For Margaret
My mother near her death is white as a downy feather.
I used to think her death was distant as a tropical bird, a giant macaw, whatever that is—a thing I have as little to do with as the Chinese poor.
I find a single feather of her suffering
I blow it gently as she blew into my neck and ear.
A single downy feather is on the scales, opposed by things of weight, not spirit.
I remember the smell of burning feathers.
I wish we could sit upon the grass and talk about grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A worm directs us into the ground.
We look alike.
I sing a lullaby to her about her children who are safe and their children.
I place a Venetian lace tablecloth of the whitest linen on the grass.
The wind comes with its song about things given that are taken away and give again in another form.
Why are the poor cawing, hooting, screaming in the woods?
I wish death were a whip-poor-will the first bird I could name.
Why is everything so heavy?
I did not think she was still helping me to carry the weight of my life.
Now the world’s poor are before me.
How can I lift them one by one in my arms?
The Lost Brother
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, on Savage Mountain 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 Buddha.
Sooner or later, some bag of wind will cut me down.
Nicky
She danced into the moonless winter, a black dog.
In the morning when I found her I couldn’t get her tongue back in her mouth.
She lies between a Japanese maple and the cellar door, at no one’s feet, without a master.
The Bathers
1.
In the great bronze tub of summer, with the lions’ heads cast on each side, couples come and bathe together: each touches only his or her lover, as he or she falls back into the warm eucalyptus-scented waters.
It is a hot summer evening and the last sunlight clings to the lighter and darker blues of grapes and to the white and rose plate on the bare marble table. Now the lovers plunge, surface, drift—an intruding elder would not know if there were six or two, or be aware of the entering and withdrawing.
There is a sudden stillness of water, the bathers whisper in the classical manner, intimate distant things. They are forgetful that the darkness called night is always present, sunlight is the guest. It is the moment of departure. They dress, by mistake exchange some of their clothing, and linger in the glaring night traffic of the old city.
2.
I hosed down the tub after five hundred years of lovemaking, and my few summers.
I did not know the touch of naked bodies would give to bronze a fragile gold patina, or that women in love jump in their lovers’ tubs.
God of tubs, take pity on solitary bathers who scrub their flesh with rough stone and have nothing to show for bathing but cleanliness and disillusion.
Some believe the Gods come as swans, showers of gold, themselves, or not at all.
I think they come as bathers: lovers whales fountaining, hippopotami squatting in the mud.
Song of Imperfection
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, limp-foot after limp-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.
When I Played a Buddhist Priest, Etc.
1
I lived in flight from an apartment, desolate as Beethoven’s jaw. On the go actor, I could put my life aside, I drank till my feet turned purple or into goat hooves. I could play the serpent, Eve, Adam, the apple before or after it was bit.
I wandered beside myself, a figure far from myself as orange rind: I could turn from David into Saul weeping—to Absalom, his hair caught in a tree. I could play my own fool, my own column of cloud, the presence of God.
I could throw myself out into the garbage, or, like a child’s top on a string, turn red and blue then whirl into a single color.
I played a Buddhist priest reading from his Book into the ear of a corpse who hears the reader’s voice telling him all his visions are his own unrealized, undiscovered forms, the horrible furies and the calm he must come to understand are his.
2
“Far below the salt cliffs,” I wrote in my Hymn Book, “the river’s violin has emptied into the sea.”
Only the man-bird flies from the Dead Sea to the Himalayas, from the ancient dead shrouded in poetry to the never-ending ice so thick, the dead are ritually butchered and fed to vultures that, surrounded by haloes of the sun, rise like doves out of the jeweled snow.
In the glacial silence a man’s leg-bone makes a sweeter whistle than your ram’s horn.
3
To bathe at birth, marriage and death, a rule in Tibet, was not enough even for me. “No one has ever slid down the Himalayas so fast,” I said in a coarse aside.
Unteachable, I learned, I fell more like Richard the Second than Adam.
In a farce I came closest to the stinking breath of my own mortality, trying to lift a snapping turtle off Deerfield road, it bit into my shoe, I fell back into a crabgrass ditch—broke my ankle and elbow.
It was Memorial Day, a day
I broke my veteran’s bones on three occasions.
4
What do I know that no one knows?
The care I wanted to give, that no one else would give.
I had lived to sing to my dying mother beside her bed. Now memory’s my mother, she keeps my life from burning off like morning mist.
