by Carl Dennis
Wisdom isn’t the only thing worth having.
Wiser or not, I’d have felt more free.
Free or not, I’d be richer now in memories,
No small matter for an old woman like me
Sitting in a sunny yard under a plum tree,
A blanket on my wasted legs in mid-July.
Not that I don’t take comfort from what I’ve done,
The way I resisted anger and envy
And worked to make my fretful disposition serene,
The wishes that lead to disappointment abandoned,
Worked to live in the moment like this plum tree.
Whatever it’s planned to do it’s doing now
Between the garage that needs to be torn down
And the fence that needs repairing.
I’ve tried to be like a character in a play
Who is nothing but what she says and does,
With nothing held in to fester between scenes
While the crowd goes out to the lobby for a smoke.
What about dinner, they ask, at Roma’s or André’s?
What about starting over in Fresno or Spokane
Where people are rumored to be more sensitive
To genius of the subtler kind?
I hope it isn’t merely ignorance of its death
That makes this tree look tranquil,
Or its saintly diet of air and water,
Which has always been too pure for me.
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
Maybe the new theory is true, and the odds
For intelligent life beyond our planet
Are even slimmer than they were here,
And the only voices ever to reach us
From beyond will be our children’s,
Our earth in a thousand years the mother of colonies
On planets never before inhabited.
Long after the sun swells in its final flare
To consume our world, they’ll remember us
Just as immigrants here remember the old country in stories.
The Earth will sound to them like a garden,
More a land of myth than of history,
Its green valleys and blue skies incredible,
The way its grasses climbed the hills untended,
The way its birds alighted in groves nobody planted
To trill phrases nobody taught them.
A house like this one, on a street like mine,
Will be a house from a dim, heroic age
When their own fate was decided. Just as I stay up late
To study a narrative of the Civil War
And marvel how close the country came to dissolving,
The great experiment cancelled, the slaves still slaves,
So they will marvel as they study our hostilities
How close we came to spoiling their chances,
Their galactic cities bombed into fictions, their farms,
Schools, churches, opera houses, and union halls
Sponged from the blackboard with the crowds
Down on the dock for Regatta Day.
Are they real or not? That’s the question
That has them worried. Are they waiting on a road
Reachable from the starting point of today?
Impossible to imagine how remote I’d feel
After rummaging in a trunk all afternoon,
Searching for proof that I paid my taxes,
If I found a letter proving I was never born,
That the mother who might have been mine
Ran off on her wedding day and was never heard from,
That I’m only my would-be father’s fantasy
As he lies in his empty house on his deathbed
Dreaming of the life he might have lived.
Today I seem to be real as I stop for groceries.
I may be moody returning to the empty house
I promised myself to fill, but not so lonely
If I think of the distant, stellar observers.
What voices deeper than reason and will
I’ve failed to hear isn’t so hard a question
As why I’ve been fated to decide their destiny.
And what’s my strategy for the day, they wonder,
To prompt them to practice songs of joy,
Not dirges?
Unfinished Symphony
Not far from here, as we stroll to the square at sundown,
An old man, writing in his room,
Resists the wind-borne noises of traffic and street games,
The click of heels in the cobbled alley.
He’s nearing the end of his great project.
He’s almost ready to prove that couples like us
Are strolling to the only square available
In the only world we could be strolling in.
However chosen the moment seems to us,
From where he sits it’s always waited
Patiently in the half-light for us to arrive
Over the only road we could have come.
And even when we turned down side roads
To explore the villages, we were still approaching,
Even while unfolding a blanket in the meadow
Beside a stream, sharing a taste of the local wine,
Napping beside the willows.
That’s what his love for the truth
Seems to be pushing him to prove once and for all
Though now a breeze from the world of might-have-been
Reaches his window, and he smells the grass himself
And pauses a moment in his argument.
The hardest part’s to come, the part where he shows
How the continent had to be settled as it was,
How the Indians had to be waiting for the Conquistadors,
How their ancestors, eons before,
Had to wander across from Asia on the land bridge,
Dancing their Tartar dances, singing their songs.
Down the coast they ventured and inland,
Wrapped in blankets their dark-haired women wove,
Dark hair in long braids that swayed
As they walked in silence behind the dray.
Outside the window, a car door slams.
