by Henri Cole
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
I
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A GOLD KIMONO
ICARUS BREATHING
THE HARE
POWDERED MILK
KAYAKS
PRESEPIO
CASABLANCA LILY
MIDDLE EARTH
VEIL
SWANS
RADIANT IVORY
APE HOUSE, BERLIN ZOO
II
BLACK CAMELLIA
LANDSCAPE WITH DEER AND FIGURE
GREEN SHADE
KYUSHU HYDRANGEA
CROWS IN EVENING GLOW
NECESSARY AND IMPOSSIBLE
CLEANING THE ELEPHANT
MORNING GLORY
MYSELF WITH CATS
PILLOWCASE WITH PRAYING MANTIS
MELON AND INSECTS
INSOMNIA
ORIGINAL FACE
MASK
III
MY TEA CEREMONY
SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE RED PRINCESS
FISH AND WATERGRASS
AT THE GRAVE OF ELIZABETH BISHOP
OLYMPIA
MEDUSA
SNOW MOON FLOWER
BLUR
Acknowledgments
Also by Henri Cole
Copyright
For my teachers
Deadheading the geraniums, I see myself
as I am, almost naked in the heat,
trying to support a little universe
of blackening pinks, wilted by rain and sun,
stooping and quivering under my scissors
as I cut the rotten blossoms from the living,
as a man alone fills a void with words,
not to be consoling or point to what is good,
but to say something true that has body,
because it is proof of his existence.
I
What high immortals do in mirth
Is life and death on Middle Earth
W. H. AUDEN,
“Under Which Lyre”
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A GOLD KIMONO
Born, I was born.
Tears represent how much my mother loves me,
shivering and steaming like a horse in rain.
My heart as innocent as Buddha’s,
my name a Parisian bandleader’s,
I am trying to stand.
Father is holding me and blowing in my ear,
like a glassblower on a flame.
Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling
of formal precision and stoicism.
Growing, I am growing now,
as straight as red pines in the low mountains.
Please don’t leave, Grandmother Pearl.
I become distressed
watching the President’s caisson.
We, we together move to the big house.
Shining, the sun is shining on my time line.
Tears, copper-hot tears,
spatter the house
when Father is drunk, irate and boisterous.
The essence of self emerges
shuttling between parents.
Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel’s tongue
draws me out of the pit.
I drop acid with Rita.
Chez Woo eros is released.
I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man’s tongue.
The draft-card torn up;
the war lost.
I cling like a cicada to the latticework of memory.
Mother: “I have memories, too.
Don’t let me forget them.”
Father: “I’m glad the journey is set.
I’m glad I’m going.”
Crows, the voices of crows
leaving their nests at dawn, circle around,
as I sit in a gold kimono,
feeling the subterranean magma flows,
the sultry air, the hand holding a pen,
bending to write,
Thank you,
Mother and Father, for creating me.
ICARUS BREATHING
Indestructible seabirds, black and white, leading and following;
semivisible mist, undulating, worming about the head;
rain starring the sea, tearing all over me;
our little boat, as in a Hokusai print, nudging closer
to Icarus (a humpback whale, not a foolish dead boy)
heaving against rough water; a voluminous inward grinding—
like a self breathing, but not a self—revivifying,
oxygenating the blood, making the blowhole move,
like a mouth silent against the decrees of fate: joy, grief,
desperation, triumph. Only God can obstruct them.
A big wave makes my feet slither. I feel like a baby,
bodiless and strange: a man is nothing if he is not changing.
Father, is that you breathing? Forgiveness is anathema to me.
I apologize. Knock me to the floor. Take me with you.
THE HARE
The hare does not belong to the rodents;
he is a species apart. Holding him firmly
against my chest, kissing his long white ears,
tasting earth on his fur and breath,
I am plunged into that white sustenance again,
where a long, fathomless calm emerges—
like a love that is futureless but binding
for a body on a gurney submerged in bright light,
as an orchard is submerged in lava—
while the hand of my brother, my companion
in nothingness, strokes our father,
but no power in the air touches us,
as one touches those one loves, as I
stroke a hare trembling in a box of straw.
