Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s
been drinking and has no idea who
this curious Andalusian is, unable
even to speak the language of poetry.
The young man who brought them
together knows both Spanish and English,
but he has a headache from jumping
back and forth from one language
to another. For a moment’s relief
he goes to the window to look
down on the East River, darkening
below as the early night comes on.
Something flashes across his sight,
a double vision of such horror
he has to slap both his hands across
his mouth to keep from screaming.
Let’s not be frivolous, let’s
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let’s not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won’t forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river. Have you ever
had a vision? Have you ever shaken
your head to pieces and jerked back
at the image of your young son
falling through open space, not
from the stern of a ship bound
from Vera Cruz to New York but from
the roof of the building he works on?
Have you risen from bed to pace
until dawn to beg a merciless God
to take these pictures away? Oh, yes,
let’s bless the imagination. It gives
us the myths we live by. Let’s bless
the visionary power of the human—
the only animal that’s got it—,
bless the exact image of your father
dead and mine dead, bless the images
that stalk the corners of our sight
and will not let go. The young man
was my cousin, Arthur Lieberman,
then a language student at Columbia,
who told me all this before he died
quietly in his sleep in 1983
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,
Arthur, he survived graduate school,
later came home to Detroit and sold
pianos right through the Depression.
He loaned my brother a used one
to compose his hideous songs on,
which Arthur thought were genius.
What an imagination Arthur had!
In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken
17 years ago in a high school class
in Providence. She sighs, and the sigh
smells of mouth wash and tobacco.
If she were writing by candlelight
she would now be in the dark, for
a living flame would refuse to be fed
by such pure exhaustion. Actually
she is in the dark, for the man
she’s about to address in her odd prose
had a life span of 125/th of a second
in the eye of a Nikon, and then he
politely asked the photographer to
get lost, whispering the request so as
not to offend the teacher presiding.
Those students are now in their thirties,
the Episcopal girls in their plaid skirts
and bright crested blazers have gone
unprepared, though French speaking, into
a world of liars, pimps, and brokers.
2.7% have died by their own hands,
and all the others have considered
the act at least once. Not one now
remembers my name, not one recalls
the reading I gave of Cesar Vallejo’s
great Memorium to his brother Miguel,
not even the girl who sobbed and
had to be escorted to the school nurse,
calmed and sent home in a cab. Evenings
in Lake Forest in mid-December drop
suddenly; one moment the distant sky
is a great purple canvas, and then it’s
gone, and no stars emerge, however
not the least hint of the stockyards
or slaughter houses is allowed to drift
out to the suburbs, so it’s a deathless
darkness with no more perfume than
cellophane. “Our souls are mingling
now somewhere in the open spaces
between Illinois and you,” she writes.
When I read the letter two weeks
later, forwarded by my publisher,
I will suddenly discover a truth
of our lives on earth, and I’ll bless
Mrs. William Settle of Lake Forest
for giving me more than I gave
her, for addressing me as Mr. Levine,
the name my father bore, a name
a man could take with courage
and pride into the empire of death.
I’ll read even unto the second page
unstartled by the phrase, “By now
you must have guessed, I am
a dancer.” Soon snow will fall
on the Tudor houses of the suburbs
turning the elegant parked sedans
into anonymous mounds, the winds
will sweep in over the Rockies
and across the great freezing plains
where America first died, winds
so fierce boys and men turn their backs
to them and simply weep, and yet
in all that air the soul of Mrs. William
Settle will not release me, not even
for one second. Male and female,
aged and middle aged, we ride it out
blown eastward toward our origins,
one impure being become wind. Above
the Middle West, truth and beauty
are one though never meant to be.
Late Friday afternoon in the final year
of the Second World War, Stanley and I
gazed from the men’s head on the fourth floor,
when downriver they came, a flotilla of ducks
breasting the waters of our river
headed toward the magic isles of Hamtramck.
We had shaved and patted our cheeks with cologne
stolen from “Sundries.” We had washed
as heroes in movies do, standing before
an open window so that women might mark
the line from armpit to crotch scrubbed clean
to the roots of the sparse thatch going dark.
