The Chairs That No One Sits In
You see them on porches and on lawns
down by the lakeside,
usually arranged in pairs implying a couple
who might sit there and look out
at the water or the big shade trees.
The trouble is you never see anyone
sitting in these forlorn chairs
though at one time it must have seemed
a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.
Sometimes there is a little table
between the chairs where no one
is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.
It may not be any of my business,
but let us suppose one day
that everyone who placed those vacant chairs
on a veranda or a dock sat down in them
if only for the sake of remembering
what it was they thought deserved
to be viewed from two chairs,
side by side with a table in between.
The clouds are high and massive on that day.
The woman looks up from her book.
The man takes a sip of his drink.
Then there is only the sound of their looking,
the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird
then another, cries of joy or warning—
it passes the time to wonder which.
Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne
Every reader loves the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.
And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.
But after a few steps into stanza number two,
wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes,
I can feel the first one begin to fade
like sky-written letters on a windy day.
And by the time I have taken in the third,
the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,
a wavering line of acrid smoke.
So it’s not until I leave the house
and walk three times around this hidden lake
that the poem begins to show
any interest in walking by my side.
Then, after my circling,
better than the courteous dominion
of her being all states and him all princes,
better than love’s power to shrink
the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,
and better even than the compression
of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas
is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,
testing the plank of every line,
it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.
Two Creatures
The last time I looked, the dog was lying
on the freshly cut grass
but now she has moved under the picnic table.
I wonder what causes her to shift
from one place to another,
to get up for no apparent reason from her spot
by the stove, scratch one ear,
then relocate, slumping down
on the other side of the room by the big window,
or I will see her hop onto the couch to nap
then later find her down
on the Turkish carpet, her nose in the fringe.
The moon rolls across the night sky
and stops to peer down at the earth,
and the dog rolls through these rooms
and onto the lawn, pausing here and there
to sleep or to stare up at me, head in her paws,
to consider the scentless pen in my hand
or the open book on my lap.
And because her eyes always follow me,
she must wonder, too, why
I shift from place to place,
from the couch to the sink
or the pencil sharpener on the wall—
two creatures bound by wonderment
though unlike her, I have never once worried
after letting her out the back door
that she would take off in the car
and leave me to die
behind the solid locked doors of this house.
Vocation
As I watched the night sky
from the wooden dock
I had painted gray earlier that day
I saw an airplane fly,
its red port-light blinking all the while,
right through the Big Dipper
nearly clipping one of the stars
of that constellation,
which was tilted upside-down at the time
and seemed to be pouring whatever it held
into space one big dipperful at a time.
And that was when I discovered
poised right above me
a hitherto unknown constellation
composed of six stars,
two for the snout and the four behind
for the pig’s trotters
though it would have taken some time
to make anyone see that.
But since there was no one there
lying next to me,
my constellation of the Pig
remained a secret
and a bright reminder,
after many jumbled days and nights,
of my true vocation—
keeping an eye on things
whether they existed or not,
recumbent under the random stars.
My Unborn Children
… of all your children, only those who were born.
—Wisława Szymborska
I have so many of them I sometimes lose track,
several hundred last time I counted
but that was years ago.
I remember one was made of marble
and another looked like a penguin
some days and on other days a white flower.
Many of them appeared only in dreams
or while I was writing a poem
with freezing fingers in the house of a miser.
Others were more like me
looking out the window in a worn shirt
then later staring into the dark.
None of them ever made the lacrosse team,
but they all made me as proud
as I was on the day they failed to be born.
There is no telling—
maybe tonight or later in the week
another one of my children will not be born.
I see this next one as a baby
lying naked below a ceiling pasted with stars
but only for a little while,
then I see him as a monk in a gray robe
walking back and forth
in the gravel yard of an imaginary monastery,
his head bowed, wondering where I am.
Hangover
If I were crowned emperor this morning,
every child who is playing Marco Polo
in the swimming pool of this motel,
shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth
Marco Polo Marco Polo
would be required to read a biography
of Marco Polo—a long one with fine print—
as well as a history of China and of Venice,
the birthplace of the venerated explorer
Marco Polo Marco Polo
after which each child would be quizzed
by me then executed by drowning
regardless how much they managed
to retain about the glorious life and times of
Marco Polo Marco Polo
Table Talk
Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—
asked if anyone had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom
of St. Sebastian.
