by Carl Dennis
When he ought to be home to help with the harvest.
The father listens with a mind as open
As he can make it when Apollo’s servant,
Her eyes shut tight, her lips foam-flecked,
Mutters and moans in a voice not hers
Words that even to her are a mystery.
As for me, my only oracle is my notebook
Open on the kitchen table to a page divided
Straight down the middle with a heavy line.
If the arguments on the left-hand side
Outnumber those on the right, the left-hand path
At the fork ahead should be my preference
Unless the arguments on the right, however few,
Appear more beautiful, their truth more piercing.
And wouldn’t that difference mean
That the right-hand path is the one I believe
An oracle would confirm if oracles existed?
The path that would lead me to the brighter good,
Me and the rest of the world worth helping,
My first choice, not my distant second.
Pride
A danger on many lists, but on mine
The best protection I have when I get an inkling
Of what it means to be shut forever
Inside one person, the windows barred.
Pride that proclaims to me and my kind
That the self isn’t so small as it seems,
Just the small corner we’re standing in,
Just this moment, which contains only a fraction
Of all we are. Look up, says pride, at the misty ceiling;
Look up ahead where the far wall rises
Covered with tapestries it will take a lifetime
To admire with the focused attention that they deserve.
Take pride away, and envy would scale our ramparts
Unopposed and force us to sign the papers
Declaring the rooms of houses other than ours
Far more inviting, more spacious and sunny,
The furniture chosen with taste that we can’t muster,
The guests over there not only more interesting
But more generous than the tribe of gossips
And climbers crowding our anterooms.
O pride, O sweet assurance we’re first,
May the dreams you provide us with always allow us
To ride in triumph through a grateful Persepolis
Certain we’ve earned the shouts of the crowd,
Certain the queen by our side isn’t deluded
To love us best, just enlightened beyond her years.
Her gaze pierces to a trove of virtues
Hidden even from us, and will teach us
How wrong we’ve been to consider her heart
More cramped in its movements now that it beats for us,
Now that it’s ours.
On the Bus to Utica
Up to a year ago I’d have driven myself to Utica
As I’ve always done when visiting Aunt Jeannine.
But since last summer, and the bad experience in my car
With aliens, I prefer bus travel. Do you believe
In creatures more advanced than we are
Visiting now and then from elsewhere in the universe?
Neither did I till experience taught me otherwise.
It happened one night last fall after the Rotary meeting.
I’d lingered, as chapter chairman, to sort my notes,
So I wasn’t surprised when I finally got to the lot
To find my car the only one there, though the shadows
Hovering over it should have been a tip-off
And the strong odor I had trouble placing—
Salty, ashy, metallic. My thoughts were elsewhere,
Reliving the vote at the meeting to help a restaurant
Take its first steps in a risky neighborhood.
So the element of surprise was theirs, the four of them,
Three who pulled me in when I opened the door
And one who drove us out past the town edge
To a cleared field where a three-legged landing craft
Big as a moving van sat idling. In its blue-green light
I caught my first good look at their faces. Like ours,
But with eyes bigger and glossier, and foreheads bumpier
With bristles from the eyebrows up, the hair of hedgehogs.
No rudeness from them, no shouting or shoving.
Just quiet gestures signaling me to sit down
And keep calm as we rose in silence to the mother ship.
I remember the red lights of the docking platform,
A dark hall, a room with a gurney where it dawned on me
Just before I went under there would be no discussions,
No sharing of thoughts on the fate of the universe,
No messages to bring back to my fellow earthlings.
When I woke from the drug they’d dosed me with
I was back in the car, in the Rotary parking lot,
With a splitting headache and a feeling I’d been massaged
Hard for a week or two by giants. Now I feel fine
Though my outlook on life has altered. It rankles
To think that beings have reached us who are smugly certain
All they can learn from us is what we can learn
From dissecting sea worms or banding geese.
Let’s hope their science is pure at least,
Not a probe for a colony in the Milky Way.
Do you think they’ve planted a bug inside me?
Is that why you’re silent? Fear will do us more harm
Than they will. Be brave. Be open.
Tell me something you won’t confide to your friends
Out of fear they may think you strange, eccentric.