One black tear at the corner of my left eye, I wept over a glass of spilled milk. I pretended to play Mozart on a violin without lessons.
I bought myself a fiddle and a bow strung with circus-horse hair, an earthly bow, not a rainbow.
Who was I to know so many tunes?
I just played my everyday music—I would never wrap the holy name letters around my fingers. I wrote a song that began:
“I fall back from making love to the kind of day it is. . . .”
I cannot escape the jail of poetry, books books books books not stone.
Love came into my cell, she is jailed with me. A lady’s absence keeps her in my prison without a word.
Hermaphrodites in the Garden
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 Swimmer
I remember her first as a swimmer:
I saw my mother swimming in a green and white bathing suit, her arms reaching out across giant ocean waves, swimming through the Atlantic breakers.
I stood on the shore, knowing almost nothing, unable to go to her— dumbfounded by the wonder of it,
It happened long before I could dress myself.
I was a little older than the weeping Chinese child sitting alone in the rubble of Nanking— barely old enough to be read to, not able to tell time or count.
When I had that kind of knowledge, in her old age she showed me herself naked, the tubes and the sack.
An hour later she said, “I must have been crazy.”
Then she swam off again and never came back.
For a few days I awoke as that child again.
Now I have learned a kind of independence.
It is mostly in dreams she comes back, younger or older, sometimes fresh from the joy of the swim.
Spoon
to Jane Freilicher
I was scribbling, “Goya painted with a spoon” when I heard Jane died, I knew enough not to be surprised but I was.
Saturn gnawed his son without a place setting.
I never got over the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage, when she screamed, “I bargained too much” (for her murdered son’s life).
The actress wore a wooden spoon as a brooch.
Tongue tied, I kept “spoon.” It is not a decoration.
In a daydream, I avow without reason Jane Freilicher painted with a spoon— potato fields, Watermill, pink mallow, her early painting Leda and the Swan, nothing we see—and with everyday palette knife, brushes or late-invented forks, useful for painting hydrangeas and eyelashes, proof painters work like translators,
English into Chinese, everyday English words: daylight, flower, woman, moon are different in Ming, Tang, and Song: different characters, different calligraphy.
She painted with a silver or oak spoon ponds or stars, bones were oblong and triangles, nothing we see. She painted light, mastered it, was mastered by it, moved the world by “tipping the horizon up.”
My honor: from a distance she painted my house on Mecox Bay, my Corinthian columns, my garden and sandpit along the old Montauk road, my beach plums, fireweed, roses of Sharon, day lilies, love mostly washed out by hurricanes.
I say “my” but I never thought I had good title to anything or anyone.
Then there was her battle of dreams versus hallucinations, battles without a heroine, the color of fate, breathtaking, inevitable colors.
She would never forgive those who think painting and poetry function about the same as wallpaper.
Sometimes she painted small pictures easily hidden from search parties as Goya did, hiding from the Inquisition because he painted nudes,
Protestant fields, Catholic fields, Jewish fields, like her.
She suffered the heresies of the Hamptons where most painters of roses, whatever their personal faith, and all poets, as such, are polytheists.
Again, she studied the many moods of the sun and ocean through a window.
I studied Chinese at the Beijing railroad station, eight thousand years or so of Chinese faces.
Every Chinese knows five cardinal relations: ruler subject, father son, husband wife, elder and younger brother, friend and friend.
I share the undiscovered country that begins at the Southampton railroad station, the beauty and color of Long Island in the mist . . .
I sit shivering with the old-timers, gossiping about the steam engines from Penn Station to Montauk 100 years ago, faster than now, the island’s chestnut trees harvested for firewood, the cemeteries, a little away from the railroad tracks, cornflowers and poppies, off Routes 114, 27, Springs Fireplace Road, overloaded with painters,
I kiss my Yoricks. I knew them well.
*
Jane, we watched the pagan ocean that holds bottom feeders that thrive in fiery volcanic waters, and birds that never come ashore.
Often we met at the beach, half-naked, barefooted or in sandals.
We knew where fifty-six swans nested, that Long Island painters seldom painted the night, or character. We chased whales, saved wounded seals.
After an Atlantic hurricane, in our trees with salt-drenched curled leaves, thousands of fooled monarch butterflies gathered on their way to Mexico.
We embraced 65 years ago— not a long time for a redwood, a long time for an oak or an elm.
