1
What is heaven but the history of color,
dyes washed out of laundry, cloth and cloud,
mystical rouge, lipstick, eyeshadow? Harlot nature,
explain the color of tongue, lips, nipples,
against Death, come-ons of labia, penis, the anus,
the concupiscent color wheels of insects and birds,
explain why Christian gold and blue tempt the kneeling,
why Muslim green is miraculous in the desert,
why the personification of the rainbow is Iris,
why Aphrodite, the mother of Eros, married
the god of fire, why Adam in Hebrew
comes out of the redness of earth . . .
The cosmos and impatiens I planted this June
may outlast me, these yellow, pink and blue annuals
do not sell indulgences, a rose ravishes a rose.
The silver and purple pollen that has blown on the roof
of my car concludes a sacred conversation.
Against Death washerwomen and philosophers
sought a fixative for colors to replace unstable substances
like saliva, urine and blood, the long process of boiling,
washing and rinsing. It is Death who works
with clean hands and a pure heart. Against him
Phoenician red-purple dyes taken from sea snails, the colors
fixed by exposing wool to air of the morning seas near Sidon,
or the sunlight and winds on the limestone cliffs of Crete—
all lost, which explains a limestone coastline
changed into mountains of pink-veined marble,
the discarded bodies of gods.
Of course Phoenician purple made for gods
and heroes cannot be produced nowadays.
Virgil thought purple was the color of the soul—
all lost. Anyone can see the arithmetic when purple
was pegged to the quantity and price of seashells.
Remember
the common gray and white seagull looked down
at the Roman Republic, at the brick red and terra-cotta
dominant after the pale yellow stone of the Greek world,
into the glare of the Empire’s white marble.
The sapphire and onyx housefly that circled
the jeweled crowns of Byzantium buzzed prayers,
thinks what it thinks, survives. Under a Greek sky
the churches held Christ alive to supplicants,
a dove alighted on a hand torn by nails.
In holy light and darkness
the presence of Christ is cupped in gold.
Death holds, whether you believe Christ
is there before you or not, you will not see Him later—
sooner prick the night sky with a needle to find the moon.
2
I fight Death with peppermints, a sweet to recall
the Dark Ages before the word Orange existed.
In illuminated manuscripts St. Jerome,
his robes egg-red, is seen translating in the desert,
a golden lion at his feet—
or he is tied to a column naked in a dream,
flagellated for reading satires and Pliny’s
Natural History that describes
the colors used by Apelles, the Greek master,
a painting of grapes so true to life
birds would alight on them to feed.
Death, you tourist, you’ve seen it all and better before,
your taste: whipped saints sucking chastity’s thumb,
while you eat your candy of diseased and undernourished infants.
On an afternoon when death seemed no more than a newspaper
in a language I could not read, I remember
looking down at Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives,
that my friend said: “Jerusalem is a harlot,
everyone who passes leaves a gift.”
Do birds of prey sing madrigals?
Outside the walls of Jerusalem, the crusaders
dumped mounts of dead Muslims
and their green banners, the severed heads of Jews,
some still wrapped in prayer shawls,
while the Christian dead sprawled near the place of a skull
which is called in Hebrew Golgotha.
Among the living, blood and blood-soaked prayers,
on the land of God’s broken promises—a flagged javelin
stuck into the Holy Sepulcher as into a wild boar.
Hauled back by the Franks, colors never seen in Europe,
wonders of Islam, taffetas, organdies, brocades, damasks.
Gold-threaded cloth that seemed made for the Queen of Heaven
was copied in Italy on certain paintings of Our Lady,
on her blue robes in gold in Arabic:
“There is no God but God, Muhammad is His Prophet”—
for whom but Death to read?
Wrapped in a looted prayer rug,
an idea seized by Aquinas: the separation of faith and reason.
Later nicked from the library of Baghdad:
the invention of paper brought from China
by pilgrims on a hajj, looted rhyme, lenses,
notes on removing cataracts.
Certain veils would be lifted from the eyes of Europe,
all only for Death to see.
Within sight of Giotto’s white, green and pink marble bell tower
that sounded the promise of Paradise,
plants and insects were used for dyes made from oak gall,
bastard saffron, beetle, canary weed, cockroach,
the fixative was fermented piss from a young boy
or a man drunk on red wine, while the painters
mixed their pigments with egg yolks and albumen,
gold with lime, garlic, wax and casein
that dried hard as adamantine, buffed with a polished agate
or a wolf ’s tooth.
At the time of the Plague, while the dead
lay unattended in the streets of Europe,
the yellow flag hung out more often than washing,
someone cloistered wrote a text
on making red from cinnabar, saffron from crocus,
each page an illumined example.
At the Last Supper the disciples sat dead at table.
Still, by the late fifteenth century
color was seen as ornament,
almost parallel to the colors of rhetoric,
blue was moving away from its place describing
the vaults of heaven to the changing sky of everyday.
Does it matter to heaven if a sleeve is blue or red or black?
In Venice Titian found adding lead-white to azurite-blue
changed a blue sleeve to satin.
3
I think the absence of color is like a life without love.
A master can draw every passion with a pencil, but light,
shadow and dark cannot reveal the lavender iris
between the opened thighs of a girl still almost a child,
or, before life was through with her, the red and purple
pomegranate at the center of her being.
Against Death on an English day Newton discovered
a single ray of white light refracted,
decomposed into a spectrum of colors,
and that he could reconstruct the totality,
mischievously reverse the process,
then produce white light again—which perhaps is why
last century, in a painting by Max Ernst,
the Holy Mother is spanking the baby Jesus.
Goethe found a like proof on a sunny summer day—
the birds, I suppose, as usual devouring insects
courting to the last moment of life.
While sitting by a crystal pool watching
soldiers fishing for trout, the poet was taken
by spectrums of color refracted from a ceramic shard
at the bottom of the pool, then from the tails of swimming trout
catching fire and disappearing,
until a rush of thirsty horses, tired and dirtied by war,
muddied the waters.
A heroic tenor sings to the exploding sun:
“Every war is a new dawning”—Fascist music.
Death would etch Saturn devouring his children on coins,
if someone would take his money.
Of course his IOU is good as gold.
Turner had sailors lash him to the mast
to see into a storm, then he painted slavers
throwing overboard the dead and dying,
sharks swimming through shades of red.
Later he painted the atheist Avalanche, then heaven
in truthful colors: Rain, Steam, Speed.
“Portraits of nothing and very like,” they said, “tinted steam.”
Turner kept most of his paintings to leave to England,
his Burning of the Houses of Parliament.
Against oblivion a still life of two red apples
stands for a beautiful woman. On her shoulder
the bruise of a painter’s brush—she is no more
than a still life of peasant shoes.
“You will not keep apples or shoes or France,” Death says.
A child chooses an object first for color,
then for form, in rooms with mother, father,
Death, and all the relatives of being.
4
Now this coloratura moves offstage
to the present, which is a kind of intermission.
My friend Mark Rothko painted a last canvas,
gray and yellow, then took a kitchen knife, half cut off his wrists
bound and knotted behind his back
(a trick of the mind Seneca never mastered)
to throw off Eros, who rode his back and whipped him
even after he was dead, till Eros, the little Greek,
was covered with blood of the Song of Songs.
Now Rothko is a study of color, a purple chapel,
a still river where he looks for his mother and father.
Death, you tourist with too much luggage,
you can distinguish the living from your dead.
Can you tell Poseidon’s trident from a cake fork,
the living from the living,
winter from summer, autumn from spring?
In a sunless world, even bats nurse their young,
hang upside down looking for heaven,
make love in a world where the lion, afraid of no beast,
runs in terror from a white chicken. Such are your winnings.
Death, I think you take your greatest pleasure
in watching us murdering in great numbers
in ways even you have not planned.
They say in paradise every third thought is of earth
and a woman with a child at her breast.
Death is not Prime Minister or resplendent,
not eternal darkness, silence, or heaven-sent.
Death is an unrepresentative form of government,
a dead mother and father who rule without consent,
a drone in every flower, the Queen in her hive.
They have a room in every house, pay no rent.
Silent at dinner, they deceive, connive,
as the clock ticks. They never say, “Live and let live.”
How many times have I tried to sing them to sleep?
Eternal bride and bridegroom,
I do what I do to make my death handsome,
to make them proud, to win a faceless smile by a leaping
somersault to childhood. I pay ransom
to my kidnappers who tie me to their bed—to weep
in their pillow, to sleep, to dream, to do or undo,
to twinkle twinkle in their firmament of two.
Silly to think there was a death: a father and mother
before there was time. Perhaps there was a single egg,
like the egg that hatched love, or something profane, other,
an indebtedness to which we should not pray, but beg
for more time. Or do we take a steel shovel and dig,
dig up a God, a Father who had a Holy Mother.
Perhaps love and death were married beneath a single egg,
a sign of resurrection like the butterfly.
Mothers and fathers live until their children die.
No moon is as precisely round as the surgeon’s light
I see in the center of my heart.
Dangling in a lake of blood, a stainless steel hook,
unbaited, is fishing in my heart for clots.
Across the moon I see a familiar dragonfly,
a certain peace comes of that. Then the dragonfly
gives death or gives birth to a spider it becomes—
they are fishing in my heart with a bare hook,
without a worm—they didn’t even fish like that
when the Iroquois owned Manhattan.
Shall I die looking into my heart, seeing so little,
will the table I lie on become a barge, floating
endlessly down river, or a garbage scow?
There is a storm over the lake.
