Collected Poems (47 page)

past some limit, I’d try again: this time

I’d cry out aloud, and it would stop.

Trembling, I’d come to myself, as,

the night of your tests, I came shuddering

awake, my fear for you, for both of us,

raging more terribly through me

than that vision of annihilation ever did.

It was like the desolate time before you:

I couldn’t turn to you for reassurance

lest I frighten you, couldn’t embrace you

for fear I’d wake you to your own anxiety,

so, as I had then, I lay helpless, mute.

The results were “negative”; now

I’ll tell you of those hours in which my life,

not touching you but holding you,

not making a sound but crying for you,

divided back into the half it is without you.

The Island

Glorious morning, the sun still mild on the eastward hills, the hills still hushed;

only sometimes will a placeless voice find its way across the softly sleeping valley,

a slightly higher wave rise and wash in sighing over the stony beach.

So pleasant in such peace the way self inhabits its perceptual containers,

luxurious to descend so insouciantly from the inwardly armored helmet of thought;

consciousness dilates, there’s a feeling of lubrication, acceleration,

my attention, as though freed of me, darts from a here which often isn’t here,

to a there which usually remains resolutely an
away;
darts now from a white house

to an even whiter church up behind it, then down across a thistled slope

before it lifts abruptly, captured by the apparition of a single yellow flower petal

soaring in a magnifying gush of light unwaveringly
upwards,
towards the firmament.

A sign? To reinforce the fittingness with which vision and its contents coincide?

Now a burly, gray-white, rather short-winged gull lifts into the square of window

and with a visibly potent muscling of its pinions banks from sight. Another sign?

Of more strenuous felicities? But if one believed such things, what wouldn’t be?

What about the fisherman out on his boat? What of the slowly moving boat itself?

How productive mind can seem, wheeling through such doing-something doing-nothing,

how pure its feeling of achievement in these world-spun strandings of connection.

But now comes an intimation of distraction; might the moment be already being lost?

No matter: let the swaying cypress, the ever-sweetening breezes be their own reprieve.

Another swell sweeps across the still-calm bay; everything ripples, everything holds.

Dirt

My grandmother is washing my mouth

out with soap; half a long century gone

and still she comes at me

with that thick, cruel, yellow bar.

All because of a word I said,

not even said really, only repeated,

but
Open,
she says,
open up!

her hand clawing at my head.

I know now her life was hard;

she lost three daughters as babies,

then her husband died, too,

leaving young sons, and no money.

She’d stand me in the sink to pee

because there was never room in the toilet.

But, oh, her soap! Might its bitter burning

have been what made me a poet?

The street she lived on was unpaved,

her flat two cramped rooms and a fetid

kitchen where she stalked and caught me.

Dare I admit that after she did it

I never really loved her again?

She lived to a hundred, even then.

All along it was the sadness, the squalor,

but I never, until now, loved her again.

Swifts

Why this much fascination with you, little loves, why this what feels like, oh, hearts,

almost too much exultation in you who set the day’s end sky ashimmer with your veerings?

Why this feeling one might stay forever to behold you as you bank, swoop, swerve, soar,

make folds and pleats in evening’s velvet, and pierce and stitch, dissect, divide,

cast up slopes which hold a beat before they fall away into the softening dusk?

That such fragile beings should concoct such sky-long lifting bends across the roofs,

as though human work counted for as little as your quickly dimming intersecting cries.

Tiniest dear ones, but chargers, too, gleaming, potent little coursers of the firmament,

smaller surely, lighter, but with that much force, that much insistence and enchantment;

godlings, nearly, cast upon the sky as upon a field of thought until then never thought,

gravity exempting from its weary weight its favorite toy, oh, you, and its delights, you and you,

as you hurl yourself across the tint of sinking sunlight that flows behind you as a wake of gold.

And the final daylight sounds you wing back to your eaves with you to weave into the hush,

then your after-hush which pulses in the sky of memory one last beat more as full dark falls.

Invisible Mending

Three women old as angels,

bent as ancient apple trees,

who, in a storefront window,

with magnifying glasses,

needles fine as hair, and shining

scissors, parted woof from warp

and pruned what would in

human tissue have been sick.

Abrasions, rents and frays,

slits and chars and acid

splashes, filaments that gave

way of their own accord

from the stress of spanning

tiny, trifling gaps, but which

in a wounded psyche

make a murderous maze.

Their hands as hard as horn,

their eyes as keen as steel,

the threads they worked with

must have seemed as thick

as ropes on ships, as cables

on a crane, but still their heads

would lower, their teeth bare

to nip away the raveled ends.

Only sometimes would they

lift their eyes to yours to show

how much lovelier than these twists

of silk and serge the garments

of the mind are, yet how much

more benign their implements

than mind’s procedures

of forgiveness and repair.

And in your loneliness you’d notice

how really very gently they’d take

the fabric to its last, with what

solicitude gather up worn edges

to be bound, with what severe

but kind detachment wield

their amputating shears:

forgiveness, and repair.

