Is one thing.
What does it mean to you,
Amber menagerie swept from his sun-struck and amber hands?
Giorgio Vasari told it first,
and told us this one as well:
A wine grower from Belvedere
Found an uncommon lizard and gave it to Leonardo
Who made wings for it out of the skins
Of other lizards,
and filled the wings with mercury
Which caused them to wave and quiver
Whenever the lizard moved.
He made eyes, a beard and two homs
In the same way, tamed it, and kept it in a large box
To terrify his friends.
His games were the pure games of children,
Asking for nothing but artifice, beauty and fear.
—20 October 1984
—Function is form, form function back here where the fruit trees
Strip to November’s music,
And the black cat and the tortoiseshell cat
crouch and slink,
Crouch and slink toward something I can’t see
But hear the occasional fateful rustlings of,
Where the last tomatoes seep
from their red skins through the red dirt,
And sweet woodruff holds up its smooth gray sticks
Like a room full of boys
all wanting to be excused at the same time:
The song of white lights and power boats,
the sails of August and late July devolve
To simple description in the end,
Something about a dark suture
Across the lawn,
something about the way the day snips
It open and closes it
When what-comes-out has come out
and burns hard in its vacancy,
Emerging elsewhere restructured and restrung,
Like a tall cloud that all the rain has fallen out of.
The last warm wind of summer
shines in the dogwood trees
Across the street, flamingoing berries and cupped leaves
That wait to be cracked like lice
Between winter’s fingernails.
The season rusts to these odd stains
And melodramatic stutterings
In the bare spots of the yard, in the gutter angles
Brimming with crisp leftovers,
and gulled blooms in the rhododendrons,
Veneer, like a hard wax, of nothing on everything.
—3 November 1984
Night Journal
—I think of Issa, a man of few words:
The world of dew
Is the world of dew.
And yet …
And yet …
—Three words contain
all that we know for sure of the next life
Or the last one: Close your eyes.
Everything else is gossip,
false mirrors, trick windows
Flashing like Dutch glass
In the undiminishable sun.
—I write it down in visible ink,
Black words that disappear when held up to the light—
I write it down
not to remember but to forget,
Words like thousands of pieces of shot film
exposed to the sun.
I never see anything but the ground.
—Everyone wants to tell his story.
The Chinese say we live in the world of the 10,000 things,
Each of the 10,000 things
crying out to us
Precisely nothing,
A silence whose tune we’ve come to understand,
Words like birthmarks,
embolic sunsets drying behind the tongue.
If we were as eloquent,
If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood
does,
Its votive candles
phosphorous and articulate in the green haze
Of spring, surely something would hear us.
—Even a chip of beauty
is beauty intractable in the mind,
Words the color of wind
Moving across the fields there
wind-addled and wind-sprung,
Abstracted as water glints,
The fields lion-colored and rope-colored,
As in a picture of Paradise,
the bodies languishing over the sky
Trailing their dark identities
That drift off and sieve away to the nothingness
Behind them
moving across the fields there
As words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.
—Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghosts
Along the way,
their destinations bereft
In a rub of brightness unending:
How distant everything always is,
and yet how close,
Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees.
—Birds sing an atonal row
unsyncopated
From tree to tree,
dew chants
Whose songs have no words
from tree to tree
When night puts her dark lens in,
One on this limb, two others back there.
—Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.
They start here, they finish here
No matter how high they rise—
my judgment is that I know this
And never love anything hard enough
That would stamp me
and sink me suddenly into bliss.
A Journal of the Year of the Ox
—January,
the dragon maple sunk in its bones,
The sky gray gouache and impediment.
Pity the poor pilgrim, the setter-forth,
Under a sweep so sure,
pity his going up and his going down.
Each year I remember less.
This past year it’s been
the Long Island of the Holston
And all its keening wires
in a west wind that seemed to blow constantly,
Lisping the sins of the Cherokee.
How shall we hold on, when everything bright falls away?
