and another looked like a goose
some days and on other days a white flower.
Many of them appeared only in dreams
or while I was writing a poem
with freezing fingers in the house of a miser.
Others were more like me,
looking out the window in a worn shirt
then later staring into the dark.
None of them ever made the lacrosse team,
but they all made me as proud
as I was on the day they failed to be born.
There is no telling—
maybe tonight or later in the week
another one of my children will not be born.
I see this next one as a baby
lying naked below a ceiling pasted with stars
but only for a little while,
then I see him as a monk in a gray robe
walking back and forth
in the gravel yard of an imaginary monastery,
his head bowed, wondering where I am.
Hangover
If I were crowned emperor this morning,
every child who is playing Marco Polo
in the swimming pool of this motel,
shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth
Marco Polo Marco Polo
would be required to read a biography
of Marco Polo—a long one with fine print—
as well as a history of China and of Venice,
the birthplace of the venerated explorer
Marco Polo Marco Polo
after which each child would be quizzed
by me then executed by drowning
regardless how much they managed
to retain about the glorious life and times of
Marco Polo Marco Polo
Table Talk
Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—
asked if anyone had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.
The differences between these two figures
were much more striking than the differences
between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.
If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,
then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:
the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.
Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.
I think I’ll have the trout, I told the waiter
for it was now my turn to order,
but all through the elegant dinner
I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing
the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian
a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances
to his body, tied to post with rope,
even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.
And I thought of the bullet never reaching
the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.
The theories of Zeno floated above the table
like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,
yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,
and after we ate and lifted our glasses,
we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,
where people usually get where they are going—
where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,
where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,
and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms—
and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,
splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,
that popular subject of European religious painting.
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.
Delivery
Moon in the upper window,
shadow of my crooked pen on the page,
and I find myself wishing that the news of my death
might be delivered not by a dark truck
but by a child’s attempt to draw that truck—
the long rectangular box of the trailer,
some lettering on the side,
then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,
maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,
and puffs of white smoke
issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers
and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky, only smaller.
What She Said
When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,
I was like give me a break.
I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.
I was just similar to give me a break.
As I said, I was like give me a break.
I would love to tell you
how I was able to resemble give me a break
without actually being identical to give me a break,
but all I can say is that I sensed
a similarity between me and give me a break.
And that was close enough
at that point in the evening
even if it meant I would fall short
of standing up from the table and screaming
Give me a break,
for God’s sake will you please give me a break?!
No, for that moment
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows
and the waiter approaching,
I felt the most I could be was like
to a certain degree
give me a break.
Drawing You from Memory
I seem to have forgotten several features
crucial to the doing of this,
for instance, how your lower lip
meets your upper lip besides just being below it,
and what happens at the end of the nose,
how much does it shade the plane of your cheek,
and would even a bit of nostril be visible from this angle?
Chinese eyes, you call them
which could be the difficulty I have
in showing the flash of light in your iris,
and being so far away from you for so long,
I cannot remember what direction
it flows, the deep river of your hair.
But all of this will come together
the minute I see you again at the station,
my notebook and pens packed away,
your face smiling as I cup it in my hands,
or frowning later when we are home
and you are berating me in the kitchen
waving the pages in my face
demanding to know the name of this latest little whore.
Cemetery Ride
My new copper-colored bicycle
is looking pretty fine under a blue sky
as I pedal along one of the sandy paths
in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,
wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons,
the Campbells, the Dunlaps, and the Davenports,
Arthur and Ethel, who outlived him by 11 years
I slow down even more to notice,
but not so much as to fall sideways on the gro
und.
And here’s a guy named Happy Grant
next to his wife Jean in their endless bed.
Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds
a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley.
And good afternoon, Emily Polasek
and to you too, George and Jane Cooper,
facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.
I wish I could take you all for a ride
in my wire basket on this glorious April day,
not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith,
even trickier then Clarence Augustus Coddington.
Then how about just you, Enid Parker?
Would you like to gather up your voluminous skirts
and ride side-saddle on the crossbar
and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?
I’ll even let you ring the silver bell.
But if you’re not ready, I can always ask
Mary Brennan to rise from her long sleep
beneath the swaying grey beards of Spanish moss
and ride with me along these halls of the dead
so I can listen to her strange laughter
as some crows flap overhead in the blue
and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.
Lakeside
As optical illusions go
it was one of the more spectacular,
a cluster of bright stars
appearing to move across the night sky
as if on a secret mission
while, of course, it was the low clouds
that were doing the moving,
scattered over my head by a wind from the east.