POWDERED MILK
Come to the garden, you said,
and I went, hearing my voice inside
your throat. It was a way of self-forgetting.
Or it was a way of facing self,
I did not know.
You drank scotch whiskey
and mixed me powdered milk,
as if I were still your boy.
Dogs tussled on the lawn around
Michelangelo’s David, kept like a shrine;
big ordinary goldfish
chewed through the pond;
and the speech of bees encircled us,
filling a void.
A hundred blooming cacti
reminded me to be and not to seem.
When a squalid sky pulled down the sun,
we grew accustomed to it.
Darkness was no nemesis.
Come play checkers on the terrace,
you sighed.
Like me, you felt neglected,
you were in a mood of mental acuteness.
Like you, I was a man
with a taciturn spirit,
I was a man who would
never belong to anything.
Solitude had made us her illegitimate sons.
KAYAKS
Beyond the soggy garden, two kayaks
float across mild clear water. A red sun
stains the lake like colored glass. Day is stopping.
Everything I am feels distant or blank
as the opulent rays pass through me,
distant as action is from thought,
or language is from all things desirable
in the world, when it does
not deliver
what it promises and pathos comes instead—
the same pathos I feel when I tell myself,
within or without valid structures of love:
I have been deceived, he is not what he seemed—
though the failure is not in the other,
but in me because I am tired, hurt or bitter.
PRESEPIO
This is the world God didn’t create,
but an artist copying the original,
or some nostalgic idea of the original,
with Mary and Joseph, or statues of Mary and Joseph,
bowing their lamp-lit faces to the baby Jesus.
Language is not the human medium here,
where every eight minutes the seasons repeat themselves,
a rainbow appears, bleeding like an iris,
and the illusion of unity is achieved,
before blowing snow buries everything again.
Looked at from above, the farmer’s sheep
are as big as conifers. Something is wrong with his sons,
whose pale bony necks make them look feral.
And the rooster cries more like a miserable donkey.
A light goes off. Another comes on.
In a little window, with a lamp to be read by,
nobody is reading. If God is around,
he seems ineffectual.
In the alps, a little trolley grinds its gears,
floating into the valley, where heavy droplets fall,
as the farmer’s wife hurries—like a moving target
or a mind thinking—to unpin her laundry
from the wet white clothesline, and the farmer,
in the granary, stifles the little cries
of the neighbor girl parting her lips.
If the meaning of life is love, no one seems to be aware,
not even Mary and Joseph, exhausted with puffy eyes,
fleeing their dim golden crib.
CASABLANCA LILY
It has the odor of Mother leaving
when I was a boy. I watch the back
of her neck, wanting to cry, Come back. Come back!
So it is the smell of not saying what I feel,
of irrationality intruding
upon the orderly, of experience
seeking me out, though I do not want it to.
Unnaturally white with auburn anthers,
climbing the invisible ladder from birth
to death, it reveals the whole poignant
superstructure of itself without piety,
like Mother pushing a basket down
the grocery aisle, her pungent vital body
caught in the stranglehold of her mind.
MIDDLE EARTH
The soup boils over.
The doorbell rings.
The gas man demands payment for the last bill.
Can you find my yellow pills?
Mother interrupts meekly.
Fruit flies follow me, circling my head.
I drink wine to forget things.
I ride the train backwards.
I go to the zoo.
I eat tiny marzipan men at the bakery;
desire and disgust get mixed up.
I read Kant:
stability is the fruit of both war and human insight.
True or false:
more humans die as a result of prophets
than statesmen?
I scramble onto the ferry with Mother.
Iridescent ducks swim away like phrases.
Let me in, let me in!
I shout when I discern her child’s face
peering through the dirty portal window.
Look in my face,
I say like Frankenstein to his bride,
look in my face.
I repeat things in order to feel them,
craving what is no longer there.
The past dims like a great, tiered chandelier.
