from ARRIVALS 2004

THE CITY

From the Greek of C. P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go away to another shore.
find another city better than this.
In all I attempt, something remains amiss
and my heart—like a dead thing—lies buried.
How long will my mind stew in all its worry?
Wherever I cast my eye, wherever I look,
I see the ruins of my life going black
here where I wasted and wrecked so many a year.”

You won’t find a new land or another shore.
This city will follow you, you’ll molder
in these streets, in these neighborhoods grow older,
and turn gray among familiar houses.
You’ll always end here—don’t hope for other places.
There is no ship, there is no road for you.
Now that you have decided you are through
with this place, you’ve wrecked your life everywhere.

GULLS IN THE WAKE

Late in our journey from the pier at Kos,
I had come up for air. Most passengers
had found their bunks or drunk themselves asleep
in the comfy bar. Adrift and floodlit,

I let suspended time wash over me,
its kitchen smells, salt wind and plodding engines,
as two guys swinging beer cans walked the deck,
singing the liturgy. Christ is risen!

Drunken, genuinely happy, they waved
across cool space at constellated lights
of villages, and greeted me, a stranger.
I answered, Truly He is risen, though

I don’t believe it. Not risen for this world.
Not here. Not now.

Then I heard cadences

of priestly chanting from an Athens church
broadcast to any pilgrim still awake.

Who could explain an unbeliever’s joy
as rockets flared from the coast near Sounion
and music ferried death to life out there,
untethered in the dark?

And that was when I saw them—ghostly, winged,
doggedly following outside our light,
hopeful without a thought of hope, feeding
or diving to feed in waves I could not see.

KALAMITSI

A path I had not walked for sixteen years,
now almost hidden under rain-soaked grass
so even the locals told me it was gone,
but two steps down where it rounded the bay
and I was back. My heart beat all the faster.

Though half the olive trees had been cut down
the stone wall stood, the gate, the little house
looking as if no one ever lived there,
the cool spring where I dipped a pot for water
hidden by bramble mounds, the cistern greening.

I stiffly climbed the gate (now chained and locked)
and walked the point of land and knew each tree—
nothing but private memories, after all.
It wasn’t the loss of time or friends that moved me
but the small survivals I was here to mark.

I had come through to see this much again,
and that plank bench under a cypress tree
where I had placed it all those years ago
to soak up shade on summer afternoons—
only a small plank bench, but quite enough.

PELICANS AND GREEKS

Edward Lear in San Remo, Italy, 1888

Nights when he cannot sleep, Lear looks for paper,
uncertain whether he should sketch or write,
or whether his living friends might comprehend
his travels off the rough and tumble roads.

As soon as I picked up my pen I felt
I was dying.

And should he then have married?

On such long nights, lines from the laureate
chase through his brain like notes flung off the scale—
an infant with no language but a cry . . .

What of Bassaë, the temple on the mountain,
the thickened oaks still stretching out their arms
to sunlight he had tried to catch in oils?
Who owned that painting now? How could one own
the love that lay behind it? All the years
and all the travels must mean little more
than light that dies along the temple flutings.

Laden with lunch, the drawing boards and paints,
Georgis played Sancho Panza to his knight.
Dear Georgis—you who witnessed wonders with me . . .
Spoken to nothing but an empty room.

On Crete a black man came, and little boy,
and peasants, and I drew them. They were all
good-tempered, laughing. I remember how
the small boy saw my drawing of a donkey
and almost cried and was impelled to give me
lemons as a gift. I gave him a pencil.
A gesture I can’t forget, ingenuous
and awkward like the play of pelicans—
the ordinary beauty of the world
that makes one jubilate in sheer delight
and shudder when we feel life leaving us.

In India an English schoolgirl came
to meet the painter, having memorized
“The Owl and the Pussycat.” Such was fame.
And there was Georgis who was mad again
because he could not ride an elephant.
And there were mountains higher than the ones
he loved in Crete and Thessaly. They too
compelled the draughtsman’s longing not to lose
minute sensations he had drawn upon,
fleabags and palaces, pelicans and Greeks.

If no one bought my drawings I should live
on figs in summertime, worms in winter,
with olive trees and onions, a parrot,
yes, and two hedgehogs for companionship,
a painting room with absolute north light . . .

So many friends are gone. No partner frets
that he cannot sleep, no child arrives to scold him.
He is the sum of all that he has lost,
his hand still dreaming on the empty page.

MUMBAI

The crowd’s no apparition on Nehru Road,
nor the grit of motor rickshaws on Nehru Road.

