Aimless Love (11 page)

I didn’t know Marianne Moore

had written a little ode to a steam roller

until this morning. She has it walking

back and forth over the particles it has crushed.

She must have watched a lot of cartoons.

She also compares it to a butterfly unflatteringly.

I like it better when she speaks to a snail.

It’s pleasurable to picture her in a garden

bending forward in her dated black clothes

and her tilted black triangle of a hat,

as she seriously addresses the fellow curled in its shell.

But when I see her standing before the big drum

of a steam roller and saying not very nice things,

only one eventuality ever comes to mind,

for I, too, am a serious student of cartoons.

And no one wants to avoid seeing

a flattened Marianne Moore hanging out to dry

on a clothesline or propped up

as a display in a store window more than I.

As much as these erratic clouds keep sweeping

this way and that over the roof

of this blue house bordered by hedges and fruit trees,

and as much as the world continues to run

in all directions with its head in its hands,

there is one particular robin who appears

every morning on a section of lawn

by the front door with such regularity

he could be a lighthouse keeper or a clock maker.

He could be Immanuel Kant were he not so small

and feathered, whom the citizens set their watches by

as he walked through town with his hair curled.

It takes a lot to startle this bird—

only a hand clap will make him rise

to one of the low branches of the nearby apple tree.

So I am wondering if he would allow me

to slip a small collar around his neck

and take him for a walk, first around the house

then later, when more trust has been gained,

into town where we would pass the locals

with their children and orthodox dogs in tow,

and I would hold the robin lightly by a string

as we waited to cross the street, then he would hop

off the curb and off we would go

not caring about what people were saying

even when we stopped at a store front

to admire our strange reflections in the window.

Because I was off to France, I packed

my camera along with my shaving kit,

some colorful boxer shorts, and a sweater with a zipper,

but every time I tried to take a picture

of a bridge, a famous plaza,

or the bronze equestrian statue of a general,

there was a woman standing in front of me

taking a picture of the very same thing,

or the odd pedestrian blocked my view,

someone or something always getting between me

and the flying buttress, the river boat,

a bright café awning, an unexpected pillar.

So into the little door of the lens

came not the kiosk or the altarpiece.

No fresco or baptistry slipped by the quick shutter.

Instead, my memories of that glorious summer

of my youth are awakened now,

like an ember fanned into brightness,

by a shoulder, the back of a raincoat,

a wide hat or towering hairdo–

lost time miraculously recovered

by the buttons on a gendarme’s coat

and my favorite,

the palm of that vigilant guard at the Louvre.

    after Li Po

This is not after Li Po

the way the state is after me

for neglecting to pay all my taxes,

nor the way I am after

the woman in front of me

on the long line at the post office.

Li Po, I am not saying

“After you”

as I stand holding open

one of the heavy glass doors

that divide the centuries

in a long corridor of glass doors.

No, the only way this is after you

is in the way they say

it’s just one thing after another,

like the way I will pause

to raise a glass of wine to you

after I finish writing this poem.

So let me get back

to sitting in the wind alone

among the pines with a pencil in my hand.

After all, you had your turn,

and mine will soon be done

then someone else will sit here after me.

Do you realize that if you had started

building the Parthenon on the day you were born

you would be all done in only one more year?

Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone,

so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.

You are loved simply for being yourself.

But did you know that at your age Judy Garland

was pulling down $150,000 a picture,

Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,

and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?

No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.

Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life

after you come out of your room

and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.

For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey

was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,

but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.

A few centuries later, when he was your age,

Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family

but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,

four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster.

But of course that was in Austria at the height

of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.

Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15

or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?

We think you are special by just being you,

playing with your food and staring into space.

By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,

but that doesn’t mean he
never
helped out around the house.

Among the animals who avoid danger

just by being still,

the heron is a favorite example,

indistinguishable from the reeds

he stands in, thin and gray, at the water’s edge.

Then there is the snowy egret

who must think he can make

his white question mark of a body

just vanish from the lake

by being as motionless as can be.

And when it comes to people

there’s the quiet man at the bar

who lifts his eyes only now and then

as well as the girl in the summer dress

who must pretend she is not here.