The present grows fragmentary
and rough:
some days the visual field is abstract or empty—
in a windy sky, birds appear young and unwise;
others it’s eerily concrete—
expressive figures move around
with an endless capacity for tumult
and uncertainty,
taking us farther from ourselves,
into the aura
at the deepest point of the river,
where grit blows in my face
and my numb hands grip onto Mother’s,
like love and hate
in the shuttered mansion on the hill,
as red mist
burns off the surface of the river.
VEIL
We were in your kitchen eating sherbet
to calm the fever of a summer day.
A bee scribbled its essence between us,
like a minimalist. A boy hoed manure
in the distance. The surgical cold of ice
made my head ache, then a veil was lifted.
Midday sprayed the little room with gold,
and I thought, Now I am awake. Now
freedom is lifting me out of the abyss
of coming and going in life without thinking,
which is the absence of freedom. Now I see
the still, black eyes saying, Someone wants you,
not me. Now nothing is hidden. Now,
water and soil are striving to be flesh.
SWANS
From above we must have looked like ordinary
tourists feeding winter swans, though it was
the grit of our father we flung hard
into the green water slapping against the pier,
where we stood soberly watching the ash float
or acquiesce and the swans, mooring themselves
against the little scrolls churned up out of the grave
by a motorboat throbbing in the distance.
What we had in common had been severed
from us. Like an umbrella in sand, I stood
rigidly apart—the wind flashing its needles
in air, the surf heavy, nebulous—remembering
a sunburned boy napping between hairy legs,
yellow jackets hovering over an empty basket.
RADIANT IVORY
After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured
out of me except sensibility, dilated.
It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal,
truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms
reaching out into a dark and crowded space,
illuminated like a perforated silver box
or a little room in which glowing cigarettes
came and went, like souls losing magnitude,
but none with the battered hand I knew.
APE HOUSE, BERLIN ZOO
Are the lost like this,
living not like a plant, an inch to drink each week,
but like the grass snake under it,
gorging itself before a famine?
Gazing at me longer than any human has in a long time,
you are my closest relative in thousands of miles.
When your soul looks out through your eyes,
looking at me looking at you, what does it see?
Like you, I was born in the East;
my arms are too long and my spine bowed;
I eat leaves, fruits and roots; I curl up when I sleep; I live alone.
As your mother once cradled you, mine cradled me,
pushing her nipple between my gums.
Here, where time crawls forward, too slow for human eyes,
neither of us rushes into the future,
since the future means living with a
self
that has fed on the squalor that is here.
I cannot tell which of us absorbs the other more;
I am free but you are not,
if freedom means traveling long distances to avoid boredom.
When a child shakes his dirty fist in your face,
making a cry like a buck at rutting time,
you are not impressed. Indolence has made you philosophical.
From where I stand, you are beautiful and ugly at once, like a weed or a human.
We are children meeting for the first time,
each standing in the other’s light.
Instruments of darkness have not yet told us truths;
love has not yet made us jealous or cruel,
though it has made us look like one another.
It is understood that part of me lives in you,
or is it the reverse, as it was with my father,
before all of him went into a pint of ash?
Sitting in a miasma of excrement and straw,
combing aside hair matted on your ass,
picking an insect from your breast, chewing a plant bulb,
why are you not appalled by my perfect teeth
and scrupulous dress? How did you lose what God gave you?
Bowing to his unappealable judgment, do you feel a lack?
Nakedness, isolation, bare inanity: these are the soil
and entanglement of actual living.
There are no more elegant redemptive plots.
Roaming about the ape house, I cannot tell which of us,
with naked, painful eyes, is shielded behind Plexiglas.
How can it be that we were not once a family
and now we’ve come apart? How can it be that it was Adam
who brought death into the world?
Roaming about the ape house, I am sweat and contemplation and breath.
I am active and passive, darkness and light, chaste and corrupt.
I am martyr to nothing. I am rejected by nothing.
All the bloated clottings of a life—family disputes, lost inheritances,
vulgar lies, festering love, ungovernable passion, hope wrecked—
bleed out of the mind. Pondering you,
as you chew on a raw onion and ponder me,
I am myself as a boy, showering with my father, learning not to be afraid,
spitting mouthfuls of water into the face of the loved one,
the only thing to suffer for.
II