Nor the steady pace of people, raga, rock,
and all the unheard music of Nehru Road.

Nor the flowers, the fruit, bowls of sacred colors,
the goats and cows that stroll down Nehru Road.

The tiffin wallahs, internet cafés,
the dogs that lick the pavement of Nehru Road.

The girls with perfect skin who wear their saris
with a demigoddess air on Nehru Road.

The crones who squat, the beggars, and the boy
washing himself from a pail on Nehru Road.

Commuters lean for air from open doors
as the long train leaves the stop on Nehru Road.

Mason, you’ve come to the other side of the world—
why can’t you lose yourself on Nehru Road?

AGNOSTOS TOPOS

We had walked a whole day on high ridges
somewhere between the heat-struck sea and peaks,
each breath a desert in a traveler’s lungs,
salt-stung, dusty, like summer’s rasping grass
and the roughness of stone. Biblical thorns
penned us, while the stunted ilex trees
shadowed the path. It seemed from these dour fields
we could not emerge on anything like a road.

A landscape no one had commodified
or fenced. If there were gardens here
the poverty of soil defeated them.
If there were homes beyond some goatherd’s hut
the gravity of ages pulled them down.
No sound but cicadas like high-pitched drills
ringing till red sunlight hissed into the sea.

And that was when, our shins scratched and throats parched,
we stumbled into a village on the shore
where people, stupefied by days upon days
that were the same, told us what to call this place.
The distance to a road? Two cigarettes,
said the old man who sat webbing his net.

Now the road cuts down from cliffs above.
I’ve been back, bought wine from the old man’s son
who keeps his car parked in an olive’s shade.
It’s better, of course, that one can come and go.
One needn’t stare a lifetime at hot cliffs,
thinking them impassable except to goats
and men whose speech and features grew like thorns.

The old man’s dead. The friends I traveled with
are long since out of touch, and I’ll admit
I’ve lost much of a young man’s nimbleness.
I call these passing years agnostos topos,
unknown country, a place of panting lizards.
Yet how like home it seemed when I walked down
out of the unfenced hills, thirsty, footsore,
with words of greeting for the fisherman.

THE COLLECTOR’S TALE

When it was over I sat down last night,
shaken, and quite afraid I’d lost my mind.
The objects I have loved surrounded me
like friends in such composed society
they almost rid the atmosphere of fright.
I collected them, perhaps, as one inclined
to suffer other people stoically.

That’s why, when I found Foley at my door—
not my shop, but here at my private home,
the smell of bourbon for his calling card—
I sighed and let him in without a word.
I’d only met the man two months before
and found his taste as tacky as they come,
his Indian ethic perfectly absurd.

The auction house in St. Paul where we met
was full that day of cherry furniture.
I still can’t tell you why he’d chosen me
to lecture all about his Cherokee
obsessions, but I listened—that I regret.
My patience with a stranger’s geniture
compelled him to describe his family tree.

He told me of his youth in Oklahoma,
his white father who steered clear of the Rez,
a grandma native healer who knew herbs
for every illness. Nothing like the ’burbs,
I guess. He learned to tell a real tomahawk
from a handsaw, or lift his half-mad gaze
and “entertain” you with some acid barbs.

So he collected Indian artifacts,
the sort that sell for thousands in New York.
Beadwork, war shirts, arrowheads, shards of clay
beloved by dealers down in Santa Fe.
He lived to corner strangers, read them tracts
of his invention on the careful work
he would preserve and pridefully display.

Foley roamed the Great Plains in his van,
his thin hair tied back in a ponytail,
and people learned that he was smart enough
to deal. He made a living off this stuff,
became a more authenticated man.
But when he drank he would begin to rail
against the white world’s trivializing fluff.

Last night when he came in, reeking of smoke
and liquor, gesticulating madly
as if we’d both returned from the same bar,
I heard him out a while, the drunken bore,
endured his leaning up against my oak
credenza there, until at last I gladly
offered him a drink and a kitchen chair.

I still see him, round as a medicine ball
with a three-day beard, wearing his ripped jeans
and ratty, unlaced Nikes without socks.
I see him searching through two empty packs
and casting them aside despite my scowl,
opening a third, lighting up—he careens
into my kitchen, leaving boozy tracks.

I offered brandy. He didn’t mind the brand
or that I served it in a water glass.
He drank with simple greed, making no show
of thanks, and I could see he wouldn’t go.
He told me nothing happened as he planned,
how he left Rasher’s tiny shop a mess.
I killed him, Foley said. You got to know.

