had sunk the bottom deep enough to please him,
when masons had dressed the face of the levee
for show with a stone wall high as a two-story house,
when the water rose, and the fishery stocked it
with yearlings in good health, a few days later,
the trout were already slow, and a cormorant came
to fish beside the dam. The mall tycoon keeps
weakening with age, and now his trout are failing him.
But the dam he built will outlast everyone living.
Bananas
A monkey with the muttonchops and lips
of Henrik Ibsen barked, and creatures
on the forest floor stood still to sniff
and listen. There, a traveler might pick,
according to Jules Verne, a fruit “healthy
as bread and succulent as cream.” Buddha
ate bananas in that realm. And Jesus
would have loved them, if he lived nearby,
or later. Muhammad with his wisdom
brought about the great diffusion of bananas
west, into the Andalusian caliphate where Berbers
ate black figs. Experts say, banana, Spanish,
comes from Portuguese, from Wolof
slave merchants who got it from the Berbers’
Arabic, banaana, meaning finger. They
don’t know. Fine tailors made kimonos
for the summer heat from fabric woven
of the softest, innermost banana leaf. BashÅ
wore bashofu, one student says, and wrote
while kneeling on a carpet of banana silk.
After United Fruit made sweet bananas
cheap and plentiful, former rabbi Eli Black
acquired the company and paid his workers,
in good conscience, six times more,
but when the company, and then his conscience,
and then bribes and tax schemes, failed,
he took his briefcase, bashed the window
from an office forty-four floors up,
and threw his papers and himself
out of the New York skyline into the street.
The Moons of Jupiter
My wife and I looked after they found one
about the size of Hawaii, and a smaller one
shaped like a russet potato with craters
for eyes, not that we saw them. What we saw
was the neighborhood where we lived, lit
by streetlights in the rain. My wife said
Patsy Cline had fallen out of a sky like that
in Tennessee years earlier. A pilot
with too little training thought he could fly her
home in a storm. Jupiter has one old storm
about the size of Alaska, and seventy-nine moons,
most with a surface area less than that of the state
park in Topanga Canyon. Two of the four moons
Galileo saw have crusts of ice with oceans
underneath. Mountain lions live in Topanga
Canyon, inside the city limits of LA. Unusual
salamanders live there too. Nobody knows
what lives in the ocean under the ice
on Europa. Nothing would be my guess.
Don’t Get Me Wrong
In praise of George Starbuck and his poem “Of Late”
My younger colleague told me, when I praised the poem
of a dead white man, that this was microaggression.
I tried to explain that the poem protested aggression too,
during the war in Vietnam. By bashing McNamara,
then the secretary of defense, the poem advocated peace.
My colleague said he advocated peace by bashing me.
Differences in scale and point of view may be deceptive.
Gamma rays, for example, with a wavelength of one
micromicron, leave an infinitesimal fleck in photographs
of space where a star far larger than most exploded
light-years from the Milky Way. The Milky Way
from out there is another fleck, adrift in the limitless
dark with galaxies flung in all directions, each
at its core having crushed into a pinhole several
million times the mass of the Sun. When power
bears down, things get full of themselves sometimes
and send out bad vibes everywhere. One gamma burst
nearby, according to professors in Kansas, killed
most living things on Earth. But that was before
what we call consciousness, when living things
were small, and nobody cared. Lately, hydrogen
bombs make bad vibes too, and the atoms
are only a few gamma wavelengths across.
The poem about the war maintains that dropping
napalm on an innocent civilian is no less wrong
when you call your target the enemy aggressor.
My colleague and I agree. What we’ve got here,
Cool Hand Luke reminded the Walking Boss
(who promptly shot him dead), is a failure
to communicate. The poem blames smug
white men for bombing people said to be less
white, though it doesn’t mention gender or the color
of anyone’s skin. I met the poet in an elevator
when I was a mailboy where he taught, and his skin
had that pink tone of Angora cat lips, slightly muted.