How shall we know what calls us
when what’s past remains what’s past
And unredeemed, the crystal
And wavering coefficient of what’s ahead?
Thursday, purgatorial Thursday,
The Blue Ridge etched in smoke
through the leaded panes of the oak trees,
There, then not there,
A lone squirrel running the power line,
neck bowed like a tiny buffalo:
The Long Island of the Holston,
sacred refuge ground
Of the Cherokee Nation:
nothing was ever killed there.
I used to cross it twice whenever I drove to the golf course.
Nobody tells you anything.
The ghost of Dragging Canoe
settles like snowflakes on the limbs
Of the river bushes, a cold, white skin
That bleeds when it breaks.
Everyone wants to touch its hem
Now that it’s fallen, everyone wants to see its face.
What sifts us down through a blade-change
stays hidden from us,
But sifts us the same,
Scores us and alters us utterly:
From somewhere inside and somewhere outside, it smooths us
down.
Here’s your Spook, Indaco said,
sliding the imitation Sandeman’s sherry figurine
Toward me along the bar, memento
And laughingstock of the 163rd,
stamped out by the thousands
At Nove, two hours up the road.
It’s usually a ceremony, all your colleagues
And fellow officers standing absurdly about
Happy you’re leaving, and you too,
everyone half drunk
And hilarious in his cordovan shoes.
But not this time, Indaco wadding the paper sack up,
He and someone whose name I can’t call back
letting me go for good, and glad of it:
I’d lost one document, I wore my hair long, I burned it by accident
And no one ever forgot.
Such small failures, such sleeveless oblivions
We passed through
trying to get our lives to fit right
In what was available from day to day,
And art,
and then the obvious end of art, that grace
Beyond its reach
I’d see each night as I thumbed the Berensons
And argued with Hobart and Schneeman
that what’s outside
The picture is more important than what’s in.
They didn’t agree any more than Indaco had,
All of us hungering after righteousness
Like Paul Cézanne, we thought, in his constancy.
Or Aeneas with the golden bough
sweeping through Hell.
O we were luminous in our ignorance O we were true.
Form comes from form, it’s said:
nothing is ever ended,
A spilling like shook glass in the air,
Water over water,
flame out of flame,
Whatever we can’t see, whatever we can’t touch,
unfixed and shining …
And today I remember nothing.
The sky is a wrung-out, China blue
and hides no meanings.
The trees have a pewter tinge and hide no meanings.
All of it hustles over me like a wind
and reminds me of nothing.
Nobody rises out of the ground in a gold mist.
Nobody slides like an acrobat
out of the endless atmosphere.
Nobody touches my face
Or hand.
Not a word is said that reminds me of anything
And O it is cold now by the fake Etruscan urn
And six miniature box bushes
nobody stands beside
In the real wind tightening its scarf
Around the white throats
of everyone who is not here.
The cold, almost solid, lies
Like snow outside
in the tufted spikes of the seed grass
And footprints we didn’t leave
That cross the driveway and disappear up the front steps.
It’s not the darkness we die of, as someone said,
seamless and shut tight
As water we warm up and rock in,
But cold, the cold with its quartz teeth
And fingernails
that wears us away, wears us away
Into an afterthought.
Or a glint
Down there by the dwarf spruce and the squirrel run.
Or one of the absences who lips at the edge of understanding
Wherever I turn,
as pursed and glittering as a kiss.
—20 January 1985
—The sunset, Mannerist clouds
just shy of the Blue Ridge
Gainsay the age before they lose their blush
In the rising coagulation of five o’clock.
Two dark, unidentifiable birds
swoop and climb
Out of the picture, the white-slatted, red-roofed Munch house
Gathering light as the evening begins to clot.
The trees dissolve in their plenitude
into a dark forest
And streetlights come on to stare like praying mantises down on us.
Next morning all’s inside out,
the winter trees with their nervous systems
Snatched up and sparkless against the sky.
