The Surveyors
Page 2
“Whoa” and “Whoa”—and you might look down on him
as being so much smaller than the poet,
though his paycheck is larger;
you might call the poet more sophisticated;
but just you try to do it, try to say something symmetrical
and yet so unexpected.
If I were a cultural critic, now
would be the time to claim that this commercial
is a thirty-second hymn to imperialism,
to the astronaut’s arrogation of the air, and the boy’s
father’s conquering of the wide-open American spaces,
that it’s a hymn to masculine muscle, to boundless
consumption, to wanting and wanting despite
our having so much, but the truth is
that although I’ve seen this ad a dozen times now
and vow to memorize the Mercedes, the BMW, whatever it is,
I never recall the make of the car
or even its color.
All I remember is how very efficient
the commercial is, as elegant as an engine,
how gently funny, how affectionate its gesture at the human
manufacture of wonder, and I reflect
that the artist is one who sometimes commands the courage
to pare everything down to two iterations
of one word that cannot be translated.
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARENTS
It isn’t what he said in Casablanca
and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless
we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.
They’re in our baggage, or perhaps are baggage
of the old-fashioned type, before the wheels,
which we remember when we pack for Paris.
Or don’t remember. Paris doesn’t know
if you’re thinking of it. Neither do your parents,
although they say you ought to visit more,
as if they were as interesting as Paris.
Both Paris and your parents are as dead
and as alive as what’s inside your head.
Meanwhile, those lovers, younger every year
(because with every rerun we get older),
persuade us less, for all their cigarettes
and shining unshed tears about the joy
of Paris blurring in their rearview mirror,
that they’ve surpassed us in sophistication.
Granted, they were born before our parents
but don’t they seem by now, Bogart and Bergman,
like our own children? Think how we could help!
We could ban their late nights, keep them home
the whole time, and prevent their ill-starred romance!
Here’s looking at us, Kid. You’ll thank your parents.
VIERGE OUVRANTE
Marvelous and a little sick
that her immaculate ivory
self is sawn into a triptych
from her uncrowned head straight down
the neck, the breastbone, and the lap
enthroning her bisected son.
Magnetic on the double-door
refrigerator of her white
body, he is miniature
but mature, an all-suffering
king already killed, reborn,
who elevates one hand in blessing
while the other must hold steady
the great globe on his knee, the whole
world that is his baby—
or will be when the world’s redeemed.
But this is France, the year 1200,
and to the sculptor it has seemed
both beautiful and necessary
that the hinged, compliant Virgin
unfold the living allegory
buried in her anatomy,
as if some holy madman surgeon
scarified there, in the three
small panels, the naked guts of sin
coiled and twisting in the back-
story of the coming Passion:
instead of one loved child who grows
within her, here are multiple
horror shows, the Man of Sorrows
mocked along his bitter path,
the stations of the Cross that lead
to the death she’s pregnant with.
Come the French Revolution, she
too will be a thing of scorn.
Turned into a children’s toy
fitted with four wheels and a cord
to pull around the Queen of Heaven,
what to do but be drawn forward
to Baltimore, where now, a vision
butterflied on her stand, she’s propped
up like the one Book’s one edition?
She knows the future is past mending.
Why look to her for an opening
for some other ending?
THE BICKERS
It’s as if he’s edible
himself, the overfed young man
clutching a greenish pair of gloves
like a bunch of steamed asparagus.
His wavy hair is chestnut. His face
is packed with juice, a pale pink cherry
topping the pudding of his body,
or topping what tops it first, the white
dollop of a scalloped collar.
His velvet cloak is a salmon color.
Even the golden frame that hems
him in is delicious, its baroque
buttercreams of ornament
the slathered icing on the cake.
His counterpart, a perfect match
(at least by the measure of the canvas
and the same resplendent frame),
hangs just to his left. How strange
I’d walked past without noticing.
The painter’s skill is just as fine:
that lifelike treatment of the hand
holding a small, improving book;
the black shape of the suit set off
by a paper-white, fine-pleated ruff
and a bearded, balding head. A man
who’s prosperous but moderate,
diligent and slightly peeved—
the languid young man’s father, surely.
Bartholomeus van der Helst
painted them both, I’m reading now,
in 1642. They were
the famous Bickers of Amsterdam.
