It makes no difference whether I lie
staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.
What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?
Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep—
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.
Madmen
They say you can jinx a poem
if you talk about it before it is done.
If you let it out too early, they warn,
your poem will fly away,
and this time they are absolutely right.
Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.
Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The restorers are the true vandals,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white smocks
always closing the wound in the landscape
and ruining the art of the mad.
I watched my poem fly down to the front
of the bar and hover there
until the next customer walked in—
then I watched it fly out the door into the night
and sail away, I could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.
All I had wished to say
was that art, too, was short,
as a razor can teach with a blind slash;
it only seems long when you compare it to life,
but that night I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
but the faint hope that I might catch
in the fan of my headlights
a glimpse of the thing,
maybe perched on a road sign or a streetlamp—
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes.
Sonnet
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
Idiomatic
It is a big question to pose so early in the morning
or “in the light woven by birds,”
as the Estonians say,
but still I must ask what is my place in life?
my “seat on the invisible train,”
as they say in Hungary.
I mean why am I just sitting here
in a lawn chair listening to a thrush,
“the little entertainer of the woods,”
as the Swiss call him,
while out there in the world
mobs of people are rushing over bridges
in and out of the cities?
Vegetables grow heavy in their fields,
clouds fly across the “face of the earth,”
as we call it in English,
and sometimes rockets lift off in the distance—
and I mean that quite literally,
“from the top of the table” as the Portuguese have it,
real rockets rising from the horizon,
or “the big line,” if you’re an Australian,
leaving behind rich gowns of exhaust smoke,
long, smooth trajectories,
and always the ocean below,
“the water machine,” as the South Sea islanders put it—
“by the clock of the devil,”
as our grandparents were fond of saying.
And still here I sit with my shirt off,
the dog at my side, daydreaming—
“juggling balls of cotton,” as they like to say in France.
The Waitress
She brings a drink to the table,
pivots, and turns away
with a smile
and soon she brings me
a menu, smiles,
and takes the empty glass away.
She brings me a fillet of sole
on a plate with parsley
and thin wheels of lemon,
then more bread in a basket,
smiling as she walks away,
then comes back
to see if everything is OK
to fill my glass with wine,
turning away
then circling back to my table
until she is every waitress
who has ever served me,
and every waiter, too,
young and old,
the eager and the sleepy ones alike.
I hold my fork in the air—
the blades of the fans
turn slowly on the ceiling—
and I begin to picture them all,
living and dead,
gathered together for one night
in an amphitheater, or armory
or some vast silvery ballroom
where they have come
to remove their bow ties,
to hang up their red jackets and aprons,
and now they are having a cigarette
or dancing with each other,
turning slowly in one another’s arms
to a five-piece, rented band.
And that is all I can think about
after I pay the bill,
leave a large, sentimental tip,
then walk into the fluorescent streets,
collar up against the chill—
all the waitresses and waiters of my life,
until the night makes me realize
that this place where they pace and dance
under colored lights,
is made of nothing but autumn leaves,
red, yellow, gold,
waiting for a sudden gust of wind
to scatter it all
into the dark spaces
beyond these late-night, practically empty streets.
The Butterfly Effect
The one resting now on a plant stem
somewhere deep in the vine-hung
interior of South America
whose wings are about to flutter
thus causing it to rain heavily
on your wedding day
several years from now,
and spinning you down
a path to calamity and ruin
is—if it’s any consolation—
a gorgeous swallowtail,
a brilliant mix of bright orange
and vivid yellow with a soft
dusting of light brown along the edges.
What’s more, the two black dots
on the wings are so prominent
as to make one wonder
if this is not an example of mimicry,
an adaptation technique whereby one species
takes on the appearance
of another less-edible one,
first brought to light,
it might interest you to know
and possibly distract you from
your vexatious dread
with regards to the hopelessness of the future,
by two British naturalists, namely,
H.W. Bates in 1862 and A. R. Wallace in 1865.
Serenade
Let the other boys from the village
gather under your window
and strum their bean-shaped guitars.
Let them huddle under your balcony
heavy with flowers,
and fill the night with their longing—
locals in luminous shirts,
yodeling over their three simple chords,
hoping for a glimpse of your moonlit arm.
Meanwhile, I will bide my time
and continue my lessons on the zither
and my study of the miniature bassoon.
Every morning I will walk the corridor
to the music room
lined with the fierce portraits of my ancestors
knowing there is nothing like practice
to devour the hours of life—
sheets of music floating down,
a double reed in my mouth
or my fingers curled
over a row of wakeful strings.
