God washed his womb in the ocean.
All things that lived in or above the sea
rejoiced that they were there.
The sand under the rocks,
the driftwood trees rejoiced.
The living, those who called to their kind,
the lucky ones, rejoiced.
When I was young and prodigal,
I dived into God’s womb and the ocean.
God spoke to me as I swam
through a thousand reflections,
his face and my face touched
like Mary’s cheek on the cheek of her deposed son.
God washed across my face. My face was in him.
From time to time I spit him out as I swam.
I came out of his womb dripping. I felt clean.
I knew God was cold and wet wilderness.
Shivering, I dried God off me with a towel
then I hung him on a clothesline to dry.
God and the towel seemed happy and laughing,
flapping in the wind without commandments.
From the shore I could see the horizon:
he was washing his womb in the ocean
after a day of love, before his gala night.
1
The nightingale never repeats its song,
sings “I want to love you,”
never “Good morning,
good morning.”
When it has mated
it plays hide-and-seek in song.
Some sing: “My nation is alive.”
Whippoorwills and mockingbirds converse,
the nightingale pours out joy and sorrow.
When Mary was told a “sword lily,”
an iris, “might pierce through her soul,”
the nightingale was Atlas to the soul.
The nightingale does not tell lies in song,
it does not sing when it builds its nest,
when it protects its young. It has reason to weep,
sometimes flies south alone.
It seems it cannot be,
but sometimes it sings days and many nights
with its songs unanswered—
a gift to the gossiping forest.
The nightingale never repeats its song.
Does it compose
during the day to sing at night in trees
new song after new song,
write with wing and feather like the Chinese,
who paint the nightingale with a rose
calligraphy in the sky and song?
However the wind blows
for want of starlight clouds fall to their knees.
How long from is, to will be, to was—not long.
When stars disappear, the nightingale takes flight,
leaves us to birds that come at daylight,
that sing of love and heartache, and repeat their song.
2
Any bird can defeat me at song. The sky is a listener.
In Ireland, country of warblers and nightingales—
beautiful defeats. Canada, for ten summers, loons,
famous countertenors—hundreds, made me a listener.
In China, I lost to songs of joy, flocks
of green magpies overhead, omens of good fortune.
I hear everyday birds. I am ashamed I do not listen,
I go about my business, have nothing better to sing.
I am a ground feeder, a wild turkey,
sometimes a screeching Atlantic seagull
fighting with gulls over the guts of a bluefish.
I am not possible—half-male Harpy, a male Siren,
whose songs cause ladies to tie themselves to the mast
lest they throw themselves into the sea
because I sing how they and I will be remembered.
The universe is artless.
The sky is a listener, my mother now.
Call me Stanley. Give me a lake and a canoe
and I will sing the songs I’ve sung since I was a fledgling
confronted by the beauty of the wilderness.
When I see Arabic headlines
like the wings of snakebirds,
Persian or Chinese notices
for the arrivals and departures of buses—
information beautiful as flights of starlings,
I cannot tell vowel from consonant,
the signs of the vulnerability of the flesh
from signs for laws and government.
The Hebrew writing on the wall
is all consonants, the vowel
the ache and joy of life
is known by heart. There are words
written in my blood I cannot read.
I can believe a cloud gave us the laws,
parted the Red Sea, gave us the flood,
the rainbow. A cloud teaches kindness,
be prepared for the worst wind, be light of spirit.
Perhaps I have seen His cloud,
an ordinary mongrel cloud
that assumes nothing, demonstrates nothing,
that comforts as a dog sleeping in the room,
a presence offering not salvation
but a little peace.
My hand has touched the ancient Mayan God
whose face is words: a limestone beasthead
of flora, serpent and numbers,
the sockets of a skull I thought were vowels.
Hurrah for English, hidden miracles,
the A and E of waking and sleeping,
the O of mouth.
Thank you, Sir, alone with your name,
for the erect L in love and open-legged V,
beautiful the Tree of Words in the forest
beside the Tree of Souls, lucky the bird
that held Alpha or Omega in his beak.
1.
In the great bronze tub of summer,
with the lions’ heads cast on each side,
couples come and bathe together: each touches only
his or her lover, as he or she falls back
into the warm eucalyptus-scented waters.
It is a hot summer evening and the last
sunlight clings to the lighter and darker blues
of grapes and to the white and rose plate
on the bare marble table. Now the lovers
plunge, surface, drift—an intruding elder
would not know if there were six or two,
or be aware of the entering and withdrawing.
There is a sudden stillness of water,
the bathers whisper in the classical manner,
intimate distant things. They are forgetful
that the darkness called night is always present,
sunlight is the guest. It is the moment
of departure. They dress, by mistake exchange
some of their clothing, and linger
in the glaring night traffic of the old city.
2.
I hosed down the tub after five hundred years
of lovemaking, and my few summers.
I did not know the touch of naked bodies
would give to bronze a fragile gold patina,
or that women in love jump in their lovers’ tubs.
God of tubs, take pity on solitary bathers
who scrub their flesh with rough stone
and have nothing to show for bathing
but cleanliness and disillusion.
Some believe the Gods come as swans,
showers of gold, themselves, or not at all.
I think they come as bathers: lovers,
whales fountaining, hippopotami
squatting in the mud.
There are principles I would die for,
but not to worship this God or that. To live
I’d kneel before the Egyptian insect god, the dung beetle
who rolls a ball of mud or dung across the ground
as if he were moving the solar disc or host across the sky.
I would pray to a blue scarab inlaid in lapis lazuli
suggestive of the heavens.
The Lord is many. I sit writing at the feet of a baboon god
counterfeit to counterfeit. My Lord smiles, barks and scratches,
all prayers to him are the honking of geese.
To live I’d pray to a god with the head of a crocodile
and the body of a man or a woman: our father who art in river,
holy mother, dozing in mud, sunning thyself,
look on your young in danger, open your crocodile mouth,
the doors of your cathedral, let us all swim in.
We are gathered by the river, nesting on your tongue, swim us to safety.
Believers and unbelievers rejoice together in the rain.
What sweet company they were for an hour or night.
Yes, I kissed them, but I left them after
my crude human lying down and getting up.
I learned their purpose: their being and beauty
is entirely erotic, but that is not to know them.
I never entered them deeper than sunlight,
never ravished their petals and perfumes.
Their pollens were wasted on me.
Socrates said, “My knowledge such as it is
is nothing but a knowledge of erotic things.”
Athenian, rest in your marble dust.
In the rummage and agora of my life,
on this summer evening my day is done,
the Lord is not a botanist
who art in heaven. He does not lead me
into green pastures. He is already there
delivering me from evil. Dandelions and false dandelions,
I am completely unprincipled. I lie with you
disobedient to the laws of cities.
I teach my friend, a fisherman gone blind, to cast
true left, right or center and how far
between lily pads and the fallen cedar.
Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last?
Our bait, worms, have no professors, they live
in darkness, can be taught fear of light.
Cut into threes even sixes they live
separate lives, recoil from light.
He tells me, “I am seldom blind
when I dream, morning is anthracite,
I play blind man’s bluff,
I cannot find myself,
my shoe, the sink,
tell time, but that’s spilled milk and ink,
the lost and found I cannot find.
I can tell the difference between a mollusk and a whelk,
a grieving liar and a lemon rind.”
Laughing, he says, “I still hope the worm will turn,
pink, lank, and warm, dined
out on apples of good fortune.
Books have a faintly legible smell.
Divorced from the sun, I am a kind
of bachelor henpecked by the night.
Sometimes I use my darkness well—
in the overcast and sunlight of my mind.
I can still wink, sing, my eyes are songs.”
Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last?
He could not fish, he could not walk, he fell
in his own feces. He wept. He died where he fell.
The power of beauty to right all wrongs
is hard for me to sell.
Better to wear an archaic smile
than to play with the word Time. Play with the rain,
play on a seesaw, play with your dogs awhile.
Reading your face or the cracked face of a mountain
is not reading Time, is reading only for style.
Footprints show the trace of a man, not his person.
Clocks and history are cheap imitation,
make a piece of ass of the moon and sun.
Older than darkness, Time is a grand personage
who lived before hunger and thirst, died without language—
the first player and surely the last upon the stage.
Older than space and light, time is here and not here,
loveless, close to and distant from everything.
What song would the moon sing, if it could sing?
Was there a Big Bang or a primordial clavier
when there was nothing: a restless ghost, nothing.
They say four rivers flowed out of Eden,
no tears, despite the serpent.
How can I explain Time with a pen?
Time is simply when and also then—
when darkness and light are absent,
the only survivor in the firmament,
always present.
No wrestling with an angel,
no dancing around, no to be or not to be.
The truth is I’m stuck with this constant
simultaneous remembering and forgetting,
each jealous of the other, each the other’s fool.
That’s the way it is to be alive,
tell the maple tree in October
in full foliage it is not constantly
remembering and forgetting.
Tell the ocean, tell sleep, tell his brother,
tell me pretty maiden,
are there any more at home like you?
I remember when I learned
female cypresses are wide in the hips,
males narrow, I looked outside my window.
A word here, a word there
and I saw the foreplay of trees
lasting from winter to spring
to summer to autumn—longer.
A maple stands by a maple or a red oak
a hundred years, two hundred years.
While remembering, forgetting myself,
a thousand adjectives fell from trees
in woods I know.
I try to learn the language of king maples,
more difficult than Chinese: hundreds of words
for green, yellow, golden, red, as Spanish has different
verbs to be for a permanent or temporary condition,
as Greek has the dual, a part of speech for twins and pairs.
The scrub oak has twenty verbs for the English verb to be:
to be tall, to be cut down, to be lonely,
to be covered in snow, to be a taker away
of sunlight and water from saplings.
I forgot I must go back to my life of
sums and minuses, family arithmetic.
I refuse to learn by rote, I forget
the greatest poem is the human nervous system.
I could play constant simultaneous forgetting
and remembering as tragedy, comedy or farce.
The curtain rises or falls on a simple set:
a nineteenth-century oak chair and table,
a transparent glass vase with water and forget-me-nots.
An actor says: “three cheers for remembrance,”
his brother Harpo brings in three chairs.
