Collected Poems (21 page)

if innocently violent fantasies of my eternal adolescence which could nearly knock me down

and send me howling through myself for caves of simple silence, blackness, oblivion.

The bubble hardens, the opacities perfected: no one in here anymore to bring accusation,

no sob of shame to catch us in its throat, no omniscient angel, either, poor angel, child,

tremulous, aghast, covering its eyes and ears, compulsively washing out its mouth with soap.

Noise: Sinalunga

The cry of a woman making love in a room giving onto our hotel courtyard sounds just like Jed,

who has bronchitis, if he were saying “Ow!” in his sleep, loudly, from his room across the hall,

and so I am awake through another dawn in another small town in the country near Siena,

waiting for my son to wake up, too, and cough, or after weeks of this, please, not cough.

Now church bells from a nearby village; now sparrows, swallows, voices from a kitchen door,

as brilliant in the brilliant air as Cortona’s Fra Angelico’s
Annunciation
’s scroll of angel speech.

Now an underpowered motorscooter on a hill and from the jukebox in the broken-down café,

the first still blessedly indecipherable traces of the ubiquitous American I-Loved-You rock …

Anger

I killed the bee for no reason except that it was there and you were watching, disapproving,

which made what I would do much worse but I was angry with you anyway and so I put my foot on it,

leaned on it, tested how much I’d need to make that resilient, resisting cartridge give way

and
crack!
abruptly, shockingly it did give way and you turned sharply and sharply now

I felt myself balanced in your eyes — why should I feel myself so balanced always in your eyes;

isn’t just this half the reason for my rage, these tendencies of yours, susceptibilities of mine? —

and “Why?” your eyes said, “Why?” and even as mine sent back my answer, “None of your affair,”

I knew that I was being once again, twice now, weighed, and this time anyway found wanting.

Even So

Though she’s seventy-four, has three children, five grown grandchildren (one already pregnant),

though she married and watched two men die, ran a good business — camping goods, tents,

not established and left to her by either of the husbands: it was her idea and her doing —

lived in three cities, and, since retiring, has spent a good part of the time traveling:

Europe, Mexico, even China, at the same time as Arthur Miller (though she didn’t see him),

even so, when the nice young driver of their bus, starting out that day from Amsterdam,

asks her if she’d like to sit beside him in the jump seat where the ill tour guide should sit,

she’s flattered and flustered and for a reason she’s surprised about, feels herself being proud.

Drought

A species of thistle no one had ever seen before appeared almost overnight in all the meadows,

coarse, gray-greenish clumps scattered anywhere the dying grass had opened up bare earth.

The farmers knew better or were too weary to try to fight the things, but their children,

walking out beside them through the sunset down the hillsides toward the still cool woods

along the narrowed brooks, would kick the plants or try to pry them out with pointed sticks:

the tenacious roots would hardly ever want to give, though, and it was too hot still to do much more

than crouch together where the thick, lethargic water filtered up and ran a few uncertain feet,

moistening the pebbles, forming puddles where the thriving insects could repose and reproduce.

End of Drought

It is the opposite or so of the friendly gossip from upstairs who stops by every other evening.

It’s the time she comes in once too often, or it’s more exactly in the middle of her tête-à-tête,

when she grows tedious beyond belief, and you realize that unless an etiquette is violated

this will just go on forever, the way, forever, rain never comes, then comes, the luscious opposite,

the shock of early drops, the pavements and the rooftops drinking, then the scent, so heady with release

it’s almost overwhelming, thick and vaginal, and then the earth, terrified she’d bungled it,

dwelt too long upon the problems of the body and the mind, the ancient earth herself,

like someone finally touching pen to page, breathes her languid, aching suspiration of relief.

Easter

As though it were the very soul of rational human intercourse which had been violated,

I can’t believe you did that,
the father chokes out to his little son, kneeling beside him,

tugging at the waistband of the tiny blue jeans, peering in along the split between the buttocks,

putting down his face at last to sniff, then saying it again, with quiet indignation, outrage,

a power more moral than parental: at issue here are covenants, agreements from the dawn of time.

The child, meanwhile, his eyes a little wider than they might be, is otherwise unblinking;

all the time the father raves, he stares, scholarly, detached, at a package in his hands:

a box of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, because it’s spring, because the god has died, and risen.

Girl Meets Boy

She would speak of “our relationship” as though it were a thing apart from either of us,

an entity with separate necessities, even its own criteria for appraisal, judgment, mode of act,

to which both of us were to be ready to sacrifice our own more momentary notions of identity.

It was as though there were a pre-existent formula or recipe, something from a textbook,

which demanded not only the right ingredients — attentiveness, affection, generosity, et cetera —

but also a constant and rigorous examination and analysis of the shifting configurations

our emotions were assuming in their presumed movement toward some ultimate consummation

in whose intensity the rest of this, not an end, would be redeemed, to wither quietly away.

Bishop Tutu’s Visit to the White House: 1984

I am afraid for you a little, for your sense of shame; I feel you are accustomed to ordinary evil.

Your assumption will be that disagreeing with your methods, he will nevertheless grasp the problems.

You will assume that he will be involved, as all humans must be, for what else is it to be human,

in a notion of personal identity as a progress toward a more conscious, inclusive spiritual condition,

so that redemption, in whatever terms it might occur, categorically will have been earned.

How will you bear that for him and those around him, righteousness and self are
a priori
the same,

that to have stated one’s good intentions excuses in advance from any painful sense of sin?

I fear you will be wounded by his obtuseness, humiliated by his pride, mortified by his absurd power.

