Poems 1962-2012 (26 page)

Because it
was
true: when I didn't move I was perfect.

RAIN IN SUMMER

We were supposed to be, all of us,

a circle, a line at every point

equally weighted or tensed, equally

close to the center. I saw it

differently. In my mind, my parents

were the circle; my sister and I

were trapped inside.

Long Island. Terrible

storms off the Atlantic, summer rain

hitting the gray shingles. I watched

the copper beech, the dark leaves turning

a sort of lacquered ebony. It seemed to be

secure, as secure as the house.

It made sense to be housebound.

We were anyway: we couldn't change who we were.

We couldn't change even the smallest facts:

our long hair parted in the center,

secured with two barrettes. We embodied

those ideas of my mother's

not appropriate to adult life.

Ideas of childhood: how to look, how to act.

Ideas of spirit: what gifts to claim, to develop.

Ideas of character: how to be driven, how to prevail,

how to triumph in the true manner of greatness

without seeming to lift a finger.

It was all going on much too long:

childhood, summer. But we were safe;

we lived in a closed form.

Piano lessons. Poems, drawings. Summer rain

hammering at the circle. And the mind

developing within fixed conditions

a few tragic assumptions: we felt safe,

meaning we saw the world as dangerous.

We would prevail or conquer, meaning

we saw homage as love.

My sister and I stared out

into the violence of the summer rain.

It was obvious to us two people couldn't

prevail at the same time. My sister

took my hand, reaching across the flowered cushions.

Neither of us could see, yet,

the cost of any of this.

But she was frightened, she trusted me.

CIVILIZATION

It came to us very late:

perception of beauty, desire for knowledge.

And in the great minds, the two often configured as one.

To perceive, to speak, even on subjects inherently cruel—

to speak boldly even when the facts were, in themselves, painful or dire—

seemed to introduce among us some new action,

having to do with human obsession, human passion.

And yet something, in this action, was being conceded.

And this offended what remained in us of the animal:

it was enslavement speaking, assigning

power to forces outside ourselves.

Therefore the ones who spoke were exiled and silenced,

scorned in the streets.

But the facts persisted. They were among us,

isolated and without pattern; they were among us,

shaping us—

Darkness. Here and there a few fires in doorways,

wind whipping around the corners of buildings—

Where were the silenced, who conceived these images?

In the dim light, finally summoned, resurrected.

As the scorned were praised, who had brought

these truths to our attention, who had felt their presence,

who had perceived them clearly in their blackness and horror

and had arranged them to communicate

some vision of their substance, their magnitude—

In which the facts themselves were suddenly

serene, glorious. They were among us,

not singly, as in chaos, but woven

into relationship or set in order, as though life on earth

could, in this one form, be apprehended deeply

though it could never be mastered.

DECADE

What joy touches

the solace of ritual? A void

appears in the life.

A shock so deep, so terrible,

its force

levels the perceived world. You were

a beast at the edge of its cave, only

waking and sleeping. Then

the minute shift; the eye

taken by something.

Spring: the unforeseen

flooding the abyss.

And the life

filling again. And finally

a place

found for everything.

THE EMPTY GLASS

I asked for much; I received much.

I asked for much; I received little, I received

next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.

A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was

hard-hearted, remote. I was

selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in early childhood.

Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.

I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract

tide of fortune turned

from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,

to celestial force? To be safe,

I prayed. I tried to be a better person.

Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror

and matured into moral narcissism

might have become in fact

actual human growth. Maybe

this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,

telling me they understood

the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,

implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick

to give so much for so little.

Whereas they meant I was
good
(clasping my hand intensely)—

a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,

like a great queen or saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.

And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe

in effort, to believe some good will come of simply
trying,

a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse

to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?

Whirling in the dark universe,

alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?

Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,

tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring

attempts to build character.

What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question

that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,

the Greek ships at the ready, the sea

invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future

lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking

it could be controlled. He should have said

I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

QUINCE TREE

We had, in the end, only the weather for a subject.

Luckily, we lived in a world with seasons—

we felt, still, access to variety:

darkness, euphoria, various kinds of waiting.

I suppose, in the true sense, our exchanges

couldn't be called conversation, being

dominated by accord, by repetition.

And yet it would be wrong to imagine

we had neither sense of one another nor

deep response to the world, as it would be wrong to believe

our lives were narrow, or empty.

We had great wealth.

We had, in fact, everything we could see

and while it is true we could see

neither great distance nor fine detail,

what we were able to discern we grasped

with a hunger the young can barely conceive,

as though all experience had been channeled into

these few perceptions.