There are night creatures about me:
a Chinese doctor’s face I like
and a raccoon I like,
I hear a woman reciting numbers growing larger and larger
which I take as bad news—I think I see a turtle,
then on the surface an asp or coral snake.
One bite from a coral snake in Mexico,
you’ll take a machete and cut off your arm
if you want to live. I would do that if it would help.
I say, “It’s a miracle.” The Chinese doctor and the moon
look down on me, and say silently, “Who is this idiot?”
I tell myself, if I lie still enough I’ll have a chance,
if I keep my eyes open they will not close forever.
I recall that Muhammad was born from a blood clot.
If I’m smiling, my smile must be like a scissors opening,
a knife is praying to a knife.
Little did I know, in a day, on a Walkman,
I would hear Mozart’s second piano concerto,
that I would see a flock of Canada geese flying south
down the East River past the smokestacks of Long Island City.
I had forgotten the beauty in the world.
I remember. I remember.
You told me your blindness is not seeing
even the shades of black called darkness.
You felt useless as a mirror until you made a poem
useful as a dog with bells around its neck.
Sometimes you wake to the wind moving through different trees.
A child, you loved to touch your mother’s face,
you wished the world were ocean,
you could hear, smell, and taste, knew that it was blue.
Trees had a smell you called green, apples red.
How could the flag be red-white-and-blue?
You laugh when I tell you “drink to me only with thine eyes”
is a love song, that some who see
only make love in the dark. You wish you could see as a bat.
Mozart you say is the great equalizer, the truest democrat,
you always preferred a dog to a cane.
When in Braille you first read, “the disciples asked,
‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’
Jesus answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents,
but that the works of God should be revealed in him . . . ’
and he spat on the ground and healed the man
with his spit and mud”—you waited awhile, then read on.
Blind in dreams, you touch, taste, smell and hear—
see nothing, nightmares like crowds are the more terrible
because you never see what terrifies you.
Since childhood it was an act of faith
to believe the sun and moon were in the sky,
it pleased you the sun is a fire the sighted cannot look into . . .
It is late. As always you, my imaginary friend,
take me by the hand and lead me to bed.
If Walt Whitman were alive, young and still living in Brooklyn,
he would have seen the burning Trade Center,
and if he were old and still in Camden, New Jersey,
he would have seen men jumping out from a hundred stories up,
some holding hands, believers and nonbelievers
who prefer a leap of faith to a death in an ocean of fire.
Walt could have seen women falling from the sun,
although the sun has no offices.
True in the heavens there often has been a kind of tit for tat,
not just thunder for lightning:
where there is grandeur observed, something human, trivial.
The South Tower fell like the old Whitman,
although it was second to be struck,
then the North Tower like the young Whitman.
What history, what hallucination?
Anyone could see the towers fell like the great poet,
with three thousand people from eighty-seven countries,
and three hundred and forty-three firefighters
into the irrational fires that burned for ninety days.
None of the dead lived in a boarding house
as would be likely in Whitman’s time.
History, hallucination?
A life goes up in flame like a page of Bible paper.
You could not pile books so high, not good books,
as this grand canyon of steel and concrete body parts,
my city’s broken backbone pushed out through her throat.
to Daniel Stern
You cherished your silent beautiful cello
after your shoulder joint wore out.
You would not play dead like that entombed Jew.
You could not stop hearing music in your head:
a disease. Whatever the conversation
or dream, you hear the chamber music you played—
the Archduke Trio, concerti in your head
in the Monday, Tuesday, everyday world—
the first cousin of a religious experience.
Sometimes I ask: “What music is playing now?”
The evening program, however sublime, always seems painful.
You sold your cello to pay a doctor’s bill.
It could have happened in a Balzac story—
wherever you are, outside in the street Balzac is standing,
winter and summer, fat and naked beneath his bronze cloak.
We are hanging on to life by a cello string.
I take the A string that carries the lyric, you the G
for darkness and light, both holding on to Dear life,
to D for Darling, Divertimento, and Don’t let go.
Our C string sounds at the bottom of a well.
The Great Concertmaster is playing us
for the hell of it. We are his cello.
His bow the tails of a hundred white horses.
Maestro, keep playing, an aire on any string will do,
Mozart, Bach, jazz, a little street music.
Sing us or pluck a note from time to time,
or a chord with one turn of the wrist
to accommodate the curve of the bridge.
Practice, practice, practice. O Concertmaster,
a question we, the cello, ask with our undersong
of lust: “Do we love the world more than one person?”
—again with a turn of the wrist
to accommodate the bridge over the dark river.
Because he would not abandon the flock for a lost sheep
after the others had bedded down for the night,
he turned back, searched the thickets and gullies.
Sleepless, while the flock dozed in the morning mist
he searched the pastures up ahead. Winter nearing,
our wool heavy with brambles, ropes of muddy ice,
he did not abandon the lost sheep, even when the snows came.
Still, I knew there was only a thin line
between the good shepherd and the butcher.
How many lambs had put their heads between the shepherd’s knees,
closed their eyes, offering their neck to the knife?
Familiar—the quick thuds of the club doing its work.
More than once at night I saw the halo coming.
I ran like a deer and hid among rocks,
or I crawled under a bush, my heart in thorns.
During the day I lived my life in clover
watching out for the halo.
I swore on the day the good shepherd catches hold,
trying to wrestle me to the ground and bind my feet,
I will buck like a ram and bite like a wolf,
although I taste the famous blood
I will break loose! I will race under the gates of heaven,
Back to the mortal fields, my flock, my stubbled grass and mud.
Until they killed my brother who killed you,
there were readers who read and smiled at:
From the rock of my heart a horse rose
that I should ride to follow them
the night they left by taxi
from the Damascus gate and fled toward Bombay.
My heart threw me off.
If only I had robes white enough,
but my robes were full of ashes and dust.
The rouge, lipstick and eyeshadows
you left on my flesh, I washed off before prayer.
My heart was gone, it looked back at me
from a distance, its reins bitten through.
Until they killed my brother who killed you,
there were readers who read and smiled at:
It is written, man was created from a blood clot.
When I am put in the grave and those who question the dead ask me,
“Was the blood drawn from the finger of God
or the heart or His tongue?”
I will not answer. I will say, “I have heard music so beautiful
it seemed the blood of the Lord.”
I know there is profit in God’s word, in prayer rugs, in silk and wool,
blood of the lamb and spit of the worm.
A man who rose from barber to physician,
I prize most my grandmother’s brass tray, pure as the sun
without etching or design, where I first saw the angel of mathematics,
the stateless angel of astronomy.
Let an old Palestinian grandmother sit in the sun
beside an old Jewish grandmother; I’ll bring them sage tea,
that in Hebrew is called something like “Miriam,” because when Mary
was pregnant with Jesus sage tea comforted her.
The Jew said, “Respect is more important than the Talmud.”
I was admiring the girl on the balcony in Ramallah
when the shrapnel hit me in the head. I did not have time
to make the break between my thoughts
and the attack on my head.
I thought it was a flower pot that fell off the balcony.
“Allahu akhbar!” I shouted. Someday the horse will fly.
Until they killed my brother who killed you,
there were readers who read and smiled at:
Love now is more dangerous than hate.
for Stanley Kunitz
The mouth on his forehead is stitched and smiling,
his head is crowned with bandages,
his broken nose: Michelangelo’s slave marble.
Like the last minutes of summer sunset
his cheekbones and eyes are lavender and black.
The face that hit the cement sidewalk of 12th Street
with the full force of his gravity does not frown.
I refuse to see what I know. I kiss the mouth of sorrow,
I rejoice that he is alive. I am drinking his gin
as if I were the English Consul,
he Lorca’s gypsy nun chased by the wind.
In his sitting room that is part greenhouse
we are on the sea of poetry in a familiar squall.
I must speak louder now above the wind.
We are on the green and mountainous Atlantic,
yes, there is a “cargo of roses,” a reason to smile.
Blaaah, blaaah. It is time to hold hands.
I hear the cries of poets washed overboard in my throat.
He says he is the oldest poet who ever lived,
fifteen years older than King Lear.
Now we are two old fishermen mending nets,
untying knots, hoping for fair weather—
then at sea between Emerson’s “Over-soul”
and “The tear is an intellectual thing.”
At Saint Vincent’s I will visit his love who broke her hip.
He says, “One step closer, I would have caught her.”
I will come Tuesday to cook, bring a new poem.
In his easy chair, his fist on the tiller, life is north northeast,
he heads windward, a hummingbird
blown out on the North Atlantic
struggling toward land to kiss a flower.
1
Death is a celestial fox that leaps out of his coffin:
tonight his tail sweeps away insects,
which the religious read as a sign:
the fox kills but does not end their lives.
Sometimes he stops, noses the air,
sings, showing his teeth.
I wish I just owed him money.
2
When my two dogs and I run on the beach
innocently thinking we hunt the fox
because we see two eyes in the ocean
where the fox crouches at the foot of a great wave,
my dogs jump in barking at nothing I can see,
while the fox leaps into its true lair,
the moist den of every sexual act.
There he waits, waits with that I-told-you-so grin.
3
I am a great cunt waiting for death to fuck me
between the golden thighs of endless morning,
swaddled in labia. American,
architect of my own destiny,
he shall not flatter me or marry me,
he shall not suck me or finger fuck me
though I am wet as the Mississippi,
death shall not slip it in.
