Collected Poems (9 page)

The rat makes her way up

the mulberry tree, the branches

getting thin and risky up close

to the fruit, and she slows.

The berry she is after is so ripe,

there is almost no red. Prospero

thinks of Christopher Smart saying

purple is black blooming. She lifts

her mouth to the berry, stretching.

The throat is an elegant gray.

A thousand shades, Christopher wrote

among the crazy people. A thousand

colors from white to silver.

The world is announced by the smell of oregano and sage

in rocky places high up, with white doves higher still

in the blue sky. Or the faint voices of women and girls

in the olive trees below, and a lustrous sea beneath that.

Like thoughts of lingerie while reading
Paradise Lost

in Alabama. Or the boy in Pittsburgh that only summer

he was nine, prowling near the rusty railroad yard

where they put up vast tents and a man lifted anvils

with chains through his nipples. The boy listened

for the sound that made him shiver as he ran hard

across the new sawdust to see the two women again

on a platform above his head, indolent and almost naked

in the simple daylight. Reality stretched thin

as he watched their painted eyes brooding on what

they contained. He vaguely understood that it was not

their flesh that was a mystery but something on the other

side of it. Now the man remembering the boy knows

there is a door. We go through and hear a sound

like buildings burning, like the sound of a stone hitting

a stone in the dark. The heart in its plenty hammered

by rain and need, by the weight of what momentarily is.

Every morning the sad girl brings her three sheep

and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley,

past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze.

She turned twelve last year and it was legal

for the father to take her out of school. She knows

her life is over. The sadness makes her fine,

makes me happy. Her old red sweater makes

the whole valley ring, makes my solitude gleam.

I watch from hiding for her sake. Knowing I am

there is hard on her, but it is the focus of her days.

She always looks down or looks away as she passes

in the evening. Except sometimes when, just before

going out of sight behind the distant canebrake,

she looks quickly back. It is too far for me to see,

but there is a moment of white if she turns her face.

It should have been the family that lasted.

Should have been my sister and my peasant mother.

But it was not. They were the affection,

not the journey. It could have been my father,

but he died too soon. Gelmetti and Gregg

and Nogami lasted. It was the newness of me,

and the newness after that, and newness again.

It was the important love and the serious lust.

It was Pittsburgh that lasted. The iron and fog

and sooty brick houses. Not Aunt Mince and Pearl,

but the black-and-white winters with their girth

and geological length of cold. Streets ripped

apart by ice and emerging like wounded beasts when

the snow finally left in April. Freight trains

with their steam locomotives working at night.

Summers the size of crusades. When I was a boy,

I saw downtown a large camera standing in front

of the William Pitt Hotel or pointed at Kaufmann’s

Department Store. Usually around midnight,

but the people still going by. The camera set

slow enough that cars and people left no trace.

The crowds in Rome and Tokyo and Manhattan

did not last. But the empty streets of Perugia,

my two bowls of bean soup on Kos, and Pimpaporn

Charionpanith lasted. The plain nakedness of Anna

in Denmark remains in me forever. The wet lilacs

on Highland Avenue when I was fourteen. Carrying

Michiko dead in my arms. It is not about the spirit.

The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul

is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged

under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.

The way a child knows the world by putting it

part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw

my way into the Lord, working to put my heart

against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night,

letting the rain after all the dry months have me.

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.

Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell

of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.

Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters

in the bright heat where he lives with the dead

woman and purity. Trying to see if something

comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.

Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No¯: whenever

the script says
dances,
whatever the actor does next

is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.

All of it. The sane woman under the bed with the rat

that is licking off the peanut butter she puts on her

front teeth for him. The beggars of Calcutta blinding

their children while somewhere people are rich

and eating with famous friends and having running water

in their fine houses. Michiko is buried in Kamakura.

The tired farmers thresh barley all day under the feet

of donkeys amid the merciless power of the sun.

The beautiful women grow old, our hearts moderate.

All of us wane, knowing things could have been different.

When Gordon was released from the madhouse, he could

not find Hayden to say goodbye. As he left past

Hall Eight, he saw the face in a basement window,

tears running down the cheeks. And I say, nevertheless.

There is a time after what comes after

being young, and a time after that, he thinks

happily as he walks through the winter woods,

hearing in the silence a woodpecker far off.

Remembering his Chinese friend

whose brother gave her a jade ring from

the Han Dynasty when she turned eighteen.

Two weeks later, when she was hurrying up

the steps of a Hong Kong bridge, she fell,

and the thousand-year-old ring shattered

on the concrete. When she told him, stunned

and tears running down her face, he said,

“Don’t cry. I’ll get you something better.”

To tell the truth, Storyville was brutal. The parlors

of even the fancy whorehouses crawling with roaches

and silverfish. The streets foul and the sex brawling.

But in the shabby clapboard buildings on Franklin

and on Liberty and on Iberville was the invention.