Redressed in our pressed white T-shirts we smoked
and sipped from a bottle of paregoric
stolen from “Addictive Medicines,” and talked
of the whole weekend that spread out before us.
Down below, patched with light, the river rode on
toward the waiting darkness. And then the ducks
appeared, a little gliding V of seven,
perhaps a family, perhaps not. “Canadian
teals,” said I. “No,” said Stanley, “birds of heaven.”
Their plumage caught the colors of the world,
their bills were gleaming and pliant, their black rumps
calm above the shadowy undercurrents as past
the Bob-Lo boat where it discharged its cargo
of daytime revellers they swept and past the moored
and serious boats to Buffalo and out
of sight to find a shore that they might waddle up
to settle down to nesting. But first the war
had to end in Asia, the river had to burn,
Stanley had to brush his teeth and comb his hair
seven times and fluff it up and grease it down.
I had to fall off a ladder to the stars
and break my right forearm and flunk calculus
so as predicted at my initial birth
I’d be good for nothing but to tell you this.
Awakening at dawn thirty-
six years ago, I see
the lifting of her eyelids
welcome me home. I can
recall her long arms encircling
me, and I reach
out until the moment slides
into all the forgotten hours.
All the rest of our lives
the tree outside that window
groans in the wind. In other
rooms we’ll hear other houses
mutter and won’t care, and
go on hearing and not
caring until our names
merge with the wind. One
room, bare, uncurtained,
in a city long ago lost,
goes with us into the wide
measureless light. A tune
goes with us too. Hear
it in the little weirs
collecting winter waters,
in the drops of frozen rain
ticking from the eaves to
pool in the tiny valleys
of their making. Six weeks,
and the wide world is green
Everyone knows that the trees will go one day
and nothing will take their place.
Everyone has wakened, alone, in
a room of fresh light and risen
to meet the morning as we did.
How long have we waited
quietly by the side of the road
for someone to slow and ask why.
The light is going, first from between
the long rows of dark firs
and then from our eyes, and when
it is gone we will be gone.
No one will be left to say,
“He took the stick and marked off
the place where the door would be,”
or “she held the child in both hands
and sang the same few tunes
over and over.”
Before dinner we stood
in line to wash the grease from our faces
and scrub our hands with a hard brush,
and the pan of water thickened and grayed,
a white scum frothed on top,
and the last one flung it in the yard.
Boiled potatoes, buttered and salted, onions,
thick slices of bread, cold milk
almost blue under the fading light,
the smell of coffee from the kitchen.
I felt my eyes slowly closing.
You smoked in silence.
What life
were we expecting? Ships sailed
from distant harbors without us,
the telephone rang and no one answered,
someone came home alone and stood
for hours in the dark hallway.
A woman bowed to a candle
and spoke as though it could hear,
as though it could answer.
My aunt went to the back window
and called her small son, gone now
27 years into the closed wards
of the state, called his name again
and again. What could I do?
Answer for him who’d forgotten
his name? Take my father’s shoes
and go into the streets?
Yes, the sun
has risen again. I can see the windows
change and hear a dog barking. The wind
buckles the slender top of the alder,
the conversation of night birds
hushes, and I can hear my heart
regular and strong. I will live to see
the day end as I lived to see
the earth turn molten and white,
then to metal, then to whatever shape
we stamped into it as we laughed
the long night hours away or sang
how the eagle flies on Friday.
When Friday came, the early hours perfect
and cold, we cursed our only lives
and passed the bottle back and forth.
Some died.
I turned and he was gone, my friend
with the great laugh who walked
cautiously and ate with his head
down, like a bear, his coarse hair
almost touching the plate. The tall one
with arms no thicker than a girl’s,
who cursed his swollen face
as though he could have another.
The one whose voice lilted softly
when he raised a finger and spoke. I sat
beside him, trying to describe the sea
as I had seen it, but it was lost,
distant and unseen, perhaps no longer
there under a low sky. I tried to tell him
how the waves darkened and left only
the sound of their breaking,
and after a silence we learned to bear,
it all came back. He turned away
to the wall and slept, and I went out
into the city. It was I who’d held his wife
and felt the small bones of her back
rising and falling as she did not cry.
