Plundered Hearts (4 page)

With a petty but regular white collar crime.

When I pick up my shirts at the laundry,

A black woman, putting down her
Daily News,

Wonders why and how much longer our luck

Will hold. “Months now and no kiss of the witch.”

The whole state overcast with such particulars.

For Emerson, a century ago and farther north,

Where the country has an ode’s jagged edges,

It was “frolic architecture.” Frozen blue-

Print of extravagance, shapes of a shared life

Left knee-deep in transcendental drifts:

The isolate forms of snow are its hardest fact.

Down here, the plain tercets of provision do,

Their picket snow-fence peeling, gritty,

Holding nothing back, nothing in, nothing at all.

Down here, we’ve come to prefer the raw material

Of everyday and this year have kept an eye

On it, shriveling but still recognizable—

A sight that disappoints even as it adds

A clearing second guess to winter. It’s

As if, in the third year of a “relocation”

To a promising notch way out on the Sunbelt,

You’ve grown used to the prefab housing,

The quick turnover in neighbors, the constant

Smell of factory smoke—like Plato’s cave,

You sometimes think—and the stumpy trees

That summer slighted and winter just ignores,

And all the snow that never falls is now

Back home and mixed up with other piercing

Memories of childhood days you were kept in

With a Negro schoolmate, of later storms

Through which you drove and drove for hours

Without ever seeing where you were going.

Or as if you’ve cheated on a cold sickly wife.

Not in some overheated turnpike motel room

With an old flame, herself the mother of two,

Who looks steamy in summer-weight slacks

And a parrot-green pullover. Not her.

Not anyone. But every day after lunch

You go off by yourself, deep in a brown study,

Not doing much of anything for an hour or two,

Just staring out the window, or at a patch

On the wall where a picture had hung for ages,

A woman with planets in her hair, the gravity

Of perfection in her features—oh! her hair

The lengthening shadow of the galaxy’s sweep.

As a young man you used to stand outside

On warm nights and watch her through the trees.

You remember how she disappeared in winter,

Obscured by snow that fell blindly on the heart,

On the house, on a world of possibilities.

The gray figure whose back they are watching

Retreat down the stone passage where the river goes

Underground—an old man because he fails

To remember the recent, only the distant past—

Was telling the pilgrims of the grain

That takes for food the light that dies.

“I have stored sheaves of this death

Under the roof of my hunger,

And it has fed me.”

•

There was no formal beginning,

No invocation, no lone patrol,

No offshore ceremonies of starting out,

Though each had a version of one,

Rich, contractual, obscure,

But missing the point

Even as it was being made

By insisting no one knew

Where it all would end, least of all

One like himself, a part of the story,

Black penitent, gradual saint.

•

Sunday. Tired of this leg of the journey,

I spent the morning in a field

Shot with broom and blooddrop poppies,

The clenched fists of thistle shaking.

Sat in a plot of clover flattened,

I guessed, by his animals. No company.

The sweet smell of grass on my sleeves.

Toward noon, two airplanes crossed

Over, high and dead ahead.

And once, somewhere near me,

A partridge made a noise

Like a blade being sharpened.

•

As if required by day-to-night necessities,

Or the custom of halting when the road

Led at last through the body’s own fatigue,

We stayed a month in the Walled City,

Cloud banks toppling its outer defenses,

Toffee-brick roofs converting its allegory

Of crooked streets into a single allusion

That kept changing its mind as it was caught.

When the time came to leave, we paused

On the ancient splintered footbridge

For the only view of where we’d been.

Each saw something smaller than his sense

Of having been, having sheltered there.

A whole note held, galactic hive,

Emblematic welt of consequences unforeseen,

A paperweight village snowbound by a whim

Of the wrist, a case of mistaken identity,

An old engraving of Manhattan’s reliquary

Of holy years on my own, when the griefs

Were never the same except in their origin,

Bold in trial, shy in isolation,

Heaped up with too many chances to take

Risks for, the humdrum deliberation

Of evenings and their standby reserves

Of permanence—belief, you called it,

In a future for the self beyond its task,

Its temporary ghosts, its squandered or hasty

Decisions to arrive, depart, to try again.

•

An invisible cloud lids

The moon’s blind eye.

The owl’s opens.

As if in response

To my unasked question,

He beats his wings,

Slowly at first,

Then faster and faster.

The moon starts up again.

That is more than God

Has ever said.

•

Stopping to admire the stream,

As if holding up its string of purls

To the light of his ability

To appreciate a pure style when he heard one,

He realized how clear the water had become

From wearing itself down on stones.

•

No plough, no wife, no child,

The four directions

Blow warm, blow cold;

The cricket sings to himself,

“Come, live in my house.”

The rains start early,

The harvest comes late,

But I have a lucky guest;

We sit down tonight to lamb,

To garlic, salt, and wine.

The buried seed will sprout,

Will branch, will bear.

The southern hills stretch far

Away from where I search,

Stretch far away from here.

•

On the drive back across the border

After a cheap dinner in Spain,

The startling burst of bonfires—

Some in tenement courtyards,

But most in parking lots

Where anyone’s car and orange crates

Burnt up and up into votive sparks—

Made us simultaneously afraid

And playful, as if (but by that time

Local friends in the backseat

Had explained tonight was St. John’s Eve)

We too could have stopped to circle

Those shooting flames all night long.

