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The First Still Life

The scene at the table wasn’t going well
so he thought, Why not try something
different? Leave Christ out. Do the bread
and wine by themselves. Add a knife.

 

Or perhaps the weather was bad—
had been for weeks—and the painter
of the first still life couldn’t work outside
on his landscapes. Or he’s poor

 

and can afford only small canvases
unsuited to a storm or crucifixion.
In front of him on the kitchen table:
a chipped white bowl and an apple.

 

He thinks, Take a bite out of it, call
the picture Original Sin. Or let the apple
decay, add a couple of flies, call it
Allegory of Life, or Vanity.

 

He understands that vanity and sin
will sell better than an apple in a bowl.
And yet—why not try the thing itself?
So he does. After which: blackberries

 

and lemons on a blue china plate,
peaches and grapes in a wicker basket,
a watermelon sliced open, then a trout,
then an eel, two glasses of wine

 

beside a letter on a desk, an egg in a cup.
And spoons and forks, of course, vases
of flowers, cascades of drapery. But first:
the apple in the bowl, a curve

 

of shadow on the top of the table.
He titles it Apple in a Bowl
to say: That’s all that is here.
There’s nothing you can’t see.

A Friend’s Umbrella

Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end
of his life, found the names
of familiar objects escaping him.
He wanted to say something about a window,
or a table, or a book on a table.

 

But the word wasn’t there,
although other words could still suggest
the shape of what he meant.
Then someone, his wife perhaps,

 

would understand: “Yes, window! I’m sorry,
is there a draft?” He’d nod.
She’d rise. Once a friend dropped by
to visit, shook out his umbrella
in the hall, remarked upon the rain.

 

Later the word umbrella
vanished and became
the thing that strangers take away.

 

Paper, pen, table, book:
was it possible for a man to think
without them? To know
that he was thinking? We remember
that we forget, he’d written once,
before he started to forget.

 

Three times he was told
that Longfellow had died.

 

Without the past, the present
lay around him like the sea.
Or like a ship, becalmed,
upon the sea. He smiled

 

to think he was the captain then,
gazing off into whiteness,
waiting for the wind to rise.

Even Clearer

Don’t be fooled by clarity, there’s always something behind it.

—DEAN YOUNG

 

Certain crimes are so clear
they’ll never be understood.
The solution keeps opening into a past
so intricate and full of longing
even the most brilliant detective
finds himself lost. Look around.
Isn’t everything a clue? The ringing
of a phone, the closing of a door,
a folded piece of paper. In Vienna
the young Hitler wanted to study art.
He painted pictures of cottages,
country roads, houses without people—
bad, yes, but not so bad, all things
considered, that he shouldn’t have gotten
into art school. He’d have worked hard,
maybe stayed away from the beer halls,
then found a job teaching. Every day
a few billion histories fail to occur.
Many times the world has ended,
and many times things turned out
a lot better than they are right now.
Don’t be fooled by what you can see.
Think back: the story of your life,
the one that happened, is enclosed
by the shadows of others,
every moment more deeply surrounded,
the way evening crosses a meadow
and climbs the walls of a house,
though inside a light still burns.

Cruelty

Vermont, 1965

 

That was the year my friends were reading
Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet.
The idea of cruelty felt important,
like being so perfect an outlaw
you became a saint. The war was on,
muffled, distant. Where we were
everything took place a few years later
than in New York or San Francisco.
Some would say it was too easy
for us to be there, talking
about almost anything. Too easy now
to say we didn’t have a clue.
I made it through the first few chapters
of Artaud, and never got to Saint Genet,
although I remember the cover clearly,
the dome of his head, his eyes, the stare
that claimed he knew something
I would never know. My friends
moved on to de Sade. And now
it occurs to me that during all those years
I never said “I love you” to anyone,
although I probably should have lied
at least twice, to see if it was a lie.
Meanwhile, the fields and mountains promised
to remain the same, and they didn’t.
Great poems told us that nature
would never betray us, but that really
wasn’t the point, was it?
And then the theater of cruelty
stopped being shocking.
We all knew why.

True Paradises

The true paradises are the lost paradises.

