The Rain in Portugal (3 page)

I have no need for a biscuit,

a chew toy, or two bowls on a stand.

No desire to investigate a shrub

or sleep on an oval mat by the door,

but sometimes waiting at a light,

I start to identify with the blond Lab

with his head out the rear window

of the station wagon idling next to me.

And if we speed off together

and I can see his dark lips flapping

in the wind and his eyes closed

then I am sitting in the balcony of envy.

Look at
you,
I usually say

when I see a terrier on a leash

trotting briskly along as if running

his weekday morning errands,

and I stop to stare at any dog

who is peering around a corner,

returning a ball to the thrower,

or staring back at me from a porch.

So early this morning

there was no avoiding a twinge

of jealousy for the young spaniel,

tied to a bench in the shade,

who was now wagging

not only his tail but the whole of himself

as a woman in a summer dress

emerged from the glass doors of the post office

then crouched down in front of him

taking his chin in her hand,

and said in a mock-scolding tone

“I told you I'd be right back, silly,”

leaving the dog to sit

and return her gaze with a look

of understanding which seemed to say

“I know. I know. I never doubted that you would.”

It occurred to me

on a flight from London to Barcelona

that Shakespeare could have written

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

with more authority had he occupied

the window seat next to me

instead of this businessman from Frankfurt.

Of course, after a couple of drinks

and me loaning him an ear bud

he might become too preoccupied

with
Miles Davis at the Blackhawk

at 36,000 feet above some realm or other to write a word.

I imagine he'd enjoy playing with my wristwatch,

the one with the tartan band,

and when he wasn't looking out the window

he would study the ice cubes in his rotating glass.

And he'd take a keen interest

in the various announcements from the flight deck

and the ministrations of the bowing attendants,

all of which would be sadly lost on me

having gotten used to rushing above the clouds

even though 99% of humanity has never been there.

Yet I am still fond of the snub-nosed engines,

the straining harmony of the twin jets,

and even the sensation of turbulence,

jostled about high above some blessed plot,

with the sound of crockery shifting in the galley,

the frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers,

and the Bard reaching for my hand

as we roared with trembling wings

into the towering fortress of a thunderhead.

Not those women who lure sailors

onto a reef with their singing and their tresses,

but the screams of an ambulance

bearing the sick, the injured, and the dying

across the rational grid of the city.

We get so used to the sound

it's just another sharp in the city's tune.

Yet it's one thing to stop on a sidewalk

with other pedestrians to watch one

flashing and speeding down an avenue

while a child on a corner covers her ears

and a shopkeeper appears in a doorway,

but another thing when one gets stuck

in traffic and seems to be crying for its mother

who has fled to another country.

Everyone keeps walking along then,

eyes cast down—for after all,

there's nothing we can do,

and today we are not the one peering

up at the face of an angel dressed in scrubs.

Some of us are late for appointments

a few blocks away, while others

have the day off and take their time

angling across a broad, leafy avenue

before being engulfed by the green of a park.

It takes only a minute

to bury a wren.

Two trowels full of dirt

and he's in.

The cat at the threshold

sits longer in doubt

deciding whether

to stay in or go out.

A child on a silver bicycle,

a young mother pushing a stroller,

and a runner who looked like he was running to Patagonia

have all passed my car, jammed

into a traffic jam on a summer weekend.

And now an elderly couple gradually

overtakes me as does a family of snails—

me stalled as if in a pit of tar

far from any beach and its salty air.

Why even Buddha has risen

from his habitual sitting

and is now walking serenely past my car,

holding his robes to his chest with one hand.

I watch him from the patch of shade

I have inched into as he begins to grow smaller

over my steering wheel then sits down again

up ahead, unfurling his palms

as if he were only a tiny figurine affixed to the dash.

None of us expected the massing thunderheads

to swing open their doors so suddenly

that we would have to drop our rakes

and run across the field to a shelter

and stand there side by side under its tin roof

looking out through a shiny curtain of rain.

