Poems 1962-2012, page 14
I will not speak again, will not
survive the earth, be summoned
out of it again, not
a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt
catching my ribs, I call you,
father and master: all around,
my companions are failing, thinking
you do not see. How
can they know you see
unless you save us?
In the summer twilight, are you
close enough to hear
your child’s terror? Or
are you not my father,
you who raised me?
THE WHITE LILIES
As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies—
Hush, beloved. It doesn’t matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor.
MEADOWLANDS (1996)
TO ROBERT AND FRANK
Let’s play choosing music. Favorite form.
Opera.
Favorite work.
Figaro. No. Figaro and Tannhauser. Now it’s your turn:
sing one for me.
PENELOPE’S SONG
Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
do now as I bid you, climb
the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
wait at the top, attentive, like
a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
it behooves you to be
generous. You have not been completely
perfect either; with your troublesome body
you have done things you shouldn’t
discuss in poems. Therefore
call out to him over the open water, over the bright water
with your dark song, with your grasping,
unnatural song—passionate,
like Maria Callas. Who
wouldn’t want you? Whose most demonic appetite
could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime,
suntanned from his time away, wanting
his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
you must shake the boughs of the tree
to get his attention,
but carefully, carefully, lest
his beautiful face be marred
by too many falling needles.
CANA
What can I tell you that you don’t know
that will make you tremble again?
Forsythia
by the roadside, by
wet rocks, on the embankments
underplanted with hyacinth—
For ten years I was happy.
You were there; in a sense,
you were always with me, the house, the garden
constantly lit,
not with light as we have in the sky
but with those emblems of light
which are more powerful, being
implicitly some earthly
thing transformed—
And all of it vanished,
reabsorbed into impassive process. Then
what will we see by,
now that the yellow torches have become
green branches?
QUIET EVENING
You take my hand; then we’re alone
in the life-threatening forest. Almost immediately
we’re in a house; Noah’s
grown and moved away; the clematis after ten years
suddenly flowers white.
More than anything in the world
I love these evenings when we’re together,
the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour.
So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus,
not to hold him back but to impress
this peace on his memory:
from this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you.
CEREMONY
I stopped liking artichokes when I stopped eating
butter. Fennel
I never liked.
One thing I’ve always hated
about you: I hate that you refuse
to have people at the house. Flaubert
had more friends and Flaubert
was a recluse.
Flaubert was crazy: he lived
with his mother.
Living with you is like living
at boarding school:
chicken Monday, fish Tuesday.
I have deep friendships.
I have friendships
with other recluses.
Why do you call it rigidity?
Can’t you call it a taste
for ceremony? Or is your hunger for beauty
completely satisfied by your own person?
Another thing: name one other person
who doesn’t have furniture.
We have fish Tuesday
because it’s fresh Tuesday. If I could drive
we could have it different days.
If you’re so desperate
for precedent, try
Stevens. Stevens
never traveled; that doesn’t mean
he didn’t know pleasure.
Pleasure maybe but not
joy. When you make artichokes,
make them for yourself.
PARABLE OF THE KING
The great king looking ahead
saw not fate but simply
dawn glittering over
the unknown island: as a king
he thought in the imperative—best
not to reconsider direction, best
to keep going forward
over the radiant water. Anyway,
what is fate but a strategy for ignoring
history, with its moral
dilemmas, a way of regarding
the present, where decisions
are made, as the necessary
link between the past (images of the king
as a young prince) and the glorious future (images
of slave girls). Whatever
it was ahead, why did it have to be
so blinding? Who could have known
that wasn’t the usual sun
but flames rising over a world
about to become extinct?
MOONLESS NIGHT
A lady weeps at a dark window.
Must we say what it is? Can’t we simply say
a personal matter? It’s early summer;
next door the Lights are practicing klezmer music.
A good night: the clarinet is in tune.
As for the lady—she’s going to wait forever;
there’s no point in watching longer.
After awhile, the streetlight goes out.
But is waiting forever
always the answer? Nothing
is always the answer; the answer
depends on the story.
Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things. What’s
a single night, especially
one like this, now so close to ending?
On the other side, there could be anything,
all the joy in the world, the stars fading,
the streetlight becoming a bus stop.
DEPARTURE
The night isn’t dark; the world is dark.
Stay with me a little longer.
Your hands on the back of the chair—
that’s what I’ll remember.
Before that, lightly stroking my shoulders.
Like a man training himself to avoid the heart.
In the other room, the maid discreetly
putting out the light I read by.
That room with its chalk walls—
how will it look to you I wonder
once your exile begins? I think your eyes will seek out
its light as opposed to the moon.
Apparently, after so many years, you need
distance to make plain its intensity.
Your hands on the chair, stroking
my body and the wood in exactly the same way.
Like a man who wants to feel longing again,
who prizes longing above all other emotion.
On the beach, voices of the Greek farmers,
impatient for sunrise.
As though dawn will change them
from farmers into heroes.
And before that, you are holding me because you are going away—
these are statements you are making,
not questions needing answers.
How can I know you love me
unless I see you grieve over me?
ITHACA
The beloved doesn’t
need to live. The beloved
lives in the head. The loom
is for the suitors, strung up
like a harp with white shroud-thread.
He was two people.
He was the body and voice, the easy
magnetism of a living man, and then
the unfolding dream or image
shaped by the woman working the loom,
sitting there in a hall filled
with literal-minded men.
