Has anyone been with me longer?
me without siblings or children,
you with your kindly 60 watt frosted bulb,
you who have not died like others I knew,
you nestled in a bath towel
on the floorboards of the car
as I backed it down the driveway of my marriage
and steered east then south down the two-then four-lane roads.
So may nights like this one,
me sleepless, you gazing down on the page
and now on a crystal rock, a tiny figure of a pig,
and an orchid dying in its blue China pot.
But that is more than enough
of the sad drapery of the past as I hold the present
between two fingers and the thumb
and a blue train whistles in the distance.
It’s time to saddle up, partner,
once I unplug your tail from the socket,
time to ride out west,
far from the gaucheries of men,
the inconstancy of women,
and the rowdy mortality of them all,
until we find a grove of trees near a river—
just you and me with our bedrolls under a scattering of stars.
Irish Poetry
That morning under a pale hood of sky
I heard the unambiguous scrape of spackling
against the side of our wickered, penitential house.
The day mirled and clabbered
in the thick, stony light,
and the rooks’ feathered narling
astounded the salt waves, the plush arm of coast.
I carried my bucket past the forked
coercion of a tree, up toward
the pious and nictitating preeminence of a school,
hunkered there in its gully of learning.
But only later, as I stood before a wash-stand
and gaunt, phosphorescent heifers
swam purposefully beyond these windows
did the whorled and sparky gib of the indefinite
manage to whorl me into knowledge.
Then, I heard the ghost-clink of milk bottle
on the rough threshold
and understood the meadow-bells
that trembled over a nimbus of ragwort—
the whole afternoon lambent, corrugated, puddle-mad.
After the Funeral
When you told me you needed a drink-drink
and not just a drink like a drink of water,
I steered you by the elbow into a corner bar,
which turned out to be a real bar-bar,
dim and nearly empty with little tables in the back
where we drank and agreed that the funeral
was a real funeral-funeral complete with a Mass,
incense, and tons of eulogies.
You know, I always considered Tom a real
friend-friend, you said, lifting your drink-drink
to your lips, and I agreed that Tom
was much more than just an ordinary friend.
We also concurred that Angela’s black dress
was elegant but not like elegant-elegant,
just elegant enough. And a few hours later
when the bartender brought yet another round
of whiskeys to our table in the corner
we recognized by his apron and his mighty girth
that he was more than just a bartender.
A true bartender-bartender was what he was
we decided, with a respectful clink-clink
of our drink-drinks, amber in a chink of afternoon light.
Best Fall
was what we called a game we played
which had nothing to do
with a favorite autumn,
somebody else’s gorgeous reds and yellows.
no, eleven years old
all we wanted was to be shot
as we charged sacrificially into the fire
of the shooter lying prone behind a hedge
or even better, to be that shooter
and pick off the others
as they charged the gun
each one stopping in his young tracks
to writhe and twist
aping the contortions of death
from the movies,
clutching our bleeding hearts
holding ourselves
as we lifted—a moment of ballet—
into the air then tumbled
into the grass behind our houses.
and whoever invented that game
made sure it would have
no ending,
for the one who was awarded
best fall by the shooter
got to be the next shooter
and so it went, shooting and being shot,
tearing at our cowboy shirts
trying our best
to make death look good
until it got almost dark
and our mothers called us in.
France
You and your frozen banana,
you and your crème brûlée.
Can’t we just skip dessert
and go back to the Hotel d’Orsay?
You and your apple tart
and your plates of profiteroles.
Can’t we just ask for the check?
Can’t you hear Time’s mortal call?
Why linger here at the table
stuffing ourselves with sweets
when all the true pleasures await us
in room trois cent quarante-huit?
All Eyes
Just because I’m dead now doesn’t mean
I don’t exist anymore.
All those eulogies and the obituary
in the corner of the newspaper
have made me feel more vibrant than ever.
I’m here in some fashion,
maybe like a gust of wind
that disturbs the upper leaves,
or blows a hat around a corner,
or disperses a little cloud of mayflies over a stream.
What I like best about this
is you realizing you can no longer
get away with things the way you used to
when it would be ten o’clock at night
and I wouldn’t know where you were.
I’m all ears, you liked to say
whenever you couldn’t bother listening.
And now you know that I’m all eyes,
looking in every direction,
and a special eye is always trained on you.
Rome in June
There was a lot to notice that morning
in the Church of Saint Dorothy, virgin martyr—
a statue of Mary with a halo of electric lights,
a faded painting of a saint in flight,
Joseph of Copertino, as it turned out,
and an illustration above a side altar
bearing the title “The Musical Ecstasy of St. Francis.”
But what struck me in a special way
like a pebble striking the forehead
was the realization that the simple design
running up the interior of the church’s dome
was identical to the design on the ceiling
of the room by the Spanish Steps
where Keats had died and where I
had stood with lifted eyes just the day before.
It was nothing more than a row
of squares, each with the carved head
of a white flower on a background of blue,
but all during the priest’s sermon
(which was either about the Wedding at Cana
or the miracle of the loaves and fishes
as far as my Italian could tell)
I was staring at the same image
that the author of Hyperion had stared at
from his death bed as he was being devoured by tuberculosis.
It was worth coming to Rome
; if only to see what supine Keats was beholding
just before there would be no more Keats,
only Shelley, not yet swallowed by a wave,
and Byron before his Greek fever,
and Wordsworth who outlived Romanticism itself.
And it pays to lift the eyes, I thought outside the church
where a man on a bench was reading a newspaper,
a woman was scolding her child,
and the heavy sky, visible above the narrow streets
of Trastevere, was in the process
of breaking up, showing segments of blue
and the occasional flash of Roman sunlight.
