by Carl Dennis
To be open with, he found a tribe of painters
To learn from, and that was enough,
The silent encouragement of high examples.
She’d tell me who the callers are
If I ever asked her.
Why should I sift the soil
If her roots sink deep enough
And the tree is flourishing?
It’s too dark to see from my window
The dogwood we planted this year.
The breeze lifting the curtains
Carries the smell of dry leaves
Fallen on a street in Paris outside the Salon.
Zola and Cézanne are glad to walk out of there
And breathe the fresh air of fall.
They’re not surprised that the judges
Threw out all the entries that were dazzling.
Now as the smell of leaves reaches her room
She may recall, as she listens,
Walking with me last fall. It’s not unlikely,
But why begrudge her an earlier memory?
Let her go riding again on her father’s farm,
Bouncing along on a pony she’s never mentioned,
Who wouldn’t be fed by anyone but her.
More Music
This one thinks he’s lucky when his car
Flips over in the gully and he climbs out
With no bones broken, dusts himself off,
And walks away, eager to forget the episode.
And this one when her fever breaks
And she opens her eyes to breeze-blown,
Sky-blue curtains in a sunlit house
With much of her life still before her
And nothing she’s done too far behind her
To be called back, or remedied, or atoned.
Now she’ll be glad to offer her favorite evening hours
To Uncle Victor and listen as he tells again
How the road washed out in the rain
And he never made it to Green Haven in time
To hear the Silver Stars and the Five Aces.
And she’ll be glad to agree that the good bands
Lift the tunes he likes best above them to another life,
And agree it isn’t practice alone
That makes them sound that way
But luck, or something better yet.
And if Victor thinks he’s a lucky man for the talk
And for his room in his nephew’s house
Up beneath the rafters, and the sweet sound of the rain
Tapping on the tar paper or ringing in the coffee can,
Should we try to deny it? Why make a list
Of all we think he’s deserved and missed
As if we knew someone to present it to
Or what to say when told we’re dreaming
Of an end unpromised and impossible,
Unmindful of the middle, where we all live now?
What Has Become of Them
Somewhere back in the lost place, you’re still repeating
The same partial, uninspired replies to the girl
Who looks out the diner window in despair,
And your mother still wipes her eyes, still walks away
From the grave of her daughter,
And your dead father still searches for a house
Where bad thoughts can’t force the door.
Once you thought these ventures finished,
Crumbled to powder, blown away. Now you know
They go on elsewhere as they were, unheard, invisible,
As the stream found in the woods, breaking on the rocks
In white water, continues to break after you’ve gone.
The sea wall washes away; the tree blows down
In the summer storm. But you still wake in the house
That burned to the ground years back
And turn to the arms of your young wife
In fresh joy, as if the fire were merely dreamed.
These moments are far now, farther each day,
But at night you make it to the town they live in
And watch them at their lighted windows
As they lose themselves in their parts
With the same emphatic gestures,
Not one word altered, not one left out.
They’re too caught up to notice their audience,
And it doesn’t matter if you stay to watch
Or drift to the spectral outskirts of tomorrow.
Later
Later you’ll notice how slanted the floors are
And learn the meaning of the cracks above the lintels.
Now on the morning you move in
The dazzling, eastern light floods the big rooms.
The man who couldn’t be happy here
Under these high ceilings won’t find another place.
If you saw now what you’ll see then
You wouldn’t be moving in, though later
You won’t regret your choice.
The bad news will arrive slowly and be different,
Not like a stranger’s illness but a friend’s.
You’ll sit by his bed to cheer him up.
Then it’s back to your study
To finish your novel about the lake.
Later you’ll see how coarse it is,
Not the last draft, as you suppose now,
But the first. Be grateful for your ignorance,
For the gift of foolish confidence that allows you to begin.
On the first day out with his new boat,
Your hero, docking on an island,
Meets a stranger down on his luck
And invites him home.
Later, when he pulls in the driveway,
You can have him remember how small his house is,
How crammed with relatives,
All of them fretful as the years
Rub them the wrong way.
