What is there to say about them
that has not been said in the title?
I saw them near dawn from a glassy room
on the other side of that river,
which flowed from some hidden spring
to the sea; but that is getting away from
the brightly colored boats upturned
on the banks of the Charles,
the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.
They were beautiful in the clear early light—
red, yellow, blue and green—
is all I wanted to say about them,
although for the rest of the day
I pictured a lighter version of myself
calling time through a little megaphone,
first to the months of the year,
then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing
as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.
I recall someone once admitting
that all he remembered of Anna Karenina
was something about a picnic basket,
and now, after consuming a book
devoted to the subject of Barcelona—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—
all I remember is the mention
of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.
The sheer paleness of her looms over
all the notable names and dates
as the evening strollers stop before her
and point to show their children.
These locals called her Snowflake,
and here she has been mentioned again in print
in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive
and helping her, despite her name, to endure
in this poem where she has found another cage.
I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—
no, you were the reason
I kept my light on late into the night
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.
On that clear October morning,
I was only behind a double espresso
and a single hit of anti-depressant,
yet there, on the shore of the reservoir
with its flipped-over row boats,
I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen
to borrow the jargon of the streets.
Yes, I was wearing the crown,
as the drug addicts like to say,
knitting a bonnet for Charlie,
entertaining the troops,
sitting in the study with H.G. Wells—
so many ways to express that mood
of royal goodwill
when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.
And later in the afternoon
when I finally came down,
a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.
In my upholstered chair by a window
with dusk pouring into the room,
I appeared to be doing nothing,
but inside I was busy riding the marble,
as the lurkers like to put it—
talking to Marco Polo,
juggling turtles,
going through the spin cycle,
or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.
I have envied the four-moon planet.
—The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Maybe he was thinking of the song
“What a Little Moonlight Can Do”
and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.
But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn’t tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room.
Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.
But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.
This love for everyday things,
part natural from the wide eye of infancy,
part a literary calculation,
this attention to the morning flower
and later to a fly strolling
along the rim of a wineglass—
are we just avoiding our one true destiny
when we do that, averting our glance
from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?
The leafless branches against the sky
will not save anyone from the void ahead,
nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.
So why bother with the checkered lighthouse?
Why waste time on the sparrow,
or the wildflowers along the roadside
when we all should be alone in our rooms
throwing ourselves at the wall of life
and the opposite wall of death,
as we hurl rocks at the question of meaning
and the enigma of our origins?
What good is the firefly,
the droplet running along the green leaf,
or even the bar of soap sliding around the bathtub
when we are really meant to be
banging away on the mystery
as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?
banging away on nothingness itself,
some with their foreheads,
others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.
The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Jose Ramón Jiménez
Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,
but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set
then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,
a long darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.
This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.
The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.
Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me
into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,
and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.
Poems are never completed—they are
only abandoned.
—Paul Valéry
That winter I had nothing to do
but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,
but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets
often turning from a wide boulevard
down a narrow side street
bearing the name of an obscure patriot.
I followed a few private rules,
never crossing a bridge without stopping
mid-point to lean my bike on the railing
and observe the flow of the river below
as I tried to better understand the French.
In my pale coat and my Basque cap
I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.
I would see beggars and street cleaners
in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
I would see the poems of Valéry,
the ones he never finished but abandoned,
wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.
Most of them needed only a final line
or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
but whenever I approached,
they would retreat from their ashcan fires
into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,
forsaken for so many long decades
how could they ever trust another man with a pen?
I came across the one I wanted to tell you about
sitting with a glass of rosé at a café table—
beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,
cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache
by Monsieur Paul Valéry himself,
big fish in the school of Symbolism
and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters
of the League of Nations if you please.
Never mind how I got her out of the café,
past the concierge and up the flights of stairs—
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.
And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,
a simple, final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,
and off to the side, me in a window seat
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.
When I came across the high-speed photograph
of a bullet that had just pierced a book—
the pages exploding with the velocity—
I forgot all about the marvels of photography
and began to wonder which book
the photographer had selected for the shot.
Many novels sprang to mind
including those of Raymond Chandler
where an extra bullet would hardly be noticed.
Non-fiction offered too many choices—
a history of Scottish lighthouses,
a biography of Joan of Arc and so forth.
Or it could be an anthology of medieval literature,
the bullet having just beheaded Sir Gawain
and scattered the band of assorted pilgrims.
