Poems 1962-2012 (27 page)

we saw, each in the other's gaze,

experience never manifested in speech.

The miraculous, the sublime, the undeserved;

the relief merely of waking once more in the morning—

only now, with old age nearly beginning,

do we dare to speak of such things, or confess, with gusto,

even to the smallest joys. Their disappearance

approaches, in any case: ours are the lives

this knowledge enters as a gift.

FABLE

The weather grew mild, the snow melted.

The snow melted, and in its place

flowers of early spring:

mertensia, chionodoxa. The earth

turned blue by mistake.

Urgency, there was so much urgency—

to change, to escape the past.

It was cold, it was winter:

I was frightened for my life—

Then it was spring, the earth

turning a surprising blue.

The weather grew mild, the snow melted—

spring overtook it.

And then summer. And time stopped

because we stopped waiting.

And summer lasted. It lasted

because we were happy.

The weather grew mild, like

the past circling back

intending to be gentle, like

a form of the everlasting.

Then the dream ended. The everlasting began.

THE MUSE OF HAPPINESS

The windows shut, the sun rising.

Sounds of a few birds;

the garden filmed with a light moisture.

And the insecurity of great hope

suddenly gone.

And the heart still alert.

And a thousand small hopes stirring,

not new but newly acknowledged.

Affection, dinner with friends.

And the structure of certain

adult tasks.

The house clean, silent.

The trash not needing to be taken out.

It is a kingdom, not an act of imagination:

and still very early,

the white buds of the penstemon open.

Is it possible we have finally paid

bitterly enough?

That sacrifice is not to be required,

that anxiety and terror have been judged sufficient?

A squirrel racing along the telephone wire,

a crust of bread in its mouth.

And darkness delayed by the season.

So that it seems

part of a great gift

not to be feared any longer.

The day unfurling, but very gradually, a solitude

not to be feared, the changes

faint, barely perceived—

the penstemon open.

The likelihood

of seeing it through to the end.

RIPE PEACH

1.

There was a time

only certainty gave me

any joy. Imagine—

certainty, a dead thing.

2.

And then the world,

the experiment.

The obscene mouth

famished with love—

it is like love:

the abrupt, hard

certainty of the end—

3.

In the center of the mind,

the hard pit,

the conclusion. As though

the fruit itself

never existed, only

the end, the point

midway between

anticipation and nostalgia—

4.

So much fear.

So much terror of the physical world.

The mind frantic

guarding the body from

the passing, the temporary,

the body straining against it—

5.

A peach on the kitchen table.

A replica. It is the earth,

the same

disappearing sweetness

surrounding the stone end,

and like the earth

available—

6.

An opportunity

for happiness: earth

we cannot possess

only experience— And now

sensation: the mind

silenced by fruit—

7.

They are not

reconciled. The body

here, the mind

separate, not

merely a warden:

it has separate joys.

It is the night sky,

the fiercest stars are its

immaculate distinctions—

8.

Can it survive? Is there

light that survives the end

in which the mind's enterprise

continues to live: thought

darting about the room,

above the bowl of fruit—

9.

Fifty years. The night sky

filled with shooting stars.

Light, music

from far away—I must be

nearly gone. I must be

stone, since the earth

surrounds me—

10.

There was

a peach in a wicker basket.

There was a bowl of fruit.

Fifty years. Such a long walk

from the door to the table.

UNPAINTED DOOR

Finally, in middle age,

I was tempted to return to childhood.

The house was the same, but

the door was different.

Not red anymore—unpainted wood.

The trees were the same: the oak, the copper beech.

But the people—all the inhabitants of the past—

were gone: lost, dead, moved away.

The children from across the street

old men and women.

The sun was the same, the lawns

parched brown in summer.

But the present was full of strangers.

And in some way it was all exactly right,

exactly as I remembered: the house, the street,

the prosperous village—

Not to be reclaimed or re-entered

but to legitimize

silence and distance,

distance of place, of time,

bewildering accuracy of imagination and dream—

I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.

This is the house; this must be

the childhood I had in mind.

MITOSIS

No one actually remembers them

as not divided. Whoever says he does—

that person is lying.

No one remembers. And somehow

everyone knows:

they had to be, in the beginning, equally straightforward,

committed to a direct path.

In the end, only the body continued

implacably moving ahead, as it had to,

to stay alive.

But at some point the mind lingered.

It wanted more time by the sea, more time in the fields

gathering wildflowers. It wanted

more nights sleeping in its own bed; it wanted

its own nightlight, its favorite drink.

And more mornings—it wanted these

possibly most of all. More

of the first light, the penstemon blooming, the alchemilla

still covered with its evening jewels, the night rain

still clinging to it.

And then, more radically, it wanted to go back.