The day you died,
I wish ex cathedra, Pope Francis said, “dogs go to heaven,” so fawns, foxes, and rabbits aren’t left behind.
You understood shadow.
At first look, you never painted sorrow.
You picked up stemless flowers, homeless like beauties standing on street corners, gorgeous juvenile delinquents.
The Debt
1.
I owe a debt to the night,
I must pay it back, darkness for darkness plus interest.
I must make something out of almost nothing, I can’t pay back by just not sleeping night after night. I hear them screaming in the streets of New York, “What? What? What?”
I can’t write a check to the night, or a promissory note: “I’ll write songs.”
Only the nightmare is legal tender.
I bribe owls, I appeal to the creatures of the night: “Help me raccoons, catfish, snakes!”
I put my head in the tunnel of a raccoon, pick up a fish spine in my mouth.
Perhaps the night will accept this?
Dying is my only asset.
These days driving along I turn up my brights.
I love and am grateful for anything that lights the darkness: matches, fireworks, fireflies.
My friend who’s been to Tibet in winter tells me when the sun is high against the ice you see the shadow of the earth.
The night after all is just a shadow . . .
The debt keeps mounting.
I try to repay something by remembering my Dante, the old five and ten thousand lira notes had Dante’s face etched on the front.
(I bought that cheap.) Hard cash to the night is finding out what I do not want to know about myself, no facts acceptable, a passage through darkness, where the one I stop to ask, “Why? What?” is always myself I cannot recognize.
2.
If only I could coin nightmares: a barnyard in Asia, the last dog and cat betrayed, are no more.
A small herd of three-legged blind cows still gives milk.
A pig with a missing snout, its face like a moon, wades in a brook.
A horse, its mane burnt to cinders, a rear hip socket shot off, tries to get up, thrusting its muzzle into the dark grass.
A rooster pecks without a beak or a coxcomb.
A rabbit that eats stones, sips without a tongue, runs without feet.
A ditch of goats, sheep and oxen locked in some kind of embrace.
All move their faces away, refuse the charity of man the warrior, the domesticator.
I see a whale with eyes yards apart swimming out of the horizon, surfacing as if it were going to die, with a last disassociated vision, one eye at peace peers down into the valley and mountains of the ocean, the other eye floats, tries to talk with its lids to the multitude.
While in the great head what is happening and what happened mingle, for neither has to be.
I pray for some of my eyes to open and some to close.
It is the night itself that provides a forgiveness.
In the Swim
1
I’m in the swim. I won’t swim across the River Styx that is out of fashion, like the Phoenix that lived 500 years. I am not merry swimming to any kind of cemetery dictionary.
I’d rather swim the Charles to a library drink Bloody Marys with Christopher Ricks.
Toward an island of dancing skeletons, I pole my boat, my passengers the seasons, paradise offers eternal life without seasons.
It’s silly to think rivers belong to anyone.
It’s time to write about rivers I’ve known, not underground, but rivers legible to mosquitos, black flies, a beaver, the human eye— poisoned, damned up. A stone’s throw from their own riverbeds, they cry out in pain, flood, are never foolish, groan, know laughter, have children called brooks, who, afraid, run to them, scribble on stone.
You who read and write books with bays, waterfalls, tidal sentences, look at a river that is a person, who tells old wives’ tales about the ocean.
In the name of no Father and no Son, I will never swim across the Mekong or join Yeats bringing the Liffey swans promised by his friend Oliver when he swam across the river— the Black and Tans’ bullets breaking water near his head like salmon.
(Gogarty loved a party, his bawdy poetry at Trinity made him a favorite among the dons.)
2
Zeus, an eagle, flew over the Meander, held Ganymede, a beauty, in His claws— lightning and hail—a pause, then thunder.
Some waters are feeders, some devour wilderness in an hour.
The Ganges shows eternal mercy, the dead set afire with floating flowers, the River Jordan is salty, full of heresy— bathe in it, get in the swim, with scribbled stone glacial ideas broken off from upriver mountains scrawled on rock “Give to the poor everything you own.”
I never tried to wash off my sins
I wanted to keep. Heaven is a small town.
God keeps His word to rivers, that are oratorios without words, half notes, quarter notes, clefs are fish and birds. Whenever, wherever His day begins,
God’s day is not our day.
We are musical scores, we hear ourselves say hello hello, farewell farewell.
May the last song I sing bring joy and remembrance to others.
