Collected Poems (11 page)

It thrashes in the oaks and soughs in the elms,

catches on innocence and soon dismantles that.

Sends children bewildered into life. Childhood

ends and is not buried. The young men ride out

and fall off, the horses wandering away. They get

on boats, are carried downstream, discover maidens.

They marry them without meaning to, meaning no harm,

the language beyond them. So everything ends.

Divorce gets them nowhere. They drift away from

the ruined women without noticing. See birds

high up and follow. “Out of earshot,” they think,

puzzled by
earshot.
History driving them forward,

making a noise like the wind in maples, of women

in their dresses. It stings their hearts finally.

It wakes them up, baffled in the middle of their lives

on a small bare island, the sea blue and empty,

the days stretching all the way to the horizon.

Each farmer on the island conceals

his hive far up on the mountain,

knowing it will otherwise be plundered.

When they die, or can no longer make

the hard climb, the lost combs year

after year grow heavier with honey.

And the sweetness has more and more

acutely the taste of that wilderness.

Flying up, crossing over, going forward.

Passing through, getting deep enough. Breaking

into, finding the way, living at the heart

and going beyond that. Finally realizing

that arriving is not the same as being resident.

That what we do is not what we are doing.

We go into the orchard for apples. But what

we carry back is the day among trees with odor,

coolness, dappled light and time. The season

and geese going over. Always and always

with death to come, and before that the dishonor

of growing old. But meanwhile the trees are

heavy with ripe fruit. We try to visit Greece

and find ourselves instead in the pointless noon

standing among vetch and grapes, disassembling

as night climbs beautifully out of the earth

and God holds His breath. In the distance there is

the faint clatter of a farmer’s bucket as she

gets water up at the well for the animals.

He stands freezing in the dark courtyard looking up

at their bright windows, as he has many nights since

moving away. Because of his promise, he does not

go up. He is thinking of the day she came back

from the hospital. They did not know her then.

He was looking down because of the happiness in her

voice talking to her husband as they went across

the courtyard. She saw him and, grinning, held up

the newborn child. Now it is the last time ever.

He finally knocks. Her eyes widen when she opens

the door. She looks to indicate her husband is home

as she unbuttons her dress. He whispers that his hands

are too cold. It will make me remember better,

she says, and puts them on her nakedness, wincing,

eyes wild with love. It is snowing when he leaves,

the narrow street lit here and there by shop windows.

Tomorrow he will be on the train with his wife, watching

the shadows on the snow. Going south to live silently

with perfect summer skies and the brilliant Aegean.

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional

and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,

vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.

But the best is often when nothing is happening.

The way a mother picks up the child almost without

noticing and carries her across Waller Street

while talking with the other woman. What if she

could keep all of that? Our lives happen between

the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual

breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about

her is that commonplace I can no longer remember.

The ship goes down and everybody is lost, or is living

comfortably in Spain. He finds himself at the edge

of emptiness, absence and heat everywhere.

Just shacks along the beach and nobody in them.

He has listened to the song so often that he hears

only the spaces between the notes. He stands there,

remembering peaches. A strange, almost gray kind

that had little taste when he got them home, and that

little not much good. But there had to be a reason

why people bought them. So he decided to make jam.

When he smelled the scorching, they were already tar.

Scraped out the mess and was glad to have it over.

Found himself licking the crust on the spoon. Next day

he had eaten the rest, still not sure whether he liked

it or not. And never able to find any of them since.

We stopped to eat cheese and tomatoes and bread

so good it made me foolish. The woman with me

wanted to go through the palace of the papal

captivity. Hazley and Stern said they were going

to the whorehouse. That surprised me twice

because it was only two in the afternoon.

The woman and I went to the empty palace

and met them later to drive on. They said

how neat and clean it was in the whorehouse,

and how all the men and most of the women had

been in the fourth grade together. I remember

the soft way they said it but not what they told

about going upstairs. It is not the going instead

to a blank palace where history had left no smell

that I regret. It is not even the dream

of a Mediterranean woman pulling off her dress,

the long tousled dark hair, or even the white

teeth in the shuttered room as she smiled

mischievously at the young American. I regret

the fresh coolness when they went inside from

the July heat and everybody talking quietly

as they drank ordinary wine in that promised land.

It was half a palace, half an ancient fort,

and built of mud. The home of a fierce baroness.

The rest were men, mostly elderly, and all German.

When Denise arrived, it woke them from their habits.

Not because she was exciting, since the men were

only interested in boys. But soon they were taking

turns choosing her costumes and displaying her

on low couches, or half asleep in nests of cushions

on the wonderful rugs. They did not want her naked

unless covered with jewelry. Always coaxed

her to sing, to have the awkwardness and the way

she sang off-key mix with the nipples so evident,

the heavy skirts rucked up. It dominated

the evenings. They insisted she tell stories

but did not listen to the rambling accounts

of growing up in Zurich. Two were interested

in the year she modeled for
Vogue.
More responded

to the life in Paris: fancy dinners where

perfectly dressed men and women made love to her

with hands and mouths and delicate silver instruments.

