you have to wait for every half note to fall into place
like pieces dropping from heaven into a puzzle.
Even if you were a saint, how could you travel back
to the Renaissance and find someone to paint you
with the putti floating over your halo, your sandals,
your coarse brown robe and wild, uplifted eyes?
And would you say that your loving deserves such sweet
levitation, such a feathery, ethereal regard?
Better to turn up the music loud enough to hear
outside, better to take a walk on the darkened lawn
and trade all this in for a new swarm of thoughts.
The rain is lighter now, atomized and soft upon your face.
It makes you stop and listen to Bud Powell pounding
in the silence and feel the old embrace of earth and sky.
The Man in the Moon
He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,
the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.
I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.
But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads
I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees
and rising again to show his familiar face.
And when he comes into full view over open fields
he looks like a young man who has fallen in love
with the dark earth,
a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,
his round mouth open
as if he had just broken into song.
Horseman, Pass By!
When I show you the photograph of me
leaning on the tombstone of Yeats,
you are surprised that I never noticed
the photograph of you leaning on it,
in a metal frame above your desk.
So many caravans of tour buses stop
at Drumcliff's little churchyard these days
there must be enough color photographs
of people leaning against that limestone slab,
casting a cold eye at the camera,
to fill an archive rivaling the archives
of people leaning on the Eiffel Tower or a sphinx,
cartons of these glossy shards of travel
stacked along the walls as the night watchman
works his crossword under a lamp etc., etc.
But still, when forced to backtrack down
that road I remember feeling myself touch
the brake, lift the directional stick and pull
like gravity into the muddy carpark.
Little point in standing again by his grave
where the picture was taken just three days before,
so I stayed in the car, low music on the radio,
holding a map, and letting the distance increase
between me and that phantom self
who could just drive by and now was miles away.
Memento Mori
There is no need for me to keep a skull on my desk,
to stand with one foot up on the ruins of Rome,
or wear a locket with the sliver of a saint's bone.
It is enough to realize that every common object
in this sunny little room will outlive me—
the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.
Not one of these things will attend my burial,
not even this dented goosenecked lamp
with its steady benediction of light,
though I could put worse things in my mind
than the image of it waddling across the cemetery
like an old servant, dragging the tail of its cord,
the small circle of mourners parting to make room.
The Last Man on Earth
Once there was a time when the moon swept
over the hemlocks, lawns and white mountaintops
of the earth, but now it only hides its face against my chest.
It used to pull sleepers from the lagoons of dreams
where they floated facedown,
but now it only lures me to an open window, curtains
billowing around my head like useless, delicate sails.
Weather used to ride high over the world
like an announcement nailed to the sky,
but now the cold wind has become my favorite song,
and I sing along in the only house with lights.
Clouds that once toured the air in the style
of dirigibles now gather helplessly in the kitchen
and stare at me across the long wooden table.
This morning when I put on my shoes they seemed
important, like the north and south poles,
and when I walked out and heard the noise of geese
I looked up as if they were calling my name.
Come Running
I spot the neighbor's dog scampering across the lawn
with my name in its mouth,
leaving me to wander through the house anonymously
and scour the telephone directory for an alias.
When I say my name out loud it sounds like
someone else's, a character in a play who cheats
the hero and comes to a bad end, or an obscure
athlete lost in the deep encyclopedia of baseball.
When I try writing it down on paper
I find I have also lost my signature. My hand
feels retarded, unable to perform its inky trick,
that unmistakable, eerie, Arabic flourish.
Perhaps the dog was never given a name
and is now eating mine with pleasure
under a porch in the cool, lattice-shadowed dirt.
Perhaps late tonight I will hear the voice
of my neighbor as she stands at her back door,
hands cupped around her mouth, calling my name,
and I will leap the hedge and come running.
Modern Peasant
This morning is the same as all other mornings.
I part the window curtain and the familiar play begins.
Sunlight keeps repeating itself as if I were blind.
The same black car waits in the driveway for my key,
my manipulations and the sound of its radio.
It is the same old song, blue exit signs enlarging
and disappearing behind the stream of my travel
as I think about the past, that rope I drag along,
and the future which is the rope that pulls me forward.
Ah, but tonight I will drink red wine at dinner.
I will continue to drink red wine after dinner.
Then I will lie down in the dark greens of the lawn
and think of something entirely new.
I will feel the rotation of the earth
as electrically as the sudden touch of a stranger.
I will wonder how many thousands of days
it would take the two of us to walk to the moon.
Instructions to the Artist
I wish my head to appear perfectly round
and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions,
please trace the circle with a dinner plate
rather than a button or a dime.
My face should be painted with
an ant-like sense of detail;
pretend you are executing a street map
of Rome and that all the citizens
can lift thirty times their own weight.
The result should be a strained
but self-satisfied expression,
as if I am lifting a Volkswagen with one foot.
The body is no great matter;
just draw some straight lines
with a pencil and ruler.
I will not be around to hear the voice
of posterity calling me Stickman.
The background I leave up to you
but if there is to be a house,
lines of smok
e rising from the chimney
should be mandatory.
Never be ashamed of kindergarten—
it is the alphabet's only temple.
Also, have several kangaroos grazing
and hopping around in the distance,
an allusion to my world travels.
Some final recommendations:
I should like to appear hatless.
Kindly limit your palette to a single
primary color, any one but red or blue.
Sign the painting on my upper lip
so your name will always be my mustache.
Weighing the Dog
It is awkward for me and bewildering for him
as I hold him in my arms in the small bathroom,
balancing our weight on the shaky blue scale,
but this is the way to weigh a dog and easier
than training him to sit obediently on one spot
with his tongue out, waiting for the cookie.