If you’re waiting for an audience that’s more congenial,
More sensitive than the one that happens
To be sitting beside you now on this ramshackle bus,
I can sympathize. Once I waited too.
Now you can see I take what’s offered.
Jesus Freaks
The approval they get from above is all they need,
So why should they care if they offend me
Here in the parking lot of the Super Duper, my arms full,
By stuffing a pamphlet or two in my pocket?
No point in shouting at them to keep back
When they’re looking for disapproval. No reason
For them to obey the rules of one of the ignorant
Who supposes the perpetual dusk he lives in
Sunny noon. Their business is with my soul,
However buried, with my unvoiced wish for the truth
Too soft for me to catch over the street noise.
Should I rest my packages on my car a minute
And try to listen if I’m sure they really believe
They’re vexing me in my own best interest?
To them I’m the loser they used to be
When they sweated daily to please themselves,
Deaf to their real wishes. Why make it easy for me
To load the trunk of my car with grocery bags
When they offer a joy that none of my purchases,
However free of impurities, can provide?
Their calls to attention shouldn’t sound any more threatening
Than the peal of a church bell. And if I call
On the car phone to lodge a complaint,
Jail will seem to them the perfect place to bear witness
In this dark dominion where Herod rules.
In jail, but also guests at a banquet, while I,
They’re certain, stubbornly stand outside
Shivering in the snow, too proud
To enter a hall not of my own devising
And warm myself at a fire I didn’t light
And enjoy a meal strangers have taken pains with.
Ye
s, the table’s crowded, but there’s room for me.
The Serpent to Adam
Just as Prometheus, the compassionate god,
Stole to deliver man from darkness,
So for your welfare I named the forbidden tree
The tree of knowledge. And just as he understood
The punishment that was bound to follow,
The rules of Olympus being clearly posted,
So I was ready to drag my trunk through the dust
Toward the glow of your first campfire.
My loss would be far outmatched by the joy
I’d feel in the company of my new-made equals.
At last a chance for serious conversation
As we planned together a home in the wilderness
Fit for creatures who know good from evil.
No wonder I was stunned by your kicks and curses.
No wonder I was wounded in more than body
As I scuttled back to the dark, dodging your stones.
Nothing could ever make you happy again
Now that the gardener didn’t dote on you
And you’d have to fend for yourself,
Grow your own food and cook it,
Standing close to the fire to fend off cold.
That was your real crime, not disobedience:
To make me, a being hopeful by nature,
Into a slinking creature of holes and crevices,
My talents wasted, my soul so embittered
I was glad when I lost my lizard ears.
A relief not to hear anymore your wind-borne
Misty laments from the valley settlements.
A thousand sighs for an Eden that didn’t suit you
And none for the Eden we might have made.
View of Delft
In the view of Delft that Vermeer presents us
The brick façades of the unremarkable buildings
Lined up at the river’s edge manage to lift the spirits
Though the sky is cloudy. A splash of sun
That yellows some gables in the middle distance
May be enough to explain it, or the loving detail
Vermeer has given the texture of brick and stone
As if he leveled each course with his own trowel.
Doubtless stones in Cleveland or Buffalo
May look like this on a day when the news arrives
That a friend is coming to visit, but the stones in the painting
Also put one in mind of the New Jerusalem,
A city we’ve never seen and don’t believe in.
Why eternal Jerusalem when the people of Delft
Grow old and die as they do in other cities,
In high-ceilinged airy rooms and in low-beamed
Smoky basements, quickly, or after a stubborn illness,
Alone, or surrounded by friends who will soon feel Delft
To be a place of abandonment, not completion?
Maybe to someone returning on a cloudy day
After twenty years of banishment the everyday buildings
Can look this way or to someone about to leave
On a journey he isn’t ready to take. But these moods
Won’t last long while the mood in the painting
Seems undying, though the handful of citizens
Strolling the other side of the river are too preoccupied
To look across and admire their home.
Vermeer has to know that the deathless city
Isn’t the Delft where he’ll be walking to dinner
In an hour or two. As for your dinner, isn’t it time
To close the art book you’ve been caught up in,
Fetch a bottle of wine from the basement, and stroll
Three blocks to the house where your friend is waiting?
