Collected Poems (19 page)

The shadows behind people walking

in the bright piazza are not merely

gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness

is not the absence of badness.

Goodness is a triumph. And so it is

with love. Love is not the part

we are born with that flowers

a little and then wanes as we

grow up. We cobble love together

from this and those of our machinery

until there is suddenly an apparition

that never existed before. There it is,

unaccountable. The woman and our

desire are somehow turned into

brandy by Athena’s tiny owl filling

the darkness around an old villa

on the mountain with its plaintive

mewing. As a man might be

turned into someone else while

living kind of happy up there

with the lady’s gentle dying.

The sound of women hidden

among the lemon trees. A sweetness

that can live with the mind, a family

that does not wear away. He will let

twenty lives pass and choose the twenty-

first. He longs to live married to

slowness. He lives now with the lambs

the minute they are being born,

lives with their perfection as they

blunder around right away in pure innocence.

He watches them go up the mountain

each morning with the twelve-year-old

nearly child. Living with his faith

as he watches them eaten at Easter

to celebrate Christ. He is not innocent.

He knows the shepherdess will be given

to the awful man who lives at the farm

closest to him. He blesses all of it

as he mourns and the white doves soar

silently in the perfect blue sky.

I was getting water tonight

off guard when I saw the moon

in my bucket and was tempted

by those Chinese poets

and their immaculate pain.

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.

They asked him what he meant by garden.

He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”

he said, “there are places walled off where color

and decorum are magnified into a civilization.

Like a beautiful woman,” he said. How like

a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives

and said garden was just a figure of speech,

then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later

he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne

couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia

Sophia and putting a round dome on a square

base after nine hundred years of failure.

The hand holding him slipped and he fell.

“White stone in the white sunlight,” he said

as they picked him up. “Not the great fires

built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew

fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody

and the symphony. The imperfect dancing

in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

In the old days we could see nakedness only

in the burlesque houses. In the lavish

theaters left over from vaudeville,

ruined in the Great Depression. What had been

grand gestures of huge chandeliers

and mythic heroes courting the goddess

on the ceiling. Now the chandeliers were grimy

and the ceilings hanging in tatters. It was

like the Russian aristocrats fleeing

the Revolution. Ending up as taxi drivers

in Paris dressed in their worn-out elegance.

It was like that in the Pittsburgh of my days.

Old men of shabby clothes in the empty

seats at the Roxy Theater dreaming

of the sumptuous headliners

slowly discarding layers of their

lavish gowns. Baring the secret

beauty to the men of their season.

The old men came from their one room

(with its single, forbidden gas range)

to watch the strippers. To remember what used

to be. Like the gray-haired men of Ilium

who waited each morning for Helen

to cross over to the temple in her light raiment.

The waning men longed to escape from the spell

cast over them by time. To escape the imprisoned

longing. To insist on dispensation. To see

their young hearts just one more time.

Those famous women like honeycombs. Women moving

to the old music again. That former grace of flesh.

The sheen of them in the sunlight, to watch

them walking by the sea.

For Susan Crosby Lawrence Anderson

In the small towns along the river

nothing happens day after long day.

Summer weeks stalled forever,

and long marriages always the same.

Lives with only emergencies, births,

and fishing for excitement. Then a ship

comes out of the mist. Or comes around

the bend carefully one morning

in the rain, past the pines and shrubs.

Arrives on a hot fragrant night,

grandly, all lit up. Gone two days

later, leaving fury in its wake.

He wonders why he can’t remember the blossoming.

He can taste the brightness of the sour-cherry trees,

but not the clamoring whiteness. He was seven in

the first grade. He remembers two years later when

they were alone in those rich days. He and his sister

in what they called kindergarten.

They played every day on the towering

slate roofs. Barefoot. No one to see them on

those fine days. He remembers the fear

when they shot through the copper-sheeted

tunnels through the house. The fear

and joy and not getting hurt. Being tangled

high up in the mansion’s Bing cherry tree with

its luscious fruit. Remembers

the lavish blooming. Remembers the caves they

built in the cellar, in the masses of clothing and draperies.

Tunnels to each other’s kingdom with their stolen

jewelry and scarves. It was always summer, except for

the night when his father suddenly appeared. Bursting

in with crates of oranges or eggs, laughing in a way

that thrilled them. The snowy night behind him.

Who never brought two pounds of anything. The boy remembers

the drunkenness but not how he felt about it,

except for the Christmas when his father tried to embrace

the tree when he came home. Thousands of lights,

endless tinsel and ornaments. He does

not remember any of it except the crash as his father

went down. The end of something.

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.

They will do anything it’s true.

And the skin is beautifully cared for.