You know the place. Grand Avenue. The Great
White Way they built over my people’s bones
after the western forts made stealing safe.
Safe for that fucking moneyed generation
F. Scott Fitzgerald tried to write about—
and here was Rasher, selling off such crap
no self-respecting dealer’d waste his time.

I heard he had good beadwork, Chippewa,
but when I went in all I saw was junk.
I’m thinking, Christ, the neighbors here must love him,
the one dusty-shuttered place on the block
and inside, counters filled with silver plate
so tarnished nobody would touch it, irons
with fraying cords and heaps of magazines.

He had the jawbone of a buffalo
from South Dakota, an old Enfield rifle,
a horn chair (or a cut-rate replica),
German Bible, a blue-eyed Jesus framed
in bottle caps—I mean he had everything
but paint-by-number sunsets, so much junk
I bet he hadn’t made a sale in years.

You got to know this guy—skinny bald head
and both his hands twisted from arthritis.
I wouldn’t give his place a second look
except I heard so much about this beadwork.
He leads me to a case in the back room.
I take a look. The stuff is fucking new,
pure Disneyland, not even off the Rez.

Foley’s glass was empty; I poured him more
to buy time while I thought of some excuse
to get him out of here. If homicide
indeed were his odd tale’s conclusion, I’d
rather let him pass out on my floor,
then dash upstairs and telephone the police.
I wouldn’t mind if “fucking” Foley fried.

It’s crap, he said. I tell this slimy coot
he doesn’t know an Indian from a dog.
I can’t believe I drove five hundred miles
to handle sentimental tourist crap.
He rolled himself upright in my kitchen chair
and looked at me with such complete disdain
that I imagined Mr. Rasher’s stare.

I knew the man. We dealers somehow sense
who we trust and who the characters are.
I looked at my inebriated guest
and saw the fool-as-warrior on a quest
for the authentic, final recompense
that would rub out, in endless, private war,
all but his own image of the best.

Pretty quick I see I hurt his feelings.
He gets all proud on me and walks around
pointing at this and that,
a World’s Fair pin, a Maris autograph,
and then he takes me to a dark wood cupboard
and spins the combination on the lock
and shows me what’s inside. The old man

shows me his motherfucking pride and joy.
I look inside his cupboard and it’s there
all right—a black man’s head with eyes sewn shut—
I mean this fucker’s real, all dried and stuffed,
a metal ashtray planted in the skull.
I look and it’s like the old man’s nodding,
Yeah, yeah, you prick, now tell me this is nothing.

He’s looking at me looking at this head,
telling me he found it in a house
just up the street. Some dead white guy’s estate
here in the liberal north allowed this coot
whatever his twisted little hands could take,
and then he hoards it away for special guests.
I didn’t say a thing. I just walked out.

Now Foley filled his glass, drinking it down.
His irises caught fire as he lit up.
I sat across from him and wiped my palms
but inside I was setting off alarms
as if I should alert this sleeping town
that murder lived inside it. I could stop
the story now, I thought, but nothing calms

a killer when he knows he must confess,
and Foley’d chosen me to hear the worst.
Weird, he said, looking straight at me beyond
his burning cigarette. I got so mad.
Like all I thought of was a hundred shelves
collecting dust in Rasher’s shop, and how
a dead man’s head lay at the center of it.

I had to get a drink. Some yuppie bar
that charged a fortune for its cheapest bourbon.
I’m in there while the sun sets on the street
and people drop in after leaving work.
I look at all these happy people there—
laughing, anyway; maybe they aren’t happy—
the well-dressed women tossing back their hair,

the men who loosen their designer ties
and sip their single malts—living on bones
of other people, right?
And two blocks down the street, in Rasher’s shop,
a head where someone flicked his ashes once,
because of course a darky can’t be human,
and someone’s family kept that darky’s head.

These genteel people with their decent souls
must have been embarrassed finding it,
and Rasher got it for a fucking song
and even he could never sell the thing.
No, he showed it to me just to get me,
just to prove I hadn’t seen it all.
Well, he was right, I hadn’t seen it all.

I didn’t know the worst that people do
could be collected like a beaded bag,
bad medicine or good, we keep the stuff
and let it molder in our precious cases.
Some fucker cared just how he dried that head
and stitched the skin and cut the hole in the top—
big medicine for a man who liked cigars.

It’s just another piece of history,
human, like a slave yoke or a scalping knife,
and maybe I was drunk on yuppie booze,
but I knew some things had to be destroyed.
Hell, I could hardly walk, but I walked back,
knocked on Rasher’s door until he opened,
pushed him aside like a bag of raked-up leaves.

