the sky had been low and overcast for days,
and I was drinking tea in a glassy room
with a woman without children,
a gate through which no one had entered the world.
She was turning the pages of a large book
on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea,
a book of colorful paintings—
a landscape, a portrait, a still life,
a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table.
Men had entered the gate, but no boy or girl
had ever come out, I was thinking oddly
as she stopped at a page of clouds
aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold.
This one is my favorite, she said,
even though it was only a detail, a corner
of a larger painting which she had never seen.
Nor did she want to see the countryside below
or the portrayal of some myth
in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete.
This was enough, this fraction of the whole,
just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough
now that the light was growing dim,
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.
Le Chien
I remember late one night in Paris
speaking at length to a dog in English
about the future of American culture.
No wonder she kept cocking her head
as I went on about “summer movies”
and the intolerable poetry of my compatriots.
I was standing and she was sitting
on a dim street in front of a butcher shop,
and come to think of it, she could have been waiting
for the early morning return of the lambs
and the bleeding sides of beef
to their hooks in the window.
For my part, I had mixed my drinks,
trading in the tulip of wine
for the sharp nettles of whiskey.
Why else would I be wasting my time
and hers trying to explain “corn dog,”
“white walls,” and “the March of Dimes”?
She showed such patience for a dog
without breeding while I went on—
in a whisper now after shouts from a window—
about “helmet laws” and “tag sale”
wishing I only had my camera
so I could carry a picture of her home with me.
On the loopy way back to my hotel—
after some long and formal goodbyes—
I kept thinking how I would have loved
to hang her picture over the mantel
where my maternal grandmother
now looks down from her height as always,
silently complaining about the choice of the frame.
Then, before dinner each evening
I could stand before the image of that very dog,
a glass of wine in hand,
submitting all of my troubles and petitions
to the court of her dark-brown, adoring eyes.
Addendum
What I forgot to tell you in that last poem
if you were paying attention at all
was that I really did love her at the time.
The maritime light in the final lines
might have seemed contrived,
as false as any puffed up Italian sonnet,
and the same could be said
for the high cliffside flowers
I claimed to have introduced to her hair
and sure, the many imaginary moons
I said were circling our bed as we slept,
the cosmos enclosed by the walls of the room.
But the truth is we loved
to take long walks on the windy shore,
not the shore between the sea of her
and the symbolic land of me,
but the real shore of empty shells,
the sun rising, the water running up and back.
On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor
in the house above ours on a hill,
it seemed that death had blundered once again.
Was it poor directions, the blurring rain,
or the too-small numerals on the mailbox
that sent his dark car up the wrong winding driveway?
Surely, it was me he was looking for—
overripe, childless, gaudy with appetite,
the one who should be ghosting over the rooftops
not standing barefooted in this kitchen
on a sun-shot October morning
after eight days and nights of downpour,
me with my presumptuous breathing,
my arrogant need for coffee,
my love of the colorful leaves beyond the windows.
The weight of my clothes, not his,
might be hanging in the darkness of a closet today,
my rake idle, my pen across a notebook.
The harmony of this house, not his,
might be missing a voice,
the hallways jumpy with the cry of the telephone—
if only death had consulted his cracked leather map,
then bent to wipe the fog
from the windshield with an empty sleeve.
Separation
With only a two-and-a-half-inch wooden goose
to keep me company at this desk,
I am beginning a new life of discipline.
No more wandering out in thunderstorms
hoping to be hit by a bolt of lightning
from the raised hand of Randall Jarrell.
No more standing at an open window
with my lyre strings finely tuned
waiting for a stray zephyr to blow my way.
Instead I will report here every morning
and bend over my work like St. Jerome
with his cowl, quill, and a skull for a paperweight.
And the small white goose with his yellow
feet and beak and a black dot for an eye
is more than enough companionship for me.
He is well worth the dollar I paid for him
in a roadside trinket shop in New Mexico
and more familiar to me than the household deities
of this guest cottage in the woods—
two porcelain sphinxes on the mantel
and a pale, blank-eyed Roman bust on a high shelf
on this first morning without you—
me holding a coffee I forgot to pay for
and the gods of wind and sun contending in the crowded trees.
four
Adage
When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter
of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.
A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.
Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.
No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.
You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,
but I am here to remind
you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.
The Flight of the Statues
The ancient Greeks … used to chain their
statues to prevent them from fleeing.
