Flight: New and Selected Poems (13 page)

 

 

Because, each week, he has entered the body,
its torso, freshly sanitized, its legs and arteries,
the rose curve on the underchin executed so deftly
by the hangman's rope; because he has entered
the forearm and cortex, the lobes and hidden
vortices, deeper, then deeper, until what remains—
shallow, undissected flesh—seems simple lines,
their one dimension shadowless;
and because he is tired and has been himself
a subject,
Tulp turns his page, then tries again
to sketch a caged orangutan. Placid, insouciant,
the animal slips its shallow glances upward,
downward, from the white-ruffed shape shaping it
to the lap and simple page, as the first lines quicken
and a ratted brow begins. There, a nostril,
and there, a shadowing, a depth that plumps
the cheek pouch, the finger's wrinkled
vortices. Slumped at their separate walls, neither
meets the other's eyes,
although, equally, each
completes the circling gaze—man to beast to page
to man: two pelt-and-pipesmoke-scented curves,
dimensionless, mammalian. Tick by tick
the minutes pass, page by crumpled page.
Beyond the door, caws and yelps and the clack
of carriage wheels . . . and still they sit,
Tulp, the ape, content to see the shapes
they've known—or felt, or sensed, or turned within—
sloughed in husks across the straw.

Did he know the one as sorrow, the one
he held, gunshot-fallen, its
remarkable long tale
. . .
beautifully variagated
?

 

For the viewer, fate's in the numbers, legend says:
One magpie for sorrow, two for mirth,
three for a wedding, four for a birth . . .

 

And wedded in their way they were—Lewis, the bird—
their fragile union finalized
with a narrow ring
of yellowish black
just at the rim of the bird's dim eye.

 

September. Morning. A breeze
through the aspens, fine. (Five for silver, six for gold . . .)
Two centuries still, until language could cup,

 

in the binary digits of zero and one, all
it could name. And so he cupped the bird,
and framed in script its glossy frame:

 

 

Time still, until sorrow's variegated wing
would bisect the land, would sever from the whole
each singular figure. Here was wonder,

 

chipped from the western sky, its legs and taloned toes,
black and imbricated, the shifting tint of its shape,
particolored, changeable. (Seven for a secret not to be told.)
The wings have nineteen feathers
. . .
it's usual food
is flesh . . . beautifull . . . yellow . . . a redish indigo blue . . .
at this season single as the halks.

 

September, the little rhyme fluttering above him,
dragging in from the far Atlantic its swift, domestic echo.
Did he wonder, then, why the story closed so suddenly?

 

(Eight for heaven, nine for hell, and ten
for the devil's own self.) Why abundance alone
could stop the heart's progression?

 

Morning. Nine's beak, eight's weightless wings.
Then ten, heartless with promise, sets down
on a dipping branch, the click of its digits—

 

black and imbricated—beginning
the cycle again: the one and then the nothing
from which the one sets forth.

At dawn on St. Barbara's Eve, just below
the plateau of his fiftieth year, Albrecht Dürer, first
having purchased spectacles, shoes, and an ivory button,
rode a wheel-etched swath of longitude
from Antwerp toward Zeeland, where a whale—
one hundred fathoms long
—pulsed on the dark sand.
First having purchased snuffers and furnace-brown,
and coated the pages of his silverpoint sketchbook,
where his scratch-lines—like pears, or tarnish, or thought—
would gradually ripen, he circled Zeeland's seven shores,
past Goes and Wolfersdyk and
the sunken place
where rooftops stood up from the water.
Already, from thought, he had sketched a dozen
tail-locked sirens, and once, gossip's composite,
a paisleyed rhinoceros with a dorsal horn—and so
would see firsthand a whale, having changed in Antwerp
a Philips florin, and dined with the Portuguese,
and studied the bones of the giant, Antigoon—
his shoulder blade wider than a strong man's back
—
although, in fact, the bones were whale, while the whale
Dürer sailed toward was history, erased by degrees
on the outgoing tide. Still, history tells us,
from his spot on that salty prow, Dürer drew precisely
the unseen sight: the absent arc of its sunken shape,
the absent fluke and down-turned eye,
even, it appears, the absent trench the acid sea
had bitten so seamlessly back into the world.

 

 

 

 

 

If it is to be The Waves, then
the moon, perhaps, weighting a sextant's upper shelf,
with the sea a shelf below some traveler's feet.
Planets, time, position line, position line—
and the place is fixed. Invisibly.

 

If it is to be The Moths, then
something about their flight. April, perhaps.
In a window, the night-blooming horn
of a gramophone. And over the fields,
moths flying, holding their brief shapes
in constant angle to a planet's light.

 

If it is to be The Waves—the sextant and salt—
then nothing to see at first but stars
and indices. Not the wake's pale seam.
Not a fin or foremast. Not even
the daylit band of the past,
just under the earth's horizon.

 

Not yet, at least. No story. (A lamp, perhaps,
a flowerpot.) No past with its child
stopped by a lake in her stiff shoes, toeing
the placid water. Arm's length before her,
in an arc, dollops of bread bob—and beyond
the bread, in a second arc, a dozen,
hand-sized turtles, treading in place.

They cannot eat, the moths. (A little nectar,
a little sap.) Mandibles gone. Just a slender,
tubal tongue wound like a watch spring
in their hollow throats. And, afraid, the turtles
will not eat, the shadow of the backlit child
rippling toward them as, one by one,
new dollops of bread drop.

