by Carl Dennis
To turn my talk to the big questions.
No dinner of mine will be spoiled by news
That Rochester’s joined with Erie in a pincer maneuver
And will soon be upon us. Our fleet is safe
From the fleet of Syracuse. Our sailors
Will die in their beds, not in the quarries,
After a calm farewell to their families.
As for the last words Socrates says
As the chill of the hemlock rises to his heart—
“I owe a cock to Asclepius”—
I admit they seem less of a bracing insight
Than a conundrum. Why is it right as he dies
To thank the god of healing for a recovery?
Still I’m grateful to him for his refusal
Of any deathbed magniloquence and feel obliged
To take issue with Nietzsche, who reads him as meaning
Life is a sickness, death a release.
“Can’t you see,” I say, “that he feels blessed
To be able to end his life as he lived it,
Loyal to one luminous purpose?”
And Nietzsche, after pondering for a while,
Is inspired enough by his master’s example
Not to grow scornful, aloof, or sullen,
As he points to shadows in my lamp-lit room.
Manners
No notes in this book on the early settling of America
Bought at the airport, so no way of knowing
Which tribe it refers to when it mentions one
That assumed the restless, pale-faced strangers
Had sailed across the sea to learn good manners.
But whatever its name, assuming the statement accurate,
It must have learned its mistake in a month or two.
No facts, only interpretations, as Nietzsche says,
But some interpretations will do us in
While others enable our tribe to continue
Doing what it does best, our priests and prophets
Passing good manners down to the next generation
Like the steps of a dance or the recipe for an elixir.
Thanks for coming so far to join us this evening
For a banquet of fish cakes, walnuts, and cherries.
We’re going to take your silence as shy approval.
We’re going to take your refusal of second helpings
As a failure in training, not of intentions.
You want to be mannerly but don’t know how.
As for any stray look of calculation
That betrays an intention to do us harm,
We believe you’re capable of remorse at any moment.
Here is the tent where you’ll sleep tonight
Dreaming of your gods’ approval as we of ours.
May they rank good manners higher than making converts.
May they feel they’ve all the worshipers they can handle
And be grateful that other gods are lending a hand.
Here’s to the gods who teach good manners
By good example, who never hurt our feelings
By complaining they’ve had to withdraw their perfection
From a precinct of being to make room for us,
Us creatures far from perfect. Here’s to their courtesy
In claiming their bad backs and wobbly knees
Keep them from bending to dust the corners,
So they’d really be grateful for our help.
Verona
I’d have come here decades sooner
If one of my art books had devoted a chapter
To beautiful central squares
And this piazza had been included,
Bright with façades meant to be festive,
Not magnificent or imposing.
Even the two earnest young men in suits
Buttonholing strollers don’t dull my pleasure,
Two Mormons from Utah, assigned to this outpost
For their stint as apostles among the gentiles.
A city not on the list that Burton and I
Drew up thirty years ago when we planned
His only chance to see Europe before his eyes
Would grow too scarred from the stress of diabetes
To let the light in. In the end, he felt too gloomy to go.
If he were alive now, and sighted, we’d agree
These two young Mormons have a tough assignment,
Making the gospel revealed to Joseph Smith
Near Palmyra, New York, irresistible
To churchgoing Veronese whose kin
Have sung in the local choirs for centuries.
As for lifting the spirits of nonbelievers,
I’ve only to pause on a bridge spanning the Adige
And gaze back on the fillet of walls and towers
The river looks pleased to wear.
Even Burton, always harder to please than I,
Might have been moved to judge this townscape
Nearly as peaceful as a townscape in oil,
Though its Sunday quiet, he might have cautioned,
Shouldn’t make us forget the weekday broils
Stirred up by the likes of the Montagues and the Capulets.
If the Mormons regard these streets merely as a backdrop
For preaching to passersby, they commit a sin
Against the church of the beautiful that Burton
Tried to visit in his cheerful moods. Streets
As an end in themselves or streets as a starting point
For a painting that offers an ideal landscape,
One of Poussin’s, say, that moves the viewer to rise
For at least a moment from a mood that’s passing
To a mood more permanent, however uncommon.
