Open Shutters (2 page)

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