This October morning,
soft lavender bursts above the Plymouth
parked on the neighbors’ lawn: lilacs, wildly
off schedule, decking themselves a second time.
Downtown, on the Universalist green,
the chestnuts drop their sleek mahogany
under lanterned branches, tallowy blooms:
season of contradictions, tempest-wrought.
Summer’s hurricane battered each branch bare,
skies suddenly wider, space in heaven
opened, our garden scoured as if by frost.
The little stars’ jewel fires more consuming.
That was August, but all at once we wanted
to unpack sweaters, wrap ourselves in warm,
saturated tones: gems and harvest, moss.
But when real autumn came, the calendar
down to its last, late pages, the world
displayed its strange dependability
in disarray, rekindling: crocus
quickened, spiking through the fallen leaves,
then cherry and box-alder budded out,
and now this rash, breathtakingly sudden
bloom.
Bobby arrives on a Saturday,
and sits on the end of the couch, scarlet
parka and a red Jamaican hat fished
from the closet pulled tight. Why’s he so cold?
This false spring? No, he looks—how to say it?
—small, not just his circumstances but him
somehow reduced. His landlord doesn’t want
him back, his sister’s dropped him on the side
of the highway, at a rest stop, his clothes
in three flowered yellow pillowcases.
My mother, he says, doesn’t want me
crying in the house; she doesn’t want
my tears around. She fed him on paper plates,
kept his laundry separate and didn’t tell
his father the diagnosis. We say
of course he can stay and Sunday he wakes
saying, I have four things inside me:
a backyard going around and around
in my head this way, lawn furniture
spinning the other way, and right here,
in my chest, chairs. It’s not that they hurt,
it’s that I can’t figure how I’m going
to get them the fuck out. He never says just what
the fourth thing is.
This month the new comes
so dizzyingly quick it coexists
with all autumn’s evidence: by the marsh,
the usual sumptuous russets, sparked
by pontillist asters. Rugosas dot
the goldenrods’ velveteen. Tulips sprout,
the crab leafs out. How are we to read
this nameless season—renewal, promise,
confusion? Should we be glad or terrified
at how quickly things are replaced?
Never again the particulars
of that August garden: waving cosmos,
each form’s crisp darkness in relief
against the stars. No way to know what’s gone,
only the new flowerings, the brilliance
that candles after rain; every day
assuming its position in the huge
gorgeous hurry of budding and decline:
bloom against dry leaf, unreconciled sorts
of evidence.
I have been teaching myself
to listen to Beethoven, or trying to—
learning to hear the late quartets: how hard
it is, to apprehend something so large
in scale and yet so minutely detailed.
Like trying to familiarize yourself,
exactly, with the side of a mountain:
this birch, this rock-pool, this square mosaic
yard of tesserated leaves, autumnal,
a jeweled reliquary. Trying to see
each element of the mountain and then
through them, the whole, since music is only
given to us in time, each phrase parcelled
out, in time.
Thursday he says All night
I had to make Elizabeth Taylor’s
wedding cake. It was a huge cake,
with nine towers, all of them spurting
like fountains, and she didn’t like it,
and I had to make it again, then
the thing was it wasn’t really a cake
anymore.
I am trying to understand
the Grosse Fuge, though I’m not sure what
it might mean to “understand” this stream
of theme and reiteration, statement
and return. What does it mean, chaos
gathered into a sudden bronze sweetness,
an October flourish, and then that moment
denied, turned acid, disassembling,
questioned, rephrased?
MRI: charcoaled flowers,
soft smudges, the image that is Bobby,
or Bobby’s head, or rather a specific
plane bisecting his head pictured on video,
cinematic, rich inky blacks, threaded
by filaments and clouds. I stand behind
the door, and watch the apparition
taking form beyond the silhouette
of the technician who wore gloves to touch him
(fully clothed, dry, harmless, but the coward
wrapped himself in latex charms anyway,
to ward off the black angel). On the screen,
like a game, he makes a Bobby of light,
numbers, and images—imagines?—Bobby
as atoms of hydrogen, magnetic,
aligned, so that radio waves transmitted
toward the body bounce back, broadcasting
this coal-smudged sketch: brain floating
on its thick stem, and little strokes of dark
everywhere, an image I can’t read,
and wasn’t supposed to see—but who could
stay away from the door? Which of these
darknesses, if any, is the one which
makes his bed swim all night with boxes,
insistent forms, repeated, rearranged?
