The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech
Page 6
Wasn’t it near this spot that the son of Kronos
pursued his inamorata, holding out a handful
of shining seeds? The ex-sailor asks, Why not?
These are time’s entropic diminishments.
As each person’s golden age is turned to tin,
he sets another crimson morsel on his tongue.
Crazy Times
For Charles Baxter
Twelve murderers are eating their dinners,
veal cutlets and walnuts, pickled pigs’ feet.
Somebody sticks his head through the door.
The inevitable question is asked.
Not me, says Biter; nor me, says Shooter.
We didn’t do it, say Choker and Stabber.
Nor me, nor me, say all the others.
The door closes with a bang.
The bad chaps return to their meal,
shoveling in the food with both hands,
slurping their jaws as they chew,
swallowing with great gulps, then belching,
picking their teeth with the tips of their daggers.
Afterward they stagger to the door and lurch down
the street. Back to work! they happily shout.
And you, shopping or walking or simply standing still,
you’d better pick up your feet and hightail it home,
lock those deadbolt locks and crawl under the covers.
Your brothers and sisters are coming to get you,
the ones you had forgotten about,
the ones you should have thought about earlier.
Ring ding goes the doorbell. Welcome to crazy times.
[revision]
Parable: Fan/Paranoia
He knew from the start it wasn’t a mistake,
that he’d been the only person singled out.
Running from the dark bar to the sunlit street,
he asked why he hadn’t been more alert.
The sidewalk was packed, and people darted
from his path, their faces distorted by disgust.
He thought fifty people had been in the bar—
a lunchtime crowd. But forty-nine were ciphers,
out-of-work actors hired for the job, and who
loved their roles given their sobs and shrieks,
the beating of fists on the floor. Yesterday
it was a near escape from a bus; before that
a brick was dropped from a roof. And those
out of work actors, they showed their hatred
by their refusal to look at him, their refusal
to give any sign of the devastation to come.
What had caused their loathing? Maybe he’d
insulted someone, or hurt someone. He tried
to recall likely enemies: ex-girlfriends, former
employers. Stubbornly, he searched his past,
going back to when he first learned to walk.
The beds he had wet, the pants he had shat.
Once begun he couldn’t stop as he recalled
the dildo hung from a girl’s dress with a pin.
No wonder he never got dates and lost friends,
no wonder someone loathed him. Had he ever
been lucky or done anything right? For years
he had lurched from one blunder to the next.
Was change an option? Could he help being a jerk?
All he knew for certain was someone somewhere
had dedicated his life to getting even, someone
sneaking along behind him, or on the next block.
The people hurrying toward him looked fretful,
the ones running away looked faint. But weren’t
there odd rewards? Didn’t his caution sharpen
the world around him so that every blossom
grew brighter, and even those who took flight
at his approach displayed a clumsy splendor,
as revulsion broke open the cage of anonymity
and inhibition? He saw the fear in their faces
and found it dreadful, but it also set his heart
beating with unfamiliar pleasure. See the man
advancing in the yellow hardhat? See the glare
in his little pink eyes? Surely his belief that here
was one of his enemy’s minions also gave delight.
So it didn’t matter when the man shouted out
in a voice rising above the street: You look like
shit! In another life, they might have been friends.
Winter Wind
Whitecaps on the river—so fierce
is the day’s wind: a crowd of people
waving hats in the air. They must be
waving goodbye. Not yet, he thinks,
best not to look. Chickadees flutter
among the branches of the juniper,
playing it safe. Who knows where
they might end up? Feathered confetti.
All night he dreamt of cars in collision;
someone’s done for, that’s for certain.
Doors bang; clouds rush to the east.
So much disorder and the sky seems
bluer than ever, a page across which
indistinct messages are scrawled in haste.
So It Happens
The dark reaches up through a crack
in the horizon and drags the sun deep
into the night. That noise, is it an owl
perched in the bare branches of an oak?
What is that creature back on the path,
zigzagging forward, jittering its rags?
The night hot and damp like the inside
of a fist, or a tumor growing within him.
Not a real tumor, no. He tends it as one
might tend a garden. Grinding, grinding—
the turning of the earth on its axis.