The differences between these two figures
were much more striking than the differences
between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.
If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,
then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:
the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.
Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died
of a heart attack.
I think I’ll have the trout, I told the waiter,
for it was now my turn to order,
but all through the elegant dinner
I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing
the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian,
a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances
to his body, tied to a post with rope,
even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.
And I thought of the bullet never reaching
the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.
The theories of Zeno floated above the table
like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,
yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,
and after we ate and lifted our glasses,
we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
then walked our separate ways in the world where things
do arrive,
where people usually get where they are going—
where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,
where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,
and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your
arms—
and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,
splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,
that popular subject of European religious painting.
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling
with quills.
Delivery
Moon in the upper window,
shadow of my crooked pen on the page,
and I find myself wishing that the news of my death
might be delivered not by a dark truck
but by a child’s attempt to draw that truck—
the long rectangular box of the trailer,
some lettering on the side,
then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,
maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,
and puffs of white smoke
issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers
and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky,
only smaller.
The Symbol
Once upon a time there were two oval mirrors
hanging face to face
on the walls of a local barbershop
in the capital city of a country
running the length of a valley
lined with the stubborn molars of mountains.
It’s hard to say how the mirrors felt
about all the faces peering into them—
the unshorn, the clean-cut, and the bald—
their only job being to double
whatever stands in front of them
including the cologned heads of customers.
And when business was slow
the mirrors would see the barbers themselves
glancing in to run a comb quickly through their hair.
Every day except Sunday the mirrors
and gave back the news, good or bad.
And the reward for their patience
arrived at night in the empty shop
when they could look down the long
corridors of each other—
one looking at the dead mirrors of the past,
the other looking into the unborn mirrors of the future,
which means that the barbershop
must symbolize the present, in case anyone wants to know—
the present with its razors, towels, and chairs,
its green awning withdrawn,
its big window and motionless pole,
and the two mirrors who lived repetitively ever after.
Winter in Utah
The road across a wide snowy valley
could not have been straighter
if someone had drawn it with a ruler
which someone probably did on a table
in a surveyor’s office a century ago
with a few other men looking over his shoulder.
We’re out in the middle of nowhere, you said,
as we bisected the whitened fields—
a few dark bison here and there
and I remember two horses snorting by a shed—
or maybe a little southwest of nowhere,
you added, after you unfolded a map of the state.
But that night, after speeding on sleds
down a road of ice, the sky packed with stars,
and the headlights of our host’s truck blazing behind,
it seemed we had come a little closer to somewhere.
And in the morning with the snow sparkling
and the rough white mountains looming,
a magpie flashed up from a fence post,
all black and white in its airy exertions,
and I said good morning to him
on this first day of the new decade
all of which left me to wonder
if we had not arrived at the middle of exactly where we were.
What She Said
When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,
I was like give me a break.
I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.
I was just similar to give me a break.
As I said, I was like give me a break.
I would love to tell you
how I was able to resemble give me a break
without actually being identical to give me a break,
but all I can say is that I sensed
a similarity between me and give me a break.
And that was close enough
at that point in the evening
even if it meant I would fall short
of standing up from the table and screaming
give me a break,
for God’s sake will you please give me a break?!
No, for that moment
with the rain streaking the restaurant windows
and the waiter approaching,
I felt the most I could be was like
to a certain degree
give me a break.
Feedback
The woman who wrote from Phoenix
after my reading there
to tell me they were all still talking about it
just wrote again
to tell me that they had stopped.
Drawing You from Memory
I seem to have forgotten several features
crucial to the doing of this,
for instance,
how your lower lip
meets your upper lip besides just being below it,
and what happens at the end of the nose,
how much does it shade the plane of your cheek,
and would even a bit of nostril be visible from this angle?
Chinese eyes, you call them
which could be the difficulty I have
in showing the flash of light in your iris,
and being so far away from you for so long,
I cannot remember what direction