The Beauty (6 page)

When all else fails,

fail boldly,

fail with conviction,

as a hammer speaks to a nail,

or a lamp left on in daylight.

Say
one.

If
two
does not follow,

say
three
, if that fails, say
life
,

say
future.

Lacking
future
,

try
bucket
,

lacking
iron
, try
shadow.

If
shadow
too fails,

if your voice falls and falls and keeps falling,

meets only air and silence,

say
one
again,

but say it with greater conviction,

as a nail speaks to a picture,

as a hammer left on in daylight.

I moved my chair into sun

I sat in the sun

the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

In certain styles of Chinese painting,

three diagonal brushstrokes balance a mountain.

Like that, the word for happiness

keeps inside it the word for chance. For haplessness, also.

You wanted to be ignorant, unknowing, thunderstruck, gobsmacked.

Wanted to be brought to your knees

by the scent of mushrooms you couldn’t know whether to pick.

When the violent, brilliant goshawk,

excessive and unforgiving, drove you from her nesting,

she battered your head with its own blunt weight of animal being.

The big, deaf bear in both lanes of the dark

was a grandmother’s fake pearl necklace suddenly real.

You ate the stories of others

because your own were already inside you and you were still hungry.

You wanted to sleep in a house you could walk the outside of,

windowed and simple, and find on it one day a door—

green-peeling, padlocked—you’d never guessed at.

You found the house, you entered, ate there, slept.

But however you rummaged and plundered the inside,

that door, that blind-hinged door, kept opening elsewhere.

Third sister,

aunt one forgets to send a card to.

Boy on a bench, second smallest,

not quick, not precise, not cunning.

Culled chick, branch-bruised peach,

chair wobbly, unused, set in a corner.

For some, almost good, almost lucky

not to be chosen,

though equally accidental—

the thirty-year-buried land mine

chooses the leg of another.

(How the mouth struggles

to say it: lucky, good.)

Most are not chosen, most mostly watch.

So it must be.

The watched

(not escaping pride, not truly minding)

bemoan their responsibilities,

so many anxieties, demands, complications.

And still: any rabbit the center

of its own rabbit world,

its universe axis a nest of tamped-down grasses.

It looks out its ground-level eyes,

is warm, is curious, hungry,

its heart beats faster or slower

with its own rabbit fate.

A rabbit’s soul cannot help

but choose its own ears, its own paws,

its own startlement, sleepiness, longings,

it has a rabbit allegiance,

and the pink nose, which

could have been drawn in charcoal

by Dürer’s sister, but wasn’t,

takes in its own warmth and fur-scent,

glints pinkly,

pinkly alters the distant star’s light

in its own cuniculan corner

among vast and unanswerable worlds,

without even knowing it does so.

“There, there,” the awkward uncle

comforts

the crying infant.

“There, there,” he repeats,

agreeing:

Here, here
is the only possible problem.

Soon now,
there
and
here

will both move along,

a lullaby about snow falling in a snowy pasture.

An extra day—

Like the painting’s fifth cow,

who looks out directly,

straight toward you,

from inside her black and white spots.

An extra day—

Accidental, surely:

the made calendar stumbling over the real

as a drunk trips over a threshold

too low to see.

An extra day—

With a second cup of black coffee.

A friendly but businesslike phone call.

A mailed-back package.

Some extra work, but not too much—

just one day’s worth, exactly.

An extra day—

Not unlike the space

between a door and its frame

when one room is lit and another is not,

and one changes into the other

as a woman exchanges a scarf.

An extra day—

Extraordinarily like any other.

And still

there is some generosity to it,

like a letter re-readable after its writer has died.

In Istanbul, my ears

three mornings heard the early call to prayer.

At fuller light, heard birds then,

waterbirds and tree birds, birds of migration.

Like three knowledges,

I heard them: incomprehension,

sweetened distance, longing.

When the body dies, where will they go,

those migrant birds and prayer calls,

as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer?

With voices of the ones I loved,

great loves and small loves, train wheels,

crickets, clock-ticks, thunder—where will they,

when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

Away from home,

I read the exiled poets—

Ovid, Brecht.

Then set my books that night

near the foot of the bed.

All night pretended they were the cat.

Not once

did I wake her.

In Italy, on the day of the dead,

they ring bells,

from every church and village in every direction.

At the usual times, the regular bells of the hour—

eleven strokes, twelve. Oar strokes

laid over and into the bottomless water and air.

But the others? Tuneless, keyless,

rhythm of wings at the door of the hive

when the entrance is suddenly shuttered

and the bees, returned heavy, see

that the world of flowering and pollen is over.

There can be no instruction

to make this. Undimensioned

the tongues of the bells,

the ropes of the bells, their big iron bodies unholy.

Barred from form, barred from bars,

from relation. The beauty—unspeakable—

was beauty. I drank it and thirsted,

I stopped. I ran. Wanted closer in every direction.

Each bell stroke released without memory

or judgment, unviolent, untender. Uncaring.

And yet: existent. Something trembling.

I—who have not known bombardment—

have never heard so naked a claim

of the dead on the living, to know them.

In space

(the experiment

suggested by two fifth graders),

a Canadian astronaut

wrings water out of a towel.

It stays by the towel,

horizontal

transparent isinglass,

a hyaline column.

Then begins to cover his hands,

his wrists,

stays on them

until he passes it to another towel.

On earth

some who watch this

recognize the wrung, irrational soul.

How it does not leave

but stays close,

outside the cleaning twist-fate but close—

fear   desire   anger

joy   irritation

mourning

wet stuff

that is shining, that cannot go from us,

having nowhere other to fall.

I would like

to take something with me

but even one chair

is too awkward

too heavy

peeling paint

falls off in a suitcase

hinge sounds betray a theft

cheeses won’t keep

the clothespin

without its surroundings

would be mediocre

the big thunder rolled elsewhere

the umbrella is for sale

but in a desert what you want is a soaking

the do not disturb sign is tattered

I have many times taken

some café’s small packets of sugar

so that in Turkey

I might sweeten my coffee with China,

and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry

but where is the coffee

hands left and right useless

knees clattery

heart finally calm

as some hero at the end of a movie

squinting silently into the sun

you can’t hold an umbrella there anyhow

and what would he hang from the clothespin

Any hour is grain bin,

fragrant, many.

Soon the must-mice come.

Each takes

its one-mouse mouthful,

and is filled.

The bin empties

to its wooden sides and floor.

Hunger that

comes and goes

turns time into memory.

Mouthful

by mouse-sized mouthful,

houseful

by vanishing houseful.

The way a sweet cake wants

a little salt in it,

or blackness a little gray nearby to be seen,

or a pot unused stays good for boiling water,

the conversations I remember most

are the ones that were interrupted.

Wait, you say, running after them,

I forgot to ask—

Night rain
, they answer.

Silver on the fire-thorn’s red berries.

How can you have been dead twelve years

and these still

Rain fell as a glass

breaks,

something suddenly everywhere at the same time.

To live like a painting

looked into from more than one angle at once—

eye to eye with the doorway

down at the hair

up at your own dusty feet.