Poems 1962-2012 (34 page)

But the ones in the river—

they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas,

not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike.

When I got home, my mother was asleep, my father was still at the table,

reading his book. And I said, Did your friend go away?

And he looked at me intently for a while,

then he said, Your mother and I used to drink a glass of wine together

after dinner.

A CORRIDOR

There's an open door through which you can see the kitchen—

always some wonderful smell coming from there,

but what paralyzes him is the warmth of that place,

the stove in the center giving out heat—

Some lives are like that.

Heat's at the center, so constant no one gives it a thought.

But the key he's holding unlocks a different door,

and on the other side, warmth isn't waiting for him.

He makes it himself—him and the wine.

The first glass is himself coming home.

He can smell the daube, a smell of red wine and orange peel mixed in with the veal.

His wife is singing in the bedroom, putting the children to sleep.

He drinks slowly, letting his wife open the door, her finger to her lips,

and then letting her eagerly rush toward him to embrace him.

And afterward there will be the daube.

But the glasses that follow cause her to disappear.

She takes the children with her; the apartment shrinks back to what it was.

He has found someone else—not another person exactly,

but a self who despises intimacy, as though the privacy of marriage

is a door that two people shut together

and no one can get out alone, not the wife, not the husband,

so the heat gets trapped there until they suffocate,

as though they were living in a phone booth—

Then the wine is gone. He washes his face, wanders around the apartment.

It's summer—life rots in the heat.

Some nights, he still hears a woman singing to her children;

other nights, behind the bedroom door, her naked body doesn't exist.

FATIGUE

All winter he sleeps.

Then he gets up, he shaves—

it takes a long time to become a man again,

his face in the mirror bristles with dark hair.

The earth now is like a woman, waiting for him.

A great hopefulness—that's what binds them together,

himself and this woman.

Now he has to work all day to prove he deserves what he has.

Midday: he's tired, he's thirsty.

But if he quits now he'll have nothing.

The sweat covering his back and arms

is like his life pouring out of him

with nothing replacing it.

He works like an animal, then

like a machine, with no feeling.

But the bond will never break

though the earth fights back now, wild in the summer heat—

He squats down, letting the dirt run through his fingers.

The sun goes down, the dark comes.

Now that summer's over, the earth is hard, cold;

by the road, a few isolated fires burn.

Nothing remains of love,

only estrangement and hatred.

BURNING LEAVES

Not far from the house and barn,

the farm worker's burning dead leaves.

They don't disappear voluntarily;

you have to prod them along

as the farm worker prods the leaf pile every year

until it releases a smell of smoke into the air.

And then, for an hour or so, it's really animated,

blazing away like something alive.

When the smoke clears, the house is safe.

A woman's standing in the back,

folding dry clothes into a willow basket.

So it's finished for another year,

death making room for life,

as much as possible,

but burning the house would be too much room.

Sunset. Across the road,

the farm worker's sweeping the cold ashes.

Sometimes a few escape, harmlessly drifting around in the wind.

Then the air is still.

Where the fire was, there's only bare dirt in a circle of rocks.

Nothing between the earth and the dark.

WALKING AT NIGHT

Now that she is old,

the young men don't approach her

so the nights are free,

the streets at dusk that were so dangerous

have become as safe as the meadow.

By midnight, the town's quiet.

Moonlight reflects off the stone walls;

on the pavement, you can hear the nervous sounds

of the men rushing home to their wives and mothers; this late,

the doors are locked, the windows darkened.

When they pass, they don't notice her.

She's like a dry blade of grass in a field of grasses.

So her eyes that used never to leave the ground

are free now to go where they like.

When she's tired of the streets, in good weather she walks

in the fields where the town ends.

Sometimes, in summer, she goes as far as the river.

The young people used to gather not far from here

but now the river's grown shallow from lack of rain, so

the bank's deserted—

There were picnics then.

The boys and girls eventually paired off;

after a while, they made their way into the woods

where it's always twilight—

The woods would be empty now—

the naked bodies have found other places to hide.

In the river, there's just enough water for the night sky

to make patterns against the gray stones. The moon's bright,

one stone among many others. And the wind rises;

it blows the small trees that grow at the river's edge.

When you look at a body you see a history.

Once that body isn't seen anymore,

the story it tried to tell gets lost—

On nights like this, she'll walk as far as the bridge

before she turns back.

Everything still smells of summer.

And her body begins to seem again the body she had as a young woman,

glistening under the light summer clothing.

VIA DELLE OMBRE

On most days, the sun wakes me.

Even on dark days, there's a lot of light in the mornings—

thin lines where the blinds don't come together.

It's morning—I open my eyes.

And every morning I see again how dirty this place is, how grim.

So I'm never late for work—this isn't a place to spend time in,

watching the dirt pile up as the sun brightens.

During the day at work, I forget about it.

I think about work: getting colored beads into plastic vials.

