Poems 1962-2012 (35 page)

circle a few sparks;

the farmer stomps on these with his boots.

It's impossible to believe this will work—

not with a fire like this, those last sparks

still resisting, unfinished,

believing they will get everything in the end

since it is obvious they are not defeated,

merely dormant or resting, though no one knows

whether they represent life or death.

MARCH

The light stays longer in the sky, but it's a cold light,

it brings no relief from winter.

My neighbor stares out the window,

talking to her dog. He's sniffing the garden,

trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.

It's a little early for all this.

Everything's still very bare—

nevertheless, something's different today from yesterday.

We can see the mountain: the peak's glittering where the ice catches the light.

But on the sides the snow's melted, exposing bare rock.

My neighbor's calling the dog, making her unconvincing doglike sounds.

The dog's polite; he raises his head when she calls,

but he doesn't move. So she goes on calling,

her failed bark slowly deteriorating into a human voice.

All her life she dreamed of living by the sea

but fate didn't put her there.

It laughed at her dreams;

it locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes.

The sun beats down on the earth, the earth flourishes.

And every winter, it's as though the rock underneath the earth rises

higher and higher and the earth becomes rock, cold and rejecting.

She says hope killed her parents, it killed her grandparents.

It rose up each spring with the wheat

and died between the heat of summer and the raw cold.

In the end, they told her to live near the sea,

as though that would make a difference.

By late spring she'll be garrulous, but now she's down to two words,

never
and
only,
to express this sense that life's cheated her.

Never the cries of the gulls, only, in summer, the crickets, cicadas.

Only the smell of the field, when all she wanted

was the smell of the sea, of disappearance.

The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink

as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson.

And everywhere the earth is rustling, not lying still.

And the dog senses this stirring; his ears twitch.

He walks back and forth, vaguely remembering

from other years this elation. The season of discoveries

is beginning. Always the same discoveries, but to the dog,

intoxicating and new, not duplicitous.

I tell my neighbor we'll be like this

when we lose our memories. I ask her if she's ever seen the sea

and she says, once, in a movie.

It was a sad story, nothing worked out at all.

The lovers part. The sea hammers the shore, the mark each wave leaves

wiped out by the wave that follows.

Never accumulation, never one wave trying to build on another,

never the promise of shelter—

The sea doesn't change as the earth changes;

it doesn't lie.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me

and it speaks the truth; it says
erasure.

Finally the dog goes in.

We watch the crescent moon,

very faint at first, then clearer and clearer

as the night grows dark.

Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and violets.

Nothing can be forced to live.

The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,

a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.

It says forget, you forget.

It says begin again, you begin again.

A NIGHT IN SPRING

They told her she came out of a hole in her mother

but really it's impossible to believe

something so delicate could come out of something

so fat—her mother naked

looks like a pig. She wants to think

the children telling her were making fun of her ignorance;

they think they can tell her anything

because she doesn't come from the country, where people know these things.

She wants the subject to be finished, dead. It troubles her

to picture this space in her mother's body,

releasing human beings now and again,

first hiding them, then dropping them into the world,

and all along drugging them, inspiring the same feelings

she attaches to her bed, this sense of solitude, this calm,

this sense of being unique—

Maybe her mother still has these feelings.

This could explain why she never sees

the great differences between the two of them

because at one point they
were
the same person—

She sees her face in the mirror, the small nose

sunk in fat, and at the same time she hears

the children's laughter as they tell her

it doesn't start in the face, stupid,

it starts in the body—

At night in bed, she pulls the quilt as high as possible,

up to her neck—

She has found this thing, a self,

and come to cherish it,

and now it will be packed away in flesh and lost—

And she feels her mother did this to her, meant this to happen.

Because whatever she may try to do with her mind,

her body will disobey,

that its complacency, its finality, will make her mind invisible,

no one will see—

Very gently, she moves the sheet aside.

And under it, there is her body, still beautiful and new

with no marks anywhere. And it seems to her still

identical to her mind, so consistent with it as to seem

transparent, almost,

and once again

she falls in love with it and vows to protect it.

HARVEST

It's autumn in the market—

not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.

They're beautiful still on the outside,

some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties

misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy—

you can't take a bite without anxiety.

Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit

still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.

Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.

Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.

The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;

they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.

And people go on for a while buying these things

as though they thought the farmers would see to it

that things went back to normal:

the vines would go back to bearing new peas;

the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin

to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.

