Signs & Wonders

And their grandfathers? The Hessians attack

  And the American commander folds;

  We could have watched those losers made to file

  Past jeering victors to the waiting holds

  Of prison ships from our Tudor-style

  Apartment building’s roof.

  When, without warning,

  Twin towers that rose up a quarter mile

  Into a cloudless sky were, early one morning,

  Wreathed in the smoke from interrupted flight,

  When they and what burst into them were burning

  Together, like a secret brought to light,

  Like something we’d imagined but not known,

  The intersection of such speed, such height---

  We went up on our roof and saw first one

  And then the other silently unmake

  Its outline, horrified, as it slid down,

  Leaving a smear of ashes in its wake.

  That scene, retold from other points of view,

  Would grow familiar, deadening the ache:

  How often we saw each jet fly into

  Its target, with the same street-level gasp

  Of shock and disbelief remaining new.

  Little by little we would come to grasp

  What had occurred, our incredulity

  Finely abraded by the videotape’s

  Grim repetitions. A nonce community

  Began almost at once to improvise

  New rituals for curbside healing; we

  Saw flowers, candles, shrines materialize

  In shuttered storefronts for the benefit

  Of those who’d stopped the digging with their cries

  And those who hadn’t. None came out of it,

  None would be found still living there, beneath

  The rubble scooped up out of Babel’s pit:

  From the clueless anonymity of death

  Came fragments identified by DNA

  Samples taken from bits of bone and teeth,

  But that was later. In those early days

  When we went outside, we walked among the few

  Grieving for someone they would grieve for always,

  And walked among the many others who,

  Like ourselves, had no loss as profound,

  But knew someone who knew someone who knew

  One of the men who fell back as he wound

  A spiral up the narrow, lethal staircase

  Or one of those who tumbled to the ground,

  The fall that our imaginations trace

  Even today: the ones we most resembled,

  Whose images we still cannot erase. …

  One night we joined our neighbors who’d assembled

  For a candlelight procession: in the wind,

  Each flame, protected by a cupped hand, trembled

  As though to mimic an uncertain mind

  Feeling its way to some insufficient word---

  What certitude could our searching find?

  Those who had come here to be reassured

  Would leave with nothing: nothing could be said

  To answer, or have answered, the unheard

  Cries of the lost. Yet here we had been led

  To gather at the entrance to the park

  In a mass defined by candles for the dead,

  As though they were beyond us in the dark

  With those who, after their war had been lost,

  Surrendered and were marched off to embark

  On the waiting prison ships. Here now at last,

  They were restored to us in a sublime

  Alignment of the present with the past.

  But none appeared to mock this paradigm:

  All that has come before us lies below

  In layer pressing upon layer. …

  Time

  Is an old man telling us how, long ago,

  As a child in Brooklyn he went out to play,

  And prodding the summer earth with his bare toe

  Discovered a bone unburied in the clay,

  A remnant of those bodies that once filled

  The hulks that settled into Wallabout Bay;

  Time is the monument that he saw built

  To turn their deaths into a victory,

  Its base filled with their bones dredged out of silt;

  Time is the silt grain polished by the sea,

  The passageway that leads from one to naught;

  Time is what argues with us constantly

  Against the need to hold them all in thought,

  Time is what places them beyond recall,

  Against the need of the falling to be caught,

  Against the woman who’s begun to fall,

  Against the woman who is watching from below;

  Time is the photo peeling from the wall,

  The busboy, who came here from Mexico

  And stepped off from a window ledge, aflame;

  Time is the only outcome we will know,

  Against the need of those lost to be claimed

  (Their last words caught in our mobile phones)

  Against the need of the nameless to be named

  In our city built on unacknowledged bones.

  After Wang Wei

  in mem. V.L.B.

  On empty hills, no one to be seen,

  though one can hear some distant voices---

  the sun shines through branches once again

  and lights upon the blue green mosses.

  Poison

  A few drops in a hollow ring,

  Or even less on a hatpin,

  Gave peace to Emperor or King

  When the Guard had fled,

  And torch-lit foes were gathering

  Around his bed;

  This was the cure for life’s disease:

  Observe how mindful Socrates

  Drinks down the hemlock to the lees;

  Watch Charmian clasp

  Her ardent mistress by the knees

  As she takes the asp.

  For others, an unsought egress:

  Many an ogre and ogress,

  Whose motto was “Only aggress!”

  Were shown the door

  (Some regarding this as Progress)

  By hellebore.

  Nero, unhappy in his station,

  Found poison won him swift promotion:

  See Claudius, eschewing caution,

  Greedily entreat a

  Servant for yet another portion

  Of the Amanita.

  Secure inside his thickset walls

  The tyrant ages and appalls;

  Does no one hear his panicked calls

  Throughout the palace?

  Another king whose kingdom falls

  To digitalis.

  The rise of the middle class occurred

  When all those kings had disappeared,

  And tightlipped spouses, vexed or bored,

  Learned of the kick

  That oatmeal has, on being stirred

  With arsenic.

  And still to be found, till recently,

  In the clandestine armory

  Of CIA and KGB,

  Was cyanide,

  Used to dispatch an enemy

  Or for suicide:

  No agent’s training was complete

  Before he’d learned how to secrete

  Upon himself the bittersweet

  End of his mission;

  The little pill that, swallowed neat,

  Ensured discretion.