The Deep
Here on this map of the oceans everything is reversed—
the land all black except for the names of the continents
whereas the watery parts, colored blue,
have topographical features and even place names
like the Bermuda Rise, which sounds harmless enough
as does the Cocos Ridge, but how about exploring
The Guafo Fracture Zone when you’re all alone?
And from the many plateaus and seamounts—
the Falkland, the Manning, the Azores—
all you could see is water and if you’re lucky
a big fish swallowing a school of smaller ones
through the bars of your deep-sea diver’s helmet.
And talk about depth: at 4,000 feet below the surface,
where you love to float on your back all summer,
we enter the Midnight Zone where the monkfish
quietly says his prayers in order to attract fresh prey,
and drop another couple of miles and you
have reached The Abyss where the sea cucumber
is said to undulate minding its own business
unless it’s deceiving an attacker with its luminescence
before disappearing into the blackness.
What attacker, I can hear you asking,
could be down there messing with the sea cucumber?
and that is exactly why I crumpled the map into a ball
and stuffed it in a metal wastebasket
before heading out for a long walk along a sunny trail
in the thin, high-desert air, accompanied
by juniper trees, wildflowers, and that gorgeous hawk.
Biographical Notes in an Anthology of Haiku
Walking the dog,
you meet
lots of dogs.
—Soshi
One was a seventeenth-century doctor
arrested for trading with Dutch merchants.
One loved sake then disappeared
through the doors of a monastery in his final years.
Another was a freight agent
who became a nun after her husband died.
Quite a few lived the samurai life
excelling in the lance, sword, and horseback riding
as well as poetry, painting, and calligraphy.
This one started writing poems at eight,
and that one was a rice merchant of some repute.
One was a farmer, another ran a pharmacy.
But next to the name of my favorite, Soshi,
there is no information at all,
not even a guess at his years and a question mark,
which left me looking vacantly at the wall
after I had read his perfect little poem.
Whether you poke your nose into Plato
or get serious with St. John of the Cross,
you will not find a more unassailable truth
than walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs
or a sweeter one, I would add.
If I were a teacher with a student
who deserved punishment, I would make him write
Walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs
on the blackboard a hundred thousand times
or until the boy discovered
that this was no punishment at all, but a treat.
And if I were that student
holding a broken piece of chalk
ready to begin filling the panels of the board,
I would first stand by one of the tall windows
to watch the other students running in the yard
shouting each other’s names,
the large autumn trees sheltering their play,
everything so obvious now, thanks to the genius of Sōshi.
Florida in December
From this dock by a lake
where I walked down after a late dinner—
some clouds blown like gauze across the stars,
and every so often an airplane
crossing the view from left to right,
its green starboard wing light
descending against this soft wind into the city airport.
The permanent stars,
I think on the walk back to the house,
and the momentary clouds in their vaporous shapes,
I go on, my hands clasped behind my back
like a professor of nothing in particular.
Then I am near enough to the house—
warm, amber windows,
cold dots of lights from the Christmas tree,
glad to have seen those clouds, now blown away,
happy to be under the stars,
constant and swirling in the firmament,
and here on the threshold of this house
with all its work and hope,
and steady enough under a fixed and shifting sky.
Dining Alone
He who eats alone chokes alone.
—Arab saying
I would rather eat at the bar,
but such behavior is regarded
by professionals as a form of denial,
so here I am seated alone
at a table with a white tablecloth
attended by an elderly waiter with no name—
ideal conditions for dining alone
according to the connoisseurs of this minor talent.
I have brought neither book nor newspaper
since reading material is considered cheating.
Eating alone, they say, means eating alone,
not in the company of Montaigne
or the ever-engaging Nancy Mitford.
Nor do I keep glancing up as if waiting
for someone who inevitably fails to appear—
a sign of moral weakness
to those who take this practice seriously.
And the rewards?
I am thinking of an obvious one right now
as I take the time to contemplate
on my lifted fork a piece of trout with almond slices.
And I can enjoy swirling the wine in my glass
until it resembles a whirlpool
in a 19th-century painting of a ship foundering in a storm.
Then there are the looks of envy
from that fellow on the blind date
and the long-married couple facing each other in silence.
I pierced a buttered spear of asparagus
and wondered if the moon would be visible tonight,
but uncapping my pen was out of the question
for writing, too, is frowned upon
by the true champions of solitude.
All that would have to wait
until after I have walked home,
collar up, under the streetlights.
Not until I would hear the echo of the front door
closing behind me could I record
in a marbled notebook—
like the ones I had as a schoolboy—
my observations about the art
of dining alone in the company of strangers.
Lucky Bastards
From the deck of the swimming pool
you could see the planes taking off from LAX
and whenever my father visited his friend there,
the two of them would sit
in the sun with their drinks
and kill the time between golf and dinner
by betting on whether the next plane would bank
left or right, and if you picked the long shot—
one continuing straight over the ocean—you got double.
The time I was there with them, I watched
the singles and fives changing hands
as they laughed “You lucky bastard!”
and I learned again the linkage between friendship and money
and the sweet primacy of one over the other,
which is not to say that Sandburg’s six-volume
biography of Lincoln or the writings of Lao Tzu
are not also excellent teachers, each in its own way.
“I Love You”
Early on, I noticed that you always say it
to each of your children
as you are getting off the phone with them
just as you never fail to say it
to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.
It’s all new to this only child.
I never heard my parents say it,
at least not on such a regular basis,
nor did it ever occur to me to miss it.
To say I love you pretty much every day
would have seemed strangely obvious,
like saying I’m looking at you
when you are standing there looking at someone.
If my parents had started saying it
a lot, I would have started to worry about them.
Aimless Love Page 11