Collected Poems (13 page)

I light the lamp and look at my watch.

Four-thirty. Tap out my shoes

because of the scorpions, and go out

into the field. Such a sweet night.

No moon, but urgent stars. Go back inside

and make hot chocolate on my butane burner.

I search around with the radio through

the skirl of the Levant. “Tea for Two”

in German. Finally, Cleveland playing

the Rams in the rain. It makes me feel

acutely here and everybody somewhere else.

Do you think it’s easy for him, the poor bastard?

To be that weak whenever their music begins?

It’s not a convenient delight, not a tempered scale.

Not a choice. As Saint Francis had no choice,

needing to be walled up in his stone cell all winter.

To be flogged through Assisi naked and foul.

God is not optional when faith is like that.

But Francis had a vocation, not a need for silly women.

Giovanni really believes they are important.

Talks about them as parallel systems. Crazy stuff.

An educated gentleman of the finest family

wandering off helplessly after their faintest glimmer.

He believes there is a secret melded with the ladies.

He smiles and nods all evening as he listens

to their chatter and the whining about their husbands.

He says the world changes because of them.

Their flesh unfolds and he goes through to something

beyond the flesh. Hears a voice, he says.

A primitive radio at the core of them.

Growing and fading, as though it comes from the moon.

I had not seen her for twenty years when she called

to welcome me back to America, wanting to see me.

Warning that she was past forty now and the mother

of a seven-year-old. The lost time flooded me.

Paris and me without money or a place to take her.

I borrowed a room and lit candles and had wine.

It went badly. My knees kept sliding away under me

on the starched sheets. I managed the humiliation

by turning my back and refusing to talk. She was

as young as I was and felt, I suspect, relief.

The birds do not sing in these mornings. The skies

are white all day. The Canadian geese fly over

high up in the moonlight with the lonely sound

of their discontent. Going south. Now the rains

and soon the snow. The black trees are leafless,

the flowers gone. Only cabbages are left

in the bedraggled garden. Truth becomes visible,

the architecture of the soul begins to show through.

God has put off his panoply and is at home with us.

We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.

We have resumed our lives. There is no hurry now.

We make love without rushing and find ourselves

afterward with someone we know well. Time to be

what we are getting ready to be next. This loving,

this relishing, our gladness, this being puts down

roots and comes back again year after year.

For Albert Schweitzer

This morning I found a baby scorpion,

perfect, in the saucepan.

Killed it with a piece of marble.

Trying to scrape the burned soup from my only pan

with a spoon after midnight by oil lamp

because if I do not cook the mackerel

this hot night it will kill me tomorrow

in the vegetable stew. Which is twice

wasteful. Though it would be another way

of cutting down, I am thinking, as I go out to get

more water from the well and happen to look up

through the bright stars. Yes, yes, I say,

and go on pulling at the long rope.

The soft wind comes sweet in the night

on the mountain. Invisible except for

the sound it makes in the big poplars outside

and the feel on his naked, single body,

which breathes quietly a little before dawn,

eyes open and in love with the table

and chair in the transparent dark and stars

in the other window. Soon it will be time

for the first tea and cool pear and then

the miles down and miles up the mountain.

“Old and alone,” he thinks, smiling.

Full of what abundance has done to his spirit.

Feeling around inside to see if his heart

is still, thank God, ambitious. The way

old men look in their eyes each morning.

Knowing she isn’t there and how much Michiko

isn’t anywhere. The eyes close as he remembers

seeing the big owl on the roof last night

for the first time after hearing it for months.

Thinking how much he has grown unsuited

for love the size it is for him. “But maybe

not,” he says. And the eyes open as he

grins at the heart’s stubborn pretending.

She lives, the bird says, and means nothing

silly. She is dead and available,

the fox says, knowing about the spirits.

Not the picture at the funeral,

not the object of grieving. She is dead

and you can have that, he says. If you can

love without politeness or delicacy,

the fox says, love her with your wolf heart.

As the dead are to be desired.

Not the way long marriages are,

nothing happening again and again.

Not in the woods or in the fields.

Not in the cities. The painful love of being

permanently unhoused. Not color, but the stain.

The goldfish is dead this morning on the bottom

of her world. The autumn sky is white,

the trees are coming apart in the cold rain.

Loneliness gets closer and closer.

He drinks hot tea and sings off-key:

This train ain’t a going-home train, this train.

This is not a going-home train, this train.

This train ain’t a going-home train ’cause

my home’s on a gone-away train. That train.

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

“And,” she said, “you must talk no more

about ecstasy. It is a loneliness.”

The woman wandered about picking up

her shoes and silks. “You said you loved me,”

the man said. “We tell lies,” she said,

brushing her wonderful hair, naked except

for the jewelry. “We try to believe.”

“You were helpless with joy,” he said,

“moaning and weeping.” “In the dream,” she said,

“we pretend to ourselves that we are touching.

