who were told by Thrift how little she charges.
Maybe the ermine collar on the robe
of Excess has come loose
or a rip in the gown of Abandon
needs mending, and no questions
will be asked about how that came to pass.
A little bell over the door rings
whenever a customer enters or leaves,
but Poetry is too busy thinking about her children
as she replaces a gold button on the blazer of Pride.
Hendrik Goltzius’s “Icarus” (1588)
The Icarus Auden favored was two tiny legs
disappearing with a splash into a green bay
while everyone else went on with their business,
fisherman and sailor, shepherd and sheep.
But in this version, the plight of the boy
in all his muscular plunging fills the circular canvas
as if he were falling through a hole in the world,
passing through the lens of our seeing him.
It’s hard to read the expression on a pair of legs,
but here we have the horrified face
contorted with regret not unlike the beady-eyed
Wile E. Coyote, who pauses in mid-air
to share with us his moment of fatal realization
before beginning his long descent into a canyon.
It’s as if Auden’s Brueghel had been run
backwards to produce an amazing sight—
a wet boy rising into the sky,
and then a sudden close-up to show the sorrow
or the stupidity, however we like to picture
the consequences of not listening to your father,
of flying too high, too close to the source of heat and light.
And to enhance the mythic drama, this Icarus
is presented as one of “The Four Disgracers”
where he joins Phaeton, who also took the sun lightly,
Ixion, bound to a fire-spoked wheel,
and Tantalus, who served up his son for dinner,
each figure tumbling operatically in a rondo of air.
To think if they were left in the hands of Brueghel,
one might have ended up as a tangle of limbs in an oak,
another as a form face down in a haycock,
and the last just a hole in the roof of a barn.
The Money Note
Every time I listen to a favorite opera,
I close my eyes at some point
and wait in the dark for the note to arrive.
It’s the high note I’m expecting,
the one that carries the singer
to the outer limits of his voice
and holds him there, but only in the way
that water is held in the hands,
for even though tenor
(from the Latin tenere) means to hold,
there is no lingering here
at the risky zenith of the possible
where the singer seems suspended
in the bright air of the hall,
stopped at the gate of a city no one
has ever entered and escaped with their voice.
It’s the note that awakens with a jolt
the dozing spouses in the upper boxes,
who mistake it for a sound of alarm
as if the heavy, dazzling chandelier
were now breaking free of its moorings.
And even the wakeful can misconstrue
the look on the singer’s florid face
as a cry for help, as if someone
could assist him down from such a height.
Of course, after the note has crested,
more of the story remains to be told
of the countess and her suitors,
some meaning well, others in disguise,
and soon enough, a soft aria of doomed love
will return the inattentive to their dreams.
But lingering still for some
is that gooseflesh moment
when the note at the tip of a scale
threatened to overwhelm the plot,
put a match to the corner of the libretto,
plant a rippling flag on a snow-blown summit
somewhere beyond the margins of music and art.
Helium
“The morning is expected to be cool and foggy.”
—WISÅAWA SZYMBORSKA “The Day After—Without Us”
Imagining what the weather will be like
on the day following your death
has a place on that list of things
that distinguish us from animals
as if walking around on two legs
laughing to ourselves were not enough to close the case.
In these forecasts, it’s usually raining,
the way it would be in the movies,
but it could be sparkling clear
or grey and still with snow expected in the afternoon.
Much will continue to occur after I die
seems to be the message here.
The rose will nod its red or yellow head.
Sunbeams will break into the gloomy woods.
And that’s what was on my mind
as I drove through a gauntlet of signs
on a road that passed through a small town in Ohio:
Bob’s Transmissions,
The Hairport, The Bountiful Buffet,
Reggie’s Bike Shop, Balloon Designs by Pauline,
and Majestic China Garden to name a few.
When I realized that all these places
could still be in business on the day after I die,
I vowed to drink more water,
to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables,
and to start going to the gym I never go to
if only to outlive
Balloon Designs by Pauline
and maybe even Pauline herself
though it would be enough if she simply
lost the business and left town for good.