But they have no sense of it. They are

all manner and amazing technique.

I lie with them thinking of your

foolish excess, of you panting

and sweating, and your eyes after.

The bird on the other side of the valley

sings
cuckoo cuckoo
and he sings back, inside,

knowing what it meant to the Elizabethans.

Hoping she is unfaithful now. Delicate

and beautiful, making love with the Devil

in his muggy bedroom behind the shabby office.

While he is explaining the slums were there

when he got the job.
And
the Buicks burning

by the roads in the dark. He was not the one

doing the judging, he says. Or the one pointing down

at the lakes of burning lead. He is feeding

her lemons. Holding shaved ice in his mouth

and sucking her nipples to help with the heat.

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.

Hearing the piano like a man moving

through the woods thinking by feeling.

The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,

step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,

but always returning to quiet, like the man

remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,

mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure

in the loss. In the yearning. The pain

going this way and that. Never again.

Never bodied again. Again the never.

Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.

A humming beauty in the silence.

The having been. Having had. And the man

knowing all of him will come to the end.

While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play

the tom-toms when it came time for that. You had to

run in order to get there first, and he would not.

So he always had a triangle. He does not remember

how they played the tom-toms, but he sees clearly

their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back

and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.

If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.

You mostly waited while the tambourines and tom-toms

went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all

triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.

Then it was tom-toms and waiting some more. But what

he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,

shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.

Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost

and the waiting for it to come again.
Waiting
meaning

without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,

sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives

silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting

for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence

as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

The world is beyond us even as we own it.

It is a hugeness in which we climb toward.

A place only the wind knows, the kingdom

of the moon which breathes a thousand years

at a time. Our soul and the body hold each other

tenderly in their arms like Charles Lamb

and his sister walking again to the madhouse.

Hand in hand, tears on their faces, him carrying

her suitcase. Blow after blow on our heart

as we grope through the flux for footholds,

grabbing for things that won’t pull loose.

They fail us time after time and we slide back

without understanding where we are going.

Remembering how the periodic table of the elements

didn’t fit the evidence for half a century.

Until they understood what isotopes were.

It waits. While I am walking through the pine trees

along the river, it is waiting. It has waited a long time.

In southern France, in Belgium, and even Alabama.

Now it waits in New England while I say grace over

almost everything: for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,

the single light on a levee while Northampton sleeps,

and because the lanes between houses in Greek hamlets

are exactly the width of a donkey loaded on each side

with barley. Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.

The heart is a foreign country whose language none

of us is good at. Winter lingers on in the woods,

but already it looks discarded as the birds return

and sing carelessly; as though there never was the power

or size of December. For nine years in me it has waited.

My life is pleasant, as usual. My body is a blessing

and my spirit clear. But the waiting does not let up.

We have seen the population of Heaven

in frescoes. Dominions and unsmiling saints

crowded together as though the rooms were small.

We think of the grand forests of Pennsylvania,

oaks and maples, when we see the miniatures

of blue Krishna with farm girls awkwardly

beside a pond in a glade of scrub trees.

The Japanese scrolls show mostly Hell.

When we read about the Christian paradise,

it is made of gold and pearls, built on

a foundation of emeralds. Nothing soft

and rarely trees, except in the canvases

of Italians where they slip in bits of Tuscany

and Perugino’s Umbria. All things

are taken away. Indeed, indeed.

But we secretly think of our bodies

in the heart’s storm and just after.

And the sound of careless happiness.

We touch finally only a little.

Like the shy tongue that comes fleetingly

in the dark. The acute little that is there.

It astonished him when he got to Kathmandu to hear

the man from the embassy say a friend was waiting

outside of customs. It was the Australian woman

he had met in Bali. His fault for running back

across the tarmac when he realized she was crying.

Kissing her while the plane waited with the door open.

Wanting her to feel valuable. Now she had used up all

her money flying to Nepal. In trouble because

we can’t parse the heart. Calling what had been

what it was not. Now lying awkwardly on the bed

for a month, marooned in the heat, the Himalayas

above the window. As he watched the delicate dawns

and the old women carrying too much firewood down

from the mountain on their backs. Him thinking of their

happiness up in the lush green terraces of rice.

Remembering her laughter as he came out of the shower,

saying the boy had come again with a plate of melon.

“He asked if you were my husband,” she said, “and I

said you were my father.” Her eyes merry. Now they sat

in cheap restaurants trying to find anything to say.

Remembering how beautiful she was the first time

coming through the palm trees of the compound at dusk.

Tall and thin in a purple dress that reached to her

bare feet. Watching while he played chess with

the Austrian photographer all night. Now calling

that good thing by the wrong name. Destroying

something valuable. Innocently killing backwards.