from dawn until noon
then devoting the rest of the day
to whittling pencils that stopped writing long ago.
All of which makes me wonder
how Donald Hall is doing tonight
when so many things are so different—
the bladed cars, a colored cube for lunch—
yet the stars look the same,
still holding their places in the sky,
except for the one that once indicated
the raised elbow of The Archer,
now gone missing in outer space.
Bags of Time
When the keeper of the inn
where we stayed in the Outer Hebrides
said we had bags of time to catch the ferry,
which we would reach by traversing the causeway
between this island and the one to the north,
I started wondering what a bag of time
might look like and how much one could hold.
Apparently, more than enough time for me
to wonder about such things,
I heard someone shouting from the back of my head.
Then the ferry arrived, silent across the water,
at the Lochmaddy Ferry Terminal,
and I was still thinking about the bags of time
as I inched the car clanging onto the slipway
then down into the hold for the vehicles.
Yet it wasn’t until I stood at the railing
of the upper deck with a view of the harbor
that I decided that a bag of time
should be the same color as the pale blue
hull of the lone sailboat anchored there.
And then we were in motion, drawing back
from the pier and turning toward the sea
as ferries had done for many bags of time,
I gathered from talking to an old deckhand,
who was decked out in a neon yellow safety vest,
and usually on schedule, he added,
unless the weather has something to say about it.
One Leg of the Journey
From the back seat of an old Toyota
on a breakneck rush to the Mexico City airport
out of the city of Puebla to the southeast,
I could see in the rear-view mirror
the clenched face of the driver
as he pushed the car to 90 then 95 miles an hour.
The sun had yet to show its face
but already thin clouds were turning yellow,
and I was tired of thinking about death
in a country with its own day of the dead
featuring skeletons on horseback,
skeletons playing the trombone,
even bride and groom skeletons,
so I closed my eyes instead and pictured
a turtle climbing onto a log to sun herself there,
motionless and nearly invisible,
while the river flowed bubbling
around her on its journey to the east.
I was tempted to add some baby turtles
to form a kind of family,
but I decided to leave well enough alone.
Before too long, we ran into
the evacuation-scale traffic of the city
and inched along through the vendors
with their bottles of water and pink toys
and pinwheels that twirled in the wind,
until we pulled up to a curb at the airport
where we all parted company—
the driver heading back to Puebla,
me looking for the number of my gate,
and the turtle poking out her head
then sliding off the log and disappearing
into the less troubled waters by the shore.
A Restaurant in Moscow
Even here among the overwhelming millions
and the audible tremble of history,
a solemn trout stared up at me
as it lay on its side on a heavy white plate
next to some broccoli and shards of broken bread.
I could tell from its expression,
or lack of expression, that it was pretending
not to listen to my silent questions about its previous life—
its cold-water adventures, its capable mother—
and that its winking at me was a trick of candlelight.
But soon, all that was left
was the spine and a filigree of bones,
so I sat back to finish off the wine
and survey this place that had comforted me
with its chests of ice where fish were bedded,
drawings of fish in frames on the white walls,
and the low music. Backed by a hint
of guitar sang a broken-hearted woman
I imagined to be my waitress
who had no English, nor I any Russian,
and who never once smiled, yet she had waited
for me to close my notebook
and put away my pen before clearing my plate
as if she understood the provocative nature of this trout.
And how sweet to realize this only later
after I had put on my raincoat
and was back in the drizzle of the wide boulevard
among pedestrians on their private missions,
heading downhill to my hotel,
the onion domes of St. Basil’s lit up in the distance.
Tanager
If only I had not listened to the piece
on the morning radio about the former asylum
whose inmates were kept busy
at wooden benches in a workshop
making leather collars and wristbands
that would later be used to restrain them.
And if only that had not reminded me,
as I stood facing the bathroom mirror,
of the new state prison whose bricks had been set
by prisoners trucked in from the old prison,
how sweet and free of static my walk
would have been along the upland trail.
