Collected Poems (52 page)

The lions, inexhaustibly fierce, never retreat, never give in.

One, off near a column of slaves, glares back at us as she dies.

The Tract

1.

Where is it where is it where is it in what volume what text what treatise what tract

is that legend that tale that myth homily parable fable that’s haunted me since I read it

I thought in Campbell but I can’t find it or some scripture some Veda not there either

that holy history anyway from those years when I was trying to skull a way out of the flat

banal world which so oppressed me I’m sure because it contained me wherever it came from

it’s haunted me haunted me lurking in everything I’ve thought or felt or had happen to me

2.

The protagonist’s not anyone special just a man he’s born grows marries has children

he’s living his life like everyone else pleasure pain pleasure pain then one day a flood

a deluge roars through his valley sweeping all before it away his house his village the people

only he and his family are left clinging to a tree then his wife’s torn from his arms

then his children too one by one then the tree is uprooted and he himself is boiled out

into the wild insatiable waves he cries out for his life goes under comes up sinks again

3.

and rises to the surface to find himself on an ocean a vast sea and looming far above him

is a god a god sleeping it’s Vishnu if I remember Vishnu asleep swaying serenely like a lotus

and as the person gazes in awe the god wakes sees the man plucks him from the waves

and thrusts him into his mouth and there in that eternally empty darkness the man realizes

that oh all he’d lived the days hours years the emotions thoughts even his family oh

were illusion reality was this all along this god huge as a storm cloud the horizonless sea

4.

Not only in depression does that tale still come back to attack me not only in melancholy

am I infected by its annihilating predications though I’ve been gloomy enough often enough

mostly early on about love then the political bedlam then work absurd writing a word

striking it out while all around you as the books of truth say is suffering and suffering

at first it would take me yes during desponds but even at moments of passion when everything

but what you want and the force of your want is obliterated except at mind’s reaches

5.

where ancient mills keep heart and brain pumping and some blessèd apparatus of emotion

and counter-emotion keeps you from weeping with the desolation that lurks in desire

a desolation I don’t thank goodness feel anymore not during passion now does that story

secrete its acids through me but still it does take me I want to say when my vigilance flags

when I don’t pay attention then the idea it postulates or the chilling suspicion it confirms

leaves me riven with anxiety for all that exists or has ever existed or seemed to

6.

Yet what is there in that no way plausible whatever it is that can still so afflict me

philosophically primitive spiritually having nothing to do with any tradition even the tragic

to which I feel linked if the wisdom it’s meant to impart is that you can’t countervail misery

with gratification or that to imagine life without suffering is to suffer I’ve learned that

and it doesn’t make death more daunting I have death more or less in its place now

though the thought still sears of a consciousness not even one’s own extinguished

7.

Not some rage of mentalism then something simpler though more frightening about love

that the man has negated in him not only the world but his most precious sentiments

what’s dire is that the story denies and so promulgates the notion that one can deny

the belief no the conviction that some experiences love most of all can must be exempted

from even the most cruelly persuasive skepticism and excluded even from implications

of one’s own cosmology if they too radically rupture what links real lives one to another

8.

To release yourself from attachment so from despair I suppose was the point of the text

and I suppose I was looking for it again to release me from
it
and if I haven’t done that

at least I’m somewhere near the opposite where I’m hanging on not to a tree in a dream

but to the hope that someday I’ll accept without qualm or question that the reality of others

the love of others the miracle of others all that which feels like enough is truly enough

no celestial sea no god in his barque of being just life just hanging on for dear life

NEW POEMS

The Gaffe

1.

If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,

as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?

If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then,

shouldn’t he have warned me he’d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?

I’m a child then, yet already I’ve composed this conscience-beast, who harries me:

is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he,

could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse,

and orchestrate ever undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself?

2.

The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying their call,

take me along, and I’m sent out with the dead boy’s brother and some others to play.

We’re joking around, and words come to my mind, which to my amazement are said.

How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies?

is what’s said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet, everyone stares,

and I want to know now why that someone in me who’s me yet not me let me say it.

Shouldn’t he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me,

it didn’t matter that I’d really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when?

3.

I could hear the boy’s mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing then stopping.

Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her it would end?

Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, still does, me,

for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes?

She didn’t laugh, though, or I never heard her.
How do you know when you can laugh?

Why couldn’t someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but to explain?

The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn’t hear anything more from inside.

The way now sometimes what’s in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really, forgets.

Thrush

Often in our garden these summer evenings a thrush

and her two nearly grown offspring come to forage.

The chicks are fledged, the mother’s teaching them

to find their own food; one learns, the other can’t —

its skull is misshapen, there’s no eye on one side

and the beak is malformed: whatever it finds, it drops.