—PROUST

 

It’s the way the sentence unfolds—
true against lost, paradise
against paradise—that convinces the reader
and forbids contradiction. Yes, but now
I’m picturing certain students,
eager freshmen fiercely determined
to disagree, and one of them

 

has raised his hand. “I think,” he says,
“that there are some true paradises
that don’t have to be lost.” “No,”
says Proust, “the true paradises
are the lost paradises.” “Well,” the student
continues, “isn’t that just your point of view?
I mean, do we have to agree?” “Yes, you do,”

 

says Proust, obviously annoyed
and unaccustomed to the Socratic method.
“If you could hear the sentence,”
Proust explains, “which, clearly, you cannot,
you would understand it.” “Well,”
says the student. “Sit down,” says Proust,
and suddenly there are many hands, raised

 

and waving. The face of the great writer
clouds with distress, and he turns to me,
whose class this is, and says,
“They are all lost.” I’m not sure
if he means the students or the paradises,
and I want to agree, but I’m feeling
a certain teacherly loyalty, luring me

into a thicket of qualifications. “Yes,”
I say, trying hard to sound ambiguous,
but for Proust the class is over.
He’s at the door, fastening his cloak.
Then he turns back. “No matter,” he says.
“Why should they believe it? What’s lost,
what’s true. Let them forget. Then remember.”

Perhaps You’ve Heard This Story Before

It’s the one where the king is out riding
through a dark forest and suddenly a witch
steps in front of his horse. The horse
rears up, but the king remains calm.
He knew that forest was haunted.
In those days, all the forests were haunted.

 

“What do you want, witch?”
he demands. And the witch says,
“Unless you return to this spot
within three days with the correct answer
to the following question, you will die.”

 

No reason for this to be happening. No reason
why he’s the one she stopped except
it was cool that morning inside her hovel,
so she walked out to stand in a patch
of sunlight, into which the king came riding.

 

“Three days,” she cackles, repeating it
just for fun. “Then tell me the question,”
says the king, steadying his horse. You know
what happens next. The question’s impossible.

 

The king searches night and day,
and everything he comes up with is wrong,
until by chance, at the last minute
he discovers the answer, gallops back,
tells the witch, and is saved.

 

Maybe the question was: What do women want?
Maybe something even harder. The point is,
there’s an answer. That was the world
the king lived in, full of inexplicable dangers,
but at the end: certainty. That was why
the king could be brave and calm, and why

 

his horse, who wasn’t able to think about danger
but felt it, needed to be steadied,
why the king touched her neck reassuringly,
then leaned down and spoke in her ear.
“There, there,” he lied. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Tenderness

Brisbane hasn’t called back
is the sentence a dream gave me.
Write it down, I was thinking,
when the dog jumped up on the bed,

 

which is what she likes to do an hour before
I need to be awake. She tucks herself
into my body, and once again
I’m wandering through the avenues of sleep.

 

So I lost that name. Somewhere
in Australia, I knew. Was it Sydney?
Perhaps a woman, then, angry
or hurt, unwilling to return my call?

 

No, she had to be a city,
out of touch with those who need
to hear from her, the way it happens
when the end of the world arrives.

 

London, Paris, Madrid—all the lines
are down. Now Brisbane
doesn’t answer. Who’s listening?
Maybe Gregory Peck in the submarine

 

from On the Beach. He’s out tracking
a skittery noise, hoping that signal
from shore isn’t the wind
fiddling with a telegraph key.

 

But it is. And soon, all over Australia,
the streets are empty, no bodies
on the sidewalks, no blood, no trace
of us beyond what we built. Death,

in this movie, has gone inside
and closed the doors, although
in the version I’m imagining
birds still dart and swoop through the air.

 

Butterflies glide from flower to flower.
Only the dogs, having survived
their masters, seem confused.
Let them hop back up on those unmade beds

 

and feel, for a day or two, bereft,
before they learn again the ways of wolves
and say goodbye to tenderness,
or what we thought was tenderness.

Desire

for Jonathan Aaron

It was late, and I was trying to remember
what someone once said about our woes—
how they rise out of our unwillingness
to stay in our rooms. After which
I opened the window, and both of us heard
the rustling sounds outside, as if small
furtive things were hurrying away, or hiding.
You were reminded of the movie Frogs
in which one character after another unwisely
leaves the house only to be hunted down
by animals not generally known
for deliberate acts of revenge.
Thus proving that what we do to the world
returns to haunt us. Radioactivity,
I said, is the usual explanation.
Also carelessness, greed, and desire.
Maybe, you replied. But Ava Gardner
was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.
There can be no doubt about that.
Although Grace Kelly in Rear Window
comes very close, for different reasons.
That left us silent and transfixed.
Outside, something was moving around,
something which now seemed
to have found its way into the walls.

