who would be grateful to have this apple,
and others who might find it in their hearts
to kill me before slipping it into a pocket.
And I considered another slice
of the world’s population, too,
those who are shielded from anything
as offensive as a slightly imperfect apple.
Then I took a second bite, a big one,
and pitched what was left
over the tall hedges hoping to hit on the head
a murderer or one of the filthy rich out for a stroll.
Elusive
As I was wandering the city this morning
working on my impression of Michael Caine,
I began to think about her again—
which makes it sound as if she were far away
or lost in the past or possibly both.
But I was with her only an hour ago,
and later I will sit in the kitchen
and watch her hair hiding her face
as she stirs some onions and butter in a skillet
and I pour us a glass of frosty white wine.
Still, she has been known to vanish
as if in a mist as we walk past
a row of store windows, or she will disappear
behind a hedge or into a side room at a party.
And often no aisle of the supermarket reveals her.
Like the fox, she is nowhere and everywhere,
a tail of fire out of the corner of my eye,
one of the corners she likes to turn
just as the streetlights are coming on
when I am searching for her in the evening crowd.
Would she and Michael Caine hit it off,
I wondered as I emerged from an alley
only to see her staring at me from a spot on a public bench.
Looking for a Friend in a Crowd of Arriving Passengers: A Sonnet
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
Not John Whalen.
John Whalen.
Digging
It seems whenever I dig in the woods
on the slope behind this house
I unearth some object from the past—
a shard of crockery or a bottle with its stopper missing,
sometimes a piece of metal, maybe handled
by the dairy farmer who built this house
over a century and a half ago
as civil war waged unabated to the south.
So it’s never a surprise
when the shovel-tip hits a rusted bolt,
or a glass knob from a drawer—
little hands waving from the past.
And today, it’s a buried toy,
a little car with a dent in the roof
and enough flecks of paint to tell it was blue.
Shrouded in a towel, the body of our cat
lies nearby on the ground where I settled her
in the mottled light of the summer trees,
and I still have to widen the hole
and deepen it for her by at least another foot,
but not before I stop for a moment
with the once-blue car idling in my palm,
to imagine the boy who grew up here
and to see that two of the crusted wheels still spin.
Central Park
It’s hard to describe how that day in the park
was altered when I stopped to read
an official sign I came across near the great carousel,
my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose.
As the carousel turned in the background,
all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses
rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope,
I was learning how the huge thing
was first designed to be powered
by a blind mule, as it turned out,
strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen
room directly below the merry turning of the carousel.
The sky did not darken with this news
nor did a general silence fall on the strollers
or the ball players on the green fields.
No one even paused to look my way,
though I must have looked terrible
as I stood there filling with sympathy
not so much for the harnessed beast
tediously making its rounds,
but instead for the blind mule within me
always circling in the dark—
the mule who makes me turn when my name is called
or causes me to nod with a wooden gaze
or sit doing nothing on a bench in the shape of a swan.
Somewhere, there must still be a door
to that underground room,
the lock rusted shut, the iron key misplaced,
last year’s leaves piled up against the sill,
and inside, a trace of straw on the floor,
a whiff of manure, and maybe a forgotten bit
or a bridle hanging from a hook in the dark.
Poor blind beast, I sang softly as I left the park,
poor blind me, poor blind earth turning blindly on its side.
Osprey
Oh, large brown, thickly feathered creature
with a distinctive white head,
you, perched on the top branch
of a tree near the lake shore,
as soon as I guide this boat back to the dock
and walk up the grassy path to the house,
before I unzip my windbreaker
and lift the binoculars from around my neck,
before I wash the gasoline from my hands,
before I tell anyone I’m back,
and before I hang the ignition key on its nail,
or pour myself a drink—
I’m thinking a vodka soda with lemon—
I will look you up in my
illustrated guide to North American birds
and I promise I will learn what you are called.
Here and There
I feel nothing this morning
except the low hum of the ego,
a constant, shameless sound behind the rib cage.
I even keep forgetting my friend in surgery
at this very hour.
In other words, a perfect time to write
about clouds rolling in after a week of sun
and a woman beating laundry on a rock
in front of her house overlooking the sea—
all of which I am making up—
the clouds, the house, the woman, even the laundry.
Or take the lights strung in a harbor
that I once saw from the bow of a sailboat,
which seemed unreal at the time and more unreal now.
Even if I were there again at the ship’s railing
as I am sitting here in a lawn chair, who would believe it?
Vast maple tree above me, are you really there?
and you, open cellar door,
and you, vast sky with sun and a fading contrail—
no more real than the pretend city
where she lies now under the investigating lights,
an imaginary surgeon busy
breaking into the vault of her phantom skull.
Villanelle
The first line will not go away
though the middle ones will disappear,
and the third, like the first, is bound to get more play.
Examples of this type are written every day,
and whether uplifting or drear,
that first line will just not go away.
It seems some lines have the right of way.
It’s their job to reappear,
for example, the third, designed to get more play.
Whether you squawk like an African Grey
or sing sweetly to the inner ear,
the line you wrote first will just not go away.
You may compose all night and day
under a bare lightbulb or a crystal chandelier,
but line number three must get more play.
How can a poet hope to go wildly astray
or sing out like a romantic gondolier
when the first line will not go away
and the third always has the final say?
Lines Written at Flying Point Beach
or at least in the general vicinity
of Flying Point Beach,
certainly closer than I normally am
to that beach where the ocean
crests the dunes at high tide
spilling tons of new salt water into Mecox Bay,
and probably closer to Flying Point Beach
than you are right now
or I happen to be as you read this.
