Writing in the Afterlife
I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulfurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.
Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.
I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.
I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed
that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,
rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be
to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—
think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,
bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.
No Time
In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents lie buried
side by side under a smooth slab of granite.
Then, all day long, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.
Elk River Falls
is where the Elk River falls
from a rocky and considerable height,
turning pale with trepidation at the lip
(it seemed from where I stood below)
before it unbuckles from itself
and plummets, shredded, through the air
into the shadows of a frigid pool,
so calm around the edges, a place
for water to recover from the shock
of falling apart and coming back together
before it picks up its song again,
goes sliding around some massive rocks
and past some islands overgrown with weeds
then flattens out, slips around a bend,
and continues on its winding course,
according to this camper’s guide,
then joins the Clearwater at its northern fork
which leads it all to the distant sea
where this and every other stream
mistakes the monster for itself,
sings its name one final time
then feels the sudden sting of salt.
Christmas Sparrow
The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—
wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.
Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.
On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.
But outside, when I uncupped my hands,
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.
For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.
Surprise
This—
according to the voice on the radio,
the host of a classical music program no less—
this is the birthday of Vivaldi.
He would be 325 years old today—
quite bent over, I would imagine,
and not able to see much through his watery eyes.
Surely, he would be deaf by now,
the clothes flaking off him,
hair pitiably sparse.
But we would throw a party for him anyway,
a surprise party where everyone
would hide behind the furniture to listen
for the tap of his cane on the pavement
and the sound of that dry, persistent cough.
Poetry
Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
come to graze under the evening clouds.
Or a cistern where the rain that fell
before history trickles over a concrete lip.
However you see it,
this is no place to set up
the three-legged easel of realism
or make a reader climb
over the many fences of a plot.
Let the portly novelist
with his noisy typewriter
describe the city where Francine was born,
how Albert read the paper on the train,
how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.
Let the playwright with her torn cardigan
and a dog curled on the rug
move the characters
from the wings to the stage
to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.
Poetry is no place for that.
We have enough to do
complaining about the price of tobacco,
passing the dripping ladle,
and singing songs to a bird in a cage.
We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,
and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.
FROM THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY
(2005)
Monday
The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.
They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth—
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.
The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.
The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.
What window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see—
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.
The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.
By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the drycleaner,
so the window is to the poet.
Just think—
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.
And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.
I mean a cold wall of field stones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.
Statues in the Park
I thought of you today
when I stopped before an equestrian statue
in the middle of a public square,
you who had once instructed me
in the code of these noble poses.
A horse rearing up with two legs raised,
you told me, meant the rider had died in battle.
If only one leg was lifted,
the man had elsewhere succumbed to his wounds;
and if four legs were touching the ground,
as they were in this case—
bronze hooves affixed to a stone base—
it meant that the man on the horse,
this one staring intently
over the closed movie theatre across the street,
had died of a cause other than war.
In the shadow of the statue,
I wondered about the others
who had simply walked through life
without a horse, a saddle, or a sword—
pedestrians who could no longer
place one foot in front of the other.
I pictured statues of the sickly
recumbent on their cold stone beds,
the suicides toeing the marble edge,
statues of accident victims covering their eyes,
the murdered covering their wounds,
the drowned silently treading the air.
And there was I,
up on a rosy-gray block of granite
near a cluster of shade trees in the local park,
my name and dates pressed into a plaque,
down on my knees, eyes lifted,
praying to the passing clouds,
forever begging in vain for just one more day.
House
I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.
The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—
and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.
I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.
So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,
he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman
or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm
when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,
lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
only the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.
The Long Day
In the morning I ate a banana
like a young ape
and worked on a poem called “Nocturne.”
In the afternoon I opened the mail
with a short kitchen knife,
and when dusk began to fall
I took off my clothes,
put on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
and soaked in a claw-footed bathtub.
I closed my eyes and thought
about the alphabet,
the letters filing out of the halls of kindergarten
to become literature.
If the British call z zed,
I wondered, why not call b bed and d dead.
And why does z, which looks like
the fastest letter, come at the very end?
unless they are all moving east
when we are facing north in our chairs.
It was then that I heard
a clap of thunder and the dog’s bark,
and the claw-footed bathtub
took one step forward,
or was it backward
I had to ask
as I turned
to reach for a far-away towel.
In the Evening
The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling her gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.
In the sky, traces of clouds,
the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.
The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.
I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick up an onion and a knife.
And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.
Flock
It has been calculated that each copy of
the Gutenburg Bible … required the
skins of 300 sheep.
—from an article on printing
I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,
all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike
it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling
which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.
Building with Its Face Blown Off
How suddenly the private
is revealed in a bombed out city,
how the blue and white striped wal
lpaper
of a second story bedroom is now
exposed to the lightly falling snow
as if the room had answered the explosion
wearing only its striped pajamas.
Some neighbors and soldiers
poke around in the rubble below
and stare up at the hanging staircase,
the portrait of a grandfather,
a door dangling from a single hinge.
And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed
by its uncovered ochre walls,
the twisted mess of its plumbing,
the sink sinking to its knees,
the ripped shower curtain,
the torn goldfish trailing bubbles.
It’s like a dollhouse view
as if a child on its knees could reach in
and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.
Or it might be a room on a stage
in a play with no characters,
no dialogue or audience,
no beginning, middle and end—
just the broken furniture in the street,
a shoe among the cinder blocks,
a light snow still falling
on a distant steeple, and people
crossing a bridge that still stands.
And beyond that—crows in a tree,
the statue of a leader on a horse,
and clouds that could be smoke,