by Carl Dennis
I imagine you waking in.
It’s a full day’s work for me not to envy
Your lack of envy for any man
As you look down on your garden.
In my best daydream I see myself down there
Talking with your friends, nodding and laughing.
I’m cheering on a friendly game of croquet
And want to join in, but don’t,
Afraid that the mallet in my hands
Might turn out dangerous, a missed shot
Stirring up something dark from the bottom
That for years had been slowly settling
Because I’d been holding my life still.
II
Now that they’re sleeping,
Their radios still till dawn,
I’m alone with the thin wedge of stars
Visible from the high window.
I have time to name all the clusters I can,
Trying to move with them as they shift west
Over land I want to know more of,
Old free states and slave,
Indian settlements, abandoned mining camps.
The more I learn, the more I feel wasted here
And the lonelier, angry at the many
Not angered by their ignorance,
Then angry at myself for vanity.
Why should they want to study
When the only student they know
Is far more sullen than they are
And aging faster, gray as a ghost,
The thinnest shadow in the land of shadows.
III
Yesterday wind seemed to be blowing
Out through the open gate of the garden
I try to believe in,
The one I carry with me.
I could almost smell the trees blossoming.
And it seemed that nothing here could hurt me.
Whatever happened would leave me strong,
Whatever time did or the guards.
And the guards seemed human,
Even the worst ones, more afraid than cruel.
So if today the wind carries no garden smell,
Should I believe I dreamed it
Any more than I dreamed the world,
The slums and mud flats,
The pear tree I once shook pears from?
Among the hours of hate, I can clear a space
For simple sorrow to breathe in.
When I find in a guard’s face nothing I want to find,
I must imagine what he might have been,
The boy on the street on summer evenings
Playing hard at hide-and-go-seek,
Cheering as a friend scrambles across the lawn
To the home tree to free the prisoners.
IV
The world locks us away and forgets,
But we never forget the world.
And if you can come on diploma day,
You can watch the few men in the study program
Receive their scrolls in the visiting room,
Students of earth crust and epics,
Foreign policy, light refraction,
Roman history, the food chain.
You can see them in the honors block
Watching the evening news.
You’d be surprised how few laugh
When the President says that America
Will ignore the World Court for the next two years,
How many feel ashamed for him
As they walk back to their cells
To daydream in the hour before bed
That their crime is undone,
That a woman is lying on the cot with them
And the cot is a blanket under the stars.
Last month I sent you my thoughts on Jefferson.
This month I’m reading Russian thinkers.
I love the way they resist regret
And look ahead as Jefferson does
To a new order, with justice for all,
No masters and no slaves, no wars or colonies.
Were they studied today
By those with power in Moscow or Washington
More countries would be free now, and appeals
Wouldn’t be piling up unread in the mailrooms.
No need for me to reread your words
To make me wonder what your life is like
And hope if you need help that help is coming,
Rumbling through the night by the truckload.
Meanwhile I can tell from here
How the letters in the Great Hall are hauled off
By the truckload to be burned,
How the smoke near the dump is so thick
The neighbors complain in letters to the authorities.
V
I’ll be all right when I get out of here
If I don’t look back to wonder who I might have been
Had I never been locked away
And don’t live fast, trying to make the years up.
Even here I’ve done what I could with books
To climb above the wall and guard towers
And look out over the trees I can’t touch
Down through house windows and screen doors.
I can almost see the people sitting down to eat:
The happy ones easy to believe in
And the sad ones no more comforted by their paintings
Than I am by my iron bed
Or my steel sink and toilet bowl.
And when the guards yell at me to come down,
I don’t allow my anger to flare out
As I strain to catch the talk in the dining room.
And if the cries of the boy I was
Rise to my lookout, I don’t look back on his beatings
And lament. I climb higher, so high
Even the sobs of the grown man for the boy
Can’t reach me.
Like the sailors in the story
With wax stuffed in their ears, not like the hero,
I sail by, and my ship isn’t turned toward home.
