Nine Horses (7 page)

What an absorbing story, especially

when you compare it to Zeus with his electric quiver

or Apollo who would just as soon

turn you into a willow tree as look at you sideways.

In every depiction, there is no mistaking

Bodhidharma, always up on his reed,

gliding toward the shores of China,

a large, fierce-looking man in a loincloth

delicately balanced on a little strip of bamboo,

a mere brushstroke on a painted scroll,

tiny surfboard bearing the lessons of the Buddha.

I recognized him one night in a Chinese restaurant

after the disappointment

of the fortune cookie, the dry orange, and the tepid tea.

He was hanging on a wall behind the cash register,

and when I quizzed the young cashier,

she looked back at the painting and said

she didn’t know who it was but it looked like her boss.

Thinking of her and Bodhidharma

makes me want to do many things,

but mostly take off my shoes and socks

and slide over a surface of water on a fragile reed

heading toward the shore of a new country.

No message would be burning in my satchel,

but I might think of one on the way.

If not, I would announce to the millions

that it is foolish to invest too heavily

in the present moment,

not when we have the benefit of the past

with its great pillowed rooms of memory,

let alone the future,

that city of pyramids and spires,

and ten thousand bridges

suspended by webs of glistening wire.

It was raining all day in Kathmandu,

first a mist then a downpour,

but still, the wide street leading to the palace

was thick with people,

all waiting for the thumb of a delegate,

whose forehead had been smudged red

by the thumb of the king,

to smudge their foreheads red

on this, the holiest holy day of the year.

Only a few would receive the touch,

a merchant told me in his shop

as he rolled out rug upon rug—

hundreds of blinding stitches per square inch—

and another agreed as he opened

a folded sheet of paper and poured out

polished blue stones on a velvet cloth.

But still they waited, hunkered down

under flapping plastic and broken black umbrellas,

hoping to make a connection

the way one might hope to be connected

by a long chain of handshakes

to Babe Ruth or Alexander Pope

only without the need to stand

in a puddle all day soaked to the skin.

On the ride back to the hotel,

in the backseat of a taxi

I blackened one of my thumb pads

with a pen then pressed it to my forehead,

to show the world my belief

that even though we will all turn to ashes,

there may be an afterlife for some of us—

a realm of ink and wind-blown shelves,

a dominion of book spines and blown-out candles.

And that became the central tenet of the religion

I founded that day in a green

car driven by a suicidal Nepalese

in a bizarre hat with orange flowers around his neck.

The central and only tenet, I resolved,

as I looked out the rain-streaked windows

at the thin children,

the holy men shuffling along in their flip-flops,

carts piled with wet apples,

and on one sidewalk, groups of shiny wet ducks

huddled together in the rain,

presided over by men wagging long, pliant sticks.

The first thing I heard this morning

was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—

wings against glass as it turned out

downstairs when I saw the small bird

rioting in the frame of a high window,

trying to hurl itself through

the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat

who was hunkered on the rug

told me how the bird had gotten inside,

carried in the cold night

through the flap of a basement door,

and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations

in a shirt and got it to the door,

so weightless it seemed

to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,

it burst into its element,

dipping over the dormant garden

in a spasm of wingbeats

then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,

I could feel its wild thrumming

against my palms as I wondered about

the hours it must have spent

pent in the shadows of that room,

hidden in the spiky branches

of our decorated tree, breathing there

among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,

its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight

picturing this rare, lucky sparrow

tucked into a holly bush now,

a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

With a basin of warm water and a towel

I am shaving my father

late on a summer afternoon

as he sits in a chair in striped pajamas.

He screws up his face this way and that

to make way for the razor,

as someone passes with a tray,

as someone else sobs in a corner.

It is impossible to remember

such closeness,

impossible to know too

whether the object of his vivid staring is

the wavering treetops,

his pale reflection in the window,

or maybe just a splinter of light,

a pinpoint caught within the glass itself.

This—

according to the voice on the radio,

the host of a classical music program no less—

this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

He would be 325 years old today,

quite bent over, I would imagine,

and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

Surely, he would be deaf by now,

the clothes flaking off him,

hair pitiably sparse.

But we would throw a party for him anyway,

a surprise party where everyone

would hide behind the furniture to listen

for the tap of his cane on the pavement

and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.

Call it a field where the animals

who were forgotten by the Ark

come to graze under the evening clouds.

Or a cistern where the rain that fell

before history trickles over a concrete lip.

However you see it,

this is no place to set up

the three-legged easel of realism

or make a reader climb

over the many fences of a plot.

Let the portly novelist

with his noisy typewriter

describe the city where Francine was born,

how Albert read the paper on the train,

how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.

Let the playwright with her torn cardigan

and a dog curled on the rug

move the characters

from the wings to the stage

to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.

Poetry is no place for that.

We have enough to do

complaining about the price of tobacco,

passing the dripping ladle,

and singing songs to a bird in a cage.

We are busy doing nothing—

and all we need for that is an afternoon,

a rowboat under a blue sky,

and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,

or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.