The Giant Book of Poetry
Page 40
It took months of work, but with practice I became clever at concealing myself in shadowy doorways and watching. I have learned that once each week a nondescript man carrying a canvas bag enters the post office through the back door, just as the ancient woman is closing her metal cage for the night. She empties the contents of the dead letter box into his canvas bag, and he leaves by the door he came in. The man then begins a devious journey which continues long into the night. Many nights I have lost him and have had to begin again the following week. He doubles back through alleys and down obscure streets. Several times he enters deserted buildings by one door and emerges from another. He crosses the cemetery and goes through the Cathedral.
But finally he arrives at his destination—the bus terminal. And there, concealed behind huge doors which can be raised to the ceiling, is the bus to Veracruz. The man places his canvas bag in the luggage compartment, slams the metal cover with a great echoing clang, and goes away.
And later, at some unspecified hour, the bus to Veracruz rolls silently out of the terminal, a luxury liner leaving port with all its windows blazing. It has three yellow lights above the windshield and three gold stars along each side. The seats are red velvet and there are gold tassels between the windows. The dashboard is draped with brocade of the richest shades of yellow, purple, and green; and on this altar is a statue of the Virgin, blond and shimmering. Her slender fingers are extended to bless all those who ride the bus to Veracruz, but the only passenger is an ancient woman with silver earrings who sits by the window, nodding and smiling to the empty seats around her. There are two drivers who take turns during the long journey. They are young and incredibly handsome, with eyes as soft as the wings of certain luminous brown moths.
The bus moves through sleeping streets without making a sound. When it gets to the highway, it turns toward Veracruz and gathers speed. Then nothing can stop it: not the rain, nor the washed-out bridges, nor the sharp mountain curves, nor the people who stand by the road to flag it down.
I believe in the bus to Veracruz. And someday, when I am too tired to struggle any longer with the verbs and nouns, when the ugliness and tedium of this place overcome me, I will be on it. I will board the bus with my ticket in hand. The doors of the terminal will rise to the ceiling, and we will move out through the darkness, gathering speed, like a great island of light.
The Stones1
I love to go out on summer nights and watch the stones grow. I think they grow better here in the desert, where it is warm and dry, than almost anywhere. Or perhaps it is only that the young ones are more active here.
Young stones tend to move about more than their elders consider good for them. Most young stones have a secret desire which their parents had before them but have forgotten ages ago. And because this desire involves water, it is never mentioned. The older stones disapprove of water and say, “Water is a gadfly who never stays in one place long enough to learn anything.” But the young stones try to work themselves into a position, slowly and without their elders noticing it, in which a sizable stream of water during a summer storm might catch them broadside and unknowing, so to speak, push them along over a slope or down an arroyo. In spite of the danger this involves, they want to travel and see something of the world and settle in a new place, far from home, where they can raise their own dynasties, away from the domination of their parents.
And although family ties are very strong among stones, many have succeeded; and they carry scars to prove to their children that they once went on a journey, helter-skelter and high water, and traveled perhaps fifteen feet, an incredible distance. As they grow older, they cease to brag about such clandestine adventures.
It is true that old stones get to be very conservative. They consider all movement either dangerous or downright sinful. They remain comfortably where they are and often get fat. Fatness, as a matter of fact, is a mark of distinction.
And on summer nights, after the young stones are asleep, the elders turn to a serious and frightening subject—the moon. which is always spoken of in whispers. “See how it glows and whips across the sky, always changing its shape,” one says. And another says, “Feel how it pulls at us, urging us to follow.” And a third whispers, “It is a stone gone mad.”
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934)
“Wise I”1
WHYS (Nobody Knows
The Trouble I Seen)
Traditional
If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won’t let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble
humph!
probably take you several hundred years
to get
out!
Rutger Kopland (b. 1934)
Natzweiler1
Translated from the Dutch by James Brockway
1.
And there, beyond the barbed wire, the view—
very charming landscape, as peaceful
as then.
They would need for nothing, they would
be laid down in those green pastures,
be led to those peaceful waters,
there in the distance. They would.
2.
I trace the windows of the barrack huts,
watch-towers, gas-chamber.
Only the black reflection of distance
in the panes, of a peaceful landscape,
and beyond it, no one.
3.
The dead are so violently absent, as though
not only I, but they too
were standing here,
and the landscape were folding their invisible
arms around my shoulders.
We need for nothing, they are saying,
we have forgotten this world,
But these are no arms,
it is landscape.
4.
The yellowed photos in the display cases,
their faces ravaged by their skulls,
their black eyes,
what do they see, what do they see?
I look at them, but for what?
Their faces have come to belong
to the world, to the world
which remains silent.
5.
So this is it, desertion, here is
the place where they took their leave,
far away in the mountains.
The camp has just been re-painted, in that gentle
grey-green, that gentle color
of war,
it is as new, as though nothing
has happened, as though
it has yet to be.
Mark Strand (b. 1934)
Eating Poetry1
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Keeping Things Whole2
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the c
ase.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Reading in Place1
Imagine a poem that starts with a couple
looking into a valley, seeing their house, the lawn
out back with its wooden chairs,
its shady patches of green,
its wooden fence, and beyond
the fence the rippled silver sheen
of the local pond, its far side a tangle of sumac, crimson
in the fading light.