The old man steadies himself to go on
And show how necessary it was for them to vanish
With their deerskin dresses, their brooches of bone.
He’ll finish soon if he doesn’t imagine them
Pausing on their trek a few yards from his house
To camp for the night. No going on without them
If the women start combing their hair out
Or sing to the sun their songs of sundown
As they always do.
Mildew
Till now a subject mentioned only as a metaphor
To stand for mustiness in the soul.
But here we have the genuine article
Growing on the north wall of my neighbor’s house
That’s cost him too much already in upkeep.
Black streaks over blue paint that was guaranteed
Against fungus of all kinds, returning each fall
After its spring treatment of bleach.
He scrubbed the bottom story himself
And would have done the rest if the gutter
He’d tried to unclog last fall
Hadn’t pulled loose, spooking him about ladders.
Black streaks and a musty smell in the guest room
That stumps the experts. Long before now
He guessed he was only a transient on the planet.
Now it’s clear his house is a transient too,
Though this evening its lights are burning warmly.
In a minute his Thanksgiving guests will arrive
Having outdone themselves with their walnut stuffing,
Having added new stories to their portfolios.
Their cheerful, spirited talk will fill the kitchen.
He
won’t interrupt to ask if they can explain
Why his is the only house on the block
With a mildew problem. Bad luck, maybe,
Though in an earlier era it would be a warning
To turn from a world he’s loved too much.
But what other world steps forward now
To offer its services? And even if it did,
What deserves more of his gratitude
Than his clapboard guardian against wind and rain,
A basement haven for Ping-Pong on winter evenings,
An attic skylight for reattaching to stars
The names washed off by the daily drizzle?
Mildew creeps to the house unseen and suddenly
Scales the walls. But not for him anymore
The temptation of the underground passage
Past the enemy line to a hidden harbor
Where he can still imagine a rowboat waiting.
Night Walk
At midnight, when you hit a snag in your essay
Describing the light only a few can love,
The few who are most awake, do what I do.
Stroll on Main Street past the lighted storefronts.
Pause to peer in the window of Spiegel’s Appliances
Past the dishwashers and floor fans.
You should recognize the watchman slumped in his chair
It’s our butcher, yours and mine,
Moonlighting here as he’s done for years
Ever since Brenda asked him for a sailboat
Like the one in the cigarette ad,
Complete with cabin, deck chair, and flag.
After you’ve pitied him for a while, as I have,
How he’s mortgaged himself to tinsel,
Boats and beauties, while the time grows late
And the first page in the book of life
Is still not filled, notice how peaceful his sleep seems,
The sleep of a man happy to drowse through weekdays
So he can snap awake on the weekend
To Brenda dangling her long legs from the bow
Or lying back in her chair, eyes closed.
Why climb the lookout if he has all he’s ever wanted?
Why not crawl back and forth on his knees,
Scrubbing the deck down while she dozes,
Or polish the chrome, already rusting?
And after you’ve asked yourself, as I have, if her smile
Can really last him all week in the undergloom
Of meats and motors, assuming she’s smiling at him,
Not merely at the wind for stroking her face,
Ask when the truth you’ve followed has once smiled back,
Once dropped a note on your plate praising your loyalty.
“Brenda,” his tombstone will say,
If the carver wants to record the love of his life.
And what about yours? What word
Would you like lovers and loners to read
As they stroll on Sundays the shady, municipal graveyard,
What truth you loved in your few moments of clarity?
Infidel
If I chew these sesame seeds slowly,
As the book advises, and do my rhythmic breathing,
I may end the year as a journeyman to Buddha,
Soon to join the circle of his companions.
No more wasting my energy on my will,
The will that butts its way through the crowd,
Shoulders stooped under its sack of ambitions.
I can walk behind it at a saving distance,
Glancing about me, not straight ahead.
Soon, if I chew these sesame seeds slowly,
I’ll wonder what it’s like to be a stone,
Or a tree, or the dog asleep by the lawn chair,
Or the woman in the chair, gray-haired and frail,
Knitting a sweater for her daughter’s baby.
To be them, and then to leave them.
To hope they’re not as stranded in what they are
As the blue flowers in the yard at the corner
Which seem to keep shouting only one name,
Blue flower, blue flower.
