Poems 1962-2012 (24 page)

I caution you as I was never cautioned:

you will never let go, you will never be satiated.

You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.

Your body will age, you will continue to need.

You will want the earth, then more of the earth—

Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.

It is encompassing, it will not minister.

Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,

it will not keep you alive.

MOTHER AND CHILD

We're all dreamers; we don't know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.

Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don't remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother's body.

Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.

Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.

And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.

Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn

to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.

Now it's your turn to be driven;

you're the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?

Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;

it is your turn to address it, to go back asking

what am I for? What am I for?

FABLE

We had, each of us, a set of wishes.

The number changed. And what we wished—

that changed also. Because

we had, all of us, such different dreams.

The wishes were all different, the hopes all different.

And the disasters and catastrophes, always different.

In great waves they left the earth,

even the one that is always wasted.

Waves of despair, waves of hopeless longing and heartache.

Waves of the mysterious wild hungers of youth, the dreams of childhood.

Detailed, urgent; once in a while, selfless.

All different, except of course

the wish to go back. Inevitably

last or first, repeated

over and over—

So the echo lingered. And the wish

held us and tormented us

though we knew in our own bodies

it was never granted.

We knew, and on dark nights, we acknowledged this.

How sweet the night became then,

once the wish released us,

how utterly silent.

SOLSTICE

Each year, on this same date, the summer solstice comes.

Consummate light: we plan for it,

the day we tell ourselves

that time is very long indeed, nearly infinite.

And in our reading and writing, preference is given

to the celebratory, the ecstatic.

There is in these rituals something apart from wonder:

there is also a kind of preening,

as though human genius had participated in these arrangements

and we found the results satisfying.

What follows the light is what precedes it:

the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

But tonight we sit in the garden in our canvas chairs

so late into the evening—

why should we look either forward or backward?

Why should we be forced to remember:

it is in our blood, this knowledge.

Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter.

It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.

It takes genius to forget these things.

STARS

I'm awake; I am in the world—

I expect

no further assurance.

No protection, no promise.

Solace of the night sky,

the hardly moving

face of the clock.

I'm alone—all

my riches surround me.

I have a bed, a room.

I have a bed, a vase

of flowers beside it.

And a nightlight, a book.

I'm awake; I am safe.

The darkness like a shield, the dreams

put off, maybe

vanished forever.

And the day—

the unsatisfying morning that says

I am your future,

here is your cargo of sorrow:

Do you reject me? Do you mean

to send me away because I am not

full,
in your word,

because you see

the black shape already implicit?

I will never be banished. I am the light,

your personal anguish and humiliation.

Do you dare

send me away as though

you were waiting for something better?

There is no better.

Only (for a short space)

the night sky like

a quarantine that sets you

apart from your task.

Only (softly, fiercely)

the stars shining. Here,

in the room, the bedroom.

Saying
I was brave, I resisted,

I set myself on fire.

YOUTH

My sister and I at two ends of the sofa,

reading (I suppose) English novels.

The television on; various schoolbooks open,

or places marked with sheets of lined paper.

Euclid, Pythagoras. As though we had looked into

the origin of thought and preferred novels.

Sad sounds of our growing up—

twilight of cellos. No trace

of a flute, a piccolo. And it seemed at the time

almost impossible to conceive of any of it

as evolving or malleable.

Sad sounds. Anecdotes

that were really still lives.

The pages of the novels turning;

the two dogs snoring quietly.

And from the kitchen,

sounds of our mother,

smell of rosemary, of lamb roasting.

A world in process

of shifting, of being made or dissolved,

and yet we didn't live that way;

all of us lived our lives

as the simultaneous ritualized enactment

of a great principle, something

felt but not understood.

And the remarks we made were like lines in a play,

spoken with conviction but not from choice.

A principle, a terrifying familial will

that implied opposition to change, to variation,

a refusal even to ask questions—

Now that world begins

to shift and eddy around us, only now

when it no longer exists.

It has become the present: unending and without form.

EXALTED IMAGE

Not one animal, but two.

Not one plate, dwarfed by cutlery,

but a pair of plates, a tablecloth.

And in the market, the little cart

neither poignantly empty nor

desperately full. And in the dark theater,

the two hands seeking each other.

Parts of a shrine, like a shrine in church,

blurred by candles.

And whose idea is this? Who is kneeling there

if not the child who doesn't belong,

the blemished one for whom

recess is the ordeal.

Later, bent over his work

while the others are passing notes,

earnestly applying what his teacher calls

his good mind to his assignment—

what is he protecting? Is it his heart again,

completely lost

in the margin at the edge of the notebook?

With what do you fill an empty life?

