always bored the morning after, stares
blankly at the warning “To Be
Removed After Six Months.” Removed
to where? To microfilm? Recycling?
The World Wide Web? The fireplace? And if
we know and hardly care, why is it
we’d feel bereft if there remained
in the universe not one such room,
relic itself of a lost age
when people hand-carved wooden shelves
with useless, newsless decoration?
Why should we relish solid proof
these pages are our days that turn
away to leave the past in ashes,
most of it local and unread?
No, she does no harm in her armchair,
that woman curled in a ball, for whom
the whole world is
Le Monde.
Months after it had plummeted off the coast
of Long Island, and teams of divers scoured
the ocean floor for blasted puzzle pieces
to hoist and reassemble like
a dinosaur (all human cargo lost,
too shattered to restore to more
than names), I heard my postcard
to friends in France had been delivered at last.
Slipped in a padded bag, with a letter
from the U.S. Postal Service (“apologies
for any inconvenience caused
by the accident”), and sea-soaked but intact,
it was legible in every word
I’d written (“Looking forward
to seeing you!”) and on the stamp I’d pressed
into a corner: “Harriet Quimby,
Pioneer Pilot.” Under her goggled helmet,
she was smiling like a hostess at
this fifty-cent anecdote, in which the most
expendable is preserved and no
rope’s thrown to the rest.
As punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm’s length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they’d sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn’t spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.
On the horizon
One toy tanker pitches south
Playing hide and seek.
Broad as a fan, each rust-pocked
Leaf of the sea-grape.
—from “Fort Lauderdale,” by James Merrill
Almost
a tanka—
Which (to remind the reader)
Allows a haiku
To glide above two submerged
Lines of seven syllables.
In my living room
Seven years after your death,
As a tape gave back
Your suave, funny-sad voice, I
Suddenly understood it.
“Toy tanker,” of course!
You’d pruned the tanka’s final
Syllables to five.
No one but you would have made
a bonsai of a bonsai.
The tanka I cite
Is the
Mirabell
of three:
A toy trilogy.
Florida: last stop before
The grandeur of Sandover?
You played hide-and-seek—
Hoping a few fans might take
A leaf from your book.
Glimpsed behind the geisha’s fan:
Your quick smile, eyebrows lifted.
Some people make real
Tankers that can transport oil,
Do the heavy stuff.
Your father was one of them.
He greased your way: God bless him.
Why count syllables
When half the world is hungry?
You had no answer,
Planted another sea-grape
In bright rows, ornamental.
How many poems
Take the disappearing ship
As death’s vehicle!
Distant, you remain in view,
Still running on drops of ink.
Tattooed, goateed, burly, a huge
guy you’d expect to find in a hardhat,
drilling a hole in the road,
he pulls out from his T-shirt pocket
a crumpled, quietly crafted page
in praise of a fellow poet.
Then steps up to the podium, slips
his glasses on, and everything blurs.
Sorry,
he laughs,
they’re hers—
these glasses are my wife’s.
I’ve met
his wife. She’s blond, fine-boned, serene,
with a face you’d swear was painted
five hundred years ago by Van Eyck.
Don’t worry,
he’s chuckling into the mike,
I’ve found my own.
But his tone
is a little disappointed.
At odd times, harum-scarum,
after we haven’t seen him
for a week or so, he hops
from the bushes at stage right
onto our green proscenium.
Why do I say it’s ours?
At best, I’m just a warden,
standing with hands in suds
at the kitchen window when
he breaks out of his warren.
Jittery, hunted vagrant,
he leaps as fast as Aesop
claimed his kind could leap,
then stops still in the grass
merely because it’s fragrant—
a wholly interested,
systematic sensualist,
a silent, smooth lawn mower
that hardly can go slower.
Sometimes he gets ahead