My son carries my ghost on his shoulder, a falcon,
I am careful not to dig in my claws. I play
I am his father owl, sometimes sparrow, a hummingbird
in his ear. I told him from my first chirp:
“Be an American democratic Jew mensch-bird.”
When he was a child in Italy I was a migrant bird
with a nest in America. When I flew home
he cried, “Perche, perche?” I wept
not wanting him to have a distant bird
or a sea captain for a father.
How many times did I cross the Atlantic
in the worst weather to perch outside his window?
What kind of nest could I make in Italy
on a hotel balcony? When he needed to be held
his mother and nannies took turns. When he reached out
to me he often fell. He said I know I know to everything
I might have taught him. I fought for his life
with one wing tied behind my back—
for his name, school, and to have his hair cut
in a man’s barber shop, not a salon for signoras.
“Lose to him! Lose to him!” his mother screamed.
I was the only one in his life
who would not throw a footrace
he could win in a year, fair and square.
How could a small boy spend so much time
laughing and talking to a father in restaurants?
He complained in Bologna I took him to six museums,
in Florence four, in Espagna mille e tre.
We laughed at those rare Italian birds
who don’t find themselves sleeping forever
on a bed of polenta—preening, displaying,
making a bella figura. An omen in his life.
I flew him to an English meadow
to study Dante, then Shakespeare’s Histories
in a king maple overlooking the Hudson,
the cast: himself, me, my mate the beautiful Jane bird.
What are years? Not a herd of cattle,
perhaps a flock of birds passing overhead.
Sometimes I hear him chirping my song
louder than I ever sang it.
One day, when the heavenly dogs and hell dogs
find me behind a bush and fight over me,
may one with a soft mouth break from the pack
and take most of me to his Master. Let Him say, “Good dog,
good dog, what a peculiar kind of bird is this,
with his gray curly feathers and strange beak?
Have I ever heard him sing?” May it dawn upon Him,
I am the bird with the human son.
Judas, patron saint of bankers,
I run a piggy bank, audit myself.
Why is my search for gifts brought to the Magi,
expenses deducted for travel, called “a journey”?
There is a difference between writing, rewriting
and cooking the books. Accounting in the dark
I have mortgaged more than my house,
my heart pays usurious interest.
Where is such a price paid? I have faith
in the Secretary of Treasury.
For my “losses carried forward half a century,”
I say only the last five years are deductible.
Judas, your God with his small coins
of good and evil, lends himself to fictions.
I am in the market for bracelets,
chains, necklaces and rings of illumination.
When you said you wanted to be useful
as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.”
Then you said you would not trade our Sundays
or Moondays, useful for two thousand years,
for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
I said, “Endless are the wonders I can say ‘ah’ to,
and the ‘Ah’ that is in heaven. Yes, I’ve heard
the ‘ah, ah’ that comforts a baby.”
Then you said, “Go make a living on metaphors
for ‘ah,’” that I was your lunatic husband,
that I secretly want to be the Lighthouse
of Alexandria, a seventy-fathom-high
collaboration of art and science
in the Greek Egyptian sky, a mirror of light
that can be seen ten days out to sea.
Further, you complained, I see myself
standing on a rock beside Poseidon,
my right hand around his “terrible trident,”
surrounded by all the wonders of Greek Africa
offering me a bed as a welcome guest.
Ah, today is Monday. I want little more
than to be a hand-mirror you carry
in your purse with a hankie
to stop my hemorrhaging humility.
In the great iron pot of the universe
there is pot-au-feu for dinner:
gravity, galaxies, darkness, plasma;
my host, my dearest and least dear father,
sits at table without conversation,
rhetoric or grammar—none I comprehend.
I am thankful for much that I swallow
and for tonight’s guests: the great what is
in front of me, to my left the face of a clam,
to my right the sky brought down to its knees.
Hungry, I rush through “God is memory.”
I am thankful I am not green as parsley,
I put my red and white checked napkin under my chin,
I eat with the manners of Saturn.
If the sun is money, as you say,
the ocean has deep pockets.
Three miles down there’s still a little flickering,
small change in the deep—eight miles further
the sun is broke, flat as a flounder.
In Lima it rains once a year;
people are hot and tired of too much money.
While in sunny Spain anarchists in the Civil War
made leaves money. Duros and pesetas were out.
Olive trees cashed in.
Your typical wallet portafoglio held oak leaves,
olive leaves, and laurel. On rare occasions
a newspaper photo of Lorca was found
among the leaves. (Some things never change:
Cuentos verdes are still dirty jokes,
Judias, Jewish women, Judias verdes, green beans.)
When anarchists burned the churches,
if caught they sometimes confessed to the priests
before they were shot against a sunrise of money.
Would to Allah leaves were still money,
paintings of Adam with money over his privates.
In 1909 anarchists protesting conscription to Africa
dug nuns from their graves and danced
with those money-covered nuns in the streets of Barcelona.
The sun is the root of all evil. Sun talks.
Blake pointed out, some see the sun as a golden guinea.
He saw it as the heavenly host crying, holy, holy, holy.
A father is teaching his daughter to swim
in the Indian Ocean,
near them a fisherman throws his net,
silver and pink fish leap out of reach,
the child, wearing water wings,
loves her accomplishment,
squeals and laughs.
The father is happy teaching his daughter
something useful that will give her joy
the rest of her life. He says, “Come to me.”
When the great stone ocean falls from the sky,
for a second, the rest of her life,
the child thinks she is swimming—
then she is a pebble in the deep.
The father, reaching for his daughter,
disappears, a shard of blue glass.
Like a seagull the water wings fly
to the foot of the mountain.
Despite a broken wing
it tries to rise from the sand.
I walk along the North Atlantic
with my wife and two dogs.
A horseshoe crab writes in the sand
the sun disappears,
everything darkness with no one to see it,
the moon a skull in the sky.
I did not say: The peach blossoms are not as white
as plum blossoms. I said: They are beautiful, beautiful.
The peach blossoms fell into a rage,
their faces redder and redder with accusation.
But I intended no harm, no offense.
There was no reason for anger.
Pity me on my birthday, the first day of summer,
when flowers have their ways completely beyond me.
I remember when the Chinese for “how do you do?”
was “have you eaten today?”
I tell Alexander Fu this summer “
I will take you to the ocean.”
The ocean has English and Chinese waves.
He reaches out and catches a white button on my shirt.
I explain my shirt isn’t the ocean.
I tell him my button isn’t the moon.
From the crowd below the Chinese guillotine
I noticed the eyes of a severed head
for some seconds responded to calls of the victim’s name.
Left to itself, the head does not roll away in shame
or modesty. The lips do not utter a word.
It is the eyes like a child at school that respond.
What are they but cattle, these butterflies,
their purple hides torn by barbed wire,
scarred blue, yellow and scarlet.
If they are not marked for slaughter
I cannot tell to whom they belong.
They are just stray cattle.
The sun does not witness,
the clouds do not testify.
Beauty does not need a public defender,
but I would listen to a serious defense
of beauty—tell me what happens to the carcass,
the choice cuts, everything useful:
hide, bones, intestines, fat.
Then talk to me of butterflies.
Now there are four rivers: once there were five,
one has left without tears or a bird cry,
rivers leave their beds, have nothing else to give,
when a lover goes, love does not die—
in an empty bed love will survive.
Love, the sweet invisible spy,
is lucky: it has tears and laughter,
for a while, past, present and hereafter.
RAINBOWS AND CIRCUMCISION*
1
He might have made some other sign,
but it fitted his purpose to use sunlight
behind rain to make his sign of the covenant,
a rainbow above the flood. What was in the sky
was suddenly moral, moonlight and passing clouds
were merely beautiful.
We answer the rainbow with an infant son,
cut a touch of ignorant flesh away.
The wordless infant stands on the Book
that separates him by the width of the pages
from the bookless ground.
Rainbow and mother tell me who I am.
We might have used another sign,
a red dot on the forehead, or a scar on the cheek,
to show the world who we are,
but our sign is intimate, for ourselves
and those who see us naked—like poetry.
2
Once in Rome, on a winter day after a rare snowfall,
I stood on a hill above the snow-covered arches,
columns and palm trees of the pillaged Forum.
Against a dark purple sky suddenly opened
by shafts of sunlight, I saw two rainbows.
To see all that at the same time, and two rainbows,
was a pagan and religious thing: holy,
it was like the thunderous beauty of a psalm, and like
peeking through the keyhole with the masturbating slaves,
watching Hector mounted on Andromache. O rainbows!
*Rainbow and circumcision: each is a biblical sign of the Covenant.
I have come to Jerusalem
because I have a right to,
bringing my family who did not come with me,
who never thought I would bring them here.
I carry them as a sleeping child to bed.
Who of them would not forgive me?
I have come to Jerusalem to dream
I found my mother’s mother by chance,
white-haired and beautiful, frightened behind a column,
in a large reception room filled with strangers
wearing overcoats. After forty-two years
I had to explain who I was. “I’m Stanley,
your grandson.” We kissed and hugged and laughed,
she said we were a modern family,
one of the first to ride on trains.
I hadn’t seen before how much she looked like
her great-great-granddaughter. I remembered
that in her house I thumped her piano,
I saw my first painting, a garden, by her lost son.
I remembered the smells of her bedroom:
lace-covered pillows, a face-powdered Old Testament.
Then my dead mother and father came into the room.
I showed them who I’d found and gave everybody chocolates,
we spoke of what was new
and they called me only by my secret name.
1
The first days of April in the fields—
a congregation of nameless green,
those with delicate faces have come
and the thorn and thistle,
trees in purple bloom,
some lifting broken branches.
