Poems 1962-2012 (33 page)

The mountain stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists,

that it mustn't be forgotten.

Above the sea, the clouds form as the wind rises,

dispersing them, giving them a sense of purpose.

Tomorrow the dawn won't come.

The sky won't go back to being the sky of day; it will go on as night,

except the stars will fade and vanish as the storm arrives,

lasting perhaps ten hours altogether.

But the world as it was cannot return.

One by one, the lights of the village houses dim

and the mountain shines in the darkness with reflected light.

No sound. Only cats scuffling in the doorways.

They smell the wind: time to make more cats.

Later, they prowl the streets, but the smell of the wind stalks them.

It's the same in the fields, confused by the smell of blood,

though for now only the wind rises; stars turn the field silver.

This far from the sea and still we know these signs.

The night is an open book.

But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.

SUNSET

At the same time as the sun's setting,

a farm worker's burning dead leaves.

It's nothing, this fire.

It's a small thing, controlled,

like a family run by a dictator.

Still, when it blazes up, the farm worker disappears;

from the road, he's invisible.

Compared to the sun, all the fires here

are short-lived, amateurish—

they end when the leaves are gone.

Then the farm worker reappears, raking the ashes.

But the death is real.

As though the sun's done what it came to do,

made the field grow, then

inspired the burning of earth.

So it can set now.

IN THE CAFÉ

It's natural to be tired of earth.

When you've been dead this long, you'll probably be tired of heaven.

You do what you can do in a place

but after a while you exhaust that place,

so you long for rescue.

My friend falls in love a little too easily.

Every year or so a new girl—

If they have children he doesn't mind;

he can fall in love with children also.

So the rest of us get sour and he stays the same,

full of adventure, always making new discoveries.

But he hates moving, so the women have to come from here, or near here.

Every month or so, we meet for coffee.

In summer, we'll walk around the meadow, sometimes as far as the mountain.

Even when he suffers, he's thriving, happy in his body.

It's partly the women, of course, but not that only.

He moves into their houses, learns to like the movies they like.

It's not an act—he really does learn,

the way someone goes to cooking school and learns to cook.

He sees everything with their eyes.

He becomes not what they are but what they could be

if they weren't trapped in their characters.

For him, this new self of his is liberating because it's invented—

he absorbs the fundamental needs in which their souls are rooted,

he experiences as his own the rituals and preferences these give rise to—

but as he lives with each woman, he inhabits each version of himself

fully, because it isn't compromised by the normal shame and anxiety.

When he leaves, the women are devastated.

Finally they met a man who answered all their needs—

there was nothing they couldn't tell him.

When they meet him now, he's a cipher—

the person they knew doesn't exist anymore.

He came into existence when they met,

he vanished when it ended, when he walked away.

After a few years, they get over him.

They tell their new boyfriends how amazing it was,

like living with another woman, but without the spite, the envy,

and with a man's strength, a man's clarity of mind.

And the men tolerate this, they even smile.

They stroke the women's hair—

they know this man doesn't exist; it's hard for them to feel competitive.

You couldn't ask, though, for a better friend,

a more subtle observer. When we talk, he's candid and open,

he's kept the intensity we all had when we were young.

He talks openly of fear, of the qualities he detests in himself.

And he's generous—he knows how I am just by looking.

If I'm frustrated or angry, he'll listen for hours,

not because he's forcing himself, because he's interested.

I guess that's how he is with the women.

But the friends he never leaves—

with them, he's trying to stand outside his life, to see it clearly—

Today he wants to sit; there's a lot to say,

too much for the meadow. He wants to be face to face,

talking to someone he's known forever.

He's on the verge of a new life.

His eyes glow, he isn't interested in the coffee.

Even though it's sunset, for him

the sun is rising again, and the fields are flushed with dawn light,

rose-colored and tentative.

He's himself in these moments, not pieces of the women

he's slept with. He enters their lives as you enter a dream,

without volition, and he lives there as you live in a dream,

however long it lasts. And in the morning, you remember

nothing of the dream at all, nothing at all.

IN THE PLAZA

For two weeks he's been watching the same girl,

someone he sees in the plaza. In her twenties maybe,

drinking coffee in the afternoon, the little dark head

bent over a magazine.

He watches from across the square, pretending

to be buying something, cigarettes, maybe a bouquet of flowers.

Because she doesn't know it exists,

her power is very great now, fused to the needs of his imagination.

He is her prisoner. She says the words he gives her

in a voice he imagines, low-pitched and soft,

a voice from the south as the dark hair must be from the south.

Soon she will recognize him, then begin to expect him.

And perhaps then every day her hair will be freshly washed,

she will gaze outward across the plaza before looking down.

And after that they will become lovers.

But he hopes this will not happen immediately

since whatever power she exerts now over his body, over his emotions,

she will have no power once she commits herself—

she will withdraw into that private world of feeling

women enter when they love. And living there, she will become

like a person who casts no shadow, who is not present in the world;

in that sense, so little use to him

it hardly matters whether she lives or dies.