I remember the niñas in Goya’s brothel
wearing two wicker chairs for hats,
naked except for chiffon blouses,
smiling at their leering clientele.
The years wander off like sheep.
They don’t have a dog or a shepherd.
I’m old hat, back home,
constantly, simultaneously
remembering and forgetting.
Today while I rejoiced with bathers,
love stole my clothes and left me naked.
to Hans Magnus Enzensberger
There is a woman in all living things, a lily.
A wounded soldier dying is a woman dying in childbirth,
a dead black soldier may be the black woman
who gave birth after she was lynched.
My mother at eighty-three died singing lullabies.
For her sake, half in mourning, half in farce,
I put her wedding ring through my nose,
tied it on a string attached to a cloud
that pulls me south down the Hudson,
noses me over industrial parks,
east over Long Island suburbs once home.
A loving pig is yanked over the pine barrens,
past Shinnecock, Conscience Point, then adrift
over the shipless Atlantic. Who or what
holds the string? Father, mother, or some
old cloudy hatred? It cannot be a butterfly
that pulls me out of reason—
perhaps some phantom pain, or pleasure, lifts me to bed,
or from cloud to cloud, beyond birthdays,
till I am over China, where woman is half the sky.
In my family the identical twin sisters
Mercy and Womb were named after words
in the Hebrew Bible spelled alike.
What luck to have two aunts,
godmothers, who kissed me on the mouth,
wished me well cautiously when I did wrong—
when I tried to right myself it was not
to disappoint them. They weren’t religious, just loving.
I ached to hear them say, “There, there,”
while they held me close, my Womb, my Mercy.
On the crazy side of my family,
I had a distant cousin who got the electric chair.
They never forgave themselves.
How many times did I hear them say,
“If you wrong someone only he or she can forgive you,
not God.” Mercy walked the picket lines against injustice
until her feet bled. Womb was an agitator.
If ever you hear a note of Womb or Mercy
in my voice, it is because something of those twins,
those darling girls and beautiful women,
those immigrants, lives in me.
Apollo, my canines are into the marrow.
You cannot pry my mouth open
with a railroad spike or a chisel.
My teeth may break. My jaw may break.
I will not let go. The bone is mine and was mine
since I was boning up in my mother’s womb.
I will take my bone that is partly words and dreams
in and out of bed. I gnaw on it.
I’m after some otherness of bone,
words I hold in my teeth, dry nerves and fat,
that has the taste of self, marrow of dreams.
Domesticated as I am, my dog
gnaws a bone that brings him out of bondage
into the forest of his forbearers.
In wolfness, he holds onto his bone,
lets only his master open his jaws
and take the bone from him.
My bone and guts are a musical instrument
I play for my own pleasure, sometimes for friends’.
At my age I know enough to lock and unlock
my teeth, some with gold fillings.
No one will take my bone from me
till my dying breath. Beware, even then, my jaws,
by reflex or custom may lock onto your leg
as shark and barracuda sometimes do
when they lie dead in the boat.
Apollo, I know enough to challenge
only myself at music, not you.
Señor, make me a stranger to myself.
I am ashamed of my over-familiarity
with myself. My lack of respect
for my privacy, my way of asking
“Who were you, who are you?
Why did you do or not do, think, feel
love, hate, deny, believe or disbelieve,
choose to eat or not eat this or that?”
I am tired of walking through my own shadow,
my hands feeding me, washing me, shaking as usual.
Doing lightens the burden of words.
Let me enter the forest of decaying nouns,
to spy on the morning glory that blooms one morning
and dies that afternoon, unless it has the luck
of a cloudy day when it lives ’til night.
May I go south to a Latin jungle
where the moonflower blooms,
is pollinated by night moths in moonlight—
until its petals fall at sunrise.
I do not want to know more than necessary
to find my hat and coat when leaving
a crowded restaurant.
Your will be done. Let me laugh or weep
because it is Tuesday or Wednesday
or the other way around.
Are there more Tuesdays than Wednesdays?
That is the question. Jocasta said, “O, man of doom,
God grant that you will never find out who you are.”
to W. S. Merwin
I said, “Nothing for the last time.”
You said, “Everything for the last time.”
Later I thought you made everything more
precious with “everything for the last time”:
the last meditation, the last falling asleep,
the last dream before the final make believe,
the last kiss good night,
the last look out the window at the last moonlight.
Last leaves no time to hesitate.
I would drink strong coffee before my last sleep.
I’d rather remember childhood, rehearse forgiveness,
listen to birdsong or a Spanish housemaid singing,
scrubbing a tiled floor in Seville—
I’d scrub and sing myself. O Susanna
Susanna, quanta pena mi costi.
I would strangle the snakes of lastness
like Herakles in his crib
before I cocked my ear to Mozart for the last time.
There is not sky or clouds enough to cover
the music I would hear for the last time.
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme of
everything for the last time grows, covered with
deadly nightshade and poison hemlock.
No last, no first, thinking in the moment,
years ago, you prepared the soil in Hawaii
before you planted your palm trees, then shared
most of your days and nights with them as equals.
You built your house with a Zen room.
I made no prayer when I dug a hole
and pushed in a twelve-foot white pine,
root ball locked in green plastic netting.
I did not cut the netting, so twenty years later
a tall, beautiful, white pine died.
I lynched the roots. To save my life
I would let them seize, cut out a bear’s heart,
I would partake in its flesh.
But you would die before you’d let them kill that bear.
Again, I say, “Nothing for the last time.”
You say, “Everything for the last time.”
Sailor, I would have killed a stranger
to save the world. Sailor, you would not.
We kissed goodbye on the cheek.
I hope not for the last time.
Home, I look into my brass telescope—
at the far end, where the moon and distant stars
should be, I see my eye looking back at me,
it’s twinkling and winking like a star. I go to bed.
My dogs, donkeys and wife are sleeping. I am safe.
You are home with your wife
you met and decided to marry in four days.
i
His or her life was never as close to us as now.
At the non-denominational funeral home called Truths
they hold services in the toilet.
The corpse wrapped in sanitary paper
is readied to be flushed down a large commode.
There is a bathtub full of flowers, or a shower stall,
depending upon the means and wishes of the family.
The toilet lid may bear the name, the date,
written on disposable paper,
the writing in lipstick in a chosen shade—
“ravish me red,” “pink pout,” “muse.”
The flush turns the body around,
the head goes down first,
into the golden pipes, and then into the septic tank.
Should the body clog the pipes,
there is a hand rubber plunger.
No organ, no Bach; the sound of a Roto Rooter,
a wire snake cleans up.
In the valley of the shadow, there’s a toilet –
saints and sinners, we are all manure.
Sparrows peck at us.
ii
In their houses of worship where truth sleeps,
priests, rabbis and mullahs dance for joy
because the soul is already in paradise,
while in icy Lhasa there are sky funerals,
bodies fed to vultures, the birds of the Gods.
Better to sing Holy, Holy, Holy,
wrap the body in a shroud, prayer shawl,
modest dress, or finery—
remember the ashes, perhaps still warm.
In Spain, what is left of the dough around the Host,
stamped out, not yet consecrated,
the leftovers, are a treat given children like a cookie
to be eaten with chocolate.
Words hold the soul, a small bird
protected in the hands of a child,
thrown upward free to fly into “what’s next?”
Now I’ve stubbed and broken my big left toe.
It’s not like breaking a nose or a jaw,
with nine still to go, it’s a comic not a tragic flaw.
Thank God Bernini curled St. Teresa’s marble toe
in ecstasy. I don’t give my toe a hee-haw
of praise that a friend gives his eleventh toe.
My toe has no art, it cannot pirouette.
It can follow a tune, a Mozart quartet,
draw a face in the sand, yet it is discontent
as the broken string of a musical instrument.
When my body loves, untutored,
my toe loves, wags and is not excluded.
I cut a hole in my shoe to give my toe a platform
on which to stand broken, alone in the storm.
The man who walks through a field in December
wears a blue suit, but above his shoulders
where his head and neck should be,
an apple tree grows
stripped of its leaves by winter.
The suit he wears makes him seem human
but his branches reaching up and outward,
higher than any man, make him arboreal.
Tears flow from under his jacket
and out of his pockets, like a stream in a forest.
The man blooms in summer, bears fruit,
walks through a field of hay and wild flowers.
The man tree never says,
“My river, My waterfall.”
A mounting lark never calls, “My . . . My . . . ”
Except when it sings
“Come be My, My Love.”
The hawk calls, “I have My, My work to do,”
then when the work is done, it shrieks with the night owl,
“It’s mine, it’s mine”
—is why death was invented.
Under a man tree a mother sings for a time,
“My child, my child, my tree, my tree.”
In the sideview mirror of my car
through the morning fog I saw a human skull
that had to be my face, where the headlights
of the car behind me should have been,
or a morning star. I did not think
to step on the gas and race away from the skull
I knew wasn’t behind me. Still it had me by the throat.
I can tell a raven from a crow,
a female evergreen from a male,
but I can’t tell visionary bone from ghost.
I’m used to my eyes fibbing to me,
5s are sometimes 8s, 2s, 3s.
I know the Chinese character for the word “nature”
is a nose that stands for breathing—life.
I need to see an ancient nose in the mirror.
After a difficult illness, in letters to friends I wrote:
“Inside my vitals it was Stalingrad.”
I could have said “Waterloo, all puns intended.”
I never would have said “a holocaust inside my belly.”
Only God could have the holocaust in His belly,
or, on second thought, Stalingrad inside His belly
with a million five hundred thousand dead,
among them battalions of Russian women,
everyday Russians and everyday Germans
in with the slaughtered Wehrmacht and Panzer
divisions––a few well-disciplined innocents
“On the wrong side of history” and the Volga: Dutch,
Romanians, Hungarians, the Spanish Blue Division.
They say the Lord passes days and nights on battlefields,
although I doubt He spends His time by human measure.
In His belly they were starved, frozen, gassed,
shot to death, blown to pieces,
or done in by subtler vehicles of departure.
God does not digest or belch. Yesterday, His time,
He devoured men battling with stone axes and clubs,
He downed all history and our yesterday’s dead.
Are His eyes on fire without tears?
Does He evacuate? The perfect being never makes a stink.
War is the hair on His head,
the beard He strokes when He sits in judgment.