Rivers trust in the Beginning, leave empty beds, their sisters and brothers.
Over the Yangtze there are bridge-temples, sure as Buddha had big ears and dimples.
Bridges separated good life from bad death, bad life from good death.
I sit near a bridge and watch the trees grow.
In China, the past is wherever you go.
I dive to find the great beneath.
I will not rhyme, I’ll swim freestyle to my death.
Come swim with me, idle readers, spend a while under water. I notice rivers flow to blue harbors under the ice, cubist sunlight indifferent to changing seasons.
I see the curtain fall, actors in underwater theaters, players in make-up, the cast: Buddha, Jehovah, Christ.
You there, look for me in holy places, I shout “praise the Lord,” among pickerelweeds and bottom feeders, I’m clothed in spawn of many fish, on shore it’s rutting season.
I hold on to uncertainty, mystery, doubt without any irritable reaching out after fact and reason.
Sleep
These days I doze off, sleep longer.
Sleep drags me off, first by inches, then by yards—now miles closer to eternity that is another name for poverty.
So sleep steals my wallet.
It should be shackled, jailed, allowed a period of recreation, time off for good behavior, paroled. As for me, I have life to live, work to do, books to read.
Think of me as one of those old rice wines.
Let me get dusty, decant me after one hundred years; do not put me on ice.
Drink me in the garden on a summer evening. Get drunk.
The Meeting
It took me some seconds as I drove toward the white pillowcase, or was it a towel blowing across the road, to see what it was.
In Long Island near sanctuaries where there are still geese and swans, I thought a swan was hit by an automobile.
I was afraid to hurt it. The beautiful creature rolled in sensual agony, then reached out to attack me.
Why do I feel something happened on the road, a transfiguration, a transgression, as if I hadn’t come to see what it was, but confronted the white body, tried to lift it, help her fly or slit its throat.
Why did I need this illusion a beauty lying helpless?
Squall
I have not used my darkness well, nor the Baroque arm that hangs from my shoulder, nor the Baroque arm of my chair.
The rain moves out in a dark schedule.
Let the wind marry. I know the Creation continues through love. The rain’s a wife.
I cannot sleep or lie awake. Looking at the dead I turn back, fling my hat into their grandstands for relief.
How goes a life? Something like the ocean building dead coral.
Listening to Water
Water wanted to live.
It went to the sun, came back laughing.
Water wanted to live.
It went to a tree struck by lightning.
It came back laughing.
It went to blood. It went to womb.
It washed the face of every living thing.
A touch of it came to death, a mold.
A touch of it was sexual, brought life to death.
It was Jubal, inventor of music, the flute and the lyre.
“Listen to waters,” my teacher said,
“then play the slow movement of Schubert’s late Sonata in A, it must sound like the first bird that sang in the world.”
Clams
Ancient of Days, bless the innocent who can do nothing but cling, open or close their stone mouths.
Out of water they live on themselves and what little seawater they carry with them.
Bless all things unaware that perceive life and death as comfort or discomfort: bless their great dumbness.
We die misinformed with our mouths of shell open.
At the last moment, as our lives fall off, a gull lifts us, drops us on the rocks, bare because the tide is out. Flesh sifts the sludge.
At sea bottom, on the rocks below the wharf, a salt foot, too humble to have a voice, thumps for representation, joy.
Krill
The red fisherman stands in the waters of the Sound, then whirls toward an outer reef.
The krill and kelp spread out, it is the sea anemone that displays the of, the into, the within.
He throws the net about himself as the sea breaks over him.
The krill in the net and out of it follow him. He is almost awash in silver and gold.
How much time has passed.
He believes the undulation of krill leads to a world of less grief, that the dorsal of your smelt, your sardine, your whitebait, humped against the ocean’s spine, cheers it in its purpose.
The krill break loose, plunge down like a great city of lights. He is left with the sea that he hears with its if and then, if and then, if and then.
Peace
The trade of war is over, there are no more battles, but simple murder is still in.
The No God, Time, creeps his way, universe after universe, like a great snapping turtle opening its mouth, wagging its tongue to look like a worm or leech so deceived hungry fish, every living thing swims in to feed. Quarks long for dark holes, atoms butter up molecules, protons do unto neutrons what they would have neutrons do unto them.
The trade of war has been over so long, the meaning of war in the O.E.D. is now “nonsense.”