DAWN

1.

Child waking up in a dark room

screaming I want my duck back, I want my duck back

in a language nobody understands in the least—

There is no duck.

But the dog, all upholstered in white plush—

the dog is right there in the crib next to him.

Years and years—that's how much time passes.

All in a dream. But the duck—

no one knows what happened to that.

2.

They've just met, now

they're sleeping near an open window.

Partly to wake them, to assure them

that what they remember of the night is correct,

now light needs to enter the room,

also to show them the context in which this occurred:

socks half hidden under a dirty mat,

quilt decorated with green leaves—

the sunlight specifying

these but not other objects,

setting boundaries, sure of itself, not arbitrary,

then lingering, describing

each thing in detail,

fastidious, like a composition in English,

even a little blood on the sheets—

3.

Afterward, they separate for the day.

Even later, at a desk, in the market,

the manager not satisfied with the figures he's given,

the berries moldy under the topmost layer—

so that one withdraws from the world

even as one continues to take action in it—

You get home, that's when you notice the mold.

Too late, in other words.

As though the sun blinded you for a moment.

FIRST SNOW

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep,

or so the story goes.

But I'm not tired, it says.

And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired—

You can see it in her face, everyone can.

So the snow has to fall, sleep has to come.

Because the mother's sick to death of her life

and needs silence.

EARTHWORM

Mortal standing on top of the earth, refusing

to enter the earth: you tell yourself

you are able to see deeply

the conflicts of which you are made but, facing death,

you will not dig deeply—if you sense

that pity engulfs you, you are not

delusional: not all pity

descends from higher to lesser, some

arises out of the earth itself, persistent

yet devoid of coercion. We can be split in two, but you are

mutilated at the core, your mind

detached from your feelings—

repression does not deceive

organisms like ourselves:

once you enter the earth, you will not fear the earth;

once you inhabit your terror,

death will come to seem a web of channels or tunnels like

a sponge's or honeycomb's, which, as part of us,

you will be free to explore. Perhaps

you will find in these travels

a wholeness that eluded you—as men and women

you were never free

to register in your body whatever left

a mark on your spirit.

AT THE RIVER

One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about

what she referred to as
pleasure,
though you could see she felt

some sort of unease about this ceremony, which she tried to cover up

by first taking my hand, as though somebody in the family had just died—

she went on holding my hand as she made her speech,

which was more like a speech about mechanical engineering

than a conversation about pleasure. In her other hand,

she had a book from which, apparently, she'd taken the main facts.

She did the same thing with the others, my two brothers and sister,

and the book was always the same book, dark blue,

though we each got our own copy.

There was a line drawing on the cover

showing a man and woman holding hands

but standing fairly far apart, like people on two sides of a dirt road.

Obviously, she and my father did not have a language for what they did

which, from what I could judge, wasn't pleasure.

At the same time, whatever holds human beings together

could hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested,

among other things, that you could only achieve pleasure

with a person of the opposite sex,

so you didn't get two sockets, say, and no plug.

School wasn't in session.

I went back to my room and shut the door

and my mother went into the kitchen

where my father was pouring glasses of wine for himself and his invisible guest

who—surprise—doesn't appear.

No, it's just my father and his friend the Holy Ghost

partying the night away until the bottle runs out,

after which my father continues sitting at the table

with an open book in front of him.

Tactfully, so as not to embarrass the Spirit,

my father handled all the glasses,

first his own, then the other, back and forth like every other night.

By then, I was out of the house.

It was summer; my friends used to meet at the river.

The whole thing seemed a grave embarrassment

although the truth was that, except for the boys, maybe we didn't understand mechanics.

The boys had the key right in front of them, in their hands if they wanted,

and many of them said they'd already used it,

though once one boy said this, the others said it too,

and of course people had older brothers and sisters.

We sat at the edge of the river discussing parents in general

and sex in particular. And a lot of information got shared,

and of course the subject was unfailingly interesting.

I showed people my book,
Ideal Marriage
—we all had a good laugh over it.

One night a boy brought a bottle of wine and we passed it around for a while.

More and more that summer we understood

that something was going to happen to us

that would change us.

And the group, all of us who used to meet this way,

the group would shatter, like a shell that falls away

so the bird can emerge.

Only of course it would be two birds emerging, pairs of birds.

We sat in the reeds at the edge of the river

throwing small stones. When the stones hit,

you could see the stars multiply for a second, little explosions of light

flashing and going out. There was a boy I was beginning to like,

not to speak to but to watch.

I liked to sit behind him to study the back of his neck.

And after a while we'd all get up together and walk back through the dark

to the village. Above the field, the sky was clear,

stars everywhere, like in the river, though these were the real stars,

even the dead ones were real.