When I get home at dusk, the room is shadowy—

the shadow of the bureau covers the bare floor.

It's telling me whoever lives here is doomed.

When I'm in moods like that,

I go to a bar, watch sports on television.

Sometimes I talk to the owner.

He says moods don't mean anything—

the shadows mean night is coming, not that daylight will never return.

He tells me to move the bureau; I'll get different shadows, maybe

a different diagnosis.

If we're alone, he turns down the volume of the television.

The players keep crashing into each other

but all we hear are our own voices.

If there's no game, he'll pick a film.

It's the same thing—the sound stays off, so there's only images.

When the film's over, we compare notes, to see if we both saw the same story.

Sometimes we spend hours watching this junk.

When I walk home it's night. You can't see for once how shabby the houses are.

The film is in my head: I tell myself I'm following the path of the hero.

The hero ventures out—that's dawn.

When he's gone, the camera collects pictures of other things.

When he gets back, it already knows everything there is to know,

just from watching the room.

There's no shadows now.

Inside the room, it's dark; the night air is cool.

In summer, you can smell the orange blossoms.

If there's wind, one tree will do it—you don't need the whole orchard.

I do what the hero does.

He opens the window. He has his reunion with earth.

HUNTERS

A dark night—the streets belong to the cats.

The cats and whatever small thing they find to kill—

The cats are fast like their ancestors in the hills

and hungry like their ancestors.

Hardly any moon. So the night's cool—

no moon to heat it up. Summer's on the way out

but for now there's still plenty to hunt

though the mice are quiet, watchful like the cats.

Smell the air—a still night, a night for love.

And every once in a while a scream

rising from the street below

where the cat's digging his teeth into the rat's leg.

Once the rat screams, it's dead. That scream is like a map:

it tells the cat where to find the throat. After that,

the scream's coming from a corpse.

You're lucky to be in love on nights like this,

still warm enough to lie naked on top of the sheets,

sweating, because it's hard work, this love, no matter what anyone says.

The dead rats lie in the street, where the cat drops them.

Be glad you're not on the street now,

before the street cleaners come to sweep them away. When the sun rises,

it won't be disappointed with the world it finds,

the streets will be clean for the new day and the night that follows.

Just be glad you were in bed,

where the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses.

A SLIP OF PAPER

Today I went to the doctor—

the doctor said I was dying,

not in those words, but when I said it

she didn't deny it—

What have you done to your body, her silence says.

We gave it to you and look what you did to it,

how you abused it.

I'm not talking only of cigarettes, she says,

but also of poor diet, of drink.

She's a young woman; the stiff white coat disguises her body.

Her hair's pulled back, the little female wisps

suppressed by a dark band. She's not at ease here,

behind her desk, with her diploma over her head,

reading a list of numbers in columns,

some flagged for her attention.

Her spine's straight also, showing no feeling.

No one taught me how to care for my body.

You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.

Once you're free of them, your wife takes over, but she's nervous,

she doesn't go too far. So this body I have,

that the doctor blames me for—it's always been supervised by women,

and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

The doctor looks at me—

between us, a stack of books and folders.

Except for us, the clinic's empty.

There's a trap-door here, and through that door,

the country of the dead. And the living push you through,

they want you there first, ahead of them.

The doctor knows this. She has her books,

I have my cigarettes. Finally

she writes something on a slip of paper.

This will help your blood pressure, she says.

And I pocket it, a sign to go.

And once I'm outside, I tear it up, like a ticket to the other world.

She was crazy to come here,

a place where she knows no one.

She's alone; she has no wedding ring.

She goes home alone, to her place outside the village.

And she has her one glass of wine a day,

her dinner that isn't a dinner.

And she takes off that white coat:

between that coat and her body,

there's just a thin layer of cotton.

And at some point, that comes off too.

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,

and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.

But for a long time you hear every sound.

It's a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.

BATS

There are two kinds of vision:

the seeing of things, which belongs

to the science of optics, versus

the seeing beyond things, which

results from deprivation. Man mocking the dark, rejecting

worlds you do not know: though the dark

is full of obstacles, it is possible to have

intense awareness when the field is narrow

and the signals few. Night has bred in us

thought more focused than yours, if rudimentary:

man the ego, man imprisoned in the eye,

there is a path you cannot see, beyond the eye's reach,

what the philosophers have called

the
via negativa:
to make a place for light

the mystic shuts his eyes—illumination

of the kind he seeks destroys

creatures who depend on things.

BURNING LEAVES

The fire burns up into the clear sky,

eager and furious, like an animal trying to get free,

to run wild as nature intended—

When it burns like this,

leaves aren't enough—it's

acquisitive, rapacious,

refusing to be contained, to accept limits—

There's a pile of stones around it.

Past the stones, the earth's raked clean, bare—

Finally the leaves are gone, the fuel's gone,

the last flames burn upwards and sidewards—

Concentric rings of stones and gray earth