The dazzle in his mind, prodigious then, is gone.
But poems of his, if you care to read them, come alive.
Tracks Everywhere at Noon
Where a bobcat leapt across the vanishing
rafter of prints from a turkey tom
with jakes and hens, to look
at the tracks and picture the animals
in the act of leaving them took me
out of myself as a boy, the way it did
to walk out waist deep into the River.
Hidden in all that water from woods
and fields in thirty states one drop,
I was thinking, might have melted weeks back
under a marmot asleep on the ice
near Three Forks, and that one drop might
in another month glide over the blacktip fin
of a shark downstream across the Gulf.
Almost everything was hidden: eels
in the cool dark underwater at noon
with spoonbill catfish, and snapping turtles
bigger and older than I would ever be.
Behind the blue there had to be planets,
thousands, with living creatures I could never
imagine, and clusters of stars afloat on the surge
of nothing out of nowhere. The current
where I stood in the full noon sun felt cool
on my legs and hands, a mile wide,
moving steadily as the River of Heaven,
which (fifty years later) landed me here
on the solid ice of a big pond with a dog
we brought home cowering from the pound.
So here she went now, after a few months free
from harm, galloping into the blizzard at noon,
springing into the drifts, beside herself to smell
tracks everywhere, crisscross, filled with snow.
The Bewilderment
My friend in high school said, God
love her, Yes, and there was nookie,
and we saw that it was
good. And lay
bewildered on a sandbar which the River
washed into the Gulf. And in her brother’s
treehouse, which was broken, as were we.
We said goodbye, and in another world
I walked out onto the rubble of Our Lady
of the Caves and Beasts in Ephesus.
Where a patchwork column stands
I stood. And dreamed. And met a college girl
with whom I shared hashish, and crabs.
She wanted to be the one on top, and it was
nookie prelapsarian as light in heaven.
Later, in the Rust Belt, in a heat wave,
God’s apocalyptic messenger downtown
kept shouting: Torment is eternal
and the Lake of Fire awaits. I looked him
in the eye and fell through helpless.
But my friend in vinyl platform pumps
with six-inch heels reached after me.
She took me by the hand, and led me home.
According to a book my father gave me,
nookie names a woman’s tender part
or person with “a kind of baby talk…
almost polite,” and in more recent use
it names the love between two men,
the tenderness that follows after a kiss,
a touch, a nibble in the kitchen while we cook,
an act which state laws meltingly approve.
As did my father, and as Jesus must have done
at supper, when he took John to his bosom.
Also John, who wrote this. And the John
who said in First John, “God is
love.” And Wild John, I would guess,
who ate his locusts dipped in honey
and felt glad to hear the Bridegroom’s voice.
But as for the John who said that locusts
sting like scorpions, so that the men stung
writhe in pain for days until they seek
the balm of death, though death flees,
and the men for five months pine away,
they fall in their bewilderment,
and in the dust they see the stinging
locusts with thoraxes like torsos
of blood horses dressed for battle,
and with gold crowns on their heads,
their faces like men’s faces,
but with women’s hair, and teeth
the teeth of lions: John, alone on Patmos,
saw this: he was pining for God’s love.
To the Moon
After I thumbed a ride I saw you
in the passenger window, more
than a crescent, almost half.
It was getting dark, and a voice
on the car radio was reporting
that Neil Armstrong had stepped
onto the Sea of Tranquility.
He was walking there in the dust.
Five times more, men visited,
two at a time. Some of them
lowered Moon buggies out of a bay
in the side of the lander. These
they unfolded and took for a spin.
Flower children of my generation
thought that the men were middle-aged,
and they were, but they were children too.
They left Moon buggies in your lap.
I wanted to tell you last year,
when I saw you in the bare limbs
at your narrowest crescent
next to the Morning Star,
and just this fall when you were large
and bright as I had ever seen:
to consider you in the night sky is
to release the mind more deeply into itself.