After a rain the true believers:
cacti surrounded by yellow flowers,
green harps and solitary scholars.
By late afternoon a nation of flowers: Taioun,
the bitter sexual smell of Israel,
with its Arabic name, the flowering red clusters
they call Blood of the Maccabees,
the lilies of Saint Catherine, cool to touch,
beside a tree named The Killing Father,
with its thin red bark of testimony.
In the sand a face of rusted iron
has two missing eyes.
2
There are not flowers enough to tell,
over heavy electronic gear
under the Arab-Israeli moon,
the words of those who see in the Dome of the Rock
a footprint of the Prophet’s horse,
or hear the parallel reasoning
of King David’s psalms and harp,
or touch the empty tomb.
It is beyond a wheat field to tell
Christ performed two miracles: first he rose,
and then he convinced many that he rose.
For the roadside cornflower
that is only what it is,
it is too much to answer
why the world is so, or so, or other.
It is beyond the reach
or craft of flowers to name
the plagues visited on Egypt,
or to bloom into saying why
at the Passover table Jews discard
a drop of wine for each plague, not to drink
the full glass of their enemy’s suffering.
It is not enough to be carried off by the wind,
to feed the birds, and honey the bees.
3
On this bright Easter morning
smelling of Arab bread,
what if God simply changed his mind
and called out into the city,
“Thou shalt not kill,” and, like an angry father,
“I will not say it another time!”
They are praying too much in Jerusalem,
reading and praying beside street fires,
too much holy bread, leavened and unleavened,
the children kick a ball of fire,
play Islamic and Jewish games:
scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors.
I catch myself almost praying
for the first time in my life,
to a God I treat like a nettle
on my trouser cuff.
Let rock build houses,
writing cover paper, scissors cut suits.
4
The wind and sunlight commingle
with the walls of Jerusalem,
are worked and reworked, are lifted up,
have spirit, are written,
while stones I pick up in the field
at random have almost no spirit,
are not written.
Is happiness a red ribbon on a white horse,
or the black Arabian stallion
I saw tethered in the courtyard of the old city?
What a relief to see someone repair
an old frying pan with a hammer,
anvil and charcoal fire, a utensil worth keeping.
God, why not keep us? Make me useful.
On the grapes and oranges you gave me on a white plate: worry,
in the kitchen, day worry, in the bedroom, night worry
about a child getting killed; worry in the everyday gardens
of Jerusalem, on geraniums and roses from the time they bloom
in December, long as they live. In the desert wind
playing over the hair on a child’s head and arms, worry.
In the morning you put on a soiled or clean shirt of worry,
drink its tea, eat its bread and honey. I wish you the luxury
of worrying about aging or money, instead of a child getting killed,
that no mother or father should know the sorrow
that comes when there is nothing to worry about anymore.
You gave me Jerusalem marble,
gypsum from the Judean desert,
granite from the Sinai,
a collection of biblical rock.
I gave you a side of smoked salmon,
a tape of the Magic Flute—
my lox was full of history and silence,
your stones tasted of firstness
and lastness, Jewish cooking.
You took me to a synagogue where a small boy came up to me
and asked me to dance him on my shoulders.
So we danced around Genesis and the Song
of Solomon. He clapped his hands to be riding
the biggest horse in Judea. I cantered lightly
around Deuteronomy, whirled around the Psalms,
Kings and Job. I leapt into the sweaty
life-loving, Book-loving air of happiness.
Breathless I kissed the child and put him down,
but another child climbed up my back.
I danced this one around Proverbs and that one
around Exodus and Ecclesiastes, till a child came up to me
who was a fat horse himself, and I had to halt.
What could I give you after that?
—When I left, a bottle of wine, half a bottle of oil,
some tomatoes and onions, my love.
In a room overlooking Jerusalem,
I felt something like a leaf on my forehead—
I picked off a louse,
squashed it between the labyrinths
of my index finger and my thumb.
I have faith every louse in Jerusalem
has come through hair and feather:
Jew, Muslim, Christian
from wing to head to beard to crotch,
from cat’s ear to rat’s balls . . .
At the Jerusalem wall between Heaven and Hell
the unprepared are given skullcaps—
I refused a clean, gray paper cap,
the kind given children in different colors
at birthday parties with other favors;
I picked dusty black rayon someone left behind
despite my friend’s warning: “You may get lice.”
Whatever the time of day, a little before fear,
the sun hurt my eyes. I kissed the wall
but had nothing further to say to it . . .
My louse’s cousins have spent time among hyena packs,
nestled in carrion, under pus, lip to lip with maggots.
Surely Christ, who suffered crucifixion,
felt the bite of the louse. My fingers are Roman soldiers
if the louse I squashed had a trace of Christ’s blood.
I have faith King David after all his adventures
had an itch in the groin, a louse danced with him.
Once a winged horse with a peacock’s tail
and a woman’s face flew into this city from Arabia
with a prophet on its back.
We all can use a little sacred preening and combing.
I should be grateful for another louse.
As full of Christianity
as the sea is salt,
the English tongue
my mother and father spoke,
so rich in Germanic tree and God worship
and old Romantic Catholic nouns,
does not quite work for me
at family burials or other,
as we say in English,
sacramental moments.
Although I know the Pater Noster
and Stabat Mater as popular songs,
I am surprised, when close friends
speak Hebrew, that I understand nothing.
Something in me expects to understand them
without the least effort,
as a bird knows song.
There is a language of prayers unsaid
I cannot speak.
A man can count himself lucky these days to be alive,
an instrument of ten strings,
or to be carried gently off by sleep and death.
What of belief? Like the tides
there is and is not a temple of words
on which work continues.
Unsynagogued, unschooled, but lettered,
I drag a block of uncut marble—
I have seen prayers pushed
into the crevices of the Western Wall,
books stacked against the boulders,
ordinary men standing beside prophets and scoundrels.
I know the great stoneworkers can show the wind in marble,
ecstasy, blood, a button left undone.
Babies, babies,
before you can see more than light or darkness,
before your mothers have kissed your heads,
I come to you with news of dead and dying friends.
You so close to the miracle of life,
lend me a miracle to bring to my friend.
Babies, babies.
Once Death was a baby, he grasped God’s little finger
to keep from falling—kicking and chortling
on his back, unbaptized, uncircumcised,
but invited to share sunlight and darkness
with the rest of us. Mother Death would nurse him,
comfort and wash him when he soiled himself
in the arms of the mourners and the heartbroken.
Older, Death took his place
at table beside his mother—her “angel.”
They ate and drank from each other’s mouth and fingers,
laughed at their private jokes. He could play
any musical instrument, knew all music by heart,
all birdsong, the purr, growl, snort, or whine
of each and every animal.
The story goes that, fat with eternal life,
older than his mother, he devoured her,
far from light or darkness.
Babies, at the moment of your first uncertain breath,
when your mother’s magic blood is still upon you,
I come to you, the helpless ones still coughing
from miracles of birth.
Babies hardly heavier than clouds,
in desperation, for my friend, for a lark
I hold up the sac you broke through
as if it were Saint Veronica’s Veil—
but no face is on it, no blood.
I hold up a heavy sack of useless words.
I shake a rattle to catch your eye or first smile.
for Yehuda Amichai
1
Snow clouds shadow the bay, on the ice the odd fallen gull.
I try to keep my friend from dying by remembering
his childhood of praise to God, who needs us all. Würzburg:
the grownups are inside saying prayers for the dead,
the children are sent out to play—their laughter
more sacred than prayer. After dark his father
blesses and kisses him gute Nacht. He wakes
to go to school with children who stayed behind
and were murdered before promotion.
Now his wife lies beside him.
He may die with her head on his pillow.
He sings in his sleep:
“Her breasts are white sheep that appear on the mountain,
her belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.
” Awake, he says, as if telling me a secret:
“When metaphor and reality come together, death occurs.”
His life is a light, fresh snow blowing across the bay.
2
A year later in Jerusalem, he carries a fallen soldier
on his back, himself. The text for the day begins:
“He slew a lion in the pit in a time of snow.”
Seconds, minutes, hours are flesh,
he tells me he is being cut to pieces—
if they had not made him turn in his rifle . . .
He sees I cannot bear more of that.
Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding
of hands in sleep and we drink to life.
Chilled in desert heat, what keeps him alive:
soldiers—his wife, his son and daughter,
perhaps the ashes of a girl he loved in childhood.
Outside their window
a Sun Bird and Dead Sea Sparrow fly
from everlasting to everlasting.
Later he covers my head with his hands, blessing me,
later unable to walk alone he holds onto my hand
with so much strength he comforts me.
It was not a dream: a poet
led me down into the earth
where the sea in another age
had hollowed out a mountain.
He led me into a cave of marble cloud:
colossal backs, shoulders, thighs of reclining Gods.
Just above us a battlefield four thousand years old,
some olive trees and wild flowers.
I cannot believe these Gods need
more than an occasional lizard
or the sacrifice of a dove that comes to them
through jags and crevices.
Madness to think the Gods
are invisible, in us, and worth fighting for
—if they want anything, I suppose,
it is for the sea to come back again.
In a museum forty years after it happened
I saw a snapshot of my lost brother,
a Hellenistic Jew, sitting in a lifeboat,
wordless, a few yards from the shoreline of Palestine,
behind him a rusty sinking freighter,
his two years in a displaced persons’ camp,
his two years in Treblinka.