Throughout the District, you could hear Tony Jackson

and King Oliver, Morton and Bechet finding it night

after night. Like the dream Bellocq’s photographs found

in the midst of Egypt Vanita and Mary Meathouse, Aunt Cora

and Gold Tooth Gussie. It takes a long time to get

the ruins right. The Japanese think it strange we paint

our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find

the
wabi
in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after

the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When

bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.

You hear yourself walking on the snow.

You hear the absence of the birds.

A stillness so complete, you hear

the whispering inside of you. Alone

morning after morning, and even more

at night. They say we are born alone,

to live and die alone. But they are wrong.

We get to be alone by time, by luck,

or by misadventure. When I hit the log

frozen in the woodpile to break it free,

it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,

which goes pure all through the valley,

like a crow calling unexpectedly

at the darker end of twilight that awakens

me in the middle of a life. The black

and white of me mated with this indifferent

winter landscape. I think of the moon

coming in a little while to find the white

among these colorless pines.

There was a great tenderness to the sadness

when I would go there. She knew how much

I loved my wife and that we had no future.

We were like casualties helping each other

as we waited for the end. Now I wonder

if we understood how happy those Danish

afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.

Often I took care of the baby while she did

housework. Changing him and making him laugh.

I would say
Pittsburgh
softly each time before

throwing him up. Whisper
Pittsburgh
with

my mouth against the tiny ear and throw

him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.

The only way to leave even the smallest trace.

So that all his life her son would feel gladness

unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined

city of steel in America. Each time almost

remembering something maybe important that got lost.

The monks petition to live the harder way,

in pits dug farther up the mountain,

but only the favored ones are permitted

that scraped life. The syrup-water and cakes

the abbot served me were far too sweet.

A simple misunderstanding of pleasure

because of inexperience. I pull water up

hand over hand from thirty feet of stone.

My kerosene lamp burns a mineral light.

The mind and its fierceness lives here in silence.

I dream of women and hunger in my valley

for what can be made of granite. Like the sun

hammering this earth into pomegranates

and grapes. Dryness giving way to the smell

of basil at night. Otherwise, the stone

feeds on stone, is reborn as rock,

and the heart wanes. Athena’s owl calling

into the barrenness, and nothing answering.

I was carrying supplies back up the mountain

when I heard it, the laughter of children,

so strange in that starkness.

Pushed past the brush and scrub willow

and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls

in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing

and were playing as though they were happy,

as if they did not know any better.

Having no way to measure, I thought,

remembering the man in Virginia who found

a ruined octagonal mansion

and repaired it perfectly. For months

he walked through the grand empty rooms

wondering what they were like.

Until he found a broken chair in the attic

and re-created the colors and scale. Discovered

maybe the kind of life the house was.

Strangers leave us poems to tell of those

they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper

of the religion upstairs in the dark,

sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,

and under trees with rain coming down

in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.

All night in the Iowa café. Friday night

and the farm boys with their pay.

Fine bodies and clean faces. All of them

proud to be drunk. No meanness,

just energy. At the next table, they talked

cars for hours, friends coming and going,

hollering over. The one with the heavy face

and pale hair kept talking about the Chevy

he had years ago and how it could

take everything in second.

Moaning that he should never have sold it.

Didn’t he show old Hank? Bet your ass!

That Fourth of July when Shelvadeen

got too much patriotism and beer

and gave some to everybody

down by the river. Hank so mad because

I left him like he was standing still.

Best car that ever was, and never should have

let it go. Tears falling on his eggs.

I never thought Michiko would come back

after she died. But if she did, I knew

it would be as a lady in a long white dress.

It is strange that she has returned

as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet

the man walking her on a leash

almost every week. He says good morning

and I stoop down to calm her. He said

once that she was never like that with

other people. Sometimes she is tethered

on their lawn when I go by. If nobody

is around, I sit on the grass. When she

finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap

and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper

in her soft ears. She cares nothing about

the mystery. She likes it best when

I touch her head and tell her small

things about my days and our friends.

That makes her happy the way it always did.

Bella fíca!
(beautiful fig, fine sex) the whore said

in the back streets of Livorno, proudly slapping

her groin when the man tried to get the price down.

Braddock, the heavyweight champion of the world,

when Joe Louis was destroying him, blood spraying

and his manager between rounds wanting to stop

the fight, said, I won the title in the ring,

I’m going to lose it in the ring. And, after more

damage, did. Therefore does the wind keep blowing

that holds this great Earth in the air.

For this the birds sing sometimes without purpose.

We value the soiled old theaters because of what

sometimes happens there. Berlin in the thirties.

There were flowers all around Jesus in his agony

at Gethsemane. The Lord sees everything, and sees

that it is good despite everything. The manger

was filthy. The women at Dachau knew they were about

to be gassed when they pushed back the Nazi guard

who wanted to die with them, saying he must live.

And sang for a little while after the doors closed.