And if this is not enough
to rouse you from your light sleep
and lure you through the open doors,
I will apply myself to the pyrophone,
the double-lap dulcimer,
the glassarina, and the tiny thumb piano.
I will be the strange one,
the pale eccentric
who wears the same clothes every day,
the one at the train station
carrying the black case
shaped like nothing you have seen before.
I will be the irresistible misfit
who sends up over a ledge of flowers
sounds no woman has ever heard—
the one who longs to see your face
framed by bougainvillea,
perplexed but full of charity,
looking down at me as I finger
a nameless instrument
it took so many days and nights to invent.
The Three Wishes
Because he has been hungry for days,
the woodsman wishes for a skillet of hot sausages
and because she is infuriated at his stupidity,
his lack of vision, shall we say,
his wife wishes the skillet would stick to his nose,
and so the last wish must also be squandered
by asking the genie to please
remove the heavy iron pan from the poor man’s face.
Hovering in the smoke that wafts up
from his exotic green bottle,
the genie knew all along the couple
would never escape their miserable lot—
the cheerless hovel, the thin dog in the corner,
cold skillet on a cold stove—
and we knew this too, looking down from
the cloud of a sofa into the world of a book.
The man is a fool, it is easily said.
He could have wished for a million gold coins
as his wife will remind him hourly
for the rest of their rueful lives,
or a million golden skillets
if he had a little imaginative flair,
and that is the cinder of truth
the story wishes to place in one of our shoes.
Nothing can come from nothing,
I nod with the rest of the congregation.
Three wishes is three wishes too many,
I mutter piously as I look up from the story.
But every time I think of it,
all I ever really feel besides a quiver
of sympathy for the poor woodsman
is a gnawing hunger for sausages—
a sudden longing for a winter night,
a light snow falling outside,
my ax leaning by the door,
my devoted, heavyset wife at the stove,
and a skillet full of sizzling sausages,
maybe some green peppers and onions,
and for my seventh and final wish,
a decent bottle of Italian, no, wait … make that Chilean red.
Pavilion
I sit in the study,
simple walls, complicated design of carpet.
I read a book with a bright red cover.
I write something down.
I look up a fact in an encyclopedia
and copy it onto a card,
the lamp burning,
a painting leaning against a chair.
I find a word in a dictionary
and copy it onto the back of an envelope,
the piano heavy in the corner,
the fan turning slowly overhead.
Such is life in this pavilion
of paper and ink
where a cup of tea is cooling,
where the windows darken then fill with light.
But I have had enough of it—
the slope of paper on the desk,
books on the floor like water lilies,
the jasmine drying out in its pot.
In fact, I am ready to die,
ready to return as something else,
like a brown-and-white dog
with his head always out the car window.
Then maybe, if you were still around,
walking along a street in linen clothes,
a portfolio under your arm,
you would see me go by,
my eyes closed,
wet nose twitching,
my ears blown back,
a kind of smile on my long dark lips.
The Movies
I would like to watch a movie tonight
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,
a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,
or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me
so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.
I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.
I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they’d hitch up a stagecoach
to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.
I would stay out of harm’s way
by identifying with characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger
who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.
Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,
helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache
and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull
out of the station
and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook
and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.
Jealousy
It is not the tilted buildings or the blind alleys
that I mind,
nor the winding staircases leading nowhere
or the ones that are simply missing.
Nor is walking through a foreign city
with a ring of a thousand keys
looking for the one door the worst of it,
nor the blank maps I am offered by strangers.
I can even tolerate your constant running
away from me, slipping around corners,
rising in the cage of an elevator,
squinting out the rear window of a taxi,
and always on the arm of a tall man
in a beautiful suit
and a perfectly furled hat
whom I know is carrying a gun.
What kills me is the way you lie there
in the morning, eyes closed,
curled into a sweet ball of sleep
and that innocent look on your face
when you tell me over coffee and oranges
that really you were right there all night
next to me in bed
and then expect me to believe you
were lost in your own dreamworld,
some ridiculous alibi
involving swimming through clouds
to the pealing of bells,
a transparent white lie about leaping
from a high window ledge
then burying your face
in the plumage of an angel.
Tomes
There is a section in my library for death
and another for Irish history,
a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan,
and in the center a row of reference books,
solid and imperturbable,
the ones you can turn to anytime,
when the night is going wrong
or when the day is full of empty promise.
I have nothing against
the thin monograph, the odd query,
a note on the identity of Chekhov’s dentist—
but what I prefer on days like these
is to get up from the couch,
pull down The History of the World,
and hold in my hands a book
containing almost everything