Later I would see my son from a distance
and not call out. I would waken that night
beside a sleeping woman and count
each breath.
Soon it was summer, afternoon,
the city hid indoors in the great heat,
the hot wind shrivelled our faces. I said,
“They’re gone.” The light turned from red
to green, and we went on. “If they’re not here,”
you said, “where are they?” We both
looked into the sky as though
it were our only home. We drove on.
Nothing moved, nothing stirred
in the oven of this valley. What
was there left to say? The sky
was on fire, the air streamed
into the open windows. We broke free
beyond the car lots, the painted windows,
the all-night bars, the places
where the children gathered, and we just
went on and on, as far as we could
into a day that never ended.
Instead walk alone in the evening
heading out of town toward the fields
asleep under a darkening sky;
the dust risen from your steps transforms
itself into a golden rain fallen
earthward as a gift from no known god.
The plane trees along the canal bank,
the few valley poplars, hold their breath
as you cross the wooden bridge that leads
nowhere you haven’t been, for this walk
repeats itself once or more a day.
That is why in the distance you see
beyond the first ridge of low hills
where nothing ever grows, men and women
astride mules, on horseback, some even
on foot, all the lost family you
never prayed to see, praying to see you,
chanting and singing to bring the moon
down into the last of the sunlight.
Behind you the windows of the town
blink on and off, the houses close down;
ahead the voices fade like music
over deep water, and then are gone;
even the sudden, tumbling finches
have fled into smoke, and the one road
whitened in moonlight leads everywhere.
In Castelldefels we say, “There are four thousand souls
living in this village,” not daring to omit even
the squat, gray haired captain of the Guardia Civil
or the trailer camp of Gypsies who thrive on a grassy plot
down by the tracks, the men who shine my wife’s boots
while leering shamelessly up her skirt, the women
who beg at the tables of the open-air cantinas
in the public square, rolling their eyes and pinching
the borrowed babies until they bawl. As a child
I was embarrassed to implore the Lord to take my “soul,”
whatever that was, before I woke. I was five then,
living splendidly in a two-story house on the West Side
with fenced yard, heated garage, and a governess to tend
my brother and me, a Mrs. Morton, who professed
a faith in the afterlife and thought it charming
at bedtime to force the twin heathens to their knees
to recite her rhyming prayer, which we did only the once
as a circus act for company. Thankfully the Great Depression
saved us, and Mrs. Morton, caught pawning my mother’s rings,
went packing—with no references—into the larger Christian world.
We moved, carless, to a dim, cramped walk-up behind
a used-car lot on Livernois. There my spiritual life
got a second start when I collapsed on the way to school
for no known reason and awakened staring up into the face
of a policeman with the improbable name of Officer German.
The school nurse, while fussing with my pulse and staring
at her watch, solemnly announced I must be dead,
and my mother was summoned from work to take me home
in a Checker cab. That night I lay face up on the couch
groping for words that might stay the inevitable.
I was allowed by the spirits that rule in such affairs
to return to life disguised as a seven-year old
not yet fully aware of the beauty of women’s legs
or the firm skin that stretched across their gleaming sternums,
though Marta—our boarder from Nazi occupied Vienna—
asked me into her room one night to sample her talcums,
her colognes and creams, and to try on her silk garments,
which I stubbornly rejected, only to bring on a storm
of Middle Eastern abuse—a lost opportunity
I lived to regret. In the sixth grade, seated beside
a budding girl in pleated skirt and starched white blouse
I felt for the first time my present incarnation
taking hold, and though I fought it for days, though I begged
the unknown powers within me for relief, preferring
to remain rounded off and complete, the yin and yang
of the eleven-year old, it went on. Now the long torpors
could descend on me each spring. I became the object
and no longer the subject of my own sentence. When I asked
the inconstant stars that occasionally winked through
the dim air over Detroit for their guidance, they answered
in an indecipherable riot of words, Basque and Chinese,
which I alone could interpret. Thus the sudden flight
to Havana in 1947 in the hope of mastering
Latin ballroom dancing, my enlistment in the naval reserve
in order to acquire discipline and bearing, the marriage
to a fifteen-year old suburban delinquent. All of this failed,
just as the year on the night shift at Wonder Bread
and the diurnal sweats of the seven ovens failed
to rinse me of indignation. The surprise came when
on my twenty-sixth birthday while sober a grown woman
chose me, who was not sober, to father her children,
and together we embarked on a life we could call ours
in the village of Castelldefels in the year of our Lord
1965, where returning home alone on foot after a long day
of idling in the great cemetery of Barcelona, I shouted out
to the night sky, “There is that lot of me and all so luscious.”
