Sailing Alone Around the Room (8 page)

Then I blinked and moved on

to other American scenes

of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare

who seemed so wired with alertness

I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some
distant country hundreds of years from now
.

— Mary Oliver

Nobody here likes a wet dog.

No one wants anything to do with a dog

that is wet from being out in the rain

or retrieving a stick from a lake.

Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight

going from one person to another

hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,

something that could be given with one hand

without even wrinkling the conversation.

But everyone pushes her away,

some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.

Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet

until they go to pet her,

push her away

then wipe their hands on their clothes.

And whenever she heads toward me,

I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

O stranger of the future!

O inconceivable being!

whatever the shape of your house,

however you scoot from place to place,

no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.

I bet everybody in your pub,

even the children, pushes her away.

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.

If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters,

and I think of the poor mother

brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught

in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?

If not,

if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?

Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse

to locate even one fellow mouse with vision

let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,

could they possibly have run after a farmer’s wife

or anyone else’s wife for that matter?

Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails

with a carving knife, is the cynic’s answer,

but the thought of them without eyes

and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard

has the cynic who always lounges within me

up off his couch and at the window

trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion

which might account for the wet stinging

in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard’s

mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,”

which happens to be the next cut,

cannot be said to be making matters any better.

There were a few dozen who occupied the field

across the road from where we lived,

stepping all day from tuft to tuft,

their big heads down in the soft grass,

though I would sometimes pass a window

and look out to see the field suddenly empty

as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

Then later, I would open the blue front door,

and again the field would be full of their munching,

or they would be lying down

on the black-and-white maps of their sides,

facing in all directions, waiting for rain.

How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded

they appeared in the long quiet of the afternoons.

But every once in a while, one of them

would let out a sound so phenomenal

that I would put down the paper

or the knife I was cutting an apple with

and walk across the road to the stone wall

to see which one of them was being torched

or pierced through the side with a long spear.

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see

the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,

her neck outstretched, her bellowing head

laboring upward as she gave voice

to the rising, full-bodied cry

that began in the darkness of her belly

and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

Then I knew that she was only announcing

the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,

pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind

to all the green fields and the gray clouds,

to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,

while she regarded my head and shoulders

above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,

skirmishes against the author

raging along the borders of every page

in tiny black script.

If I could just get my hands on you,

Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,

they seem to say,

I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—

“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!”—

that kind of thing.

I remember once looking up from my reading,

my thumb as a bookmark,

trying to imagine what the person must look like

who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”

alongside a paragraph in
The Life of Emily Dickinson
.

Students are more modest

needing to leave only their splayed footprints

along the shore of the page.

One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.

Another notes the presence of “Irony”

fifty times outside the paragraphs of
A Modest Proposal
.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,

hands cupped around their mouths.

“Absolutely,” they shout

to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.

“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”

Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points

rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college

without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”

in a margin, perhaps now

is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own

and reached for a pen if only to show

we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;

we pressed a thought into the wayside,

planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria

jotted along the borders of the Gospels

brief asides about the pains of copying,

a bird singing near their window,

or the sunlight that illuminated their page—

anonymous men catching a ride into the future

on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,

they say, until you have read him

enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,

the one that dangles from me like a locket,

was written in the copy of
Catcher in the Rye

I borrowed from the local library

one slow, hot summer.

I was just beginning high school then,

reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,

and I cannot tell you

how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smears

and next to them, written in soft pencil—

by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

whom I would never meet—

“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,

bend their legs at the knees,

if they come with that feature,

and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,

the man in the brown suit,

the woman in the blue dress,

perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one

who is lifted up by the ribs,

then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse

to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,

but how would you like it

if you never knew from one day to the next

if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,

your shoulders in the clouds,

or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,

staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three
.

—Lolita

It is possible to be struck by a meteor

or a single-engine plane

while reading in a chair at home.

Safes drop from rooftops

and flatten the odd pedestrian

mostly within the panels of the comics,

but still, we know it is possible,

as well as the flash of summer lightning,

the thermos toppling over,

spilling out on the grass.

And we know the message

can be delivered from within.

The heart, no valentine,

decides to quit after lunch,

the power shut off like a switch,

or a tiny dark ship is unmoored

into the flow of the body’s rivers,

the brain a monastery,

defenseless on the shore.

This is what I think about

when I shovel compost

into a wheelbarrow,

and when I fill the long flower boxes,

then press into rows

the limp roots of red impatiens—

the instant hand of Death

always ready to burst forth

from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

Then the soil is full of marvels,

bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,

red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick

to burrow back under the loam.

Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,

the clouds a brighter white,

and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge

against a round stone,

the small plants singing

with lifted faces, and the click

of the sundial

as one hour sweeps into the next.

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,

the swale of the afternoon,

the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,

his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—

throwing off the light covers,

feet on the cold floor,

and buzzing around the house on espresso—

maybe a splash of water on the face,

a palmful of vitamins—

but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,

the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows—

trees fifty, a hundred years old

out there,

heavy clouds on the way

and the lawn steaming like a horse

in the early morning.

All it takes is one to throw a room

completely out of whack.

Over by the window

it looks hundreds of yards away,

a lone stark gesture of wood

on the distant cliff of a table.

Up close, it draws you in,

cuts everything down to its size.

Look at it from the doorway,

and the world dilates and bloats.

The button lying next to it

is now a pearl wheel,

the book of matches is a raft,

and the coffee cup a cistern

to catch the same rain

that moistens its small plot of dark, mossy earth.

For it even carries its own weather,

leaning away from a fierce wind

that somehow blows

through the calm tropics of this room.

The way it bends inland at the elbow

makes me want to inch my way

to the very top of its spiky greenery,

hold on for dear life

and watch the sea storm rage,

hoping for a tiny whale to appear.

I want to see her plunging forward

through the troughs,

tunneling under the foam and spindrift

on her annual, thousand-mile journey.

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok

you would never see him doing such a thing,

tossing the dry snow over the mountain

of his bare, round shoulder,

his hair tied in a knot,

a model of concentration.

Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word

for what he does, or does not do.

Even the season is wrong for him.

In all his manifestations, is it not warm and slightly humid?

Is this not implied by his serene expression,

that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe?