Nine Horses (6 page)

you gave me one Christmas,

a big black curve

standing at the end of the room,

a red bow tied around its leg

while snow fell on the house

and the long rows of hemlocks.

Since then, I have learned some chords

and a few standards,

but I still love lying on the floor

like this, eyes closed,

hands locked behind my head,

laying down the solo on “Out of the Blue”

in the Fantasy Studios,

Berkeley, California,

on October 4th, 1951, when I was ten.

Ink strokes on rice paper—

a wooden bridge

curved over a river,

mountains in the distance,

and in the foreground

a wind-blown tree.

I rotate the book on the table

so the tree

is leaning toward your village.

I do not require a ton of pink marble,

a hundred tubes of paint,

or an enormous skylit loft.

All I need is a pen,

a little blank notebook,

and a lamp with a seventy-five-watt bulb.

Of course, an oak desk would be nice,

maybe a chair of ergonomic design,

and a collie lying on an oval rug,

always ready to follow me anywhere

or just sniff my empty palm.

And I would not turn down a house

canopied by shade trees,

a swing suspended from a high limb,

flowering azaleas around the porch,

pink, red, and white.

I might as well add to the list

a constant supply of pills

that would allow me to stay awake all night

without blinking,

a cellar full of dusty bottles of Bordeaux,

a small radio—

nothing, I assure you, would go unappreciated.

Now if you wouldn’t mind

leaving me alone—

and please close the door behind you

so there won’t be such a draft

on my shoulders—

I will get back to work

on my long metrical poem,

the one I will recite to the cheering throng

prior to your impending beheading.

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,

shot with pristine light,

not this sulfurous haze,

the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,

but no one mentioned all the boats,

their benches crowded with naked passengers,

each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child

with a model train and a model tunnel,

and I knew I would not live forever,

jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side

and the clink of the final coin

in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,

but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived

we would be asked to describe this place

and to include as much detail as possible—

not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,

not simply the shackles, but the rusty,

iron, ankle-shredding shackles—

and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,

our thoughts and feelings about being dead,

not really an assignment,

the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,

think of writing as a process,

a never-ending, infernal process,

and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,

and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

How exhilarating it was to march

along the great boulevards

in the sunflash of trumpets

and under all the waving flags—

the flag of desire, the flag of ambition.

So many of us streaming along—

all of humanity, really—

moving in perfect sync,

yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

How stimulating the scenery of the world,

the rows of roadside trees,

the huge blue sheet of the sky.

How endless it seemed until we veered

off the broad turnpike

into a pasture of high grass,

heading toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.

Generation after generation,

we shoulder forward

under the play of clouds

until we high-step off the sharp lip into space.

So I should not have to remind you

that little time is given here

to rest on a wayside bench,

to stop and bend to the wildflowers,

or to study a bird on a branch—

not when the young

keep shoving from behind,

not when the old are tugging us forward,

pulling on our arms with all their feeble strength.

The morning sun is so pale

I could be looking at a ghost

in the shape of a window,

a tall, rectangular spirit

peering down at me now in my bed,

about to demand that I avenge

the murder of my father.

But this light is only the first line

in the five-act play of this day—

the only day in existence—

or the opening chord of its long song,

or think of what is permeating

these thin bedroom curtains

as the beginning of a lecture

I must listen to until dark,

a curious student in a V-neck sweater,

angled into the wooden chair of his life,

ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,

quiet as a goldfish in winter,

serious as a compass at sea,

eager to absorb whatever lesson

this damp, overcast Tuesday

has to teach me,

here in the spacious classroom of the world

with its long walls of glass,

its heavy, low-hung ceiling.

In a rush this weekday morning,

I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery

where my parents are buried

side by side under a smooth slab of granite.

Then, all day long, I think of him rising up

to give me that look

of knowing disapproval

while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

A few days ago

when leaves were rushing by the windows,

I took this feeling

I have toward the world,

this mix of love and fear,

and carved a scale model of it

out of a block of balsa wood,

something you can find at any reputable hobby shop.

