with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?
Carpe Diem
Maybe it was the fast-moving clouds
or the spring flowers quivering among the dead leaves,
but I knew this was one day I was born to seize—
not just another card in the deck of the year,
but March 19th itself,
looking as clear and fresh as the ten of diamonds.
Living life to the fullest is the only way,
I thought as I sat by a tall window
and tapped my pencil on the dome of a glass paperweight.
To drain the cup of life to the dregs
was a piece of irresistible advice,
I averred as I checked someone’s dates
in the Dictionary of National Biography
and later, as I scribbled a few words
on the back of a picture postcard.
Crashing through the iron gates of life
is what it is all about,
I decided as I lay down on the carpet,
locked my hands behind my head,
and considered how unique this day was
and how different I was from the men
of hari-kari for whom it is disgraceful
to end up lying on your back.
Better, they think, to be found facedown
in blood-soaked shirt
than to be discovered with lifeless eyes
fixed on the elegant teak ceiling above you,
and now I can almost hear the silence
of the temple bells and the lighter silence
of the birds hiding in the darkness of a hedge.
Lost
There was no art in losing that coin
you gave me for luck, the one with the profile
of an emperor on one side and a palm on the other.
It rode for days in a pocket
of my black pants, the paint-speckled ones,
past storefronts, gas stations and playgrounds,
and then it was gone, as lost as the lost
theorems of Pythagoras, or the Medea by Ovid,
which also slipped through the bars of time,
and as ungraspable as the sin that landed him—
forever out of favor with Augustus—
on a cold rock on the coast of the Black Sea,
where eventually he died, but not before
writing a poem about the fish of those waters,
into which, as we know, he was never transformed,
nor into a flower, a tree, or a stream,
nor into a star like Julius Caesar,
not even into a small bird that could wing it back to Rome.
Dublin
So much to be learned out here in the drizzle
with all the tall busses swinging themselves
so close to me around corners and men
in bunches smoking outside the betting parlors.
And when the rain falls steadily enough
to drive me into a gallery or a city castle,
then the knowledge only comes pouring down
whether I am in the mood for it or not.
Today, it’s the codex of Leonardo on display
in the dim light where you touch a screen
to turn a page, the margins busy with pulleys
and siphons, whirlwinds, tides, and sluices.
And better informed I am to read on a little card
the news that Herbert Hoover translated
into English for the first time the works
of Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy himself.
Out the windows of the gallery,
a jumble of raincoats and black umbrellas,
and so my afternoon education continues
with the discovery in a vitrine of Vegetarius,
who in the 4th century came up
with the idea of underwater warfare,
hand-to-hand combat beneath the lily pads
as if bloodying one another on the ground were not enough.
And if his illustration of an armed soldier
standing on the bottom of a lake
and breathing through a snake-like tube
comes at me tonight and shakes me out of sleep,
nor put on a robe and stand by the stove
looking at the ads in a magazine
while some milk is heating in a pan.
I only need to slide into place
the image of Leonardo at a table by a window,
his marvelling head resting in his hands,
as he wonders if water could exist on the moon.
New Year’s Day
Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—
a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,
this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
And as an only child—
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning—
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more might be a small consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
on some kitchen calendar of the future,
the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,
party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
The Day Lassie Died
It is 5:40 in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, a Tuesday
a few days before the birthday of Martin Luther, yes
it is 1959 and I need to do my chores
which include milking the ten cows—
did I mention it was 5:40 in the morning?—
and driving them with a stick into the pasture.
After breakfast (I am thinking oatmeal
with brown sugar and some raisins)
I will drive the twelve miles into town
and pick up a few things,
a tin of hoof softener for the horse,
some batteries, shells, a pair of rubber gloves,
and something for my wife but I don’t know what.
Maybe this cotton apron
with little pictures of the Eiffel Tower on it,
or she might like some hairpins, a box of tissues,
yet I am tempted by this anthology
of the Cavalier poets edited by Thomas Crofts
or maybe The Pictorial History of Eton College by B.J.W. Hill,
but after pacing up and down the aisles
of Olsen’s Emporium, I finally settle on
The Zen Teaching of Huang Po
translated from the Chinese (obviously)
by John Blofeld and published
recently by the infamous Grove Press,
and when I take everything up to Henry
at the big bronze cash register,
&nbs
p; he asks have you seen today’s Sentinel
and there’s her face, the dark eyes,
the long near-smile, and the flowing golden coat
and I’m leaning on the barn door back home
while my own collie, who looks a lot like her,
lies curled outside in a sunny patch
and all you can hear as the morning warms up
is the sound of the cows’ heavy breathing.
three
Tension
Never use the word suddenly just to create
tension.
—Writing Fiction
Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.
When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.
A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.
I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving
to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.
Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue
to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.
The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning
began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.
The Golden Years
All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasants to be seen
and, last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.
Vermont, Early November
It was in between seasons,
after the thin twitter of late autumn
but before the icy authority of winter,
and I took in the scene from a porch,
a tableau of silo and weathervane
and a crowd of ferns on the edge of the woods—
nothing worth writing about really,
but it is too late to stop now
that the ferns and the silo have been mentioned.
I drank my warm coffee
and took note of the disused tractor
and the lopsided sign to the cheese factory.
Not one of those mornings
that makes you want to seize the day,
not even enough glory in it to make you want
to grasp every other day,
yet after staring for a while
at the plowed-under fields and the sky,
I turned back to the order of the kitchen
determined to seize firmly
the second Wednesday of every month that lay ahead.
The Effort
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
“What is the poet trying to say?”
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker’s third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows—the drizzle and the morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
The Lamps Unlit
It is difficult to write an aubade,
a song about noon, or a few crepuscular lines
without stopping to realize
just where you are on the dial of a certain day,
which is at least a beginning
and better than the usual blind rush
into the future, believed to reside
over the next in an infinite series of hills.
I’m all for noticing that the light
in the tops of the trees
is different now with the grass moist
and cold, the heads of flowers yet unfolded,
all for occupying a chair by a window
or a wayside bench for an hour—
time enough to look here and there
as the caravan of time crosses the sand,
time to think of the dead and lost friends,
their faces hidden in the foliage,
and to consider the ruination of love,
a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney.
And who cares if it takes me all day
to write a poem about the dawn
and I finish in the dark with the night—
some love it best—draped across my shoulders.
China
I am an ant inside a blue bowl
on the table of a cruel prince.
Battle plans are being discussed.
Much rice wine is poured.
But even when he angers
and drives a long knife into the table,
I continue to circle the bowl,
hand-painted with oranges and green vines.
Looking Forward
Whenever I stare into the future,
the low, blue hills of the future,
shading my eye
s with one hand,
I no longer see a city of opals
with a sunny river running through it
or a dark city of coal and gutters.
Nor do I see children
donning their apocalyptic goggles
and hiding in doorways.
All I see is me attending your burial
or you attending mine,
depending on who gets to go first.
There is a light rain.
A figure under an umbrella
is reading from a thick book with a black cover.
And a passing cemetery worker
has cut the engine to his backhoe
and is taking a drink from a bottle of water.
(detail)
It was getting late in the year,