Poems 1962-2012, page 25
because he can’t remember anymore the word for chair.
It is terrible to be alone.
I don’t mean to live alone—
to be alone, where no one hears you.
I remember the word for chair.
I want to say—I’m just not interested anymore.
I wake up thinking
you have to prepare.
Soon the spirit will give up—
all the chairs in the world won’t help you.
I know what they say when I’m out of the room.
Should I be seeing someone, should I be taking
one of the new drugs for depression.
I can hear them, in whispers, planning how to divide the cost.
And I want to scream out
you’re all of you living in a dream.
Bad enough, they think, to watch me falling apart.
Bad enough without this lecturing they get these days
as though I had any right to this new information.
Well, they have the same right.
They’re living in a dream, and I’m preparing
to be a ghost. I want to shout out
the mist has cleared—
It’s like some new life:
you have no stake in the outcome;
you know the outcome.
Think of it: sixty years sitting in chairs. And now the mortal spirit
seeking so openly, so fearlessly—
To raise the veil.
To see what you’re saying goodbye to.
2.
I didn’t go back for a long time.
When I saw the field again, autumn was finished.
Here, it finishes almost before it starts—
the old people don’t even own summer clothing.
The field was covered with snow, immaculate.
There wasn’t a sign of what happened here.
You didn’t know whether the farmer
had replanted or not.
Maybe he gave up and moved away.
The police didn’t catch the girl.
After awhile they said she moved to some other country,
one where they don’t have fields.
A disaster like this
leaves no mark on the earth.
And people like that—they think it gives them
a fresh start.
I stood a long time, staring at nothing.
After a bit, I noticed how dark it was, how cold.
A long time—I have no idea how long.
Once the earth decides to have no memory
time seems in a way meaningless.
But not to my children. They’re after me
to make a will; they’re worried the government
will take everything.
They should come with me sometime
to look at this field under the cover of snow.
The whole thing is written out there.
Nothing: I have nothing to give them.
That’s the first part.
The second is: I don’t want to be burned.
3.
On one side, the soul wanders.
On the other, human beings living in fear.
In between, the pit of disappearance.
Some young girls ask me
if they’ll be safe near Averno—
they’re cold, they want to go south a little while.
And one says, like a joke, but not too far south—
I say, as safe as anywhere,
which makes them happy.
What it means is nothing is safe.
You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.
Like the field, the one that burned.
Afterward, the girl was gone.
Maybe she didn’t exist,
we have no proof either way.
All we know is:
the field burned.
But we saw that.
So we have to believe in the girl,
in what she did. Otherwise
it’s just forces we don’t understand
ruling the earth.
The girls are happy, thinking of their vacation.
Don’t take a train, I say.
They write their names in mist on a train window.
I want to say, you’re good girls,
trying to leave your names behind.
4.
We spent the whole day
sailing the archipelago,
the tiny islands that were
part of the peninsula
until they’d broken off
into the fragments you see now
floating in the northern sea water.
They seemed safe to me,
I think because no one can live there.
Later we sat in the kitchen
watching the evening start and then the snow.
First one, then the other.
We grew silent, hypnotized by the snow
as though a kind of turbulence
that had been hidden before
was becoming visible,
something within the night
exposed now—
In our silence, we were asking
those questions friends who trust each other
ask out of great fatigue,
each one hoping the other knows more
and when this isn’t so, hoping
their shared impressions will amount to insight.
Is there any benefit in forcing upon oneself
the realization that one must die?
Is it possible to miss the opportunity of one’s life?
Questions like that.
The snow heavy. The black night
transformed into busy white air.
Something we hadn’t seen revealed.
Only the meaning wasn’t revealed.
5.
After the first winter, the field began to grow again.
But there were no more orderly furrows.
The smell of the wheat persisted, a kind of random aroma
intermixed with various weeds, for which
no human use has been as yet devised.
It was puzzling—no one knew
where the farmer had gone.
Some people thought he died.
Someone said he had a daughter in New Zealand,
that he went there to raise
grandchildren instead of wheat.
Nature, it turns out, isn’t like us;
it doesn’t have a warehouse of memory.
The field doesn’t become afraid of matches,
of young girls. It doesn’t remember
furrows either. It gets killed off, it gets burned,
and a year later it’s alive again
as though nothing unusual has occurred.
The farmer stares out the window.
Maybe in New Zealand, maybe somewhere else.
And he thinks: my life is over.
His life expressed itself in that field;
he doesn’t believe anymore in making anything
out of earth. The earth, he thinks,
has overpowered me.
He remembers the day the field burned,
not, he thinks, by accident.
Something deep within him said: I can live with this,
I can fight it after awhile.
The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased,
when he understood that the earth
didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead.
And then go on existing without him.
OMENS
I rode to meet you: dreams
like living beings swarmed around me
and the moon on my right side
followed me, burning.
I rode back: everything changed.
My soul in love was sad
and the moon on my left side
trailed me without hope.
To such endless impressions
we poets give ourselves absolutely,
making, in silence, omen of mere event,
until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.
after Alexander Pushkin
TELESCOPE
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.
THRUSH
—for Noah Max Horwitz and Susan Kimmelman, in memory
Snow began falling, over the surface of the whole earth.
That can’t be true. And yet it felt true,
falling more and more thickly over everything I could see.
The pines turned brittle with ice.
This is the place I told you about,
where I used to come at night to see the red-winged blackbirds,
what we call thrush here—
red flicker of the life that disappears—
But for me—I think the guilt I feel must mean
I haven’t lived very well.
