And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is no way you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s teacup.
But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.
The Return of the Key
It was a drowsy summer afternoon,
hot wind stirring the papers in the room,
smoke slanting up from my cigarette
as from a tiny factory that produced only smoke.
I was reading William Carlos Williams,
growing weary of the note on the kitchen table
and the broken glass on the roadside,
so I reached into one of his small poems
and lifted out a tiny key
lying on a glass tray next to a glass tumbler
in a room of an inn where someone stood
in the doorway holding a suitcase.
I knew all things come in threes,
so I was not discouraged when the key
did not open the golden lock
on my daughter’s diary,
or the empty strongbox under the bed,
and I knew I was getting warm
when I entered the orangerie
and stood before the birdcage on its metal stand.
Small wonder that the bird
fluttered into the air
and circled the chandelier
as soon as the little door swung open.
Smaller wonder
that it banked sharply
against a background of windows,
then dove and disappeared
into the anthology of American poetry
that lay open on the table—
the key clenched in its beak,
the pages lifting like many wings in the breeze.
The Listener
I cannot see you a thousand miles from here,
but I can hear you
whenever you cough in your bedroom
or when you set down
your wineglass on a granite counter.
This afternoon
I even heard scissors moving
at the tips of your hair
and the dark snips falling
onto a marble floor.
I keep the jazz
on the radio turned off.
I walk across the floor softly,
eyes closed,
the windows in the house shut tight.
I hear a motor on the road in front,
a plane humming overhead,
someone hammering,
then there is nothing
but the white stone building of silence.
You must be asleep
for it to be this quiet,
so I will sit and wait
for the rustle of your blanket
or a noise from your dream.
Meanwhile, I will listen to the ant bearing
a dead comrade
across these floorboards—
the noble sounds
of his tread and his low keening.
The Literary Life
I woke up this morning,
as the blues singers like to boast,
and the first thing to enter my mind,
as the dog was licking my face, was Coventry Patmore.
Who was Coventry Patmore?
I wondered, as I rose
and set out on my journey to the encyclopedia
passing some children and a bottle cap on the way.
Everything seemed more life-size than usual.
Light in the shape of windows
hung on the walls next to the paintings
of birds and horses, flowers and fish.
Coventry Patmore,
I’m coming to get you, I hissed,
as I entered the library like a man stepping
into a freight elevator of science and wisdom.
How many things have I looked up
in a lifetime of looking things up?
I wondered, as I set the book on the piano
and began turning its large, weightless pages.
How would the world look
if all of its things were neatly arranged
in alphabetical order? I wondered,
as I found the P section and began zeroing in.
How long before I would forget Coventry Patmore’s
dates and the title of his long poem
on the sanctity of married love?
I asked myself as I closed the door to that room
and stood for a moment in the kitchen,
taking in the silvery toaster, the bowl of lemons,
and the white cat, looking as if
he had just finished his autobiography.
The Great Walter Pater
In the middle of the formal gardens,
laid out with fastidious symmetry
behind the gray stone château,
right at the center
where all the gravel paths lead the eye,
at the point where all the hedges
and the vivid flower beds converge,
is a small rectangular pond with a flagstone edge,
and in the center of that pond is a statue
of a naked boy holding a jar on one shoulder,
and from the mouth of that jar
a fine stream of water issues forth night and day.
I never for a minute wanted
to be a nightingale or a skylark
or a figure immobilized on the slope of an urn,
but when the dogs of trouble
have me running down a dark winding alley,
I would not mind being that boy—
or, if that is not possible,
I would choose, like the great Walter Pater,
to be one of the large, orange carp
that live under the surface of that pond,
swimming back and forth all summer long
in the watery glitter of sinking coins,
resting all winter, barely moving
under a smooth, translucent sheet of ice.
By a Swimming Pool Outside Siracusa
All afternoon I have been struggling
to communicate in Italian
with Roberto and Giuseppe who have begun
to resemble the two male characters
in my Italian for Beginners,
the ones always shopping, eating,
or inquiring about the times of trains.
Now I can feel my English slipping away,
like chlorinated water through my fingers.
I have made important pronouncements
in this remote limestone valley
with its trickle of a river.
I stated that it seems hotter
today even than it was yesterday
and that swimming is very good for you,
very beneficial, you might say.
I also posed burning questions
about the hours of the archaeological museum
and the location of the local necropolis.
But now I am alone in th
e evening light
which has softened the white cliffs,
and I have had a little gin in a glass with ice
which has softened my mood or—
how would you say in English—
has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain
with greater gentleness, shall we say,
or, to put it less literally,
this drink has extended permission
to my mind to feel—what’s the word?—
a friendship with the vast sky
which is very—give me a minute—very blue
but with much great paleness
at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now.
Bermuda
When we walk down the bleached-out wooden stairs
to the beach and lie on our backs
on the blue and white chaises
near the edge of the water
on this dot in the atlas,
this single button on the blazer of the sea,
we come about as close
as a man and a woman can
to doing nothing.