If the two apostles suppose the actual landscape
Will surpass Poussin’s in tranquillity of the spirit
Once their gospel is acknowledged by everyone,
They join a crowd of prophets whose promises
Made Burton angry. Better not wait around,
He would have told them, for slugs
To change into butterflies. Better work instead
At making the stubbornly untransformed
Care about learning to vote for candidates
Likely to serve the city, though they realize
Their city is only the roughest sketch of Poussin’s.
In my favorite painting of his, the city’s a distant line
Near the horizon. The human figures set in the foreground
Are thumb-sized blues and yellows in a field of green.
It’s harvest time, and among the harvesters
The Capulets and the Montagues are swinging their scythes.
Also the Mormon boys, no longer in summer suits
But garbed like peasants, steadily working beside them
While Pan and Flora look on from a stand of willows.
And Burton is there with his sight restored,
Pointing to a stand of birch where the workers
Can rest in the shade and admire the view.
And here he is later, returning to ask the rested
If they’d help him load more bales on the wagon
For the last trip of the day to the barn.
A Colleague Confesses
Now that we’ve gotten along as office mates
For three semesters, I don’t mind letting you know,
In confidence, that the poems and stories we’re teaching
Are less important to me than they are to you.
However beautiful in themselves, they don’t uplift me
As meditation uplifted me when I was a disciple.
To be sure, I gave up the discipline after a year,
Unable, finally, to empty my mind enough
For the kind of harmony with the void
Enjoyed by the few enlightened.
Now, in my fallback mode, I try to content myself
With worki
ng at harmony with the world.
I want to know what it’s like to be other people
And am always practicing, weekdays with students
And colleagues, weekends with strangers.
Even in the car alone, on a Sunday drive,
I move my lips with the preachers on the radio
As I imagine what longing pushes them forward.
As for the satisfied, what right have I to judge them,
To declare they shouldn’t be happy
With the raises they’ve earned or the holiday reservations
They’ve called in early enough to book the rooms
They covet, facing the ocean?
I wouldn’t know what to say if they asked me
Point-blank about the life I believe they’re missing.
As for the books we’re teaching,
I think I respond to their plots and characters
As fully as anyone, but I have to confess
I don’t regard them as throwing much light
On the world beyond the page. True to experience,
Now and then, the best ones, maybe,
But not to something experience merely hints at,
Something more spacious and longer lasting.
It seems odd that the books likely to last
Can only acknowledge that nothing lasts but wishes.
Am I leaving out something that stories and poems
Help you see clearly? Spell it out, if you think so.
I’m not too set in my ways to listen.
In Paris
Today as we walk in Paris I promise to focus
More on the sights before us than on the woman
We noticed yesterday in the photograph at the print shop,
The slender brunette who looked like you
As she posed with a violin case by a horse-drawn omnibus
Near the Luxembourg Gardens. Today I won’t linger long
On the obvious point that her name is as lost to history
As the name of the graveyard where her bones
Have been crumbling to dust for over a century.
The streets we’re to wander will shine more brightly
Now that it’s clear the day of her death
Is of little importance compared to the moment
Caught in the photograph as she makes her way
Through afternoon light like this toward the Seine.
The cold rain that fell this morning has given way to sunshine.
The gleaming puddles reflect our mood
Just as they reflected hers as she stepped around them
Smiling to herself, happy that her audition
An hour before went well. After practicing scales
For years in a village whose name isn’t recorded,
She can study in Paris with one of the masters.
No way of telling now how close her life
Came to the life she hoped for as she rambled,
On the day of the photograph, along the quay.
But why do I need to know when she herself,
If offered a chance to peruse the book of the future,
Might shake her head no and turn away?
She wants to focus on her afternoon, now almost gone,
As we want to focus on ours as we stand
Here on the bridge she stood on to watch
The steamers push up against the current or ease down.
This flickering light on the water as the boats pass by
Is the flow that many painters have tried to capture
Without holding too still. By the time these boats arrive
Far off in the provinces and give up their cargoes,
Who knows where the flow may have carried us?
But to think now of our leaving is to wrong the moment.