And who am I to talk,

the last flamingo to leave the party,

good at avoiding danger so far,

away from any cove or shore,

conspicuous as the drink I carry out the door.

Whatever it was that just flew out of my head

did not leave a trace,

not a contrail in the sky

not a footprint in a field of new snow.

The last thing I remember

is reading a sentence

in a long biography of Abraham Lincoln,

something about his face being so ugly

it became beautiful

in the eyes of Walt Whitman,

but there was something after

that made me fold down the corner

of the page and close the book—

so much I cannot think of today,

a team of white birds lifting off a shoreline

and disappearing into the sun.

Maestro, I am writing to tell you

that your serenade in D minor

with its stretches of martial confidence

then some sweet wanderings of the woodwinds

has not really brought me to the edge of anything,

yet compared to the inane movie

being shown on this long flight to Seattle,

listening to your music has made me a better

person than that other self,

so slack of jaw and fishy of stare,

who would have watched the movie to its end

oblivious to the startling 33,000 feet of air below.

I never visited your tomb in Prague

or even the site of your former apartment

on East 17th Street before it was demolished

to make room for a hospital for sufferers from AIDS.

So I am thanking you here for the lift

of a tune to ride with over the clouds

high above towns bisected by roads,

and fields with their plowed circles.

You remind me of a canary

I once stared at for an unusually long time

and the communion that developed between us

as we gazed into and out of the unhooded cage.

Time well spent, I thought,

as the bird broke it off and began to peck

at the image of his twin in a little oval mirror,

leaving me to return to the many ways

we have concocted to waste our lives—

ten thousand at least, wouldn’t you say,

Maestro, with your baton, your furious pencil,

and the closet where all your dark clothes used to hang.

Not only colorful beds of flowers

ruffled today by a breeze off the lake

but the ruffled surface of the lake itself,

and later a boathouse and an oak tree

so old its heavy limbs rested on the ground.

And I don’t want to leave out

the uniformed campus guard I saw studying

a map of the campus without a student in sight.

Closer to town, shops under awnings

and several churches,

one topped with a burnished cross,

another announcing a sermon:

“What You
Can
Take with You.”

So many odd things to see

but mostly it’s the sun at its apex

inscribing little circles,

little haloes at the top of the sky,

and the freshening breeze,

the nowhere it came from

and the nowhere it is headed,

every leaf wavering, each branch bowed,

and what can I do, I heard myself asking,

with all this evidence of something,

me without a candle, wafer, or a rug,

not even a compass to tell me which way to face.

It all began fairly early in the day

at the coffee shop as it turned out

when the usual waitress said

I’ll bet you’re going to write a poem about this

after she had knocked a cup of coffee into my lap.

Then later in the morning I was told

by a student that I should write a poem

about the fire drill that was going on

as we all stood on the lawn outside our building.

In the afternoon a woman I barely knew

said you could write a poem about that,

pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead.

And if all that were not enough,

a friend turned to me as we walked past

a man whose face was covered with tattoos

and said, I see a poem coming!

Why is everyone being so helpful?

I wondered that evening by the shore of a lake.

Maybe I should write a poem

about all the people who think

they know what I should be writing poems about.

It was just then in the fading light that I spotted

a pair of ducks emerging

from a cluster of reeds to paddle out to open water,

the female glancing back over her russet shoulder

just in time to see me searching my pockets for a pen.

I knew it, she quacked, with a bit of a brogue.

But who can blame you for following your heart?

she went on.

Now, go write a lovely poem about me and the mister.

One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago

as I waited for my eggs and toast,

I opened the
Tribune
only to discover

that I was the same age as Cheerios.

Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios

for today, the newspaper announced,

was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios

whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.

Already I could hear them whispering

behind my stooped and threadbare back,

Why that dude’s older than Cheerios

the way they used to say

Why that’s as old as the hills
,

only the hills are much older than Cheerios

or any American breakfast cereal,

and more noble and enduring are the hills,

I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.

I was a little disappointed

in the apple I lifted from a bowl of fruit

and bit into on the way out the door,

fuzzy on the inside and lacking the snap of the ripe.

Yesterday it was probably perfect,

I figured, as I held it out before me,

soft red apple bearing my tooth marks,

as if I were contemplating the bust of Aristotle.