Earlier Poems (10 page)

1

In real life
it's the living who haunt you.
Expect, in addition

to moments of anguish, the always-astonishing realization of just how generic one's most deeply personal torments really are.

And learn how to be alone,
now.
We end alone.

2

It is good to be loved but it isn't essential.
The need to love is,
infinitely.

Human beings routinely survive without love, but

you cannot survive without loving
someone or something
more than yourself. Since if you fail
to, you cease
to have a self at all.

They are taking a walk in the woods
of early spring or waning autumn.
In van Gogh, as in the works of most great masters,
all four or five of them,
there are no symbols. (Because
there are no symbols.) Only
things as they are
things as he perceived them
during visionary states,
normal states, incandescent
and lurid hangovers, creating from nothing
breakfast for a whore's little boy, or
as usual dying of loneliness, etc.
Still, besides an older man
in a formal black but somewhat shabby
suit and a girl in what will have been
considered a long pale-green dress
from the 1960s, it's hard not to
see a skeleton with clothes on and a woman
walking two or three Eurydicean paces
right behind him (one more
slip: at least he mixed his references here).
He has on what looks like a squashed-down top hat:
Vincent the mad, most regretfully
expelled, malnourished
and no doubt tertiary syphilitic lover
of the cosmos never lost his sense of fun.
The young woman's face is dead
white, though. In fact
she has no face;
and there's nothing, incidentally, in the least bit metaphorical about it. I can remember seeing this, once, outside the painting.

How different the book looks to its maker: the botched phantom pages still there, interleaved before his eyes.

Before his eyes
the maybe five nights
when he fell asleep
the way a flower turns toward the sun.

Against all of the years
unable to sleep or go on.
So busy failing,
nobody knows what hard work that is.

Barely time for a coffee break,
never mind a vacation.
Some have worked their whole lives without finding
time to cry.

There is a heartbreaking beauty about my crummy street tonight, at 2 o'clock in the first snow: I stand looking out

at this window, I think
how everything seen
is something seen for the last time.
At last I turn away,

I give up. I am tired,
I can't mourn anymore
the loss of what I never asked for
and never understood.

Place where we're summoned and someoned without our knowing, without knowing why

Instruction is provided, more or less-

but that which reveals itself at first

as elementally suited to our little grasp,

within the scope of what we can endure,

does not remain so for long.

No,

it can only grow more foreign (impossibility become a possibility) the more you come to learn about things

here.

And soon enough the original problem presents itself

again
in reverse:

place where we're summoned, expected

to no one ourselves, still not knowing how.

One of those last October days, late
on an afternoon already starting
to darken
this page. Sometimes
the way we think in secret's
strange, strange
and deadly. Sometimes
the grace of not thinking
at all
will descend: I have only
to begin gazing out
a window to become
the empty street
I peer into, the
soft yellow light
blowing through everything, one
of the no longer
here, beyond
fear, one
with you.

So it was home that left him
little by little, and not
the other way around. The others
disappearing, the house growing
emptier, gaining new rooms, one
he had so seldom entered
the view from the window
encompassed a landscape of cornfields and woods
he had never seen before—
it made his heart hurt.
Anxious trespasser, thief
who will take only what he can carry.
He thought he heard the front door open,
now he began to hear voices
filling the house, and he wondered
why he'd bothered
as long as he had
when he would not be asked to stay.
It would be easy enough to escape
once more—he knew all about that—
hiding under the bed until they were asleep.
He notices that he's referring to himself
as somebody else,
someone else in the past again.
But never mind that.
He is very tired of escaping;
and the reason the thought of it scares him
so much is as simple
as it always was:
absolute absence of option.
Because where?
Wherever you happen to go
it's the same thing all over again.
First, you find yourself there
waiting for you. And then
you have a place
you'll have to leave; you leave
to find a place …
So many rooms now, the house so much bigger,
homesickness already beginning
to tighten at his throat,
and he's not even gone. He is,
of course, quite gone. And yet
here he is—someone else figure it out.
Yes, it seems to have doubled in size;
either that or he has just turned four.
There's nothing that can't happen now.
The ceiling so high
he can lie on the bed in his sister's old room
and see the black-blue sky, as from down
in a well, stars appearing, the gold tinge of the crescent.
On some tomorrow's afternoon
all at once he will notice the light's
starting to shine through the walls.
Very faintly at first, but at last—
it is inevitable—
he will find himself staring right through them.
All the way down the untraveled
back road. And without even turning his head
on the pillow, past the crows' fields
through the first November snow,
the skeletal cornstalks' gold gleam
in the woods, in what's left
of the sun.
The time has arrived to get drunk,
he's decided.
He has never done this before
and so figures he'll just mix them all:
half a glass of something dark,
then one of something transparent, in a big jar.
He fills up this jar maybe twice
and maybe more than twice,
drinking it down as if it were water—
drowning in desperate green nausea, and wondering
what it will be like when it happens.
It is harder to tell, he supposes,
when no one is there;
but he's certain that his face is altered.
Into that of someone related to him, living
a long time before he was born;
perhaps it's changed back to his old face, or forward
in time, it's the face God had prepared.
There's been some massive reconstruction
no matter how you part your hair,
but the mirrors—you cannot look into them
since each has become a starless abyss
someone is sure to fall into.
They ought to put sheets over all of them.
The telephone begins to ring:
a brief game of Russian roulette?
He has five or six seconds to decide.
Now he's going to get to hear a little music.
It seems to be a bird's voice: one
he has never heard before, or noticed.
It's producing a kind of high fugue in the octaves beyond
which nobody can hear;
he feels he could listen forever,
except he's lost the power to shut it off.
That makes a difference. You have to
watch out for these figures of speech, don't you think.
He opens his eyes all at once,
the noon sun turning everything to a white blindness.
He slowly sits up in the dead corn stubble,
all the while gazing around;
a few silent crows perched nearby
on their stalks
incuriously staring—
crows with stars for eyes.
It is snowing lightly and the moon-sized sun burns white.
It appears he is fully dressed under his coat,
someone has put his gloves on,
thoughtful. He notices he's even wearing
that ridiculous Christmas scarf
his mother knitted the year he got tall
but not tall enough to keep
from stepping on it now and then,
incurring the mirth of all.
The one he hanged himself with.
He turns his head.
The house is gone. He is relieved to note
the little Olivetti
like a miniature suitcase
placed beside him on the frozen ground.
A hangover isn't so bad—
one feels extremely courageous and lucid,
apparently.
And you need no one.
He thumbed a ride at this point, clearly.
It had been written down
for years,
it had already happened.
It suddenly occurs to him
that the element of grammar they call
tense, like time itself, has always been
falsely assumed to reflect some demonstrable
facet of reality—that word.
As if there were just one.
Then there's the problem of your watch,
weight, age, and height
in eternity.
Let Augustine worry about it.
The glorious future awaited him,
or awaits him, the future
perfect, too. His life—
it had begun at last, and high time. It has been over so long.