We have to be wholly here as she was
If we want the city that welcomed her
To welcome us as students trained in her school
To enjoy the music as much as she did
When she didn’t grieve that she couldn’t stay.
Delphinium
How and why their ancestors slowly moved out
From the home pool of algae scum
Onto dry land to make a meadow
Is hidden now. No dream possessed them,
That much is clear, of founding a new nation
Free of old-world law, old-world opinion.
To say they wanted to be delphinium
Is to force upon them a life within
They have no use for. And if they’re blue
Because the competition with other flowers for bees
Happened to be less fierce in that band of the spectrum,
If the shape of their buds reminded the male bee
Of the female, it’s anyone’s guess why the plant
Grew like a column, not like a bouquet or spray.
It looks like a tower rising above the roofs
For viewing the ships of friends or enemies
Sailing into the bay, though the flowers themselves
Are sightless. Good thing our admiring glances,
Unnoticed by them, can’t puff them with pride,
The pride that goeth before a fall. As for the fall
That will soon be upon them, their ignorance
As their one and only future dwindles to zero
Marks a gap between them and us
That can’t be closed. Still if sentiment moves you
You’re free to regard each sprig as an orphan
And tend some yourself, a foster parent
Nursing a baby through mumps and measles.
It shows a big heart to offer succor
Without the expectation of gratitude, though later
The sight of their blue spires
Upright under a leaden sky may seem like a gift.
None looks disheartened, confused, or querulous.
None attempts to flatter you with the question,
“What am I, a delphinium, that thou,
Great gardener, should be mindful?”
In the Coffee Shop
The big smile the waitress gives you
May be a true expression of her opinion
Or may be her way to atone for glowering
A moment ago at a customer who slurped his coffee
Just the way her cynical second husband slurped his.
Think of the meager tip you left the taxi driver
After the trip from the airport, how it didn’t express
Your judgment about his service but about the snow
That left you feeling the earth a tundra
Only the frugal few could hope to cross.
Maybe it’s best to look for fairness
Not in any particular unbiased judgment
But in a history of mistakes that balance out,
To find an equivalent for the pooling of tips
Practiced by the staff of the coffee shop,
Adding them up and dividing, the same to each.
As for the chilly fish eye the busboy gave you
When told to clear the window table you wanted,
It may have been less a comment on you
Than on his parents, their dismissing the many favors
He does for them as skimpy installments
On a debt too massive to be paid off.
And what about favors you haven’t earned?
The blonde who’s passing the window now
Without so much as a glance in your direction
Might be trying to focus her mind on her performance
So you, or someone like you, will be pleased to watch
As she crosses the square in her leather snow boots
And tunic of red velvet, fur-trimmed.
What have you done for her that she should turn
The stones of the public buildings
Into a backdrop, a crosswalk into a stage floor,
A table in a no-frills coffee shop
Into a private box near the orchestra?
Yesterday she may have murmured against the fate
That keeps her stuck in the provinces.
But today she atones with her wish to please
As she dispenses with footlights and spotlights,
With a curtain call at the end, with encores.
No way to thank her but with attention
Now as she nears the steps of the courthouse
And begins her unhurried exit into the crowd.
Window Boxes
Even the few on my street who regard themselves as aliens
Declare with their window boxes that they’re not ungrateful
For the happenstance of being alive,
That they’re just as responsive to the balmy June air
As old Mrs. Ford on the street of my childhood,
Whose window boxes made everyone pause in wonder.
In her loneliness after her husband died,
She would have left St. Louis, my mother said,
And moved to her daughter’s house in Chicago
If it weren’t for her brother downtown in the asylum;
And still she deemed her flowers worth the effort.
Asylum, that was the word back then,
As if the residents down on Arsenal Street
Had fled there from persecution, a platoon of Dantes
Come to Ravenna, city of colored mosaics
And gem-like flowers, after Florence disowned them.
Not many flowers at Mrs. Ford’s funeral
With only six people attending, her daughter and son-in-law
And four neighbors, my brother and I among them,
To help with the coffin. A shame that her window boxes,
Left to their fate, didn’t receive the care
From the new owner that people here
Seem glad to provide, some more than others.
Lilies of the valley, astilbe, and woodruff