Nothing to spoil the purity of the ascent—
the early sun, wafer-white,
breaking over the jagged crest of that ridge,
a bird with a bright-orange chest
flitting from branch to branch with its mate,
and a solitary coyote that stopped in its tracks
to regard me, then moved on.
Plus the cottonwood fluff snowing sideways
and after I stood still for a while,
the coyote appearing again in the distance
before vanishing in the scrub for good.
That’s the kind of walk it might have been.
Santorini
Turn any corner in this village,
the owner of the eccentric bookstore assured me,
and you are likely to run into
the history of Greek poetry,
and sure enough there was a woman
picking out lemons from a pile of lemons
and a barber leaning in his doorway with folded arms.
I even thought I saw Yannis Ritsos
whispering something to George Seferis
as they sat under a white awning
while the others pulled down their hat brims
and pretended not to be listening in.
And Cavafy might have risen
in a room like the one where I woke up
to chalk-washed walls, two wicker chairs,
and on a battered table, coffee
and a single peach, newly sliced.
But let us not go overboard.
When I peered out the small window
at the foot of the bed
that offered the immensity of the Aegean,
I did not see the sail of Odysseus at dawn
rounding the island’s volcanic corner
and coming slowing but plainly into view.
Rather, I h
eard the hornet whine
of a motorbike flying up the street,
a metal grill being unlocked and lifted open,
then some mourning doves on the roof,
a clatter of dishes in a kitchen,
and other siren songs of an ordinary day.
Bravura
It wasn’t until I took a class in oil painting,
which met on Saturday afternoons
in the painter’s apartment on Central Park West,
that I realized that painters of still lifes
as much as they are displaying an affection
for the material objects of the world,
are also busy showing off their stuff.
Why else would anyone leave the ease
of a tableau of violin, curl of parchment,
a silvery knife and a pear, all backed by a velvet cloth,
and take on a glass bowl full of light bulbs
or a crystal chandelier reflected in a mirror
except to inflame the confraternity
of one’s fellow artists with jealous furor?
I will never forget the stunner
modestly titled “Still Life with Roses,”
which featured so many decanters and mirrors
the result was a corridor of echoing replications.
For when I leaned in to examine
one of the softly textured red petals,
I could see suspended there a drop of moisture
and on its surface a tiny window catching the light
and next to that a solitary, delineated ant
who had paused in his travels
before the globular liquid mirror
just to see how he looked on that overcast weekday morning.
Muybridge’s Lobsters
At first sight
the photographs in the series
appear to be the same—
all black and white,
a single lobster
at the center of each,
underwater, probably in a tank.
But look more closely
along the rows
and you will see the motion
of a single antenna, waving
as if to ask a question,
something you had missed.
Of course, this was late
in the old man’s life,
well after the gymnasts
and the airborne racehorses,
after the leap-frogging boys
and that woman
hopping over a footstool,
even after the photographs of himself
swinging a coal-pick in the nude.
And then the lobster studies—
a reminder perhaps
of the falling off to come for us all,
a focus on the smaller parts
like a settlement of crumbs
beside a cup and saucer
or the bars of light on a painted wall.
That day at the exhibition
a small boy asked his mother
why the pictures were not in color,
too young to know that a lobster
wagging its claws at the bottom of the sea
is either black or a very dark green
and that it must be coaxed, by boiling, into being red.
Portrait
After she swiveled on a heel
and headed with a flip
of the ponytail
toward Grand Central Station
I watched her
disappear into the crowd
the way a forest
may disappear into its trees.
And then I too began
to disappear, a scrivener’s
eraser rubbing out
the pencil lines of my being.
Now neither of us
was either here nor there
and would fail to make our mark
on the history of civilization.
And that reminded me of the day
I stood in a museum
before a somber painting
then bent close to read
the little printed card
that told me it was a portrait
of an anonymous Dutch family
by an anonymous Dutch artist.
Early Morning
I don’t know which cat is responsible
for destroying my Voter Registration Card
so I decide to lecture the two of them
on the sanctity of private property,
the rules of nighttime comportment in general,
and while I’m at it, the importance
of voting to an enlightened citizenship.
