The Beauty (4 page)

its flowers

done with the first opening

not yet gone into the second

these too will finally bend toward the earth

exiles

writing letters

sent over the mountains by friendly horses and donkeys

Does the butterfat know it is butterfat,

milk know it’s milk?

No.

Something just goes and something remains.

Like a boardinghouse table:

men on one side, women on the other.

Nobody planned it.

Plaid shirts next to one another,

talking in accents from the Midwest.

Nobody plans to be a ghost.

Later on, the young people sit in the kitchen.

Soon enough, they’ll be the ones

to stumble
Excuse me
and quickly withdraw.

But they don’t know that.

No one can ever know that.

I wake early,

make two cups of coffee,

drink one,

think, go back to sleep,

wake again, think,

drink the other.

To start a day over

is a card game played for no money,

a ripe tomato,

a swimming cat.

Time here:

lukewarm,

with milk and sugar,

big and unset as a table.

I wake twice.

Twice the window

unbroken, transparent.

Twice the cat’s nose and ears above water.

Twice the war (my war)

is distant,

its children’s children are distant.

In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed,

the mushroom scent lingers.

As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.

As a person who’s once loved completely,

a country once conquered,

does not release that stunned knowledge.

They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels,

clownish puffballs.

Lichens have served as a lamp-wick.

Clean-burning coconuts, olives.

Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing:

light that is fume and abradement.

Unburnable mushrooms are other.

They darken the air they come into.

Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken.

Music comes with instructions:

pianissimo, forte.

In Nō plays the actors wear masks,

so their souls can be seen:

wild-haired old woman, callow young priest.

Each morning I wake in strange country,

my bed made of strange wood.

Time arrives clockless.

Rain poses hieroglyphic, with bent knees,

shoulders askew, arms lifting

from out of the future

the future—

a box labeled neither

“Requests” nor “Suggestions.”

What is, what will be,

is honey.

Touched, it sticks to the fingers.

Andromeda overhead, silent.

Below, ears, eyes,

an aching elbow,

Chekhov, the laboring bees.

As sunlight or darkness fits itself

around lamp, table, or mountain,

silence stitches itself

around hopes, thoughts, and words.

Some hear it

the sound of their own speech

coming back from where they are dead.

Some find it summer-cool pillow,

winter wool coat.

Some tack their names

on its door and step inside.

And if in that room there is happiness

so without measure

you cannot keep your eyes open to see it,

and if in that room sorrow bends

like late nettles in sleet,

the silence will be there also to greet them,

setting each in its wicker hamper

on a plaid blanket, two sleepy puppies.

color of a library wall

in Venice

bred

to stay on the stem

hands of an old woman

on an old chicken

pull them off

“for the petals”

she says

while remembering

the sudden mercilessness

between lovers

I am on my knees again,

mop without stick,

over old fir trees turned into flooring.

A thought stood once in the middle,

near the cookstove, left heel and right heel.

Left hand and right hand, I wash around it.

Thought without handle,

thought without hands, without lemons or Serengeti.

One breath, another,

one corner of cotton in water wets the whole cloth.

You are trying to solve a problem.

You’re almost certainly halfway done,

maybe more.

You take some salt, some alum,

and put it into the problem.

Its color goes from yellow to royal blue.

You tie a knot of royal blue into the problem,

as into a Peruvian quipu of colored string.

You enter the problem’s bodegas,

its flea markets, souks.

Amid the alleys of sponges and sweets,

of jewelry, spices, and hair combs,

you ponder which stall, which pumpkin or perfume, is yours.

You go inside the problem’s piano.

You choose three keys.

One surely must open the door of the problem,

if only you knew only this:

is the quandary edible or medical,

a problem of reason or grief?

It is looking back at you now

with the quizzical eyes of a young, bright dog.

Her whole body pitched for the fetch,

the dog wants to please.

If only she could ascertain which direction,

what object, which scent of riddle,

and if the problem is round or elliptical in its orbit,

and if it is measured in foot-pounds, memory, or meat.

Without philosophy,

tragedy,

history,

a gray squirrel

looks

very busy.

Light as a soul

released

from a painting by Bosch,

its greens

and vermilions stripped off it.

He climbs a tree

that is equally ahistoric.

His heart works harder.

A chair in snow

should be

like any other object whited

& rounded

and yet a chair in snow is always sad

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

a chair is shaped for just one thing

to hold

a soul its quick and few bendable

hours

perhaps a king

not to hold snow

not to hold flowers

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,

in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,

nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.

Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me

whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets—the narrow ones,

unlabeled on the self-map—

they follow stairs down music ears can’t follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,

in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

they speak in restless syllables of other losses, other loves.

There too have been the hard extinctions,

missing birds once feasted on and feasting.

There too must be machines

like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.

A few escape. A mercy.

They leave behind

small holes that something unweighed by the self-scale lives in.

The practical castle is cold.

All around it the world is a stream bed.

A few well-placed openings

under the windows

let rain weep back outward.

The rain is string

for wrapping a package no one knows

the inside of, they just keep trying to mail it.

Perhaps it is licorice. Perhaps it is kindness.

The package so large even wetness becomes an umbrella.

I found myself

suddenly voluminous,

three-dimensioned,

a many-roofed building in moonlight.

Thought traversed

me as simply as moths might.

Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,

It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.

Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,

the usual footsteps above me.

Washed my face again with hot water,

as I did when I was a child.

in the corner of a high rain gutter

under the roof tiles

new grasses’ delicate seed heads

what war, they say

In Chinese painting, there are flowers with bones,

flowers that are boneless.

Also in trees, men, mountains, horses, and houses.

A calcium not subject

but angle

the brush is held by, minerals into.

Fox hairs are soft,

yet fox bones and fox teeth are in them.

Dragon veins
, the space between mountains is called.

Lu Ch’ai wrote, “When painting a rock, paint all three of its faces.”

I think of the two Greek masks, one laughing, one weeping,

and then of the third he would have found missing—

mask-face of wonder? of anger? of rigor?

a child’s look before sleep?

Lu wrote,

“There is only one thing to be said here: rocks painted fully are living.”

And then, of painting people,

“Hands slipped into sleeves are warm, no feeling of coldness.”

The bee does not speak to me.

The whale does not speak to me.

The horse is silent.

History does not speak to me.

Arachne is only a spider.