With him in the boat, half a dozen Jews,
tired to death and hopeful, my brother
sat in the middle, somehow a little apart,
in a good overcoat, his gloved hands
in his pockets, thumbs out, his tilted fedora
brim up, a clean handkerchief in his breast pocket
as our mother taught him, still the boulevardier,
the flâneur. Knee deep in the water
to meet the boat and help them in, Mr. Kraus
from Frankfurt, giving the newcomers his card,
directing them to his Viennese pastry shop,
the best in Palestine.
My brother washed more than one death
out of his handkerchief. For me as a child
his handkerchief was a white mous
e he set free in Europe’s worst winter,
when it became inhuman to love.
Ariel, whose language am I speaking?
A VISIT TO THE DEVIL’S MUSEUM IN KAUNAS
I put on my Mosaic horns, a pointed beard,
my goat-hoof feet—my nose, eyes, hair and ears
are just right—and walk the streets of the old ghetto.
In May under the giant lilac and blooming chestnut trees
I am the only dirty word in the Lithuanian language.
I taxi to the death camp and to the forest
where only the birds are gay, freight trains still screech,
scream and stop. I have origins here, not roots,
origins among the ashes of shoemakers
and scholars, below the roots of these Christmas trees,
and below the pits filled with charred splinters of bone
covered with fathoms of concrete. But I am the devil,
I know in the city someone wears the good gold watch
given to him by a mother to save her infant
thrown in a sewer. Someone still tells time by that watch,
I think it is the town clock.
Perhaps Lithuanian that has three words for soul
needs more words for murder—murder as bread:
“Please pass the murder and butter” gets you to:
“The wine you are drinking is my blood,
the murder you are eating is my body.”
Who planted the lilac and chestnut trees?
Whose woods are these? I think I know.
I do my little devil dance,
my goat hooves click on the stone streets.
Das Lied von der Erde
ist Murder, Murder, Murder.
Perhaps the players chose to wear something
about the person, a spoon, or since it was autumn
a large gold maple leaf that looked like a star of David
pinned to a shirt or blouse. The play was One Can’t Know Anything.
Someone shouted: “You are play-acting in a cemetery!”
But they went on: “To sit, to stand, to lie on the ground,
is it better to close or open your eyes, to listen or not,
to speak or not to speak? Those are the questions.”
Then a grave song: “I knew him well, Horatio.
Here hung the lips I have kissed I know not how often . . .
My Lord, I have some remembrances of yours".
Fifty-six years later in a sandlot where for three hundred years
the Great Synagogue stood, I watch children playing.
Perhaps God shows himself as hide and seek,
as wrestling, laughter, as children falling,
cutting their knees, and the rush of tears.
God of Walls and Ditches, every man’s friend,
although you may be banqueting in heaven
on the peaches of immortality
that ripen once every three thousand years,
protect a child I love in China
and on her visits to the United States,
if your powers reach this far, this locality.
You will know her because she is nine years old,
already a beauty and an artist. She needs more
than the natural protection of a tree on a hot day.
You have so many papers,
more than the God of Examinations,
more than the God of Salaries,
who is not for me, because I am self-employed.
It may help you find her to know her mother
was once my bookkeeper,
her brother is a God in the family,
who at six still does not wipe his bottom.
Protect her from feeling worthless.
She is the most silent of children.
She has given me so many drawings and masks,
today I offered her fifty dollars for a painting.
Without a smile she answered,
"How much do you get for a metaphor?”
Sir, here is a little something to keep the incense burning,
remember her to the Almighty God whose character is Jade.
When I saw the Greek hunter
painted on the fifth-century red-figured pot
was changed into a startled fawn
because he watched a goddess bathe naked,
and that his own dogs tore him to pieces,
I had already changed from myself
to another self, further apart
than man from fawn.
When coming out of my self, I woke you
in the middle of the night to carry you off
to the sea; I stopped three times
to ravish you; you took me beyond my life,
raced me from great distance to great distance,
till helpless I fell in your lap
and said I was near death.
You lifted the heavy beast’s head,
still snorting and groaning, kissed me
and washed your blood from my face,
stroked me and called me “sweet one”—
then you sang your siren song,
told me how I would be remembered,
that sleep and death were brothers,
that the sirens defeated by poetry
were changed into the great boulders
on which the city of Naples,
so well known to lovers, was founded.
I kissed you and you asked gently,
since you were young and I was not,
what Dido asked Aeneas
who was soon to go to war:
“Will you leave me without a son
of your name?”
That night in Florence,
forty-five years ago,
I heard him play
like “honey on a razor,”
he could get maple syrup
out of a white pine,
out of a sycamore,
out of an old copper beech.
I remember that summer
Michelangelo’s marble
naked woman’s breasts,
reclining Dawn’s nipples—
exactly like the flesh I ached for.
How could Dawn behind her clouds hurt me?
The sunrise bitch was never mine.
He brought her down. In twelve bars of burnt sugar,
she was his if he wanted her.
I knew that tree was my lost brother
when I heard he was cut down
at four thousand eight hundred sixty-two years;
I knew we had the same mother.
His death pained me. I made up a story.
I realized, when I saw his photograph,
he was an evergreen, a bristlecone like me
who had lived from an early age
with a certain amount of dieback,
at impossible locations, at elevations
over 10,000 feet in extreme weather.
His company: other conifers,
the rosy finch, the rock wren, the raven and,
blue and silver insects that fed mostly off each other.
Some years bighorn sheep visited in summer—
he was entertained by red bats, black-tailed jackrabbits,
horned lizards, the creatures old and young he sheltered.
Beside him in the shade, pink mountain pennyroyal—
to his south, white angelica.
I am prepared to live as long as he did
(it would please our mother),
live with clouds and those I love
suffering with God.
Sooner or later, some bag of wind will cut me down.
ELEGY FOR A 5,000-YEAR-OLD TREE
That tree was a teacher, whatever the weather—
everyday birds, hawks and osprey nested
in its branches, nations of common insects
fought in its gullies, while generations of deer
scraped their antlers against it in rutting season.
Looking up to its crown, it seemed higher than the Brooklyn Bridge
from a ferry passing beneath—some were frightened.
Few understood the tree’s gentleness with bees and butterflies,
its hospitality to rodents, lavender and Lad’s-love,
that for centuries horned lizards, toads
and snakes hid in its dens—the joys and sorrows it found
in heavy rains and snows, its heroism
at the timberline, its lifelong love of clouds.
The golden-mantled squirrel survives.
Curious to find the ancient tree’s age, an “arborist”
chose to count its rings by drilling with a diamond-tipped corer.
Putting his back into the drill, as if the tree were marble,
he quickly passed through American history,
knot and counter-knot, to the age of Mozart,
through the Baroque, through Shakespearian grain,
through a charcoal cave where lightning struck,
through the time of Jesus and Buddha’s enlightenment,
through the guano of owls, the Olmec.
In the era of the prophets, the drill broke—
what could a tree person do? After clearing away young trees,
to save his drill, he appealed to forest rangers.
It took five, with orange hydraulic saws, to fell the great tree.
When they counted rings, it took them hours, some five thousand rings.
The tree they killed was the oldest known living thing on earth.
Where can you weep for the tree that had wept and laughed
beyond all human consequence? No one could agree
what poured out: butterflies or troupes of prima ballerinas,
old men or unemployed youths who never found a purpose,
newspapers, folios, books, leaflets or turtles
with ancient Chinese writing on their backs.
A madman shouted that God had carried the tree to heaven.
Everyone let him rave. Some say the fallen tree began to shudder
and sing a requiem for all the slaughtered, innocent multitudes.
Lingering for a moment before they disappeared,
two shadows searched for their young.
Or were they two readers in the Warsaw ghetto
stopping to buy a book out of a discarded baby carriage?
Pushing up through a hole in the red marble floor of heaven
a black prisoner sentenced to death,
shows his tattooed resurrected flesh:
a blue tear under the outside corners of his eyes,
on his arm two copulating dragons,
their eyes a woman’s breasts,
a pierced bleeding heart on his back the size of an eagle,
his chest bears the face of Christ.
Anathema, it cannot be true such unlikely flesh rises to heaven.
Now in the maw of heaven
I see poor losers shrouded with eternal ink—
it’s a little like whistling against Bach’s B-minor Mass,
there is so much ecclesiastical counterfeit money around:
the anti-Christ silver dollar, the St. Sebastian dime.
Asleep on the marble floor a drowned sailor,
at his knee a cock, his wrists ringed with barbed wire;
a woman walks in circles,
her body still scented with the lilies of death,
her mouth the shape of her lovemaking,
a wolf ’s head on her shoulder,
its nose nestled between her breasts.
Beneath a huge egg hanging from a cord,
a woman who seems to be mad
says she will die if she sleeps alone,
a vine of tiny roses runs down both sides of her belly
to her bush still moist, a large bee put where the hair begins—
on her back, lovers beneath a tree in full foliage
and the motto: God is the name of my desire.
Anathema, it cannot be true such unlikely flesh rises to heaven.
Is it true Jewish children with tattooed numbers on their arms
keep their religion even in heaven?
I look at my own flesh with the dyes of age,
the craquelure of love and caprichos. How many nights
have I fallen asleep to the beat of the oars in a boat
with the adult passengers: summer, winter, autumn, spring—
not knowing who is the designer, who the boatman,
the needles writing all night like dreams,
awaking, as all of us, to an uncompleted world,
to the Behold I am standing before Thy face.
for Irving Howe
In a world where you are asleep with your fathers,
in that part of the forest where trees read,
your tree still reads to us. Tonight your branches bend over
Conrad, Trotsky, Saba,
the evergreen Irish.
