Poems 1962-2012 (31 page)

*   *   *

Cold light filling the room.

I know where we are

she said

that's the window

when I was a child

That's my first home, she said

that square box—

go ahead and laugh.

Like the inside of my head:

you can see out

but you can't go out—

*   *   *

Just think

the sun was there, in that bare place

the winter sun

not close enough to reach

the children's hearts

the light saying

you can see out

but you can't go out

Here, it says,

here is where everything belongs

A MYTH OF DEVOTION

When Hades decided he loved this girl

he built for her a duplicate of earth,

everything the same, down to the meadow,

but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,

because it would be hard on a young girl

to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness.

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,

first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.

Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.

Let Persephone get used to it slowly.

In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth

except there was love here.

Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years,

building a world, watching

Persephone in the meadow.

Persephone, a smeller, a taster.

If you have one appetite, he thought,

you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night

the beloved body, compass, polestar,

to hear the quiet breathing that says

I am alive,
that means also

you are alive, because you hear me,

you are here with me. And when one turns,

the other turns—

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,

looking at the world he had

constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind

that there'd be no more smelling here,

certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?

These things he couldn't imagine;

no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.

First he thinks:
The New Hell.
Then:
The Garden.

In the end, he decides to name it

Persephone's Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,

behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.

He wants to say
I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks

this is a lie, so he says in the end

you're dead, nothing can hurt you

which seems to him

a more promising beginning, more true.

AVERNO

1.

You die when your spirit dies.

Otherwise, you live.

You may not do a good job of it, but you go on—

something you have no choice about.

When I tell this to my children

they pay no attention.

The old people, they think—

this is what they always do:

talk about things no one can see

to cover up all the brain cells they're losing.

They wink at each other;

listen to the old one, talking about the spirit

because he can't remember anymore the word for chair.

It is terrible to be alone.

I don't mean to live alone—

to
be
alone, where no one hears you.

I remember the word for chair.

I want to say—I'm just not interested anymore.

I wake up thinking

you have to prepare.

Soon the spirit will give up—

all the chairs in the world won't help you.

I know what they say when I'm out of the room.

Should I be seeing someone, should I be taking

one of the new drugs for depression.

I can hear them, in whispers, planning how to divide the cost.

And I want to scream out

you're all of you living in a dream.

Bad enough, they think, to watch me falling apart.

Bad enough without this lecturing they get these days

as though I had any right to this new information.

Well, they have the same right.

They're living in a dream, and I'm preparing

to be a ghost. I want to shout out

the mist has cleared—

It's like some new life:

you have no stake in the outcome;

you know the outcome.

Think of it: sixty years sitting in chairs. And now the mortal spirit

seeking so openly, so fearlessly—

To raise the veil.

To see what you're saying goodbye to.

2.

I didn't go back for a long time.

When I saw the field again, autumn was finished.

Here, it finishes almost before it starts—

the old people don't even own summer clothing.

The field was covered with snow, immaculate.

There wasn't a sign of what happened here.

You didn't know whether the farmer

had replanted or not.

Maybe he gave up and moved away.

The police didn't catch the girl.

After awhile they said she moved to some other country,

one where they don't have fields.

A disaster like this

leaves no mark on the earth.

And people like that—they think it gives them

a fresh start.

I stood a long time, staring at nothing.

After a bit, I noticed how dark it was, how cold.

A long time—I have no idea how long.

Once the earth decides to have no memory

time seems in a way meaningless.

But not to my children. They're after me

to make a will; they're worried the government

will take everything.

They should come with me sometime

to look at this field under the cover of snow.

The whole thing is written out there.

Nothing: I have nothing to give them.

That's the first part.

The second is: I don't want to be burned.

3.

On one side, the soul wanders.

On the other, human beings living in fear.

In between, the pit of disappearance.

Some young girls ask me

if they'll be safe near Averno—

they're cold, they want to go south a little while.

And one says, like a joke, but not too far south—

I say, as safe as anywhere,

which makes them happy.

What it means is nothing is safe.

You get on a train, you disappear.

You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,

places you enter as a young girl,

from which you never return.

Like the field, the one that burned.

Afterward, the girl was gone.

Maybe she didn't exist,

we have no proof either way.

All we know is:

the field burned.