It wished simply to repeat the whole passage,

like the exultant conductor, who feels only that

the violin might have been a little softer, more plangent.

And through all this, the body

continues like the path of an arrow

as it has to, to live.

And if that means to get to the end

(the mind buried like an arrowhead), what choice does it have,

what dream except the dream of the future?

Limitless world! The vistas clear, the clouds risen.

The water azure, the sea plants bending and sighing

among the coral reefs, the sullen mermaids

all suddenly angels, or like angels. And music

rising over the open sea—

Exactly like the dream of the mind.

The same sea, the same shimmering fields.

The plate of fruit, the identical

violin (in the past and the future) but

softer now, finally

sufficiently sad.

EROS

I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.

I was in a kind of dream or trance—

in love, and yet

I wanted nothing.

It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.

I wanted only this:

the room, the chair, the sound of the rain falling,

hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.

I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.

My heart had become small; it took very little to fill it.

I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city—

You were not concerned; I could let you

live as you needed to live.

At dawn the rain abated. I did the things

one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,

but I moved like a sleepwalker.

It was enough and it no longer involved you.

A few days in a strange city.

A conversation, the touch of a hand.

And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.

That was what I wanted: to be naked.

THE RUSE

They sat far apart

deliberately, to experience, daily,

the sweetness of seeing each other across

great distance. They understood

instinctively that erotic passion

thrives on distance, either

actual (one is married, one

no longer loves the other) or

spurious, deceptive, a ruse

miming the subordination

of passion to social convention,

but a ruse, so that it demonstrated

not the power of convention but rather

the power of eros to annihilate

objective reality. The world, time, distance—

withering like dry fields before

the fire of the gaze—

Never before. Never with anyone else.

And after the eyes, the hands.

Experienced as glory, as consecration—

Sweet. And after so many years,

completely unimaginable.

Never before. Never with anyone else.

And then the whole thing

repeated exactly with someone else.

Until it was finally obvious

that the only constant

was distance, the servant of need.

Which was used to sustain

whatever fire burned in each of us.

The eyes, the hands—less crucial

than we believed. In the end

distance was sufficient, by itself.

TIME

There was too much, always, then too little.

Childhood: sickness.

By the side of the bed I had a little bell—

at the other end of the bell, my mother.

Sickness, gray rain. The dogs slept through it. They slept on the bed,

at the end of it, and it seemed to me they understood

about childhood: best to remain unconscious.

The rain made gray slats on the windows.

I sat with my book, the little bell beside me.

Without hearing a voice, I apprenticed myself to a voice.

Without seeing any sign of the spirit, I determined

to live in the spirit.

The rain faded in and out.

Month after month, in the space of a day.

Things became dreams; dreams became things.

Then I was well; the bell went back to the cupboard.

The rain ended. The dogs stood at the door,

panting to go outside.

I was well, then I was an adult.

And time went on—it was like the rain,

so much, so much, as though it was a weight that couldn't be moved.

I was a child, half sleeping.

I was sick; I was protected.

And I lived in the world of the spirit,

the world of the gray rain,

the lost, the remembered.

Then suddenly the sun was shining.

And time went on, even when there was almost none left.

And the perceived became the remembered,

the remembered, the perceived.

MEMOIR

I was born cautious, under the sign of Taurus.

I grew up on an island, prosperous,

in the second half of the twentieth century;

the shadow of the Holocaust

hardly touched us.

I had a philosophy of love, a philosophy

of religion, both based on

early experience within a family.

And if when I wrote I used only a few words

it was because time always seemed to me short

as though it could be stripped away

at any moment.

And my story, in any case, wasn't unique

though, like everyone else, I had a story,

a point of view.

A few words were all I needed:

nourish, sustain, attack.

SAINT JOAN

When I was seven, I had a vision:

I believed I would die. I would die

at ten, of polio. I saw my death:

it was a vision, an insight—

it was what Joan had, to save France.

I grieved bitterly. Cheated

of earth, cheated

of a whole childhood, of the great dreams of my heart

which would never be manifest.

No one knew any of this.

And then I lived.

I kept being alive

when I should have been burning:

I was Joan, I was Lazarus.

Monologue

of childhood, of adolescence.

I was Lazarus, the world given to me again.

Nights I lay in my bed, waiting to be found out.

And the voices returned, but the world

refused to withdraw.

I lay awake, listening.

Fifty years ago, in my childhood.

And of course now.

What was it, speaking to me? Terror

of death, terror of gradual loss;

fear of sickness in its bridal whites—

When I was seven, I believed I would die:

only the dates were wrong. I heard

a dark prediction

rising in my own body.

I gave you your chance.

I listened to you, I believed in you.

I will not let you have me again.

AUBADE

There was one summer

that returned many times over

there was one flower unfurling

taking many forms

Crimson of the monarda, pale gold of the late roses

There was one love