Weathervane
It’s not a rooster, a horse, or a simple arrow,
nor the ship or whale you might see near a harbor,
but a cat silhouetted in black metal
extending a forepaw downward
in order to reach one of the four metal mice
perched on the arms that indicate the compass points.
A mouse for the east, a mouse for the west,
a mouse for the north, a mouse for the south,
facing in all directions as the vane turns in the wind
and the cat reaches down to snatch a wee one in its hooks.
Like nothing less than the lovers on Keats’ urn
or the petrified bodies at Pompeii, here is another
frozen moment in western culture,
for the cat will never consume one of the mice,
and no mouse will ever be disjointed by the black cat
no matter which way the wind is blowing,
no matter how madly the cat swivels on the roof
while you and I are at home, safe from a coming storm,
or far away in another country, as we are now,
thinking about a weathervane in a café in Istanbul.
Species
I have no need for a biscuit,
a chew toy, or two bowls on a stand.
No desire to investigate a shrub
or sleep on an oval mat by the door,
but sometimes waiting at a light,
I start to identify with the blond Lab
with his head out the rear window
of the station wagon idling next to me.
And if we speed off together
and I can see his dark lips flapping
in the wind and his eyes closed
then I am sitting in the balcony of envy.
Look at you, I usually say
when I see a terrier on a leash
trotting briskly along as if running
his weekday morning errands,
and I stop to stare at any dog
who is peering around a corner,
returning a ball to the thrower,
or staring back at me from a porch.
So early this morning
there was no avoiding a twinge
of jealousy for the young spaniel,
tied to a bench in the shade,
who was now wagging
not only his tail but the whole of himself
as a woman in a summer dress
emerged from the glass doors of the post office
then crouched down in front of him
taking his chin in her hand,
and said in a mock-scolding tone
“I told you I’d be right back, silly,”
leaving the dog to sit
and return her gaze with a look
of understanding which seemed to say
“I know. I know. I never doubted that you would.”
The Bard in Flight
It occurred to me
on a flight from London to Barcelona
that Shakespeare could have written
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England
with more authority had he occupied
the window seat next to me
instead of this businessman from Frankfurt.
Of course, after a couple of drinks
and me loaning him an ear bud
he might become too preoccupied
with Miles Davis at the Blackhawk
at 36,000 feet above some realm or other to write a word.
I imagine he’d enjoy playing with my wristwatch,
the one with the tartan band,
and when he wasn’t looking out the window
he would study the ice cubes in his rotating glass.
And he’d take a keen interest
in the various announcements from the flight deck
and the ministrations of the bowing attendants,
all of which would be sadly lost on me
having gotten used to rushing above the clouds
even though 99% of humanity has never been there.
Yet I am still fond of the snub-nosed engines,
the straining harmony of the twin jets,
and even the sensation of turbulence,
jostled about high above some blessed plot,
with the sound of crockery shifting in the galley,
the frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers,
and the Bard reaching for my hand
as we roared with trembling wings
into the towering fortress of a thunderhead.
Sirens
Not those women who lure sailors
onto a reef with their singing and their tresses,
but the screams of an ambulance
bearing the sick, the injured, and the dying
across the rational grid of the city.
We get so used to the sound
it’s just another sharp in the city’s tune.
Yet it’s one thing to stop on a sidewalk
with other pedestrians to watch one
flashing and speeding down an avenue
while a child on a corner covers her ears
and a shopkeeper appears in a doorway,
but another thing when one gets stuck
in traffic and seems to be crying for its mother
who has fled to another country.
Everyone keeps walking along then,
eyes cast down—for after all,
there’s nothing we can do,
and today we are not the one peering
up at the face of an angel dressed in scrubs.
Some of us are late for appointments
a few blocks away, while others
have the day off and take their time
angling across a broad, leafy avenue
before being engulfed by the green of a park.
Predator
It takes only a minute
to bury a wren.
