Poems 1962-2012, page 28
not with a fire like this, those last sparks
still resisting, unfinished,
believing they will get everything in the end
since it is obvious they are not defeated,
merely dormant or resting, though no one knows
whether they represent life or death.
MARCH
The light stays longer in the sky, but it’s a cold light,
it brings no relief from winter.
My neighbor stares out the window,
talking to her dog. He’s sniffing the garden,
trying to reach a decision about the dead flowers.
It’s a little early for all this.
Everything’s still very bare—
nevertheless, something’s different today from yesterday.
We can see the mountain: the peak’s glittering where the ice catches the light.
But on the sides the snow’s melted, exposing bare rock.
My neighbor’s calling the dog, making her unconvincing doglike sounds.
The dog’s polite; he raises his head when she calls,
but he doesn’t move. So she goes on calling,
her failed bark slowly deteriorating into a human voice.
All her life she dreamed of living by the sea
but fate didn’t put her there.
It laughed at her dreams;
it locked her up in the hills, where no one escapes.
The sun beats down on the earth, the earth flourishes.
And every winter, it’s as though the rock underneath the earth rises
higher and higher and the earth becomes rock, cold and rejecting.
She says hope killed her parents, it killed her grandparents.
It rose up each spring with the wheat
and died between the heat of summer and the raw cold.
In the end, they told her to live near the sea,
as though that would make a difference.
By late spring she’ll be garrulous, but now she’s down to two words,
never and only, to express this sense that life’s cheated her.
Never the cries of the gulls, only, in summer, the crickets, cicadas.
Only the smell of the field, when all she wanted
was the smell of the sea, of disappearance.
The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink
as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson.
And everywhere the earth is rustling, not lying still.
And the dog senses this stirring; his ears twitch.
He walks back and forth, vaguely remembering
from other years this elation. The season of discoveries
is beginning. Always the same discoveries, but to the dog,
intoxicating and new, not duplicitous.
I tell my neighbor we’ll be like this
when we lose our memories. I ask her if she’s ever seen the sea
and she says, once, in a movie.
It was a sad story, nothing worked out at all.
The lovers part. The sea hammers the shore, the mark each wave leaves
wiped out by the wave that follows.
Never accumulation, never one wave trying to build on another,
never the promise of shelter—
The sea doesn’t change as the earth changes;
it doesn’t lie.
You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.
Finally the dog goes in.
We watch the crescent moon,
very faint at first, then clearer and clearer
as the night grows dark.
Soon it will be the sky of early spring, stretching above the stubborn ferns and violets.
Nothing can be forced to live.
The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,
a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.
It says forget, you forget.
It says begin again, you begin again.
A NIGHT IN SPRING
They told her she came out of a hole in her mother
but really it’s impossible to believe
something so delicate could come out of something
so fat—her mother naked
looks like a pig. She wants to think
the children telling her were making fun of her ignorance;
they think they can tell her anything
because she doesn’t come from the country, where people know these things.
She wants the subject to be finished, dead. It troubles her
to picture this space in her mother’s body,
releasing human beings now and again,
first hiding them, then dropping them into the world,
and all along drugging them, inspiring the same feelings
she attaches to her bed, this sense of solitude, this calm,
this sense of being unique—
Maybe her mother still has these feelings.
This could explain why she never sees
the great differences between the two of them
because at one point they were the same person—
She sees her face in the mirror, the small nose
sunk in fat, and at the same time she hears
the children’s laughter as they tell her
it doesn’t start in the face, stupid,
it starts in the body—
At night in bed, she pulls the quilt as high as possible,
up to her neck—
She has found this thing, a self,
and come to cherish it,
and now it will be packed away in flesh and lost—
And she feels her mother did this to her, meant this to happen.
Because whatever she may try to do with her mind,
her body will disobey,
that its complacency, its finality, will make her mind invisible,
no one will see—
Very gently, she moves the sheet aside.
And under it, there is her body, still beautiful and new
with no marks anywhere. And it seems to her still
identical to her mind, so consistent with it as to seem
transparent, almost,
and once again
she falls in love with it and vows to protect it.
HARVEST
It’s autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They’re beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—
Inside, they’re gone. Black, moldy—
you can’t take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.
Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.
Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.
At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.
The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground’s so hard the farmers think
it isn’t worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?
And then the frost comes; there’s no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.
I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.
What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.
CONFESSION
He steals sometimes, because they don’t have their own tree
and he loves fruit. Not steals exactly—
he pretends he’s an animal; he eats off the ground,
as the animals would eat. This is what he tells the priest,
that he doesn’t think it should be a sin to take what would just lie there and rot,
this year like every other year.
As a man, as a human being, the priest agrees with the boy,
but as a priest he chastises him, though the penance is light,
so as to not kill off imagination: what he’d give
to a much younger boy who took something that wasn’t his.
But the boy objects. He’s willing to do the penance
because he likes the priest, but he refuses to believe that Jesus
gave this fig tree to this woman; he wants to know
what Jesus does with all the money he gets from real estate,
not just in this village but in the whole country.
Partly he’s joking but partly he’s serious
and the priest gets irritated—he’s out of his depth with this boy,
he can’t explain that though Christ doesn’t deal in property,
still the fig tree belongs to the woman, even if she never picks the figs.
Perhaps one day, with the boy’s encouragement,
the woman will become a saint and share her fig tree and her big house with strangers,
but for the moment she’s a human being whose ancestors built this house.