And the rains get heavier; they carry

the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.

And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,

harvest,
to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.

A few roots, maybe, but the ground's so hard the farmers think

it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?

To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,

no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.

The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.

The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.

The earth is like a mirror:

calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.

What dies, dies without struggle.

CONFESSION

He steals sometimes, because they don't have their own tree

and he loves fruit. Not steals exactly—

he pretends he's an animal; he eats off the ground,

as the animals would eat. This is what he tells the priest,

that he doesn't think it should be a sin to take what would just lie there and rot,

this year like every other year.

As a man, as a human being, the priest agrees with the boy,

but as a priest he chastises him, though the penance is light,

so as to not kill off imagination: what he'd give

to a much younger boy who took something that wasn't his.

But the boy objects. He's willing to do the penance

because he likes the priest, but he refuses to believe that Jesus

gave this fig tree to this woman; he wants to know

what Jesus does with all the money he gets from real estate,

not just in this village but in the whole country.

Partly he's joking but partly he's serious

and the priest gets irritated—he's out of his depth with this boy,

he can't explain that though Christ doesn't deal in property,

still the fig tree belongs to the woman, even if she never picks the figs.

Perhaps one day, with the boy's encouragement,

the woman will become a saint and share her fig tree and her big house with strangers,

but for the moment she's a human being whose ancestors built this house.

The priest is pleased to have moved the conversation away from money,

which makes him nervous, and back to words like
family
or
tradition,

where he feels more secure. The boy stares at him—

he knows perfectly well the ways in which he's taken advantage of a senile old lady,

the ways he's tried to charm the priest, to impress him. But he despises

speeches like the one beginning now;

he wants to taunt the priest with his own flight: if he loves family so much,

why didn't the priest marry as his parents married, continue the line from which he came.

But he's silent. The words that mean there will be

no questioning, no trying to reason—those words have been uttered.

“Thank you, Father,” he says.

MARRIAGE

All week they've been by the sea again

and the sound of the sea colors everything.

Blue sky fills the window.

But the only sound is the sound of the waves pounding the shore—

angry. Angry at something. Whatever it is

must be why he's turned away. Angry, though he'd never hit her,

never say a word, probably.

So it's up to her to get the answer some other way,

from the sea, maybe, or the gray clouds suddenly

rising above it. The smell of the sea is in the sheets,

the smell of sun and wind, the hotel smell, fresh and sweet

because they're changed every day.

He never uses words. Words, for him, are for making arrangements,

for doing business. Never for anger, never for tenderness.

She strokes his back. She puts her face up against it,

even though it's like putting your face against a wall.

And the silence between them is ancient: it says

these are the boundaries.

He isn't sleeping, not even pretending to sleep.

His breathing's not regular: he breathes in with reluctance;

he doesn't want to commit himself to being alive.

And he breathes out fast, like a king banishing a servant.

Beneath the silence, the sound of the sea,

the sea's violence spreading everywhere, not finished, not finished,

his breath driving the waves—

But she knows who she is and she knows what she wants.

As long as that's true, something so natural can't hurt her.

PRIMAVERA

Spring comes quickly: overnight

the plum tree blossoms,

the warm air fills with bird calls.

In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun

with rays coming out all around

but because the background is dirt, the sun is black.

There is no signature.

Alas, very soon everything will disappear:

the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,

even the earth itself will follow the artist's name into oblivion.

Nevertheless, the artist intends

a mood of celebration.

How beautiful the blossoms are—emblems of the resilience of life.

The birds approach eagerly.

FIGS

My mother made figs in wine—

poached with cloves, sometimes a few peppercorns.

Black figs, from our tree.

And the wine was red, the pepper left a taste of smoke in the syrup.

I used to feel I was in another country.

Before that, there'd be chicken.

In autumn, sometimes filled with wild mushrooms.

There wasn't always time for that.

And the weather had to be right, just after the rain.

Sometimes it was just chicken, with a lemon inside.

She'd open the wine. Nothing special—

something she got from the neighbors.

I miss that wine—what I buy now doesn't taste as good.

I make these things for my husband,

but he doesn't like them.

He wants his mother's dishes, but I don't make them well.

When I try, I get angry—

He's trying to turn me into a person I never was.

He thinks it's a simple thing—

you cut up a chicken, throw a few tomatoes into the pan.

Garlic, if there's garlic.

An hour later, you're in paradise.

He thinks it's my job to learn, not his job