This man loves the gun, that one the lily:
so each creates his idea of the world.
Tinsel
There were dreams in which he fell in love. The woman was no one from the real world. At times they touched, at times the touching was a promise that lay ahead. At times there were obstacles—distances to be crossed, moments to be found. At times it was easy from the start: the ecstatic tension, the joy in beholding the face of the other. And there, in the midst of sleep, he felt he’d soon be released from futility and disconnection. Then, on waking, he was crushed by his loss. This figment adorning his dream, it was dreadful to think she didn’t exist, had never existed. For a few nights he hoped to dream of her again and instead came his usual dreams of searching for something among dark streets and cul-de-sacs. And if until then his life had seemed complete, now he felt a lack; if his life had been lacking, now it seemed empty. That’s how it can happen in dreams—the intrusion of a tinseled deceit on which to base all hopes that turns the day to shadow.
Future
The skeleton of a horse, still noble
in a museum in Indiana, a century dead
and its service for the North long over;
or a stuffed St. Bernard in a monastery
in the Alps, honored for the near frozen
it saved from the snow; or something
modest, a two-headed rabbit packed
in a jar—so those friends he had lost or
were dispersed, buried, given to science,
how much better to have them stuffed,
mounted, fixed in a museum: One reading
a good book as he strokes his mustache;
a girl laughing as she flips off a bottle cap.
A favorite place to walk at the start of day,
running his fingers over the glass cases, like
seeing friends who can give advice almost.
Then a chair where he’d sit in the evening,
reading the paper by a lamp, a little music,
no one speaking but companionable, the world’s
ruckus shut out. Hard not to go more often,
harder each time to leave. These i
maginings
that grow as he gets older on how the future
might work out: ambulance rejected, doctors
sent packing. Only others would call it death.
Parable: Poetry
It was hot. At night the penguin dreamt of the Antarctic.
That’s how it began. He bought a fan; he bought
ice cubes. He bought an old Ford convertible and let
the wind riffle his feathers. He rushed all over town.
It’s my duty to be happy, he told himself. His life
took on new meaning. He hung yellow rubber dice
from the mirror, tied a raccoon tail to the antenna.
He sang along to country on the radio. He waved
at pretty girls. But soon his car began to cough,
as when a bit of steak goes down the wrong tube.
It shook all over like a kitten in winter. The vehicle
prepared to die. Luckily, a garage lay straight ahead.
The mechanic was busy, but said: Return in an hour
and I’ll know better. So the penguin strolled to a diner
just next door where he ordered apple pie à la mode.
By far his favorite. Then he hurried back to the garage.
The mechanic was stretched out beneath the hood,
his face smeared with grease. Engine parts lay
scattered across the floor. You got real problems,
said the mechanic. Your fuel pump’s busted,
your generator’s shot, your carburetor’s rusted
and it looks like you’ve blown a seal. Nah, said
the other, wiping a drop from his bill, It’s ice cream.
Freeze this moment. The penguin wore a benign
and self-satisfied expression. The mechanic’s
expression showed confusion and rising distaste.
Then bit by bit the two swapped how they looked.
The penguin showed hesitation and the mechanic
had the critical demeanor of a man ready to correct
the other. Isn’t this how it is with poetry? Both
had examined a creation with multiple meanings
as mystery moved from perplexity to possibility
to discovery. The mechanic with neither patience
nor learning again showed disgust; the penguin
revealed revelation. Where would we be without
language? The perception of one and confusion
of the other could easily be expressed in a sonnet.
Sad to say the mechanic hated poetry. As for the penguin,
stuck to his brain with the nail of surprise was a sense
of the human condition, which let him see himself
afresh, and only arose after he’d worked to attain
a modicum of meaning. Didn’t this explain his silly grin?
As for the mechanic, his brain was blank, apart from
intense revulsion: an emotion that lessened his chance
for a humanistic vision. He didn’t get that poetry
offers the opportunity to see the world through
a pristine lens; and maybe, just maybe, if he stared
hard enough, he might find himself staring back.