The future must contain what I haven’t seen
In a place I’ve never visited
If it’s holding something good in store for me.
FOR JOHN HEMMERS
Little League
It must be different in the other kingdom in June
When the Little Leaguers are out, screaming in the lots,
And Mr. Dellums, our old coach,
Doesn’t have to settle in the outfield
For butterfingers like me or Harvey Schmitz,
For scatter-arms like Joe Dignam and Rubin Kornfeld,
But can choose his players among the best.
Not called on there to bench boys for catcalls
Or belabor the fundamentals till his voice goes raw.
He should be happy now if fielding an incredible team
Can make him happy. Why he wasted his time with us
Is a mystery. In love with the game, to be sure,
But not, surely, with the way we played it.
Four evenings a week and for no pay.
Maybe he wanted to show his gratitude
To old instructors who put up with his clumsiness.
But how will his heart be tested over there
Where nobody pushes his patience as we did
Past the breaking point? And how will he teach his team
Politeness toward teams with fewer advantages
If every team over there has new uniforms
And a coach to exemplify a plucky spirit,
No boys who must dream one up on their own?
Fear of the Dark
Fear of the dark stays with me but not the shame.
And the worry that my story won’t reach the light
Where other stories wait and be understood
No longer seems a weakness I should overcome.
So what if it seems so to the few who require
Only themselves to fill their theaters. For them
I
t’s a mystery why even Hamlet, no lover of the world,
Is anxious, dying, for the world to get the facts right
And makes Horatio promise to retell the play;
Why even the dead in Hell cry out to Dante
To carry their stories back; why Dante,
Banished from Florence, promises.
No need for anyone who doesn’t ask to be heard
To hear the dead of Sodom crying for an audience
Though it’s likely some good men died in that fire,
Fathers to widows and orphans, friends to the poor.
After the ashes settled, the scribes blackened the name
Of the charred walls to keep God’s name pure.
It won’t be easy to say enough
To get those ghosts to rest in the dark
As Troy rests, its ashes content with Homer’s account
Of its long war and fiery fall,
Beautiful Troy, city beloved of Zeus,
Whose altars day and night smoked with offerings.
On the Soul
They told you you owned it and you believed them,
Flattered as if a real-estate man,
Pointing to a mansion with a lofty portico
On the crest of a hill, had assured you it was yours,
And the dream sounded too good to be resisted
Even when the doorman had sent you around back,
Even after ten years’ work in the kitchen,
Ten years on your bed of straw
Dreaming of the empty suite upstairs
And of the empty bed with the crown
Hanging from the bedpost, bejeweled with your name.
It would have been better if they’d said nothing,
Or told you it lived its own life, like deer
Hidden in the woods, not seen from the road
As you drive past in the car, not seen
When you stop and climb the fence.
Even if they browse on your own land,
They’re happiest left alone,
Stepping down in the evening to the stream,
Bedding down in silence under a screen of thickets
To dream what you may guess at and can’t know.
At Becky’s Piano Recital
She screws her face up as she nears the hard parts,
Then beams with relief as she makes it through,
Just as she did listening on the edge of her chair
To the children who played before her,
Wincing and smiling for them
As if she doesn’t regard them as competitors
And is free of the need to be first
That vexes many all their lives.
I hope she stays like this,
Her windows open on all sides to a breeze
Pungent with sea spray or meadow pollen.
Maybe her patience this morning at the pond
Was another good sign,
The way she waited for the frog to croak again
So she could find its hiding place and admire it.
There it was, in the reeds, to any casual passerby
Only a fist-sized speckled stone.
All the way home she wondered out loud
What kind of enemies a frog must have
To make it live so hidden, so disguised.
Whatever enemies follow her when she’s grown,
Whatever worry or anger drives her at night from her room
To walk in the gusty rain past the town edge,
Her spirit, after an hour, will do what it can
To be distracted by the light of a farmhouse.
What are they doing up there so late,
She’ll wonder, then watch in her mind’s eye
As the family huddles in the kitchen
To worry if the bank will be satisfied
This month with only half a payment,
If the letter from the wandering son
Really means he’s coming home soon.