  How innocent such poisons now

  Appear to us, for even though

  Fatal, they were (no matter how

  Grimly horrific)

  Local anesthetics, thoroughly

  site specific:

  A dose intended for the Master

  Might have dispatched his dog or taster,

  But our poisons yield disaster

  Without distinction,

  And on a scale so much vaster,

  That our extinction

  Appe
ars to be quite plausible:

  A momentary lapse, a spill,

  And the stain spreads, insensible

  To our lot;

  Or just consider, if you will,

  The microdot

  Of some designer pathogen,

  Dripped from the tip of a counterfeit pen

  Or someone’s nose: less ‘if’ than ‘when,’

  When you think about it,

  An end that unlike hell or heaven,

  Cannot be doubted,

  And which replaces God and Devil,

  Those outworn fictions, with a novel

  Point of departure and arrival

  For humankind;

  One with no need for the survival

  Of projective Mind

  To speculate on what space is,

  Or what we are. Us it erases

  Without disturbing Gaia’s stasis

  Or all we have wrought,

  The slowly evanescing traces

  Of one dark thought.

  I have no wisdom to dispel

  The unbroken gloom I foretell,

  Nor any wish to toll the knell

  Of parting day.

  (I pinched that last bit---could you tell?

  From Thomas Gray.)

  Nor would I wish the world to be

  Left to the darkness or to me.

  But how successful, then, could we

  Possibly be at

  The task of reversing entropy

  By decree or fiat?

  Might there not be some good reason

  To cut short the losing season,

  And, if not with a dose of poison,

  Find life’s antidote

  In blade, revolver or the noose encircling

  one’s throat?

  Though we may not know where to send

  The thank-you notes that we have penned

  To the Imaginary Friend,

  Much needs our praise,

  And many need the help we tend

  To get through their days.

  So if there is no God to thank,

  And if the cosmic data bank

  Will soon, like the stock market, tank,

  If things get dire,

  Uncork one corking Sauvignon Blanc

  Build up the fire,

  Inquire not, nor seek to know

  (As Horace told us long ago)

  What hour of what day you’ll go;

  Just carpe diem,

  Catch and release the ceaseless flow

  Of A.M. and P.M.

  For, as John Maynard Keynes once said,

  In the long run, we are all dead.

  Until that happens, eat your bread

  And drink your wine

  And lie with your love close in bed,

  As I with mine.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the editors of the following journals, in which many of the poems in this collection originally appeared, sometimes in different form or with different titles:

  Alabama Literary Review “On a Roman Perfume Bottle”

  “The Sacred Monsters”

  Dark Horse “Mind in the Trees”

  The Formalist “Poem for the Millennium”

  The Hopkins Review “Near Jeffrey’s Hook”

  “Souvenir”

  “Support”

  The Hudson Review “After 9/11”

  “The Coffee House Philosopher”

  “East Side, West Side”

  “The Spaniard”

  Iambs & Trochees “Who Knows What’s Best?”

  Journal of Italian Translation “The Good Soldiers”

  Literary Imagination “Ovid to His Book”

  Measure “Theory Victorious”

  The New Criterion “Some Kind of Happiness”

  Pequod “To Himself”

  Rattapallax “Autopsychography”

  Smartish Pace “Brooklyn in the Seventies”

  “For the End of the Age of Irony”

  The Southwest Review “Poison”

  “Words to Utter at Nightfall”

  Stone Canoe “The Flower Thief”

  The Yale Review “Getting Carded”

  “After 9/11” was reprinted in the anthology Best American Spiritual Writing, 2006.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHARLES MARTIN’S most recent book of poems, Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. His verse translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid received the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2004. In 2005, he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other books of poems include Steal the Bacon and What the Darkness Proposes, and a translation, The Poems of Catullus, all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Other work includes Catullus, a critical introduction to the Latin poet. He is the recipient of a Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as Poet in Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York from 2005 to 2009.

  POETRY TITLES IN THE SERIES

  John Hollander, Blue Wine and Other Poems

  Robert Pack, Waking to My Name: New and Selected Poems

  Philip Dacey, The Boy under the Bed

  Wyatt Prunty, The Times Between

  Barry Spacks, Spacks Street, New and Selected Poems

  Gibbons Ruark, Keeping Company

  David St. John, Hush

  Wyatt Prunty, What Women Know, What Men Believe

  Adrien Stoutenberg, Land of Superior Mirages: New and Selected Poems

  John Hollander, In Time and Place

  Charles Martin, Steal the Bacon

  John Bricuth, The Heisenberg Variations

  Tom Disch, Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems

  Wyatt Prunty, Balance as Belief

  Tom Disch, Dark Verses and Light

  Thomas Carper, Fiddle Lane

  Emily Grosholz, Eden

  X. J. Kennedy, Dark Horses: New Poems

  Wyatt Prunty, The Run of the House

  Robert Phillips, Breakdown Lane

  Vicki Hearne, The Parts of Light

  Timothy Steele, The Color Wheel

  Josephine Jacobsen, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems

  Thomas Carper, From Nature

  John Burt, Work without Hope: Poetry by John Burt

  Charles Martin, What the Darkness Proposes: Poems

  Wyatt Prunty, Since the Noon Mail Stopped

  William Jay Smith, The World below the Window: Poems 1937–1997

  Wyatt Prunty, Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems

  Robert Phillips, Spinach Days

  X. J. Kennedy, The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992–2001

  John T. Irwin, ed., Words Brushed by Music: Twenty-Five Years of the Johns Hopkins Poetry Series

  John Bricuth, As Long As It’s Big: A Narrative Poem

  Robert Phillips, Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems

  Daniel Anderson, Drunk in Sunlight

  X. J. Kennedy, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007

  William Jay Smith, Words by the Water

  Wyatt Prunty, The Lover’s Guide to Trapping

  Charles Martin, Signs & Wonders