Collected Poems (17 page)

His spirit dances the long ago, and later.

Starlight on a country road in worn-out

western Pennsylvania. The smell of weeds

and rusting iron. And gladness.

His spirit welcomes the Italian New Year’s

in a hill town filled with the music

of glass crashing everywhere in the cobbled

streets. Champagne and the first kisses.

Too shy to look at each other and no language

between them. He dances alone, the dance

of after that. Now they sit amid the heavy

Roman sunlight and talk of the people

they are married to now. He secretly

dances the waltz she was in her astonishing

beauty, drinking wine and laughing, the window

behind her filled with winter rain.

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down

but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch

while we sleep, and walk with us later

as long-legged beauty through

the dirty streets. It is no surprise

that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.

We know the horses are there in the dark

meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

For Michiko

The brain is dead and the body is

no longer infected by the spirit.

Now it is just machines talking

to the machine. Helping it back

to its old, pure journey.

We are given the trees so we can know

what God looks like. And rivers

so we might understand Him. We are allowed

women so we can get into bed with the Lord,

however partial and momentary that is.

The passion, and then we are single again

while the dark goes on. He lived

in the Massachusetts woods for two years.

Went out naked among the summer pines

at midnight when the moon would allow it.

He watched the aspens when the afternoon breeze

was at them. And listened to rain

on the butternut tree near his window.

But when he finally left, they did not care.

The difficult garden he was midwife to

was indifferent. The eight wild birds

he fed through both winters, when the snow

was starving them, forgot him immediately.

And the three women he ate of and entered

utterly then and before, who were his New World

as immensity and landfall, are now only friends

or dead. What we are given is taken away,

but we manage to keep it secretly.

We lose everything, but make harvest

of the consequence it was to us. Memory

builds this kingdom from the fragments

and approximation. We are gleaners who fill

the barn for the winter that comes on.

It is burden enough that death lies on all sides,

that your old kimono is still locked in my closet.

Now I wonder what would happen if my life did

catch on fire again. Would I break in half,

part of me a storm and part like ice in a silver bowl?

I lie awake remembering the birds of Kyoto

calling
No No,
unh unh.
No No,
unh unh. And you

saying yes all night. You said yes when I woke you

again in the dawn. And even disgracefully

at lunchtime. Until all the men at the small inn

roamed about, hoping to see whoever that voice was.

The Buddha tells us we should clear every obstacle

out of the way. “If you meet your mother in the path,

kill her. If the Buddha gets in the way, kill him.”

But my spirit sings like the perishing cicadas

while I sit in the back yard hitting an old pot.

The spirit opens as life closes down.

Tries to frame the size of whatever God is.

Finds that dying makes us visible.

Realizes we must get to the loin of that

before time is over. The part of which

we are the wall around. Not the good or evil,

neither death nor afterlife but the importance

of what we contain meanwhile. (He walks along

remembering, biting into beauty,

the heart eating into the naked spirit.)

The body is a major nation, the mind is a gift.

Together they define substantiality.

The spirit can know the Lord as a flavor

rather than power. The soul is ambitious

for what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament

that is both spirit and flesh. And neither.

They piled the bound angels with the barley

in the threshing ring and drove the cow

and donkeys over them all day. Threw the mix

into the wind from the sea to separate

the blond grain from the gold of what

had been. It burned in the luminous air.

When the night came, the mound of chaff

was almost higher than the farmhouse. But there

were only eight sacks of the other.

Walked around Bologna at three in the morning.

Beautiful, arcaded, deserted piazza and winter rain.

Got the train at five of four. Slept badly

in a hot compartment, curled up on my half

of the seat. No real dawn. Beginning to see

a little into the mist. The looming mountain

brindled with snow. The higher pines crusted.

Oyster-white behind them. The train running along

a river between the hills. Mostly apple orchards

with occasionally pale apples still near the top.

Also vineyards. No feeling of Italy here.

No sense of the Umbrian peasants farming

with their white ocean. A tractor instead

putting out compost near an orchard with rotten

red squash gourds. Later another man standing

in the river with a long-handled net, looking

steadily down. Then the commuter line between

Bolzano and Merano. Changing pants on the toilet.

Checked my bag in the station and walked

to the center of the town. Hotels everywhere.

Mountain scenery in the summer, skiing in winter.

Went into the CIT and asked about Pound. (Because

the address had been left at home in Perugia.)

They said he was not there anymore. Went to

the tourist office. Herr Herschel said, yes, Pound

was still there. I came out chuckling, as though

I had been sly. Then, waiting for the first bus

to Tirolo. It leaves at ten-thirty. It’s supposed

to be a half hour’s walk from there.