With pencil and paper I subtract my weight
from our total to find out the remainder that is his,
and I start to wonder if there is an analogy here.
It could not have to do with my leaving you
though I never figured out what you amounted to
until I subtracted myself from our combination.
You held me in your arms more than I held you
through all those awkward and bewildering months
and now we are both lost in strange and distant neighborhoods.
One Life to Live
This is the only life I have, this one in my head,
the one that travels along the surface of my body
singing the low voltage song of the ego,
the one that feels like a ball between my ears
sometimes, and other times feels absolutely galactic,
the life that my feet carry around like two blind
scholars working together on a troublesome manuscript.
This is the only life I have, and I am standing
dead in the center of it like a man doing a rope trick
in a rodeo, passing the lasso over his body,
smiling inside a twirling of ovals and ellipses.
This is the only life I have and I never step out of it
except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel
or when love makes me want to remove my clothes
and sail classical records off a cliff.
Otherwise you can always find me within this hoop of myself,
the rope flying around me, moving up to encircle my head
like an equator or a halo or a zero.
The Wires of the Night
I thought about his death for so many hours,
tangled there in the wires of the night,
that it came to have a body and dimensions,
more than a voice shaking over the telephone
or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.
His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs,
windows and shutters which are the motionless wings
of windows. His death had a head and clothes,
the white shirt and baggy trousers of death.
His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index,
and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read.
His death had hinges and bolts which were oiled and locked,
had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna which listened
to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past.
His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams.
It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor
you could not lie down on in the middle of the night.
In the freakish pink and grey of dawn I took
his death to bed with me and his death was my bed
and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,
and then it was the light of day and the next day
and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future
like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.
Axiom
“Life is beautiful. Life is sad.”
—NABOKOV
And the two are braided together
like the long hair of a woman
who is about to die suddenly.
She arranges a vase of flowers,
takes a coat from the closet.
She regards herself in a mirror.
She is leaving the house,
closing the door behind her.
There is no stopping her.
The sadness is the bread
and the beauty is the wine
or the other way around.
I have been visited by a thought
contoured like an automobile:
beautiful.
Then again, I am lying under
all the clothes of the dead,
feeling every ton
as they add more to the pile.
Vade Mecum
I want the scissors to be sharp
and the table to be perfectly level
when you cut me out of my life
and paste me in that book you always carry.
Not Touching
The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart
and still we are not touching, like things
in a poorly done still life
where the knife appears to be floating over the plate
which is itself hovering above the table somehow,
the entire arrangement of apple, pear and wineglass
having forgotten the law of gravity,
refusing to be still,
as if the painter had caught them all
in a rare moment of slow flight
just before they drifted out of the room
through a window of perfectly realistic sunlight.
Night Sand
When you injure me, as you must one day,
I will move off like the slow armadillo over night sand,
ambulating secretly inside his armor,
ready to burrow deep or curl himself into a ball
which will shelter his soft head, soft feet
and tail from the heavy, rhythmic blows.
Now can you see the silhouettes of ranchers' hats
and sticks raised against the pink desert sky?
Love in the Sahara
The small camel leaves his common place
on the front of the pack of cigarettes
and sways across the floorboards in search of water.
His absence leaves a vacuum as eerie
as the one you left in our rented house,
empty as a desert without its furniture.
I never thought I would find myself smoking here
on this flat stretch of uncountable sand,
a forlorn illustration of figure and ground,
my only company the tiny pyramids and palms
planted in the distance, and the man
whose shirt pocket I ride in all afternoon.
Invective
Turn away from me, you, and get lost in the past.
Back to ancient Rome you go, with its parallel columns and syllogisms.
Stuff yourself with berries, eat lying on your side.
Suck balls of snow carried down from the Alps for dessert.
I don't care. I am leaving too, but for the margins of history,
to a western corner of ninth century Ireland I go,
to a vanishing, grey country far beyond your call.
There I will dwell with badgers, fish and deer,
birds piercing the air and the sound of little bells.
I will stand in pastures of watercress by the salmon-lashing sea.
I will stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of cows.
4
The Life of Riley: A Definitive Biography
He was born one sunny Florida morning
a
nd napped through most of his childhood.
He spent his adult life relaxing in beach chairs,
always a tropical drink in his hand.
He never had a job, a family or a sore throat.
He never mowed a lawn.
Passersby would always stop to remind him
whose life it was he was living.
He died in a hammock weighing a cloud.
Jack
Just when I am about to telephone her
so she can hear me swallowing my pride,
a thing the size of a watermelon,
a giant barges out of a fairy tale,
picks up the house by the chimney
and carries it off laughing like thunder.
She will never believe this I tell myself.
From the windowsill where I hang on
I can see geysers of plumbing,
the exposed basement embarrassed by its junk,
snapped telephone wires on the lawn,
and the neighbors looking up with little
apocalypse expressions on their faces.
I realize on the way up the beanstalk
apologizing over the phone was a bad idea.
A letter provides a more reflective means
of saying hard things, expressing true feelings.
If there is pen and paper in his kingdom,
I plan to write her a long vivid one
communicating my ardor, but also describing
the castle floating in high clouds,
the goose, the talking musical instruments,
and the echo of his enormous shoes.
In fact, to convince her of my unwavering love,
I will compose it while pacing back and forth
in his palm.
Metamorphosis
If Kafka could turn a man into an insect in one sentence
perhaps he could transform me into something new,
a slow willful river running through a forest,
or simply the German word for river, a handful of letters
hidden in the dark alphabetical order of a dictionary.
Not that I am so miserable, but I could use a change
of scenery and substance, plus the weather reminds me of him.
Questions About Angels Page 3