by Carl Dennis
Scratches as it sways in the night wind,
Knocks its branches in the dark under the ribs.
It’s hard to tell where its roots are bedded,
What clear pool it’s groping for;
Hard to know if it’s nourished
When you walk out under the stars
Or read late by the fire.
If it dies it dies from within,
Withers and rots to nothing, and you live on
Afraid of the wind,
Branches scattered on the ground,
The hollow trunk filling up with leaves.
Sunday
In the fading photograph of the pleasure boat
The pleasure-seekers, dressed in their Sunday best,
Crowd all three decks, women in sun hats
Pausing to chat with bearded men in derbies
Who lean on the rail, listening to the band.
On shore, the quiet farms slide by. Here and there
A cluster of low houses, a river town. The sun
Shines overhead. Everyone looks willing to be interested,
Pointing to the inlets and islands, recalling their names,
Though many have boarded the boat nudged by a friend,
By a promise to a child, though the children are already lost,
Crying with their dolls in the passageways.
It’s only because they’re long dead
That they all look sad. But some must be happy.
Some must refuse to envy the boats in front
Or look back on the boats behind and sigh.
The ride is no empty promise to them
Of a better ride to come, and no omen of a worse.
Whatever they expected to be shown is here.
Whatever lies behind the water, the sun, the air,
The uniforms of the band, is too imperfect to be seen,
Unfinished, still composing its face in the dark,
Waiting, as this moment waited, below deck
Till the Sunday comes when it’s ready to appear.
Grandmother and I
Grandmother sits on the couch in our tiny apartment
Over the drugstore, leafing through the news.
She’s larger than my parents and knows all things.
It’s turning out just as she expected.
The same hoodlums are climbing on the trains
And buying up all the seats.
“You don’t have to read the paper to learn this,”
She mutters to herself, and nods.
When I come to the couch for a story
She bends down and whispers, slightly deaf,
“Obey your father.” Her voice is warm.
Such phrases in her Russian accent often mean, “Young man,
How are you today, whoever you are?
Where are you going in your cowboy suit?”
We don’t expect her to remember all our names.
By middle age she’d outlived five presidents
And the sons of two czars.
Napoleon himself, it’s rumored, as he neared the border,
Stopped at Grandmother’s for advice.
“You’ll be sorry, Napoleon,” she said;
“Go home and stay warm.”
It’s hard to convince an emperor.
Many have grown small with the years,
But every year Grandmother grows larger,
Like a tree by sweet water.
The whole family sleeps without fear
In the widening circle of her shade.
At night in my bed,
Groping my way in dream through cloudy streets,
I hear from her branches far above
Birds that sing of the workshop of my father,
Boris the long-lost tailor, still alive,
Waiting in the story I’ve always loved.
A Plea for More Time
New Year’s already come and gone
And the wish still miles away
To live here again;
To be cast up after an interval
Back to this yard, the same man,
No heaven or hell between,
Immortal return to the lumberpile.
After sweating out new plans for a table
To build the old one again.
So little time left, and still
Nothing I’ve won would make me glad
To win it forever;
To notice a mirror face at the window
With lines I’d weep to alter,
Like the face of a friend.
And to think of walking the night rounds
Full of love for my gatelocks,
Blessing the knots of boundary wire
And the hills behind blocking my view;
How strangely slow the watchman saunters;
How far away he seems even now.
The Band
Pensioners fondle the books in the sidewalk bins
For the big bargains, two for a dollar:
Eat Yourself Slim, Secret Missions of the Civil War,
Great Train Wrecks, Photographing Your Dog.
At home on their tables the books, never finished, pile up,
Their promises not fulfilled. The pensioners pace in their rooms.
Sundays they’re called outside by the music of the band
From the green rotunda. The musicians strain at their horns.
Their necks are pinched by the starched collars of their uniforms.
They appear to be playing in this heat from duty,
As if asked by friends. Others may enjoy the music
If not them, so why not play for an afternoon?
The music floats up and away over the roofs
To the window of your hilltop room, where you lie in bed,
Whispering to your one love.