He would never have a little fat belly like Buddha.
Looking around the world, I say to God,
“Come to us all knowing or unknowing,
jealous, melancholy, wildflower baby,
who, as long as I live,
by any other name may smell as sweet.”
With any luck you can still find a rain god
in a cornfield, chaotic symmetry, a sacred wood,
although nothing remains of certain gods
but an octagonal vault and part of a leg. Enough.
The moon goddess doesn’t weep, the sun god does not laugh.
I strike a match to light the night, a puff
of smoke, no more. I strike another to light the day
to prove I do not need a sun god anyway.
The No God inside me is not a golden calf.
My No God has two dogs: Night and Day.
They take their time, they do not come to me.
I whistle, call “stay, stay.” They do what they rather.
“I’ll take you in the car to run along the sea.”
They race what is, what was and what will be.
They take their time and sniff an apple tree
because there in moonlight the deer gather
to eat apples and praise their heavenly father.
I pray weary of his nothingness my No God
will not call back his dogs: Night and Day,
or, for his pleasure, let slip another flood.
If I could I’d gorge on Time, twirl hours on my fork
and wipe my plate clean with my daily bread,
but I am Time’s pretzel, his pistachio nut.
I wish I were Time’s spaghetti carbonara.
I am what he munches at the bar
waiting for the waitress to take his order,
then Time is seated wherever he is—
this godlike No God who little by little
devours me. Eat, eat, my Lord,
you will not swallow me in one gulp.
I will give you such indigestion in Paradise
with my hard head, stiff neck, broken bones,
you will wish you were never born. Eat.
You may think, Wise Guy, you can fart me out,
but what about Mount Etna, Vesuvius,
who were those nobodies?
Invisible universal glutton,
lift your little trident! Keep me off your plate!
Eat your sheep, not this Jew.
1
Winter. The ice slept here, the father ice
with his eye sharp as ice tongs, that cold anger
under sawdust, never thanking
the wind or a cloud over the sun
for a little relief from the pain of being ice,
while the blue-eyed ice,
whose breast he sucked for coldness,
crashed into the logs that shored up the roof.
Still what shade there was came from her
who loved the snow truly, the long below-zero nights
after a snowfall that were God-given.
2
A child looked out at the pond,
the frogs, and dry cattails,
a broken oar still iced in.
Peer deep as he could through the ice
he only saw white, silver, violet, black;
there was the red gill of a fish on a nail
near the roof, but that was as rare as laughter
in the icehouse.
The flowers on the hillside confused him,
especially the mouth-red flames.
Despite crosscut saws, ice-tongs and axes,
he made his way over the frozen straw,
through the abandoned snake nest,
toward the forbidden windows, doors, slides.
He melted ever so slowly.
He was disobedient,
though in his heart he knew he was one of them
and always would be, there was nothing
that could change him under the sun
as he slipped out between the floorboards,
down the hillside.
He made his way to the red flowers, he was sure
it was his love for them that washed
him into the brook—he loved the stones,
the roots of trees, the trout swimming through him
and leaping for flies, the ferns and webs barely
touched his cheek. Part of a brook,
these days he looks back at the icehouse.
He remembers the first dank lesson:
the joy of receiving gifts being ice-picked
out of him. Old ice, palsied now.
Someone killed a water moccasin,
threw half an orange on its head.
He knows his gifts, counts his blessings.
It had become possible
for any living thing to consume him.
3
Summer. When I swim in the pond that is language
I am at best a tourist with an American accent.
I swim into deep water. I can’t touch bottom.
I think grammar is down there in the mud.
I can dive down in the icy water,
touch something unborn
among the egg layers and live bearers,
the imperfect, the pluperfect,
pollywogs of words.
I swim, which signals I am not a floating oar.
Take your frog, leech, turtle, fishkind—
I devour, reproduce, live for pleasure with them.
Unlike the clouds, we are earthlings, we swimmers
the Yets, the Stills, the Howevers
half-asleep in the sun,
afraid of our kind. I make for shallow water.
I kiss waterlilies.
I think they kiss back, an old story:
God’s womb holds on to my foot.
I am deep, shallow, and muddy,
I look back over my shoulder,
remember the icehouse and the warm belly of a rabbit.
to Hans Magnus Enzensberger
I was pleased to see a one-hundred-year-old oak
and then lindens that survived the air raids.
Now the city seems to me lyrical, the smoke
of yesteryear blown God knows where.
Now sixty-five years are toast and marmalade,
are sweet and sour. The dead not here or there,
the living are here and there, have made the grade,
while grandma and grandpa fell down the hill
with another sixty million not Jack and Jill.
Thou shalt not kill is a bitter pill
to swallow. To be human is not human.
We must learn to choose the better part of human,
go back to kindergarten waking and sleeping.
Laughter is human, so is weeping.
I built our house on Mecox Bay
out of an old barn and Greek columns,
a five-minute sail south to the North Atlantic.
In sand, along the bulkhead, I planted Montauk daisies,
red hibiscus above the sun-splashed waves.
My dogs played wolf. Swans nested, songbirds
and sea gulls lived their seemingly pagan lives.
Occasional osprey swooped in to earn a living.
All weather, times of day, seasons were welcome.
Sometimes coming out of the ocean like gods
three seasons visited in a single day.
I thought I would never sell the house,
the flowering trees I planted, the hydrangeas,
the day lilies with my dog Sancho beneath,
their blossoms something like his color.
Old, my mother and father were guests
at our bountiful table, surrounded by my dogs
Dulcie, Sancho and Horatio,
often fed from my hand and plate. Out of the blue
my mother asked, “Will you ever forgive us
for giving away your dog?” I said, “No”
and changed the subject.
I was taught from childhood to count my blessings:
at night when I called, my mother came,
good food, summers in Adirondack wilderness.
At seven I swam a mile across the lake and back
without a following boat. From an attic window
in Kew Gardens, above a maple, I read
with my dog Rhumba and pretended.
Still sometimes I went to school black and blue.
A kid of nine, I saw wonders of the ancient world:
there is a photo of me with the sphinx and a camel.
I walked along the harbor once straddled
by the fallen Colossus of Rhodes. A week later,
on the Acropolis, I was doomed and blessed
for life by Greek beauty.
I lived in a house of unnatural affection.
More than kin and more than kind,
my mother suffered from Metamorphosis:
changed from good wife, to pillow, to slave
rebuked for planting daisies along the driveway.
Still, she shared in taking down
her opinionated, overgrown thirteen-year-old
by giving away Rhumba, his old dog,
to a waitress whose face I remember.
I loved my dog for nine years. That mutt kissed
the eyes of my blind friend, came when I whistled,
gave seminars on love, intimacy and simple honesty.
Jesus said, “Father forgive them
for they know not what they do.”
But Jesus never had a dog.
Thirty years later we sold our house
where I had entertained my mother and father,
buried their ashes in acid soil.
Farmer and gravedigger,
I transplanted two unmarked rocks,
Montauk daisies, my mother and father,
day lilies, my dogs, from garden to garden.
I recited prayers honoring my parents.
I only pardoned them. I never forgave them
for giving away my old dog,
despite my dog’s teaching “never hold a grudge.”
Of course, if my grandpas had not left
Lithuania for Philadelphia,
if we had not been free in America,
if I still managed to be born,
I would not have likely survived in Kaunas
to indulge myself in the fine distinction
between pardon and forgiveness.
I would most likely have had a roach
or a rooster for a pet, no dog—
my knowledge more Talmudic than canine.
Water wanted to live.
It went to the sun,
came back laughing.
Water wanted to live.
It went to a tree
struck by lightning.
It came back laughing.
It went to blood. It went to womb.
It washed the face of every living thing.
A touch of it came to death, a mold.
A touch of it was sexual, brought life to death.
It was Jubal, inventor of music,
the flute and the lyre.
“Listen to waters,” my teacher said,
“then play the slow movement
of Schubert’s late Sonata in A,
it must sound like the first bird
that sang in the world.”
I got up a little after daybreak:
I saw a Luna Moth had fallen
between the window and a torn screen.
I lifted the window, the wings broke
on the floor, became green and silver powder.
My eyes followed green, as if all green
was a single web, past the Lombardy poplars
and the lilac hedge leading to the back road.
I can believe the world
might have been the color of hide or driftwood,
but there was—and is—the gift of green,
and a second gift we can perceive the green,
although we are often blind to miracles.
There was no resurrection of green and silver wings.
They became a blue stain on an oak floor.
I wish I had done something ordinary,
performed an unknown, unseen miracle,
raised the window the night before,
let the chill November air come in.
I cannot help remembering
e.e. cummings’ wife said, hearing him
choking to death in the next room,
she thought she heard moths on the window screen
attracted to the nightlight in his study.
Reader, my head is not a gravestone.
It’s just that a dead poet and a Luna Moth
alighted. Mr. Death, you’re not a stone wall.
You’re more like a chain-link fence
I can see through to the other side. There’s the rub:
You are a democracy, the land of opportunity,
the Patria. Some say you are a picnic.
Are there any gate-crashers beside the barbecue?
I’m afraid every living and once-living thing
will be asked to leave again.
The first death is just playtime.
There is a DEAD END beyond darkness
where everyone and every thing tries to turn around.
Every thing that ever lived sounds its horn.
And you, Mr. Death, are just a traffic cop.
for Stanley Kunitz
In a dream after he died
I received picture postcards
from him every day for two weeks
in a single night—the picture:
blazing maples and walnut trees,
New England in full foliage.
I wept that he should write
to me and my wife in a handwriting not his
in blue ink so often.
Since I do not remember the text,
I suppose the message was:
“Every autumn you know where to find me.”
THREE SONGS FOR A SINGLE STRING
1
I wish the praying wind would hire me
to help out in the valley.
In the morning when the clouds are low,
I can push clouds up toward heaven
that Muhammad said lies under the feet
of every mother.
2
You may trick a she-camel or goat
to feed on hay stuffed in the skin of her dead kid
so she will give milk to serve her master,
or an orphaned kid or camel.
In my tradition
one of the names of God is Breast.
Almighty Breast, may I be tricked to give
the love for my dead to the living.
You will have to do more than show me
a lock of hair and a glass of whiskey.