But how close do I really need to be
to Flying Point Beach
or to any beach in order to write these lines?
Oh, Flying Point Beach,
I love all three words in your name,
not to mention the deep, white sand
and the shorebirds on their thin legs
facing into the wind
along that low stretch between the ocean and the bay.
How satisfying it is to be
even within bicycling distance of you,
though it’s dangerous to ride at the edge of these roads.
Thoreau had his cabin near a pond.
Virginia Woolf stood on the shore of the River Ouse,
and here I am writing all this down
not very far at all—maybe twenty minutes by taxi
if the driver ever manages to find this place—
from the many natural wonders of Flying Point Beach.
Lines Written in a Garden by a Cottage in Herefordshire
No, this time I’m not kidding around.
There’s some half-shattered outdoor furniture,
then crowds of dianthus and pink hydrangeas,
honeysuckle going wild over the bright blue door,
and zinc buckets and coal carriers overflowing
with pansies, lavender, and some kind of soft fern—
just the right combination of growth and neglect.
And you don’t have to wish for a brick wall,
a gravel path or a leaning disused shed
to complete the picture because they’re all right here
as well as a concrete statue of a maiden
holding a jug, one breast exposed, overgrown with ivy.
The only thing you might not think of,
being in another place so far away,
is this one bee who just refused to wait
for all the morning glories to unfurl in the early sun,
and instead, pushed her way into the white flute
of a blossom, disappearing for a moment
before she flew off in her distinctive gold
and black uniform like a player on a team,
heading over the hedge toward a core of honey.
American Airlines #371
Pardon my benevolence,
but given the illusion that my fellow passengers and I
are now on our way to glory,
rising over this kingdom of clouds
(airy citadels! unnamable goings-on within!)
and at well over 500 miles per hour,
which would get you to work in under one second,
I wish to forgive the man next to me
who so annoyed me before the wine started arriving
by turning each page of his newspaper
with a kind of crisp, military snap,
and the same goes for that howling infant,
and for the child in the row behind me
who persisted in hitting that F above high C
that all of her kind know perfectly how to hit
while rhythmically kicking the back of my seat.
Yes, I have softened and been rendered
even grateful by the ministrations of Eva,
uniformed wine bearer in the sky,
and if we are not exactly being conveyed to Paradise,
at least we are vectoring across the continent
to Los Angeles—orange tree in the backyard,
girl on a motorcycle roaring down Venice Boulevard.
And eventually we will begin our final descent
(final descent! I want to shout to Eva)
into the city of a million angels,
where the world might terminate or begin afresh again,
which is how I tend to feel almost every day—
life’s end just around another corner or two,
yet out the morning window
the thrust of a new blossom from that bush
whose colorful name I can never remember.
Keats: or How I Got My Negative Capability Back
I remember the first time I realized
how lacking I was in Negative Capability.
It was on a long slope of lawn
next to a turreted stone building
that housed the shenanigans
of the department of English.
Some brown birds were pecking in the grass,
and yet here I was, a nineteen year old
too concerned with my clothes
and the nervous mystery of girls
to identify with this group of common sparrows
another student was pointing to,
let alone the nightingale we had read about,
invisible in the woods of England.
I was so short on empathy in those days
the only Negative Capability I could have possessed
would be negative Negative Capability,
which I could have turned into a positive
had Keats not so firmly determined
that regular Negative Capability was already a positive thing.
All those birds are surely dead by now,
no more hopping around
in the grass of Massachusetts for them,
but I’m still here this afternoon
looking at a dog asleep half under the porch,
an old brown mongrel with a hoary muzzle,
his paws twitching so frantically
I can even see what he is dreaming
as the sun helps itself down the sky.
Yes, I am watching him jump a stone wall
in pursuit of a darting rabbit—
I’m way up on a high branch
of a tree that is swaying in the wind of his dream.
The Music of the Spheres
The woman on the radio
who was lodging the old complaint
that her husband never listens to her
reminded me of the music of the spheres,
that chord of seven notes,
one for each of the visible planets,
which has been sounding
since the beginning of the universe,
and which we can never hear,
according to Pythagoras
because we hear it all the time
so it sounds the same as silence.
But let’s say the needle were lifted
from the spinning grooves
of those celestial orbs—
then people would stop
on the streets and look up,
and others would stop in the fields
and hikers would stop in the woods
and look this way and that
as if they were hearing something
for the first time,
and that husband would lower
the newspaper from his face
look at his wife
who has been standing in the doorway
and ask Did you just say something, dear?
Orient
You are turning me
like someone turning a globe in her hand,
and yes, I have another side
like a China no one,
not even me, has ever seen.
So describe to me what’s there,
say what you are looking at
and I will close my eyes
so I can see it too,
the oxcarts and all the lively flags.
I love the sound of your voice
like a little saxophone
telling me what I could never know
unless I dug a hole all the way down
through the core of my self.
Heraclitus on Vacation
It is possible to stick your foot
into the same swimming pool twice,
dive, or even cannonball
into the deep or shallow end
as many times as you like
depending on how much you had to drink.
Ode to a Desk Lamp
Oh faithful light, under which I have written
and read for all these decades,
flying saucer with your underbelly softly aglow,
rising on a stem from a heavy metal base,
lamp I rescued from my old girlfriend’s mother,
who was about to toss you
from her condo on a bluff
overlooking the ruffled Pacific.
Aimless Love Page 10