All morning you’ve played together slowly and quietly,
Free of the need to rush to some grand finale
That drives the strivers in the town,
The young attorneys, who crave release.
Over this ample district of the present
Floats the mournful, dowdy music of the band.
It mingles with your sighs as you rise to dress.
You move with its rhythms to the straight-back chair at your desk
Where your paper lies ready, forms for a new agreement
Between you and the town, between the town and your one love
As she steps outside to mingle with the pensioners,
Who listen patiently to the band,
Hoping if they stay to the end
That something left behind in their rooms
Won’t look the same when they return.
from The Near World (1985)
Hector’s Return
By now he’s died so often
And been dragged in the dirt so many times
It’s easy. He’d have it no other way
And chooses with open eyes
To be deluded by his will to live
And press the attack on the ships,
To forget what he knew at the opening,
That Troy must burn, abandoned by its gods,
His wife and son doomed to be slaves,
His name lost among strangers.
It hurts me to see his mistaken hope,
Though I’m glad that the man I left last year
As ashes cooling on a funeral pyre
Has risen long enough
To fight Achilles once again and fall.
A poem that shows the generations of men
As frail as the generations of leaves,
That makes my solid city flutter in the wind
Like Troy and thin to shadows, as unreal
As my grandmother’s village in Lithuania,
Burned down in the War,
Or as the farm she lived on here,
Paved over for a mall years back,
Is the same poem that’s watered roses
In Priam’s garden so
they bloom still.
I turn the page and the trampled leaves
Float up again to the branches
And turn green. And it seems for a moment
That time is too weak a god to worship,
Another illusion I can put my hand through,
Not the last word, as I supposed.
We assumed Grandmother’s muttering at the end
About waves and crossings
To be her dream of some longed-for,
Fabled afterworld,
Not guessing she was a girl again
Crossing the sea to us,
Eager to rejoin the long line
On Ellis Island.
At the Corner
This slender woman in the rain, rounding the corner,
Looks too determined for a trip to the store.
Maybe she turned on her porch a few moments before
And called back a few reminders to the baby-sitter—
If anyone calls, she’s shopping up the block—
Then hurried the other way. Now she’s half done
With her journey crosstown to the tenements.
I can see her later as she climbs four flights
And lets herself in with her key.
In the tiny room, dim beneath a bare bulb,
Her friend lies huddled in bed, coughing,
His face to the wall. Without a word
She clears a space at the littered table
And washes two mugs at the sink for tea.
For an hour they discuss the real questions.
Is spirit unfolding itself slowly in history,
As Hegel argues, or holding back,
Camping out all year in open fields?
And why is spirit missing in the new novel
The woman recounts to her friend this week?
It makes her sad to meet characters not permitted
To think for themselves, who have to make do
With reciting, when asked, a few dull proverbs.
The man sipping tea at the table agrees.
He sketches the plot of the fable he’s working on,
The Mermaid and the Carpenter, how the two
Meet on the dock, exchange a few words on the weather,
And suddenly love. Imagine the obstacles.
The woman tries to picture their house by the sea
As she walks home later,
Certain their blueprints can be reconciled.
And now the house floats into focus, its stilts and piers.
The way there seems nearly as clear
As the way this tree on the corner, shining in the rain,
Calls up for me a long walk in the rain
With someone I believe was you.
The Midlands
In summer in our town,
When the ghost of Hamlet’s father, stifled,
Wrenches from his grave, lunges up the road
Toward the hillside cabin of his son, the stargazer,
Perched higher than the goats graze,
He tires halfway and sits down, panting, on a stone.
In the town below the streetlamps glitter.
The street noise thins to nothing as it climbs.
Listen as he might, he hears no cries of revenge
Among all the scraping of crickets and leaves.
After an hour what can he do but head home?
Meanwhile his son, undistracted, his eyes on the stars,
Hauls his blanket to the roof for a clearer picture,
Jots down his sightings, dozes off at dawn.
In winter in our town,
When white-haired wise men arrive
With handmade presents for the child,
They get lost in a bad district and are robbed.
It’s snowing hard when they try to rise.
They stagger to the lighted door of the bar.