In the Russian Efron Encyclopedia, war, voina, means “dog shit”; in the Littré, guerre is “a verse form, obsolete”; in Germany, Krieg has become “a whipped-cream pastry”; Sea of Words, the Chinese dictionary, has war, zhan zheng, as “making love in public,” while war in Arabic and Hebrew, with the same Semitic throat, harb and milchamah, is defined as “anything our distant grandfathers ate we no longer find tempting—like the eyes of sheep.”
And lions eat grass.
Frog
I hold this living coldness, this gland with eyes, mouth, feet, shattered mirror of all creatures, pulsing smile of fish, serpent and man, feet and hands come out of a head that is also a tail, just as I caught him most of my life ago in the sawdust of the icehouse.
I could not believe in him if he were not here.
He rests my spirit and is beautiful as waterlilies.
The sound of his call is too large for his body: “irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.”
Once in the dry countries he was a god.
Vanitas
In the sideview mirror of my car through the morning fog I saw a human skull that had to be my face, where the headlights of the car behind me should have been, or a morning star. I did not think to step on the gas and race away from the skull I knew wasn’t behind me. Still it had me by the throat.
I can tell a raven from a crow, a female evergreen from a male, but I can’t tell visionary bone from ghost.
I’m used to my eyes fibbing to me, 5s are sometimes 8s, 2s, 3s.
I know the Chinese character for the word “nature” is a nose that stands for breathing—life.
I need to see an ancient nose in the mirror.
Lost Daughter
I have protected the flame of a match I lit and then discarded more than I cared for you.
I had little to go on: a postcard that came for no reason, forty years ago, that told me of your birth and name, but not who was your father.
I would never give my child your name.
In the woods and ditches of my life you are less than a wildflower.
If you have a garden I am less than melted snow.
I never held your hand and this is the only bedtime story I will ever tell you.
No love, no prayer, no flame.
Beauty is Not Easy
What are they but cattle, these butterflies, their purple hides torn by barbed wire, Chinese peacock butterflies, scarred blue, yellow and scarlet.
If they are not marked for slaughter I cannot tell to whom they belong.
They are just stray cattle, swallowtails 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.
Moss, 1987, West Shokan NY
Walking
1.
His stride is part delusion.
They laugh at him, “A little water in the boot, he thinks he walks on water.”
At home to get a cup of coffee he walks across Norway, and his talk— sometimes he speaks intimately to crowds, and to one person as to a crowd. On principle he never eats small potatoes.
Illusion, mirage, hallucination, he loves a night painting of a fable: a man is grinning at a boy lighting a candle from an ember, a monkey on his shoulder chained to heaven— a reminder that art apes nature.
When they told him “reality is simply what is,” it was as though he had climbed Sinai, then walked down to get the laws.
He dreams only of the migrations of peoples beneath the migrations of birds, he wakes to new nations, he yawns riddles of the north and south wind, whistles his own tune in the Holy Sepulchre.
Some afternoons he stretches out in a field like an aqueduct. “All we do,” he says, “is carry a bucket or two of God’s waters from place to place.”
2.
Under a roof, from a chandelier, on a rope, hangs an amusing tragedy, a kind of satyr play, but not every fat man dancing by is wrapped in grape leaves. Facing himself in a bronze mirror like the one the ancient Chinese thought cured insanity, tongue-tied he speaks to his own secret face, or standing in the sunlight against the lives of mountains, sky and sea, he speaks, made-up and masked, the lyrical truth, the bare-faced lie. Not speaking the language of his fathers, a hero may die because all flesh is grass and he forgets the password.
From a lectern, or the top of a hay wagon, or leaping down, a few steps away from everyday life, into something like a kitchen garden, he unearths in the wordless soil things sung or said, kinds of meaning: what is denoted or symbolic, or understood only by its music, or caught on to without reason, the endless twisting of its roots, its clarity.
He points to the old meaning of looking to the Last Judgment, while he believes nothing is merely or only.
3.
At a garden party he almost said,
“Madame, it is not in the bones of a lover or a dog to wait long as the bleached mollusk on the mountain. Time is an ice cube melting in a bowl, the world is refracted, ridiculous.
In life, you often reach out for a stone that isn’t where you see it in the stream.”
But it was summer, no one would believe time was so cold on a hot day, so comforting, when the purple iris was already dry and the tulips fallen.
Prayer
Give me a death like Buddha’s. Let me fall over from eating mushrooms Provençale, a peasant wine pouring down my shirtfront, my last request not a cry but a grunt.
