who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
2
Questions About Angels
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
A Wonder of the World
It is just now coming into view.
You can begin to make out its westerly corner
and you are now getting some idea of its dimensions.
As we continue to maintain this heading
more of it will gradually be revealed,
the mountain appearing to step aside to permit a fuller view.
At this point you can see a great deal of it.
It is more colossal than you had expected,
and you were not at all prepared for its look
of almost archaeological seriousness
as if you should be wearing steel-rimmed spectacles
in order to view it properly.
Now you are able to see the whole thing, in moonlight!
Nothing is standing between you and it
except an immeasurable volume of salty night air.
It looks different than it does in photographs
and it is nothing like what you had imagined,
but there it is, motionless, unavoidable, real.
It is enough to make you reach for the locket
in which you carry your picture of the world
as you glide closer and closer to it
over the cold streaming surface of these waters.
Mappamundi
On the pages I am turning are early pictures of the world,
the continents and oceans so erroneously shaped
it is hard to tell which is which at first,
as if they were drawn by a child or someone blindfolded.
Along the shorelines, tiny ships are under sail,
blown by the pursed mouth of a cloud with an angry face,
and sea beasts prowl the waves that lap at the margins
where knowledge trails off and ink lines squiggle
into a vast unknown, an incognita
far from the old garden of Europe in the center
where the mapmaker sits bent over his slanted desk,
touching the contours of the earth with the tip of his pen.
The library windows are streaming with summer rain
as I sit bent over this book of ancient maps,
feeling how the edges of my own world blur into tundra
and imagining what monsters must be illustrated there
far from the middle of what little I know.
But I am oriented here, encased in a local thunderstorm,
flipping through these imagined worlds, noticing
that east, not north, is always at the top where mornings
begin and discovering at the bottom of one intricate page
an early version of Australia, so far from anything
that it even has its own sun drawn in the sky overhead.
Now that is the kind of sun I would like to be under
this afternoon, basking naked on an arc of beach
at the end of the world while sea monsters writhe offshore,
then lying down prone on the sand, my arms stretched out
so wide I can feel the slight curvature of the earth
as I work effortlessly on my imaginary tan.
The First Geniuses
It is so early almost nothing has happened.
Agriculture is an unplanted seed.
Music and the felt hat are thousands of years away.
The sail and the astrolabe, not even specks on the horizon.
The window and scissors: inconceivable.
But even now, before the orchestra of history
has had time to warm up, the first geniuses
have found one another and gathered into a thoughtful group.
Gaunt, tall and bearded, as you might expect,
they stand outlined against a landscape of smoking volcanoes
or move along the shores of lakes, still leaden and unnamed,
or sit on high bare cliffs looking like early arrivals
at a party the earth is about to throw
now that the dinosaurs have finally cleared the room.
They have yet to discover fire, much less invent the wheel,
so they wander a world mostly dark and motionless
wondering what to do with their wisdom
like young girls wonder what to do with their hair.
Once in a while someone will make a pronouncement
about the movement of the stars, the density of silence,
or the strange behavior of water in winter,
but there is no alphabet, not a drop of ink on earth,
so the words disappear into the deep green forests
like flocks of small, startled birds.
Eventually one of them will come up with the compass
or draw the first number in sand with a stick,
and he will let out a shout like Archimedes in his tub
and curious animals will look up from their grazing.
Later the water screw and the catapult will appear;
the nail, the speedometer and the bow tie will follow.
But until then they can only pace the world gravely,
knowing nothing but the thrumming of their minds,
not the whereabouts of north or the notion of zero,
not even how to sharpen a stone to a deadly point.
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
You go to the place you always thought you would go,
the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.
Some are being shot up a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.
Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air-conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.
Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.
There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,
while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.
There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of a furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.
The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.
The Dead
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
Endangered
It is so quiet on the shore of this motionless lake
you can hear the slow recessional of extinct animals
as they leave through a door at the back of the world,
disappearing like the verbs of a dead language:
the last troop of kangaroos hopping out of the picture,
the ultimate paddling of ducks and pitying of turtledoves
and, his bell tolling in the distance, the final goat.
Going Out for Cigarettes
It's a story as famous as the three little pigs:
one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,
closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,
not one phone call, not even a postcard from Rio.
For all anyone knows, he walks straight into the distance
like a line from Euclid's notebooks and vanishes
with the smoke he blows into the soft humid air,
smoke that forms a screen, smoke to calm the bees within.
He has his fresh pack, an overcoat with big pockets.
What else does he need as he walks beyond city limits,
past the hedges, porch lights and empty cars of the suburbs
and into a realm no larger than his own hat size?
Alone, he is a solo for piano that never comes to an end,
a small plane that keeps flying away from the earth.
He is the last line of a poem that continues off the page
and down to a river to drag there in the cool flow,
questioning the still pools with its silver hook.
Let us say this is the place where the man who goes out
for cigarettes finally comes to rest: on a riverbank
above the long, inquisitive wriggling of that line,
sitting content in the quiet picnic of consciousness,
nothing on his mind as he lights up another one,
nothing but the arc of the stone bridge he notices
downstream, and its upturned reflection in the water.
3
Purity
My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.
Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.
Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.
I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.
In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.
I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.
After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.
Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.
Cliché
My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.
It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private.
Every reader must be a translator with a thick lexicon.
No one has read the whole thing but me.
Most dip into the middle for a few paragraphs,
then move on to other shelves, other libraries.
Some have time only for the illustrations.
I love to feel the daily turning of the pages,
the sentences unwinding like string,
and when something really important happens,
I walk out to the edge of the page
and, always the student,
mak
e an asterisk, a little star, in the margin.
Field Guide
No one I ask knows the name of the flower
we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick
and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.
I am passing through the needle of spring
in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south
as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs
and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas
and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport
to return to where this purple madness is not seen
blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the roadside.
On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer
my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave
the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.
Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger
looks up from his magazine and says wisteria.
Putti in the Night
It is raining so hard and the jazz on the radio
is playing so loud, you almost feel like surrendering
to the wish that somebody up there actually liked you
or at least was keeping an eye on your solitude.
Not necessarily God himself, glaring down through the roof
while he fingers a weighty book looking for your name.
You would rather be canopied by a small group of putti,
those angels in their infancy always hovering
in the upper, vaporous corners of religious paintings.
Chubby little witnesses treading the light blue air,
they look as if they had just tumbled out of paradise,
noticed the Ascension or the Birth of the Virgin
going on below and fluttered over to take a look.
You have seen them too in sumptuous portrayals of love,
dropping rose petals, letting arrows fly from tiny bows
above a scene of immense silks, bosoms and men with swords.
Imagine leaning back in your chair and beholding
an aggregation of those weightless, buoyant babies above,
trailing their clouds of glory, casting smiles upon your life.
But it is doubtful that they will be attending you tonight,
though the hour is late and the music has become so slow
Questions About Angels Page 2