He wakes up in the silence of the winter woods,

the silence of birds not singing, knowing he will

not hear his voice all day. He remembers what

the brown owl sounded like while he was sleeping.

The man wakes in the frigid morning thinking

about women. Not with desire so much as with a sense

of what is not. The January silence is the sound

of his feet in the snow, a squirrel scolding,

or the scraping calls of a single blue jay.

Something of him dances there, apart and gravely mute.

Many days in the woods he wonders what it is

that he has for so long hunted down. We go hand

in hand, he thinks, into the dark pleasure,

but we are rewarded alone, just as we are married

into aloneness. He walks the paths doing the strange

mathematics of the brain, multiplying the spirit.

He thinks of caressing her feet as she kept dying.

For the last four hours, watching her gradually stop

as the hospital slept. Remembers the stunning

coldness of her head when he kissed her just after.

There is light or more light, darkness and less darkness.

It is, he decides, a quality without definition.

How strange to discover that one lives with the heart

as one lives with a wife. Even after many years,

nobody knows what she is like. The heart has

a life of its own. It gets free of us, escapes,

is ambitiously unfaithful. Dies out unaccountably

after eight years, blooms unnecessarily and too late.

Like the arbitrary silence in the white woods,

leaving tracks in the snow he cannot recognize.

She is never dead when he meets her.

They eat noodles for breakfast as usual.

For eleven years he thought it was the river

at the bottom of his mind dreaming.

Now he knows she is living inside him,

as the wind is sometimes visible

in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb

are in the garden and then not.

Her ashes are by the sea in Kamakura.

Her face and hair and sweet body still

in the old villa on a mountain where

she lived the whole summer. They slept

on the floor for eleven years.

But now she comes less and less.

I remember how I’d lie on my roof

listening to the fat violinist

below in the sleeping village

play Schubert so badly, so well.

The boat of his heart is tethered to the ancient

stone bridges. Beached on the Pacific hills with

thick evening fog flooding whitely over the ridge.

Running in front of the Provençal summer. Drowned

as a secret under the broad Monongahela River.

Forever richly laden with Oak Street and Umbria.

“There be monsters,” they warn in the blank spaces

of the old maps. But the real danger is the ocean’s

insufficiency, the senseless repetition throughout

the empty waters. Calm and storms and calm again.

Too impoverished for the human. We come to know

ourselves as immense continents and archipelagoes

of endless bounty. He waits now in the hold

of a wooden ship. Becalmed, maybe standing to.

Bobbing, rocking softly. The cargo of ghosts

and angels all around. The wraiths, surprisingly,

singing with the clear voices of young boys.

The angels clapping the rhythm. As he watches

for morning, for the dark to give way and show

his landfall, the new country, his native land.

For Kerry O’Keefe

She came into his life like arriving halfway

through a novel, with bits of two earlier lives

snagged in her. She was the daughter of

a deputy attorney general. And when

that crashed she tried singing and got married.

Now she is in trouble again, leaving soup

on his porch before really knowing him.

Saying she heard he had a bad cold, and besides

it was a tough winter. (It was like

his first wife who went to the department store

and bought a brass bed, getting a salesman

his size to lie down so she could see if it fit.

When she still knew him only at a distance.)

But when people grow up, they should know better.

You can’t call it romance when she already had

two children. He had decided never again to get

involved with love. Now everything

has gone wrong. She doesn’t just sing softly

up to his window. You can see them in the dark

upstairs, him singing badly and her not minding.

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important

(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.

Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was

inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,

beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when

he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.

He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back

to what he knew then. Poetry registers

feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches

out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.

Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be

an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world

part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux

to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.

The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward

to know its merit with attention.

I can’t remember her name.

It’s not as though I’ve been in bed

with that many women.

The truth is I can’t even remember

her face. I kind of know how strong

her thighs were, and her beauty.

But what I won’t forget

is the way she tore open

the barbecued chicken with her hands,

and wiped the grease on her breasts.

When he wakes up, a weak sun is just rising

over the side of the valley. It is eight

degrees below zero in the house.

He builds a fire and makes tea. Puts out seeds

for the birds and examines the tracks

in fresh snow, still trying to learn

what lives here. He is writing a poem

when his friend calls. She asks what

he plans to do today. To write some

letters, he tells her (because he is falling

behind in his project of writing one

every day for a month).

She tells him how many letters famous poets

write each day. Says she doesn’t mean

that as criticism. After they hang up,

he stands looking at the unanswered mail

heaped high on the table. Gets back

in bed and starts reworking his poem.