In one of those, he says, is the virus,
a box of AIDS. And if I open it…
I bring home, from each walk to town, pockets
full of chestnuts, and fill a porcelain
bowl with their ruddy, seducing music—
something like cellos, something that banks deep
inside the body. The chestnuts seem lit
from within, almost as if by lamplight,
and burnished to warm leather, the color
of old harnesses…
I have four bottles,
cut glass cologne bottles, right here, under
my ribs, by my heart. Can you tell the doctor?
I can’t, he doesn’t like me.
Scribbled notes,
Opus 130: first movement: everything
rises to this sweetness, each previous note
placed now in context, completed, once
the new phrase blooms. Second movement: presto,
skittering summation of the first.
Next, andante broken open
by the force of feeling it contains,
tumbling out into moments of intense
punctuation, like blazing sumac,
goldenrod so densely interwoven
in the field I can’t keep any of it
separate for long: pattern of cadence,
spilling out, forward, then cessations.
Like seeing, in jeweled precision,
exact, wet and startlingly there, oak leaves,
and birch, and exclamations of maple:
the flecked details of the piebald world.
Seeing it all, taking it in, and yet
rising up to see at once whole forests…
Is that it? All my work of listening,
and have I only learned that Beethoven
could see the forest and the trees?
Bobby
cries on the couch: All I want is one head.
Later, My head and my legs are one thing.
Over breakfast: Please, you’ve got to tell me,
the truth now, no matter what, swear.
The boxes, do they ever hold still?
They’re driving me crazy with their dancing.
Mostly he looks away, mouth open,
as if studying something slightly above
and to the right of the world.
The music
is like lying down in that light which gleams
out of chestnuts, the glow of oiled and rubbed
mahogany, of burled walnut, bird’s-eye
maple polished into incandescence:
autumn’s essence of brass and resin, bronze
and apples, the evanescent’s brisk smoke.
But how is a quartet—abstract thing—
passionate, autumnal, fitful, gleaming,
regretful, hesitant, authoritative,
true? Is any listening an act
of translation, a shift of languages?
Even the music words themselves may make?
Flutter of pendant birch. Then I pull
myself back from the place where the music
has brought me; the music is not leaves,
music is not Bobby’s illness; music,
itself, is always structure: redolent,
suggestive occasion, a sort of scaffold
which supports the branching of attention.
After the flood of detail the quartet
conjures, nothing: the great block of silence
which the fugue has defined around itself.
When I was seventeen, and everyone
I knew acquired a new vocabulary—mantra,
sutra, Upanishads—I learned a chant,
in Sanskrit, gät
gät pärägät
is all I can remember of the words
but the translation goes gone gone beyond
gone, altogether beyond gone, and that
is where the music has gone, and Bobby’s
going,
though not today, not yet. AZT’s
a toxic, limited miracle, and
Bobby’s in the kitchen, banging
the teakettle, cursing the oatmeal,
the first time he’s been up in weeks. Last night,
when a Supremes song graced the radio,
he suddenly rose, coiffed in his blanket,
and lip-synched twenty seconds of blessed,
familiar drag routine. He’s well enough
to be a bitch, to want a haircut
and a shave. Still too sick to go home,
—wherever that might be—and too ill, as well,
to stay: the truth is we can’t live
in such radical proximity to his dying.
But not today. In the wet black yard,
October lilacs. Misplaced fever? False flowering,
into the absence the storm supplied?
Flower of the world’s beautiful will
to fill, fill space, always to take up space,
hold a place for the possible? A little
flourish, a false spring? What can I do but echo
myself, vary and repeat? Where can the poem end?
What can you expect, in a world that blooms
and freezes all at once?
There is no resolution in the fugue.