•

When it was their turn to descend

The inverse spire of thresholds

And mainstays that closed in

On the cold breath at the bottom,

They waited, listening

To a short-winded cowbell first

Climb down its own hollow

Wooden overtones. Rung by rung

They followed, their feet soon used

To the drilled vermicular

Passage illuminated in a beam

Of lantern light the guide cast.

Filing down through tributaries

It seemed their hearts had divided

Into, summoned to ten springs

Of pain and joy at the summit

Of a cry carried to the very center

Of a gathering universal emptiness,

They grew absorbed by the dark face

That led them on. Missing front tooth,

Red shirt rolled up on writhing tattoos,

Young enough to mask his self-possession,

And old enough to conjure up the myth

Of a boy, a boatman, a bereavement.

Hand over hand, he pulled the launch

Along the river by grips hammered into

The runneling cave at intervals

Between some new contrivance

Of time collapsed in stone—drapery,

Hogshead, needle pavilion, cascade

Accumulated since the muse first sang

In the steadfast informing trill of water

The boy, in his language, called

“Falling angels,” each dropped down

Into this vast freezing echo

Of themselves as they left the air.

•

There was no finding their way

Through the pass that morning or next.

(Years ago this was when it happened.)

The flat valley floor, its scrub brush

And laurel, its dusty copperplated prairie,

Too abruptly gave way—and within sight

Of the other side—to sheer crags

Glowering as they disappeared behind

Overlapping jadeite scrolls of fog

On which was written nothing but

The tingling silence they stood in,

Slept in, woke in with what misgivings,

What intermittent attempts at self-effacement

They couldn’t have understood until now.

•

They can all but see the dimpled smiles

Break up the clear reflecting pool

From the depths of which others reach

Their infant fingers towards them.

Or toward a homelike roof overhead,

The nightsky lit by fate’s maternal fires.

•

The night before they arrived

They took separate rooms

The better to ponder each

His own solitude long after

It was probable, they’d been told,

Either would be alone again.

No more the rigors of endless

Possibility remote from love

Yet closer to an exacting idea

Of some imagined mark—

The weeping flight of cranes,

Or the plash of an oar

Opening petal by petal,

A deliquescent lily floating

On the swell of a response.

Instead, the pair’s ardent plight,

Twinned complexity of pattern

And overcharged resource

Pledged to far-reaching years,

With little opportunity to ask

For more than would find itself

In reach. A constant expectation,

Common table, late hours at rest.

One closed his eyes, thought

Of his dead friends, of rotting

Masterpieces, their hopes,

The whispering shrine of sudden

Death in which they meditated

On its available mode of infinity.

There was no need to go further

With the arbitrary rules.

He opened his eyes, thought

Write the book

               
in your hearts.

Lose no time.

And the other, bewildered by himself,

Watched out the window,

Cracked through a diamond diagonal

Whose faults kept doubling the stars.

Anthony Hecht’s

And what if now I told you this, let’s say,

By telephone. Would you imagine me

Talking to myself in an empty room,

Watching myself in the window talking,

My lips moving silently, birdlike,

On the glass, or because superimposed

On it, among the branches of the tree

Inside my head? As if what I had to say

To you were in these miniatures of the day,

When it is last night’s shadow shadows

Have made bright.

                         Between us at the reading—

You up by that child’s coffin of a podium,

The new poem, your “Transparent Man,” to try,

And my seat halfway back in the dimmed house—

That couple conspicuous in the front row

You must have thought the worst audience:

He talked all the while you read, she hung

On
his
every word, not one of yours.

The others, rapt fan or narcolept,

Paid their own kind of attention, but not

Those two, calm in disregard, themselves

A commentary running from the point.

Into putdown? you must have wondered,

Your poem turned into an example, the example

Held up, if not to scorn, to a glaring

Spot of misunderstanding, some parody

Of the original idea, its afterlife

Of passageways and the mirrory reaches

Of beatitude where the dead select

Their patience and love discloses itself

Once and for all.

                         But you kept going.

I saw you never once look down at them,

As if by speaking
through
her you might

Save the girl for yourself and lead her back

To
your
poem,
your
words to lose herself in,

Who sat there as if at a bedside, watching,

In her shift of loud, clenched roses, her hands

Balled under her chin, the heart in her throat

All given in her gaze to the friend

Beside her. How clearly she stood out

Against everything going on in front of us.

It was then I realized that she was deaf

And the bearded boy, a line behind you,

Translating the poem for her into silence,

Helping it out of its disguise of words,

A story spilled expressionless from the lip

Of his mimed exaggerations, like last words

Unuttered but mouthed in the mind and formed

By what, through the closed eyelid’s archway,

Has been newly seen, those words she saw

And seeing heard—or not heard but let sink in,

Into a darkness past anyone’s telling,

There between us.

                         What she next said,

The bald childless woman in your fable,

She said, head turned, out the window

Of her hospital room to trees across the way,

The leaflorn beech and the sycamores

That stood like enlargements of the vascular

System of the brain, minds meditating on

The hill, the weather, the storm of leukemia

In the woman’s bloodstream, the whole lot

Of it “a riddle beyond the eye’s solution,”

These systems, anarchies, ends not our own.