The priest is pleased to have moved the conversation away from money,
which makes him nervous, and back to words like family or tradition,
where he feels more secure. The boy stares at him—
he knows perfectly well the ways in which he’s taken advantage of a senile old lady,
the ways he’s tried to charm the priest, to impress him. But he despises
speeches like the one beginning now;
he wants to taunt the priest with his own flight: if he loves family so much,
why didn’t the priest marry as his parents married, continue the line from which he came.
But he’s silent. The words that mean there will be
no questioning, no trying to reason—those words have been uttered.
“Thank you, Father,” he says.
MARRIAGE
All week they’ve been by the sea again
and the sound of the sea colors everything.
Blue sky fills the window.
But the only sound is the sound of the waves pounding the shore—
angry. Angry at something. Whatever it is
must be why he’s turned away. Angry, though he’d never hit her,
never say a word, probably.
So it’s up to her to get the answer some other way,
from the sea, maybe, or the gray clouds suddenly
rising above it. The smell of the sea is in the sheets,
the smell of sun and wind, the hotel smell, fresh and sweet
because they’re changed every day.
He never uses words. Words, for him, are for making arrangements,
for doing business. Never for anger, never for tenderness.
She strokes his back. She puts her face up against it,
even though it’s like putting your face against a wall.
And the silence between them is ancient: it says
these are the boundaries.
He isn’t sleeping, not even pretending to sleep.
His breathing’s not regular: he breathes in with reluctance;
he doesn’t want to commit himself to being alive.
And he breathes out fast, like a king banishing a servant.
Beneath the silence, the sound of the sea,
the sea’s violence spreading everywhere, not finished, not finished,
his breath driving the waves—
But she knows who she is and she knows what she wants.
As long as that’s true, something so natural can’t hurt her.
PRIMAVERA
Spring comes quickly: overnight
the plum tree blossoms,
the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun
with rays coming out all around
but because the background is dirt, the sun is black.
There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends
a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are—emblems of the resilience of life.
The birds approach eagerly.
FIGS
My mother made figs in wine—
poached with cloves, sometimes a few peppercorns.
Black figs, from our tree.
And the wine was red, the pepper left a taste of smoke in the syrup.
I used to feel I was in another country.
Before that, there’d be chicken.
In autumn, sometimes filled with wild mushrooms.
There wasn’t always time for that.
And the weather had to be right, just after the rain.
Sometimes it was just chicken, with a lemon inside.
She’d open the wine. Nothing special—
something she got from the neighbors.
I miss that wine—what I buy now doesn’t taste as good.
I make these things for my husband,
but he doesn’t like them.
He wants his mother’s dishes, but I don’t make them well.
When I try, I get angry—
He’s trying to turn me into a person I never was.
He thinks it’s a simple thing—
you cut up a chicken, throw a few tomatoes into the pan.
Garlic, if there’s garlic.
An hour later, you’re in paradise.
He thinks it’s my job to learn, not his job
to teach me. What my mother cooked, I don’t need to learn.
My hands already knew, just from smelling the cloves
while I did my homework.
When it was my turn, I was right. I did know.
The first time I tasted them, my childhood came back.
When we were young, it was different.
My husband and I—we were in love. All we ever wanted
was to touch each other.
He comes home, he’s tired.
Everything is hard—making money is hard, watching your body change
is hard. You can take these problems when you’re young—
something’s difficult for a while, but you’re confident.
If it doesn’t work out, you’ll do something else.
He minds summer most—the sun gets to him.
Here it’s merciless, you can feel the world aging.
The grass turns dry, the gardens get full of weeds and slugs.
It was the best time for us once.
The hours of light when he came home from work—
we’d turn them into hours of darkness.
Everything was a big secret—
even the things we said every night.
And slowly the sun would go down;
we’d see the lights of the city come on.
The nights were glossy with stars—stars
glittered above the high buildings.
Sometimes we’d light a candle.
But most nights, no. Most nights we’d lie there in the darkness,
with our arms around each other.
But there was a sense you could control the light—
it was a wonderful feeling; you could make the whole room
bright again, or you could lie in the night air,
listening to the cars.
We’d get quiet after a while. The night would get quiet.
But we didn’t sleep, we didn’t want to give up consciousness.
We had given the night permission to carry us along;
we lay there, not interfering. Hour after hour, each one
listening to the other’s breath, watching the light change
in the window at the end of the bed—
whatever happened in that window,
we were in harmony with it.
AT THE DANCE
Twice a year we hung the Christmas lights—
at Christmas for our Lord’s birth, and at the end of August,
as a blessing on the harvest—
near the end but before the end,
and everyone would come to see,
even the oldest people who could hardly walk—
They had to see the colored lights,
and in summer there was always music, too—
music and dancing.
For the young, it was everything.
Your life was made here—what was finished under the stars
started in the lights of the plaza.
Haze of cigarettes, the women gathered under the colored awnings
singing along with whatever songs were popular that year,
cheeks brown from the sun and red from the wine.
I remember all of it—my friends and I, how we were changed by the music,
and the women, I remember how bold they were, the timid ones
along with the others—
A spell was on us, but it was a sickness too,
the men and women choosing each other almost by accident, randomly,
and the lights glittering, misleading,
because whatever you did then you did forever—
And it seemed at the time
such a game, really—lighthearted, casual,
dissipating like smoke, like perfume between a woman’s breasts,
intense because your eyes are closed.
How were these things decided?
By smell, by feel—a man would approach a woman,
ask her to dance, but what it meant was
will you let me touch you, and the woman could say