The heart lies to itself because it must.”

The door was in the whitewashed eight-foot walls

of the narrow back street common to Greek islands.

Beautiful light and shade in the clear air.

The big iron bolt was on the outside locking

something in. Some days the pounding inside

made the heavy wooden door shudder. Often a voice

screaming. The crazy old woman, people said.

She would hurt the children if they let her out.

Pinch them or scare them, they said.

Sometimes everything was still and I would delay

until I heard the tiny whimper that meant she knew

I was there. Late one afternoon on my way for oil,

the door was broken. She was in the lot opposite

in weeds by the wall, her dress pulled up, pissing.

Like a cow. Able to manage, quiet in the last light.

The massive overhead crane comes

when we wave to it, lets down

its heavy claws and waits tamely

within its power while we hook up

the slabs of three-quarter-inch

steel. Takes away the ponderous

reality when we wave again.

What name do we have for that?

What song is there for its voice?

What is the other face of Yahweh?

The god who made the slug and ferret,

the maggot and shark in his image.

What is the carol for that?

Is it the song of nevertheless,

or of the empire of our heart? We carry

language as our mind, but are we

the dead whale that sinks grandly

for years to reach the bottom of us?

For Gianna

I tie knots in the strings of my spirit

to remember. They are not pictures

of what was. Not accounts of dusk

amid the olive trees and that odor.

The walking back was the arriving.

For that there are three knots

and a space and another two

close together. They do not imitate

the inside of her body, nor her clean

mouth. They cannot describe, but they

can prevent remembering it wrong.

The knots recall. The knots

are blazons marking the trail

back to what we own and imperfectly

forget. Back to a bell ringing

far off, and the sweet summer darkening.

All but a little of it blurs and leaks

away, but that little is most of it,

even damaged. Two more knots

and then just straight string.

Are the angels of her bed the angels

who come near me alone in mine?

Are the green trees in her window

the color I see in ripe plums?

If she always sees backward

and upside down without knowing it

what chance do we have? I am haunted

by the feeling that she is saying

melting lords of death, avalanches,

rivers and moments of passing through.

And I am replying, “Yes, yes.

Shoes and pudding.”

We are resident inside with the machinery,

a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus.

We exist with a wind whispering inside

and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts,

inside the basilica of bones. The flesh

is a neighborhood, but not the life.

Our body is not good at memory, at keeping.

It is the spirit that holds on to our treasure.

The dusk in Italy when the ferry passed Bellagio

and turned across Lake Como in the hush to where

we would land and start up the grassy mountain.

The body keeps so little of the life after

being with her eleven years,

and the mouth not even that much. But the heart

is different. It never forgets

the pine trees with the moon rising behind them

every night. Again and again we put our

sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed

them back into their death, each moving slowly

into the dark, disappearing as our hearts

visited and savored, hurt and yearned.

There were a hundred wild people in Allen’s

three-story house. He was sitting at a small

table in the kitchen quietly eating something.

Alone, except for Orlovsky’s little brother

who was asleep with his face against the wall.

Allen wearing a red skullcap, and a loose bathrobe

over his nakedness. Shoulder-length hair

and a chest-length, oily beard.

No one was within fifteen years of him. Destroyed

like the rest of that clan. His remarkable

talent destroyed. The fine mind grown more

and more simple. Buddhist chants, impoverishing

poems. There are no middle tones in the paintings

of children. Chekhov said he didn’t want

the audience to cry, but to see. Allen showing

me his old man’s bald scalp. A kind of love.

Aachen is a good copy of a mediocre building.

Architects tried for two thousand years to find

a way to put a dome on a square base.

Only you and I still stand in the snow on Highland Avenue

in Pittsburgh waiting for the blundering iron streetcars

that never came. Only you know how the immense storms

over the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers were the scale

I wanted. Nobody but you remembers Peabody High School.

You shared my youth in Paris and the hills above Como.

And later, in Seattle. It was you playing the aria from

Don Giovanni
over and over, filling the forest of Puget

Sound with the music. You in the front room and me

upstairs with your discarded wife in my bed. The sound

of your loneliness pouring over our happy bodies.

You were with your third wife when I was in Perugia

six months later, but in love with somebody else.

We searched for her in Munich, the snow falling again.

You trying to decide when to kill yourself. All of it

finally bringing us to San Francisco. To the vast

decaying white house. No sound of Mozart coming up

from there. No alleluias in you anymore. No longer

will you waltz under the chandeliers in Paris salons

drunk with champagne and the Greek girl as the others

stand along the mirrored walls. The men watching

with fury, the eyes of the women inscrutable. No one

else speaks the language of those years. No one

remembers you as the Baron. The streetcars have

finished the last run, and I am walking home. Thinking

love is not refuted because it comes to an end.