Even old age won’t cramp her
If she loses herself on her evening walk
In piano music drifting from a house
And imagines the upright in the parlor
And the girl working up the same hard passages.
The Circus
If you’ve done things you should still feel sorry for,
Then sending your check to the Shriner’s Circus Fund
For Crippled Children won’t make you feel good
Any more than it’s made the wife-beater feel good
Or the loan shark or the bookkeeper at the missile plant.
Send it simply, as they do, to sponsor a little joy.
Then if you sit in the crowd you’ll wonder
If the crippled children should be laughing with the healthy ones
Or shaking their fists at the roof instead with Job’s wife,
Resolved not to accept what they’d never have to
In a world carefully planned and made.
From your seat in back something will look so wrong
It will dawn on you why the maker was afraid
When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge,
Afraid they’d notice his slipshod craftsmanship.
It won’t surprise you then that many aspire to leave,
That the ladder that Plato climbed led him away
From the visible kingdom to a beauty that didn’t exist
And never would, that wasn’t responsible
For the pitiful imitations. No wonder the couple
On the high trapeze delights the children so much,
Flouting the cloddish law of gravity, trying to be birds.
And then the army of clowns climbing out of the car
That by any law of matter couldn’t hold four.
And still they come, another and another,
While those in the crowd who can’t jump up
Strain forward in their seats to cheer them on.
On the Way to School
Even a lover of the bare truth must admit
This new façade painted on the high-rise
Is a big improvement over the blank face,
Pillars and capitals freshly applied
With a golden pediment and a frieze.
They seem to float above the bare bricks
Like a blurred dream, an admission
Of how much beauty the bricks left out.
Even art that remembers to build beauty in
Has to confine itself to a single theme and exclude
Most of the beautiful truths available,
Even the epic I like to teach each fall
Where the great battle is still raging,
Every hour more proof of how angry Achilles is.
His friends keep losing ground and he still won’t help.
What Homer leaves out to concentrate on a war
He points to openly in the similes.
It relieves him to say the battle turns at the hour
When the woodcutter loads his wagon and heads home,
To compare soldiers crowding in for a kill
To summer flies clustering on a milking pail.
When Achilles yields to Priam
And unties the corpse of Hector from his chariot,
He seems to guess that something has been left out
In his quest for glory, as his quest for glory
Reminds me what I miss to rebuff the world.
This morning, on my way to school,
The sun, striking the high-rise head on,
Turns its painted face so shimmery
The illusion takes me in, marble as rich in detail
As the real marble of the city hall
Put up when the romance of commerce and self-rule
Was still strong, Syracuse and Arcade
In friendly competition with Troy and Ithaca,
Doric columns rising a hundred feet from the forest
For a city that didn’t exist then and doesn’t now.
No details are left out when Homer stops the fighting
For a thousand lines to describe the world
Crowding the face of Achilles’ shield.
Here are the two cities in gold relief,
The wedding, the trial in the marketplace,
The harvest and the harvest festival.
Boys and girls dance on the polished dancing floor.
All this Achilles carries on his arm,
Which seems to mean he knows,
When he sees death coming, what life includes,
What exactly death leaves out.
from Meetings with Time (1992)
The Photograph
The background’s blurred, so I can’t be certain
If this showboat is docked on a river or a lake,
But the clothes of the dancers on deck
Make clear it’s summer in the early forties,
And the long shadows suggest it’s almost sundown.
No way to guess the song the couples are dancing to
But it looks like most are enjoying it.
The sadness that seems ingrained in the late light
Is the usual sadness of photographs, not theirs,
The feeling that comes from wondering
How few of the dancers welcome the light now.
And if I see them as ignorant, too confident in the future,
It’s only because they’re dancing in my childhood.
No reason to believe that the chubby man in the foreground
With his hand on the waist of the smiling blonde
Hasn’t stepped back often to observe how his life
Is almost half gone and then returned
To press the moment more eagerly than before.