And believed it. I believe it now, even though
the squat captain of the Guardia Civil goes on censoring
my mail, the dwarf barber sneers as he calls me Don Felipe,
the butcher hints I lack the cojones to take her sister,
and each night the sea tears at the littered coast, the wind
rages through the pines, and—except for us—all four thousand
souls, some alone, some in pairs, huddle in their beds and pray.
Crouching down in the loud morning air
of the docks of Genoa, with the gulls wheeling
overhead, the fishermen calling, I considered
for a moment, then traded a copy of T.S. Eliot
for a pocket knife and two perfect lemons.
The old man who engineered the deal held
the battered black Selected Poems, pushed
the book out at arm’s length perusing the notes
to “The Wasteland” as though he understood them.
Perhaps he did. He sifted through the box
of lemons, sniffing the tough skins of several,
before finally settling on just that pair.
He worked the large blade back and forth
nodding all the while, and stopped abruptly
as though to say, Perfect! I had not
come all that way from America by way
of the Indies to rid myself of the burden
of a book that haunted me or even to say,
I’ve had it with middle age, poetry, my life.
I came only from Barcelona on the good ship
Kangaroo, sitting up on deck all night
with a company of conscript Spaniards
who passed around the black wine of Alicante
while they sang gypsy ballads and Sinatra.
We’d been six hours late getting started.
In the long May light the first beacons
along the Costa Brava came on, then France
slipped by, jewelled in the darkness, as I
dozed and drank by turns in the warm sea air
which calmed everything. A book my brother gave
twenty years before, out of love, stolen
from Doubleday’s and brought to the hospital
as an offering, brother to brother, and carried
all those years until the words, memorized,
meant nothing. A grape knife, wooden handled,
fattened at one end like a dark fist, the blade
lethal and slightly rusted. Two lemons, one
for my pocket, one for my rucksack, perfuming
my clothes, my fingers, my money, my hair,
so that all the way to Rapallo on the train
I would stand among my second-class peers, tall,
angelic, an ordinary man become a gift.
for Ernesto Trejo
Plum, almond, cherry have come and gone,
the wisteria has vanished in
the dawn, the blackened roses rusting
along the barbed-wire fence explain
how April passed so quickly into
this hard wind that waited in the west.
Ahead is summer and the full sun
riding at ease above the stunned town
no longer yours. Brother, you are gone,
that which was earth gone back to earth,
that which was human scattered like rain
into the darkened wild eyes of herbs
that see it all, into the valley oak
that will not sing, that will not even talk.
In the last light of a summer day facing the Canadian shore
we watched from the island as night sifted into the river,
blackening the still surface. An ore boat passed soundlessly
trailing a tiny wake that folded in upon itself with a sigh,
unless that sigh was hers or mine. In the darkness it’s hard
to tell who is listening and who is speaking. St. Augustine
claimed we made love in the dark— though he did not write
“made love”— because we were ashamed to do it in the sight
of anything, although I suppose God could see in the dark, having
at least as good eyesight as a cat. Our cat Nellie used to like
to watch my wife and me at love, but she was not a creature
who generalized and of all things she liked best a happy household.
“God loves a happy giver,” I read in the Abyssinian chapel
on top of the Holy Sepulcher, which suggests the old saint
had no idea what he was talking about, but in the darkness
it’s not easy to tell who is talking and who listening, who giving,
who taking, who praying, who cursing. Even then, watching
from the island, I thought that making love was a form of prayer.
You got down on your knees, if you were a boy, and prepared yourself
for whatever the future held in store, and no matter how firm
your plans without the power of another power you were lost.
