Collected Poems (7 page)

What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,

but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day

on these immense, perishing fields? What then?

(Desire is not the problem. This far south,

we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)

He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.

In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.

Year by year he works himself,

replacing youth with stone.

But the marble rings with love

even more than the fine flesh.

What is the best we leave behind?

Certainly love and form and ourselves.

Surely those. But it is the mornings

that are hard to relinquish, and music

and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty

piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.

What we are busy with doesn’t make us

groan
ah! ah!
as we will for the nights

and the cucumbers.

All this windless day snow fell

into the King’s Garden

where I walked, perfecting and growing old,

abandoning one by one everybody:

randomly in love with the paradise

furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark,

dreaming of a marble sun

and its strictness. This

is to tell you I am not coming back.

To tell you instead of my private life

among people who must wrestle their hearts

in order to feel anything, as though it were

unnatural. What I master by day

still lapses in the night. But I go on

with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow

come down, learning to flower by tightening.

I called Sue the week I moved back from Rome.

She was getting married on Sunday she said,

but would drive over after lunch to say goodbye.

Later, in the tall grass between some homes,

we were searching around in the torn dirt,

frantic and laughing. Trying to find

the huge diamond engagement ring.

Our bodies flaring in the winter moonlight.

When the storm hit, I was fording the river

and thinking of Doctor Johnson. Garrick, as a boy,

spied on that bulbous man doting on his blowsy wife.

For years did the famous imitation for London society

of those walruses pretending to be lovers. I was

thinking of Johnson’s permanent sadness after she died.

I looked up at the palms floundering in the warm rain

and out at the waves piling up in the cove.

I thought of the foolish earth and how we dally

in my bed. The absurd exaggeration of her.

She lies with me after singing, singing, singing,

singing—Oh, it is such a marriage, however it looks

through any keyhole. I went on, carrying the fish,

feeling for the bottom, and dreaming of us entering

the great hall at Versailles: everyone gaping

and elaborate Louis Quatorze wondering at his envy.

The pigeon with a broken wing.

The pigeon with no left foot.

That pigeon with his beak grown wrong

starving among the others eating.

Or the homeless old women carrying

all they own in worn shopping bags

around Chicago at three in the morning.

What is the point of my suffering?

They are nothing to me. Filthy

pigeons. Jew-hating old women.

Why does it bother with me?

Imagine if suffering were real.

Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.

What if the midget or the girl with one arm

really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be

to live if some people were

alone and afraid all their lives.

It was hard to see the moonlight

on the gravestones

because of the neon

in the parking lot.

I said I did in my letters.

But thinking back on it now,

I don’t feel sure.

Not wanting to lose it all for poetry.

Wanting to live the living. All this year

looking on the graveyard below my apartment.

Holding myself tenderly in this marred body.

Wondering if the quiet I feel is that happiness

wise people speak of, or the modulation

that is the acquiescence to death beginning.

We had walked three miles through the night

when I had to piss. She stopped just beyond.

I aimed at the stone wall of a vineyard,

but the wind took it and she made a sound.

I apologized. “It’s all right,” she said out

of the dark, her voice different. “I liked it.”

Robinson Crusoe breaks a plate on his way out,

and hesitates over the pieces. The ship begins

to sink as he sweeps them up. Sets the table

and stands looking at history for the last time.

Knowing precision will leak from him

however well he learns the weather or vegetation,

and despite the cunning of his hands.

His mind can survive only among the furniture.

Amid the primary colors of the island, he will

become a fine thing, perhaps, but a different one.

I went to sleep by the highway

and woke just before dawn,

to see people drifting toward me

across the fields. Silently

getting into trucks.

Blurred like first love.

Another inappropriate beauty

I leave out of what I am making.

Every generation tells

of how the good world died.

How he went into the giant corn

at night, leaving the dogs.

Always they say it was the end

once and for all of America.

Grandfather and curing tobacco.

We picked the clumsy leaves,

sweating. And piled them on sleds.

Girls tied them in bunches

and the bunches on poles. The poles

were hung in a log barn.

He built fires underneath for days

and stayed up with the thermometer.

I was proud to be out there, but afraid

of his dogs and the size of the dark.

A city child, down for the summer.

When suddenly he walked into

the twelve-foot wall of corn.

Leaving the dogs. Firelight

on the barn. The smell of Carolina.

The stars making me lurch.

Thirty years ago. And now

loud cantons night

after night: America, America.

He came back with watermelons,

but always I see him going

into the corn. And that order ending.

Helot for what time there is

in the baptist hegemony of death.

For what time there is summer,

island, cornice. Weeping

and singing of what declines

into the earth. But of having,

not of not having. What abounds.

Amazed morning after morning

by the yielding. What times there are.

My fine house that love is.