For now, as the breeze bellies the sails,
Let him imagine guest rooms waiting, and guest wings,
And months left at the doors like gifts,
May baskets, June boxes, July crowns,
August horns of plenty.
Charity
Time to believe that the thin disguise
On the face of the blessing in disguise
Will never be pulled off,
That the truth that’s still in hiding
Will stay there, far in the dark.
All that can be revealed is revealed.
All that can be learned from the burning house
Was learned the first time, when the smoke
Blackened the walls in every room.
So much for more experience. What can grow
Has grown; what’s small now stays small.
No portion waits for those who deserve more.
The flowers in the yard of the blind and deaf girl
Will never smell any sweeter to her
Than they smell now to any of her visitors.
The music she imagines will never compare to ours.
Her best day will brighten with no joy
That hasn’t brightened our day more.
Time to admit that her steady cheer
Is the burden she assumes to keep us here
Touching her fingers for a while.
Time Heals All Wounds
The first wound, the cut at the cord stem,
No longer tender, the scab fallen off,
The baby no longer sleeping with its knees
Tucked up, dreaming of the dark,
But reaching for the window on belly,
Elbows, and hands, on feeble frog legs;
The cut closed in the boy’s head
Received as he ran back for the catch,
Not hearing as the fielder called for it
Or hearing but not believing the ball
Destined for anyone but him;
Pain gone from the wrist
Sprained when the enemy stormed the camp
And tore
the flag from the guard’s hands
While the guard played dead,
Thinking how unfair it was
For the good side to be so outnumbered;
The tear in the hollow of the thigh
Where the angel touched it and the holy,
Aspiring sap of the wrestler
Leaked out, wetting the ground,
Feeding the seed of a flower whose smell
No one alive remembers, all healed now;
The wounds in the back
Where once the wings joined the body
Healed, and the legs grown used
To the whole weight.
from The Outskirts of Troy (1988)
Heinrich Schliemann
If the main plot in his life were his rise
From grocer’s apprentice and shipwrecked scrivener
To rich indigo merchant with a palace in St. Petersburg,
The master of a dozen languages, it would be easy
For critics like us to patronize,
Easy to grant him a place in the storybook
With Dick Whittington and the woodcutter’s youngest son.
And we could pity his distance from the real world
When he leaves the trading firm in middle age
To learn the ancient Greek of Homer
And falls in love with an Athenian schoolgirl
When he hears her recite Andromache’s long plea
And marries her, moving his life from storybook
Into dream, as if the noise of traffic outside the church
Were the hubbub on the fields around Troy.
If only he hadn’t taken it into his head
To dig in a sleepy backwater village
For Troy’s walls and somehow found them;
If he hadn’t knelt in the dirt all day
With beautiful Sophia, chipping away crust
From the tiles of Priam’s palace, from bracelets
That once circled the slim wrists of princesses;
If he hadn’t proved that his dream was graspable,
That the stories he loved were fashioned in the high style
Not to escape the world but to remember it,
An offering to the dead, to the dead bright ones
Whose gestures, vivid as they are in song,
Were doubtless in the flesh more dazzling.
The Promised Land
The land of Israel my mother loves
Gets by without the luxury of existence
And still wins followers,
Though it can’t be found on the map
West of Jordan or south of Lebanon,
Though what can be found bears the same name,
Making for confusion.
Not the land I fought her about for years
But the one untarnished by the smoke of history,
Where no one informs the people of Hebron or Jericho
They’re squatting on property that isn’t theirs,
Where every settler can remember wandering.
The dinners I spoiled with shouting
Could have been saved,
Both of us lingering quietly in our chairs,
If I’d guessed the truth that now is obvious,
That she wasn’t lavishing all her love
On the country that doesn’t deserve so rich a gift
But on the one that does, the one not there,
That she hoped good news would reach its borders
And cross into the land of the righteous and merciful
That the Prophets spoke of in their hopeful moods,
That was loved by the red-eyed rabbis of Galicia
Who studied every word of the book and prayed
To get one thread of the meaning right;
The Promised Land where the great and small
Hurry to school and the wise are waiting.