Experience

After a string of failed romances and intensely remarked sexual adventures she’d finally married.

The husband was a very formal man, handsome, elegant … perhaps to my taste too much so;

I sensed too much commitment in him to a life entailing … handsomeness and elegance, I suppose,

but he was generous with her and even their frequent arguments had a manageable vehemence.

She smiled often in those days, but behind her face an edge of animation seemed nailed shut.

You wouldn’t really worry for her, by now you knew she’d be all right, but there were moments

when for no reason you could put your finger on you’d feel something in yourself too rigidly attentive:

it was as though some soft herd-alarm, a warning signal from the species, had been permanently tripped.

Resentment

What is there which so approaches an art form in its stubborn patience, its devotion to technique,

to elegant refinement: that relentless searching for receptacles to capture content and expression?

The fiercest lust of self toward self: is there anything which keeps the soul so
occupied?

My slights, affronts: how I shuffle and reshuffle them, file them, index, code, and collate.

Justification, accusation: I permutate, elaborate, combine, condense, refocus, re-refine.

I mull, I ponder, convince, cajole; I prove, disprove, accomplish, reaccomplish, satisfy, solve.

Begin again: courageous, unflinching, resigned, my conscience swooning with projected ingenuities;

my mind’s two mouths, their song, their kiss, this inaccomplishable, accomplished consummation!

Mornings: Catherine

Sometimes she’d begin to sing to herself before she was out of bed, before, I can remember thinking

as I listened from my table in the other room, she really could have even been all the way awake:

no sound of sheets pulled back, footsteps, just her voice, her song, so soft at first I wasn’t sure,

rising from the silence but so close to being in it still that I couldn’t hear the words,

only the threads of melody a car passing or a child crying in another house would brush away,

until it would insist again, or I’d think it would, with the volume of a breeze, the odor of a breeze …

Waiting to hear it again, to hear her again, I wouldn’t move, I’d almost, yes, hold my breath:

her voice, her song, the meshings and unmeshings with the attending world, with my incredulity.

The Ladder

God was an accident of language, a quirk of the unconscious mind, but unhappily never of my mind.

God had risen from dream, was dream, was a dream I wanted, would do much to have, but never had had.

Therefore, or maybe therefore, God became functioned, with want, with lack, with need, denial.

Then therefore, maybe therefore, equations: God and death, God and war, God injustice, hatred, pain.

Then my only revelation, knowing that if God did speak what He’d say would be,
Your heart is dull.

I let my sophistries and disputations fail: I knew that only in His own fire would God be consumed.

God, a sheet of paper scrawled with garbled cipher, flared, then cooled to cinder, then the cinder,

pounded by these hammerings, blended with the textures of my — could I still say “soul”? — my soul.

War

Jed is breathlessly, deliriously happy because he’s just been deftly ambushed and gunned down

by his friend Ha Woei as he came charging headlong around the corner of some bushes in the
bois.

He slumps dramatically to the ground, disregarding the damp, black, gritty dirt he falls into,

and holds the posture of a dead man, forehead to the earth, arms and legs thrown full-length east and west,

until it’s time for him to rise and Ha Woei to die, which Ha Woei does with vigor and abandon,

flinging himself down, the imaginary rifle catapulted from his hand like Capa’s Spanish soldier’s.

Dinnertime, bath time, bedtime, story time:
bam, bambambam, bam
— Akhilleus and Hektor.

Not until the cloak of night falls do they give themselves to the truces and forgivenesses of sleep.

Greed

A much-beaten-upon-looking, bedraggled blackbird, not a starling, with a mangled or tumorous claw,

an extra-evil air, comically malignant, like something from a folktale meant to frighten you,

gimps his way over the picnic table to a cube of moist white cheese into which he drives his beak.

Then a glister of licentious leering, a conspiratorial gleam, the cocked brow of common avarice:

he works his yellow scissors deeper in, daring doubt, a politician with his finger in the till,

a weapon maker’s finger in the politician, the slobber and the licking and the champ and click.

It is a lovely day, it always is; the innocent daylight fades into its dying, it always does.

The bird looks up, death-face beside the curded white, its foot, its fist of dying, daintily raised.

The Past

The past is not dependent on us for existence, but exists in its own right.

— Henry Steele Commager

All along certainly it’s been there, waiting before us, waiting to receive us, not to waver,

flickering shakily across the mind-screen, always in another shadow, always potentially illusion,

but out ahead, where it should be, redeemable, retrievable, accessible not by imagination’s nets

but by the virtue of its being, simply being, waiting patiently for us like any other unattended,

any other hardly anticipated or not even anticipated — as much as any other fact rolling in …

All the project needs is patience, cunning, similar to that with which we outwit trembling death …

Not “history” but scent, sound, sight, the sensual fact, the beings and the doings, the heroes,

unmediated now, the holy and the horrid, to be worked across not like a wistful map, but land.

Ice

Whatever the argument the young sailor on the train is having and whomever with, he’s not winning.

In his silly white starched French recruit’s suit with its outsized bib and teeny ribboned cap,

he looks endearingly anachronistic, like a deckhand in
Potemkin
in the calm before they rise,

but he’s gesticulating, striking one hand into the other, his feet tapping out separate rhythms,

and he’s whispering, pleading, fervently, intensely, sometimes with a sweet, almost goofy grin,

sometimes angrily, most often angrily, or desperately, trying to convince himself of something,

or someone else of something, something or someone more important than he’d ever dreamed he’d know,

so it’s frightening to wonder what it is, who it is, to elicit winces like that, like a lion’s roar.