that you did not have cancer, as they first thought,
I was in the kitchen trying to follow a recipe,
glancing from cookbook to stove,
shifting my glasses from my nose to my forehead and back,
a recipe, as it turned out, for ratatouille,
a complicated vegetable dish
which you or any other dog would turn up your nose at.
If you had been here, I imagine
you would have been curled up by the door
sleeping with your head resting on your tail.
And after I learned that you were not sick,
everything took on a different look
and appeared to be better than it usually is.
For example (and that’s the first and last time
I will ever use those words in a poem),
I decided I should grate some cheese,
not even knowing if it was right for ratatouille,
and the sight of the cheese grater
with its red handle lying in the drawer
with all the other utensils made me marvel
at how this thing was so perfectly able and ready
to grate cheese just as you with your long smile
and your brown and white coat
are perfectly designed to be the dog you perfectly are.
Genesis
It was late, of course,
just the two of us still at the table
working on a second bottle of wine
when you speculated that maybe Eve came first
and Adam began as a rib
that leaped out of her side one paradisal afternoon.
Maybe, I remember saying,
because much was possible back then,
and I mentioned the talking snake
and the giraffes sticking their necks out of the ark,
their noses up in the pouring Old Testament rain.
I like a man with a flexible mind, you said then,
lifting your candlelit glass to me
and I raised mine to you and began to wonder
what life would be like as one of your ribs—
to be with you all the time,
riding under your blouse and skin,
caged under the soft weight of your breasts,
your favorite rib, I am assuming,
if you ever bothered to stop and count them
which is just what I did later that night
after you had fallen asleep
and we were fitted tightly back to front,
your long legs against the length of mine,
my fingers doing the crazy numbering that comes of love.
TWO
Horoscopes for the Dead
Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the daily paper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.
Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals,
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.
Another day, I learn that you should not miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.
I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.
A dramatic rise in income may be a reason
to treat yourself, but that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.
But you will be relieved to learn
that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting,
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back seat
to the business responsibilities that you never really had.
And don’t worry today or any day
about problems caused by your unwillingness
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more romance,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.
So leave it up to me now
to plan carefully for success and the wealth it may bring,
to value the dear ones close to my heart,
and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way
though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.
I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.
And you stay just as you are,
lying there in your beautiful blue suit,
your hands crossed on your chest
like the wings of a bird who has flown
in its strange migration not north or south
but straight up from earth
and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.
Hell
I have a feeling that it is much worse
than shopping for a mattress at a mall,
of greater duration without question,
and there is no random pitchforking here,
no licking flames to fear,
only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.
Yet wandering past the jovial kings,
the more sensible queens,
and the cheerless singles
no scarlet sheet will ever cover,
I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno,
which I could fully bring to mind
and recite in English or even Italian
if the salesman who has been following us—
a crumpled pack of Newports
visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—
would stop insisting for a moment
that we test this one, then this softer one,
which we do by lying down side by side,
arms rigid, figures on a tomb,
powerless to imagine what it would be like
to sleep or love this way
under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,
which Dante might have included
had he been able to lie on his back between us here today.
Simple Arithmetic
I spend a little time nearly every day
on a gray wooden dock
on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.
And if there is nothing on my mind
but the motion of the wavelets
and the high shape-shifting of clouds,
I look out at the whole picture
and divide the scene into what was here
five hundred years ago and what was not.
Then I subtract all that was not here
and multiply everything that was by ten,
so when my calculations are complete,
all that remains is water and sky,
the dry sound of wind in the reeds,
and the sight of an unflappable heron on the shore.
All the houses are gone, and the boats
as well as the hedges and the walls,
the curving brick paths, and the distant siren.
The plane crossing the sky is no more
and the same goes for the swimming pools,
the furniture and the pastel umbrellas on the decks,
And the binocula
rs around my neck are also gone,
and so is the little painted dock itself—
according to my figuring—
and gone are my notebook and my pencil
and there I go, too,
erased by my own eraser and blown like shavings off the page.