The Bickers! Savor too the name.
Picture the Bickers’ League, a band
of seven family politicians
holding office all at once.
Andries, the father here, was mayor
time and again, a mercantile
diplomat who sought to make
the world safe for his shipping routes.
Thanks to pragmatists like him,
the Eighty Years’ War stopped at last.
That was a topic van der Helst
would paint too, as a grand tableau:
Banquet at the Crossbowmen’s Guild
in Celebration of the Treaty
of Munster. Here the revelers are,
deaf to whatever caused the war,
shaking hands and doffing hats,
lifting refilled pilsner glasses,
and letting their long hose fall down
into their floppy, wide-cut boots.
Poor Andries, meanwhile—stuck
beside that spoiled brat on the wall,
his only child, Gerard, who ate
the fruits of other people’s work!
Opposites attract, and yet
one Bicker only can endure
at the Rijksmuseum gift shop
as a refrigerator magnet.
Gerard, of course. Who’d want his dad,
that pious trading magnate, for
a souvenir of all that’s sour?
It hardly matters he had cause.
The old war of the generations
outlives all truces, and remains
rich fodder for our snickering.
Taking a seat at the café,
I order waffles with whipped cream
and can hear the Bickers, bickering.
LITTLE MEN
Two men I’ve loved loved little men
when they were little children—
tin soldiers they could push around
the carpet in their little fists.
They could play all antagonists,
make sound effects for every sound,
but were peremptory and unfair
as those Olympian puppeteer
gods in the Iliad. All alone
each boy beat the odds and won.
And stunned the enemy the next day
from some new flank, and changed which war
it was, and pretended uniforms
were colors other than they were.
And rarely put the toys away
because war is eternal.
(Myself, I’d had a paper doll
I dressed, and dressed, and dressed to kill.)
Of these two boys who ordered all
the playroom into battle, one
grew up to be a novelist.
Reader, I married him; we lost.
The other rose in rank to Colonel,
draft-numbered for a distant war
nobody wanted anymore,
and nobody is more pacifist.
We read the daily news in bed,
updates to the casualty list
that verifies more little men
have won, and winning’s what to have.
And me? Which side should I be on?
Hope too is eternal.
I’m on his side, beside my love:
the story rests here with my head
against the drumbeat in his chest.
SMOKING THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
A flickering black-and-white
documentary reel
recalls them at their feast:
long tables spread with fragments
in Aramaic and Hebrew,
with tags in Arabic
numerals like place cards
for scholars in white shirts.
It’s 1952,
five years since Bedouin
shepherds broke a pot
in a cave; and in their lab
the puzzle-solvers laugh
at something, with a silent-
movie hamminess.
“Turn this way.” (You imagine
the voice of the cameraman.)
One of them looks up
from a snippet of Scotch tape
he’s affixing to a scrap
of antiquity (the next
generation’s task
will be, we know, to scrape
a yellow gum from the text),
while the sun—the very sun
of Creation—illuminates
through flung-open windows
the crumbling manuscripts
darkness kept legible
over millennia.
The young man resumes his work,
pressing a curled parchment
flat with one hand, and raising
with the other hand his half-
finished cigarette,
a tiny, perfect scroll
of paper that burns his lungs
pleasantly, as an era
is vanishing in smoke.
ST. FLORIAN WITH BURNING CHURCH
Funny how you can pass time and again
the same things in the same room and not see them.
Somehow, pacing for years through this museum,
I’ve slighted three-foot-high St. Florian
and now I stop. Why now? Saint who? Consult
smartphone: apparently, he was a cult
figure, often featured with a pail
of water like this, ever tipped to douse
the flames engulfing, at his feet, a house—
no, it’s a church, but to a dollhouse-scale.
Medieval artists played with small and large:
the point here is that Florian took charge.
His pose is wooden; then again, he’s made
(as is the water and the fire) of wood
and everything about them is a falsehood.
“Light a fire,” the legend says he said,
“and I will climb to Heaven on it.” One
comment like that, your bio is all done—
a millennium passes and the fire motif
has gotten out of hand; a Roman soldier
martyred in 304 C.E., now you’re
a fetish throughout Europe, and (good grief)
credited with extinguishing whole towns.