THE SINGING

[2003]

I

The Doe

Near dusk, near a path, near a brook,

we stopped, I in disquiet and dismay

for the suffering of someone I loved,

the doe in her always incipient alarm.

All that moved was her pivoting ear

the reddening sun shining through

transformed to a color I’d only seen

in a photo of a child in a womb.

Nothing else stirred, not a leaf,

not the air, but she startled and bolted

away from me into the crackling brush.

The part of my pain which sometimes

releases me from it fled with her, the rest,

in the rake of the late light, stayed.

The Singing

I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon under the blossoms

Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing no it was more of a cadenced shouting

Most of which I couldn’t catch I thought because the young man was black speaking black

It didn’t matter I could tell he was making his song up which pleased me he was nice-looking

Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost beside him and “Big”

He shouted-sang “Big” and I thought how droll to have my height incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked in fact pointedly away

And his song changed “I’m not a nice person” he chanted “I’m not I’m not a nice person”

No menace was meant I gathered no particular threat but he did want to be certain I knew

That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord between us I should forget it

That’s all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to me again he arrived

Where he was going a house where a girl in braids waited for him on the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions were left where they were

It occurred to me to sing back “I’m not a nice person either” but I couldn’t come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn’t have meant it nor he have believed it both of us knew just where we were

In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something is watching and listening

Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there

Bialystok, or Lvov

A squalid wayside inn, reeking barn-brewed vodka,

cornhusk cigarettes that cloy like acrid incense

in a village church, kegs of rotten, watered wine,

but then a prayer book’s worn-thin pages,

and over them, as though afloat in all that fetidness,

my great-grandfather’s disembodied head.

Cacophonous drunkenness, lakes of vomit

and oceans of obscenities; the smallpox pocked

salacious peasant faces whose carious breath

clots one’s own; and violence, the scorpion-

brutal violence of nothing else, to do, to have,

then the prayers again, that tormented face,

its shattered gaze, and that’s all I have,

of whence I came, of where the blood came from

that made my blood, and the tale’s not even mine,

I have it from a poet, the Russian-Jewish then

Israeli Bialik, and from my father speaking of

his father’s father dying in his miserable tavern,

in a fight, my father said, with berserk Cossacks,

but my father fabulated, so I omit all that,

and share the poet’s forebears, because mine

only wanted to forget their past of poverty

and pogrom, so said nothing, or perhaps

where someone came from, a lost name,

otherwise nothing, leaving me less

history than a dog, just the poet’s father’s

and my great-grandfather’s inn, that sty,

the poet called it, that abyss of silence, I’d say,

and that soul, like snow, the poet wrote,

with tears of blood, I’d add, for me and mine.

This Happened

A student, a young woman, in a fourth floor hallway of her
lycée,

perched on the ledge of an open window chatting with friends between classes;

a teacher passes and chides her,
Be careful, you might fall,

almost banteringly chides her,
You might fall,

and the young woman, eighteen, a girl really, though she wouldn’t think that,

as brilliant as she is, first in her class,
and beautiful, too,
she’s often told,

smiles back, and leans into the open window, which wouldn’t even be open if it were winter,

if it were winter someone would have closed it (
Close it!
)

leans into the window, farther, still smiling, farther and farther,

though it takes less time than this, really an instant, and lets herself fall.
Herself fall.

A casual impulse, a fancy, never thought of until now, hardly thought of even now …

No, more than impulse or fancy, the girl knows what she’s doing,

the girl means something, the girl means to
mean,

because, it occurs to her in that instant, that beautiful or not, bright yes or no,

she’s not who she is,
she’s not the person she is,
and the reason, she suddenly knows,

is that there’s been so much premeditation where she is, so much plotting and planning,

there’s hardly a person where she is, or if there is, it’s not her, or not wholly her,

it’s a self inhabited, lived in by her, and seemingly even as she thinks it

she knows what’s been missing: grace, not premeditation but grace,

a kind of being in the world spontaneously, with
grace.

Weightfully upon me was the world.

Weightfully this self which graced the world yet never wholly itself.

Weightfully this self which weighed upon me,

the release from which is what I desire and what I achieve.

And the girl remembers, in this infinite instant already so many times divided,

the grief she felt once, hardly knowing she felt it, to merely inhabit herself.

Yes, the girl falls, absurd to fall, even the earth with its compulsion to take unto itself all that falls

must know that falling is absurd, yet the girl falling isn’t myself,

or she is myself, but a self I took of my own volition unto myself.

Forever. With grace.
This happened.

Self-Portrait with Rembrandt Self-Portrait

I put my face inches from his

and look into his eyes

which look back,

but whatever it is

so much beyond suffering

I long towards in his gaze

and imagine inhabiting mine

eludes me.

I put my face inches from his

face palette-knifed nearly raw,

scraped down to whatever it is

that denies flesh yet is flesh

but whatever it is

which still so exalts flesh,

even flesh scraped nearly raw,