All morning long we watch the clouds
roll overhead
or close our eyes and do the lazy
back-and-forth of talk,
our voices flattened by the drone of surf,
our words tumbling oddly in the wind.
It’s Good Friday here, hundreds of miles
from any mass of land,
thousands from Calvary.
Wild hibiscus twists along the roadsides,
the yellow-breasted bird sings its name,
and all the stores are closed
because today is the day to make hot cross buns
and fly kites from the beaches—
to eat the sweet cross,
to fix with a string a cross in the sky.
The white sand heats up
as one of us points out the snout of a pig
on the horizon, and higher up
a gaping alligator poised to eat a smaller cloud.
See how that one is a giant head,
like the devil wearing glasses
you say, but my eyes are shut against the sun
and I only hear your words,
softened and warped by the sea breeze,
telling me how the head is becoming a bicycle,
the high-wheel kind on playing cards,
while the sea rushes in, falls back—
marbles pouring endlessly onto a marble floor—
and the two of us so calm
it seems that this is not our only life,
just one in a series, charms on a bracelet,
as if every day we were not running
like the solitary runners on the beach
toward a darkness without shape
or waves, crosses or clouds,
as if one of us is not likely to get there first
leaving the other behind,
castaway on an island
with no pink houses or blue shutters,
no plum-colored ones trimmed in cream,
no offshore reef to burst the waves into foam,
and no familiar voice being bent in the wind.
Ignorance
It’s only a cold, cloud-hooded weekday
in the middle of winter,
but I am sitting up in my body
like a man riding an elephant
draped with a carpet of red and gold,
his turban askew,
singing a song about the return of the cranes.
And I am inside my own head
like a tiny homunculus,
a creature so excited over his naked existence
that he scurries all day
from one eye socket to the other
just to see what scenes are unfolding before me,
what streets, what pastures.
And to think that just hours ago
I was as sour as Samuel Johnson
with a few bad sherries in him,
quarreling in a corner of the Rat and Parrot,
full of scorn for the impertinence of men,
the inconstancy of women.
And to think further that I have no idea
what might have uplifted me,
unless it was when I first opened
the front door to look at the sky
so extensive and burdened with snow,
or was it this morning
when I walked along the reservoir?
Was it when the dog
scared up some ducks off the water
and I stopped to watch them flapping low
over the frozen surface,
and I counted them in flight,
all seven—the leader and the six hurrying behind.
Death in New Orleans, a Romance
Long into the night my pencil
hurried across the page,
a young messenger boy
running his nervous little errands,
making lines,
making comparisons—
the world is like this, the moon like that,
the mind, I wrote, is like a wire birdcage
hanging from a stand
with a wooden perch and a tiny mirror,
home of a single canary,
I went on,
always the same one, the same song every day,
Always the same yellow and white feathers,
I continued,
yellow for the past, white for the future—
I added for symbolic weight—
and on the day I die,
I wrote, curving toward the elegiac,
the wire door will swing open
and the bird take flight,
looping over the ironwork of the city,
the water tanks and windowed buildings,
then up into the clouds and stars,
I typed,
leaving my body behind,
slumped upon a café table,
my empty head in a pool of wine,
the waiter and two customers
bending over me with obvious concern.
Air Piano
Now that all the twilight has seeped
out of the room
and I am alone listening,
the bass is beginning to sound
like my father
ascending the flights of stairs,
always the same cadence
every weekday evening,
a beat you could build a city on.
And the alto is the woman
I sat next to on a train
who wore a tiny silver watch around her wrist.
The drums are drops of water
on my forehead,
one for every inhabitant of China.
And the tenor, perhaps,
is someone’s younger brother
who moved out west and never writes
or a swan passing under a willow.
But the piano—
the piano is the piano
you gave me one Christmas,
a big black curve
standing at the end of the room,
a red bow tied around its leg
while snow fell on the house
and the long rows of hemlocks.
Since then, I have learned some chords
and a few standards,
but I still love lying on the floor
like this, eyes closed,
hands locked behind my head,
laying down the solo on “Out of the Blue”
in the Fantasy Studios,
Berkeley, California,
on October 4th, 1951, when I was ten.
Drawing
Ink strokes on rice paper—
a wooden bridge
curved over a river,
mountains in the distance,
and in the foreground
a wind-blown tree.
I rotate the book on the table
so the tree
is leaning toward your village.
To My Patron
I do not require a ton of pink marble,
a hundred tubes of paint,
or an enormous skylit loft.
All I need is a pen,
a little blank notebook,
and a lamp with a seventy-five-watt bulb.
Of course, an oak desk would be nice,
maybe a chair of ergonomic design,
and a collie lying on an oval rug,
always ready to follow me anywhere
or just sniff my empty palm.
And I would not turn down a house
canopied by shade trees,
a swing suspended from a high limb,
flowering azaleas around the porch,
pink, red, and white.
I might as well add to the list
a constant supply of pills
that would allow me to stay awake all night
without blinking,
a cellar full of dusty bottles of Bordeaux,
a small radio—
nothing, I assure you, would go unappreciated.
Now if you wouldn’t mind
leaving me alone—
and please close the door behind you