Maybe I was shouting, I don’t know.
I heard him shouting at my back, and then
he came around between me and the case,
a little twisted guy with yellow teeth
telling me he’d call the fucking cops.
I found the jawbone of that buffalo.
I mean I must have picked it up somewhere,

maybe to break the lock, but I swung hard
and hit that old fucker upside the head
and he went down so easy I was shocked.
He lay there moaning in a spreading pool
I stepped around. I broke that old jawbone
prizing the lock, but it snapped free, and I
snatched out the gruesome head.

I got it to my van all right, and then
went back to check on Rasher. He was dead.
For a while I tried to set his shop on fire
to see the heaps of garbage in it burn,
but you’d need gasoline to get it going
and besides, I couldn’t burn away the thought
of that weird thing I took from there tonight.

It’s out there, Foley said. I’m parked outside
a few blocks down—I couldn’t find your house.
I knew you’d listen to me if I came.
I knew you’d never try to turn me in.
You want to see it? No? I didn’t either,
and now I’ll never lose that goddamned head,
even if I bury it and drive away.

By now the bluster’d left his shrinking frame
and I thought he would vomit in my glass,
but Foley had saved strength enough to stand,
while I let go of everything I’d planned—
the telephone, police, and bitter fame
that might wash over my quiet life and pass
away at some inaudible command.

I thought of all the dead things in my shop.
No object I put up was poorly made.
Nothing of mine was inhumane, although
I felt death in a kind of undertow
pulling my life away. Make it stop,
I thought, as if poor Foley had betrayed
our best ideals. Of course I let him go.

The truth is, now he’s left I feel relieved.
I locked the door behind him, but his smell
has lingered in my hallway all these hours.
I’ve mopped the floor, washed up, moved pots of flowers
to places that he touched. If I believed,
I would say Foley had emerged from hell.
I ask for help, but the silent house demurs.

IN THE BORROWED HOUSE

While flowerbeds have gone to seed,
a book you didn’t plan to read
offers the unexpected phrase
that occupies your minds for days.

You write with someone else’s pen
of someone else’s life. And when
light’s absence leans across the town,
you lay another body down.

ADAM SPEAKS

When I was clay there was so much to feel: symmetries of sunlight

traced within the feather and the leaf, pale secretions

trailing from shells, the clammy hands of fog touching my body.

My first uncurling into day was built from muted fires

below, and I began to grow distinct, bone, nail and hair,

muscled, akimbo, awkward as the fawn I later named.

There was a sea inside my flesh—I tensed to hold it in,

but found it was the whisper of the moon calling to me.

You who are thinking of me then, remember I tore my self

out of myself, bellowing like thunder. When I saw birds

I thought they were the love of God, and wailed at how they flew above me.

BALLADE AT 3 A.M.

A Dunkin’ Donuts denizen,
Phil diagrammed conspiracies
in which the country had a plan,
contrived by top authorities,
to generate our mass malaise.
When I would ask him why or how,
suspicion flickered in his eyes.
I don’t know where he’s living now.

Jake had the presidential grin,
describing all the Saigon whores
who sold their wares to a bored Marine.
Due to his unexplained disease
he lived on federal subsidies,
though late at night he would avow
his fate was fixed by a hiring freeze.
I don’t know where he’s living now.

The bullet piercing Marvin’s spleen
was not a North Vietnamese
but friendly fire from an M16.
He wasn’t even overseas
and bore no combat memories
that might explain the way his brow
twitched as if he had DTs.
I don’t know where he’s living now.

Lost in the disco Seventies,
I met them briefly, anyhow,
and went on to my girlfriend’s place.
I don’t know where they’re living now.

THE LOST HOUSE

A neighbor girl went with me near the creek,
entered the new house they were building there
with studs half-covered. Alone in summer dark,
we sat together on the plywood floor.

The sky way I contrived it, my right hand
slipped insinuatingly beneath her blouse
in new maneuvers, further than I planned.
I thought we floated in that almost-house.

Afraid of what might happen, or just afraid,
I stopped. She stood and brushed the sawdust off.
Fifteen that summer, we knew we could have strayed.
Now, if I saw it in a photograph,

I couldn’t tell you where that new house stood.
One night the timbered hillside thundered down
like a dozen freight trains, crashing in a flood
that splintered walls and made the owners run.

By then I had been married and divorced.
The girl I reached for in unfinished walls
had moved away as if by nature’s course.
The house was gone. Under quiet hills

The creek had cut new banks, left silt in bars
now sprouting alder scrub. No one would know,
cruising the dead-end road beneath the stars,
how we had trespassed there so long ago.

