The Rain in Portugal (5 page)

The thinnest of slivers can come

as a surprise some nights.

A girl leaving a restaurant

points up to show her friends.

And there is the full one,

bloated with light,

a bright circle over the city

keeping the dreamers from sleep.

But the moon tonight

is crossed by a drift of clouds

and looks like a mug shot

of a criminal, a cornered man.

One of its seas forms a frown

that makes for a grudging look.

The last thing it ever wanted

was to end up being a moon.

It's the only light in the sky

save for a solitary star,

whose sisters and brothers

must be blinking somewhere afar,

leaving the moon and me

to circle in our turning places,

his face remote and cold,

mine warm but vexed by his troubles.

I just dared to eat

a really big peach

as ripe as it could be

and I have on

a pair of plaid shorts

and a blue tee shirt with a hole in it

and little rivers of juice

are now running down my chin and wrist

and dripping onto the pool deck.

What is your
problem,
man?

Nothing much to report this morning

as if anyone were waiting to hear,

putting the day on hold like,

just a few women jogging by,

girls with their eyes lowered,

and a few men, their awkward hellos.

The squirrels don't really count

because of their ubiquity,

but there was the one brown rabbit

frozen up ahead on the cinder path,

immobile as a painting of a brown rabbit,

so I stopped and tried to be

as still as a pencil drawing of a man,

and maybe a half a minute passed

before he bounced himself into the weeds.

Was that you, Seamus,

coming to pay me a little visit?

Who else could it possibly be?

I asked with confidence.

Not Robert Penn Warren surely.

No, only you with your eye still bright.

Today is my mother's birthday,

but she's not here to celebrate

by opening a flowery card

or looking calmly out a window.

If my mother were alive,

she'd be 114 years old,

and I am guessing neither of us

would be enjoying her birthday very much.

Mother, I would love to see you again

to take you shopping or to sit

in your sunny apartment with a pot of tea,

but it wouldn't be the same at 114.

And I'm no prize either,

almost 20 years older than the last time

you saw me sitting by your deathbed.

Some days, I look worse than yesterday's oatmeal.

Happy Birthday, anyway. Happy Birthday to you.

Here I am in a wallpapered room

raising a glass of birthday whiskey

and picturing your face, the brooch on your collar.

It must have been frigid that morning

in the hour just before dawn

on your first December 1st

at the family farm a hundred miles north of Toronto.

I imagine they had you wrapped up tight,

and there was your tiny pink face

sticking out of the bunting,

and all those McIsaacs getting used to saying your name.

The moment I was told about the Irish habit

of tipping the cap to the first magpie

one encounters in the course of a day

and saying to him “Good morning, sir,”

I knew I would be in for the long haul.

No one should be made to count

the number of magpies I have treated

with such deference, such magpie protocol,

the latest being today when I spotted one

perched on the railing of a fence

along the crooked road from the house.

This was a bird well out of its usual climate

according to the map in my bird book—

a stray, a rebel-rebel if you will,

not flocking with birds of its feather,

rather flying to a different drummer

who beats his drum with the tiny bones of birds.

But why wouldn't every bird merit a greeting?

a nod or at least a blink to clear the eyes—

a wave to the geese overhead,

maybe an inquiry of a nervous chickadee,

a salute in the dark to the hoot of an owl.

And as for the great blue heron,

as motionless in profile by the shore

as a drawing on papyrus by a Delphic priest,

will anything serve short of a genuflection?

As a boy, I worked on that move,

gliding in a black cassock and white surplice

inside the border of the altar rail

then stopping to descend,

one knee touching the cool marble floor

palms pressed together in prayer,

right thumb crossed over left, and never the other way around.

The thing about the huge platter

of sliced celery, broccoli florets,

and baby tomatoes you had arranged

to look like a turkey with its tail fanned out

was that all our guests were so intimidated

by the perfection of the design

no one dared disturb the symmetry

by removing so much as the nub of a carrot.

And the other thing about all that

was that it took only a few minutes

for the outline of the turkey to disappear

once the guests were encouraged to dig in,

so that no one else would have guessed

that this platter of scattered vegetables ever bore

the slightest resemblance to a turkey

or any other two- or four-legged animal.

It reminded me of the sand mandalas

so carefully designed by Tibetan monks

and then just as carefully destroyed

by lines scored across the diameter of the circle,

the variously colored sand then swept

into a pile and carried in a vessel

to the nearest moving water and poured in—

a reminder of the impermanence of art and life.