In real life, though, it’s Florian who drowns
and sinks to the bottom, poor unread footnote.
They club him, scourge and flay him; for good measure,
they throw him in the Enns, the local river,
a millstone dangling from his soft young throat.
Later, a woman named Valeria takes
his body from the deep: and thus his relics
travel through Noricum (in present-day
Austria), to Linz, then Cracow, where
the church named after him commands the square.
Today in Poland, all you have to say
is “Florian!” on the phone: it’s understood
as code, even now, to call the fire brigade.
Submission is the mark of all the saints,
too humble to protest how history paints
their acts in its canonical report.
As for the rest of us, who knows our sins?
Some vague, antique offense occurred near Linz,
famous for Hitler and the Linzertorte.
ADVANTAGE FEDERER
The Holy Roman Empire comes to mind
tonight, as I sit among the nineteen thousand
in Madison Square Garden, which is not
anywhere near Madison, nor is it square,
nor is it a garden.
Still, even Voltaire
could have found something holy about it,
partly because the real Placido Domingo
is in the stands, enduring the microphone
somebody jams in his face on the Jumbotron;
and also because, loud as opera, in a cloud
of dry ice from the locker room pit,
a herald’s voice proclaims that it is Fed
himself parting the crowd, and by god that’s him,
the Greatest of All Time.
His opponent gets some hoopla, but how can he rate?
I scrutinize Roger’s legs (shapely and human,
in shorts trimmed by a gold tuxedo stripe)
with the same imploring attention I’ve seen him train
on the face of his racket
in close-ups on TV; and look, he’s doing it now,
plucking pensively at the Wilson logo,
the W in the mirror: I am the man,
I can do this. All the chanters agree he can:
let’s go, Roger, let’s go!
And yet…although our tickets buy us space,
time is an ace; the match is whizzing by.
First set, second, third. Now he has lost.
Now all the talking, graying heads can say
into their cameras gravely: How long can he last?
Oh but elation has the highest ranking!
Surely I’m winning, simply by being alive
while Roger Federer is thirty-three
and playing like an angel and also blessing
the sponsors and the “Baby Fed” Dimitrov:
“I’d like to thank Grigor for beating me.”
Seventh Avenue is seventh heaven
as I float out into the evening, hardly aware
of the rain when I open my umbrella’s face
to stare into it, as Federer might stare.
TENNIS IN THE SNOW
You looked up from
your book, and apropos
of nothing, asked: Did I ever tell you
I played tennis once in the snow?
No, I said. You didn’t. Where was this?
Tennis in the snow! you said again.
It was…in Colorado. No, in Kansas.
I was a young captain.
Did you win?
I don’t know. I’d play this guy at the base.
Marty. I can see us laughing,
slipping and sliding all over the place.
Were tennis balls still white back then?
(A smile from you.) No, they were yellow
already. This was the late eighties.
It wasn’t all that long ago.
Oh, I said. That’s a shame.
I’m picturing the big white flakes
whirling around, and part of the game
was that you guys could hardly tell
the difference between falling snow
and the big white fuzzy tennis ball
or even the full moon that would seem
to lob over your heads that night,
like a movie or a dream.
It was daytime, you said. Nice story, though.
Sorry, I said. I should leave it there.
I just wanted to be mixed up in it,
the place where your memories are.
THE SURVEYORS
Also, I had a dream, about a year and half ago, that I read a poem called “The Surveyors,” and it was by you. Does this poem exist? I cannot remember any of the words, only that there were all four seasons in it, and that there were nice descriptions of a chain being made taut, the running out of the chain, over and over…
for Matthew Yeager, who wrote me this letter
Dear Matt,
I’m sorry to say “The Surveyors” does not exist,
despite my being haunted by your question
for a long while now, imagining time and again
that the past can change; that the poem is on the list
of things I did once, because you dreamed it of me.
It’s true, I regret, I’ve never put all four
seasons into one poem, though the Shakespeare
sonnet I love most keenly, 73
(“That time of year thou may’st in me behold”),
implies them, and I wish I’d made a gesture
at least of homage. But when I read your letter
in the autumn of my life, I felt no cold;
I heard Vivaldi’s “Spring” scrape violins
over and over, like the running out of chains.
“Over and over, like the running out of chains”—