Don’t be surprised if the painting lingers awhile in memory
And the trees set back on a lawn you’re passing
Seem to say that to master their language of gestures
Is to learn all you need to know to enter your life
And embrace it tightly, with a species of joy
You’ve yet to imagine. But this joy, disguised,
The painting declares, is yours already.
You’ve been longing again for what you have.
A Chance for the Soul
Am I leading the life that my soul,
Mortal or not, wants me to lead is a question
That seems at least as meaningful as the question
Am I leading the life I want to live,
Given the vagueness of the pronoun “I,”
The number of things it wants at any moment.
Fictive or not, the soul asks for a few things only,
If not just one. So life would be clearer
If it weren’t so silent, inaudible
Even here in the yard an hour past sundown
When the pair of cardinals and crowd of starlings
Have settled down for the night in the poplars.
Have I planted the seed of my talent in fertile soil?
Have I watered and trimmed the sapling?
Do birds nest in my canopy? Do I throw a shade
Others might find inviting? These are some handy metaphors
The soul is free to use if it finds itself
Unwilling to speak directly for reasons beyond me,
Assuming it’s eager to be of service.
Now the moon, rising above the branches,
Offers itself to my soul as a double,
Its scarred face an image of the disappointment
I’m ready to say I’ve caused if the soul
Names the particulars and suggests amendments.
So fine are the threads that the moon
Uses to tug at the ocean that Galileo himself
Couldn’t imagine them. He tried to explain the tides
By the earth’s momentum as yesterday
I tried to explain my early waking
Three hours before dawn by street noise.
Now I’m ready to posit a tug
Or nudge from the soul. Some insight
Too important to be put off till morning
Might have been mine if I’d opened myself
To the occasion as now I do.
Here’s a chance for the soul to fit its truth
To a world of yards, moons, poplars, and starlings,
To resist the fear that to talk my language
Means to be shoehorned into my perspective
Till it thinks as I do, narrowly.
“Be brave, Soul,” I want to say to encourage it.
“Your student, however slow, is willing,
The only student you’ll ever have.”
Audience
When I take the time to read slowly, the words sink in.
If I hadn’t rushed my reading of Anna Karenina
The first time through, focusing on plot, not nuance,
I might have been able to say why Karenin,
On the night he discovers his wife loves Vronsky,
Gives her a cool lecture on the proprieties
And hides what he feels, how the bridge of his life
Has suddenly fallen away beneath him.
Why does a man who’s tumbling into the void
Want to tumble in silence, without a cry?
Now as I drive to visit a friend in the country,
Listening as the story is slowly spoken on tape
By an actress with all the time in the world,
It’s clear to me the invisible beings
Karenin imagines watching him from their balcony
Would be embarrassed by any display of feeling.
As to why he’s chosen for himself an audience
That judges on the basis of a cool appearance,
Good form, good show, and neglects the soul,
This must be what it means to live in St. Petersburg,
City of courtiers and court ambitions,
And
not in Moscow, its country cousin,
Noisy with laughing and crying families.
I’m glad the friend I’m driving to visit
Lives hours away in a country village,
A tolerant woman who won’t reproach me
For driving slowly, who’ll be glad to learn
I’m taking my own sweet time for reflection.
It’s a shame no one enlightened steps forward
To tell Karenin he’s a character in a novel
Where no one’s commended for preserving his dignity,
Only for shouting and weeping and tearing his hair,
For throwing a book of philosophy out the window.
It looks like I’m one of the fortunate few
With leisure enough to ask myself
If all the invisible beings watching my life
Hail from Moscow. And I’ll have time this evening
To ask my friend her honest opinion
And to weigh her answer.
And then it’s time to ask if the life she’s living
Pleases the beings she imagines watching
And whether they watch from duty or sympathy.
Life would be easier, I’ll say, if our audience
Were a single person, like Dante’s Beatrice.
Just the thought of her silently looking on
From across a stream was enough to brighten a path
Otherwise forlorn. But how can Dante be sure,
My friend will ask me, that he knows her wishes?
What if they don’t all show in her face, or only show
As if veiled by mist, and he sees them darkly?
A Letter from Mary in the Tyrol
You may believe you’re as sorry as you say you are
Not to be hiking with me over mountain meadows,
Sorry your duties at home keep you from travel.