Scale
For Heather McHugh
In the stratification of domestic perception,
the man walks through the living room and notes
the mantel’s pricey bric-a-brac; the child stares up
at a light bulb, brighter than the sun beneath
the floor lamp’s shade. For the dog, it’s knees
and tabletops. For the cat, it’s the darting escapes
of the small. Mouse, cockroach, and louse—worlds
scaled to discriminating ambitions and dimensions.
How easily overthrown when the man, in his hurry,
stops and turns, puts a hand to his heart, and then
drops past mantel, lamp, and tabletop—thump!
Now his eyes focus on the coffee table’s claw foot,
next on a single polished claw stretched toward
a scrap of walnut hung up on filaments of carpet,
a tidbit dropped by a grandson. After that, he spots
specks of lint, dust motes that grow with his attention
so huge they change into solar systems with planets
where he might see cities, rooftops and, who knows,
even a man mowing his lawn, if he had the time.
But now his eyes fix on a vortex of pink spirals, ridges
and rills whirling inward to the labyrinth’s still center
where at last his focus stops. Why, look, it’s his own
dear fingerprint. First there forever, and then not.
Cut Loose
Perhaps this is what death is like
when the soul first separates
from the body. He feels cut loose.
Trees extend in all directions,
gray columns to hold a cloudy day.
Was it like this for her? It might
have been like this. It’s late fall;
dead leaves carpet the trail. Earlier,
when he entered the forest, red paint
marked the trees to show the way.
Then he saw fewer; now he finds none.
Cut loose from what? Cut loose
from the living. Birds squabble
among the leaves, sparrows or
chickadees; he can’t tell which.
The wind has stopped. Should he
turn back? Who’s to say what’s back?
Who’s to say he’ll find the last tree
with its slash of red? What did it
look like? A tree, that’s all, leafless,
like the others. Was it like this for her,
a constancy of gray? He wavers
between reason and invention.
It’s mid-afternoon; the sun sets early.
Snowflakes seek out paths between
a latticework of branches. Which
way is forward? He’s been offered
a collection of mistaken directions.
The silence, surely she experienced
a similar silence, its frigid palpability.
What was it like for her at the end
with the gray pressing in? He needs
to see what she might have seen,
to hear what she heard till he feels her
nearby. Snow collects about his boots;
deepening twilight, deepening cold.
Death must be something like this:
an absence within an absence. Cut loose
from what? Cut loose from the world.
He holds his breath to feel her close.
She is nowhere; she is empty space.
Damp fetor of decaying leaves.
Recognitions
The awful imbalance that occurs with age
when you suddenly see that more friends
have died, than remain alive. And at times
their memory seems so real that the latest
realization of a death can become a second,
smaller death. All those talks cut off in midsentence.
All those plans tossed in the trash.
What can you do but sit out on the porch
when evening comes? The day’s last light
reddens the leaves of the copper beach.
Laugh
Hayden Carruth (1921–2008)
What he wished was to have his ashes flushed
down the ladies’ room toilet of Syracuse City Hall,
which would so clog the pipes that the resulting
blast of glutinous broth would douse the place clean
much in the way that Heracles once flushed out
the Augean stables. After serious discussion,
his wife agreed to do the job. Such an action
was in keeping with his anarchist beginnings,
letting life come full circle and being his ultimate
say-so on the topic of individual liberty. Luckily,
or not, he then forgot, or wiser minds prevailed,
I don’t know, and his ashes were packaged up
for the obligatory memorial service—probably
more than one—so the mayor and his council,
all the lackeys, flunkies, toadies, and stoolies
caught up in a shit-spotted cascade down those
marble steps and into the astonished street
is an event that exists first in my imagination
and now in yours. But I’d also have you see him
in those last days in his hospital bed in Utica’s
St. Luke’s, wearing the ignominious blue and
flower-specked nightie the nurses call a johnny,
stuck with more tubes than a furnace has pipes,
and contraptions to check every bodily function
including the force of his farts, while his last bit
of dignity was just enough to swell that fetid bag
hanging like a golden trophy at the foot of his bed.
Blind and half-paralyzed, a bloody gauze mitten
to keep his hand from yanking out his piss-pipe,
his skin hop-scotched with scabs and splotches,
his hair and beard like the tossed off cobwebs
of a schizophrenic spider, he listened, when
those of us in the room felt certain he had fallen