For the Germans, decadence was undistinguished,

but it mattered when they recognized the names

of nobles, the painters, and the young
couturière

who was the sensation of that season.

What Denise remembers most from the nights

is how they ended. She and the man with her

would each choose a lad and go up to the bedroom

with the wild lamentation of the unchosen following

behind them. Most had never seen a beautiful woman.

None had seen a white one. They were desperate

in their loss. When the boys were forced out,

they pounded on the great door, a thunder searching

through the empty corridors. Some went around

to the side where her window was. Swarmed up

each other’s back until there were lines up the wall

six and seven bodies high. When one reached the sill

he fell immediately, because the seeing was so intense.

A long wail and a thud, and then the whimpering

and barking began again. But what she dreams of

is the first time the Germans took her to the river.

Small figures appeared in the distance. Drifted

silently across the desert, slowly through the blur

of the heat. Soon she could see how young they were.

A few riding on horses. All discarding their clothes

as they got closer to the water. Wading, swimming

across. The black horses splashing. Stopping

in a ragged line, waiting to be chosen

for the later choosing. Mostly now she dreams

of those motionless figures in the powerful emptiness.

Wordless, shining, staring at her out of their blank faces.

He manages like somebody carrying a box

that is too heavy, first with his arms

underneath. When their strength gives out,

he moves the hands forward, hooking them

on the corners, pulling the weight against

his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly

when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes

different muscles take over. Afterward,

he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood

drains out of the arm that is stretched up

to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now

the man can hold underneath again, so that

he can go on without ever putting the box down.

I heard a noise this morning and found two old men

leaning on the wall of my vineyard, looking out

over the fields, silent. Went back to my desk

until somebody raised the trap door of the well.

It was the one with the cane, looking down inside.

But I was annoyed when the locked door rattled where

the grain and wine were. Went to the kitchen window

and stared at him. He said something in Greek.

I spread my arms to ask what he was doing.

He explained about growing up out there long ago.

That now they were making a little walk among

the old places. Telling it with his hands.

He made a final gesture, rubbing the side

of the first finger against that of the other hand.

I think it meant how much he felt about being here

again. We smiled, even though he was half blind.

Later, my bucket banged and I saw the heavy one

pulling up water. He cleaned the mule’s stone basin

carefully with his other hand. Put back a rock

for the doves to stand on and poured in fresh water.

Stayed there, touching the old letters cut in the marble.

I watched them go slowly down the lane and out

of sight. They did not look back. As I typed,

I listened for the dog at each farm to tell me

which house they went to next. But the dogs did not

bark all the way down the long bright valley.

We think the fire eats the wood.

We are wrong. The wood reaches out

to the flame. The fire licks at

what the wood harbors, and the wood

gives itself away to that intimacy,

the manner in which we and the world

meet each new day. Harm and boon

in the meetings. As heart meets what

is not heart, the way the spirit

encounters the flesh and the mouth meets

the foreignness in another mouth. We stand

looking at the ruin of our garden

in the early dark of November, hearing crows

go over while the first snow shines coldly

everywhere. Grief makes the heart

apparent as much as sudden happiness can.

He stands there baffled by pleasure and how little

it counts. The long woman is finally asleep on the bed,

the sweat beautiful on her New England nakedness.

It was while he was walking toward the shuttered window

with sunlight blazing behind it that something

important happened. He looks down through the gap

between the shutters at the Romans and late summer

in the via del Corso, trying to find a name for it,

knowing it is not love. Nor tenderness. He considers

other times just after, the random intensity sliding away,

unrecoverable. It is the sorrow that stays clear.

This specialness inside his spirit is bonded to

a knowing he cannot remember. When he was crushed,

each minor shift of his body traced out the bones

with agony, making his skeleton more and more clear

inside him. As though floodlit. He remembers

the intricate way he would lift his arm from the bed

in the hospital, turning his hand cautiously this way

and that to find the bearable paths through the air,

discovering an inch here and there where the pain

was missing. Or the cold and hunger as he walked

the alleys all night that winter down by the docks

of Genoa until each dawn, when he held the hot bowls

of tripe in his numb hands, the steam rising into his face

as he drank, the tears mixing with happiness. He opens

the shutters, and the shutters of the other window,

so the Mediterranean light can get to her. Desperately

trying to break the code while there is still time.

She told about when the American soldiers

came to the island. How the spirits would cling

to the wire fence and watch their bigness

and blondness, often without shirts, working

in the sunlight. So different from reality.

So innocent and laughing, as though it were

simple to be happy and kind. And their smell!

They had a smell that made the spirits shiver

and yearn to be material. She said that

the spirits would push long thin poles,

ivory in the moonlight, silently through

the fence, trying to touch the whiteness

those sleeping men had around their hearts.