But we
saw
that.

So we have to believe in the girl,

in what she did. Otherwise

it's just forces we don't understand

ruling the earth.

The girls are happy, thinking of their vacation.

Don't take a train, I say.

They write their names in mist on a train window.

I want to say, you're good girls,

trying to leave your names behind.

4.

We spent the whole day

sailing the archipelago,

the tiny islands that were

part of the peninsula

until they'd broken off

into the fragments you see now

floating in the northern sea water.

They seemed safe to me,

I think because no one can live there.

Later we sat in the kitchen

watching the evening start and then the snow.

First one, then the other.

We grew silent, hypnotized by the snow

as though a kind of turbulence

that had been hidden before

was becoming visible,

something within the night

exposed now—

In our silence, we were asking

those questions friends who trust each other

ask out of great fatigue,

each one hoping the other knows more

and when this isn't so, hoping

their shared impressions will amount to insight.

Is there any benefit in forcing upon oneself

the realization that one must die?

Is it possible to miss the opportunity of one's life?

Questions like that.

The snow heavy. The black night

transformed into busy white air.

Something we hadn't seen revealed.

Only the meaning wasn't revealed.

5.

After the first winter, the field began to grow again.

But there were no more orderly furrows.

The smell of the wheat persisted, a kind of random aroma

intermixed with various weeds, for which

no human use has been as yet devised.

It was puzzling—no one knew

where the farmer had gone.

Some people thought he died.

Someone said he had a daughter in New Zealand,

that he went there to raise

grandchildren instead of wheat.

Nature, it turns out, isn't like us;

it doesn't have a warehouse of memory.

The field doesn't become afraid of matches,

of young girls. It doesn't remember

furrows either. It gets killed off, it gets burned,

and a year later it's alive again

as though nothing unusual has occurred.

The farmer stares out the window.

Maybe in New Zealand, maybe somewhere else.

And he thinks:
my life is over.

His life expressed itself in that field;

he doesn't believe anymore in making anything

out of earth. The earth, he thinks,

has overpowered me.

He remembers the day the field burned,

not, he thinks, by accident.

Something deep within him said:
I can live with this,

I can fight it after awhile.

The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,

when he understood that the earth

didn't know how to mourn, that it would change instead.

And then go on existing without him.

OMENS

I rode to meet you: dreams

like living beings swarmed around me

and the moon on my right side

followed me, burning.

I rode back: everything changed.

My soul in love was sad

and the moon on my left side

trailed me without hope.

To such endless impressions

we poets give ourselves absolutely,

making, in silence, omen of mere event,

until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.

after Alexander Pushkin

TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away

when you forget where you are

because you've been living, it seems,

somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.

You're in a different place,

a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.

You exist as the stars exist,

participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.

At night, on a cold hill,

taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward

not that the image is false

but the relation is false.

You see again how far away

each thing is from every other thing.

THRUSH

—
for Noah Max Horwitz and Susan Kimmelman, in memory

Snow began falling, over the surface of the whole earth.

That can't be true. And yet it felt true,

falling more and more thickly over everything I could see.

The pines turned brittle with ice.

This is the place I told you about,

where I used to come at night to see the red-winged blackbirds,

what we call
thrush
here—

red flicker of the life that disappears—

But for me—I think the guilt I feel must mean

I haven't lived very well.

Someone like me doesn't escape. I think you sleep awhile,

then you descend into the terror of the next life

except

the soul is in some different form,

more or less conscious than it was before,

more or less covetous.

After many lives, maybe something changes.

I think in the end what you want

you'll be able to see—

Then you don't need anymore

to die and come back again.

PERSEPHONE THE WANDERER

In the second version, Persephone

is dead. She dies, her mother grieves—

problems of sexuality need not

trouble us here.

Compulsively, in grief, Demeter

circles the earth. We don't expect to know

what Persephone is doing.

She is dead, the dead are mysteries.

We have here

a mother and a cipher: this is

accurate to the experience

of the mother as

she looks into the infant's face. She thinks:

I remember when you didn't exist.
The infant

is puzzled; later, the child's opinion is

she has always existed, just as

her mother has always existed

in her present form. Her mother

is like a figure at a bus stop,

an audience for the bus's arrival. Before that,

she was the bus, a temporary