Two trowels full of dirt
and he’s in.
The cat at the threshold
sits longer in doubt
deciding whether
to stay in or go out.
Traffic
“…watching the next car ahead and in the mirror the car behind.”
—GRAHAM GREENE
A child on a silver bicycle,
a young mother pushing a stroller,
and a runner who looked like he was running to Patagonia
have all passed my car, jammed
into a traffic jam on a summer weekend.
And now an elderly couple gradually
overtakes me as does a family of snails—
me stalled as if in a pit of tar
far from any beach and its salty air.
Why even Buddha has risen
from his habitual sitting
and is now walking serenely past my car,
holding his robes to his chest with one hand.
I watch him from the patch of shade
I have inched into as he begins to grow smaller
over my steering wheel then sits down again
up ahead, unfurling his palms
as if he were only a tiny figurine affixed to the dash.
Sixteen Years Old, I Help Bring in the Hay on My Uncle John’s Farm with Two French-Canadian Workers
None of us expected the massing thunderheads
to swing open their doors so suddenly
that we would have to drop our rakes
and run across the field to a shelter
and stand there side by side under its tin roof
looking out through a shiny curtain of rain.
We had never spent any time together
except for the haying, raking it into piles
and pitchforking it up into an old truck,
but now there was nothing to do
but watch and listen to the downpour
and nothing to say either
and lit one by one with the flame of a single match.
The Present
Much has been said about being in the present.
It’s the place to be, according to the gurus,
like the latest club on the downtown scene,
but no one, it seems, is able to give you directions.
It doesn’t seem desirable or even possible
to wake up every morning and begin
leaping from one second into the next
until you fall exhausted back into bed.
Plus, there’d be no past
with so many scenes to savor and regret,
and no future, the place you will die
but not before flying around with a jet-pack.
The trouble with the present is
that it’s always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period—already gone.
What about the moment that exists
between banging your thumb
with a hammer and realizing
you are in a whole lot of pain?
What about the one that occurs
after you hear the punch line
but before you get the joke?
Is that where the wise men want us to live
in that intervening tick, the tiny slot
that occurs after you have spent hours
searching downtown for that new club
and just before you give up and head back home?
On Rhyme
It’s possible that a stitch in time
might save as many as twelve or as few as three,
and I have no trouble remembering
that September has thirty days.
So do June, November, and April.
I like a cat wearing a chapeau or a trilby,
Little Jack Horner sitting on a sofa,
old men who are not from Nantucket,
and how life can seem almost unreal
when you are gently rowing a boat down a stream.
That’s why instead of recalling today
that it pours mostly in Spain,
I am going to picture the rain in Portugal,
how it falls on the hillside vineyards,
on the surface of the deep harbors
where fishing boats are swaying,
and in the narrow alleys of the cities,
where three boys in tee shirts
are kicking a soccer ball in the rain,
ignoring the window-cries of their mothers.
The Five Spot, 1964
There’s always a lesson to be learned
whether in a hotel bar
or over tea in a teahouse,
no matter which way it goes,
for you or against,
what you want to hear or what you don’t.
Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,
with two then three saxophones
in his mouth at once
and a kazoo, no less,
hanging from his neck at the ready.
Even in my youth I saw this
not as a lesson in keeping busy
with one thing or another,
but as a joyous impossible lesson
in how to do it all at once,
pleasing and displeasing yourself
with harmony here and discord there.
But what else did I know
as the waitress lit the candle
on my round table in the dark?
What did I know about anything?
2128
It’s the year when everyone is celebrating
the 200th birthday of Donald Hall,
but I don’t know what to do with myself.
No one ever thought to tell me
that he and I would live
beyond anyone’s expectations
and that the challenge would be
to figure out how to keep ourselves busy.
Were not Tennyson’s “Tithonus”
and Swift’s sketch of the Struldbrugs
eloquent enough warnings
of the dangers of living too long?
And here’s a more recent proof:
me pacing around a dining room table