3
The ocean, stars, mountains
without their least attention
have mated with me, as they do
with all living things.
What can I do to serve them?
Give them my bones to play with.
AND THERE ARE AFRICAN LINKS/LICKS
IN EVERY LANGUAGE
So if God made us in His image*
and likeness He’s a black man.
Which did He hate more,
crucifixion or slavery?
Adam and Eve were black,
Cain and Abel black.
Somewhere there was
a white man in the woodpile.
Maybe God, come back,
had to drink at a Negro fountain—
wasn’t what he meant by dividing the waters.
Black Jesus or Jehovah’s voice
walked in the cool of the day.
Not that whites invented slavery,
they just made more money at it,
made it a Christian virtue,
found when they got a taste for it,
like good whiskey, watering it down a little
is better than nothing.
Do I see the Father come again,
sunning Himself,
passing the time of day
or night on street corners
out of a job?
If in the beginning was the Word,
we know the Word was African.
* DNA evidence proves all human beings have an early black/African heritage.
My scarred tongue has been everywhere
my finger has been and for longer.
My tongue is gentle, my heart’s cousin.
I have no time for ornament
thinking why the wind does this or that.
The afternoon breakers roll ashore,
there is little left in the sand,
a shell where my face was.
I spit out more sand than truth.
I go to my garden. I save the day
with dirty hands. Rain, rain, rain,
I’m sure the rain means more to the garden
than to sand. Then I remember creatures that live
with their mouths wide open, their tongues in sand,
that we first made love in a bed of Atlantic sand.
ON BEES DISAPPEARING IN AMERICA AND EUROPE
BUT NOT IN BRITAIN
Someone is playing tricks on flowers and blossoming trees;
now you see, now you don’t see bees, wasps and hornets.
This summer, the hives and nests are empty,
pollen and nectar dry, untouched, unsucked in the cup.
Perhaps gunsmoke and lies did them in.
Bees are royalists, perhaps a little democracy
did them in. I can tell a bumblebee from a hummingbird,
how Samson found bees in a lion’s carcass.
I remember Psalm 118:
The nations compassed me about like bees;
they are quenched as the fire of thorns:
for in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.
—a passage St. Augustine read as referring to Christ’s capture.
Yes, I am grateful for the gift of black ants
to peonies, the sexy winds of summer, while insecticides
stop and question butterflies who lost their memory
in fields and gardens of America.
Hail Britannia, where queens and drones still prosper,
kept alive, I think, in public and private gardens
by Shakespeare in the air.
to Zhou Ming
She remembered her dad’s kissing-her-everywhere game,
her puppy pushed off the bed, not much about her old flame.
She could see his pointed eyebrows, heard, “No rain,
no rainbow.” She remembered her Uncle James had a game
of pretending to throw his granddaughter out the window.
Why did she remember that, and what did that have to do
with the forced-upon-her pleasure and pain
of her dad’s finger-inside-her game?
She banished herself for his smell and saliva on her pillow.
Smells can lie, but saliva’s true as rain.
What she could not remember they would do again:
he is there, sure as hyacinths are blue.
She buried his ashes under a weeping willow
and went down river in a boat she could not row.
You asked me how I would kill time
three hours before my next appointment.
I did not want to lose a moment.
I remember the day was resplendent.
Three hours before my next appointment
my senses were not working wisely or too well.
I remember the day was resplendent.
I hurried to Cézanne’s sad naked bathers.
My senses were not working wisely or too well.
The French still make love from cinq à sept.
I hurried to Cézanne’s sad naked bathers,
and two rejoicing bathers, their sex covered over.
The French still make love from cinq à sept.
In a room with sixty sad naked bathers,
and two rejoicing naked bathers, their sex covered over,
time was not wasting me.
In a room with sixty sad naked bathers,
nearby, a wine bottle standing on blue nothing.
Time was not wasting me.
Beyond reason, a black scribble in a blue-and-white sky.
Nearby, a wine bottle standing on blue nothing.
Such scribbling defies the laws of nature.
Beyond reason, a black scribble in a blue-and-white sky.
I stayed until I was ordered out.
Such scribbling defies the laws of nature.
You asked me how I would kill time.
I stayed until I was ordered out.
I did not want to lose a moment.
Cruelty will not fool me,
love will not fool me,
but unexpected kindness
like disappointment
startles me into being a dog.
I lick the face of kindness,
roll over on my back
offer my throat to disappointment,
bark or just whine from time to time
throughout the night.
These days I doze off, sleep longer.
Sleep drags me off, first by inches,
then by yards—
now miles closer to eternity,
that is another name for poverty.
So sleep steals my wallet.
It should be shackled, jailed,
allowed a period of recreation,
time off for good behavior,
paroled. As for me, I have life to live,
work to do, books to read.
Think of me as one of those
old Portuguese wines.
Let me get dusty, decant me
after one hundred years;
do not put me on ice.
Drink me in the garden
on a summer evening. Get drunk.
Please may be a town in Oklahoma,
but in my GI track doctor’s waiting room
an old man in a wheelchair
kept repeating the word please:
pleaseplease please please please
without stop at intervals endlessly.
I thought his “pleases” had different meanings:
Please, please says, “help, the pain is killing me!”
Then there were pleadings to have a shot,
one I thought a prayer, useless without praise.
Could he crash into paradise with one word?
I remember the cries of sailors screaming in pain
without words or legs or arms,
the pain coming from limbs not there.
“Phantom.” Please please. Please.
I think every living thing no matter how rude
has a way of asking please please please.
Please is not like a telephone that keeps ringing.
At the American Hotel, “Lady Lowell” cried, “Please,
please kill me. Please, please kill me,”
while eating steak. I said “no,” she said “why not?”
I said, “because tomorrow’s Thursday.”
I take my hat off to St. Francis
who signed a pact with a wolf
before a notary: the town
of Gubbio would feed it,
the wolf would have no need
to eat children. If you need proof of this,
there are paintings of St. Francis
holding the paw of a wolf
beside the notary—in the distance
that shows the past, at the edge of a forest,
the remains of a child.
I would sign a pact with a wolf,
I kiss him good night.
We share blueberries.
We mix our blood to seal the bargain.
To those who would kill me with pleasure,
I say, “Look: the howl of a wolf
comforts me. What’s the matter?
I will hold your hand, make
your favorite dish your mother cooked.”
I see a grenade flying my way, a deadly sparrow.
I hide my head under a poem,
I hear obscenities in languages entangled
like flowers along the Amazon.
What can I offer compared to the pleasures of killing?
A wolf ’s song. I swear before a notary,
“I’ll ask the ancient goddess Breast
to wash their steps with milk.”
Peace is an erratic boulder
left behind by a glacier,
different from the surrounding landscape.
I will shake hands with a rock.
ON WILLIAM BLAKE’S DRAWING,
“THE GHOST OF A FLEA”
Blake drew a giant flea inhabited
by the soul of a man,
“bloodthirsty to access,”
usually, “providentially confined”
to the size and form of a flea.
This ghost flea is an inhuman giant,
its face and body part man’s, part flea’s,
drawn in pencil and gold leaf on mahogany,
tongue curled out of its mouth—
it clutches a bowl of blood
out of which it feeds.
On a heavy wooden plank,
near the feet of the giant ghost
is an almost invisible second flea,
a common flea. A dream of madness produces fleas.
Flea-bitten by wars and slavery, God’s messengers
visited Blake every day, found if the poet prayed at all
he kneeled or stood in what he called
“the seven synagogues of Satan.”
Many days, the Angels of God brought and returned
the same message made human by Blake:
Every thing that lives is holy.
Afflicted, Blake rejoiced to see his dead brother
clapping his hands on his way to heaven,
while Jehovah held naked Jerusalem
in His arms, pressing her to Him,
holding her buttocks firmly in both hands.
His last words, “The Sun is God.”
He found truth in color,
the Book of Revelation useful.
He cried out against the four angels
to whom it was given to hurt the earth and sea.
He followed a guiding star, a flight to Egypt,
a donkey burdened with the Word
and the Christian nation.
He gave a damn,
more than the sun, moon or darkness cared.
With a palette knife and thumb prints,
he answered the question,
“If God is the sun, what is the sunset?”
—proof the most pious death is by a kiss?
On his palette, primary colors,
something like never-before words,
his dead father, his mother in a madhouse.
He picked cherries with Claude and Poussin,
knew Rembrandt sometimes painted with his own feces,
that beauty may stink to heaven.
His own suffering never washed out of his brushes,
his Last Judgment, an angel with a sword, standing in the sun.
He did not know Blake’s Last Judgment,
almost black from working and reworking.
God breaketh not all men’s hearts alike.
Blake saw God sitting at the window,
Turner tried to pour sorrow out the window.
In the distant sky, beyond the stars there is
no Venice, no Titian, the Sun of Death shines.
Better if I had said in song what I wanted
from a lady beneath her window or in a car
or when she passed twirling a parasol.
I saw Goya knew about suffering.
He etched a baby a woman held by its wrists
and ankles, its anus used as a bellows
to flame up the fire. I was Goya’s child.
It was just after dark, someone
reproached me for lingering,
I smelled smoke, there was an air
of constant discourtesy. I smelled something
sour, like the dirty yellow smoke of a paper mill.
Roads were out. Two colossal figures like me,
Goya’s boys, stood in the middle of a valley,
one with a club, the other swinging a rock on a rope.
In the distance, the crowd divided, moved
in opposite directions, dark figures on foot
speaking useless languages.
I heard a woman screaming, her hand
reached out was half the size of her body.
Under cement arches I saw a heap
of corpses, Jews with amazed faces;
some still alive raised their heads in protest.
I thought changing my shirt
for a clean one was the right thing to do.
I couldn’t close open wounds
with flaming iron like an old soldier.
La Verbena of Seville is a burial party.
On a summer Sunday afternoon,
if the sky is a family, the clouds and I are
useless brothers. To find out what
access to the unknown I might have
I played a blind philosopher who had fifty-eight years,
led by a street-wise, seventeenth-century
Neapolitan kid. I told the boy who led me
by a fold of my cape, I live like the dreamer
who in sleep seems to act and speak
but waking has said and done nothing.
I live in total darkness
where the most ordinary things must be imagined
and the unknown becomes less extraordinary.
