Poems 1962-2012 (13 page)

to show he's capable

of open affection.

My father used

the dog in the same way.

My son and I, we're the living

experts in silence.

Snow's sweeping the sky;

it shifts directions, going

first steadily down, then sideways.

3.

One thing you learn, growing up with my sister:

you learn that rules don't mean anything.

Sooner or later, whatever you're waiting to hear will get itself said.

It doesn't matter what it is:
I love you
or
I'll never speak to you again.

It all gets said, often in the same night.

Then you slip in, you take advantage. There are ways

to hold a person to what's been said; for example, by using the word
promise.

But you have to have patience; you have to be able to wait, to listen.

My niece knows that in time, with intelligence, she'll get everything she wants.

It's not a bad life. Of course, she has those gifts,

time and intelligence.

ANIMALS

My sister and I reached

the same conclusion:

the best way

to love us was to not

spend time with us.

It seemed that

we appealed

chiefly to strangers.

We had good clothes, good

manners in public.

In private, we were

always fighting. Usually

the big one finished

sitting on the little one

and pinching her.

The little one

bit: in forty years

she never learned

the advantage in not

leaving a mark.

The parents

had a credo: they didn't

believe in anger.

The truth was, for different reasons,

they couldn't bring themselves

to inflict pain. You should only hurt

something you can give

your whole heart to. They preferred

tribunals: the child

most in the wrong could choose

her own punishment.

My sister and I

never became allies,

never turned on our parents.

We had

other obsessions: for example,

we both felt there were

too many of us

to survive.

We were like animals

trying to share a dry pasture.

Between us, one tree, barely

strong enough to sustain

a single life.

We never moved

our eyes from each other

nor did either touch

one thing that could

feed her sister.

SAINTS

In our family, there were two saints,

my aunt and my grandmother.

But their lives were different.

My grandmother's was tranquil, even at the end.

She was like a person walking in calm water;

for some reason

the sea couldn't bring itself to hurt her.

When my aunt took the same path,

the waves broke over her, they attacked her,

which is how the Fates respond

to a true spiritual nature.

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:

that's why she escaped suffering.

My aunt's escaped nothing;

each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

Still, she won't experience

the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:

where it touches land, it must turn to violence.

YELLOW DAHLIA

My sister's like a sun, like a yellow dahlia.

Daggers of gold hair around the face.

Gray eyes, full of spirit.

I made an enemy of a flower:

now, I'm ashamed.

We were supposed to be opposites:

one fair, like daylight.

One different, negative.

If there are two things

then one must be better,

isn't that true? I know now

we both thought that, if what children do

can really be called thinking.

I look at my sister's daughter,

a child so like her,

and I'm ashamed: nothing justifies

the impulse to destroy

a smaller, a dependent life.

I guess I knew that always.

That's why I had to hurt

myself instead:

I believed in justice.

We were like day and night,

one act of creation.

I couldn't separate

the two halves,

one child from the other.

COUSINS

My son's very graceful; he has perfect balance.

He's not competitive, like my sister's daughter.

Day and night, she's always practicing.

Today, it's hitting softballs into the copper beech,

retrieving them, hitting them again.

After a while, no one even watches her.

If she were any stronger, the tree would be bald.

My son won't play with her; he won't even ride bicycles with her.

She accepts that; she's used to playing by herself.

The way she sees it, it isn't personal:

whoever won't play doesn't like losing.

It's not that my son's inept, that he doesn't do things well.

I've watched him race: he's natural, effortless—

right from the first, he takes the lead.

And then he stops. It's as though he was born rejecting

the solitude of the victor.

My sister's daughter doesn't have that problem.

She may as well be first; she's already alone.

PARADISE

I grew up in a village: now

it's almost a city.

People came from the city, wanting

something simple, something

better for the children.

Clean air; nearby

a little stable.

All the streets

named after sweethearts or girl children.

Our house was gray, the sort of place

you buy to raise a family.

My mother's still there, all alone.

When she's lonely, she watches television.

The houses get closer together,

the old trees die or get taken down.

In some ways, my father's

close, too; we call

a stone by his name.

Now, above his head, the grass blinks,

in spring, when the snow has melted.

Then the lilac blooms, heavy, like clusters of grapes.

They always said

I was like my father, the way he showed

contempt for emotion.

They're the emotional ones,

my sister and my mother.

More and more

my sister comes from the city,

weeds, tidies the garden. My mother

lets her take over: she's the one

who cares, the one who does the work.

To her, it looks like country—

the clipped lawns, strips of colored flowers.

She doesn't know what it once was.

But I know. Like Adam,

I was the firstborn.

Believe me, you never heal,

you never forget the ache in your side,

the place where something was taken away

to make another person.