If Earth is alive, you were alive
when these men lived on you.
When they left you died,
and they plunged living into the sea.
Transit of Venus, 1882
Known for unruly auburn hair
and a dark look and the moody
talk only his sister took to heart,
he felt urgency was a virtue.
But when he proposed to his sister’s friend,
she wanted him to join the church,
and after he settled into the practice of law,
finally, when she said I do, what he wanted
on their wedding night went nowhere.
*
A junco nesting just outside flew
at her own reflection, skull first
thumping into the glass,
over and over every day.
The lady of the house made plans
for a luncheon and for whist.
The counselor walked for miles
in the woods around the lake.
She had not wanted him,
she did not, and she never would.
*
More and more in the face of his wife
at fifty, entertaining guests,
he saw the smile of her father
the barkeep, dead from drink.
A young astronomer told their friends
scattering light waves in thin air
tinted the clear sky blue.
*
The counselor’s son at twenty
taught the astronomer’s wife a step
they called the Hesitation Waltz. He let it be
known he found her irresistible as a flirt,
and dance lessons ended in a parting of ways.
*
But the counselor, who was her father’s age,
kept taking her on carriage rides in the country.
He brought her to play and sing for his sisters,
the way she learned at the Conservatory in Boston.
The sisters, both of them single, pitied him
in his marriage, and after she sang they let him know
they approved…though one of them
listened only from her room upstairs.
The following day he spoke as he said he must,
she hesitated before she looked away.
*
Within a month her husband had left
on an expedition to California
where he wrote in his diary
about the transit of Venus photographed
from an observatory on the Pacific,
“We saw things as plain as was ever seen
with any glass in the world.”
His wife, meanwhile, explored
the December woods near home
in the company of the older man.
*
Within a year the counselor’s youngest,
eight years old, contracted a fever. This
was the boy who had returned his father’s
affection always, often it seemed
when there was no one else.
*
Having buried his son, he lay in bed
with malaria for a week, shivering, sweating,
begging forgiveness from the dead.
When he appeared again in public
he wore the wig he had worn for years,
with the unruly auburn hair of his youth,
but under the pallor of illness and age
in his face there was a wound past healing.
*
The astronomer and his wife
decided together, it was time:
she took the older ma
n as her lover
now in the elegant dining room
of the house where he was born,
his wife asleep in the house next door,
the sisters quiet in their beds upstairs.
*
For years to come, after observing the stars,
the husband home at daybreak
would whistle a tune from a comic opera
to let the lovers know he had arrived.
*
The astronomer’s wife had forgiven him
his affairs, not that he would ever change
or repent. But he came home. He built
a fire. He laid out pillows by the hearth.
He led her there, and knelt,
and spoke while he undressed her.
*
At first, to relieve the uneasiness in her mind
she needed devotion from her husband.
And later, more, from her lover. She needed
to search the tenderness in their hands,
their mouths, the urgency in the face of one,
and then of the other, often that same day.
The two men, meanwhile, had become good friends.
*
Because the dance lessons ended in a parting of ways,
the eldest reported everything to his mother.
It was a secret everyone everywhere knew.
Her sisters-in-law had known
in advance. The congregation
knew, faculty, faculty wives.
Her neighbors’ servants knew.
Shopkeepers. Judges. Deans.
*
In the year of mourning for their son
endless arguments led nowhere.
He was a man of the law. Pleading,
with him, was even more useless than tears.
When she suggested renovating the house,
and he objected to the expense, she wheeled
to rip at the wallpaper with her hands.
When she threw a kitchen knife
at his heart, what surprised her
least was her revulsion,
seeing him walk away.
*
Her well-known evenings now
became a travesty for gawkers.
She, the unloved wife, must
drunkenly play herself.
*
For years, even on days he planned
to spend the night in his neighbor’s arms,