Kicking my heels to heaven, may I succumb tumbling into a rosebush after a love half my age. Though I’m deposed, my tomb shall not be empty; may my belly show above my coffin like a distant hill, my mourners come as if to pass an hour in the country, to see the green, that old anarchy.
Author, aged nine months
Song of Alphabets
When I see Arabic headlines like the wings of snakebirds, Persian or Chinese notices for the arrival and departures of buses— information beautiful as flights of starlings, I cannot tell vowel from consonant, the sign of the vulnerability of the flesh from signs for laws and government.
The Hebrew writing on the wall is all consonants, the vowel the ache and joy of life is known by heart. There are words written in my blood I cannot read.
I can believe a cloud gave us the laws, parted the Red Sea, gave us the flood, the rainbow. A cloud teaches kindness, be prepared for the worst wind, be light of spirit.
Perhaps I have seen His cloud, an ordinary mongrel cloud that assumes nothing, demonstrates nothing, that comforts as a dog sleeping in a room, a presence offering not salvation but a little peace.
My hand has touched the ancient Mayan God whose face is words: a limestone beasthead of flora, serpent and numbers, the sockets of a skull I thought were vowels.
Hurray for English, hidden miracles, the A and E of waking and sleeping, the O of mouth.
Thank you, Sir, alone with your name, for the erect L in love and open-legged V, the beautiful Tree of Words in the forest beside the Tree of Souls, lucky the bird that held Alpha or Omega in his beak.
Delmore Schwartz
He heard God coughing in the next apartment, his life a hospital, he moved from bed to bed with us and Baudelaire, except he always had Finnegans Wake tucked in his pajamas, which must mean, sure as chance, the human race is God’s Phlegm. Penitent,
I say a prayer in God’s throat:
“Mister, whose larynx we congest, spit us into the Atlantic or Hudson . . . let us be dropped into the mouth of the first fish that survived by eating its young— drink hot tea and honey Your mother brings You till You are rid of Your catarrh, well again.
Let us swim back to our handiwork.”
Far from the world of Howth Castle, Delmore died in a bed-bugged hotel unclaimed for three days.
A week before, by chance, I saw him at a drugstore counter, doubled over a coffee, he moaned, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, deceitful enemy kisses.”
He held my hand too tight, too long.
Melancholy Eros flew to my shoulder, spoke in Greek, Yiddish, and English:
“Wear his sandals, his dirty underwear, his coat of many colors that did not keep him warm.”
Visiting Star
I woke at sunrise,
fed my dogs, Honey and Margie – to the east a wall of books and windows, a lawn, the trees in my family, the donkeys and forest behind the hill.
Sunlight showed itself in, passed the China butterflies on the window so birds watch out, don’t break their necks.
On the back of a green leather chair for guests facing me in sunlight and shadow, a sunlit Star of David, two large hand spans square.
I call my wife to see the star she first thinks I painted on the chair.
Soon she catches on − no falling star.
We searched the room and outside.
How did the star come to be?
Without explanation. None.
The star visited a few minutes, disappeared, or became invisible. Why?
I wondered if it was le bel aujourd’hui or a holiday some Jews celebrate.
Playing fair, I told myself: watch out for a crucifix anywhere before which contrition saves condemned souls – watch in the forest for portraits of the Virgin, the wheel of Dharma down the road, that teaches ‘save all living beings’, when the moon is full a crescent moon reflected on a wall or lake.
Watch for flying horses!
I read the news of commandments broken.
Thou shalt not kill.
I write between the lines
Thou shalt not steal seventy-five years from the life of a child.
Next day, I found my Star of David was a glass sun and star reflection of a tinkling shimmering wind chime made in China.
A pleasing, godless today fills my study.
Clouds
Two beautiful women in the sky kissing, their arms and legs wrapped around each other, one has wings, is an angel. Her lover’s left hand is deep in her feathers. Her lover’s right hand reaches deep inside her. Their tongues are pink, gentle, rough or hard.
The miracle is that a cloud can kiss, that if one cloud has wings and is wrapped around the other, the other is helpless.
Now they are rolling over each other.
I wish I could carve ‘Stanley’ on the white marble bluff. I am in Cardiff.
I sleep at the Angel Hotel.
They Plow Their Father’s Field
I taught English poetry in Beijing 30 years ago. I thought there has to be a special name for Chinese work, working the same field in the same way with the same wooden implement, the plow looked Chinese 8000 years ago.