It’s so dark back then I can’t tell what I’m thinking, although
I haven’t placed my hand on Millie’s shoulder for nothing,
nor have I turned my face toward Millie’s merely to catch
a reflection of the darkness in her wide, hazel eyes, cat eyes
I called them then. Millie sighs, the ore boat passes silently
to disappear into a future that’s still mysterious, I take a breath,
the deepest breath of my life, and knowing the generations of stars
are watching from above, I go down on my knees in prayer.
You pull over to the shoulder
of the two-lane
road and sit for a moment wondering
where you were going
in such a hurry. The valley is burned
out, the oaks
dream day and night of rain
which never comes.
At noon or just before noon
the short shadows
are gray and hold what little
life survives.
In the still heat the engine
clicks, although
the real heat is hours ahead.
You get out and step
cautiously over a low wire
fence and begin
the climb up the yellowed hill.
A hundred feet
ahead the trunks of two
fallen oaks
rust; something passes over
them, a lizard
perhaps or a trick of sight.
The next tree
you pass is unfamiliar,
the trunk dark,
as black as an olive’s; the low
branches stab
out, gnarled and dull: a carob
or a Joshua tree.
A sudden flaring up ahead,
a black-winged
bird rises from nowhere,
white patches
underneath its wings, and is gone.
breath catching in your ears,
a roaring, a sea
sound that goes on and on
until you lean
forward to place both hands
—fingers spread—
into the bleached grasses
and let your knees
slowly down. Your breath slows
and you know
you’re back in central
California
on your way to San Francisco
or the coastal towns
with their damp sea breezes
you haven’t
even a hint of. But first
you must cross
the Pacheco Pass. People
expect you, and yet
you remain, still leaning forward
into the grasses
that if you could hear them
would tell you
all you need to know about
the life ahead.
Out of a sense of modesty
or to avoid the truth
I’ve been writing in the second
person, but in truth
it was I, not you, who pulled
the green Ford
over to the side of the road
and decided to get
up that last hill to look
he’d come to call home.
I can’t believe
that man, only thirty-two,
less than half
my age, could be the person
fashioning these lines.
That was late July of ’60.
I had heard
all about magpies, how they
snooped and meddled
in the affairs of others, not
birds so much
as people. If you dared
to remove a wedding
ring as you washed away
the stickiness of love
or the cherished odors of another
man or woman,
as you turned away
from the mirror
having admired your newfound
potency—humming
“My Funny Valentine” or
“Body and Soul”—
to reach for a rough towel
or some garment
on which to dry yourself,
he would enter
the open window behind you
that gave gratefully
onto the fields and the roads
bathed in dawn—
he, the magpie—and snatch
up the ring
in his hard beak and shoulder
his way back
into the currents of the world
on his way
to the only person who could
change your life:
a king or a bride or an old woman
asleep on her porch.
Can you believe the bird
stood beside you
just long enough, though far
smaller than you
but fearless in a way
a man or woman
never could be? An apparition
with two dark
and urgent eyes and motions
so quick and precise
they were barely motions at all?
When he was gone
you turned, alarmed by the rustling
of oily feathers
and the curious pungency
and were sure
you’d heard him say the words
that could explain
the meaning of blond grasses
burning on a hillside
beneath the hands of a man
in the middle of
his life caught in the posture
of prayer. I’d
heard that a magpie could talk,
so I waited
for the words, knowing without
the least doubt
what he’d do, for up ahead
an old woman
waited on her wide front porch.
My children
behind her house played
in a silted pond
poking sticks at the slow
carp that flashed
in the fallen sunlight. You
are thirty-two
only once in your life, and though
July comes
too quickly, you pray for
the overbearing
heat to pass. It does, and
the year turns
before it holds still for
even a moment.
Beyond the last carob
or Joshua tree
the magpie flashes his sudden
wings, a second
flames and vanishes into the pale
blue air.
July 23, 1960.
I lean down
closer to hear the burned grasses
whisper all I
need to know. The words rise
around me, separate
and finite. A yellow dust
rises and stops
caught in the noon’s driving light.
Three ants pass
across the back of my reddened
right hand.
Everything is speaking or singing.
We’re still here.