Now imagine somebody reading the poem
and thinking, “I never guessed it would be like this,”
then slipping it into the back
of a book while the oblivious
couple, feeling nothing is lost, not even the white
streak of a flicker’s tail that catches their eye,
nor the slight
toss of leaves in the wind,
shift their gaze to the wooded dome
of a nearby hill where the violet spread of dusk begins,
but the reader,
out for a stroll in the autumn night, with all
the imprisoned sounds of nature
dying around him, forgets
not only the poem, but where he is, and thinks instead
of a bleak Venetian mirror that hangs in a hall
by a curving stair,
and how the stars in the sky’s black glass
sink down and the sea heaves them ashore like foam.
So much is adrift
in the ever-opening rooms of elsewhere,
he cannot remember whose house it was,
or when he was there.
Now imagine he sits years later under a lamp
and pulls a book from the shelf; the poem drops
to his lap. The couple are crossing a field
on their way home, still feeling that nothing is lost,
that they will continue to live harm-free, sealed
in the twilight’s amber weather.
But how will the reader know,
especially now that he puts the poem, without looking
back in the book,
the book where a poet stares at the sky
and says to a blank page,
“Where, where in Heaven am I?”
Paul Zimmer (b. 1934)
Zimmer’s Head Thudding Against the Blackboard1
At the blackboard I had missed
five number problems in a row,
and was about to foul a sixth,
when the old exasperated nun
began to pound my head against
my six mistakes. When I cried,
she threw me back into my seat,
where I hid my head and swore
that very day I’d be a poet,
and curse her yellow teeth with this.
David R. Slavitt (b. 1935)
Titanic1
Who does not love the Titanic?
If they sold passage tomorrow for that same crossing,
who would not buy?
To go down … we all go down, mostly
alone. But with crowds of people, friends, servants,
well fed, with music, with lights! Ah!
And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do
and almost never does.
There will be the books and movies
to remind our grandchildren who we were
and how we died, and give’m a good cry.
Not so bad, after all. The cold
water is anesthetic and very quick.
The cries on all sides must be a comfort.
We all go: a few, first-class.
C.K. Williams (b. 1936)
My Fly1
for Erving Goffman, 1922-1982
One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly generated
from fresh excrement and who maneuver through our airspace with a deft
intentionality that makes them seem to think, materializes just above my
desk, then vanishes, his dense, abrasive buzz sucked in after him.
I wait, imagine him, hidden somewhere, waiting, too, then think, who
knows why, of you—don’t laugh—that he’s a messenger from you, or
that you yourself
(you’d howl at this),
ten years afterwards have let yourself be incarnated as this pestering anti-
angel.
Now he, or you, abruptly reappears,
with a weightless pounce alighting near my hand.
I lean down close, and though he has to sense
my looming presence, he patiently attends,
as though my study of him had become
an element of his own observations—maybe it is you!
Joy! To be together, even for a time!
Yes, tilt your fuselage, turn it towards the light,
aim the thousand lenses of your eyes back up at me;
how I’ve missed the layers of your attention,
how often been bereft without your gift for sniffing out pretentiousness
and moral sham.
Why would you come back, though? Was that other radiance not
intricate enough to parse?
Did you find yourself in some monotonous century
hovering down the tidy queue of creatures waiting
to experience again the eternally unlikely bliss
of being matter and extension?
You lift, you land—you’re rushed, I know;
the interval in all our terminals is much too short.
Now you hurl against the window,
skid and jitter on the pane:
I open it and step aside
and follow for one final moment of felicity
your brilliant ardent atom swerving through.
The Dance1
A middle-aged woman, Quite plain, to be polite about it, and somewhat
stout, to be courteous still, but when she and the rather good-looking,
much younger man she’s with get up to dance, her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained but confident ardor athwart his shoulder, drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and moving him with effortless grace into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all rhythmically solid music in this second-rate caf,
that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed, nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for, but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence, which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world, that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.
Gail Mazur (b. 1937)
In Houston1
I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo.
It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies
just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds.
Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue.
Children rode around and around on pastel trains.
I read the labels stuck on every cage the way
people at museums do, art being less interesting
than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map,
laminated with a stain to tell where in the world
the animals had been taken from. Rhinos waited
for rain in the rhino-colored dirt, too grief-struck
to move their wrinkles, their horns too weak
to ever be hacked off by poachers for aphrodisiacs.
Five white ducks agitated the chalky waters
of a duck
pond with invisible orange feet
while a little girl in pink ruffles
tossed pork rinds at their disconsolate backs.
This wasn’t my life! I’d meant to look
with the wise tough eye of exile, I wanted
not to anthropomorphize, not to eQuate, for instance,
the lemur’s displacement with my displacement.
The arched aviary flashed with extravagance,
plumage so exuberant, so implausible, it seemed
cartoonish, and the birdsongs unintelligible,
babble, all their various languages unraveling—
no bird can get its song sung right, separated from
models of its own species.
For weeks I hadn’t written a sentence,
for two days I hadn’t spoken to an animate thing.
I couldn’t relate to a giraffe—
I couldn’t look one in the face.
I’d have said, if anyone had asked,
I’d been mugged by the Gulf climate.
In a great barren space, I watched a pair
of elephants swaying together, a rhythm
too familiar to be mistaken, too exclusive.
My eyes sweated to see the bull, his masterful trunk
swinging, enter their barn of concrete blocks,
to watch his obedient wife follow. I missed
the bitter tinny Boston smell of first snow,
the huddling in a cold bus tunnel.
At the House of Nocturnal Mammals,
I stepped into a furtive world of bats,
averted my eyes at the gloomy dioramas,