Joyce hated flowers,
his wife put a houseplant on his grave.
There are no socialist flowers
yet the balmiest wind favors
a more even distribution of wealth.
Some have seen among the flowers religious orders,
proved a rose a Christian,
while of course they pruned away the Jew.
It is easier for me to believe flowers
know something about wages and hours,
a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work in the sun,
than to believe in the resurrection of the flesh.
When you died, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers
of America published a notice
of their mourning and sent flowers.
Your last sweet note that reached me after your death,
I left on the dashboard in a book,
the way they used to press dry flowers.
As I drove along in Canada,
it flew out of the window—
I thought it was a bill.
I was not Eros with a limp, or sleepwalking,
even so on a December Sunday afternoon
sunning itself on a footbridge that was three planks
over a meandering dry stream,
I saw a small green snake that was perhaps a year
twist away at the first sight of me into the tall reeds
of the future, with time enough to found a nation.
I crossed the same planks, the heavy serpent
of old age oozed along behind me.
The sunlight on the bridge and the two snakes
were a sundial beyond the indications
of the world’s Christian calendar.
Then I passed green fields of winter rye
already six inches high despite the early snow.
I whispered to myself:
Verde, que te quiero verde. Verde viento . . .
Follow the heart, follow the heart!
Where are the birthday poems
for Stalin and Hitler,
the angelhair tarts for Franco?
Where are the sweets of yesteryear,
the party hats? Our revels are not over!
They are shooting rifles in the air
for bin Laden and Saddam.
Happy children are making bombs of themselves
as never before.
Dreams of mass murder have only begun:
daydreams and wet dreams.
But where is the pastry?
Where are the poems?
Coming, coming, the children sing.
Coming, coming.
You caterpillars, who want to eat
until there is not one familiar leaf on our living tree,
in New York there are bees that will bore into your belly,
sleep with your striped velvet over their eyes,
with their feet on your heart,
that, waking, will eat their way out of your soft belly.
I promise you would prefer
the quick sharp beak of a crow.
Become a butterfly.
Today I am Saddam Hussein’s U.S. Army dentist.
I open his mouth, the color of a mop that has scrubbed blood
from a prison floor. His soul, the smell of his breath,
rises up in my face: vomit and eau de cologne.
It isn’t every day I have a mass murderer in my chair.
I whistle for courage the staccato opening bars
of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro,
when my drill hits his nerve I hold every note.
He gives me a look of contempt that says
you are only a Jew dentist, not a torturer.
I put the removable bridge of his soul back
in his mouth and tell him to rinse.
Alas, I remember George Washington
had five slaves’ teeth pulled out to fix in his bridge.
I leap high as I can for joy, higher than you think I can.
My son writes he is marrying in September in Fiesole,
I leap over my dogs, whom he invited,
although they don’t understand weddings.
You, dear reader, are also invited,
after all the funerals I brought you to.
I’ve often played a drum major in a brass band called hope—
even when the band wasn’t there. I suggest to my son
he ready his foot to break the wineglass
in memory of the destruction of the Temple. If he doesn’t care to,
I’ll leave the wineglass around, so it may break
by happy accident. I never broke a wineglass
except when it fell off the table, or in rage. My best advice:
the usual public vows are not for nothing, when there’s a problem
talk it over. I hope family history does not weigh heavier than love
and honorable intention. Bless you both,
now let the centaurs and Russian dancers in.
Whom can I tell? Who cares?
I see the shell of a snail protected by a flaw
in its design: white is time, blue-green is rot,
something emerging in the rough dust, the unused
part of a shape that is furious and calm.
In aging grasses, knotted with their being,
the snail draws near the east bank of the pond,
not because that is where the morning sun is,
but out of coastal preference, raising
a tawny knotted counterwhirl
like a lion cub against its mother’s haunch,
anus of a star. But let the conch stand
in the warm mud, with its horn become an eye,
suffering the passion of any snail:
a hopeful birth, a death, an empty tomb.
I’d walk with this horned eye, lip-foot after lip-foot,
beyond the dry wall of my life, backward
into the sacramental mud, where the soul begins to reason—
as on that afternoon Aristotle dissecting
squid proclaimed “the eternity of the world.”
There is not a thing on earth without a star
that beats upon it and tells it to grow.
I had just written “good and evil, each
indebted to the other and the gift of life”
when the call came—conceived in liberty
and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal—
I’m going to have grandchildren,
conceived three weeks ago, “likely twins”
already revolving around the sun, young but not silly,
holding on to their mother for dear life.
Bienvenito! May you speak the honest tongue
of my grandparents and great-grandparents,
and Latin, Greek and Chinese.
Honor your father and mother, read left to right
and right to left. Make peace.
My surgeon went harrowing like Christ in Hell,
dug a virtuous pagan tumor from my kidney.
“What do I look like inside?” I asked. “Just like every other,
except the distance from your kidney to your heart.”
“Aah,” I thought, “I have a certain lonely alley inside,
like the Vicolo della Bella Donna in Florence.”
I thought I knew the catechism of the bladder,
the daily questions and answers, until blood clots
clogged my drain, once a Roman fountain.
My bladder swelled as if giving birth,
then for all the world—a razor blade in the anus.
I cried uncle. Christ and surgeon,
if you believe merely thinking
it is the same as driving in the nails,
leave my wound! Physician, heal Thyself.
Herodotus tells us in an election year
Peisistratus, the Athenian tyrant,
wanting the protection of a god,
got the biggest beautiful woman he could find,
dressed her in silver and gold armor,
proclaimed her the goddess Athena
and drove through the streets of Athens
with the goddess at his side.
In our elections, every candidate
wants to be photographed
going to or coming from Jesus.
One declared, “Jesus is in my heart,”
but when he refused to stay the death warrants for a hundred or so,
his Jesus was silent.
Our presidential candidates,
like Roman emperors,
favor the death penalty,
but in two thousand years there is a difference.
No candidate would do it for fun, or think death
a competent sentence for cutting down trees
or killing deer, as in 18th century England.
It’s not all blood and circus:
when Camus asked de Gaulle,
“What can a writer do for France?”
The President replied: “Write well!”
Have you heard what’s new on the Rialto:
since Pope John Paul declared anti-Semitism a sin,
hell has been so crowded,
you can’t find a decent room there at a hotel.
He found his good wife weeping alone
when their friend’s infidelity was discovered.
She had long pretended her husband’s playing around
was like filmmaking: a take here, a take there,
out of sequence, everything but their life together
would end up on the cutting room floor.
Now she wept at breakfast,
forgot to pick up his suit at the cleaners,
and wept over that.
Angered, he realized his friend’s infidelity
had held a full-length mirror to his own,
that the friend’s behavior was unacceptable:
he had inconvenienced the distinguished critic,
the reader, the Anglophile, the man of the left.
For some days, my life was a fly buzzing around his head—
he swatted with the Times.
Lord of Crops, Prince of Cereals, Queen of Coffee and Milk,
I’m sunning myself on a balcony in January.
Yesterday, I crossed the Negev to where I am.
Just over the brim of my coffee cup is the Red Sea.
Looking straight ahead, I see Saudi Arabia,
but Mecca, the Kaaba I cannot see. Without moving my head,
to the left I study the continuous limestone
coastline from Eilat, Israel to Jordon, Aqaba.
From the corner of my right eye:
Egypt 500 meters down the way.
Good News: the bus drivers of Jordan, Israel, and Egypt
are making deals. The bad news is purple mountains,
the Negev, the Arabian Desert, Sinai, the sun and Red Sea
don’t make deals. To trade a little Koran for a little Torah,
a little Torah for a little New Testament,
you need poets or Marx Brothers.
I think Byzantine fish on the coral reefs below
are willing to make deals in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic,
Greek, Latin, Turkish, even in Suez English.
They eat, are eaten, add, subtract, and multiply.
Christ, what stories they could tell,
passed down from fish to fish,
but their purple, red, and blue tails only fan the waters.
I like to think that poetry does a little more—
Arabic, Hebrew, and Provençal made a deal for rhyme.
Tomorrow I will drive to Saint Catherine’s Monastery,
to the foot of God-Trodden Mount Sinai.
Such information is less than sand,
has the weight of a few syllables.
These days only a few old timers
and two timers live behind / within the prison bars of rhyme,
talk behind them. A deal can be made between forms of life
that can live locked in stone. Perhaps the deal is that hatred
has to be desalinated, but English and my tongue
will never lick the salt out of the Red Sea.
After P.A. Cuadra
Maria, sister,
it was the end of days.
Everything collapsed and we were left
in the street with what we wore,
twelve brothers and sisters trembling
and Mama wanting to put her arms around each of us.
At that moment, we were suffocating in the dust, listening
to the death rattle of the world.
At that moment I was thinking, “Papa,”
you understand, you already know the ways of our father,
“I’m going to look for him,” I said,
my poor mother screaming,
the brothers and sisters weeping.
But what can you do when everything falls,
when time succumbs, what remains
except looking for your father?
How often we said to him, “Father,
charity begins at home.”
He, you know, always in the clouds,
always giving to everyone,
but demanding of us.
I ran through those black streets
while the whole city rose up
in dust and lamentation.
The shadows threw stones at me.
I felt rage, the deaf rage of a son
against a father
who abandons him,
and I blamed him
as if he were the author of Tenebrae,
the fist of destruction.
