Questions About Angels (3 page)

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,

or riffling through a magazine in bed,

the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They are moving off in all imaginable directions,

each according to his own private belief,

and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:

that everyone is right, as it turns out.

You go to the place you always thought you would go,

the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot up a funnel of flashing colors

into a zone of light, white as a January sun.

Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits

with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir

and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,

while the less inventive find themselves stuck

in a big air-conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,

a woman in her forties with short wiry hair

and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.

With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies

of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on

the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,

ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,

little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld

by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.

He will bring them to the mouth of a furious cave

guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins

wishing they could return so they could learn Italian

or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.

They wish they could wake in the morning like you

and stand at a window examining the winter trees,

every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,

drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,

they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

It is so quiet on the shore of this motionless lake

you can hear the slow recessional of extinct animals

as they leave through a door at the back of the world,

disappearing like the verbs of a dead language:

the last troop of kangaroos hopping out of the picture,

the ultimate paddling of ducks and pitying of turtledoves

and, his bell tolling in the distance, the final goat.

It's a story as famous as the three little pigs:

one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,

closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,

not one phone call, not even a postcard from Rio.

For all anyone knows, he walks straight into the distance

like a line from Euclid's notebooks and vanishes

with the smoke he blows into the soft humid air,

smoke that forms a screen, smoke to calm the bees within.

He has his fresh pack, an overcoat with big pockets.

What else does he need as he walks beyond city limits,

past the hedges, porch lights and empty cars of the suburbs

and into a realm no larger than his own hat size?

Alone, he is a solo for piano that never comes to an end,

a small plane that keeps flying away from the earth.

He is the last line of a poem that continues off the page

and down to a river to drag there in the cool flow,

questioning the still pools with its silver hook.

Let us say this is the place where the man who goes out

for cigarettes finally comes to rest: on a riverbank

above the long, inquisitive wriggling of that line,

sitting content in the quiet picnic of consciousness,

nothing on his mind as he lights up another one,

nothing but the arc of the stone bridge he notices

downstream, and its upturned reflection in the water.

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,

weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.

This is how I go about it:

I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.

Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile

as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only

a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.

I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.

I do this so that what I write will be pure,

completely rinsed of the carnal,

uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them

on a small table near the window.

I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms

when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.

I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.

I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.

Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,

most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe

where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.

Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.

Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.

Now I write only about death, most classical of themes

in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.

I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh

and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage

and speed through woods on winding country roads,

passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,

all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

My life is an open book. It lies here

on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,

outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,

and I am reading and writing it simultaneously

in a language troublesome and private.

Every reader must be a translator with a thick lexicon.

No one has read the whole thing but me.

Most dip into the middle for a few paragraphs,

then move on to other shelves, other libraries.

Some have time only for the illustrations.

I love to feel the daily turning of the pages,

the sentences unwinding like string,

and when something really important happens,

I walk out to the edge of the page

and, always the student,

make an asterisk, a little star, in the margin.

No one I ask knows the name of the flower

we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick

and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

I am passing through the needle of spring

in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south

as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs

and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport

to return to where this purple madness is not seen

blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the roadside.

On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer

my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave

the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger

looks up from his magazine and says
wisteria
.

It is raining so hard and the jazz on the radio

is playing so loud, you almost feel like surrendering

to the wish that somebody up there actually liked you

or at least was keeping an eye on your solitude.

Not necessarily God himself, glaring down through the roof

while he fingers a weighty book looking for your name.

You would rather be canopied by a small group of putti,

those angels in their infancy always hovering

in the upper, vaporous corners of religious paintings.

Chubby little witnesses treading the light blue air,

they look as if they had just tumbled out of paradise,

noticed the Ascension or the Birth of the Virgin

going on below and fluttered over to take a look.

You have seen them too in sumptuous portrayals of love,

dropping rose petals, letting arrows fly from tiny bows

above a scene of immense silks, bosoms and men with swords.

Imagine leaning back in your chair and beholding

an aggregation of those weightless, buoyant babies above,

trailing their clouds of glory, casting smiles upon your life.

But it is doubtful that they will be attending you tonight,

though the hour is late and the music has become so slow

you have to wait for every half note to fall into place

like pieces dropping from heaven into a puzzle.

Even if you were a saint, how could you travel back

to the Renaissance and find someone to paint you

with the putti floating over your halo, your sandals,

your coarse brown robe and wild, uplifted eyes?

And would you say that your loving deserves such sweet

levitation, such a feathery, ethereal regard?

Better to turn up the music loud enough to hear

outside, better to take a walk on the darkened lawn

and trade all this in for a new swarm of thoughts.

The rain is lighter now, atomized and soft upon your face.

It makes you stop and listen to Bud Powell pounding

in the silence and feel the old embrace of earth and sky.

He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,

the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.

I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.

But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads

I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees

and rising again to show his familiar face.

And when he comes into full view over open fields

he looks like a young man who has fallen in love

with the dark earth,

a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,

his round mouth open

as if he had just broken into song.

When I show you the photograph of me

leaning on the tombstone of Yeats,

you are surprised that I never noticed

the photograph of
you
leaning on it,

in a metal frame above your desk.

So many caravans of tour buses stop

at Drumcliff's little churchyard these days

there must be enough color photographs

of people leaning against that limestone slab,

casting a cold eye at the camera,

to fill an archive rivaling the archives

of people leaning on the Eiffel Tower or a sphinx,

cartons of these glossy shards of travel

stacked along the walls as the night watchman

works his crossword under a lamp etc., etc.

But still, when forced to backtrack down

that road I remember feeling myself touch

the brake, lift the directional stick and pull

like gravity into the muddy carpark.

Little point in standing again by his grave

where the picture was taken just three days before,

so I stayed in the car, low music on the radio,

holding a map, and letting the distance increase

between me and that phantom self

who could just drive by and now was miles away.

There is no need for me to keep a skull on my desk,

to stand with one foot up on the ruins of Rome,

or wear a locket with the sliver of a saint's bone.

It is enough to realize that every common object

in this sunny little room will outlive me—

the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.

Not one of these things will attend my burial,

not even this dented goosenecked lamp

with its steady benediction of light,

though I could put worse things in my mind

than the image of it waddling across the cemetery

like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord,

the small circle of mourners parting to make room.

Once there was a time when the moon swept

over the hemlocks, lawns and white mountaintops

of the earth, but now it only hides its face against my chest.

It used to pull sleepers from the lagoons of dreams

where they floated facedown,

but now it only lures me to an open window, curtains

billowing around my head like useless, delicate sails.

Weather used to ride high over the world

like an announcement nailed to the sky,

but now the cold wind has become my favorite song,

and I sing along in the only house with lights.

Clouds that once toured the air in the style

of dirigibles now gather helplessly in the kitchen

and stare at me across the long wooden table.

This morning when I put on my shoes they seemed

important, like the north and south poles,

and when I walked out and heard the noise of geese

I looked up as if they were calling my name.