I used a set of knives

that would be very alarming horrifying shocking dreadful

in the hands of the wrong person,

especially if he had you strapped to a chair,

but in my hands, under a lamp,

they allowed me to express exactly

the way I feel toward people and things.

I did not smoke a cigarette while I worked

or sip a glass of ginger ale with ice,

as another might.

I just worked,

shaving away, like Michelangelo,

all the wood that was not my lust and apprehension.

When I had finished,

when I had gone as far as the knives

would allow me to go,

I placed my attitude toward the world

on a lace tablecloth,

a thing so light, so delicate and airy

I could think of nothing to do

but sit down in a chair and feel like

the happiest shell on the beach,

the happiest hobbyist in town.

Tomorrow I will get busy working

on another scale model,

this time of my childhood,

which I will fashion also from balsa,

being careful to keep the blades

from flying out of control

as they slice away at the soft cube of wood,

being careful not to draw any blood.

Then on Sunday, I will go to the park,

carrying the fragile thing under my arm,

and set it on the smooth surface of the oval pond.

And while the boys are sailing their boats,

running along the water’s edge with their long sticks,

oblivious to the cries of their guardians,

I will stand off to the side

and watch my childhood—

that small vessel of wonder and cruelty—

being blown away by sudden unexpected gusts.

is where the Elk River falls

from a rocky and considerable height,

turning pale with trepidation at the lip

(it seemed from where I stood below)

before it is unbuckled from itself

and plummets, shredded, through the air

into the shadows of a frigid pool,

so calm around the edges, a place

for water to recover from the shock

of falling apart and coming back together

before it picks up its song again,

goes sliding around the massive rocks

and past some islands overgrown with weeds

then flattens out and slips around a bend

and continues on its winding course,

according to this camper’s guide,

then joins the Clearwater at its northern fork,

which must in time find the sea

where this and every other stream

mistakes the monster for itself,

sings its name one final time

then feels the sudden sting of salt.

The sun is so clear and torch-like

on this cool October morning,

all I am aware of is the sensation

of its steady heat on my upturned face.

I am not thinking of how late the train is

that I am here to meet,

here with nothing to read, not even

the morning paper or a story by O. Henry.

The unfiltered burn of the autumn sun

on my skin is all that I know,

that and a small bubble of curiosity

about whether you could re-create this feeling in hell

if you managed to position yourself

just the right distance from the roaring

bank of furnaces where the sounds

of shoveling and howling are coming from.

But no, the damned would always be jostling

and pushing us closer to some fiery maw,

and in heaven the light would be

too hallowed, too theatrical to warm our faces.

And there would be no place for the train station

or the little café across the street,

no place in hell for the sunny table,

the bitter coffee, and the woman walking her dog.

Only the glare—I am imagining

with my eyes closed behind my favorite sunglasses—

the glare, some low chanting,

and the milling of some vast, incorporeal gang.

Is there any part of the devil’s body

that has not been used to name

some feature of the American topography,

I wondered when the guide directed

our attention to the rocky tip of a mesa

which was known as the Devil’s Elbow.

He was a college student

just trying to do his summer job

and besides, the cumulus clouds

were massing beautifully

above the high rock face,

so I was not about to say anything,

but from my limited encounters

with evil, it looked to me more

like the hammer in the devil’s inner ear.

Oh, birds of Arizona,

who woke me yesterday with your excited chirping,

where do you go to die?

So many of you, and yet never a trace

of your expirations,

no lump of feathers happened upon

here on the pavement

or another there on a square of lawn.

Are you down in the scrub turning in circles?

Do you tilt and fall on your side?

Do you lie there breathing among the warm rocks,

lie there breathing,

lie there

as the moon rises,

as the members of your flock fall silent for the night,

and the earth revolves around the center of your tiny eye?

This morning the surface of the wooded lake

is uncommonly smooth—absolute glass—

which must be the reason I am thinking

of Bodhidharma, the man who brought Buddhism

to China by crossing the water standing on a single reed.