Amorous figures, the self

in a dream, the self

replicated in another self, the two

stacked together, though the arms and legs

are always perfectly shaded

as in an urn or bas relief.

Inside, ashes of the actual life.

Ashes, disappointment—

And all he asks

is to complete his work, to be

suspended in time like

an orange slice in an ice cube—

Shadows on the dark grass. The wind

suddenly still. And time, which is so impatient,

which wants to go on, lying quietly there, like an animal.

And the lovers lying there in each other's arms,

their shattered hearts mended again, as in life of course

they will never be, the moment

of consummate delight, of union, able to be sustained—

Is it vivid to them? He has seen them.

He has seen, in his singlemindedness, his apparent abstraction,

neither distracted nor frightened away

by all the writhing, the crying out—

And he has understood; he has restored it all,

exalted figure of the poet, figure of the dreamer.

REUNION

It is discovered, after twenty years, they like each other,

despite enormous differences (one a psychiatrist, one a city official),

differences that could have been, that were, predicted:

differences in tastes, in inclinations, and, now, in wealth

(the one literary, the one entirely practical and yet

deliciously wry; the two wives cordial and mutually curious).

And this discovery is, also, discovery of the self, of new capacities:

they are, in this conversation, like the great sages,

the philosophers they used to read (never together), men

of worldly accomplishment and wisdom, speaking

with all the charm and ebullience and eager openness for which

youth is so unjustly famous. And to these have been added

a broad tolerance and generosity, a movement away from any contempt or wariness.

It is a pleasure, now, to speak of the ways in which

their lives have developed, alike in some ways, in others

profoundly different (though each with its core of sorrow, either

implied or disclosed): to speak of the difference now,

to speak of everything that had been, once, part

of a kind of hovering terror, is to lay claim to a subject. Insofar

as theme elevates and shapes a dialogue, this one calls up in them (in its grandeur)

kindness and good will of a sort neither had seemed, before,

to possess. Time has been good to them, and now

they can discuss it together from within, so to speak,

which, before, they could not.

RADIUM

When summer ended, my sister was going to school.

No more staying at home with the dogs,

waiting to catch up. No more

playing house with my mother. She was growing up,

she could join the carpool.

No one wanted to stay home. Real life

was the world: you discovered radium,

you danced the swan queen. Nothing

explained my mother. Nothing explained

putting aside radium because you realized finally

it was more interesting to make beds,

to have children like my sister and me.

My sister watched the trees; the leaves

couldn't turn fast enough. She kept asking

was it fall, was it cold enough?

But it was still summer. I lay in bed,

listening to my sister breathe.

I could see her blond hair in the moonlight;

under the white sheet, her little elf's body.

And on the bureau, I could see my new notebook.

It was like my brain: clean, empty. In six months

what was written there would be in my head also.

I watched my sister's face, one side buried in her stuffed bear.

She was being stored in my head, as memory,

like facts in a book.

I didn't want to sleep. I never wanted to sleep

these days. Then I didn't want to wake up. I didn't want

the leaves turning, the nights turning dark early.

I didn't want to love my new clothes, my notebook.

I knew what they were: a bribe, a distraction.

Like the excitement of school: the truth was

time was moving in one direction, like a wave lifting

the whole house, the whole village.

I turned the light on, to wake my sister.

I wanted my parents awake and vigilant; I wanted them

to stop lying. But nobody woke. I sat up

reading my Greek myths in the nightlight.

The nights were cold, the leaves fell.

My sister was tired of school, she missed being home.

But it was too late to go back, too late to stop.

Summer was gone, the nights were dark. The dogs

wore sweaters to go outside.

And then fall was gone, the year was gone.

We were changing, we were growing up. But

it wasn't something you decided to do;

it was something that happened, something

you couldn't control.

Time was passing. Time was carrying us

faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory,

and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.

My mother stirred the soup. The onions,

by a miracle, became part of the potatoes.

BIRTHDAY

Amazingly, I can look back

fifty years. And there, at the end of the gaze,

a human being already entirely recognizable,

the hands clutched in the lap, the eyes

staring into the future with the combined

terror and hopelessness of a soul expecting annihilation.

Entirely familiar, though still, of course, very young.

Staring blindly ahead, the expression of someone staring into utter darkness.

And thinking—which meant, I remember, the attempts of the mind

to prevent change.

Familiar, recognizable, but much more deeply alone, more despondent.

She does not, in her view, meet the definition

of child, a person with everything to look forward to.

This is how the others look; this is, therefore, what they are.

Constantly making friends

with the camera, many of them actually

smiling with real conviction—

I remember that age. Riddled with self-doubt, self-loathing,

and at the same time suffused