written in fine Italian ink
and signed with a flourish of the papal sash.
Carrara
The Tyrrhenian Sea was bouncing off to the right
as we headed south down the coast,
and to the left rose the Apennine mountains,
some with their faces quarried away,
from where heavy blocks of white marble
had been cut and carried down
and stacked in rows in yards along the highway.
Is anyone hiding within? I wondered,
as we passed a little Fiat
and were passed in turn by a green Lamborghini,
hiding the way Pinocchio hid inside a log—
maybe a David who goes by another name,
or an anonymous girl caught dancing,
or any other figure encased and yet to be revealed.
Are you in there, Dawn with your sunburst halo,
concealed from the freshly sharpened chisel?
How about you, Spirit of Revolution
waving a flag of marble
and crushing the serpent of Tyranny with one foot?
Or is nobody home, no one barely breathing
in the heavy darkness of the pure white stone?
Soon, we were standing on a wide beach
where the body of Shelley had floated ashore,
and where all those questions washed away—
though later I pictured a sculptor wandering
among the blocks, hands clasped behind his back,
then deciding it was time to get to work
on a towering likeness of his favorite English poet.
Report from the Subtropics
For one thing, there’s no more snow
to watch from an evening window,
and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house
so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,
and once inside, no iron stove like an old woman
waiting to devour her early dinner of wood.
No hexagrams of frost to study
on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.
No black sweater to pull over my head
while I wait for the coffee to brew.
Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes—
shorts and a tee shirt with the name of a band
lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody.
The sun never fails to arrive early
and refuses to leave the party
even after I go from room to room,
turning out all the lights, and making a face.
And the birds with those long white necks?
All they do is swivel their heads
keeping an eye on me as I walk along,
as if they all knew my password
and the name of the little town where I was born.
Lesson for the Day
I didn’t know Marianne Moore
had written a little ode to a steam roller
until this morning. She has it walking
back and forth over the particles it has crushed.
She must have watched a lot of cartoons.
She also compares it to a butterfly unflatteringly.
I like it better when she speaks to a snail.
It’s pleasurable to picture her in a garden
bending forward in her dated black clothes
and her tilted black triangle of a hat,
as she seriously addresses the fellow curled in its shell.
But when I see her standing before the big drum
of a steam roller and saying not very nice things,
only one eventuality ever comes to mind,
for I, too, am a serious student of cartoons.
And no one wants to avoid seeing
a flattened Marianne Moore hanging out to dry
on a clothesline or propped up
as a display in a store window more than I.
Promenade
As much as these erratic clouds keep sweeping
this way and that over the roof
of this blue house bordered by hedges and fruit trees,
and as much as the world continues to run
in all directions with its head in its hands,
there is one particular robin who appears
every morning on a section of lawn
by the front door with such regularity
he could be a lighthouse keeper or a clock maker.
He could be Immanuel Kant were he not so small
and feathered, whom the citizens set their watches by
as he walked through town with his hair curled.
It takes a lot to startle this bird—
only a hand clap will make him rise
to one of the low branches of the nearby apple tree.
So I am wondering if he would allow me
to slip a small collar around his neck
and take him for a walk, first around the house
then later, when more trust has been gained,
into town where we would pass the locals
with their children and orthodox dogs in tow,
and I would hold the robin lightly by a string
as we waited to cross the street, then he would hop
off the curb and off we would go
not caring about what people were saying
even when we stopped at a store front
to admire our strange reflections in the window.
The Unfortunate Traveler
Because I was off to France, I packed
my camera along with my shaving kit,
some colorful boxer shorts, and a sweater with a zipper,
but every time I tried to take a picture
of a bridge, a famous plaza,
or the bronze equestrian statue of a general,
there was a woman standing in front of me
taking a picture of the very same thing,
or the odd pedestrian blocked my view,
someone or something always getting between me
and the flying buttress, the river boat,
a bright café awning, an unexpected pillar.
So into the little door of the lens
came not the kiosk or the altarpiece.
No fresco or baptistry slipped by the quick shutter.
Instead, my memories of that glorious summer
of my youth are awakened now,
like an ember fanned into brightness,
by a shoulder, the back of a raincoat,
a wide hat or towering hairdo–
lost time miraculously recovered
by the buttons on a gendarme’s coat
and my favorite,
the palm of that vigilant guard at the Louvre.
Drinking Alone
after Li Po
This is not after Li Po
the way the state is after me
for neglecting to pay all my taxes,
nor the way I am after
the woman in front of me
on the long line at the post office.
Li Po, I am not saying
“After you”
as I stand holding open
one of the heavy glass doors
that divide the centuries
in a long corridor of glass doors.
No, the only way this is after you
is in the way they say
it’s just one thing after another,
like the way I will pause
to raise a glass of wine to you
after I finish writing this poem.
So let me get back
to sitting in the wind alone
among the pines with a pencil in my hand.
After all, you had your turn,
and mine will soon be done
then someone else will sit here after me.
To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl
Do you realize that if you had started
building
the Parthenon on the day you were born
you would be all done in only one more year?
Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone,
so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.
You are loved simply for being yourself.
But did you know that at your age Judy Garland
was pulling down $150,000 a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?
No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life
after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks.
For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey
was Queen of England when she was only fifteen,
but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,
four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster.
But of course that was in Austria at the height
of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you are special by just being you,
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.
Animal Behavior
Among the animals who avoid danger
just by being still,
the heron is a favorite example,
indistinguishable from the reeds
he stands in, thin and gray, at the water’s edge.
Then there is the snowy egret
who must think he can make
his white question mark of a body
just vanish from the lake
by being as motionless as can be.
And when it comes to people
there’s the quiet man at the bar
who lifts his eyes only now and then
as well as the girl in the summer dress
who must pretend she is not here.
And who am I to talk,
the last flamingo to leave the party,
good at avoiding danger so far,
away from any cove or shore,
conspicuous as the drink I carry out the door.
Lincoln
Whatever it was that just flew out of my head
did not leave a trace,
not a contrail in the sky
not a footprint in a field of new snow.
The last thing I remember
is reading a sentence
in a long biography of Abraham Lincoln,
something about his face being so ugly
it became beautiful
in the eyes of Walt Whitman,
but there was something after
that made me fold down the corner
of the page and close the book—
so much I cannot think of today,
a team of white birds lifting off a shoreline
and disappearing into the sun.
Note to Antonín Dvorák
Maestro, I am writing to tell you
that your serenade in D minor
with its stretches of martial confidence
then some sweet wanderings of the woodwinds
has not really brought me to the edge of anything,
yet compared to the inane movie
being shown on this long flight to Seattle,
listening to your music has made me a better
person than that other self,
so slack of jaw and fishy of stare,
who would have watched the movie to its end
oblivious to the startling 33,000 feet of air below.
I never visited your tomb in Prague
or even the site of your former apartment
on East 17th Street before it was demolished
to make room for a hospital for sufferers from AIDS.
So I am thanking you here for the lift
of a tune to ride with over the clouds
high above towns bisected by roads,
and fields with their plowed circles.
You remind me of a canary
I once stared at for an unusually long time
and the communion that developed between us
as we gazed into and out of the unhooded cage.
Time well spent, I thought,
as the bird broke it off and began to peck
at the image of his twin in a little oval mirror,
leaving me to return to the many ways
we have concocted to waste our lives—
ten thousand at least, wouldn’t you say,
Maestro, with your baton, your furious pencil,
and the closet where all your dark clothes used to hang.
Sunday Walk
Not only colorful beds of flowers
ruffled today by a breeze off the lake
but the ruffled surface of the lake itself,
and later a boathouse and an oak tree
so old its heavy limbs rested on the ground.
And I don’t want to leave out
the uniformed campus guard I saw studying
a map of the campus without a student in sight.
Closer to town, shops under awnings
and several churches,
one topped with a burnished cross,
another announcing a sermon:
“What You Can Take with You.”
So many odd things to see
but mostly it’s the sun at its apex
inscribing little circles,
little haloes at the top of the sky,
and the freshening breeze,
the nowhere it came from
and the nowhere it is headed,
every leaf wavering, each branch bowed,
and what can I do, I heard myself asking,
with all this evidence of something,
me without a candle, wafer, or a rug,
not even a compass to tell me which way to face.
The Suggestion Box
It all began fairly early in the day
at the coffee shop as it turned out
when the usual waitress said
I’ll bet you’re going to write a poem about this
after she had knocked a cup of coffee into my lap.
Then later in the morning I was told
by a student that I should write a poem
about the fire drill that was going on
as we all stood on the lawn outside our building.
In the afternoon a woman I barely knew
said you could write a poem about that,
pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead.
And if all that were not enough,
a friend turned to me as we walked past
a man whose face was covered with tattoos
and said, I see a poem coming!
Why is everyone being so helpful?
I wondered that evening by the shore of a lake.
Maybe I should write a poem
about all the people who think
they know what I should be writing poems about.
It was just then in the fading light that I spotted
a pair of ducks emerging
from a cluster of reeds to paddle out to open water,
the female glancing back over her russet shoulder
just in time to see me searching my pockets for a pen.
I knew it, she quacked, with a bit of a brogue.
But who can blame you for following your heart?
she went on.
Now, go write
a lovely poem about me and the mister.
Cheerios
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.
Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
for today, the newspaper announced,
was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.
Already I could hear them whispering
behind my stooped and threadbare back,
Why that dude’s older than Cheerios
the way they used to say
Why that’s as old as the hills,
only the hills are much older than Cheerios
or any American breakfast cereal,
and more noble and enduring are the hills,
I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.
Quandary
I was a little disappointed
in the apple I lifted from a bowl of fruit
and bit into on the way out the door,
fuzzy on the inside and lacking the snap of the ripe.
Yesterday it was probably perfect,
I figured, as I held it out before me,
soft red apple bearing my tooth marks,
as if I were contemplating the bust of Aristotle.
I considered all the people
Aimless Love Page 9