Only, in the case of the vegetable turkey

such a reminder was never intended.

Or if it was, I was too busy slicing up

even more vivid lessons in impermanence

to notice. I mean the real turkey minus its head

and colorful feathers, and the ham

minus the pig minus its corkscrew tail

and minus the snout once happily slathered in mud.

It's very peaceful pissing under the stars

or beneath the mild colors of twilight,

so refreshing to take a deep breath outdoors

then exhale all the woes of the day

and even the longer woes and thorns of the year.

Such a calm descends like a calm descending

as you piss from a dock into a wavy lake

and think about your many brethren,

spread out across the land, pissing tonight

against a tree beyond the circle of a campsite

or watering a flowering bush at a corner of a lawn,

some brothers holding a drink in one hand

others content to gaze up at the passing clouds

then down at the pissing still going on

then up again as if there were all the time in the world.

It's a form of meditation only without the ashram,

and it's no exaggeration to say that in doing this

you are doing what you were designed to do,

pissing away into a dark hedge,

just as the clouds above you are doing

what they were made to do, being nudged by a westerly wind.

Brother, you being yourself now

just as the moon is perfectly being itself

spreading its soft radiance throughout the sky

and lighting your way back through the garden

and across the lawn to the party you left

where everyone is hooting and shouting

over that song you love that's playing so loud.

Whenever I taught “Introduction to Literature,”

I remember how I would wince

whenever a student, wishing to be respectful,

would refer to “Mr. Frost,” “Mr. Hemingway,”

or, worse yet, “Mr. Shakespeare.”

Just write “Hemingway” or “Frost,” I would tell them,

the way you would with a ballplayer like Jeter or Brady.

No one writes “Mr. Jeter stole second base”

or “Mr. Brady badly overthrew his receiver.”

So why don't we just call Shakespeare “Shakespeare”?

And yet, when a living author is referred to

by the last name only, it sounds so final,

as if the author were already dead

and the critical comment were part of a eulogy

delivered over the body stretched out in a satin casket.

When I read “The closer Bidart gets to the self…”

or “Here Bidart addresses a former lover…”

I feel that Frank has been reduced to English literature,

turned into a stone where his name is chiseled

above his dates separated by the hyphen of his life.

Does anyone say “Good morning, Bidart”

or “Bidart, let me freshen up that drink.”

Only a drill sergeant would shout “BIDART!”

in Frank's face with some barracks in the background,

or a teacher calling roll with a flag hanging limp in the corner.

So odd to suddenly become subject matter

then have some Sarah fail to identify you on a test

or be analyzed in an essay by a young Kyle

who is on to you and your obsession with sex.

It's enough to make us forget where poems begin,

maybe in the upstairs room of an anonymous boy,

his face illuminated by lamplight.

He has penciled some lines in a notebook,

and now he pauses to think up a strange and beautiful title

while the windows of his parents' house fill with falling leaves.

The greatest influence that anxiety can have

is directly on the anxious person,

the one who is suffering from the anxiety.

For sure.

Anxiety has two main influences

on these people—visible and invisible.

By visible, I mean trembling hands

and sometimes sweating like in a cartoon

with beads of sweat popping out of their foreheads.

Also shifty eyes and just appearing

to others to be acting jumpy and weird for no reason.

It's not hard to spot a super anxious person

in a subway car or other form of public transportation.

By invisible, I mean what the anxious person

is feeling inside. For example, fear,

sinking feelings of insecurity,

nervousness about what the future may bring,

and also being scared of things

like heavy traffic, elevators, propellers,

rapids, balancing rocks, even wind chimes

if there is an unexpected gust of wind.

Well, enough about how anxiety

can have an influence on anxious people.

What about the rest of us who are cool

but sometimes have to put up with anxiety cases?

In conclusion, anxiety can have

many important influences,

first by making some unlucky people

all jittery and uncool

and second, by making regular chill people

appear to be all tense and edgy themselves.

As I have proven, anxiety can be contagious.

It can pass from a real loser

to a stone member of the cool team

just through normal everyday social contact.

Let's face it: if you go out with someone for pizza

and he or she is twitching around

in the booth or in his or her chair

and starts getting creepy over the menu

and looks freaked when you remind him or her

that it's his or her turn to pay,

well, you can start getting creepy too,

and it's entirely the fault of your spooky friend,

though you shouldn't have suggested going for pizza in the first place.