Her
There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is pleased to offer fresh evidence:
the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing
one leaf around an enormous house with columns,
on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck
equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.
There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes,
or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.
How can the birds get a peep
or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?
But this morning is different,
only a soft clicking sound
and the low talk of two workmen working
on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.
Otherwise, all quiet for a change,
just the clicking of tiles being handled
and their talking back and forth in Spanish,
then one of them asking in English
“What was her name?” and the silence of the other.
Florida
This yellow rubber ducky
afloat in the middle of a blue-green pool
with its red beak and its tail up
is one of those duckies with sunglasses on,
a cool ducky, nonchalant
little dude on permanent vacation.
But this morning he looks different,
his shades more like the dark glasses of the blind
and him a poor sightless creature swiveling
on the surface of the ruffled water,
lost at a busy intersection of winds,
unable to see the cobalt-blue sky,
the fans of palmettos, or the bright pink hibiscus,
all much ablaze now in my unshielded, lucky eyes.
A Question About Birds
I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,
and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John James Audubon might have wandered
through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,
and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?
Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?
Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?
The New Globe
It was a birthday gift,
the kind that comes on a stand
and glows from within at night.
It’s the size of a basketball
but much more interesting
with all its multicolored countries
and its blue pelagic expanses.
No matter how closely you look,
you will not see a seabird or a fellow sitting on a wall,
yet place a hand on its curvature
and you will feel the raised mountain ranges,
the bumpy Himalayas under your palm.
It shows little desire to join the solar system,
content to remain in this room
showing one side of itself at a time.
And it is a small thrill to gaze upon it
as if gazing through space
from another planet or a balcony of clouds.
You can spin it on its famous axis
and stop it with a thumb
to see where you might belong in the world.
Or you can pretend, as I did,
that your index finger
would go down as the first index finger
in history to circumnavigate the earth.
Just don’t get lost like me,
lost as a baby dropped in an ocean.
Oh it’s a good thing I was alone,
nobody there to hear me shouting
The Cape of Good Hope must be somewhere, but where?
Girl
Only a few weeks ago,
the drawings you would bring in
were drawings of a tower with a fairy princess
leaning out from a high turret,
a swirl of stars in the background,
and bright moons, distant planets with rings.
Then yesterday you brought in
a drawing of a scallion,
a single scallion on a sheet of white paper—
another crucial step
along the path of human development,
I thought to myself
as I admired the slender green stalk,
the white bulb, and the little beard
of roots that you had penciled in so carefully.
Watercoloring
The sky began to tilt,
a shift of light toward the higher clouds,
so I seized my brush
and dipped my little cup in the stream,
but once I streaked the paper gray
with a hint of green,
water began to slide down the page,
rivulets looking for a river.
And again, I was too late—
then the sky made another turn,
this time as if to face a mirror
held in the outstretched arm of a god.
At the Home of the Baroness of Pembrokeshire
The bedroom that was mine for the night
was as delicate
as a room on a page in Flaubert.
The bedclothes were pulled so taut
I slept outside the covers
trying not to dream, trying to be invisible.
When I smoked a cigarette in the dark,
I flicked the ashes out the top
of a lowered bathroom window.
Whenever I crossed the room,
I feared the furniture
would shatter in the wake of my passing.
If one of the roses in the Chinese vase
is now less aromatic than the others,
blame it on the furtive sniff I took.
Tiptoeing down for breakfast,
I regretted only the pigeons I had let in
after all their bobbing and moaning on the sill.
Poem on the Three Hundredth
Anniversary of the Trinity School
When a man asked me to look back three hundred years
Over the hilly landscape of America,
I must have picked up the wrong pen,
The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.
So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse
Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,
A sight we might have seen so many years ago—
Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace—
Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,
The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,
Which I climbed and then could see even more,
A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.
The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,
And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,
Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,
Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without
bridges.
And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,
Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,
Three hundred of them, one for every school year
Walking single-file over the decades into the present.
I thought of the pages they had filled
With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,
The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,
The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.
And then I heard their singing, all those voices
Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years
Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,
History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.
THREE
Horoscopes for the Dead Page 2