I said nothing that made anything better,
so I put what I wrote away,
not wanting to be barely entertaining.
I think I lived between always and never.
I wanted to forget that. I was like a dog,
chin on a rock, looking up at the sky.
Two beautiful women in the sky kissing,
their arms and legs wrapped around each other,
one has wings, is an angel. Her lover’s left hand
is deep in her feathers. Her lover’s right hand
reaches deep inside her. Their tongues
are pink, gentle, rough, or hard.
The miracle is that a cloud can kiss,
that if one cloud has wings and is wrapped
around the other, the other is helpless.
Now they are rolling over each other.
I wish I could carve ‘Stanley’
on the white marble bluff. I am in Cardiff.
I sleep at the Angel Hotel.
The day is a lion across the horizon,
the forests, a thorn in its foot,
it gnaws on hapless years, its stomach full.
The lion rolls on its back kicking the heavens.
The lion of Judah is part of its pride, its mate—
some say the favorite.
Furthest from the truth: the night, the universe
is a black Labrador pup biting
as if we were its mother’s teat.
Lear’s fool says, “Truth’s a dog must to kennel . . . ”
One day the mind will dream up an equation
for reality—I may grasp in my mouth
as a bitch holds her pup
or some, an after-dinner mint. It’s true the night
is the same for the sun, the rose and us,
I mouth metaphors for memory like the zoo,
put lovers in cages with primates and reptiles.
I remember a mother sea lion feeding her young—
balancing a spinning world on the tip of her nose.
There is still time to rejoice in it all.
The Irish say, over drinks, “The night is still a pup.”
I’ll be back to you very, very soon, English.
I’m going back to Yiddish Russian, my grandmother’s tongue.
I’m not a traitor, I just need my grandmother.
America, I’ll be back. My friend, speak to me in Gaelic,
I’ll understand.
to Paul Muldoon
THE WILD DOGS OF SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE
At the school in the Plaza Hotel, Mexico,
I taught the young and old what I could:
Learn from the starving dogs of San Miguel
how to see and listen. Do not waste a word
or a syllable, they are loaves and fishes,
enough to feed five thousand. No lies:
angels are specific, the devil generalizes.
We know there is mythological bread.
When you use what is called a metaphor
it is just an alibi, unless you knead it
like a baker kneads dough to make it rise
to bread, or cake, to—whatever, the devil’s word.
Then use it. That’s what you do for a living.
In the hills of San Miguel there are snakes
that once were walking sticks. Saint Hubert
was converted when he saw a stag
with a crucifix between its antlers.
Who has not seen a starving dog in headlights
running with a crucifix in its mouth?
At night when the wind dies down, some who listen
hear the Virgin weeping. She knows starving dogs
at the foot of the cross, snarling at evil,
licked up her son’s pooling blood while He suffered,
and after, when she held Him, licked His wounds.
Any dog can nose a rat in the anus of the rich,
mercy in the asshole of the poor. Red-haired
Judas fed his good dog under the table.
The starving dogs of San Miguel de Allende
will carry off your sorrows if you put your trust in them,
or feed them from your hand.
Easier to speak for wild dogs than the poor.
Here is a lady with a unicorn in her lap,
a holy mother with a unicorn,
a symbol of Christ the Savior,
a black horse with a yellow horn and yellow tail.
I see the Lady with a unicorn, a savior who is not Christ,
but poetry. She kisses the beast
who licks her face. The unicorn
pokes its horn in her neck, a sign of love,
closes its eyes, falls asleep in her arms,
forgets all suffering.
In a heartbeat, heart beating so hard
you can hear it, the beast awakens,
runs about the house, kissing books and sharpening its horn,
today on free forms. Rising on its back legs
it stands on Shakespeare—
showing its golden penis, it ejaculates,
then grazes in “the valley of its saying,”
on Góngora, Lorca, the Psalms,
washing and feeding the poorest of the poor,
until, with the excuse that it is in love,
or loveless, it returns to the barn, the library—
weeping because it is only a metaphor,
captured in the lap of the virgin.
FOR MY GODMOTHER, TWENTY YEARS LATER
Give me a death like hers without tears,
those flies on a summer day about a carcass—
about the house medicine, Mozart, and good cheer.
My song: life is short, art long, death longer.
My doctor uncle covered her with kisses.
When her life was a goldfinch in his hand,
on a feeder and birdbath outside her window:
larks sang, splashed and fed above the sparrows.
A blue jay militaire drove them away.
Then, a bird of prey, a necessary reprimand
screamed overhead without mercy. Instead
of terror, it was met at her window
by the warbler of good cheer that sometimes sings for the dead.
I whistle for it to come and nest near my window.
He rode into the city unrecognized on a lion,
wore a pointed hat with fool’s bells,
whetting his knife on his lion’s haunch. Someone shouted,
“He made the laws before he made the world!”
His hand dripping oils, the rider pointed at the voice.
“I want my bond, since I made the laws before the world.”
The lion bowed its head.
“Christians, Muslims, Jews, I will teach you to be content,
one as the other. Know this law:
you must first be one, then the other,
Jew play Christian and Muslim, Muslim play Jew
and Christian. Christian, wear my gabardine, then be a Turk.
That is my bond, the pound of flesh I cut from your heart.
You must learn to leave the meat of your life behind,
as an infant cut from its mother—
whatever the nothingness you call years.
Kick me, spit on me, or praise me—no matter.
I stand for judgment.
Now play your parts. Change gods, change gods,
then do the dance you call your days.”
A lion is swimming in the Grand Canal.
If the table and chandelier
made for Wright’s mile-high building
had “social relations, hapless and unheard,”
according to your lyrical experiment,
where might you go then to tell your story?
Where, où, ¿dónde?, dove, nali in sexual Chinese
nali nali also meaning “you’re welcome”? Nowhere.
A “confessional poem”? Sooner waterboarding.
If there were a San Francisco earthquake,
would Varieties of Religious Experience fall off the shelf?
Did your mother speak for a year without a noun or verb
except in the last sentence? With barely a taste of self,
we are like prisoners in San Quentin,
salt and sugar taken off our tables,
two in a cell playing husband or wife on alternate weeks.
In a wink, you join with the one action that is death,
the broken nose of stars—
the last line of an unfinished style,
the last syllable of meaning squeezed out of a lemon.
A child of seven, I swam across the Hudson
at her source and rise in the Adirondacks,
at Lake Tear of the Clouds. I had her
where she is golden and sandy, ten yards wide,
as generations of swimmers have had her
in deep and shallow waters. I have spent many nights
beside worldly rivers. The Hudson is provincial,
sometimes like an overworked mother,
daughter, or servant. Her eyes and shoreline
show years of disappointment and disrespect.
Damn those who defame her.
She is indifferent to me—still, I have had her
it seems all my life. I fall asleep beside her.
Often I awake half-dreaming.
I see the Hudson is naked.
In the torn clouds I see a little boat with a light
on top of the mast. Is the light her navel or nipples?
I say that, but I know you can ‘have’ a mother,
not a river, not any other woman.
Swimming in the Hudson I learned I can love a woman,
“have” her, and she may believe I “have” her too,
and that she can “have” me for a greater or lesser price,
but we cannot keep anything but our word.
I bet my tongue on that.
i
At Piazza Santa Croce
I bought a print for less than the cost of a gelato,
an etching made when vivisection was a sin:
a battle in a vineyard: long-haired naked men
against long-haired naked men, Tuscans
cut open, dissected with sabers, crossbows and axes.
They do not fight half lusting for each other.
They do not take pleasure in their nakedness as bathers do
or fight for a cause, city or God,
or over a lover removed from the scene.
There is the artist’s cause—to show flesh unresurrected,
how men look, stripped to bones and innards.
ii
With their book on love, The Neck-Ring of the Dove,
Muslims came to Florence from Córdoba,
dressed lords and ladies in gold and silver
brocades and taffetas—their poet-physicians taught
how naked bodies looked in life and death,
kissed and torn to pieces on earth, in hell and paradise.
iii
These days they pass a camera with ease
down the throat and out the anus, taking silent movies
of what was thought divine. Note: the sacred heart,
masked surgeons watch vital signs, seldom genuflect.
There is the poetry of sonar imaging, the heart, the kidneys,
the diseased prostate doomed to shipwreck
in the blood and urine of mothering seas.
X-rated and X-rayed, the body is sacred, love is still an art
some call “praying”: lying down, standing up, or on their knees,
whatever the place, the time of day or night they please,
when the body lets the soul do whatever it please.
to Arnold Cooper
A week ago my friend, a physician, phoned
to say he has lung cancer, “not much time
so come on over.” I brought him some borscht
I cooked and about a tablespoon of good cheer.
We kissed goodbye as usual.
Then it was as if
we walked out in deep snow.
He was still in bedroom slippers.
March was a long way off, the snow
much too deep for crocuses to push through.
Then it was as if he laughed,
“I lost a slipper. Poor snow.”
I put his bare foot in my woolen hat.
We talked about February and books
as if it were a summer day. I thought,
“No better mirror than an old friend.”
He said, “In my work I’ve done what I wanted to do.”
A branch broke off a sycamore, fell
into the snow for no reason.
The buildings of New York’s skyline seemed empty
of human beings, gigantic glass and steel gravestones.
These words are obsolete.
We had an early summer. He died the ninth of June,
directed toward eternity like a swan in flight,
Katherine and Melissa at either wing.
Surrounded by love, he landed in his garden—ashes now.
Hibiscus, roses, day lilies: hold firm!
Universe after universe opens outward
as an ocean seen from shore,
where the waves and breakers do not roll toward shore.
They break outward toward
a region from which nothing, not even light, escapes.
I am there, beyond numbers and humdrum words,
billions of light-years away
with lightless, darkened, sun-filled,
begotten, misbegotten, dirtless stars
playing as puppies on planetary tits—
still not beyond what is. I think I heard
Emilia Bassano playing the virginal.
A caterpillar, I write riding a leaf in space.
I have only left or right.
I beg for east or west, north or south.
The maple leaf I ride blows out to a universe inferred
into and beyond amoral black holes
through its interaction with other matter,
unlike the moral silences between words.