This is the way it was in school.
No one would admit to winging a piece of chalk
past the ear of Sister Mary Alice,
so the whole class would have to stay after.
And likewise in the army, or at least
in movies involving the army. All weekend
privileges were revoked until the man
who snuck the women and the keg of beer
into the barracks last night stepped forward.
Of course, it’s hard to get them to stay
in one place let alone hold their attention
for more than two seconds. The black one
turns tail and pads into the other room,
and the kitten is kneading a soft throw
like crazy, pathetically searching for a nipple.
Meanwhile, it’s overcast, not pewter
or anything like that, just overcast period,
and I haven’t had a sip of coffee yet.
You know, when I told that interviewer
early morning was my favorite time to write,
I was not thinking of this particular morning.
I must have had another kind of morning in mind,
one featuring a peignoir, some oranges, and sunlight.
But now there’s nothing else to do
but open the back door a crack for the black one,
who enjoys hunting and killing lizards,
while blocking the kitten with one foot,
the little cottontail fucker who’s still too young to go out.
Child Lost at the Beach
This time, a boy had gone missing
for so many hours a television crew had been sent
to cover the story, which is how I heard
one lifeguard explain to the camera
that a lost child will often start walking
along the shoreline, in the direction of the sun.
I took this as a hopeful sign,
not because it was a safer choice
than toddling into the pounding surf
or inland into the parking lot and the traffic beyond—
but something about the power of the sun and the bravery of children.
That’s when I began to picture
a long single-file parade of lost children
walking through the sand toward the lowering sun
before that moment when their parents
turned to each other with the shock of the absence,
each boy or girl traveling toward
the light burning in the distance,
hundreds of little explorers striking out
into uncharted territory with nothing but a sunhat,
a useless pail and shovel—
Lewis without Clark, Clark with no Lewis.
The evening news showed the boy being swept up
into the glad arms of his parents,
you will be pleased to know,
but I continued to follow the rest of the children
as they disappeared over the horizon
continuing their journey into the days ahead
and in the process blazing a new path
across the upper reaches of the continent,
thus establishing a solid American presence in the early West.
In Praise of Ignorance
On a bench one afternoon
in a grassy park in Minneapolis,
I realized that what I liked best
about the dogs of Minneapolis
is they have no idea they’re in Minneapolis.
The same could be said
of the dogs of Houston or Philadelphia,
it occurred to me on the slow walk
back to my hotel, but I was
in no mood to be distracted.
I’m sticking with the dogs of Minneapolis,
I resolved as the elevator
rose to my floor, just as they stick
with their owners, the natives of Minneapolis,
most of whom know exactly where they are.
Alone in my room on the 17th floor,
I surveyed the vast prospect below me—
the slithery river and hills beyond
and the bluish hills beyond those hills—
in the manner of those English poets
who loved to regard the world from a height.
One of them even had a witty epitaph
inscribed upon the tombstone of his hound.
Microscopic Pants
Among the more remarkable features of the calendar,
right up there with the meandering date of Easter
and the regular appearance of Flag Day,
is how the end of May slips unnoticed into the beginning of June.
It’s a transition so subtle
(usually one day of sunshine and birdsong
passing into another day of sunshine and birdsong)
that it feels like being switched as an infant
from one of your mother’s breasts to the other,
which is how the Bengali poet Tagore described
the smooth transition from this life into the next.
A truly striking way of putting it,
like saying the ants in your pants have ants
in their pants when you are more nervous than usual
because it’s fun to think of ants wearing pants,
and it rhymes. Plus, it suggests an infinite
series of tinier and tinier ants
pulling on smaller and smaller pairs of pants,
like the facing barbershop mirrors
of my childhood when my newly shorn head
would repeat itself down a hallway of reflections.
I hadn’t heard of Tagore back then,
nor had I given much thought to the calendar,
The Rain in Portugal Page 3