up every morning on the fourth floor,

in the two-hundred-year-old walls made

of plaster and river grass. I would leave

the woman and walk across beautiful København

to the island of Amager. To my small room

in the leftover Nazi barracks that looked out

on a swamp. Most of the time it was winter.

I would light my hydrant-size iron stove

and set a pot on top, putting in hamburger

and vegetables while the water was getting hot.

Starting to type with numb hands. The book

I planned to write in two weeks for a thousand

dollars already a week behind (and threatening

to get beyond a month). Out of money and no

prospects. Then the lovely smell of soup

and the room snug. I would type all day

and late into the night. Until the soup

was finished. Then I would start back across

the frozen city, crunching over the moats,

loud in the silence. The stars brilliant.

Focused on her waiting for me, ready to fry

sausages at two in the morning. Me thinking idly

of the ancient Chinese poet writing in his

poverty, “Ah, is this not happiness.”

Used, misled, cheated. Our time always shortening.

What we cherish always temporary. What we love

is, sooner or later, changed. But for a while we can

visit our other life. Can rejoice in its being there

in its absence. Giving thanks for what we are allowed

to think about it, grateful for it even as it wanes.

For knowing it is there. The way women on rainy days

sometimes go into the bedroom to cry about losing

the first man they loved. The way a man remembers the young

woman at an upstairs window looking out he saw once,

for a moment, as he drove through a sleeping village.

Or the brightness in the memory of the failed hotel

where the waiters in their immaculate white uniforms

were barefoot. The elegant dining room silent except for

the sound of rain falling in the tin buckets. And

the whispering of giant overhead fans with broken

blades as they turned in the heat. There was the scraping

sound in the piles of dead leaves on the lavish veranda.

And occasionally the bright sound of broken glass.

All of it a blessing. The being there. Being alive then.

Like a giant bell ringing long after you can’t hear it.

After twenty hours in bed with no food, I decided

I should have at least tea. Got up to light the lamp,

but the sweating and shivering started again

and I staggered backwards across the room. Slammed

against the stone wall. Came to with blood on my head

and couldn’t figure out which way the bed was.

Crawled around searching for the matches but gave up,

remembering there was one left in a box by the stove.

It flared and went out. “Exaggerated,” I said

and groped back toward my desk, feeling for the matches

with barefoot geisha steps. Began to shake and moan,

my teeth chattering like the hero did in the old movie

when his malaria returned. I smiled but was worried.

No telephone and nobody going by out there in the field

I could call to. And God knows what I had. Realized

I was on all fours again. Interesting, something said

as I dragged myself onto the bed. Interesting?

another part said. Interesting! For Christ’s sake!

That is what the Odyssey means.

Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico

raising peacocks for the rest of your life.

The seriously happy heart is a problem.

Not the easy excitement, but summer

in the Mediterranean mixed with

the rain and bitter cold of February

on the Riviera, everything on fire

in the violent winds. The pregnant heart

is driven to hopes that are the wrong

size for this world. Love is always

disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.

Eden cannot manage so much ambition.

The kids ran from all over the piazza

yelling and pointing and jeering

at the young Saint Chrysostom

standing dazed in the church doorway

with the shining around his mouth

where the Madonna had kissed him.

In the morning when Eve and Adam

woke to snow and their minds,

they set out in marvelous clothes

hand in hand under the trees.

Endlessly precision met them,

until they went grinning in time

with no word for their close

escape from that warm monotony.

The Greek fishermen do not

play on the beach and I don’t

write funny poems.

Having swum in the jungle pool

under the waterfall and struggled

down again through the wattle huts,

we still had three hours to wait

before the boat would go back.

The only foreigners had a gallery.

She was British and naked in her halter.

He also was standard, with his stubble

and drunken talk of sex at ten

in the morning. Telling us loudly

how she stayed with him because

of his three hundred a month. She waded

through their old hatred picking up

the sketches as each in turn blew down

in the wind running before the storm.

More and more it is the incidental that makes

him yearn, and he worries about that.

Why should the single railroad tracks

curving away into the bare December trees

and no houses matter? And why is it

the defeated he trusts? Is it because

Pittsburgh is still tangled in him that he

has the picture on his wall of God’s head

torn apart by jungle roots? Maybe

growing up in that brutal city left him

with a taste for grit and whatever it was

he saw in the titanic rusting steel mills.

It might be the reason he finally moved out

of Paris. Perhaps it is the scale

of those long-ago winters that makes him

restless when people laugh a lot.

Why the erotic matters so much. Not as

pleasure but a way to get to something darker.

Hunting down the soul, searching out the iron

of Heaven when the work is getting done.

She might be here secretly.

On her hands and knees

with her head down a bit

tilted to peer around the doorjamb

in the morning, watching me

before I wake up.

Only her face showing

and her shoulders. In a slip,

her skin honey against the simple

white of two thin straps

and the worked edge of the bodice.

With her right hand a little visible.

It pleases him that the villa is on a mountain

flayed bare by the great sun. All around

are a thousand stone walls in ruin. He likes knowing

the house was built by the king’s telegrapher.

“To write at a distance
.”
He keeps the gate closed

with a massive hasp and chain. The weeds inside

are breast-high around the overgrown rosebushes

and two plum trees. Beyond that, broad stairs

rise to a handsome terrace and the fine house

with its tall windows. He has excavated most

of the courtyard in back. It’s there they

spent their perfect days under a diseased

grape arbor and the flowering jasmine. There is

a faint sound of water from the pool over by

the pomegranate tree with its exaggerated fruit.

The basin is no longer choked by the leaves

accumulated in the twelve years of vacancy.

He has come to the right place at the right time.

The blue Aegean is far down, and the slow ships

far out. Doves fly without meaning overhead.

He and the Japanese lady go out the back gate

and up the stream stone by stone, bushes on each side

heavy with moths. They come out under big plane trees.

There is a dirt path from there to a nunnery.

She says goodbye and he starts down to the village

at the bottom where he will get their food for a week.

The sky is vast overhead. Neither of them knows

she is dying. He thinks of their eleven years together.

Realizes they used up all that particular time

everywhere in the cosmos, and forever.