Afloat

After the interesting guest at the party
declared that Giorgione’s The Storm
was the strangest painting ever made,
you flew to Venice to see it. And the canals
as well, the celebrated light
on the water, all those churches
where someone might be playing Bach
or Vivaldi while off in a shadowy corner
another masterpiece begs to be discovered.
So, for a time, yours is a life
of important surprises. You’d like
to forget that Venice is sinking
and no one knows how to save it, but today
walking across the flooded piazza feels
almost instructive: the mortal
just touching our need for permanence.
So much, after all, is vanishing.
And still the delicate city remains afloat,
the water you don’t want to fall into
glittering cheerfully as you cross the bridge
to the Accademia, where at last you will find
the enigmatic Tempesta, a picture much admired
by Byron, who in general detested painting
unless it could remind him
of something he had seen
or some day might see.

Mad Doctors

Even as children they always went too far.
What will happen, they kept thinking,
if I pull that switch, strike this match?
Maybe no one told them not to,
or explained, logically, what could go wrong.
Then they were playing with lightning,

 

wondering what they would do if they didn’t
have to die. Consider Doctor Cyclops,
stuck in the middle of the jungle
with his radium, making things small.

 

It’s 1940, five years before Hiroshima.
Even then science wasn’t on our side.
In the movie, Albert Dekker’s
shaved head makes him monstrous
and impressive, and a little like a child.
Yet he seems to have no past—

 

no wife to bring back from the dead,
no motive for evil, nothing but research.
His eyes are bad and he hardly sleeps.
We should remember Doctor Cyclops

 

from time to time, and Doctor Frankenstein,
Doctor Jekyll, and Doctor X.
They were all deceived by ambition,
although they believed themselves
betrayed by the world.

 

Maybe no one ever told them
we don’t need to live forever.
Maybe no one explained, exactly,
the logic of it.

The History of Forgetting

When Adam and Eve lived in the garden
they hadn’t yet learned how to forget.
For them every day was the same day.
Flowers opened, then closed.
They went where the light told them to go.
They slept when it left, and did not dream.

 

What could they have remembered,
who had never been children? Sometimes
Adam felt a soreness in his side,
but if this was pain it didn’t appear
to require a name, or suggest the idea
that anything else might be taken away.
The bright flowers unfolded,
swayed in the breeze.

 

It was the snake, of course, who knew
about the past—that such a place could exist.
He understood how people would yearn
for whatever they’d lost, and so to survive
they’d need to forget. Soon
the garden will be gone, the snake
thought, and in time God himself.

 

These were the last days—Adam and Eve
tending the luxurious plants, the snake
watching from above. He knew
what had to happen next, how persuasive
was the taste of that apple. And then
the history of forgetting would begin—
not at the moment of their leaving,
but the first time they looked back.

The Way They Lived Then

Beginning with a phrase by
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

 

 

In former days when the soul
was still immortal, men and women walked
beside the sea, in and out of the fog, talking

 

as we might talk today, the fog
wrapped around them, then rising,
their hands apart, then touching.

 

How changed is the world
from the one they never doubted?
Each night the news informs us.

 

What once was vast
will be small, what was endless
will end. After which:

 

black holes, burnt-out stars
wandering through the dark.
We won’t be there, you and I.

 

But can’t you hear, stepping
outside, in the sound of water
or of birds, some diminishment?

 

Remember the past? The way they lived then?
What they took for granted?
What they didn’t have to understand?

Hawthorne on His Way Home

Walking through the village
of Danvers, late one afternoon
in the fall of 1836, Nathaniel Hawthorne
saw an old man carrying

 

two dry, rustling bundles
of cornstalks, and he thought:
A good personification of Autumn.
Another man was hoeing up potatoes.

 

What did he represent? It was October.
The wild rosebushes were bare.
In the fields—brittle Indian corn,
pale rows of cabbages.

 

“A landscape now wholly autumnal,”
Hawthorne wrote in his journal, and perhaps
he noticed the way now means then
as soon as it’s written down,

 

the way remembering conceals invention,
or tries to. Idea for a tale:
a man, composing a story, finds
it shaping itself against his intentions.

 

The characters act otherwise
than he planned. Unforeseen events occur.
Hawthorne paused. Above the village
clouds were being carried off by the wind.

 

In a story, he thought, what a man observes
might shadow forth his fate:
wild roses, barberry, Indian corn.
The down of thistles flying through the air.