But later, as I was drifting off to sleep,
I realized that the executed book
was a recent collection of poems written
by someone of whom I was not fond
and that the bullet must have passed through
his writing with little resistance
at twenty-eight-hundred feet per second,
through the poems about his sorry childhood
and the ones about the dreary state of the world,
and then through the author’s photograph,
through the beard, the round glasses,
and that special poet’s hat he loves to wear.
In this sentimental painting of rustic life,
a rosy-cheeked fellow
in a broad hat and ballooning green pants
is twirling a peasant girl in a red frock
while a boy is playing a squeeze-box
near a turned-over barrel
upon which rest a knife, a jug, and small drinking glass.
Two men in rough jackets
are playing cards at a wooden table.
And in the background a woman in a bonnet
stands behind a half-open Dutch door
talking to a merchant or a beggar who is leaning on a cane.
This is all I need to inject me with desire,
to fill me with the urge to lie down with you,
or someone very much like you
on a cool marble floor or any fairly flat surface
as clouds go flying by
and the rustle of tall leafy trees
mixes with the notes of birdsong—
so clearly does the work speak to me of vanishing time,
obsolete musical instruments,
passing fancies, and the corpse
of the largely forgotten painter moldering
somewhere beneath the surface of present-day France.
The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,
then the arms and legs,
and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.
And often an entire head followed the nose
as it might have done when bread
was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.
No hope for the flute once attached
to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,
nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,
the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,
the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,
and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.
But the torso is another story—
middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,
propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,
and the mighty stone ass endures,
so smooth and fundamental, no one
hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.
And that is the way it goes here
in the diffused light from the translucent roof,
one missing extremity after another—
digits that got too close to the slicer of time,
hands snapped off by the clock,
whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.
But outside on the city streets,
it is raining, and the pavement shines
with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—
hundreds of noses still intact,
arms swinging and hands grasping,
the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.
It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come
when there is nothing left of us
but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon
now exposed to the open air,
just the wind in the trees and the shadows
of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.
We did not have the benefit of a guide,
no crone to lead us off the common path,
no ancient to point the way with a staff,
but there were badlands to cross,
rivers of fire and blackened peaks,
and eventually we could look down and see
the jeweler running around a gold ring,
the boss trapped in an hour glass,
the baker buried up to his eyes in flour,
the banker plummeting on a coin,
the teacher disappearing into a blackboard,
and the grocer silent under a pyramid of vegetables.
We saw the pilot nose-diving
and the whore impaled on a bedpost,
the pharmacist wandering in a stupor
and the child with toy wheels for legs.
You pointed to the soldier
who was dancing with his empty uniform
and I remarked on the blind tourist.
But what truly caught our attention
was the scene in the long mirror of ice:
you lighting the wick on your head,
me blowing on the final spark,
and our children trying to crawl away from their eggshells.
is not really the title of a movie
but if it were I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theatre.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.
I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
There was no art in losing that coin
you gave me for luck, the one with the profile
of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.
It rode for days in a pocket
of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,
past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,
and then it was gone, as lost as the lost
theorems of Pythagoras, or the Medea by Ovid,
which also slipped through the bars of time,
and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—
forever out of favor with Augustus—
on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,
where eventually he died, but not before
writing a poem about the fish of those waters,
into which, as we know, he was never transformed,
nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,
nor into a star like Julius Caesar,
not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.
Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension.
—Writing Fiction
Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.
When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.
A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.
I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving
to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.
Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue
to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.
The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning
began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.
All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasant to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.
It was getting late in the year,
the sky had been low and overcast for days,
and I was drinking tea in a glassy room
with a woman without children,
a gate through which no one had entered the world.
She was turning the pages of an expensive book
on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,
a book of colorful paintings—
a landscape, a portrait, a still life,
a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.
Men had entered there but no girl or boy
had come out, I was thinking oddly
as she stopped at a page of clouds
aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.
This one is my favorite, she said,
even though it was only a detail, a corner
of a larger painting which she had never seen.
Nor did she want to see the countryside below
or the portrayal of some myth
in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.
This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.
When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter
of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.
A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.
Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.
No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.
You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,
but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.
The ancient Greeks … used to chain
their statues to prevent them from fleeing.
—Michael Kimmelman
It might have been the darkening sky
that sent them running in all directions
that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,
but were they not used to standing out
in the squares of our city
in every kind of imaginable weather?