 

If it is to be The Waves, then
cycles on cycles. Eternity. Plurality. (Even the rogue
absorbed.) If it is to be The Moths, then
singleness and brevity. Great brevity—although,
in the leaves behind the child, they are just
beginning to stir, the day's late light

 

caught in the orbs of the early lamps.
And what is that feeling, shaking its wings
within her? Late day, the leaves and bread
and urgency, all the curious curved shapes
treading in place. If she took a step backward,
would they, in an arc, draw nearer, as a ring
might follow its planet? What then
would she make of the world?

 

 

A skin of ice on the inner panes
and Faraday there at the window, his candle flame
burning a peephole. Already morning has warmed
the eaves, the hedgerows thickened by snow.
Children,
he thinks, penless, his words underscored
by a tendril of smoke,
I speak to you as a child myself,
amazed by the candle's phenomena: wax and light
and uplifting air, the little cup they form together,
the shallow pool that shivers there.
Over
an empty hummock, parallel tracks of a sleigh soften,
and between the tracks, a horse's widening hoofprints.
Something has scurried across that journey—marten
or hare—bisecting the sleigh tracks.
Consider
that grand circularity, light to fuel to light.
And mystery: a flame that never bites the host
but fattens from it nonetheless.
Perhaps there were
two horses, stepping in tandem down the hummock,
one set of hoofprints absorbing the other.
Children,
we are drawn here to be philosophers, to ask always,
What is the cause? And so you question,
How do flame and fuel meet? And so I say,
By mutual attraction. By the bonding of things
undissolved in each other.
Unlikely, of course, still
were their gaits equal and the reins crossed
their shoulders simultaneously. . . .
Let us turn
to an illustration. Tip your towel to a basin of water,
or better—better!—trouble your mother for a fresh prawn,
then place it tail first in a tumbler, plump head
cupped over the rim. Children, water will climb
through the creature—as fuel climbs a wick!—
by mutual attraction.
Already morning
has warmed the eaves, the icicles transparent now,
sloughing their waxy frost—and soon to be prisms,
blinding, as the sun arcs into view.
And what of the flame,
you ask me, its shadow so solid on the classroom wall?
How can it be both substance and light?
Perhaps
there were two horses, stepping in tandem
down the white expanse—soon to be blinding . . .
Children, I must leave you for now with this:
Never is flame of a single body, but a multitude of
successions, so rapid the eye unites them as one.
Something has scurried across the sleigh tracks—
marten or hare—its jittery flight bisecting the hummock,
this way—or that—its slim path both absence and shape,
a low-slung whip of smoke.

You write for news and Venetian vellum.

 

I answer: From the sea today a mystery:
proportion's carapaced nightmare: lobster.

 

You write for burnt glass.

 

I answer: When tides cross San Marco's cobbles,
bare-shouldered women, bare-shouldered girls,
walk planks to the dark cathedral.

 

Herr Willibald, my French mantle greets you!
My plumes and misgivings greet you!
Blue-black near the boiling vat, my carapaced neighbor
greets you! (Since dusk, his thin-stalked eyes, like sunflowers,
have tracked my orbiting candle.)

 

You write that my altarpiece
cups in its wings our destinies.

 

I answer: In one-point perspective, all lines converge
in a dot of sun far out on the earth's horizon.

 

I answer: Nightfall makes centaurs of the gondoliers.

 

I answer: Afloat through the inns, a second perspective
transposes the reign of earth and sun, placing
us
at the vanishing point.

 

You write that stubble on the winter fields
supports, through frost, a second field.

I answer: When tides withdraw there are birthmarks
on the cobbles. And on the girls' satin slippers
age-rings of silt.

 

You have seen, secondhand, the centaurs.

 

I have seen the lobster redden,
then rise like a sun through the boiling water.

 

Immortality's sign? you ask me. That slow-gaited sea change?
That languorous rising?

 

I have also seen a comet cross the sky.

To the dedicated listener, two sounds prevailed that night:
from rafters above the Grand Canal, pigeon snores,
and from the murky water, the tap of gondolas,
like empty walnut shells, against the water steps.
A January Wednesday, 1894, and through those
parenthetic sounds, a figure, Constance Woolson—
novelist, great friend to Henry James—leapt
to her death.
She fell.
Depressed—
delirious, demented
—she died of—
influenza
—
loving him.
Of unrequited love for James? There is no
evidence
. Seven years before that night, mid-April
through late May, they shared a home in Bellosguardo.
A villa. Voluminous
. Then met in Geneva, secretly.
Secretly? Perhaps, although discretion ruled, not
impropriety.
No impropriety? Agreed, although
what ruled was vanity, his need for her devotion.
A spinster, deaf
—in just one ear—
and elderly
—a mere
three years his senior—
she was for him primarily a . . .
source—think Alice, Tita, Cornelia, May—
yes, a loyal friend, of course, but . . .
Knowing
her death was suicide, James “utterly collapsed.”
He could not know, although he suffered, yes.
And moved
into her empty rooms, into her empty beds, in Venice, then
in Oxford.
He sought her ghost—as you do now.
She took herself away—
There is no evidence
—
away from his possession,
he who so valued possession.

What is biography?
What did he mourn?
Analysis?
Appropriation?
She slipped away, as he has slipped
from you.
Anecdote and intuition?
Some weeks beyond
her death, by gondola, James ferried her dresses
to the wide lagoon and, one by one—
Reverence?
Devotion?—
lowered them into the water.
They floated back, and back, he said—
Hearsay?
Secondhand remembrance?
—like ghastly, black
balloons, empty and full simultaneously;
although, through salt, silt, and the turning years,
their tidal scrape against the weave—
Reciprocal immortality?
—there is no evidence.