Channeled without memory.

Because the past was lost to us as referent,

lost as image, as narrative. What had it contained?

Was there love? Had there been, once,

sustained labor? Or fame, had there ever been

something like that?

In the end, we didn't need to ask. Because

we felt the past; it was, somehow,

in these things, the front lawn and back lawn,

suffusing them, giving the little quince tree

a weight and meaning almost beyond enduring.

Utterly lost and yet strangely alive, the whole of our human existence—

it would be wrong to think

because we never left the yard

that what we felt there was somehow shrunken or partial.

In its grandeur and splendor, the world

was finally present.

And it was always this we discussed or alluded to

when we were moved to speak.

The weather. The quince tree.

You, in your innocence, what do you know of this world?

THE TRAVELER

At the top of the tree was what I wanted.

Fortunately I had read books:

I knew I was being tested.

I knew nothing would work—

not to climb that high, not to force

the fruit down. One of three results must follow:

the fruit isn't what you imagined,

or it is but fails to satiate.

Or it is damaged in falling

and as a shattered thing torments you forever.

But I refused to be

bested by fruit. I stood under the tree,

waiting for my mind to save me.

I stood, long after the fruit rotted.

And after many years, a traveler passed by me

where I stood, and greeted me warmly,

as one would greet a brother. And I asked why,

why was I so familiar to him,

having never seen him?

And he said, “Because I am like you,

therefore I recognize you. I treated all experience

as a spiritual or intellectual trial

in which to exhibit or prove my superiority

to my predecessors. I chose

to live in hypothesis; longing sustained me.

In fact, what I needed most was longing, which you seem

to have achieved in stasis,

but which I have found in change, in departure.”

ARBORETUM

We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger.

Not needing, anymore, even to make a contribution.

Merely wishing to linger: to be, to be here.

And to stare at things, but with no real avidity.

To browse, to purchase nothing.

But there were many of us; we took up time. We crowded out

our own children, and the children of friends. We did great damage,

meaning no harm.

We continued to plan; to fix things as they broke.

To repair, to improve. We traveled, we put in gardens.

And we continued brazenly to plant trees and perennials.

We asked so little of the world. We understood

the offense of advice, of holding forth. We checked ourselves:

we were correct, we were silent.

But we could not cure ourselves of desire, not completely.

Our hands, folded, reeked of it.

How did we do so much damage, merely sitting and watching,

strolling, on fine days, the grounds of the park, the arboretum,

or sitting on benches in front of the public library,

feeding pigeons out of a paper bag?

We were correct, and yet desire pursued us.

Like a great force, a god. And the young

were offended; their hearts

turned cold in reaction. We asked

so little of the world; small things seemed to us

immense wealth. Merely to smell once more the early roses

in the arboretum: we asked

so little, and we claimed nothing. And the young

withered nevertheless.

Or they became like stones in the arboretum: as though

our continued existence, our asking so little for so many years, meant

we asked everything.

DREAM OF LUST

After one of those nights, a day:

the mind dutiful, waking, putting on its slippers,

and the spirit restive, muttering

I'd rather, I'd rather—

Where did it come from,

so sudden, so fierce,

an unexpected animal? Who

was the mysterious figure?

You are ridiculously young, I told him.

The day tranquil, beautiful, expecting attention.

The night distracting and barred—

and I cannot return,

not even for information.

Roses in bloom, penstemon, the squirrels

preoccupied for the moment.

And suddenly I don't live here, I live in a mystery.

He had an odd lumbering gaucheness

that became erotic grace.

It is what I thought and not what I thought:

the world is not my world, the human body

makes an impasse, an obstacle.

Clumsy, in jeans, then suddenly

doing the most amazing things

as though they were entirely his idea—

But the afterward at the end of the timeless:

coffee, dark bread, the sustaining rituals

going on now so far away—

the human body a compulsion, a magnet,

the dream itself obstinately

clinging, the spirit

helpless to let it go—

it is still not worth

losing the world.

GRACE

We were taught, in those years,

never to speak of good fortune.

To not speak, to not feel—

it was the smallest step for a child

of any imagination.

And yet an exception was made

for the language of faith;

we were trained in the rudiments of this language

as a precaution.

Not to speak swaggeringly in the world

but to speak in homage, abjectly, privately—

And if one lacked faith?

If one believed, even in childhood, only in chance—

such powerful words they used, our teachers!

Disgrace, punishment: many of us

preferred to remain mute, even in the presence of the divine.

Ours were the voices raised in lament

against the cruel vicissitudes.

Ours were the dark libraries, the treatises

on affliction. In the dark, we recognized one another;