Maybe they were frightened by a headline
on a newspaper that was blowing by
or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?
Did they finally learn about the humans
they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?
Did they know something we did not?
Whatever the cause, no one will forget
the sight of all the white marble figures
leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.
In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.
The vendor froze under his umbrella.
A dog tried to hide in his owner’s shadow.
Even the chess players under the trees
looked up from their boards
long enough to see the bronze generals
dismount and run off, leaving their horses
to peer down at the circling pigeons
who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.
According to the guest information directory,
baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel.
Baby-listening—not a baby who happens to be listening,
as I thought when I first checked in.
Leave the receiver off the hook,
the directory advises,
and your infant can be monitored by the staff,
though the staff, the entry continues,
cannot be held responsible for the well-being
of the baby in question.
Fair enough: someone to listen to the baby.
But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,
lying there in the room next to mine
listening to my pen scratching against the page,
or a more advanced baby who has crawled
down the hallway of the hotel
and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.
poetry is a place where both are true at once,
where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.
Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door
as well as the baby who is being listened to,
quietly breathing into the nearby telephone.
And it also wants the baby
who is making sounds of distress
into the curved receiver lying in the crib
while the girl at reception has just stepped out
to have a smoke with her boyfriend
in the dark by the great wash and sway of the North Sea.
Poetry wants that baby, too,
even a little more than it wants the others.
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It’s enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.
I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn’t have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.
As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.
I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.
And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.
And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow
even after the waiter had removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley.
As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.
If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.
And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse
and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.
Eventually—one can only read so fast—
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,
and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,
leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?
We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.
I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.
Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks
across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.
is the usual thing to say when you begin
pulling on the toes of a small child,
and I have never had a problem with that.
I could easily picture the piggy with his basket
and his trotters kicking up the dust on an imaginary road.
What always stopped me in my tracks was
the middle toe—this little piggy ate roast beef.
I mean I enjoy a roast beef sandwich
with lettuce and tomato and a dollop of horseradish,
but I cannot see a pig ordering that in a delicatessen.
I am probably being too literal-minded here—
I am even wondering why it’s called “horseradish.”
I should just go along with the beautiful nonsense
of the nursery, float downstream on its waters.
After all, Little Jack Horner speaks to me deeply.
I don’t want to be the one to ruin the children’s party
by asking unnecessary questions about Puss in Boots
or, again, the implications of a pig eating beef.
By the way, I am completely down with going
“Wee wee wee” all the way home,
having done that many times and knowing exactly how it feels.
I am glad I resisted the temptation,
if it was a temptation when I was young,
to write a poem about an old man
eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.
I would have gotten it all wrong
thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world
and with only a book for a companion.
He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.
So glad I waited all these decades
to record how hot and sour the hot and sour soup is
here at Chang’s this afternoon
and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.
And my book—José Saramago’s Blindness
as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up
from its escalating horrors only
when I am stunned by one of its arresting sentences.
And I should mention the light
which falls through the big windows this time of day
italicizing everything it touches—
the plates and tea pots, the immaculate tablecloths,
as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress
in the white blouse and short black skirt,
the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice
and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.
Not only in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.
Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.
Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.
When I finally arrive there—
and it will take many days and nights—
I would like to believe others will be waiting
and might even want to know how it was.
So I will reminisce about a particular sky
or a woman in a white bathrobe
or the time I visited a narrow strait
where a famous naval battle had taken place.
Then I will spread out on a table
a large map of my world
and explain to the people of the future
in their pale garments what it was like—
how mountains rose between the valleys
and this was called geography,
how boats loaded with cargo plied the rivers
and this was known as commerce,
how the people from this pink area
crossed over into this light-green area
and set fires and killed whoever they found
and this was called history—
and they will listen, mild-eyed and silent,
as more of them arrive to join the circle,
like ripples moving toward,
not away from, a stone tossed into a pond.
Go, little book,
out of this house and into the world,
carriage made of paper rolling toward town
bearing a single passenger
beyond the reach of this jittery pen
and far from the desk and the nosy gooseneck lamp.
It is time to decamp,
put on a jacket and venture outside,
time to be regarded by other eyes,
bound to be held in foreign hands.
So off you go, infants of the brain,
with a wave and some bits of fatherly advice:
stay out as late as you like,
don’t bother to call or write,
and talk to as many strangers as you can.