As you pity
the deceived sea that tried
to take him away forever
and took only the first,
the actual husband, you must
pity these men: they don’t know
what they’re looking at;
they don’t know that when one loves this way
the shroud becomes a wedding dress.
TELEMACHUS’ DETACHMENT
When I was a child looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
PARABLE OF THE HOSTAGES
The Greeks are sitting on the beach
wondering what to do when the war ends. No one
wants to go home, back
to that bony island; everyone wants a little more
of what there is in Troy, more
life on the edge, that sense of every day as being
packed with surprises. But how to explain this
to the ones at home to whom
fighting a war is a plausible
excuse for absence, whereas
exploring one’s capacity for diversion
is not. Well, this can be faced
later; these
are men of action, ready to leave
insight to the women and children.
Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased
by a new strength in their forearms, which seem
more golden than they did at home, some
begin to miss their families a little,
to miss their wives, to want to see
if the war has aged them. And a few grow
slightly uneasy: what if war
is just a male version of dressing up,
a game devised to avoid
profound spiritual questions? Ah,
but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun
calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s
loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.
There on the beach, discussing the various
timetables for getting home, no one believed
it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable
affliction of the human heart: how to divide
the world’s beauty into acceptable
and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,
how could the Greeks know
they were hostage already: who once
delays the journey is
already enthralled; how could they know
that of their small number
some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,
some by sleep, some by music?
RAINY MORNING
You don’t love the world.
If you loved the world you’d have
images in your poems.
John loves the world. He has
a motto: judge not
lest ye be judged. Don’t
argue this point
on the theory it isn’t possible
to love what one refuses
to know: to refuse
speech is not
to suppress perception.
Look at John, out in the world,
running even on a miserable day
like today. Your
staying dry is like the cat’s pathetic
preference for hunting dead birds: completely
consistent with your tame spiritual themes,
autumn, loss, darkness, etc.
We can all write about suffering
with our eyes closed. You should show people
more of yourself; show them your clandestine
passion for red meat.
PARABLE OF THE TRELLIS
A clematis grew at the foot of a great trellis.
Despite being
modeled on a tree, the trellis
was a human invention; every year, in May,
the green wires of the struggling vine
climbed the straightforward
trellis, and after many years
white flowers burst from the brittle wood, like
a star shower from the heart of the garden.
Enough of that ruse. We both know
how the vine grows without
the trellis, how it sneaks
along the ground; we have both seen it
flower there, the white blossoms
like headlights growing out of a snake.
This isn’t what the vine wants.
Remember, to the vine, the trellis
was never an image of confinement:
this is not
diminishment or tragedy.
The vine has a dream of light:
what is life in the dirt
with its dark freedoms
compared to supported ascent?
And for a time,
every summer we could see the vine
relive this decision, thus
obscuring the wood, structure
beautiful in itself, like
a harbor or willow tree.
TELEMACHUS’ GUILT
Patience of the sort my mother
practiced on my father
(which in his self—
absorption he mistook
for tribute though it was in fact
a species of rage—didn’t he
ever wonder why he was
so blocked in expressing
his native abandon?): it infected
my childhood. Patiently
she fed me; patiently
she supervised the kindly
slaves who attended me, regardless
of my behavior, an assumption
I tested with increasing
violence. It seemed clear to me
that from her perspective
I didn’t exist, since
my actions had
no power to disturb her: I was
the envy of my playmates.
In the decades that followed
I was proud of my father
for staying away
even if he stayed away for
the wrong reasons;
I used to smile
when my mother wept.
I hope now she could
forgive that cruelty; I hope
she understood how like
her own coldness it was,
a means of remaining
separate from what
one loves deeply.
ANNIVERSARY
I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean
your cold feet all over my dick.
Someone should teach you how to act in bed.
What I think is you should
keep your extremities to yourself.
Look what you did—
you made the cat move.
But I didn’t want your hand there.
I wanted your hand here.
You should pay attention to my feet.
You should picture them
the next time you see a hot fifteen year old.
Because there’s a lot more where those feet come from.
MEADOWLANDS 1
I wish we went on walks
like Steven and Kathy; then
we’d be happy. You can even see it
in the dog.
We don’t have a dog.
We have a hostile cat.
I think Sam’s
intelligent; he
resents being a pet.
Why is it always family with you?
Can’t we ever be two adults?
Look how happy Captain is, how
at peace in the world. Don’t you love
how he sits on the lawn, staring up at the birds? He thinks
because he’s white they can’t see him.
You know why they’re happy? They take
the children. And you know why they can go
on walks with children? Because
they have children.
They’re nothing like us; they don’t
travel. That’s why they have a dog.
Have you noticed how Alissa always comes back from the walks
holding something, bringing nature
into the house? Flowers in spring,
sticks in winter.
I bet they’re still taking the dog
when the children are grown up.
He’s a young dog, practically
a puppy.
If we don’t expect
Sam to follow, couldn’t we
take him along?
You could hold him.
TELEMACHUS’ KINDNESS
When I was younger I felt
sorry for myself
compulsively; in practical terms,
I had no father; my mother
lived at her loom hypothesizing
her husband’s erotic life; gradually
I realized no child on that island had
a different story; my trials
were the general rule, common
to all of us, a bond
among us, therefore
with humanity: what
a life my mother had, without
compassion for my father’s
suffering, for a soul
ardent by nature, thus
ravaged by choice, nor had my father
any sense of her courage, subtly