The shape of a character in calligraphy is not work or labor or farming or plowing— is part study, part poetry.
The character for truth is a real theory.
For the name of a girl, a dead poet’s daughter, the character is plain the name means she is a commoner.
Her brother is Sho-fan, Sunshine, he is a poet who works for Tel and Tel.
Both children are often lonely.
Their surname Yang means Flute.
They are their mother’s joy, they plow their father’s field.
—To He Huaren
Li Hua (b. 1907) woodblock, 1947.
The Grammarian
I say, to be silly, Death is a grammarian.
He needs the simple past, the passato remoto, the passé composé, the le in Chinese added to any verb in the present that makes it past.
In the pluperfect houses of worship death hangs around, is thought to be undone.
Sometimes he is welcome.
I thank him for the simple present and his patience.
For My Godmother, Twenty Years Later
Give me a death like hers without tears, those flies on a summer day about a carcass— about the house medicine, Mozart, and good cheer.
My song: life is short, art long, death longer.
My doctor uncle covered her with kisses.
When her life was a goldfinch in his hand, on a feeder and birdbath outside her window: larks sang, splashed and fed above the sparrows.
A blue jay militaire drove them away.
Then, a bird of prey, a necessary reprimand screamed overhead without mercy. Instead of terror, it was met at her window by the warbler of good cheer that sometimes sings for the dead.
I whistle for it to come and nest near my window.
March 21st, First Day of Spring
Twenty inches of snow on the ground, I saw a swallow with a blade of dry grass begin to build a nest on my porch between an American Corinthian capital and a gutter, where he or she nests every year.
Welcome, welcome! What can I do to help?
I’ll stay in my warm house, get out of your way, I’ll watch out for raccoons, and eagles.
I leave apples on the porch, seeds in a bucket.
Where have you been all winter?
I know Welsh swallows winter in Egypt.
It makes me shudder to think you fly south from the Catskills to the Andes.
The important thing is you’re back.
Suddenly I am in the arms of spring.
I love you but don’t know if you’re a mother or a father bird. I feel safe with you here.
I think I’ll write the Times: better your nest than a flock of aircraft carriers in the harbor.
Pax Poetica
The earth needs peace more than it needs the moon, that beauty without which the oceans lose their intellect.
Peace in bombed gardens where butterflies swoon into the sun, living one day and dying in the shelling of that night, where joyous rat and knife inspect the numerous wares the dead are selling.
The earth needs peace more than it needs the moon.
Sometimes the dead lie hand in hand: six, seven, eight after a night of minuses and endless decrease, they do not serve, or stand or wait, they unpeople themselves flogged in the sun.
No caesura. No rainbow. No peace.
I pity the poets who think that war will be undone by poetry, the hate-filled world saved by music. I am one. . .
A little more time and poetry will set things straight.
It took time to find the Golden Fleece.
The useless dead hang in markets of the sun, alone as pork thighs. Every morning comes and goes more quickly. I know where wild thyme blows, that naked beauty steals naked to my arms, then goes to pay a debt to sorrow. No peace.
In a sometime-sometime land, there will be no joy in killing.
We are meant to hold each other but not for keeping; we kill—just as the toad cannot keep from leaping.
In the grave there is no work or device nor knowledge nor wisdom, I read in Ecclesiastes.
Still, fishermen lift their nets, hoist death weeping, throw back death twinkling like a small coin into the profitless seas.
Look, the eternal fish swims away leaping.
Moonless, we still have starlight, the aurora borealis, fires above the Conqueror Worm and beneath till the sun runs off with the earth in its teeth.
My History of Laughter
My history of laughter: the first human beings who laughed were thrown out of their caves by grunters and humpers because they wanted romance.
Chuckles and smiles. There must have been laughter before marriage vows and last rites.
“We are the only mammals who laugh” is not true.
There are those who laugh a lot because of too much grief.
Every living thing laughs.
Flowers laugh so hard their petals fall.
Gardens are sometimes like a theatre with comic and tragic hydrangeas, some roses have thorns.
I hear laughter, it’s raining hard, laughter after a hot summer day.
If you don’t think maples, oaks, evergreens laugh, walk in another part of the forest, come sit with me under a greenwood tree.
I smile when I hear “War of the Roses,” laugh with the laughing birds: the green woodpeckers, laughing thrush, laughing doves and crows.