It may be—I thought—he’s helping others. And so it was.
Do you remember Juan,
the caretaker? Remember
Juan, the one who left him with all the work in the field
and ran off with a prostitute?
I came across our father with his hands bleeding
rescuing Juan,
I saw him carrying Juan.
He looked at me with his gentle eyes: “Help me!”
he said. I should have shouted,
“Father, Father,
why have you abandoned us?”
It’s useless! You know how he is,
he always
abandons the flock
for a lost sheep.
to Arnold Cooper
A mile from the Atlantic,
in your living room with the books and flowers
and the painting of fields behind your house
facing Mecox Bay, home to some two hundred swans,
fifty of which I have known since they were born,
it came down to this: I saw the room a little tilted
and you saw it straight, and when you proved it with a ruler
and leveler I fought back. The ruler might be wrong,
I have no faith an inch is equal to any other inch.
There are no equal numbers,
there is just an agreement as to what they mean.
I pity the violinist who just plays the notes.
But the roof of your house is not a sonata,
or your apple tree a violin, whoever plucks the fruit.
And worse, you, old friend, know better than I
the uniqueness of human beings
you measured hoping to prove me right. I remember
once when we had caught a stringer full of bass
I tied them to the oarlock with a double hitch
I learned in the navy. When we came ashore
my knot had slipped—the trophy fish gone.
Even that, you forgave me with an archaic smile.
We are the same age, equals before the law,
but one will slip away under the water lilies
before the other. Whoever slips away first,
proving me right about the ceiling, the roof, and inches—
the other shall hold a kind of grudge.
After an Atlantic hurricane,
no curled brine-drenched leaf
was at first to Katherine’s eyes
a Monarch butterfly,
yet she telephoned the news:
flights of deceived Monarchs
had dropped down on her Black Maple
till she could not tell
leaf from butterfly.
In the morning when I arrived
only the tree of metaphor was there,
the butterflies gone to Mexico.
Katherine and her lover, soon to marry,
returned to Manhattan
to practice medicine and music.
Left behind by so much storm and flutter,
I have almost lost count of the seasons.
From whose breast does the milk of madness course?
I or he, an 18-year-old boy makes up his address,
the deaths of his parents still alive, his father’s suicide.
I woo or he woos a girl, feigning coming blindness,
asked what he would farm—rifles, he smiles.
I or he memorized Milton.
I or he never learned to say a prayer out loud
so God would hear us. Speaking to ourselves
as if to the Lord, he and I are two persons,
three, four, five, a multitude
climbing out of the mouth of a Leviathan.
My mother’s breast wept, losing its milk.
He and I became the nurslings of dark clouds.
HOW I GOT TED ROETHKE’S RACCOON-SKIN COAT
I gave my friend a lovely naked woman
dancing with a tambourine above her head,
a red terra-cotta plaque by Renoir.
With a laugh he gave me ten dead raccoons,
a blue and gold lining: his raccoon-skin coat,
made for hard Michigan winters and football games,
with a pocket inside for a whiskey flask.
Later, I sent to Seattle my English homburg
that flew cheering for him across America.
He told me to keep his blue pajamas
he left behind, sent back love and this:
“Robert Traill Spence Lowell lays on his effects with a trowel,
I put them with Ginsberg’s Howl,
the works of Robert Traill Spence Lowell.”
FOR VIRGINIA ON HER 90TH BIRTHDAY
We know at ninety sometimes it aches to sing
or to sit in any chair, that words, music, love, and poetry
sometimes trip over each other.
Virginia, teach me not to walk steadily into the grave,
but to trip over it, to do the funny dance of the good long life.
It’s easy as one, two, three. But what is one,
what is two, and where is three?
A good death is like a black butterfly
born too soon during a mild winter.
Just when I think I am about to be tilted
on a table for death to eat—my friend arrives
playing a harmonica. It is my birthday.
He sings a little song that is a poem
written for the occasion.
How does he know the day I was born
the midwife laughed, enthusiastic
over the size of my head, chest and penis?
My mother must have told him.
My years are sheep, I shepherd them night and day,
I live with their “ba-ba.”
They much prefer his harmonica to a panpipe.
Some years graze near me,others wander
across the valley out of sight.
I have two dogs, one dog can’t do the job.
My 57th year keeps mounting my early years,
my 63rd year is giving it hard to my 57th,
my dogs are running in circles,barking for joy.
1. PHAETON
Canto I
News reached Helios the Sun God,
as sounds of war, prayers,
the distant traffic of the world sometimes does:
a handsome boy was nearing the sun in a chariot,
in danger of catching fire. The boy had passed through
India, asking anyone old enough to be wise:
“Can the Sun God be my father?”
School friends had made fun of the fatherless boy,
although his mother Clymene explained
she met Helios by chance in an orchard.
“I loved him because he made the flowers bloom.
March became summer in an hour. The Sun
bit into me and the orchard—as if we were one apple,
and you were born.”
Phaeton’s chariot arrived at the palace barely singed.
The God of Fire had turned his face away.
He met his son at the flaming doorway.
“Before you ask, Phaeton, what your mother said is true.
You are my son. To celebrate our meeting
I will stock the northern lakes with sunfish.”
The God noticed the boy’s hair was flaming red.
He had his father’s sunrise.
Phaeton badmouthed the God:
“Where were you when I needed you to teach me
everyday lessons? I think you are a father
for a day.” The God erupted,
“Who are you to think sunny? Still, there’s sunrise
in you; ask me a favor, I will grant it—
I swear on the River Styx.”
Phaeton grinned. “What I ask is your chariot.
I want to drive the winged horses for a day—
the car with the gold pulpit and axle,
the chrysolite wheels and silver spokes.
Keep your word to the River Styx and me.”
The Sun God’s voice darkened, “Yes.
Since the dawn of time that I am, there has been a form
in the sky, an eagle the size of an oak on its shoulder.
From the creature’s entrails, you hear screams
of every living creature being devoured by their fathers.
Out of a vent in its tail leaks a dreck of fathers and sons.
That creature would be called “the Master of Creation”
if Zeus did not hold it back, spike it with lightning.
Passing that monster that begat itself,
without me the winged horses
will panic, snap the reins you hanker for
made of gold hair left on my pillow.”
The Sun God knew his words were useless.
The Hours were leading out the four winged horses.
“Phaeton, be a bright dawn, the hope of the world.
Drive westward, pyramids on your left. No horse
or boy ever learned from whippings or floods.
Look, the moon, my poor sister, is pale as a dove—
do not cause a drought. Because of me
there is no God of Disappointment.”
The Sun God was mumbling now, afraid of his son’s fate.
The boy jumped into his father’s chariot,
shouted, “I’ll be back tonight.”
Rising from the East like any other day
Phaeton opened the night clouds with his whip,
turning them to fire. The horses knew
they were carrying a light, mortal thing that had no history.
Noon. The horses high in the heavens,
half a sky off course, smelled mares below,
dragged the godless flaming chariot earthward,
let off fountains of urine in Phaeton’s face.
Phaeton’s knees shook. He had to urinate.
He wished he never knew who his father was.
He wished his father had broken his oath.
He wished he were a bastard again.
Where is East, where is West? Who is North, who is South?
Now the eagle the size of an oak was coming toward him.
A wheel broke off, rolled in flames through Africa.
Crete and Sicily were under water, the Arctic—mud.
China was a flaming paper lantern,
rivers promised swans for coming summer boiled.
The world’s olive groves, some sacred, were hissing embers.
Parnassus was blackened marble.
The Earth Goddess called to Zeus,
“Oh my great lover, all my harvests,
all the years of laboring, good farmers I blessed, gone,
the pain of the plough I bore, come to nothing.
Strike down the sun’s vainglorious boy!”
Zeus smacked Phaeton out of the burning clouds.
Helios the helpless Sun God wept.
For the first time since chaos he took off his golden helmet.
He felt like a coal miner in a pit. In darkness he shouted,
“Zeus, you bugger, you seducer of mortal wives
and boys, disguise yourself as the great prick you are
and piss out the fires. Zeus, may you be deposed by Jews,
Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Baptists and Buddhists.
I owe nothing to the world. I see the living live by stealing fire.
Since I was the Dawn of Time, I labored.
How often I found my bright work dull.
Don’t you think I wanted to command the Sea,
make War, or Music?”
Zeus mumbled, “My thunderbolt is not a question mark.”
Every God and Goddess yawned. The Sun’s flaming tears fell
into what rivers were left on Earth, making amber
that would one day become gifts between lovers,
recalled in the Canticle of Canticles, the Song of Songs.
After years of darkness, Helios took pity on the Earth Goddess,
with Eros on his shoulder, he turned his face toward Earth.
There was sunlight, good tempests and good blizzards.
The Earth bloomed. There were crops and farm houses,
oil lamps, fires under soup kettles, marble cities, slums again.
An old Greek, not an oracle, only a clever fellow
said: “These days, you almost never see a naked swimmer—
the Earth is filling with burning dumps and battlefields—
an insult to the Earth Goddess.”
Someone shouted across the port of Athens,
“You will never crucify Apollo!” The Greek wrote in a letter:
“The Sun can never be made to look ridiculous.
You cannot get a hook into a Leviathan,
catch him with a line, or carry him to market.
You cannot get a word out of him, or have a covenant with him.
Sooner battle the Leviathan than the Sun.”
The Sun had long since called back his winged horses,
whipped them and drowned them in flames.
Now every day is like every other to the Sun.