Someone like me doesn’t escape. I think you sleep awhile,
then you descend into the terror of the next life
except
the soul is in some different form,
more or less conscious than it was before,
more or less covetous.
After many lives, maybe something changes.
I think in the end what you want
you’ll be able to see—
Then you don’t need anymore
to die and come back again.
PERSEPHONE THE WANDERER
In the second version, Persephone
is dead. She dies, her mother grieves—
problems of sexuality need not
trouble us here.
Compulsively, in grief, Demeter
circles the earth. We don’t expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.
We have here
a mother and a cipher: this is
accurate to the experience
of the mother as
she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks:
I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant
is puzzled; later, the child’s opinion is
she has always existed, just as
her mother has always existed
in her present form. Her mother
is like a figure at a bus stop,
an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that,
she was the bus, a temporary
home or convenience. Persephone, protected,
stares out the window of the chariot.
What does she see? A morning
in early spring, in April. Now
her whole life is beginning—unfortunately,
it’s going to be
a short life. She’s going to know, really,
only two adults: death and her mother.
But two is
twice what her mother has:
her mother has
one child, a daughter.
As a god, she could have had
a thousand children.
We begin to see here
the deep violence of the earth
whose hostility suggests
she has no wish
to continue as a source of life.
And why is this hypothesis
never discussed? Because
it is not in the story; it only
creates the story.
In grief, after the daughter dies,
the mother wanders the earth.
She is preparing her case;
like a politician
she remembers everything and admits
nothing.
For example, her daughter’s
birth was unbearable, her beauty
was unbearable: she remembers this.
She remembers Persephone’s
innocence, her tenderness—
What is she planning, seeking her daughter?
She is issuing
a warning whose implicit message is:
what are you doing outside my body?
You ask yourself:
why is the mother’s body safe?
The answer is
this is the wrong question, since
the daughter’s body
doesn’t exist, except
as a branch of the mother’s body
that needs to be
reattached at any cost.
When a god grieves it means
destroying others (as in war)
while at the same time petitioning
to reverse agreements (as in war also):
if Zeus will get her back,
winter will end.
Winter will end, spring will return.
The small pestering breezes
that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers—
Spring will return, a dream
based on a falsehood:
that the dead return.
Persephone
was used to death. Now over and over
her mother hauls her out again—
You must ask yourself:
are the flowers real? If
Persephone “returns” there will be
one of two reasons:
either she was not dead or
she is being used
to support a fiction—
I think I can remember
being dead. Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
how can I endure the earth?
And he would say,
in a short time you will be here again.
And in the time between
you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.
A VILLAGE LIFE (2009)
TO JAMES LONGENBACH
TWILIGHT
All day he works at his cousin’s mill,
so when he gets home at night, he always sits at this one window,
sees one time of day, twilight.
There should be more time like this, to sit and dream.
It’s as his cousin says:
Living—living takes you away from sitting.
In the window, not the world but a squared-off landscape
representing the world. The seasons change,
each visible only a few hours a day.
Green things followed by golden things followed by whiteness—
abstractions from which come intense pleasures,
like the figs on the table.
At dusk, the sun goes down in a haze of red fire between two poplars.
It goes down late in summer—sometimes it’s hard to stay awake.
Then everything falls away.
The world for a little longer
is something to see, then only something to hear,
crickets, cicadas.
Or to smell sometimes, aroma of lemon trees, of orange trees.
Then sleep takes this away also.
But it’s easy to give things up like this, experimentally,
for a matter of hours.
I open my fingers—
I let everything go.
Visual world, language,
rustling of leaves in the night,
smell of high grass, of woodsmoke.
I let it go, then I light the candle.
PASTORAL
The sun rises over the mountain.
Sometimes there’s mist
but the sun’s behind it always
and the mist isn’t equal to it.
The sun burns its way through,
like the mind defeating stupidity.
When the mist clears, you see the meadow.
No one really understands
the savagery of this place,
the way it kills people for no reason,
just to keep in practice.
So people flee—and for a while, away from here,
they’re exuberant, surrounded by so many choices—
But no signal from earth
will ever reach the sun. Thrash
against that fact, you are lost.
When they come back, they’re worse.
They think they failed in the city,
not that the city doesn’t make good its promises.
They blame their upbringing: youth ended and they’re back,
silent, like their fathers.
Sundays, in summer, they lean against the wall of the clinic,
smoking cigarettes. When they remember,
they pick flowers for their girlfriends—
It makes the girls happy.
They think it’s pretty here, but they miss the city, the afternoons
filled with shopping and talking, what you do
when you have no money…
To my mind, you’re better off if you stay;
that way, dreams don’t damage you.
At dusk, you sit by the window. Wherever you live,
you can see the fields, the river, realities
on which you cannot impose yourself—
To me, it’s safe. The sun rises; the mist
dissipates to reveal
the immense mountain. You can see the peak,
how white it is, even in summer. And the sky’s so blue,
punctuated with small pines
like spears—
When you got tired of walking
you lay down in the grass.
When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you’d been,
the grass was slick there, flattened out
into the shape of a body. When you looked back later,
it was as though you’d never been there at all.
Midafternoon, midsummer. The fields go on forever,
peaceful, beautiful.
Like butterflies with their black markings,
the poppies open.
TRIBUTARIES
All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.
Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—
The fountain rises at the center of the plaza;
on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub.