We had never spent any time together

except for the haying, raking it into piles

and pitchforking it up into an old truck,

but now there was nothing to do

but watch and listen to the downpour

and nothing to say either

after the cigarettes had been offered around

and lit one by one with the flame of a single match.

Much has been said about being in the present.

It's the place to be, according to the gurus,

like the latest club on the downtown scene,

but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.

It doesn't seem desirable or even possible

to wake up every morning and begin

leaping from one second into the next

until you fall exhausted back into bed.

Plus, there'd be no past

with so many scenes to savor and regret,

and no future, the place you will die

but not before flying around with a jet-pack.

The trouble with the present is

that it's always in a state of vanishing.

Take the second it takes to end

this sentence with a period—already gone.

What about the moment that exists

between banging your thumb

with a hammer and realizing

you are in a whole lot of pain?

What about the one that occurs

after you hear the punch line

but before you get the joke?

Is that where the wise men want us to live

in that intervening tick, the tiny slot

that occurs after you have spent hours

searching downtown for that new club

and just before you give up and head back home?

It's possible that a stitch in time

might save as many as twelve or as few as three,

and I have no trouble remembering

that September has thirty days.

So do June, November, and April.

I like a cat wearing a chapeau or a trilby,

Little Jack Horner sitting on a sofa,

old men who are not from Nantucket,

and how life can seem almost unreal

when you are gently rowing a boat down a stream.

That's why instead of recalling today

that it pours mostly in Spain,

I am going to picture the rain in Portugal,

how it falls on the hillside vineyards,

on the surface of the deep harbors

where fishing boats are swaying,

and in the narrow alleys of the cities,

where three boys in tee shirts

are kicking a soccer ball in the rain,

ignoring the window-cries of their mothers.

There's always a lesson to be learned

whether in a hotel bar

or over tea in a teahouse,

no matter which way it goes,

for you or against,

what you want to hear or what you don't.

Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,

with two then three saxophones

in his mouth at once

and a kazoo, no less,

hanging from his neck at the ready.

Even in my youth I saw this

not as a lesson in keeping busy

with one thing or another,

but as a joyous impossible lesson

in how to do it all at once,

pleasing and displeasing yourself

with harmony here and discord there.

But what else did I know

as the waitress lit the candle

on my round table in the dark?

What did I know about anything?

It's the year when everyone is celebrating

the 200th birthday of Donald Hall,

but I don't know what to do with myself.

No one ever thought to tell me

that he and I would live

beyond anyone's expectations

and that the challenge would be

to figure out how to keep ourselves busy.

Were not Tennyson's “Tithonus”

and Swift's sketch of the Struldbrugs

eloquent enough warnings

of the dangers of living too long?

And here's a more recent proof:

me pacing around a dining room table

from dawn until noon

then devoting the rest of the day

to whittling pencils that stopped writing long ago.

All of which makes me wonder

how Donald Hall is doing tonight

when so many things are so different—

the bladed cars, a colored cube for lunch—

yet the stars look the same,

still holding their places in the sky,

except for the one that once indicated

the raised elbow of The Archer,

now gone missing in outer space.

When the keeper of the inn

where we stayed in the Outer Hebrides

said we had bags of time to catch the ferry,

which we would reach by traversing the causeway

between this island and the one to the north,

I started wondering what a bag of time

might look like and how much one could hold.

Apparently, more than enough time for me

to wonder about such things,

I heard someone shouting from the back of my head.

Then the ferry arrived, silent across the water,

at the Lochmaddy Ferry Terminal,

and I was still thinking about the bags of time

as I inched the car clanging onto the slipway

then down into the hold for the vehicles.

Yet it wasn't until I stood at the railing

of the upper deck with a view of the harbor

that I decided that a bag of time

should be the same color as the pale blue

hull of the lone sailboat anchored there.

And then we were in motion, drawing back

from the pier and turning toward the sea

as ferries had done for many bags of time,

I gathered from talking to an old deckhand,

who was decked out in a neon yellow safety vest,

and usually on schedule, he added,

unless the weather has something to say about it.