Among ancient trees, there stood a colossal Oak
that protected others for a thousand years.
When earthquakes levelled temples and their marble Gods,
the Sacred Oak protected the Greek countryside.
Even when lightning seized it by the throat,
it sheltered fieldworkers, orchards, nests and hives.
How many lovers had slept below its branches?
In summer, but especially in winter
when there was snow, birds and butterflies
alighted on its branches in such numbers
passing armies would lay down their weapons
surrendering, it seemed, to beauty.
Profane Criton, the Tyrant, in need of timber,
drove away lovers, gave orders to his slaves
to cut down the colossal Oak. He boasted,
“The great tree may be the one the Goddess loves most,
it may be the Goddess herself, but this tree has lived only
to be useful to me, for ships and a banquet hall.”
Then Criton killed two slaves who refused his command.
Taking up the axe himself, he swung in fury.
The Oak trembled, groaned, the green leaves
turned pale, then black, the tree moaned,
blood pouring out where the branches joined the trunk,
as from a bull’s throat cut for sacrifice,
blood pulsing from its mouth. The Tyrant and slaves
heard a voice: “A nymph loved by Demeter,
I live in the wood; I say to all who love green,
worthless Criton will soon die
—my last consolation.”
Still, he struck blows for pleasure,
till the weeping oak chained by ropes and tackles
manned by an army of whipped slaves,
fell with the roar of a great waterfall in spring.
Butterflies, lovers, birds, snakes and rabbits,
wild cats and bears flew out of the tree
to save themselves—some without their young.
The falling giant broke the backs of a thousand trees.
Voices came from everywhere, in Greek and shrill Persian:
“We have never ploughed a field or picked a fig
without permission of the Goddess of Harvest.
Punish this zero to the left. Punish him!”
Demeter nodded Yes—the fields and forest trembled.
“I sentence him to endless Famine!” (Of course,
she could not speak to Famine because Fate
never allows the Goddesses of Harvest and Famine to meet.)
In her place, Harvest sent a messenger
saying, “Go where the earth is salt and bones,
where nothing lives but cold, pallor and fear.
Go to the screeching hag Goddess Famine.
Tell her I will put in a word for her where it counts
if she crawls inside Criton, hides in his body,
lets nothing give him nourishment.” The Goddess smiled.
“Take my chariot of winged dragons to make the distance shorter.”
In Scythia on a crag of the frozen Caucuses,
where the dragons could only steady the chariot
by continually beating their wings, the messenger found Famine.
If not for a bleeding jaw and her diseased eyes,
he would not have distinguished Famine
from the pink gravel and ice around her.
Her skin so tight, so transparent,
her stomach seemed a skull.
He thought Famine’s throat covered with brine sang—then Famine,
knowing Zeus loved the goddess of Harvest, took her bargain.
Like a silver crab, on three broken wings
that once were elbows,
she crawled the great distance to Criton,
sleeping away his last moments of satisfaction
in a purple and gold room without a household god.
Famine locked her scaled arms around him.
Her breath that smelled of human waste spilled
on his face and in him, her broken teeth
stabbing his throat with the needles of endless hunger.
Then, her good work done, she turned back
from a country of green fields and flowering orchards
to her fatherland, the mountains and valleys
of bones, salt and ice.
Sleep, with its soft wings still caressed Criton,
soothed him, but now in his sleep he dreamed of feasting:
but his jaws bit into nothing, his parched throat swallowed nothing.
His mouth full of sewage his tongue struggled to escape.
Yet he woke famished.
He summoned a legion of servants and slaves,
ordered them to slaughter his cattle, to heap before him
meats cooked or raw, fish, fowl and frogs.
Whatever he ate, his stomach
shouted in pain and anger.
He swallowed rabbits whole and turtles in their shells
and he groaned, “I am starving, I am starving.”
Night and day he ate what would feed a city, a nation
but the more he ate, the more he craved.
He starved as fire burns straw, crawling to dry branches,
from fallen trees to flaming forests.
Then, as an ocean eats a coastline, he hungered,
cliff by cliff, mountain by mountain,
he sucked out the marrow—all this was to him
less than a black olive, a dry fig.
His stomach was a gorge cut by a dry river.
Starving and moneyless, he called on his daughter,
sold her for five sheep. She looked toward the sea,
crying out to Poseidon, who had once been her lover,
“Remember, oh God, three nights in summer, save me.”
Poseidon, quick as a fish takes to water
when dropped from a fisherman’s net, disguised her as a fisherman,
red-eyed from the sun, skin becoming coral,
so the slavemaster did not know her,
saying to her simply, dumbfounded,
“Fisherman, where is the slave girl I paid for?”
She answered, “I swear, may Poseidon not watch every net I cast,
no one’s been here but me.” The fool went off with his deceived dog.
Then Poseidon’s trident gave her back her own form.
Starving Criton, seeing that his daughter had the gift
to change her form,sold her over and over again
to barbarians. But she walked away,
now a mare, now a heifer, now a sheep, now a lion,
now a dove, now an eagle
till there was no food for her father to buy
till there was nothing, nothing at all—
only his own flesh for his teeth to gnaw.
He licked his fingers then ate them,
then his hands, then his wrists, then elbows,
his trotters and sex, he swallowed his own ears
and lips and tongue, portion by portion,
he consumed his own body, his whole self.
Demeter, who does not allow a field to be planted
without her permission, had made clear her will.
POPE PIUS XII ANNOUNCED HE WAS VISITED BY
CHRIST ON HIS SICKBED
An easy bus ride or short walk through Rome,
sewer of Heaven that flushed Christ home,
a grave-faced Christ visited the Pope,
his Irish sheets changed, already rancid,
cross in fist, his eyes in a backward slope;
that day I do not remember what I did,
Christ’s voice echoed under St. Peter’s Dome,
Neptune to ocean, the Holy Ghost to foam,
He strode out on the lifeless shore. Lift the host,
sea bells clang the presence of the Holy Ghost
along the Tiber, a headless angel sings
with collars of bees about his throat, Christ king,
and bees swarm out of their golden hive
into Italian Spring. What lives that hunted on the Mount of Olives
for a younger, unaging Christ? Not the dead,
the dead have buried the dead,
the living celebrate the living
for a younger Christ, on Easter Sunday,
almost the first day of spring, a display
of miracles, bread and wine on the table,
the ordinary adorable.
There’s farce, silly, and turnabout.
Once in Heaven, you can get thrown out,
ask some questions, raising doubt.
Was Christ appearing enough?
Did the Lord say anything off the cuff?
Did He choose to play it rough,
say, in sacred conversation, Pacelli,
you hammered in another nail
when you mystically waved “sieg heil!”?
Did you genuflect when you danced the hoochie coochie
with Il Duce?
Did Christ come to Rome for a last laugh?
I’m sure the Pope believed what he saw.
Soon after, I do not think Pacelli went to hell,
heaven, or that he got his what for.
I believe at this late date
I shall have the same fate.
An oracle told me
an elephant in a zoo
will pick up a child higher
than he has ever been
on a swing or a seesaw—
the trunk an S
over the elephant’s head.
His father will drop
his ice cream cone,
the kid will wave to the world
hello, goodbye—
then he’s thrown swoosh across the moat.
That’s the way it will happen.
You will call the mother
saying, “Darling,
I have something to tell you . . . ”
the taste of chocolate still in your mouth.
And you are the father
and you are the child.
1
Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being.
Even memory is a finger to my lips.
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 this master of her ninety nipples?”
the public whispered.
Now the ocean is my audience,
I see in secret my last secret.
2
Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined
myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity
blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar
I saw myself wearing it even into the deep,
an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight,
on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music
this growing from flesh and bone into seashell:
undulating salts become a purple mantle,
and the almost translucent
bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.
1.
After the lesson of the serpent there is the lesson
of the slug and the snail—hermaphrodites,
they prosper on or under leaves, green or dead,
perhaps within the flower. See how slowly
on a windless day the clouds move over the garden
while the slug and the snail, little by little, pursue
their kind. Each pair with four sexes
knows to whom it belongs, as a horse knows
where each of its four feet is on a narrow path:
two straight below the eyes, two a length behind.
There is cause and reason for,
but in the garden, mostly life befalls.
Each male female lies with a male female,
folds and unfolds, enters and withdraws.
On some seventh day after a seventh day they rest,
too plural for narratives, or dreams, or parables,
after their season. One by one they simply die—
in no special order each sex leaves the other
without comfort or desire.
2.
I open my hands of shadow and shell that covered my face—
they offered little protection from shame or the world.
I return to the garden, time’s mash of flowers,
stigmas and anthers in sunlight and fragrant rain.
Human, singular, the slug of my tongue
moves from crevice to crevice, while my ear,
distant cousin of a snail, follows the breathing
and pink trillium of a woman who is beautiful
as the garden is beautiful, beyond joy and sorrow,
where every part of every flower is joy and sorrow.
I, lost in beauty, cannot tell which is which,
the body’s fragrant symmetry from its rhymes.
I am surrounded by your moist providence.
A red and purple sunrise blinds me.
The man who never prays
accepts that the wheat field in summer
kneels in prayer when the wind blows across it,
that the wordless rain and snow
protect the world from blasphemy.
His wife covers him with a blanket
on a cold night—it is, perhaps, a prayer?
The man who never prays says kindness and prayer
are close, but not as close as sleep and death.
He does not observe the Days of Awe,
all days are equally holy to him.
In late September, he goes swimming
in the ocean, surrounded by divine intervention.