Just a mouthful of sesame seeds and salt
To neutralize the acidity of the blood
And maybe in a week or two the fretful yin child
Will be a contemplative, joyful yang.
And if I can change, my friends can follow
If they’re willing to be more flexible
And don’t insist, as they have till now,
On their own vivid, unchastened perspectives.
Strange to love those who resist me,
Who block the sidewalk when I go exploring
And won’t give ground, who force me
To step aside with my ears ringing,
My eyes watering, and move on
Under awnings that flap their colors
As awnings do, under lindens
Shaking their leaves as lindens will
When they want to refresh themselves
In gusts blowing now from the mountains,
Now from the sea.
My Moses
Time to praise the other Moses, the one who concludes
That the bush isn’t really burning, as he first supposed,
Just backlit in red by the setting sun,
Magnified by the need of a runaway to be pardoned,
To pull his shoes off and receive a vision.
The Moses who, when he lifts his staff,
Can’t part the waters, who has to wade in
At low tide and hope for the best.
Nobody drowns. Nobody’s following. The twelve tribes,
Sluggish after a hard day in the quarries,
Didn’t find his lecture on the virtues inspiring.
And Pharaoh was willing to see him go.
Good riddance, what with his praise of creation
That gouged the work month with holidays.
Now he’s wringing his clothes out on the other side,
Relieved it hasn’t taken him any longer to realize
He isn’t much of a prophet, that he hasn’t the gift.
Free now of the journey to the Promised Land
And the wars with the natives, he can settle down at once
Whenever he pleases, and be happy even here
In the country that disappointed Columbus,
That wasn’t the hoped-for shortcut to spices.
Happy even on this block of mine, my neighbor,
A civics teacher at the high school,
Who leaves the gate to his yard unlocked
So the neighborhood children can pick the berries
Before the frost comes and leaf smoke rises
From small, mute fires he’s lit himself.
Delaware Park, 1990
These five students from China,
Cooking their dinner on the grill by the swings,
May be trying to resist the great temptation
Of feeling orphaned, reminding themselves instead
How they were lonely often back home too
And were happy to be neglected by the authorities.
This country, they could be saying,
May have felt just as alien
To the settlers who arrived early from Europe,
The odd ones who sold their old-country farms
For a passage to a land that for all they knew
Was merely hearsay. As for the Indians,
Who knows what homeland meant to them
When they woke to a vista of hills
Unmarked by clearings, barns, and orchards?
This park could be the one
Their children will play in
As if the benches were made for them,
As if they owned the sun and the clouds,
As if a rain like the one beginning to fall now
Disappointed them only as a friend would,
For reasons they could accept with
out knowing.
This day, they could be saying
As they gather their blankets, doesn’t prove
The life here cold and unwelcoming.
The man who’s watched them an hour from his bench
One day won’t be a mystery.
They’ll be able to guess what he’s thinking
Just as they might guess a stranger’s thoughts in China.
Today he seems knowing, confident, and remote.
One day he may seem confused and frail,
In need of sponsors. And they’ll step forward
With solace they can’t offer now.
Spring Letter
With the warmer days the shops on Elmwood
Stay open later, still busy long after sundown.
It looks like the neighborhood’s coming back.
Gone are the boarded storefronts that you interpreted,
When you lived here, as an emblem of your private recession,
Your ship of state becalmed in the doldrums,
Your guiding stars obscured by fog. Now the cut-rate drugstore
Where you stocked your arsenal against migraine
Is an Asian emporium. Aisles of onyx, silk, and brass,
Of reed baskets so carefully woven and so inexpensive
Every house could have one, one work of art,
Though doubtless you’d refuse, brooding instead
On the weavers, their low wages and long hours,
The fruit of their labor stolen by middlemen.
Tomorrow I too may worry like that, but for now
I’m focusing on a mood of calm, a spirit of acceptance,
Loyal to my plan to keep my moods distinct
And do each justice, one by one.
The people in line for ice cream at the Sweet Tooth
Could be my aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews.
What ritual is more ancient or more peaceable?
Here are the old ones rewarding themselves
For making it to old age. Here are the children
Stunned into silence by the ten-foot list of flavors
From Mud Pie to Milky Way, a cosmic plenty.
And those neither young nor old, should they be loyal