The barkeeper washes their wounds.
In the morning, waking in a beer haze,
They’re too ashamed to go on.
So the child, never named, grows up ignorant
And copies the habits of his friends,
Tries to be last inside when his mother calls,
Jockeys for first place in line on the Sabbath
At the double doors of the Tivoli,
Whose double feature never seems to change.
Beauty Exposed
At the bookstore you wait for the new clerk,
The beautiful one, who sold the books you ordered
To someone else, though the plain one
Brings you what you need unasked.
Not wanting to feel guilt, the Greeks
Made beauty the gift of a goddess,
Called their love for fine features piety.
And Plato, straining to prove man rational,
Argued that to love the beautiful
As all men do is to love the good,
The two one in the spectral world
Of metaphor, where the question’s begged.
Here where we live, in the cave,
Nobody’s fooled.
And nobody’s foolish enough to believe
It lives only in the beholder, as personal
As your taste for the ginger cookies
Your mother made, which no one else liked.
Too much agreement for that and for too long.
The statues in the museum aren’t exchanged
Each year for new ones. They stay,
And we find new reasons, new ways to explain
Why they wake the flesh in the old way.
All our heads turned in unison
When the girl in the blue dress entered
And walked along the library aisles
To the section on law and kneeled
Or stood on her toes, hair flung back.
Before she uttered a word we could look behind,
Before an action we could dream up motives for,
We had to sit confounded by the surface glare
Of the visible, frightened to be so far
From the dark world we understand.
Captain Cook
So often had he sailed the world in dream
That even the first voyage was more like homage
To the gods of repetition than like discovery.
The day the land birds perched in the spars
After months of empty seas was one of many.
Again through mist the steep headland
Or the same flat beach at dawn when the sky cleared
Or darkened. Always the excited crowds on shore,
The flotilla of canoes, the eager swimmers,
Young men and girls laughing among the ropes.
Today he may call their home New Zealand,
Tomorrow the Society Islands or Friendly Islands.
And this is Mercury Bay, Hawke Bay, or Bream Bay.
Time again for patching the wound in the main keel,
For refilling the water casks and exchanging cloth and nails
For pigs and fruit, rock oysters and yams.
Always the same trouble with island thieves,
The spyglass missing again, the quadrant, the anchor buoys,
More shovels, pulleys, bolts, and screws,
Till the worst offenders are driven off with small shot
Or flogged, and the sailors are flogged again
For not stowing their muskets more carefully.
Today as before the Captain rows after two deserters
And climbs the hill to their leafy hideaway
And drags them from the arms of the weeping island girls
Back to the ship, and again the sailors wail
Like Odysseus’s sailors dragged back from the lotus fields.
And now a chief rows out to deliver his long,
Incomprehensible speech of welcome,
And the Captain, like a man who’s been everywhere,
Patiently hears him out to the end,
Then makes his own incomprehensible s
peech in return
And proceeds to the rubbing of noses, as is the custom.
Not a part of all he meets, not hungry for experience,
Though no one is readier when it comes to tasting
The boiled South-Sea dog and the worm stew,
No one more impressed by the nightlong paddle dance.
It doesn’t matter to him how much or little his heart
Is written on by adventure as he writes in his log
His reckoning of the latitude, practicing the same skill
He practiced before in the same Pacific
Under the moon in its numbered phases
And the wheel of stars.
At Home with Cézanne
When the phone rings down the hall, I let it ring.
I sit still in my study chair and go on reading
About Cézanne. Sarah will answer it.
Most likely it’s for her, an old boyfriend
From high school, or her first husband,
Calling for more advice, attentive still.
Only this evening I learned that Zola and Cézanne
Grew up together in Aix-en-Provence,
Friends through their boyhood and beyond.
What a great log of a fact
To throw on an autumn fire and muse on
When my books grow dull, to think what encouragement
Passed between them on their daylong rambles.
Why should I worry if her heart is large enough
For them all? I should be proud
To hear her voice through the wall
Grow sad when the caller’s voice grows sad
Or brighten as his brightens.
Though Cézanne in Paris found few friends