CHILD CRYING OUT

You're asleep now,

your eyelids quiver.

What son of mine

could be expected

to rest quietly, to live

even one moment

free of wariness?

The night's cold;

you've pushed the covers away.

As for your thoughts, your dreams—

I'll never understand

the claim of a mother

on a child's soul.

So many times

I made that mistake

in love, taking

some wild sound to be

the soul exposing itself—

But not with you,

even when I held you constantly.

You were born, you were far away.

Whatever those cries meant,

they came and went

whether I held you or not,

whether I was there or not.

The soul is silent.

If it speaks at all

it speaks in dreams.

SNOW

Late December: my father and I

are going to New York, to the circus.

He holds me

on his shoulders in the bitter wind:

scraps of white paper

blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked

to stand like this, to hold me

so he couldn't see me.

I remember

staring straight ahead

into the world my father saw;

I was learning

to absorb its emptiness,

the heavy snow

not falling, whirling around us.

TERMINAL RESEMBLANCE

When I saw my father for the last time, we both did the same thing.

He was standing in the doorway to the living room,

waiting for me to get off the telephone.

That he wasn't also pointing to his watch

was a signal he wanted to talk.

Talk for us always meant the same thing.

He'd say a few words. I'd say a few back.

That was about it.

It was the end of August, very hot, very humid.

Next door, workmen dumped new gravel on the driveway.

My father and I avoided being alone;

we didn't know how to connect, to make small talk—

there didn't seem to be

any other possibilities.

So this was special: when a man's dying,

he has a subject.

It must have been early morning. Up and down the street

sprinklers started coming on. The gardener's truck

appeared at the end of the block,

then stopped, parking.

My father wanted to tell me what it was like to be dying.

He told me he wasn't suffering.

He said he kept expecting pain, waiting for it, but it never came.

All he felt was a kind of weakness.

I said I was glad for him, that I thought he was lucky.

Some of the husbands were getting in their cars, going to work.

Not people we knew anymore. New families,

families with young children.

The wives stood on the steps, gesturing or calling.

We said goodbye in the usual way,

no embrace, nothing dramatic.

When the taxi came, my parents watched from the front door,

arm in arm, my mother blowing kisses as she always does,

because it frightens her when a hand isn't being used.

But for a change, my father didn't just stand there.

This time, he waved.

That's what I did, at the door to the taxi.

Like him, waved to disguise my hand's trembling.

LAMENT

Suddenly, after you die, those friends

who never agreed about anything

agree about your character.

They're like a houseful of singers rehearsing

the same score:

you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.

No harmony. No counterpoint. Except

they're not performers;

real tears are shed.

Luckily, you're dead; otherwise

you'd be overcome with revulsion.

But when that's passed,

when the guests begin filing out, wiping their eyes

because, after a day like this,

shut in with orthodoxy,

the sun's amazingly bright,

though it's late afternoon, September—

when the exodus begins,

that's when you'd feel

pangs of envy.

Your friends the living embrace one another,

gossip a little on the sidewalk

as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze

ruffles the women's shawls—

this, this, is the meaning of

“a fortunate life”: it means

to exist in the present.

MIRROR IMAGE

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as

the image of my father, whose life

was spent like this,

thinking of death, to the exclusion

of other sensual matters,

so in the end that life

was easy to give up, since

it contained nothing: even

my mother's voice couldn't make him

change or turn back

as he believed

that once you can't love another human being

you have no place in the world.

CHILDREN COMING HOME FROM SCHOOL

The year I started school, my sister couldn't walk long distances.

Every day, my mother strapped her in the stroller; then,

they'd walk to the corner.

That way, when school was over, I could see them; I could see my mother,

first a blur, then a shape with arms.

I walked very slowly, to appear to need nothing.

That's why my sister envied me—she didn't know

you can lie with your face, your body.

She didn't see we were both in false positions.

She wanted freedom. Whereas I continued, in pathetic ways,

to covet the stroller. Meaning

all my life.

And, in that sense, it was lost on me: all the waiting, all my mother's

effort to restrain my sister, all the calling, the waving,

since, in that sense, I had no home any longer.

AMAZONS

End of summer: the spruces put out a few green shoots.

Everything else is gold—that's how you know the end of the growing season.

A kind of symmetry between what's dying, what's just coming to bloom.

It's always been a sensitive time in this family.

We're dying out, too, the whole tribe.

My sister and I, we're the end of something.

Now the windows darken.

And the rain comes, steady and heavy.

In the dining room, the children draw.

That's what we did: when we couldn't see,

we made pictures.

I can see the end: it's the name that's going.

When we're done with it, it's finished, it's a dead language.

That's how language dies, because it doesn't need to be spoken.

My sister and I, we're like amazons,