Light lies without desire on the black wires
And the white wires,
the dead leaves sing like gnats,
Rising and settling back when the wind comes.
How does one deal with what is always falling away,
Returning diminished with each turn?
The grass knows, stunned in its lockjaw bed,
but it won’t tell.
—30 January 1985
—We stand at the green gates,
substitutes for the unseen
Rising like water inside our bodies,
Stand-ins against the invisible:
It’s the blank sky of the page
—not the words it’s never the words—
That backgrounds our lives:
It’s you always you and not your new suit
That elicits solicitude:
The unknown repeats us, and quickens our in-between.
Winter is like that—abstract,
flat planes and slashes,
The Blue Ridge like a worm’s back
Straight ahead,
one skewed hump and then a smooth one,
Hallelujah of tree branches and telephone poles
In front, and a house or two and a nurse:
February music,
high notes and a thin line strung
For us to cleave to, black notes
Someone is humming we haven’t been introduced to:
Like the stone inside a rock,
the stillness of form is the center of everything,
Inalterable, always at ease.
—7 February 1985
—The rain, in its white disguise,
has nothing to say to the wind
That carries it, whose shoulders
It slips from giving no signal, aimlessly, one drop
At a time, no word
Or gesture to what has carried it all this way for nothing.
This is the disappearance we all dreamed of when young,
Without apology, tougher than water, no word
To anyone,
disguised as ourselves
And unrecognizable, unique
And indistinguishable from what we disappeared into.
—13 February 1985
—One, one and by one we all slip into the landscape,
Under the muddy patches,
locked in the frozen bud
Of the down-leafed rhododendron,
Or blurred in the echoing white of a rabbit’s tail
Chalked on the winter’s dark
in the back yard or the driveway.
One, one and by one we all sift to a difference
And cry out if one of our branches snaps
or our bark is cut.
The winter sunlight scours us,
The winter wind is our comfort and consolation.
We settle into our ruin
One, one and by one as we slip from clear rags into feathery skin
Or juice-in-the-ground, pooled
And biding its time
backwashed under the slick peach tree.
One, one and by one thrust up by the creek bank,
Huddled in spongy colonies,
longing to be listened to.
Here I am, here I am, we all say,
I’m back,
Rustle and wave, chatter and spring
Up to the air, the sweet air.
Hardened around the woodpecker’s hole, under his down,
We all slip into the landscape, one, one and by one.
—25 February 1985
—Fever and ooze, fever and ooze:
Pronoun by pronoun, verb by irregular verb,
Winter grows great with spring: March:
already something has let loose
Deep in the hidden undersprings
Of the year, looking for some way out: moss sings
At the threshold, tongues wag
down the secret valleys and dark draws
Under the sun-stunned grass:
>
What can’t stop comes on, mewling like blood-rush in the ear,
Balancing over the sunken world:
fever and ooze, fever and ooze.
—9 March 1985
—I used to sit on one of the benches along the Adige
In a small park up-river from S. Anastasia
from time to time
When I lived in Verona,
the Roman theater like lapped wings
On some seabird across the water
Unable to rise, half folded, half turned in the pocked air
The river spray threw up
on me and on it.
Catullus’s seat—VALERI—was carved on top of the left-hand wing.
I used to try to imagine—delicious impossibility—
What it must have been like to be him,
his vowels and consonants
The color of bee wings hived in the bee-colored afternoons.
An iron-spiked and barbed-wire jut-out and overhang loomed
just to my left.
I always sat as close to it as I could.
I remember a woman I saw there once,
in March,
The daylight starting to shake its hair out like torch flames
Across the river,
the season poised like a veiled bride,
White foot in its golden shoe
Beating the ground, full of desire, white foot at the white
threshold.
She stared at the conched hillside
as though the season became her,
As though a threshold were opening
Somewhere inside her, no woman more beautiful than she was,
No song more insistent than the beat of that white foot,
As she stepped over,
full of desire,
Her golden shoe like a sun in the day’s deep chamber.
Zone Journals Page 3