I am a bird feeder, a laugh, some birds hunt for dead men’s teeth.
Beautiful to think in the beginning was the word according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to John, according to Luke. I play the most Christian instrument: the accordion.
(I hear a little laughter in the pit). Further back, when the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, when God created the heavens and the earth laughter came about the time there was light, laughter and light were good. Jokes become comics.
Tonight, come and kiss me sweet and sixty seventy, eighty, ninety.
I sing a song of my devotion,
I’m a little drunk, be my ocean, take me on a cruise around the world. Be my muse, show me poetry is not complaining, the truest poetry is the most feigning.
Ocean, come over my bow, let’s sail Into the fog up ahead, the future.
Kind winds prevail, there is no end, there is departure.
Night comes. I sound a foghorn,
I am reborn.
I’m beginning to know who I am,
I want. I give a damn.
Darling ocean, sweet adventure,
I am a gardener, a rake, the grand tour.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Wordsworth beheld “the sea lay laughing at a distance.”
If water equals time, providing beauty with its double, so be it. I keep time with water clocks,
Greek and medieval candle clocks.
I know how to make a laughing clock: ha, haha, hahaha, up to twelve.
I want this verse to be a laughing clock.
I have not forgotten the sun on water is a ripple of laughter.
In a confession booth a sinner laughed so piously he was given absolution.
He did not hail Mary, he laughed with her.
Freud on humor: A man about to be hanged says, What a beautiful day for a hanging.
A newborn sinless babe does not laugh.
A world away from The Book of Proverbs, the Japanese have a saying, “Letting off a fart doesn’t make you laugh when you are alone.” Idle reader, I never heard a snake break wind.
A rattlesnake did a twisting dance in my house. I picked up the serpent with two sticks, threw it into an apple tree. It didn’t get the joke, went off without enchantment in search of a charmer.
Here is my fairy tale, The Birthday Cake: you take six eggs, beat the yolks and whites, a little flour, half an hour in the oven.
Laughter. The batter rises, strawberries and cream for shortcake.
A loving mother hen missed her eggs, she jumped on top of the cake, sat on her beaten eggs, wept on the pretty cake in the center of the table.
Outside in the yard a rooster mounted a New Hampshire Red. The guests laughed.
I circled Manhattan with Pablo Neruda on a ferry—Neruda, Communist rooster on top of the world, dressed, it seemed, in Savile Row tweed, Church’s shoes. We talked.
He remembered under the Triboro Bridge, “I asked Lorca to come with me to a circus: old tightrope walkers and acrobats, an old clown shot out of a cannon.”
Lorca’s answered a 1935 question with an Andalusian frown that suffers in translation, “Pablo, it’s getting difficult. I must leave España, go to Granada to kiss the Lorcas and Romeros goodbye.”
Federico was shot by unnecessary bullets that whistled half notes and quarter notes.
He died at sunrise, not five o’clock in the afternoon. Fascist laughter.
Present mirth has present laughter.
Buddha laughs with joy, thanks to the hereafter.
Someone shouts, “There is the laughter of murderers!
Nothing funnier than a dead body!”
It’s worth repeating: 170 pounds of cold meat, four buckets of water, a pocket of salt.
I throw my sombrero into the Mediterranean.
It floats—mysterious laughter.
I can see Silenus laughing with Dionysus.
They drink laughing wine in dazzling goblets.
I can’t forget Eros laughs with happy lovers in cheap, dear rooms of Washington Heights.
I remember a Bernini fountain, in Piazza Navona, water laughing, I drank out of the mouth of a satyr.
The satyr kissed me.
It was Epiphany, when shepherds come to Rome from the compagna, playing goatskin bagpipes.
When I’m laid out, I prefer to keep my skin.
They can make a bagpipe fashioned of my laughing belly, I’ll be a musical instrument, I prefer being blown than fingered like a harp or clavier.
I was moved to tears by a laughing jazz band, black laughter instead of drums. Chick Webb could do it, Louis Armstrong forced a scat-laugh revolution.
Laughter is ancient as the sun, older than the moon.
The Chinese word for laughter is made of two characters: the character for sky beneath the character for grass.
Translated in Chinese a laughing Falstaff might give you a dancing Falstaff tripping on a sunset, upside down cows and sheep grazing in the sky.
What is the moon doing rising below my feet?
Laugh me to scorn.
“Weeping may endure all night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