I

Fire begins seriously at the body

and it sits up. The oldest son beats it down.

It sits up and he clubs it back again.

That’s what I want.

This best time begins and stomach can’t have it.

Nor pride. Nor snakebrain’s excitements

and darkness. Let him hammer me down

into the paradise furnace.

The boy I was remembers the scale. Flames

two hundred feet up into the sky every night.

Three powerful rivers naked everywhere.

Brick and metal. Dirty brick and old raw iron.

He does not understand, but he knew the wanting.

Remembers working in the mill, the titanic shear

cleaving slabs into sections. Halfway

to something. Smell of Pittsburgh after rain.

Smell of winter steel and grease, and the smell

of welding. Believing there were breasts.

So he will hammer me deep into that rendering.

Knowing blindly there is something to get.

II

Love like chunks of an animal.

Clothes ripped off and clothes drawn aside.

Bodies like cries from the ocean.

Hearts like unkeeled Jerusalem.

Italian breasts under brambles in Perugia.

My youth clandestinely in the palazzo.

Stumbling into love,

bewildered by the storms of me. Soft beauty.

Beyond youth after, and my heart augmenting.

(Stronger, she said to the choir, not louder.)

Love a second time, then eight years with Linda.

Now love probably not again.

The pictures of paradise seem innocent,

and the Devil’s temptation things for children.

I would burrow into stone. Into iron.

Into the rain to find someone important

there in the dark. A mystery that magnifies

the earth but does not lie. What is Pure Land

to that? Let him force me to try once more.

Insist, insist until I at least fail.

III

Cicadas on the olive trees rage in brevity.

When I go out at night, the stars and quiet

smell of jasmine and I long for a life

like fatty boiled beef. Pound me into that.

I was looking down on my Tokyo graveyard

late at night and heard in the complete

silence a violin string snap.

Drive me down there.

Lord Nobunaga (surrounded, the castle

on fire), knowing he would die that day,

put on his kimono and slowly danced the No¯

in the flames. When great Hideyoshi was sho¯gun

and lying on his deathbed, he wept constantly.

Saying over and over, I don’t want to die.

I want to live a thousand years.

Keep me at them both.

The boy walked the mean winter streets of Pittsburgh

knowing of their leafy summer. Let him make sure

the dreams are loose before the fire gets it all.

And I am hammered into the sun.

The fish are dreadful. They are brought up

the mountain in the dawn most days, beautiful

and alien and cold from night under the sea,

the grand rooms fading from their flat eyes.

Soft machinery of the dark,
the man thinks,

washing them. “What can you know of my machinery!”

demands the Lord.
Sure,
the man says quietly

and cuts into them, laying back the dozen struts,

getting to the muck of something terrible.

The Lord insists: “You are the one who chooses

to live this way. I build cities where things

are human. I make Tuscany and you go to live

with rock and silence.” The man washes away

the blood and arranges the fish on a big plate.

Starts the onions in the hot olive oil and puts

in peppers. “You have lived all year without women.”

He takes out everything and puts in the fish.

“No one knows where you are. People forget you.

You are vain and stubborn.” The man slices

tomatoes and lemons. Takes out the fish

and scrambles eggs.
I am not stubborn,
he thinks,

laying all of it on the table in the courtyard

full of early sun, shadows of swallows flying

on the food.
Not stubborn, just greedy.

The man certainly looked guilty.

Ugly, ragged, and not clean. Not to mention

their finding him there in the woods

with her body. Neighbors told how he was

always playing with dead squirrels,

mangled dogs, even snakes. He said

those were the only things that would

allow him to get close. “Look at me,”

the old man said with uncomplaining

simplicity, “I’m already one of the dead

among the dead. It’s hard to watch things

humiliated the way death does it.

Possums smeared on the road, birds with ants

eating out their eyes. Even dying rats

want privacy for their disgrace.

It’s true I washed the dirt from her face

and the blood off the body. Combed her hair.

I slept beside her, at her feet for two days,

the way my dog used to. I got the dress

on the best I could. She looked so neglected.

Like garbage thrown in the weeds.

Like nobody cared because he had done that

to her. I kept thinking about how long

she is going to be alone now. I knew

the police would take pictures and put them

in the papers naked and open so people

eating breakfast could look at her. I wanted

to give her spirit enough time to get ready.”

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite.
Love,
we say,

God,
we say,
Rome
and
Michiko,
we write, and the words

get it wrong. We say
bread
and it means according

to which nation. French has no word for home,

and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people

in northern India is dying out because their ancient

tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost

vocabularies that might express some of what

we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would

finally explain why the couples on their tombs

are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands

of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,

they seemed to be business records. But what if they

are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve

Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.

O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,

as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.

Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts

of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred

pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what

my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this

desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script

is not a language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.