The clouds I touch are as hot as the ovens of Auschwitz
and as cold as the gulags of Siberia,
temperatures I know from picture books.
I eat away on my leaf. I call from nowhere:
Sweetheart, have dinner. I won’t be back in time.
I say, to be silly,
Death is a grammarian.
He needs the simple past,
the passato remoto, the passé composé,
the le in Chinese added
to any verb in the present
that makes it past.
In the pluperfect houses of worship
death hangs around,
is thought to be undone.
Sometimes he is welcome.
I thank him for the simple present
and his patience.
to J.B.
Your Onlyness, your first commandment was:
“Forget about me. It’s the passerby that matters.”
Was that my neighbor? I followed him into the crowd
but lost him. I barely saw his face.
My book of uncommon prayer commands:
‘You shall love the stranger as yourself.’
Those without a spine with crooked hearts?
I saw a snake cut open, its heart exactly like mine.
He was a passerby. We did not walk the same,
but All-knowing Onlyness, You saw we danced alike.
I love the garter snake and the fer-de-lance,
but I cannot love my neighbors equally. At school I sang:
“Trust thou in Your Onlyness, He shall establish your heart.”
When years hunted as wolves in snow,
before the forests were poetry, the plowed fields fiction,
I was something like an Arctic lizard
that lived ten months a year under ice,
a dew of reptile-antifreeze in my skin.
You did that. Then one day You chose to make me human.
Your Onlyness, what did You ever do I knew the reason for?
What did I ever do I knew the reason for?
The rat holds her young tenderly as Our Lady,
sings a lullaby in a sewer pipe.
I am among the passersby.
I live with the music I love, that faceless beauty.
I think Your Holy Ghost is every living thing.
Seventh child
crippled by polio
backward
born to my grandparents,
my mother’s side
in their fifties.
When my grandmother died
my aunt did not speak
for seven weeks, till she met a stranger
to whom she could pass on
the evil eye.
She wrote Bessie
and her address
in her prayer book
so God would know
where to find her.
I was her infant lover.
She played with my
personal pronoun I.
I will bury
her prayer book in my garden,
a fallen leaf to mark
the text for the day:
The palm tree protested,
Do not cut down
the cedar. Both of us
are from the same root.
I owe much to my distant relative
the recently discovered
primordial ocean creature
an Eye surrounded
by a few transparent
gelatinous arms and wings.
The Eye prospered,
found food, avoided danger,
read shoals, corals, ocean bottom,
floated
out to sea, looking,
looking. Before there was hearing
or smell, an Eye swam,
saw. The evidence
is still insufficient
under sand, sunken mountains,
hidden perhaps in our salt tears.
Before primordial syntax
or love at first sight,
my ancestor, my ancestor saw!
Today, flying from Munich to Rome,
I saw Venice through Tiepolo clouds.
I knew Venus and Mars
were making love down there.
Two days ago, my dog died,
ate poison,
her insides were cut to pieces.
You Doges, Popes,
Admiral Jehovah,
Admiral Jesus, Zeus, Satan,
whoever is up to it,
I’ll give you Venice, the Titians, Bellinis, Tiepolos,
the piazzas and palaces—un affare.
It’s all yours. Give me back my dog.
Today I saw proof in the dusty theater
of my Y chromosomes: 7,000 years
before King David my ancestors wore
his invisible star, G2a(P15).
Out of Ethiopia or Tanzania
they hunted and gathered their way north,
ice ages before what we now call years,
past Ephesus, the Black Sea, to Iberia.
Some lingered behind, found figs and grapes
they shared with larks and wolves.
My Betters, I am a child of your hungers.
Ancient, present, and future Silences,
I invite all of you to a fish soup dinner.
Call me a ship, a freighter and crew, adrift.
My joys and sorrows are battened down.
In my hold is the dry rot of things “better left unsaid.”
Drifting? I am on my old course: I need
to wake up not knowing where I am.
Call it love of wilderness, Elijah, chance,
my North Star. Waves teach me winds.
I follow Aphrodite and Venus, those streetwalkers.
I read my slips of the tongue as if they are charts.
My rudder is for waving goodbye.
Pardon, Silences. What is this? Sooner or later
a message in a bottle thrown into the sea.
I am still at sea. God knows I love a storm.
The trade of war is over, there are no more battles,
but simple murder is still in.
The No God, Time, creeps his way,
universe after universe, like a great snapping turtle
opening its mouth, wagging its tongue
to look like a worm or leech
so deceived hungry fish, every living thing
swims in to feed. Quarks long for dark holes,
atoms butter up molecules, protons do unto neutrons
what they would have neutrons do unto them.
The trade of war has been over so long,
the meaning of war in the O.E.D. is now “nonsense.”
In the Russian Efron Encyclopedia,
war, voina, means “dog shit”;
in the Littré, guerre is “a verse form, obsolete”;
in Germany, Krieg has become “a whipped-cream pastry”;
Sea of Words, the Chinese dictionary,
has war, zhan zheng, as “making love in public,”
while war in Arabic and Hebrew, with the same
Semitic throat, harb and milchamah, is defined
as “anything our distant grandfathers ate
we no longer find tempting—like the eyes of sheep.”
And lions eat grass.
to Jean Garrigue
Sometimes I would see her with her lovers
walking through the Village, the wind
strapped about her ankles.
Simply being, she fought
against the enemies of love and poetry
like Achilles in wrath.
Her tongue was not a lake,
but it lifted her lovers
with the gentle strength of a lake
that lifts a cove of waterlilies—
her blue eyes, the sky above them—
till night fell and the mysteries began.
My friend I love, poet I love,
if you are not reading or writing tonight
on your Underwood typewriter,
if no one is kissing you, death is real.
HOTEL ROOM BIRTHDAY PARTY, FLORENCE
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
who’s that old guy in my room?
In the red nightshirt on my bed
I’m a kabuki extra. If I please
I can marry all
to nothing, snow to maple trees,
leap for joy over my head,
play bride and bridegroom,
an old and young shadow on the wall.
I can play a decapitated head
laughing in its basket of flies.
There are no clocks in paradise,
a dog’s tail keeps time instead.
(Today be foolish for my sake.)
Which comes last, sunset or sunrise?
Nightfall or daybreak?
The day is Puccini’s,
the street is for madrigals,
the celebration in the cathedral:
a skull beside a loaf of bread,
but for my grandmother’s sake
it’s a portion of torta della nonna I take.
It is a double portion of everything I want.
A mirror is a stage: I’m all the comedies
of my father’s house and one of the tragedies.
I draw my boyhood face
in blood and charcoal
I hold my masks in place—
all the worse for wear
with a little spit behind the ear,
and because this is my birthday
like a donkey in its stall
let fall what may.
To be alive is not everything
but it is a very good beginning.
In our graves we become
children again
then we are grandchildren
then great-grandchildren
and so on, name after name
till we are nameless
free as the birds to sing
songs without words
mating calls, warnings
simple trills, for no reason,
that call the day is glorious.
“I want a hero: an uncommon want . . . ”
—Byron, Don Juan
A common satyr and poet, I want a hero
who reaches up to the matter beneath
the stanza: eight lines, ten syllables or so,
as into underpants, who rhymes faith
and death, hello if he cares to with Galileo,
who recanted, but fathered before his death
Natural Philosophy and three natural daughters
baptized in the Arno’s muddy waters.
I cheer for love, what some call vice,
what some call sin, some simply pleasure,
humping, romance, odd ways of making nice,
taking advantage of, taking the measure.
One wife’s passion is another’s sacrifice,
one man’s poison is another’s cure.
A little fornication rights all wrongs,
there are no commandments in the Song of Songs.
We are made of water, earth, air, and fire
in the image of the One you-know-Who,
whose hair in the wind is Hebrew barbed wire.
On the first day when the sun was brand new,
creation a blast, He simply took a flyer,
since in darkness there was little to do,
He made us—to drown us in the ocean
of the last full measure of devotion.
Not every lady returns from the dance
with the guy who brought her, anything written
by man or woman in honest ink may rinse
away in tears. Love’s not an altered kitten
in the master’s lap, fed on white mice.
For every French kiss there is a France,
for every bugger there is a Britain,
for every time I bite, twice I’m bitten.
I like heels, their music on the floor, not bare human feet.
Mozart loved to hear the sound of hoof beats
on oak, marble—Köchel 44,
his concerto for woodwinds and satyr hooves,
brought satyrs to court before the Emperor.
Today you hear such music, such hooves
in Andalusian caves and orange groves,
in Greek cafes, and on the Mount of Olives.
When a boy, I first saw my lower half:
my goat hooves, my pecker, I shook in terror,
called it “my sock apple tree” for a laugh.
How many would eat my apples to the core,
would I father a kid, a faun, a calf—
I stood helpless before the mirror,
the living proof of the Creator’s error,
erotic errata, a kid who pees on the floor?
My mother told me Jesus was a satyr
so I wouldn’t feel bad at Christmas without a tree,
that God was a lover, not a hater,
to button up my overcoat when the wind is free
(she said she’d tell me about the Devil later),
to take good care of myself, she belonged to me.
She taught me to be silly, and to be good,
which brightened the night sky of my childhood.
Further, she explained, “Be true to your phallus.
Live in the wilderness. The future is now, not eternity.”
I loved the Aurora Borealis.
Hell was the city, heaven the country,
the woods, a field of wildflowers, my place.
One kiss in the country is worth ten in the city,
whatever the weather, I took nymphs at random,
one at a time, in circles or in tandem.
Now, the question is, how can a good wife
live with a circumcised satyr from Queens
who thinks sin is cutting spaghetti with a knife,
childbirth the parable of spilled beans.
To understand this mystery, this hieroglyph,
each day she needs a Rosetta Stone, she preens
burrs, hay and lice from my graying plumage,
gently combs the old madness from my rage.
Centaurs teach, satyrs are autodidacts.
I have horns, not rays of light like Moses,
following the heart is my business, not facts,
or lines of reason. I chase the scent of roses,
waterfalls, meanings that fall through the cracks.
The day composes and decomposes—
love after love—I pay attention to rhyme,
to sunrise and sunset, not silly-billy time.
I have no time for clocks that tie up time’s
two legs so the Gods only hop and jump—
sure to stumble on “is” or simple rhymes
for “was.” My god makes the grasshopper jump,
frogs croak, the sun go down while the moon climbs
up to darkness. Love made the first atom jump.