—Michael Kimmelman
It might have been the darkening sky
that sent them running in all directions
that afternoon as the air turned a pale yellow,
but were they not used to standing out
in the squares of our city
in every kind of imaginable weather?
Maybe they were frightened by a headline
on a newspaper that was blowing by
or was it the children in their martial arts uniforms?
Did they finally learn about the humans
they stood for as they pointed a sword at a cloud?
Did they know something we did not?
Whatever the cause, no one will forget
the sight of all the white marble figures
leaping from their pedestals and rushing away.
In the parks, the guitarists fell silent.
The vendor froze under his umbrella.
A dog tried to hide in his owner’s shadow.
Even the chess players under the trees
looked up from their boards
long enough to see the bronze generals
dismount and run off, leaving their horses
to peer down at the circling pigeons
who were stealing a few more crumbs from the poor.
Passivity
Tonight I turned off every light
in this stone, slate-roofed cottage,
then I walked out into the blackened woods
and sat on a rock next to a bust
of what looked like a sneering Roman consul,
a mantle of concrete draped over his shoulders.
I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon
and the stars scattered like a handful of salt
across the faraway sky,
and I visited some of my new quandaries
including where to live and what to do there,
and leaning back to take in the sizable night,
I arrived at the decision
that I would never make another decision.
Instead of darting this way or that,
I would stand at a crossroads until my watch
ran down and the clothes fell off me
and were carried by a heavy rain out to sea.
Instead of choosing one thing over another,
I would do nothing but picture
a little silver ball swinging back and forth from a cloud.
I would celebrate only the two equinoxes
and pass the rest of the time
balancing a silver scale with silver coins.
And I would see to it that the image of a seesaw—
or teeter-totter as it once was called—
was added to my family crest,
stitched into that empty patch
just below the broken plow
and above the blindfolded bee.
Ornithography
The legendary Cang Jie was said to
have invented writing after observing
the tracks of birds.
A light snow last night,
and now the earth falls open to a fresh page.
A high wind is breaking up the clouds.
Children wait for the yellow bus in a huddle,
and under the feeder, some birds
are busy writing short stories,
poems, and letters to their mothers.
A crow is working on an editorial.
That chickadee is etching a list,
and a robin walks back and forth
composing the opening to her autobiography.
All so prolific this morning,
these expressive little creatures,
and each with an alphabet of only two letters.
A far cry from me watching
in silence behind a window wondering
what just frightened them into flight—
a dog’s bark, a hawk overhead?
or had they simply finished
saying whatever it was they had to say?
Baby Listening
According to the guest information directory,
baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel.
Baby listening—not a baby who happens to be listening,
as I thought when I first checked in.
Leave the receiver off the hook,
the directory advises,
and your infant can be monitored by the staff,
though the staff, the entry continues,
cannot be held responsible for the well-being
of the baby in question.
Fair enough, someone to listen to the baby.
But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,
lying there in the room next to mine
listening to my pen scratching against the page,
or a more advanced baby who has crawled
down the hallway of the hotel
and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.
Lucky for some of us,
poetry is a place where both are true at once,
where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.
Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door
as well as the baby who is being listened to,
quietly breathing by the nearby telephone.
And it also wants the baby
who is making sounds of distress
into the curved receiver lying in the crib
while the girl at reception has just stepped out
to have a smoke with her boyfriend
in the dark by the great sway and wash of the North Sea.
Poetry wants that baby, too,
even a little more than it wants the others.
Bathtub Families
is not just a phrase I made up
though it would have given me pleasure
to have written those words in a notebook
then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
on the label of a clear plastic package
containing one cow and four calves,
a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
I hesitated to buy it because I knew
I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
which would leave no room in the tub
for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
It’s enough just to have the words,
which alone make me even more grateful
that I was born in America
and English is my mother tongue.
I was lucky, too, that I waited
for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
otherwise I might not have wandered
down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.
I think what I am really saying is that language
is better than reality, so it doesn’t have
to be bath time for you to enjoy
all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.
Despair
So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.
Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?
Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,
W
a-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces, Ye-Hah.
The Idea of Natural History at Key West
When I happened to notice myself
walking naked past a wall-length mirror
one spring morning
in a house by the water
where a friend was letting me stay,
I looked like one of those silhouettes
that illustrate the evolution of man,
but not exactly the most recent figure.