And as hard as I looked
I could not get the stars to budge again.
It was like the curious figure
of the duck/rabbit—
why, even paradoxical Wittgenstein
could not find his way back to the rabbit
once he had beheld the bill of the duck.
But which was which?
Were the stars the rabbit
and the blown clouds the duck?
or the other way around?
You’re being ridiculous,
I said to myself,
on the walk back to the house,
but then the correct answer struck me
not like a bolt of lightning,
but more like a heavy bolt of cloth.
My Hero
Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.
Poetry Workshop Held in a Former Cigar Factory in Key West
After our final class, when we disbanded
as the cigar rollers here had disbanded decades ago,
getting up from their benches for the last time
as the man who read to them during their shift
closed his book without marking the page where he left off,
I complimented myself on my restraint.
For never in that sunny white building
did I draw an analogy between cigar-making and poetry.
Not even after I had studied the display case
containing the bladed chaveta, the ring gauge,
and the hand guillotine with its measuring rule
did I suggest that the cigar might be a model for the poem.
Nor did I ever cite the exemplary industry
of those anonymous rollers and cutters—
the best producing 300 cigars in a day
compared to 3 flawless poems in a lifetime if you’re lucky—
who worked the broad leaves of tobacco
into cylinders ready to be held lightly in the hand.
Not once did I imply that tightly rolling an intuition
into a perfectly shaped, hand-made thing
might encourage a reader to remove the brightly colored
encircling band and slip it over her finger
and take the poet as her spouse in a sudden puff of smoke.
No, I kept all of that to myself, until now.
Returning the Pencil to Its Tray
Everything is fine—
the first bits of sun are on
the yellow flowers behind the low wall,
people in cars are on their way to work,
and I will never have to write again.
Just looking around
will suffice from here on in.
Who said I had to always play
the secretary of the interior?
And I am getting good at being blank,
staring at all the zeroes in the air.
It must have been all the time spent
in the kayak this summer
that brought this out,
the yellow one which went
nicely with the pale blue life jacket—
the sudden, tippy
buoyancy of the launch,
then the exertion, striking
into the wind against the short waves,
but the best was drifting back,
the paddle resting athwart the craft,
and me mindless in the middle of time.
Not even that dark cormorant
perched on the No Wake sign,
his narrow head raised
as if he were looking over something,
not even that inquisitive little fellow
could bring me to write another word.
NEW POEMS
The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska
Too bad you weren’t here six months ago,
was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska.
You could have seen the astonishing spectacle
of the sandhill cranes, thousands of them
feeding and even dancing on the shores of the Platte River.
There was no point in pointing out
the impossibility of my being there then
because I happened to be somewhere else,
so I nodded and put on a look of mild disappointment
if only to be part of the commiseration.
It was the same look I remember wearing
about six months ago in Georgia
when I was told that I had just missed
the spectacular annual outburst of azaleas,
brilliant against the green backdrop of spring
and the same in Vermont six months before that
when I arrived shortly after
the magnificent foliage had gloriously peaked,
Mother Nature, as she is called,
having touched the hills with her many-colored brush,
a phenomenon that occurs, like the others,
around the same time every year when I am apparently off
in another state, stuck in a motel lobby
with the local paper and a styrofoam cup of coffee,
busily missing God knows what.
Foundling
How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,
jotting down little things,
noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,
then wondering what will become of me,
and finally to work alone under a lamp
as if everything depended on this,
groping blindly down a page,
like someone lost in a forest.
And to think it all began one night
on the steps of a nunnery
where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,
which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,
staring into the turbulent winter sky,
too young to wonder about anything
including my recent abandonment—
but it was there that I committed
my fi
rst act of self-expression,
sticking out my infant tongue
and receiving in return (I can see it now)
a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.
Catholicism
There’s a possum who appears here at odd times,
often walking up the path to the house
in the middle of the day like a little ghost
with a long tail and a blank expression on his face.
He likes to slip behind the woodpile,
but sometimes he gets so close to the window
where I am standing with a glass in my hand
that I start to review my sins, systematically
going from one commandment to the next.
What is it about him that causes me
to begin an examination of conscience,
calling to mind my failings in this time of reflection?
It could just be the twitching of the tail
and that white face, but his slow priestly pace
also makes a contribution, as do the tiny paws,
more like hands, really, with opposable thumbs
able to carry a nut or dig a hole in the earth
or lift a chalice above his head
or even deliver a document,
I am thinking as he nears the back door,
not merely a subpoena but an order
of excommunication with my name and a date
Aimless Love Page 8