Henry James and Hester Street
Two or three characters talking in a lamplit parlor
Beside a fire, the curtains closed—
So the novel begins, and James is happy.
What a relief to reach this quiet shelter,
Back from America, far from the castles of Fifth Avenue,
From their fresh, unweathered vulgarity,
Far from change run wild, the past trundled away,
His father’s dependable neighborhood
Forced to give ground to “glazed perpendiculars”
That compel the passersby to feel equal, equally small.
In the curtained parlor, where tea is being served,
The banker protagonist fills the cups so graciously
I’m convinced he’s gathered his treasure with spotless hands,
His flaws as fine as the hairline cracks
In the landscapes from the Renaissance that adorn the walls.
Why shouldn’t James protect his characters from the world
If that’s what he thinks they need to be free?
Soon they’ll have problems enough of their own
Without being made to feel what their maker felt
Touring Manhattan slums, shoved to the curb
By hordes of “ubiquitous aliens.” Imagine those crowds
Hawking and bargaining on Hester Street,
Their clanging pushcarts and swarming children,
Immigrants like the couple in the photograph in my hall,
My mother’s father and mother fresh off the boat.
Had I stood where James stood back then
They’d have made me uneasy too,
Though now I assume they felt even more alien
Than James felt when he left for good.
As the banker, setting his cup down,
Peers at a landscape to inspect some travelers
Sheltered under a plane tree in a storm,
I inspect the faces in the photograph
As they stare out, eager and sober,
Brave though confused. Their faith in a life
Whose outlines even now are still concealed
Inspires me, just as James’s fidelity to his muse
Must have inspired the younger writers who visited.
Pulling their coats on, they stepped out into the chill
And grimy fog they planned to describe in plainer,
Ruder detail, but in a light more revealing
Than the murky light of history, the day more meaningful
Than any November Tuesday in 1913.
Visiting a Friend Near Sagamon Hill
If I take this drive as leisurely as I can,
I may remember, by the time I spot my friend’s house,
My speech of consolation,
Which so far seems to have hidden itself
Among the speeches powerless to console,
The ones that silence would be an improvement on.
This road winding through beech and sycamore,
This spring sunlight filtered and shimmering,
Reminds me I’m one of the lucky few.
I too have grown on well-drained soil
In unstinted sun, smiled on,
As Homer might say, by Hyperion,
Not like the stunted, scrubby trees
Rooting below in marshland.
Those marsh trees are like my sick friend,
Whose life hasn’t been sent to test him
But to sap him, to wear him down.
One life, and he knows that his one hope now
Is to be two people,
The sufferer and the one who observes
His suffering from above
As calmly as Zeus observes from grassy Ida
The warriors fighting and falling at Troy,
At ease in the best seat in the house.
That’s it, down there, the little dark spot
Balancing the highlights on the other side.
The scene lingers a moment and then fades.
Zeus drifts back to the clouds;
My friend discovers himself in bed
Listening as a car crunches in the gravel drive.
Now for the task of finding himself delighted
When his visitor tells him the road from the valley floor
Has never looked greener, the beech and sycamore
Escaped from the clutch of winter without a scratch.
Twenty Years
I
Other prisoners you’ve written to
Must have told you stories like mine,
How, when they were ten or eleven,
Their fathers began to drink too much,
How when the beatings grew too heavy
They ran loose all night.
I’m willing to admit that my brothers, as wild as I was,
Turned out all right. I don’t compare
Their daily killings on the market now
With the one killing on my hands.
All I ask you to see is how much more hate
I had to keep in check than you had to
Or have to now, how good feelings,
When they come to you, come mostly from the heart,
Unforced, not from the will.
If I could write well
I’d write a book on the subject of unequal chances,
Unequal tests and trials,
And not mention myself at all.
The subject must interest you too.
Why else would you want to write me,
A stranger and a prisoner? I’m glad you do
In spite of the days when a bad taste rises in my throat
As I think how little anger you have to swallow
Waking each day in the sunlit, carpeted room