I am entangled by love and untangled—
love the enchanting, love the newfangled.
When I heard the great god Pan was dead,
I asked did he die three deaths for us: goat,
man, and God, the hand of Saturn on his head?
He taught the ways of imperfection. Devout
Pan, you died so we might know Lust instead
of moderation, so we who cannot fly can float,
free as you taught us, our drunken hooves unsure,
walking the giddy clouds above our pasture.
The trick was not to know myself, I was not
human, so I could only pretend to be
a gentleman, a fish out of water, a Whatis-
That?, a centaur, a mule, a donkey.
Let me be a well-written sentence, not
a blot on the human page, not poetry,
a satyr, a freak of nature, a growth,
a knot on a tree, a goat of my word, an oath.
I said, “I will never forget you, dear,”
but what is my never, never, never worth?
Once my “never” was worth fifty years;
you could take it to the bank, a piece of earth
you could mortgage. Now my life is in arrears,
it is late December, there is a dearth
of everything, years, months, days are hostile.
I will remember you, love, a little while.
My lady’s touch has a way of whispering:
“It is summer, a perfect day, cloud
after cloud.” The world’s a good-for-nothing
and a good-for-something. It is right that a hungry crowd
of seagulls attacks a fluke as if it were the world.
In the lucky world, still on the wing,
love whispers, “It is summer, a perfect day.”
May my lady’s touch have its way.
It means little to me now when I am rusting away
that at dawn gods still roll out of our human beds,
that once I entered down the center aisle
at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus
on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me.
“Who is the master of her ninety nipples?”
the public whispered. No one noticed I was in fact
a bronze satyr, my goat feet, my tail, my erect penis.
I loved confusion, chaos was paradise.
I found happiness, so to speak, on the ramps
and scaffolding of the Tower of Babel,
I danced holding a tambourine above my head
made from a brass Turkish sieve I called time.
Water, sacramental wine, ink once words, passed through.
In old Rome, I played the flute, but at the first sight
of my combed, perfumed, and throbbing lower half,
Lucretia thrust a dagger through her heart.
Later in Pisa, when on the Piazza a colossal
New Testament was carved in marble in Greek—
chapter and verse, I danced across Matthew, John,
Mark and Luke, leapt to Revelation, stars flashing
from my hooves. In the Basilica, virgins
lined up on their knees in white for first communion.
A proper satyr, I took half a dozen from behind.
The wafers danced on their tongues. Beautiful,
the little hearts of blood on white lace.
The Tower of Pisa leaned away from me in disgust.
I shouted back at the mob of tourists who attacked me:
You will never put out the fires of hell
with a nineteenth-century American candle-snuffer.
The devil is no one, a French-Canadian plaster loon.
Frightened by my mythological smell
a bronze horse reared up, broke away
from his handler. Mares turned their hindquarters
to the north wind, bred foals without the aid of stallions.
Born for blasphemy and lust, uncircumcised half-goat,
I made my way to the Holy Land.
I am proud my bronze prick was the clapper
in many a Jewish, Christian and Muslim belle.
I must have done something right,
Jew, Christian and Muslim chased after me
throwing stones: onyx, opals, diorite,
the glass eyes of their god.
I hid in the cold lawless night of Sinai,
my companions a snail, a lamprey eel skeleton.
Wise man, remember every giraffe farts above your head.
What have I stolen from myself, I thought.
How can I pay myself back in kind?
The sun and moon survive absolutely without conscience.
WHEN I was a child, I moved my pillow to a different part of the bed each night because I liked the feeling of not knowing where I was when I woke up. From the beginning I yearned for the nomadic life. I wandered, grazed like a goat on a hill—the move from grazing to exploring was just a leap over a fence. In my seventh year, I had a revelation. A teacher asked me a question. I knew the answer. Miss Green, a horse-faced redhead, asked the 3A class of P.S. 99, Kew Gardens, Queens, a long way from Byzantium: “What are you going to do in life?” Most of the answers remain a blur, but someone said she was going to be a novelist and someone said he’d write a play, or for the movies. I remember waiting; I was last to answer: “I am certain I am a poet.” Then Miss Green said, “I knew it. You, Stanley, are a bronze satyr,” and she whacked my erect penis with a twelve inch Board of Education wooden ruler.
I ran home in a fury at my parents. They had never told me I was a satyr. My mother’s explanation: “You know what a hard time I had giving birth to you. Why do you think every time I hit you it hurts my hand? You had whooping cough the first six months of your life. The doctor said no human being could survive that. Even so, when you were three months old in your crib, you knocked your five-year old sister unconscious. Nothing ever fits you, not your shoes, not your pants, not your shirts, nothing. Your feet always hang off the bed.” How many times did I hear my mother say, “That kid doesn’t know his own strength. You’ll injure somebody for life. Don’t hit. Don’t hit. The other kids, gentile and Jew, lie. You are mythological.”
After the revelation, at dinner, I saw my father—a public high school principal—as an angry centaur. Most evenings he was out herding his mares and women together for song, smell, and conversation. At our dinner table, I knew if I didn’t speak, no one would. My fifth summer, my father went to Europe “alone,” mostly, I think, to Venice and Vienna. By watching others, I taught myself to swim. When he returned I couldn’t look him in the eye. He brought back presents: a wooden bowl that, when lifted, played a Viennese waltz, a bronze ashtray of a boy peeing, after the fountain in Brussels, a silver top on a plunger I could never figure out, a blue necklace for my mother, some etchings of Venetian views and one of Beethoven. We lived in an apartment as desolate as Beethoven’s jaw.
Still, on February 7, 1935, with my father on sabbatical leave, we set out as a family aboard the S.S. Statendam, heading for the stormy waters of the Atlantic, then southeast to the sunny Mediterranean. It was the first of many voyages I would take under different circumstances from the moral north to the warm south. For the first time, I heard the Roman languages of satyrs and satires, then Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish. I heard rolling r’s, strange j’s and h’s, sometimes silent, throated on olives, anchovies and garlic. Until that February, I had entered a house of worship only on special occasions—a Protestant Adirondack church in summer, to attend films—a synagogue, only once, to tell my grandmother on Yom Kippur that my mother was waiting outside in a car—I was thrown out for not wearing a hat, or perhaps because I was a satyr. My mother offered me hers, a brown, broad-brimmed hat with a veil that I refused to wear. Within a month, this satyr stood before the Nightwatch in Amsterdam. I read “Franco Franco Franco” on a wall in Malaga, I rode a camel beside the Sphinx, toured the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, watched men praying at The Wailing Wall; I entered the Church of the Nativity and the Holy Sepulcher, heard the “good news” for the first time. I took off my shoes, heard my hooves echo on the green rugs and tiles in the mosque of Santa Sophia and the Blue Mosque. I was photographed with the caryatids on the Acropolis, ran through the Parthenon on a windy February or March day, the Greek sun so bright against the white marble it hurt my eyes.
A few days later, on the Island of Rhodes, I was proud to be nicked in the leg by a ricocheted bullet in a post-revolutionary celebration. When I told the story throughout my childhood, I was shot in the leg in a Greek Revolution; I said I had a scar to prove it—and I do. That spring, I wandered off alone into the red light district of Algiers. An auburn-haired, tattooed lady smelling of flowers and sweat kissed me for nothing behind a beaded curtain. She touched a naked breast to my lips—I was in paradise. My mother thought I was lost. Soon, in Cairo, late at night, I roused most of the hotel attendants, claiming I had leprosy. I was covered with volcanoes of blood, my only comfort a black dragoman, tribal scars on his face, until my parents returned from a performance of belly dancers and made the discovery that I had been bitten by an army of fire ants. I would not forget the poverty and disease in the slums of Cairo, the crack of whips over the donkeys and horses. I was nine years old, eight years younger than the Soviet Union, changed forever.
Aboard the Statendam, I played chess with a thirteen-year-old kid named Matthew. He wore white knickers and traveled with his grandmother. I last saw him crying, kicking and spitting at my father, who was beating the dickens out of him. I never, in the two-month voyage, saw Matthew or his grandmother again. I asked my mother if Dad threw them overboard; she said, “You’re exaggerating again.” My father said, “To ask questions is a sign of intelligence, but you ask too many questions. Your mother is the Tower of Babel. You and she are two of a kind.”
Now that I could accept and was proud of being a bronze satyr, I remembered when I was a baby in my Aunt Bessie’s arms, I took her breasts out of her blouse, thinking, “I am pretending to be just a baby, but I am really out for a feel.” I wish I had been photographed, then with my little victorious, evil satyr smile, instead of the family photo of me in a baby carriage reaching for a cloud. In our family, the beginning of civilization was understood to be the moment Abraham sacrificed the ram instead of his firstborn son. I started one dinner’s conversation with “I think it would have been better to kill Isaac than the ram. I think the ram stands for me. Daddy, you know there’s a very thin line between the good shepherd and the butcher.”
“Who are you to think!” Whack went my father’s Board of Education ruler, a thirty-six-inch weapon. My mother threatened to stab herself in the heart with a kitchen knife like a bronze Lucretia. We were a family of atheists; still, we celebrated an occasional seder with uncles, aunts, and their children, most of whom kept away from me, lest I molest them. What could I do to liven up the evening? I planted a snail and a skeleton of an eel under the parsley and horseradish on my father’s seder plate. The moment he passed out the horseradish, everyone saw the snail and eel’s skeleton. I said, “Horseradish rhymes with Kaddish.” Lightning, my father reached out for me, but he missed. I was ordered out of the house, into the world of wild things.
I had planned one last, beautiful gesture. My mother and Aunt Mabel had a friendly contest, who could make the lightest matzo balls. My mother always lost. I had found my aunt’s matzo balls laid out on a platter in the kitchen. I took our little collection of stones and jewels from Jerusalem, and one by one I thrust them into the center of each matzo ball: diorite, opal, quartz, limestone, sandstone, onyx. I watched through the window as the matzo balls were served with a spoon, one by one, into the chicken soup. My aunt had a big and loyal constituency that typically gulped their food. Hypocrites, they swallowed the matzo balls with such comments as, “Light as air!” “Like perfume,” until my cousin Audrey cried, “I broke a tooth on a rock!” I danced my little goat dance outside for joy. For the first and only time in her life, my dear mother was declared a winner.