MR. LOUDEN AND THE ANTELOPE

Mr. Louden was my father’s ranching friend
whose pickup sprouted rust from summer hail.
It didn’t bother him. He had one arm,
and a tucked-in sleeve, and drove us toward the end
of his fence line, passing piñon and chaparral.
Forty years. By now he’s bought the farm.

I can still hear him chuckling: No, there ain’t
nothing funnier than a one-armed man
driving while he tries to swat horseflies.
I never heard him utter a complaint.
He could have been weathered sandstone, deadpan
when his empty sleeve flapped out in the breeze.

He released the wheel to point as antelope,
like dolphins of the desert that were playing
in our dusty wake, surfaced alongside us
and in one fleet formation climbed the slope
ahead, and over it. They left us saying
little and were far too fast to guide us.

Where were we headed in that battered truck,
my father, old Mr. Louden, and I?
And was it the hail-pocked wreck that I recall?
Now forty-eight, I can’t believe my luck,
to have seen those agile creatures chasing by—
unless, of course, I only dreamed it all.

Though I can’t prove it’s true, I saw them go
out of sight like figures out of a myth.
They left us gasping in their kicked-up dust,
our own dust settling like summer snow,
while Mr. Louden laughed, conjuring with
his only arm, mage of the blooming rust.

A MEANING MADE OF TREES

From a phrase by Seamus Heaney

This bedroom high in the old house,
its roof pitched steeply overhead,

traps the lake water sounds, afloat
on what it holds: liquid lapping.

I could lie here half the day long,
hearing rain wrung out of the sky,

windows open, so the outer
breath and green of the world get in.

The alder’s scabbed, serrated leaves
that will fail later in the fall

fulfill themselves, a waterfall
steeped in the greening chlorophyll.

That stir of limbs against the roof
must be the native Douglas fir—

a winter friend because it keeps
the housebound memory evergreen.

Most of all the cedar rises,
huge and straight, the hulking host

and omphalos of my dream world,
its rootedness a kind of triumph.

WINTER 1963

As my father turned the car into the drive
and we were home from our rare trip to church,
a man’s voice speaking from the radio
caused us to linger there, engine running.
Just so, the voice with its calm cadences
lingered by woods where snow fell downily.

Though only eight, I thought I understood
the words to fit our snowless January,
and that the man, whose name was Robert Frost
(like rime I saw that morning on the lawn),
had died in Boston, which was far away.

Who knows where I went next, with all the woods
about the house to play in, but I recall
the chilling dullness of the winter sky
and firs so still I almost heard them breathing.
I thought it wasn’t Jack, but Robert Frost,
Who made them live in such a cold repose.

Within two weeks another poet died,
her head in a cold gas oven. No poem
of hers was broadcast to my family.
Years would pass before I learned her name.

The old man in his woods, the young mother
dying with two babies near—such vanity
and madness framed the choices both had made—
the way he stuck it out, the way she lost it.

I’ve tried to cast my lot with that old man,
but something in her fate tugs at me too.
She can’t have known the cause célèbre she’d be,
wanting to leave the world for leaving her.

The world goes on despite us and our poems,
snow falling in woods, or not falling,
lights coming on in houses, lights going out,
but I feel grateful that my father stopped
the car that January day, his head
almost bowed as he left the radio on.

SWIMMERS ON THE SHORE

Like half a filial circus act
splashing the Y pool shallow end,
I swam about my father, who could stand.
And when I climbed, an acrobat,
diving from his muscled shoulders,
they seemed as solid as two boulders.

Now I can hold his shrunken frame
in my arm’s compass. We’re together
on a park bench in lingering summer weather
before I make the long drive home.
But halfway through some story, speech
lies suddenly beyond his reach.

I see him cast for words, and fail.
Though talking never came with ease,
it is as if my father’s memories
dissolve in a cedar-darkened pool,
while I no longer am aware
which of us goes fishing there.

Has he begun the long swim out
toward silence that we all half dread?
I hug my father’s shoulders, lean my head
closer to his, yet I cannot,
from his unfinished sentences,
quite fathom where or who he is.

I want to stay. The day is warm,
the salt breeze blows across the Sound
long plaintive cries of seagulls sailing down
to hover over churning foam
there in the docking ferry’s wake.
I want to stay for my own sake,

holding the man who once held me
until I dove and splashed about.
He gives my hand a squeeze. There is no doubt,
despite his loss of memory,
and though the words could not be found,
it’s I who have begun to drown.