It seems to regress then, crouching before the mother,

gullet agape, as though it were back in the nest:

she always finds something else for it to eat,

but her youngster’s all but as large as she is,

she’s feeding two of herself — she’ll abandon it soon,

and migrate; the chick will doubtlessly starve.

Humans don’t do that, just leave, though a young woman

I saw rushing through the train station this morning

with a Down’s syndrome infant in a stroller

I thought might if she could. The child, a girl,

was giggling so hard at how splendidly fast

they were going that she’d half fallen from her seat,

until the mother braked abruptly, hissed “Shush!”

and yanked her back into place. The baby, alarmed,

subsided but still intrepidly smiled as the mother —

she wasn’t eighteen, with smudged eyeliner, scuffed shoes

and a cardboard valise — sped on, wielding carriage

and child as a battering ram through the oncoming crush.

The thrushes have been rapidly crisscrossing the lawn

in and out of the flowerbeds all through the long dusk,

now they leave, the rest of the birds go quiet —

I can hear someone far off calling children to bed —

and it’s the turn of the bats, who materialize, vanish,

and appear again, their own after-selves, their own ghosts.

Cows

Face in her hands, bike

thrown down beside her, a girl

on the road from the village

stands brokenheartedly crying.

I assume it’s some love-

thing but stop a ways on

to be sure; in a meadow nearby,

ten or so spotted heifers,

each with a numbered tag

in her ear, see me and rush

to the fence and low over,

all of them, all at once,

with so much feeling that not

“Feed me!” do they seem

to be saying but “Save me!”

Save me! Save me! Save me!

Still long-legged,

still svelte, their snug

skin milk-white

and gleaming, obsidian black …

I think of Io, transfigured

by treacherous Zeus to a heifer,

whose beauty was still such

men longed to embrace her.

These, by next year, unless

they’re taken to slaughter,

will be middle-aged ladies

with udders, indifferently grazing.

When I look in the mirror, the girl —

should I have offered to help her? —

is gone: I’ll never know what

happened to her, nor what will.

The cows watch still,

jaws grinding, tails lashing

the squadrons of flies on their flanks.

Save me! Save me!

Marina

As I’m reading Tsvetaeva’s essays,

“Art in the Light of Conscience,”

stunning —
“Art, a series of answers

to which there are no questions”
—

a tiny insect I don’t recognize

is making its way across my table.

It has lovely transparent wings

but for some reason they drag behind

as it treks the expanse of formica

and descends into a crack.

“To each answer before it evaporates,

our
question”:
composed in Paris

during the difficult years of exile.

But which of her years were easy?

This at least was before the husband,

a spy, an assassin, went back,

then she, too, with her son,

to the Soviet madhouse, back …

“This being outgalloped by answers,

is inspiration…”
Outgalloped!

Still lugging its filigreed train,

the insect emerges: fragile, distracted,

it can’t even trace a straight line,

but it circumnavigates the table.

Does it know it’s back where it began?

Still, it perseveres, pushing

courageously on, one inch, another …

“Art … a kind of physical world

of the spiritual … A spiritual world

of the physical … almost flesh.”

One daughter, dying, at three,

of hunger, the other daughter,

that gift of a sugar-cube

in her mouth, drenched with blood …

“A poet is an answer … not to the blow,

but a quivering of the air.”

The years of wandering,

the weary return, husband betrayed,

arrested, daughter in a camp …

“The soul is our capacity for pain.”

When I breathe across it,

the bug squats, quakes, finally flies.

And couldn’t she have fled again,

again have been flown? Couldn’t she,

noose in her hand, have proclaimed,

“I am Tsvetaeva,” and then not?

No, no time now for “then not.”

But
“Above poet, more than poet…”

she’d already said it, already sung it:

“Air finished. Firmament now.”

Blackbird

There was nothing I could have done —

a flurry of blackbirds burst

from the weeds at the edge of a field

and one veered out into my wheel

and went under. I had a moment

to hope he’d emerge as sometimes

they will from beneath the back

of the car and fly off,

but I saw him behind on the roadbed,

the shadowless sail of a wing

lifted vainly from the clumsy

bundle of matter he’d become.

There was nothing I could have done,

though perhaps I was distracted:

I’d been listening to news of the war,

hearing that what we’d suspected

were lies had proved to be lies,

that many were dying for those lies,

but as usual now, it wouldn’t matter.

I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s

“… You can’t fool all of the people

all of the time…,” how I once

took comfort from the hope and trust

it implied, but no longer.

I had to slow down now,

a tractor hauling a load of hay

was approaching on the narrow lane.

The farmer and I gave way and waved:

the high-piled bales swayed

menacingly over my head but held.

Out in the harvested fields,

already disked and raw,

more blackbirds, uncountable

clouds of them, rose, held

for an instant, then broke,

scattered as though by a gale.

Wasp

Hammer, hammer, hammer, the wasp