Whatever the weather, the smoke of battle never cleared. In November, on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death, my mother lit a Yartzheit memorial candle in a glass. I believe she prayed. “What would happen,” I asked, “if I blew out the flame?” My mother’s face saddened that I should ask such an unspeakable question, but she knew my ways. “That would be a sin.” She almost never used that word. Now I knew there was a second sin—the first, the greater sin, wasting food. A proper satyr, sin was my pie in the sky. I knew that in one evening Alcibiades had cut the penises off half the herms in Athens. I scouted the neighborhood, and in one evening, with our nineteenth-century American candlesnuffer, I put out the flames of seven Yahrzeit candles. I came across a magazine called Twice a Year that introduced me to Rimbaud, Lorca, Wallace Stevens; they taught me how to survive. Out of a bar of Ivory soap I carved a Virgin Mother with a baby satyr in her lap, then another virgin with a unicorn in her lap. My thought was the unicorn represented, not Christ, but my savior—poetry. I cut school and went two or three days a week to the main reading room of the Forty-second Street Library (a satyr among lions), or the Museum of Modern Art, or to the Apollo Theater to see foreign films. I smoked five-cent Headline cigars. One romantic evening I called my father a sadist (the first shot of the fourth Punic War). It was then I was banished from Jackson Heights forever.
Hard years. I learned to disguise myself to earn a living. Wherever I went I carried my desperately thin production of poems and Wallace Stevens. I was sure Hitler was anti-satyr. I joined the Navy at seventeen. A sword wound and the G.I. Bill got me through college in style. I had a recurring nightmare that, like the satyr Marsyas, I was flayed—just for being a satyr, for no reason at all, not for challenging Apollo at music. I leapt around graduate women’s dorms, broke windows and doors. Police were called. I was expelled for “subversive activity.” Now history: I was hired by a detective agency to spy on organizing workers. I became a counterspy for Local 65. I sang in a band, played the bass, waited on tables; I was a sailor on a Greek merchant ship (I got the job through Rae Dalven, the translator of Cavafy); I grazed a while at New Directions; for mysterious reasons, Dylan Thomas and I became passionate friends—I loved his poetry and his deep-throated Christianity. I remember his saying “the truth doesn’t hurt.” He could and would talk intimately to anyone, regardless of class or education, not a habit of American or English intellectuals. He drank, he told me, because he wasn’t useful, which I understood to mean he could not relieve human suffering. Anyone who really cared about him knew how profoundly and simply Christian he was. Dickens was a favorite teacher. He gave away the shirt off his back. The turtleneck sweater Dylan wore in that picture was mine, knitted for me by my Aunt Tilly. We discovered an Italian funeral home on Bleecker Street where, after the bars closed at 4 a.m., we drank whiskey on a gold and onyx coffin. He introduced me to Theodore Roethke, his second-favorite living American poet. His favorite was e.e. cummings— “he can write about anything.” Dylan, Ted and I spent an evening with townspeople from Laugharne, trolls who whitewashed the town. What a concert of Welsh accents and laughter. Dylan had his boathouse, Roethke his greenhouse, I had my apartment house in Queens.
I met a blond, green-eyed Catalan beauty named Ana Maria. Full of Spanish poetry and Catalan republican-heretical-anarchistic tragedy, she was a great bad-weather friend. After Barnard College she sailed off to Spain; I followed, after writing a poem called “Sailing from the United States.” (I earned the money to follow by wild luck—an old 8th Street satyr who knew I loved painting gave me an El Greco to sell, a crucifixion with a view of Toledo.) We married at the American Consulate in Tangiers. Our witnesses—her mother and two virgin sisters. There was blood on the floor. It turned out that one of her sisters had been given a metal garter with nails by a nun at the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón because the nun thought Ana Maria was marrying an American Protestant. A miracle: the sister who wore the garter and shed her blood at my wedding found her way to Philadelphia, married an orthodox Jew, a painter. They both died too soon and are buried on a hillside overlooking Haifa.
I knew in Rome there was a tradition of centaur teachers—why not satyrs? I made my way to pagan Rome. I taught English and tutored. We lived facing the temple of the Vestal Virgins across the Tiber. I decided, one August evening, to have a mythological picnic, a cookout for my mythological friends. Of course, it had to be beside the river, on the embankment of the Tiber, because the hippocamps were half-horse, half-fish; the tritons were half-man, half fish. There were nymphs and maenads. The great god Pan himself came—and the Artemis of Ephesus on a sacred barge. (You understand I could not serve my famous fish soup.) A giraffe crashed the party. He said he was a tree, a sycamore among men, lonely since his nesting birds flew south. He said he envied trees that can lean over a river and see their reflection. Madness, I thought, to have a private mythology, but I knew to speak to him I had to accept his metaphor. The symposium began. How did it feel to a man to make love to a fish, how did it feel to a horse to make love to a fish? What was love? Someone complimented Artemis on the beauty of her many breasts. A harpy screeched, “She has no nipples; they are the testicles of sacrificed bulls.” We all came out of darkness, hatched from a single egg that was love the enchanting, the brilliant. When we departed, we kissed goodbye in our several heartfelt ways. Some wept because the sirens, as usual, sang their song of how we would be remembered.
I spent years in Rome, happy to eat the leftovers of the gods, reading and writing, trying to make a living holding four jobs simultaneously. More than once, drunk on Frascati, I bathed in the Bernini fountain of the four rivers. On summer evenings, I drank from the Nile with a marble tiger. I corresponded with my mother. I received one letter from my father I carried around a while. Finally I destroyed it, lest God should see it. Out of the blue, I received a postcard from my father, “We will be in Pisa on August 18, 1956, at the Hotel Cavellieri, if you care to see us.” Signed, “Pop.” Never, not once in my life, did I call my father “Pop.” I arrived on the appointed day, shocked to see how much they had aged. They were fifty-eight. We had lunch in the piazza, the pages of the Bible flapping in the wind. A little peeved that I had learned Italian and Spanish in the passing years, my father taught himself passing Italian and Spanish to go with his Greek, Latin, and French. He had more than enough Italian to order, as usual, exactly what he wanted. He insisted on having his spaghetti with cinnamon and sugar, no doubt a Litvak recipe out of his mother’s kitchen. My mother said my hair was getting straight; did that have anything to do with the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Oh, how I miss my mother’s questions. My father spent a cordial week in Italy, my mother another month at our apartment in Trastevere. She slept in a room I usually rented out, in a bed just vacated by Christopher Isherwood and friend. If she had known, would she have slept a wink? My father said, in wishing me goodbye, “If you had only been a bronze horse rearing up once in a while, I could have handled you.” What was our mettle, a word I misspelled in my head as m-e-t-a-l? What we were really made of, the years would prove.
Coming out of his thoughts, my father said abruptly, “What I know of poetry I owe to you.”
“How so?” I asked suspiciously.
“When I was studying for my principal’s exam when you were two or three, I had to memorize passages from Shakespeare. On walks, I would recite the great speeches over your head, and repeat them out loud until I had them: Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest.”
I said, “Perhaps what I know of poetry I owe to you.”
He started reciting “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” with his large, tin ear. I finished it. I kissed him and said, “Thanks a lot.” (A well-known actress from a famous acting family once put me down with “I saw my father play King Lear when I was ten. You couldn’t possibly understand the difference between that and studying Shakespeare at Yale.” I informed her that I began my Shakespeare studies when I was two.)
I met Ted Roethke again in Rome when I was munching on the review Botteghe Oscure. We both had passed dangers. We hit it off. We met again two years later by chance at a Pinter play in London when I was heading back to the States after Rome fell. We joined up to see Hamlet and Gielgud in The Tempest (we did not drown our books). Eight seasons passed. Ted and Beatrice came to stay with me at 57th Street at a barn I was living in. I gave Ted big breakfasts and my homburg, he gave me his famous raccoon skin coat. He liked the fish and turtle tank in my small dining room. He told me he was once in love with a snake. Ted brought me to dinner at Stanley Kunitz’s. I remember that first long, long, long evening. Thinking back, I didn’t quite know how lucky I was. They were in their fifties, Stanley had almost fifty years to go, Ted had six. Dylan had crossed the Styx a handful of years before. On still another evening, not after death, Roethke came with his not-quite-finished manuscript of The Far Field. He went off one evening to show it to Stanley Kunitz. He put on a blue serge suit and my homburg for the occasion. Just before dawn, he rolled back in. “What did Stanley say?” I asked.
“He liked it a lot.” Then a look of pain crossed his face and I knew that Ted, who had been in the mood to be crowned heavyweight champion and nothing less, was disheartened. I thought Kunitz had found something not quite right, that he had been demanding and not just celebratory. Suddenly, Ted said, talking half to me and half to the world, “Stanley Kunitz is the most honest man in America.” I told this story in an introduction to a book of Kunitz conversations. More years. Roethke long dead, after a formal Roethke celebration at which Kunitz, an aged ex-Roethke sweetheart and I were the only three people in the room who knew him, Kunitz asked me to repeat the story at dinner to a young poet. I was pleased my story had touched Stanley.
When my father was soon to die, he spent his last hours in a fury that he hadn’t died a year before when he’d wanted to. His doctor kept saying to me, “He’s made of stainless steel. He’s made of stainless steel.” I understood my bronze self was just a chip off the old block, a mere alloy of tin and copper. What is a satyr, a Turkish brass sieve without moral outrage, a chamber pot that lets the urine through beside my father’s moral steel.
My mother divorced my father six months before her death. On her birthday, a month to the day before she died, she saw her second great-granddaughter, who, to her joy, was named after her. She never knew she had a grandson. My sister sent our mother’s ashes through the U.S. mail. My parents are buried in a garden I made in Water Mill, the graves two unmarked stones, surrounded by Montauk daisies and pink mallow. I didn’t think my mother would want the stones too close. Last spring, a swan nested right on the graves. When the eggs hatched, the mother swan para ed with her six grey cygnets in the bay in front of our house. When I approached, they all jumped on their mother’s back, and she swam away with them to safety. My mother would have liked that.